More human stories, entertaining to read.
The first two describe how most of the other 80% live in China. On this point, why would anyone be envious. Instead they should be commended for the hard work. What's all the recent noise about tariffs and quotas and protectionism. The majority in China consumes minimal fuel and energy in their daily life. No wasteful spending there, for sure. It is consumed by the industries for producing goods to meet and satisfy the world's and American demands.
The last one is about pinyin and how it was misunderstood for a girl's name.
Yes! Jim, that's a cool story. I love to read stuff like that. Aren't you glad you had the opportunity to experience it?
My fiance had a condo that was built in the 70's, so it's in pretty bad shape. All concrete and is falling apart. Two bedrooms, steel door, dining room right at the front door. Toilet, obviously, was a squatter, but it did have a flush.
I was lucky to live with a family in this housing, wash out of a pan of warm water with a rag for two weeks, with mode of transportation a rickety bike with bad brakes and a bed that was as hard as brick. I loved it!
Yeah, China, the land of Zoolander cell phones???? Ha.
Patrick
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What's behind all those big beautiful buildings that the tourists see?
On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 22:39:46 -0000, "James Hoffman" said:
Yes, we have much larger cell phones. They stick out of my pocket!! Hehehe!!! When I was in Beijing last summer and when I first met my wife in person, she keep wanting to wash my clothes there in the hotel room. I keep saying no, no, no...I got up one morning and all of my dirty clothes were hanging in the bathroom!!! Her house (one room apartment) in Zigong just has an outside water facet in the room with a drain. There is no sink and the wiring is the same size as telephone wire. If it took 3 amps, that was something. I bought 2 little heaters and kept blowing the strange looking fuse. Finally, I jumped the fuse out. Burnt telephone wires were not going to cause a fire against a brick wall.
People do not see the real China. They go down the street and look at the modern store fronts. They do not see the 100s of families living in the building in terrible conditions. They do not see the shanties hidden by the big, beautiful buildings. There really is 2 Chinas.....Jim
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"Patrick" wrote:
That's funny. Yeah, it's an eye-opener, isn't it? And some of the things we take for granted. Like in-house "wireless" phones. Yanhua's son mentioned that they have smaller cellphones in China, when he first saw our cordless phones.
Yanhua's home had no hot running water. When she came to my (our) home, I would turn on the hot water. She was really surprised that we had hot water.
Later, she kept using it. I then found out the water was not hot when she used it (one handle kitchen facet). She asked me hot to get the hot water again! When I showed her, she was really surprised.
And then there's the things like not washing socks with the other clothes. Or not washing colors with whites, even with Color Safe clothing (and being a guy, I invariably toss everything together because I'm simple and lazy).
Patrick
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Mon, 14 Mar 2005, "james hoffman" said:
Hehehehehe!!! I would be rolling!!! This is the reason I love my wife so much. She keeps me in stitches and she can laugh along with me!!! We were in the hotel in Chengdu and I was going to take a nice back to warm up from all that cold!!! No hot water!!! I told my wife and she said, "I fix. I fix." I said, "OK" I then sat down and started watching TV. I heard this strange noise and it sounded like SWISH........I lookied in the bathroom and my wife was holding the hot water facet in one hand and was trying to put the facet back on the pipe with the other hand. Water was squirting everywhere!!! Rather than say anything and lose face, she was determined to fix it herself....Hehehehe!! I had to call the desk and they sent a plumber up. Hehehehe!!! I sure do love her...
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Patrick wrote:
There's a ton of Asians here. The percentage of the population is pretty high, so I don't think Asians are just part of the landscape out here like everyone else. That is, no one makes the distinction.
I think it just may be her social aura. The combination of us. I don't know. I think having her around is affecting the way I act in public.
I guess it's best to not analyze and just appreciate.
I was treated very well in Qinhuangdao. Treated as an oddity. Some girls at a wildlife park wanted their picture taken with me because I was "so white".
HOw does the saying go in China? "A crane among the chickens."
Patrick
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Mon, 14 Mar 2005 "James Hoffman" said:
Perhaps you have stumbled onto something. When we are in China, especially areas that do not see many westerners, we are treated very well. It is similar to you and your wife there. People go out of their way to welcome her. However, In Beijing where there are so many westerners, they ignore you and actually try at times to snub you. Perhaps the rarity lends itself to a different demeanor....Lao Mao,ÀÏë£
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"Patrick" wrote:
Yeah, what is it? Run, don't walk, from Beijing? It felt like LA to me. And the people didn't seem too friendly. As for being friendly, I feel as Yanhua has brought a lot of grace with her. Life has changed so much for me. I can't believe it. Just her aura? I don't know. But people just seem so much friendlier.
With just the girls and I, we rarely interacted with people in stores or wherever. But now with Yanhua, it seems that people open up to us with smiles. It really is amazing. Nice.
So she has been happy with her encounters here so far. Very nice and pleasant.
The weather has been amazing, with no rain, so we are officially in a drought in Washington state. The mountains look like they would seem in August.
Patrick
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Mon, 14 Mar 2005, "james hoffman" said:
Philip,
You brought back so many memories of Nanning...close to Guilin...that I am homesick. I remember a man on a bicycle each morning taking his bird for a ride. He must have loved his bird. I can vividly see the throngs of people with bikes, motorscooters, motorcycles, bikes with wagons attached, horses with wagons behind, taxis, cars, and prople all on the same street in front of the Yong Jiang Hotel at the same time.
It was a sight that I will never forget and I was entranced and kept saying..aload at times...so many people, so many people!! I can smell the strange odors of spices in the air from people cooking. I can see the people in the parks playing an erhu or two and doing tai chi...You have made me very homesick. Beijing was very different and was like any city in the US with many cars...Jim
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Philip VanZandt wrote:
Jim:
Definitely the 'funny' for the day. I actually never knew
anyone named Pin or Yin, but my daughter says that in her middle- school English class, they were taught a kind of alphabet which it turns out is Pin-Yin (but no teacher ever identified it by that name). As you probably know it is not quite phonetic, even for the Brits who developed it with the Chinese way back.
Pin-Yin takes into account sounds, tones but cannot really make the learner, if Westren, aware of the correct pronunciation for words like "Cao" (tsao) or names like Xinmin (Chzeemen) yet Chinese who learn it do much better with English. I have not been successful teaching LiWei, or Alexis phonics. My niece in Nanning did quite well however, as did a neighbor in Guilin when I made lists of sounds that went with the beginning and ends of words. In general these never vary (in practice a few do) - "ch","ur","lo","ph", etc. I started this with some neighbor kids in Guilin who'd stop by to practice their English as they invariably could not get the sounds of many common words correct. After some weeks, I began to notice that the near-by day-school kids would all line up in front of our gate in the morning with a teacher or nanny. One day I went outside when they appeared... and was greeted by: "GOOD MORNING" and a few giggles somewhat in unison. After that I tried to be there at 9AM just to hear the new English words the kids had learned ... One of the nannies, who herself was learning English in night courses, asked me, quite embarrased, if the children were annoying me ... I said they definitely were not! I was happy to see their morning smiles and waves. I asked her if the 'school' needed anything; perhaps a Chinese/English dictionary as we had three of them. She greatfully accepted our biggest (which I never really learned to use, because it was groups of Chinese words, which required going to pages where there were synonyms for, but rarely the English word I though should fit) and the references were in Chinese... so, I asked her if the kids could learn phonetically (this word is seldom understood by Chinese)?
After I explained what phonics could do... she looked at me and
said: "Phillipu sir - please make a list, and I shall learn to teach children". Well, within just a few days the children came by one morning in a light drizzle; all dressed in rain-jackets and without the teacher. They all rattled the front gate and when I opened the door and looked out, they said: "Mister Phillipu... we wish good morning, you", a few giggles; then the largest girl thanked me for the lists of study word sounds (which I had run-off on the computer) and they did a right-face maneuver and marched off to school.
A few days later, we were to go to Guangzhou for LiWei's exit visa, and when we returned, the spring-holidays had just begun and school was out. We went off to do some traveling and say good-byes to family; make financial arrangements for RiYong with her uncle in Nanning that would allow the girl; her school to receive money, not her bio-father to intercept it, since he had recently lost his job. When we returned, the school children soon noticed and began their morning routine again, replete with songs and an Easter Card, which they had all signed!
Those were amongst my most memorable days @ LiJiang Gardens, Guilin. They included lots of bus & taxi-rides down town, some
bicycling with neighbors to city parks... and one of the things that progress has really made me miss - horse-drawn wagons, and people leading their water-buffalo down our boulevard-street past the front gate, to take them to graze at the river's edge.
Then too, there was the walking-bridge while the new Li river one was under construction... literally 10,000 people walked, pushed bikes, carried goods on their backs each day. We'd take a bus as far as we could ride, then hike the bridge and catch a bus on the otherside. At night, during the summer the east-side shore would be lined with acetylene-lantern lit stalls to catch the tourist out for an evening stroll from the many hotels that lined that bank. There'd be great bar-b-q and snax right up to the bridge when we'd hike back across to catch the last bus @ 10PM... and we'd almost always stop for ice-cream a block from our place, getting there just as they were about to close....
Guilin is more Glitzy now, more refined in its offers to tourists...more modern, I suppose. It still has its charm, somewhat enhanced by pagodas and connected water-ways. You can't just hop the stone lilly-pads across a creek to get to the old Ming Buddhist shrine and the back-side of Elephant trunk hill, which was known as Moon Cave. The pavillion where caged song-birds were displayed by the older locals is no more, and perhaps one cannot find the cages scattered thru the older neighborhood trees as they widened the road to the bridge to 8-lanes from two. It costs now to get a river-side view of Elephant-trunk, and there are vendors who'll take you out for a closer look on a bamboo, poled raft - at a price.
Tell your wife that I never met a Pin Yin, but had a friend once named PingPing Fu
Phil!
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James Hoffman wrote:
I just had one of those cultural moments.....Hehehehe!!! I cannot stop laughing!!! I told my wife about typing pinyin on the computer.
She thought that I was typing on my computer to a girl named pinyin!!! Hehehehe I had to call her on her cell to explain that ...Pinyin shi zhongoren!!! Bu Bu woman!!!! Hehehehe (Pinyin is Chinese!! It is not a woman!!) Hehehehehehehehe!!!! Her son was laughing and so was the computer room!!!! hehehe She was too after she understood what pinyin was!!!! hehehehe!!! A cultural moment!!!! Hehehehe |
