memories…
Posted by wangbo in tilting at windmills on March 19, 2009
Because sometimes expat life really sucks. There are some things that you think would be easier to deal with if you were somewhat less than eleven thousand kilometres from home. I’m getting bad news, the kind of news that isn’t going to get good. There’s really very little I could do even if I were in New Zealand, even less from here.
But this is news I’ve been expecting for a long time now.
Doesn’t make it any easier. Doesn’t make it cut any less.
And the memories. I must catch them. These are memories that form a very important part of my early childhood. I need them.
book shopping
Posted by wangbo in life in Beijing on March 14, 2009
lzh and I went up to the book market at 甜水园/Tianshuiyuan this afternoon. Her boss suggested she should take some translator’s exam, so she was looking for books to study for that, and, well, book shopping is one of the very few forms of shopping I actually enjoy. We didn’t stay long, though. As soon as she found her books and I’d picked out a couple that looked interesting, we paid up, thereby emptying my wallet (not much point in staying any longer, then, was there?) and left. I guess that means we managed to set two records:
- lzh’s shortest ever shopping trip; and
- the shortest time I’ve ever spent in a bookstore.
That’s pretty impressive. It normally takes ages to drag me out of a bookstore, and her shopping trips are usually full day affairs.
So what did I get?
- 汉语外来词/史有为著。-北京：商务印书馆，2000 （汉语知识丛书）
- 汉语方言学/李如龙著。-2版。-北京：高等教育出版社，2007.2
Or, to translate just as quickly and roughly as I usually do: Foreign Words in Chinese, by Shi Youwei, published by the Commercial Press in Beijing in 2000 as part of the Chinese Knowledge Series, and Chinese Dialectology, (2nd edition) by Li Rulong, published in Beijing by the Higher Education Press in February 2007.
This raises, for the sake of keeping the motif of short lists running, two questions:
- Is my Chinese up to reading these books?
- Will I actually read them?
It’s too early to answer the first question. All I can say is that with both books I immediately understood the title and all that publication detail I just listed up there, and almost all of the contents pages (yeah, there were a few new characters, but that’s why you read foreign language books, to expand your command of that foreign language, right?). By the second question I mean (again- I mean, I can’t go abandoning short lists this late in the piece, now, can I?):
- One of the things I do not lack is Chinese-language books and Chinese language textbooks sitting on the bookshelf, window sills, and other flat surfaces, unread.
- The start of this semester has been so busy and tiring I’m surprised I still have energy to walk home at the end of the day, let alone read anything.
But I suspect the semester will settle down, especially once all our new teachers finally have all the documents they need. So it’s just a question- like my very slow progress through Walden and Other Writings by Henry David Thoreau- of, when I do have time and energy, turning the bloody computer off and reading real stuff.
Because much as I love my online life, sitting down with a good, old fashioned, dead tree book is far more satisfying. It’s the feel and smell of the paper and ink, you see, that the internet does not have, and the ease of distracting oneself that books so perfectly lack.
two things
Posted by wangbo in Environment, life in Beijing, news on March 14, 2009
You’ll have to forgive the long periods of silence. Work has been busy, busy to the point of eating into my weekends, even.
Anyway, sifting through the 新京报/The Beijing News’ Beijing news this morning I came across two interesting little tidbits. One piece of good news with potentially bad news appended and one curious little item involving changing the colour of Beijing’s rooves. I’ll start with the good news, but only in summary:
Beijing’s municipal government, in accordance with the spirit of the notice from the central government, they say, has set this year’s Qingming holiday for Saturday 4 April to Monday 6 April. 4 April is the day of Qingming itself.
The potentially bad news appended is that Beijing’s six month trial of traffic restrictions is set to end on April 10, and so far there’s been no word as to whether the traffic restrictions will continue.
Rooves changing colour? That one’s a curious piece:
屋顶绿化将成城市新景观
Roof greening to become city sight
屋顶绿化要从环保项目转变为城市新景观，让市民看得见摸得着。昨天下午，记者从2008年北京屋顶绿化总结表彰大会上获悉，屋顶绿化将如同地面绿化一样，纳入新建建筑设计范畴。
Roof greening will be transformed from an environmental protection project into a new sight of the city citizens will be able to see and touch. This reporter learned at yesterday afternoon’s meeting to summarise and commend Beijing’s 2008 roof greening that roof greening will become the same as the greening of the land and be incorparted as a category of the design of new construction.
“屋顶绿化最早是作为环保项目出现的，不属于城市景观。”北京市园林绿化局绿地管理处处长杨志华介绍目前北京屋顶绿化面积达到100多万平米。
“Roof greening first emerged as an environmental protection project and did not belong to the city’s scenery.” Head of the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Landscape and Forestry [Seems they can’t decide on one single English name] Division of Green Land Management Yang Zhihua said that currently Beijing’s area of greened roof has reached over 1 million square metres.
杨志华说，目前屋顶绿化还以简单草坪为主，有花有草有树的花园式比较少，原因是楼盖完后才考虑屋顶绿化，已建成楼的承重问题、防水问题、安全问题都是制约因素。
Yang Zhihua said that currently roof greening is still mainly simple lawns, and gardens with flowers, grass and trees are relatively rare. The reason is that roof greening is considered after the roof has been put on the building, the ability of already-constructed buildings to carry weight, water-proofing and safety are all restricting factors.
北京市园林绿化局副局长强健认为，下一步将协调相关部门，逐步将屋顶绿化纳入新建建筑设计范畴。
The assistant head of the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Landscape and Forestry strongly believes that the next step will be to coordinate with related departments to progressively incorporate roof greening as a category of the design of new construction.
Hmm….. perhaps I should not attempt to translate anything before breakfast….
I have to say I like the idea of rooftop gardens. There’s something fundamentally cool about putting a garden on the roof of a building. And if they do start designing buildings so they can put gardens including trees on rooftops, even cooler.
how not to help
Posted by wangbo in news, ranting, tilting at windmills on March 7, 2009
Unfortunately racism is a problem everywhere around the world, and even more unfortunately New Zealand does have a history of specifically anti-Chinese and more generally anti-Asian (Asian usually meaning East Asian or more specifically Chinese) prejudice. I would like to think that is very much history, but it does rear its ugly head in modern New Zealand with frustrating regularity. But when an incident of racially-charged violence happens in your town, this is not how to help improve your town’s image:
“Two of them [Asians] were in school uniform and an adult was with them. One had two baseball bats, [and was] flinging them around like bloody chopsticks,” a witness said.
He said as soon as the youth with the baseball bats appeared everything escalated. “It was just like a rat’s nest being disturbed by a fox terrier, they were going everywhere.”
CHOPSTICKS?!?!?!?!?!
First of all, you don’t fling chopsticks around. And I find it hard to imagine a context in which it would be appropriate to fling baseball bats around- in a fight, wouldn’t it be better to hold on to your baseball bat? That way you have something to continue beating your opponent with, whereas if you fling it around, your opponent can pick it up and use it against you.
Secondly, chopsticks are considerably smaller than baseball bats.
Thirdly, why? I mean, why use this word “chopsticks” in your seriously warped simile? Could it be the Asian-ness of those doing the flinging around? Some bizarre stereotype of kung fu movies?
And to then follow that up with rats? Wow, you really are trying to reinforce the image of Timaru as a racist, redneck hole, aren’t you?
And perhaps I’m being a little oversensitive, but it seems to me that this article focusses more on the actions of the Asians than the Europeans, despite one girl claiming she was with White Power. There is talk of a fight and offensive racial remarks and gestures, but that’s it. Flinging chopsticks around like baseball bats, smashing a car window, and climbing on to a car are rather extreme reactions to offensive remarks and gestures, aren’t they? Am I wrong to suggest that the real story goes deeper than this?
mauri
Posted by wangbo in tilting at windmills on March 5, 2009
There was something that got me thinking about Bao Pu’s and Peony’s last comments on this post of Peony’s this morning that I just about, but didn’t have time to, put into words early this morning. There’s been a long running discussion on several blogs closely related to Peony’s about how to translate 德. I guess most of us, looking at modern Chinese, will say ‘Virtue’, but looking back at the ancient texts, life gets more complicated.
And Peony replies:
Hi Bao Pu,Derek will ask the same question no doubt– but can you give a full example? Do you mean like what I wrote about in lunar virtue?
夜光何徳 死則又育
厥利維何 而顧菟在腹
『楚辞』The above might be an argument to keep the translation virtue, because in this case integrity might not work– even “moral power” is iffy… but “what virtue does the moon have?” can just mean, “what does the moon teach us?” No?
In this case (above) while some “power” may perhaps be implied, it is more about human interpretation… that is to say, what “de” does the moon have could also be understood (in my opinion) as “what can the moon teach us about “de” in life?
And I get to thinking, based purely on their attempts to translate 德, especially with reference to these two comments: Well, aren’t we talking nature here? Not nature 自然, but the inherent natural properties of a thing, the vital force that animates it, mauri…. oh dear. Not the first time I’ve been tempted to inject a Maori word into the discussion, and it is rather disturbing to find the first google results referring to shoes. Shoes, for crying out loud! Oh well, here’s wikipedia. Look at the top result.
There are problems, though. First, I don’t speak Maori. It goes like this: Growing up in New Zealand, I learned a fair few Maori words and phrases, first in school, and then seeing more and more the way society was evolving around me, the increasing use of Maori words first of all to express Maori concepts that can not be expressed easily in English, then in a broader sense to cover ideas that us Pakeha had grown used to, but for which we could not find any English word, only Maori words. The most obvious examples of these words are haka, hangi, hongi, tangi, iwi, hapu, even perhaps whanau. And on the periphery you find such words as mauri, words that haven’t quite found their way into wider Pakeha consciousness, but which are lurking there around the edges, bugging those of us more observant than most.
Mauri, the vital force, the life force that animates living things.
Oh, and I finally find something helpful.
On the one hand, having grown up in New Zealand developing a certain linguistic awareness and curiosity woke me up to the facts that:
- All things can be translated.
- But not all ideas have an equivalent in the language you want to translate them in to.
In other words, sometimes in translating you just have to take the closest equivalent you can find for that particular context, and sometimes you just have to adopt that foreign word. 德 and mauri are perfect examples.
My biggest trouble relating my heavily Pakeha understanding of mauri with 德 is that my Pakeha self has never heard mauri used to refer to any non-human, let alone inanimate object, except, perhaps, and I’m stretching here, in the case of Hone Tuwhare’s poem of that name from his first published collection no ordinary sun. Here it is:
Mauri
Ere gods were shaped
to polished images of brass
and fired clay
the meek stone hardened
to a consciousness its own.
From its soul’s core sun
to another sun responded:
succoured the lonely man
his tribe’s invention of trees
sweeping the sky’s floor clean.
When gods were fused
to an angered one
all-seeing triple-faced
still
did this man’s tribe store
reverence for the stone
from whence plants sprang
sweet water leapt:
and jealous of its well-spring
destroyed utterly
the new god’s sour
and honeyed strength
turning alas
the meek stone’s joy
to a cloud
to an ashen face.
And the rather slim edition that is no ordinary sun contains, at the bottom of that very page, a note informing us that “Mauri is a material symbol of the hidden principle protecting vitality. Life principle, talisman, thymos of man. (Denotative meaning taken from Dictionary of Maori Language by Rev. Hoani Laughton.)” But that’s because it was first published in 1964.
And so I’m still lost and confused. Virtue and Integrity don’t do it for me. They don’t come close to encoding 德, at least, not as it has been discussed by Peony and her friends. I’m comfortable with 德 as virtue in modern Chinese, but that’s largely because I don’t know any better. But in the context of the 道德经, I just don’t know. Peony keeps putting Maori words in my brain, because the way she talks about 德 gets me thinking mana, and then mauri. But neither mana or mauri is sufficient. Nor is any English word I’ve ever heard of.
So I guess we’re just going to have to run with whatever English word fits the particular context, with footnotes for the more serious scholars to remind them that each particular English word is the best translation of 德 available under this particular context.
more subways
Posted by wangbo in beijing public transport on February 28, 2009
I long since gave up reading articles on the expansion of Beijing’s subway system because they’re so repititive, but today I opened this one in 新京报/The Beijing News and decided, why not?:
5条地铁线明年将通车
5 new subway lines open next year
明年北京将有5条地铁新线建成通车，包括大兴线、亦庄线、昌平线一期、房山线以及15号线一期，6号线、8号线及9号线也有望分段开通运营。昨日召开的“2009中国城市轨道交通关键技术论坛”上，北京市交通委相关负责人透露了上述消息。
Next year construction of 5 new subway lines in Beijing, the Daxing Line, Yizhuan Line, Phase 1 of the Changping Line, the Fangshan Line as well as Phase 1 of Line 15, will be complete and they will be open to traffic. Segments of Line 6, Line 8 and Line 9 hopefully will also be open to traffic. The relevant person in charge at the Beijing municipal transport committee revealed this information at the “2009 Chinese Urban Rail Key Technology Forum” held yesterday.
The rest I don’t really want to translate, it’s the same old fluff, but it does, naturally, come with some pretty impressive statistics:
…确保2010年实现地铁开通300公里，2012年达到420公里，2015年达到561公里。今年至2015年这7年间，轨道交通建设总投资将达2080亿元，其中今年计划投资389亿元，明年计划投资511亿元。
…ensure the realisation of having 300 kilometres of subway line running in 2010, reaching 420 kilometres in 2012 and 561 kilometres in 2015. In the seven years from this year to 2015, the total amount invested in rail transport construction will reach 208 billion yuan, of which 38.9 billion is planned to be invested this year and 51.1 billion next year.
Wow.
Also, taken randomly from parts of the article I didn’t translate:
- There are currently 7 lines under construction, and within the year the number of lines under construction will reach 13, with a total length of 317 kilometres and 206 stations.
- The subway system currently handles 23% of public transport passenger volume. That is planned to be over 50% by 2015.
- The subway network will very comprehensively cover the downtown area in 2015, and there will be 7 lines coming into the city centre from the outer suburbs.
fun with spelling
I was forwarded this on Facebook, and rather forward it on to a few others, I thought I’d put it out there for everybody:
fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too. Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 56 plepoe out of 100 can.
i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be
in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tih! s is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!
Yes, I can read it, but I don’t find that in anyway amazing or surprising, and I certainly do not think my ability to read it implies that there might be anything strange about my mind- especially considering “only” 56 out of 100 people can read it- hello, people! Not even my maths is that bad! 56% is a majority! But I do find myself wondering where, precisely, this came from and what research at Cambridge University it refers to.
So why can I read it? Just off the top of my head, I can think of a few possible answers:
- Word games. Kids are given word games as part of their education- both formal and informal- and so learn to do things like find words in a wordsearch or unscramble letters to spell the word correctly. Some of us continue playing word games like crosswords into adulthood. Hey, crosswords are fun and good exercise for the brain.
- Work. A large part of my job involves interpreting crazy concoctions of letters and strange jumbles of words to show students how they should’ve written things.
- This sentence: “Tih! s is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. ” And that makes perfect sense when you think of the Chinese language. The question is why does the brain function that way? Is it natural, or a result of our education?
But I don’t see anything to be proud of in being one of “only” 56% of people who can read that. First up, that’s a majority. A slim majority, but a majority nevertheless. Secondly, 56% of what people? Clearly that is not 56% of the total global population. The majority of people in this world do not read English and therefore have no hope of being able to read that text. 56% of people who do read English? Perhaps, and I just showed it to lzh who read it to me easily. 56% of literate native English speakers? Plausible, I guess. And how did they come up with that number?
Oh well, it’s good for a little fun, I suppose.
smokefree village
Posted by wangbo in Environment, news on February 22, 2009
No, they didn’t ban smoking. Instead, one village in Yanqing County has replaced it’s old wood, straw and coal stoves for cooking and heating with fancy new ones. It’s perhaps a little puffy, the article, despite the lack of smoke, but it reports that Mijiabu Village in Yanqing Township (the area in roughly the centre of the county, centred on the county town) has retired it’s dirty, smoky old stoves with “环保节能的生物质炊事炉。”- Environmentally friendly energy saving biomass cooking stoves. The article doesn’t enlighten me as to just how these new stoves produce heat from biomass without producing smoke, but maybe I’m missing something. But it does quote one villager happily saying that the new stoves are much faster, boiling a pot of water in only 10 minutes, and they’re environmentally friendly and hygienic.
Hygienic? Well, my mother in law still uses an old, cornstalk-fired stove for cooking, and cooking a meal can easily smoke out the kitchen and entrance hall. Usually when she’s cooking I have to seek refuge from the smoke in a room with the door tightly closed. And of course, there’s the coal stove used for heating, and we all know coal isn’t the cleanest-burning of fuels. So yes, hygienic. Replacing those old stoves is not just good for the environment, but good for public health, too.
It also lists a series of new energy projects the township is implementing:
…大型沼气、秸秆压块、吊炕、太阳能浴池、墙体保温…
…large-scale methane, straw briquettes, suspended kangs, solar-powered bath houses, wall insulation…
Actually, that reminds me, we saw a new solar-powered bath house up in our township over Spring Festival. It’s a single-storey concrete building divided into men’s and women’s halves with a huge rack of solar water heaters on the roof. An aunt caught a chill bathing there. It seems to run on a first in first served basis, so if the hot water starts to run out while you’re still bathing, you’d best get out quick.
I still don’t know what a suspended kang is, but they were mentioned in an article I translated last April.
But this smokefree village article does end with an interesting perspective:
从烧柴、烧煤到用上新能源，米家堡村今年60多岁的赵德海深有感触，几十年来，他亲眼目睹了农村炊事的三大变迁。过去，由于农村没有别的能源，主要依靠木 柴生火，大量树木遭到砍伐，许多青山变成了秃山，绿坡变成了荒地，烧柴产生的大量烟雾，使原来清新的空气受到了污染。渐渐的，人们不再砍树取柴，用上了节 煤炉，烟煤、蜂窝煤取而代之，虽然省事了，但依旧是煮饭满屋烟，熏黑四面墙，灰尘扫不完。如今，村民免费用上了秸秆“绿气”，方便快捷，乌烟瘴气的景象一 去不复返了。
From burning wood and coal to using new energy, 60-something Mijiabu villager Zhao Dehai is deeply moved. Over the decades, he has seen with his own eyes three great changes in rural cooking. In the past, because the countryside had no other energy resource, the mainly relied on burning wood. Many trees were cut down, and many green moountains became barren mountains, green slopes became wastelands. Burning wood produced a lot of smoke, polluting the originally pure air. Gradually people stopped felling trees for firewood and started using coal stoves, replacing wood with soft coal and coal briquettes. Although it was less trouble, cooking still filled the room with smoke, blackening the walls, and there was endless ash to sweep. Today villagers use free straw “green gas”, which is convenient and fast, and the foul sight has gone never to return.
Yeah, first time I went to Yanqing I was surprised by the obvious lack of natural old-growth forests on the mountainsides. Almost all the trees were young and short and obviously planted in an effort at reforesting the slopes. Guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, I mean, any forest within easy reach of a village is obviously a target for those in need of firewood.
Anyway, hopefully our township learns about these new stoves and starts installing them. Cooking over cornstalks is hard, dirty work.
more snow
There’s something oddly pleasant about this article’s headline:
雪过太阳升风来气温降
Snow passes, sun rises, wind comes, temperature drops
Well, it has a more pleasant symmetry in Chinese… And we could all live without the “temperature drops” bit.
Still, it’s not too stiff a temperature drop, with the low forecast at minus 3 celsius. That’s not too bad. And so far the clearing skies and winds of Force 4 or 5 have failed to materialise, so maybe it won’t get that cold after all. And it does end on a positive note:
气象专家表示，这场降雪对进一步降低火险气象等级，净化并湿润城市空气，减少呼吸道疾病，增加京郊农田土壤墒情，缓解旱情十分有利。
Meteorologists said that this snowfall would definitely help further reduce the fire danger, clean and moisten the air, lessen respiratory diseases, increase soil moisture content in Beijing’s suburban rural areas, and alleviate the drought.
Then it goes off onto some related article that I just can’t be arsed reading.
Derek: “I’m curious as to what these are.”
— Well, we have De ascribed to the sun (日), the stars (星), alcohol (酒), oxen (牛) the seasons (春, 夏, 秋, 冬), roosters (雞), etc. Often, some sense of “power” is implied.