China Blog, the view from the street

Kevin Munns

China Blog

The view from the street…

This is my blog about China, written from the point of view of the average bloke on the street. Or at least its my point of view of his point of view translated into English, if you get what I mean…

Monday February 15th, 2010

Emergency Face Pack

New mum had given up her job to have the baby. New dad was still working at the same company. Their classmate had been in Chengdu for a while now and was hoping for a new job. Rui’s turn. She went with 400 other applicants to the Qatar Airways recruitment fair in Chengdu, and was one of 7 candidates chosen to be sent abroad, earn 20 times her father’s salary and be sent to every major economy in the world on 5-star expenses. That wasn’t how Rui put it, but by the looks on their faces that was what they got. I felt our position was strong, and started to relax.

This was the first in a series of errors.

Rui’s High School friend recently had a baby. We took presents, of course. I suggested something for mum, since if the UK is anything to go by then everyone ignores the poor woman who has been through Hell and showers useless items on a baby that refuses to move. So Rui came back from the shops with some expensive Emergency Face Pack, and a selection of baby clothes.

We bumped into another High School classmate also on the way to visit. The new mum was pleased. He and Rui were the first schoolmates to visit, and after a few minutes of coochey-coo, it turned into a miniature school reunion.

Congratulations were enthusiastically expressed. Then a query.

“What’s he going to do?”

The warning lights were now all flashing red, but unfortunately someone must have switched the alarm to silent mode.

Rui hesitated, then looked at me, and with a sigh said “I don’t know really. Tell them what you think about it, darling.”

This was a massive tactical blunder.

Rocking my shoulders a bit, I made a little chuckle sound.

“I’m just going to carry on studying and Rui’s going to have to look after me, heh heh.”

For a moment there was a silence, as though a bomb had gone off, the room only surviving in my imagination.

Rui cut through to my consciousness. “Darling.” Her teeth were gritted together so hard I thought I could see splits appearing up the enamel. “I have absolutely no face left whatsoever,” she said in English, “do something to save my face immediately.”

I took stock of the situation. I could now see that we were hurtling towards the ground having lost control, and the best I could do would be try to pull up and hope for 50% fatalities. I grappled with the controls.

“I dunno, I guess, it’s just a little joke about cultural differences my love.”

A full investigation will take years to complete.

However, an interim report by the investigating authorities suggested urgent research into new “Emergency Face Packs” in order to avoid similar catastrophic accidents in the future.

Wednesday January 27th, 2010

Will Bai-du do?

So, that’s settled then, Baidu for Chinese stuff, Google for foreign stuff.

This was not good enough, according to Sasha. Some industries are more ruthless and corrupt in pursuit of commercial gain than others.

Gosh Sasha, what villains are these of which you speak?

“If you put ‘Hospitals in Chengdu’ into Baidu, you will just get a lot of rubbish.”

Sasha, your English is really coming on these days, well done.

It was the obvious one. “Will anyone miss Google if they pull out of China?” I’d just come back to China after Christmas, and the students and me were all in a chatty mood. The answer? Oddly, most of the students used both. Perhaps biased by the fact that it’s an English class, but most of the students used Baidu, the main search engine in China, for some things, and Google for others. So which one for what?

Sasha put her finger right on it. “The results on Baidu come up according to which company gives them the most money.”

Interesting. Google receive money for advertising, it’s true, but it’s really obvious which, as they are labelled as Sponsored Links and don’t even appear in the same column.

So, Sasha mostly searches for things on Baidu, and then checks to see if companies that come up are fake or not by looking on Google. Of the other students, most used Google for foreign-related or international things, especially news stories, but also for foreign companies which they come across in China. Baidu is better for things you would naturally search for using Chinese language: famous Chinese people and movies, and things only of interest inside China.

No such distinction on Baidu.

Wednesday February 24th, 2010

Blowing Hot and Cold

It was my manager who I now saw in a new light, however. He is a nice guy, of course. And it was nice of him to come and get me, for sure. But if he’d tried to send me directions in a text message, in whichever language, maybe I would never have arrived at all. Needless to say, he, also, hadn’t told me that.

Before the Spring Festival got underway our English School had a meal out. No alcohol of course, instead hotpot is the standard arrangement in Sichuan. There are a lot of ‘out-of-towners’ in our company though, so we had organised for half-half hotpots, with one part blisteringly spicy, and the other part pretty bland.

I couldn’t help thinking this was quite symbolic of China really. On the one hand heart-wrenchingly warm and friendly, and on other occasions, frankly, a bit lacking.

Take the arrangements for today’s dinner. One of the managers had told me the part of town where the restaurant was, and told me to give him a call when I got there.

I arrived at a bit of a landmark and called him up. He would come out to get me. I hadn’t planned an answer for this, so I just agreed to wait.

After a few minutes I sent him a text, in Chinese, that he could just tell me how to get there, in Chinese, to save him the bother (both of coming to get me, and typing it in English). He called me. No, no, just stay there, he was coming too get me. It was no bother. Where was I?

After about 20 minutes we met up, and made our way across the junction to the restaurant on the opposite side, which gave us the chance for a pleasant 30 second chat on the way. Well, I thought, how very nice of him to really really take the effort of leaving the others, and coming all the way over to, basically, help me across the road.

There have been other times when travel arrangements have seemed a lot more trouble. For last year’s National Day festival Rui and myself were due to go and stay with her uncle’s family. He would give us a lift for the 3 hour drive.

The big CCTV National Holiday Show would start on the Thursday morning. ‘Number 3 Mum-Uncle (by marriage)’, if you like full-translations, announced that carriages would be leaving after people finished work on Wednesday, so that not a single minute of the TV show would be missed the next day.

There was a problem. I taught in the evening.

The official answer came back: I would get home as quickly as possible and they would wait.

The pressure was on. Before the evening class started though, I asked Rui to re-open the negotiation, and suggest that they come to our flat, since I was going to be the last one ready. After all, it was more or less on the way, they had said they would all be sitting at home waiting for me, and getting the bus to their place would probably add an hour-and-a-half.

No can do.

Slightly disbelieving, I decided things couldn’t therefore be that desperate, and made my way home as normal. Back at the flat however, my working arrangements had caused a diplomatic incident. Regular 15 minute text messages of urgency had increased to every 5 minutes, and the trip was in jeopardy. And we still had at least an hour on the bus. But why hadn’t they come over?

Back at the work do, it was while taking something out of the cool half of the hotpot and dunking it in the spicy bit that I realised there was a common explanation. They were opposite experiences, but yes, they all came from the same pot.

While I had been changing my clothes in the flat those months before, swearing about my potential in-laws and declaring the incomprehensibility of the Chinese psyche, Rui had given the answer.

“We have to go there. If he came over to get us he’d get lost.”

I understood. And of course he hadn’t told us that. And yes, most Chinese people are completely hopeless with directions. Hence the logistical gymnastics to avoid asking us where our flat is.

Saturday September 23rd, 2010

Lost in transl… nope, actually just completely lost.

Most foreigners who spend more than a week in China soon get over being amused my bad translations into English, and photographing them would merely take up all of one’s spare time. However, a recent encounter this week encouraged me to put together an inch or two of a few favourites I’ve seen.

This translation for ’Disabled Toilet’ is one of my favourites. The interesting thing is that the Chinese does indeed say ’disabled toilet’, and like ’Disabled Toilet’ doesn’t distinguish male or female. For the rest of my life I shall occasionally wonder what on earth they could have written on the one in the female toilet.

Chengdu Shuangliu Airport, May 2010.

Perhaps only 14 year-old schoolboys would find this funny, anyway, I did as well.

To be fair, our cousins in the USA probably wouldn’t have noticed anything that bad about this translation.

Three Gorges Dam, September 2007.

Clearly, it’s not the 99% probability that the translation isn’t quite perfect, but the 1% possibility that they actually got the translation completely correct. On that basis, this sign wouldn’t seem the slightest bit interesting in a laid back coastal resort on the med.

Jingzhou City, Hubei Province, September 2007.

The rubbish written on the side of this bus wouldn’t at first appear to warrant more than a few seconds of scornful consideration.

Then I read the Chinese.

It needs some explaining. Chinese characters are much more flexible than letters of the alphabet. Books are often written left to right in paragraphs, as in English, but it’s also entirely normal to print a book with vertical columns for each sentence instead, and also starting at the back, reading the book from right to left.

Buses are much more interesting. On the left-hand side of a bus they will write the characters as you would expect to see them in a book or in a newspaper. But it seems to be important to have the first character at the front of the bus, so that the sentence is ‘going forward’ when the bus moves, as it were. This means that on the right-hand side of the bus, the beginning of the title is on the right, and the end is on the left. Armed with this information, have another look at the title of the bus in English.

Chengdu, September 2010.

Saturday October 2nd, 2010

Neighbourly Love

The Media back at home have been pouring over some grainy pictures of Kim Jong-Un when he was a kid, and falling over themselves to find any other tiny details they can from mysterious and secretive North Korea to include in their news reports. The relationship here, however, would appear to be a far more ‘touchy feely’ than it is back at home.

Back on the 12th September, before all this coverage, the Chengdu Business Daily had a lovely article, tucked away on page 7, reporting that North Korea were currently publishing stamps to commemorate the 60th Anniversary of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army coming to the aid of the embattled state during the Korean War.

Particularly touching are the background scenes of soldiers hugging babies and children and generally showing their love all round to the Korean people. (Voluntarily, by the way.)

The writing in (Mainland style) Chinese characters on the right-hand side sums up the feeling nicely: “Resisting the Americans, Helping the Koreans, Saving Home and Country”. How touching, and, if I may say, what a lovely display of mutually respectful and carefully thought out diplomacy.

The short article doesn’t say what the Chinese Government thinks about the stamps, but then, it doesn’t really need to; the press release is credited to the Xinhua News Agency itself - the Chinese Government’s own news organisation.

Saturday February 5th, 2011

The Sage of Technology

The most fun English class involves students disagreeing with each other about various Chinese things. It therefore amuses me in my spare time to think of things which will get them at it. You’d be amazed what pops up.

We were discussing an old topic rehashed many times - the problem of plagiarism, and rife counterfeiting of music and DVD’s. Will China one day lose out because of all this copying? Why doesn’t the Government do more? Would Chinese pop music be better if there was less copying?

Then came the argument to trump all arguments: Chinese people copy not because they are poor or because they are morally bankrupt, but because this comes from Chinese ancient history and culture - Confucius said this is what people should do.

This I had to hear. It’s true, Confucius’ attitude towards education was that you should learn whenever you can, and pass on to others your knowledge whenever you can, and that this shouldn’t be for material gain. He also said that when three people together one of them will always become your teacher, and the other one your student. So, ‘pass it on for free’ then, the Sage himself says so.

Needless to say, the next two weeks of classes, whether teaching English or me learning Chinese, contained the moral question: “If Confucius was alive today, would he have been at it downloading everything from the internet for free?”. The results came in; it was a 50 / 50 split down the middle, and it cut through boundaries of sex, age, wealth, and anything else you can think of. Some were shocked that this culture could be twisted into such a morally corrupt notion, others waded in feet first with further proof that all people with Chinese blood should never pay for anything electronic ever again. The sparks flew, I sipped tea.

One girl, however, put the icing on the cake. I asked her about the quality of today’s pop music, and she said “Yes, I can’t stand it, all the music these days is really rubbish.” But, would it be better if you paid a few pence for it? “No way, downloading things for free is one of our fundamental human rights”.

That’s it, now I’m really in the shite…

This was priceless.

Thursday February 24th, 2011

My Beautiful Essay

Last semester we were asked to write a rather boring ‘Introductory / Descriptive Essay’, entitled ‘Beautiful xxx ‘, about whatever we wanted. I decided to follow the outline, but add some British irony. You can decide whether it worked or not. My teacher clearly didn’t…

The Beautiful Capital

Because the world is getting smaller, more and more people are going away to discover differences between places across the world. Because there is no better model of a country than the capital, my deepest impression is of the capital city of which we have all heard.

This is a ‘discussion essay’, the discussion content is relatively deep and extensive, but this is not in compliance with the rules of a ‘descriptive essay’. This time the instructions were to write a ‘descriptive essay’, and were not to write a ‘discussion essay’. In a ‘descriptive essay’ descriptions are the most important, discussion and emotion should be rare. Please go and study the rules of a ‘descriptive essay’ and how it should be written.

In the Beautiful Capital an important culture is how people pass national festivals. At this time the streets are packed, and recreational activities are abundant. If its not specially constructed floral displays, then it’s dancing shows [which can be seen].

So that ordinary people who can’t get to the capital can enjoy the activities, television channels continuously cover these activities. Because of this, the audience across the country can feel as satisfied and harmonious as that in the capital. Due to this, the Government can also take this opportunity to encourage the ordinary people to work hard, continue the development, and improve living standards. To see city dwellers and those from outside existing so unitedly and harmoniously is very moving, and leaves a deep memory.

In the capital the customs and good level of food is easy for outsiders to see. Although traditional food and customs are very bountiful, when having a meal people in the city do not forget the poor and struggling peasants. State television often reports how government organised programs help the lowest level people. These cultural points can tell us: to enter the Central Government of course requires both morality as well as scholarly skill, and civil servants could not ’further themselves at the expense of others’. From this we can know that one’s general level of education is an expression of culture.

The standards in the capital of course exceed those outside. The abilities of the workers are many and various. The upbringing of the children is among the best. This is because business people all have to have dealings with the government in order to do business. To have more opportunities to negotiate with the government of course affects business greatly. More opportunities to enter the Communist Party of course brings many benefits and convenience. For this reason people living in the capital have better standards than those of other places. These things are not illegal, but naturally the actual situation in any country. In this way the culture of the capital can represent the modal culture of the whole country.

This is all what I have experienced in The Beautiful Capital. After going abroad, knowing this unity, persistence, and ability to face difficulties I would recommend you to experience the amazing culture of The Beautiful Capital, would recommend you to go to this beautiful Pyongyang in North Korea.

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Monday November 29th, 2011

Off-the-shelf vs Off-your-trolley

The recent holiday period has seen lots of articles about how you could spend your time, or your money, during the many days off which you get in the Autumn here.

Surely there must be cheaper clothes available for this poor woman? The article has the answer: “For more ordinary ones we recommend ‘New Yorker’ at Isetan Department Store, where men’s tailored suits are normally around 5000 RMB” (£504 GBP / $785 USD). She later says buying an off-the-shelf size isn’t recommended, as suits are “not traditional Chinese clothing” and are often unsuitable. After seeing that price, I’m not sure I’d really care, but clearly I don’t know anything about fashion.

Is this possible? Sadly, I reckon it is. Firstly, Chinese people don’t make mistakes with the prices of things, so it’s not likely to be a typing error. Secondly, this sounds just like a typical snapshot of the luxury goods market in China. It’s not just about buying something expensive, it’s about showing people that you can buy something expensive. Something good quality, but very reasonably priced, therefore, isn’t going to sell as well as tat which everybody knows costs three times the price. If a Chinese businessman takes you out on an important dinner and you end up drinking red-wine, he will order the most expensive bottle on the wine list. Does he want to make sure you enjoy the best wine? Not really; he will buy the most expensive wine, regardless of whether it’s the best one or not. He does, however, care that you notice the price.

I read a regular column called ‘You Ask, I Answer’, and had a helpful answer to one woman’s question about clothes. “Where can you order (Western Style) suits in Chengdu? My husband’s a bit fat, where can I buy clothes for chubby people?” The paper’s fashion reporter helps with the answer, “High quality custom-made clothes in Chengdu are already becoming more and more common”. She lists some shops, and the prices, ”prices normally start from about 100,000 RMB for an outfit”. (That’s about £10,080 British Pounds, or $15,700 US Dollars.) Ouch.