Yiwu, here are some tidbits of writings about life in China, by a few who have spouses in China and who live and travel part of the year in China. These Americans are very literate and seem at home in China. One is in Harbin and the other in Nanning.
Let me hear your comments.
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This fellow mentioned that his wife speaks "King's" English, like "Mary Poppins" and he had to get used to understanding her English. His wife told him that 10 - 20 years ago, schools taught the British version of English. Now the schools teach American English.
My wife is leaning English but not with an English accent. She is learning English on her own with tapes and she does better than my mandarin. She is too cheap to hire an interpreter or to pay for English lessons. Her incentive to learn on her own is money or lack of it. Shanghai is too big a city for me. It is like Beijing. You will have to get away for a few days in country with your SO. There are many beautiful places in China. There is Guilin, where Philip and LiWei have a 2nd home, there is the beautiful beaches and resorts like BeiHei, and then there is the metropolis like Nanning with no stop signs in the city and only a few lights on the main street. You will love the crazy 'toad' ride in a taxi there. I swear that you will close your eyes and keep saying, "Did we hit them? Did we hit them?" I have never seen anything like it in any other city in China. It is better than paying for an amusement park ride here.
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Tibet is slowly getting modernized and commercialized while preserving the culture. At least it's not fully commercialized and westernized like some people wanted them to be, so they can have their bungalows there. Heaven's forbid what Lhasa would look like today if the westerners have their hands on it - probably plenty of churches there today and plenty of christian converts.
In a similar vein... I went to Lhasa (via ChengDu) in summer of '96 and stayed at the Tibet Hotel which was on the main-drag west of the city proper, Definitely an up-scale hotel, it was still in the midst of remodeling, so few rooms were completely finished and occupied.
Having had a 'Tibetan breakfast' which I found was actually
catered in from a small adjacent restaurant because the hotel's kitchen was un-staffed due to the few guests. I decided to walk down and do the Potala temple
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There is a question on how to make sense on cities' names. Where is the center of China from which the names of cities is referrenced to the north, south, east, and west?
Nanning is further south, but it's in GuangXi which is west of Guangdong; making it east of GuangXi... now if we could determine the geographical center of China which looks like ChengDu... oh, well... thought it was too good to
be true.. I just saw BeiHai which is pretty far south (though north of the Gulf of Tongking) and Nansang which in in frost-bite land... I suppose China got these directions messed up the same way as N. Dakota is north of South Dakota, which are both north of North & South Carolina and then we throw in places like Wyoming, Montana and Michigan, just to add to the mixture!
Bei..(like in Beijing)=North
Nan..(like in Nanjing)=south
..xi.(like in Guangxi)=west
...dong..(like in Guangdong)=east
I do not think we are ever to old to learn something new. We might not get the pronunciation correct but if we use it, we will get it right in time. I am surprised how many words I understand when I listen to Chinese music. I think I am doing better with Chinese than I ever did with French. Perhaps because I use the Chinese in China when I go there. I have never been in France or even the other France, Quebec......
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In 1999 LiWei and I met a couple at the GZ Consulate awaiting her visa... the lady was from Lianyin, a city in way northern Heilongjiang Province; in fact about as northern as one could get. She said she could actually throw a stone across the Amur into Siberian Russia. She was a tall, pale (almost white skinned) Chinese, but her native language was written in script, not characters... almost a Mongolian style. Her English was excellent, but she could not understand much of the Chinese spoken in GZ... in fact, she had to ask LiWei if she would listen for her name to be called; saying Guangzhou folks had such bad accent!'
LiWei told her when her name came up and then I waited with her fiance while she had her interview. He was mid-40s and from Tennesee, and told me he had been in China 6-months trying to get to this point. Besides her good English, his girlfriend fixed him fried eggs, bacon & potatoes, and could make soup like he never tasted... He mentioned the bitter cold and artic-like snow of the past winter, and the heavy gear he had to wear to stay warm. They had taken 2 trains to Harbin in February for the Ice Festival, and he said it was 'much warmer' there!
I believe she had a 14-y-o daughter immigrating with her, if I remember correctly. The girl was tall like her mom (who stood about 6' in some stylish jeans, a butterfly shirt and mocasins). The man she was to marry was about 5'6" and LiWei said they looked like a Chinese TV comedy couple (equiv. to Mutt & Jeff) and she almost laughed. I often wondered what happened to them once they made it to the USA???
One thing I would very much like to learn ... is it the women who want to immigrate -or- us American men that ask them to. I know it was not really LiWei's desire... though her daughter did want to come to America. I have a friend in Wuhan, who un-burdens all her private passions and affairs with Americans who always seem to show up at her door looking only for some companionship and a quick fling while visiting China. At least, the few who have promised over the last 6-years, never made good on any visa application. Ling is approaching 40 and still a bit skinny, but certainly personable and able to carry-on good conversations in English. She told me her desire is to come to America and avoid the family pressures she has felt since a 1997 divorce... apparently the ex- is a good family friend and has re-married. He now has a wife that produced a son, so her 14-y-o daughter is up for grabs, too.
While in Guilin, we had a neighbor who asked me to write her introductory and correspondence with American men (she came on her own last year, under bond and has asked for Refugee Status as a Fallun Gong; her sister did the same thing a year before). Our good friends' daughter, 21, also had me write to men here for her... she got a 45-y-o boyfriend, but her parents felt he was a bit too old! All three of these women had similar reasons to immigrate; none expected a rich husband, and all planned to work when they got here.
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Here is about the gap between the rich and the poor. But such was the case in early 1900's USA.
And most China's citizens don't turn up the heat in their homes. They sleep in their down or silk quilts and let near freezing temperatures for the rest of their apartments and houses. But all I hear in US news media is about the increased fuel consumption in China, as if blaming China for the high cost of fuel. That kind of information leaves American public as clueless that most people in China don't waste energy like we do in US. Not even close, and there is no comparison.
BTW, some clothing factories (sweaters) allow workers to keep the rejects (slight defects) and sell them without the labels. If sold in stores, the wool sweaters would have a 300 Yuan price tag. I bought two 100% wool high quality sweaters for 30 Yuan each.
I was surprised at the class structure in China. There are the very rich and the very poor. There are few middle class. Did you guys see the same? The image that stands out in my mind is the little children and adults standing outside the McDonalds and KC in Zigong.
The McDonalds girls would come outside each restaurant... seems they were competing...and dance and sing for the little children. Then they would line the little children up like a school class and teach then a coordinated dance and a song, that I do not understand. The children should join in and after they did their routine, the children would get a reward, a paper hat that had McDonald's ads or KC ads. The parents would be so happy and would give it up to eat at either restaurant. Some had nothing. I can remember one little boy that had the song and dance down pat. He was even chosen to lead the other children. He had no sox and torn pants and it was so cold I thought that I was going to freeze.....The money that the parents spent at either restaurant might have been a week's groceries. It reminded me of our seniors giving up food so that they can buy prescriptions....
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That's a piece of cake....duibuqi (pronounced doi bu chi) is excuse me. Zaijiang (pronounced shy jan) is good bye, and hello is Ni Hao. Ni is you. Woh is I or me. Xie xie is thanks and xie xie ni (pronounced shea shea knee) is thank you. Don't forget what WC means!!! hehehe
Ahh - DaShan... famous and infamous amongst ESL teachers, depending on what list and who's the moderator. My hat's off to you, Jim... I lived there for 2-years and didn't learn the phrases you use. I suppose if there was such a thing as pidgeon Putongua, then I'd be a neophyte there, too! I tried a few phrases on our daughter... and she laughed; saying they were too formal and had not enough Chinese slang in them. Wei is how almost everyone answers the phone in China... but somehow, LiWei's family and friends most often use "Hello".
Today LiWei had a call from her friend in Perth, Australia. The lady started out well enough, by asking: "Phil, is LiWei there? May I speak with her" and from there she resorted to some mixed English/Mandarin when I told her LiWei was at work. It seems that she is learning English phrases in order to get a job while her husband chefs at a Chinese eatery there. She married a guy from H-K whose English skills were fair, and I imagine there is a bit of competition between them. LiWei will call her back this evening.
When I traveled in Europe, I spoke only a few words in several languages and English was always acceptable, even in Italy and the Greek Islands. In S. and Central America, I'd resort to what little Spanish I remembered from school and get the point over in sign-language.
So when I decided to ride across China's mid-section, I went prepared with 'hello', 'good-by', 'how are you', and the universal 'excuse me'. Gasoline or petrol seemed to suffice when at the pump and if I could not read the food lable and it didn't look apetizing I didn't buy it. I wish I had found 'walk-around-the-kitchens' places sooner for obvious reasons.
My hitch-hikers seemed to have a modicum of English, and we communicated what remained in sign-language. Mechanics just looked at the few engine problems I had; diagnosed them and wrote down their estimates, which, when compared to cycle shops in the USA, were cheaper than the dirt on their floors - so no bargaining was ever needed. That is, until I decided to trade the CJ in on a Honda. Actually, I just sold it to the Guilin shop that did the PSB's bikes... and haggled the price down on the 125 CG cruiser. It was fun to be back on two wheels and I was soon to get another lady hanging on in my aft saddle.. the school-teacher who missed the bus to ChengDu (or rather, she was left behind at the first potty-stop!).
Fortunately, this gal was an English teacher enroute to her first assignment - so we got on fabulously and she did all the talking for me during the week it took us to chase her bus to Kunming (the big Daewoo thing out-distanced us the first couple days, but since her luggage was aboard, I told her we'd continue... and I gave her some cash to buy a change of clothes and bought the meals. Haven't heard much from her since a 2000 e-mail.
I can type in Pin-Yin, see: ?? ???. but I cannot read the characters. Once I thought I had it down for 'soup'... and I got snails when I ordered from the Chinese menu. Of course, they were Yanshuo snails, and better than any soup in the place (once you learn how to eat them with a tooth-pick). Once in Dunhuang I bought 3-kilos of assorted raisins - that's a lot of raisins, let me tell you. It took me a while to sort out kilos from pounds! My guide loved the small cans of SMILING FISH (hot, salted macrel and sardines). She always had some very tasty wafers available for a snack, with a cola from the cooler in our 4-WD Toyota... until we broke an axle in the desert a few hours from Jiayuan by train.
We walked to the train-station... way out in some desert oasis I cannot remember the name of. It was unusual in that it had the platform between two sets of tracks and one had to traverse the tracks and climb up. All along the platform were stalls selling meat, vegetables and eggs. The meat was apparently the hind quarters of something, so once He Li got us seated in a first-class cabin (for 6), I asked her what that meat was that they were selling??? Without batting an eye, she replied: "Donkey meat... this is one place in China where you can get a piece of Ass right on the railway platform!"
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I keep seeing vehement complaints from ESL teachers of various yahoogroups about discipline problems in schools and private institutions in China. Some say it's the parents fault, some say the schools don't care as long as the parents pay for their chidren to go ther. Chinese English teachers seem to voice similar opinions. I'd like to hear from those on this list who's wives and fiancees are teachers if this is true in the schools where they teach... Back when I attended school, our teachers had discipline problems, too. I'd like to share some of the corrective actions as well as the pranks of rich kids attending a prep-school in Grosse Pointe, MI. |
