 | ||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| | ||||||||
| ||
|
I was flying from Shanghai to Zhuhai and forgot to turn off my mobile phone. After we'd been flying for about an hour, my mobile phone said 'beep, beep, beep', and I discovered I had received a text message - in the airplane, flying at 10,000 meters. I checked the time of the message, and it was sent at that time. I can't imagine how that could happen; it should be impossible........ | ||
|
Soon after arriving in Shanghai, and after one of my many dinners here, I went to my first Karaoke bar. You get a room (small or large) with video screens and a computerised music system containing maybe 300,000 songs, all with an accompanying music video with the words - in Chinese or English - and the brave stand up with a microphone and sing along. And after one of these New Year's dinners, pretty much everyone is brave enough to take the mike, including yours truly. "Country Roads" never sounded so good. These Karaoke places are plentiful, popular, and are a venue for many people to relax and entertain themselves. It serves the same purpose as people going to bars in the West, except here the emphasis is less on drinking and more on having fun. And, of course, it's possible to do both. | ||
|
In English, we have names for a few family members - father, mother, child, cousin, uncle and aunt, and that's about it. But on the other hand, we have dozens of names for beverages with alcohol in them. Five kinds of beer and ale, dozens of whiskies, zillions of wines..... The Chinese have many words to describe family relationships - words for older or younger brother, uncle on the mother's or father's side, and so on. Many different words, to describe almost any conceivable family relationship. On the other hand, the Chinese have one word for any kind of drink with alcohol in it. You can specify beer or whiskey if you want.... That must say something about the cultural interests and heritage of the people involved, though I don't know exactly what the conclusion would be. | ||
|
I do have to credit the Chinese for their persistence. We sometimes talk in the West about 'making a second effort' if your first try fails. These people are into 'thirteenth effort; they make us look like sissies. Actually, I see that everywhere. Even the beggars on the street won't stop with a simple request or two. They believe that it's only after the twenty-second refusal that maybe you are really serious about NO!!. One day I was standing on a corner waiting for a light to change and some man came up to me with his 3 practiced and polished words of English. He said, "Give me money!!". Surprised the hell out of me. So I said, "NO". And he said, "YES". And we continued that two-word conversation until the light changed. He didn't fail for lack of trying. And I didn't kill him because there was a policeman on the corner. | ||
|
Coffee here is really expensive. Even at the wholesale markets, coffee here costs more than in the supermarkets in Canada, and in the supermarkets here it is two or three times that price. And in coffee shops, the price is often 30 or 40 RMB per cup - that's $5 or $6. People here don't have much experience with coffee, and huge numbers of Chinese drink Nescafe instant and think it's actually coffee. I drink it sometimes if I'm really desperate, but it isn't a good thing to introduce to the people in China. It seems so strange at Chinese New Year to see thousands of people in the malls carrying "gift boxes" of Nescafe - a huge, brightly-colored box with a jar of instant coffee and a couple of fancy cups - and these cost a lot of money. But coffee here is a luxury good so the prices are high. And Nescafe has done a good (if twisted) job of re-branding instant coffee to move from the parking lot to the penthouse. So, we see many people buying these items as gifts. They don't understand that to us in the West it would be like receiving a McDonald's hamburger for a birthday gift. | ||
|
The Chinese have a word 'jiu', which translates to 'wine', but is really a generic term meaning anything with alcohol in it. People here often talk about drinking 'white wine', which may be white but sure isn't wine. It's a hard liquor made from rice, wheat, barley and I don't know what else, and is about 60% alcohol. Tastes a bit funny but is smooth enough and seems to have no immediate effect. And then it just comes up and smacks you. Happy New Year. No, really. The New Year's Dinners are all in large restaurants. The standard protocol is to take your little glass filled with 'white wine' and visit all the other tables to drink a toast to the new year. And all your friends may come to you to drink a toast just with you. What that means is that if you have very many friends, you also are toast. My solution was to mix this dragon juice with Sprite. It's the same color so nobody knows you're cheating, and you gain great face by downing all these drinks in one gulp. But eventually it comes up and smacks you anyway, and that's when the tables begin throwing bottle corks and other stuff at each other. Time to leave. | ||
|
The demand for English teachers here is very strong and increasing, and people are becoming more demanding. I could find jobs for 10,000 sane and civilised people who wanted to move here to teach English, and I'm serious about that number. Some universities want 40 or 50 people who can teach English, and the teachers don't have to be 'English' teachers, just anyone preferably with a degree who is a native English speaker and could do the job. And there are companies and housewives and students and businesses, and everybody who really wants to learn to speak English and who will spend serious money to learn. It's astonishing how many people are really interested. I read in a paper here that the country could use another 200,000 Westerners to teach English, at all levels in all kinds of schools and institutions, to say nothing of all the individual adults who arrange for a teacher on their own. | ||
|
People here don't take summer vacations the way we do in other countries. The Chinese have three big holidays each year, each one lasting for a week, and then they get maybe a week's vacation each year which they might add to one of the other holidays and use for extended travel or just time off. They get a week for Chinese New Year, which is the big holiday of the year like our Christmas, and the time varies with the Lunar Calendar but normally in January or February. Then a week for Labor Day which is the first week in May, and another in the Fall. I think there may be the odd day off in addition to that, but during the week-long holidays everyone is off except those in the service industries like hotels and restaurants etc. Unfortunately, those big holidays are not a good time to travel in China because everyone has the same idea and you don't really want to be on a train with 1.3 billion other people going to the same place on the same day. | ||
|
I've had much opportunity to question people here about their views toward foreigners, especially the English and Americans and French - who committed a parcel of astonishing atrocities here. The attitude of my Chinese friends is that the facts are true, that the actions were unspeakable, but China was weak then and unable to defend itself - and that has now changed. I'm truly astonished at the level of forgiveness that exists here. The Japanese are somewhat less forgiven, partly because their actions were more recent, within living memory, and were militarily aggressive. But the thinking applies to everyone. If this were my country, nobody from the UK would ever set foot on my soil again, but I seem to be the only person in China who feels this way. | ||
|
Chinese people genuinely want to please their friends and guests, and often if you tell someone that you like something they will offer it to you sincerely, or order it for you. I'm still learning to be careful about telling people how much I like something. I was out for dinner with some friends a while back, and noticed the parsley being used as a garnish on many of the food plates. I told them how much I liked parsley for cooking, but could never seem to find it in a grocery store. And I looked up two minutes later and there in front of me was a huge dish full of parsley. What was I supposed to do? Fill my pockets? | ||
|
The girls here don't know how to cook, nor to do much of anything related to housework. I had to teach a friend how to turn over chicken wings while they were frying. She didn't know how - it was a new experience for her. The parents of a friend of mine bought a new home much farther away from her work place, and she said she and her mother would stay there sometimes during the week and go to the new house only on the weekends. I asked why her mother had to stay with her, and she said, "I would die. I don't know how to cook or do anything." | ||
|
I have discovered that some of my cooking appeals to Chinese tastes. My potato salad is a great hit with everyone. I made a huge potful and a friend took it to her office on her last day of work, and her friends said that was the best going-away party they ever had. My mashed potatoes could win a culinary award here - as they have done (modestly) all over the rest of the world. And my chicken wings are always devoured. I often have groups of friends over on a weekend to play cards and watch movies, and they will eat any amount of chcken wings. I just fry them, pour out the oil and pour in some soy sauce. Nothing special, but everyone really likes them, so I'm happy. I make various kinds of sandwiches with a French baguette, and all my friends here tell me they love the inside but not the outside. Chinese people don't like bread with a hard crust. Breaks my heart, but there's nothing to be done. So they eat the inside. I taught some friends to make French toast and they love it. | ||
|
China is still a cash society. Credit cards and debit cards are coming, but not here yet in volume, and people don't seem to write cheques. I pay my rent by making a deposit into the apartment owner's account in the bank across the street. Everything else is cash too. One of my friends told me of buying her first house with a suitcase full of bills. She said it was heavy, too. And because of the cash history, a credit history doesn't exist for most people, so the banks have no idea who should have a credit card. Good thing the American banks are coming here in force. They'll give everybody a credit card and lose 50 billion dollars while educating Chinese consumers and building up a credit reporting system. Bills here don't last very long because they are used so much. They also go through very many hands, and nobody knows where those hands have been. In Canada, we often lick our fingers while we count bills, so we can separate them more easily. You won't do that here more than once. I hoard new bills and squander the used ones. | ||
|
Learning to speak Chinese is difficult for foreigners, for several reasons, lack of intelligence not least among them. Another is all the regional dialects - which never seem to give locals too much of a problem, but are incomprehensible to me. One difficulty is that Chinese is an ideographic language, so that we cannot look at a word and 'see' how to pronounce it; we must memorize the sound for each ideogram, each character, each word. Another problem is that Chinese is a tonal language, and the tones are important because they change the meanings of the words. We use tones in English as well, but only for emphasis, so this requires adustment. And in fact, it is like learning two languages. It isn't so difficult in practice to memorise the sounds for words in a sentence, but then one must also learn the tones for each word. And, in practice, it seems easy enough to remember one or the other, but not both. | ||
|
The Chinese are accustomed to the existence of all their various dialects, which, compared to Standard Mandarin, are essentially a mispronunciation of words. They can live with that, and can often understand from the context, because the tones are still the same. So the WORD may be pronounced a bit differently, but the TONE is consistent, and that's what they listen for. We aren't accustomed to that in other languages, so we ignore the tone and focus on pronouncing the word correctly. Unfortunately, that's exactly the wrong thing to do. For example, 龙, the word for dragon, has the same pronunciation as 笼, which means 'chicken coop', except that the tone is slightly different. So when you focus on correct pronunciation but miss the tone, a Chinese person doesn't hear a badly-pronounced 'dragon'; he hears a perfectly-pronounced 'chicken coop'. | ||
|
It's difficult for us to remember that these slight variations can change the meanings of words beyond our ability to reincarnate ourselves. For example, 牛, the word for 'cow', is pronounced only slightly differently than 妞, the word for 'girl'. Can you see where I'm going? You're at a dinner party where someone introduces you to a high government official, and you decide to impress yourself indelibly into his memory by complimenting his taste in women. Unfortunately, you've just told him his girl friend looks like either a cow or a pus-filled pimple. |
