early
Posted by wangbo in news, tilting at windmills on January 15, 2008
Alright, I’m reacting to this very early, and yet too late. Early in the piece, and too late in the night. And right now I have a gazillion other things demanding my attention. But, thanks to richard, I found my way to this article. Now, on top of the usual questions, I have to ask this: Why is the Western, Capitalist press publicising something that reeks to high heaven of Marxism in practice? I mean:
The Fujin farmers focused on 250,000 acres that had been taken over by local officials in the 1990s for sale to private agriculture companies. Only part of the land was in theory redistributed last month, they said, because police moved in and prevented further allocations. But the farmers have since moved beyond the issue of the seized land and asserted the right to own all the collective farmland that they currently work under lease.
“The encroached-upon collective land should be divided evenly by households and possessed by us farmers,” said a statement issued in the name of the Fujin villages and posted on the Internet. “Our farmers’ land rights should include the right to use the land, the right to make income from it, the right to inherit it and dispose of it and the right to negotiate over it and set the price of it with developers. . . . So-called collective ownership has actually deprived farmers of their rights as landowners for a long time.”
and:
“In the industrial sector in cities, ownership of the means of production is clearly defined, but in rural areas, the relationship between farmers and their land, their basic means of production, is not clear,” said Zhong Dajun, who runs the nongovernmental Dajun Center for Economic Observation and Study in Beijing. “So this has generated protests from farmers. This shows their attitude toward the land-ownership system. They are not satisfied with the current system of collective land ownership.”
And yet at the same time I smell the beginnings of landed Capitalism at the same time.
Actually, reading that article I can’t decide who I could support. Both sides have equally sold out Communism, and neither side has any chance of success. I would like to side with the farmers, but in this case, based on what the WaPo has written, I can’t. I sympathise with the farmers, but I can’t see any solutions in this article.
blow up my kitchen
Posted by wangbo in life in Beijing on January 15, 2008
lzh just blew up our kitchen… or at least that’s what it looked and sounded like. She dumped potato shreds in the wok, and in addition to the usual explosive sound of raw food hitting a hot wok, the wall suddenly shone orange in the light of the flames… and I’m getting the blame, because I put so much oil on and in and around the wok last time I cooked.
Wait, last time I cooked was this morning and I cooked porridge, as I do almost every morning… no, wait, I think she’s referring to the last time I cooked a real meal, which involved deep frying tofu. And yeah, the wok’s been acting kinda funny, at least in terms of its interaction with the flame, since then.
hehehehehehehe
she’s already denounced me as an assassin of public infrastructure, maybe she’s right.
what year is it?
Posted by wangbo in news, ranting, tilting at windmills on January 15, 2008
Ladies and gentleman, the only thing Orwell got wrong was the date.
I only have two questions about this article:
- “The “radio frequency identification” tags, as long as two grains of rice,”- Would that be two grains of rice placed side-by-side or end-to-end?
- “consist of a glass capsule holding a computer chip, a copper antenna and a “capacitor” to transmit data”- Why is”capacitor” in scare quotes? Last I heard it was a perfectly normal, standard technical term for an item of electrical doohickery that has been in use for decades. Unless, of course, that phrase “to transmit data” is key here, implying that the word “capacitor” has been applied to a new bit of electrical doohickery that transmits stuff, but I doubt that the boffins would use old words for things still commonly used to name a new thing, especially when the new thing isn’t all that new. No, clearly “to transmit data” refers to the entire assembly- that is, after all, what the copper antenna is for- and the sentence is simply poorly written by an ignorant journalist. Still, that little bit of fact-checking shouldn’t have been too difficult. Two minutes with any high school physics textbook, or even easier, asking the person who told you the technical details of these “”radio frequency identification” tags” (oh wait, I just noticed more unnecessary scare quotes- where does the Independent find it’s journalists, 1814? RFID is a relatively recent invention, but it’s been around a few years and is commonly used) would’ve cleared up any confusion.
Anyway, I could rant more, except I’ve done far too much skiving off this morning as it is. Let’s just say Legalism does not an harmonious society make.
oh please no
Posted by wangbo in news, ranting, tilting at windmills on January 14, 2008
I wish nobody had ever come up with this braindead idea, and now that they have, judging by this article, we have an example of an official English name for a Chinese dish that is still “chinglishy” and potentially misleading. Spring chicken. That’s right, order this dish and the staff will find the youngest person in the restaurant, chop them up, and stir-fry them.
For the sake of being constructive: If I could’ve had my way, I would’ve ordered all restaurants to pinyinise their menus and offer explanations in English, e.g. “hongshao shizitou – Chinese meatballs in red sauce”(bad example, I know, but you see my point). That would keep the Chinese names intact, make ordering a far more interesting cultural experience than just “point and click” or reading off the “English” name in the vain hope the waitress might have actually learned it, and would actually go some way towards removing the bad translations and making life easier for everybody while keeping China’s dignity intact.
cab conversations
Posted by wangbo in life in Beijing on January 14, 2008
I didn’t want to go out this afternoon, but a colleague who is about to head home for the summer holidays (you read that right: She’s also a Kiwi) wanted translation help buying gifts of an electronic nature for family back home. And so I wound up going up to the Buy Now/百脑汇 at Dongdaqiao. Turns out the only help she needed was finding the particular thing she wanted. Once found, she could manage all the buying perfectly well in her basic, broken Chinese. Still, buying stuff is never difficult. But that’s not the point…
This colleague has a driver who she always calls on any occasion she has to go beyond walking distance- and walking distance for her is not very far. This driver has a little, silver Geely hatchback, so I have to assume that he makes his living as a heiche (black, or underground taxi) driver. Still, it’s uncanny just how often he is available at the drop of a hat to take my colleague anywhere… Anyway, she called up her driver, he took us up to Dongdaqiao, shopping done, he picked us up, and then dropped her off at Hong Qiao on the way to bringing me home.
Fortunately my colleague had not even for one second entertained the idea of taking me along on the rest of her shopping expedition. Fortunately, because she first said we’d go to this mysterious place I’d suggested for her electronic stuff, then she wanted to go to the Silk Market. I asked if I could be excused from translation duty once her electronic stuff was safely purchased, and she said, of course! and the driver will bring you straight home then return to pick me up. And then I voiced my somewhat less than glowingly positive opinion of the Silk Market, and we chatted about such things, and she said, yeah, Hong Qiao is generally better, and so the plan was changed to her being dropped off at Hong Qiao for shopping while the driver brought me home, after which he’d return to Hong Qiao to pick her up…
…but that’s still not the point.
So, on the way home, I thought I’d try and strike up a conversation. Is he from Beijing? Yes. Laobeijingren (Old Beijinger- family has been there several generations)? Yes. But he’s still being unusually reticent for a Laobeijingren. So I asked what he thought of Beijing now, as opposed to, like….
Luan! Chaotic!
What do you mean?
And then followed a tirade about the sheer number of people that have come from Outside to Beijing, the number of cars on the roads, the amount of chaotic shit that happens thanks to all these people coming into Beijing…
I mentioned that I’d recently read a couple of articles suggesting that the capital be moved, seeing as Beijing’s environment simply can not accomodate this number of people, being far too dry, and that the reason there are so many people here. Yeah, he says, but there’s no hope of moving the capital right now. Right, I says, Tiananmen Square and the Great Hall of the People and Zhongnanhai are simply too important in China’s political culture, trying to spur him on. Yeah, he says, Tiananmen, that piece of land, is just too important. And then he’s off on this rant about how Chinese people only go there to watch the raising and lowering of the National Flag, and what’s the big deal? It’s just a flag going up and down! But there they go, all have to see it, and he takes his child there every National Day, and they show up early and spread some newspaper on the ground to sit on as they wait, but you wanna see the sheer number of people there! And last time they spread their newspapers on the ground and sat down to wait, and there was this old lady from Shunyi there with two kids waiting, a bloody hour before the flag raising! And there was this huge mass of people all waiting for the flag raising, thousands, an hour early. And then all of a sudden this huge mass of people, an hour before the flag raising, suddenly surged forward, all pushing and shoving ahead to get a good view!
And then we arrived at my gate and we said our goodbyes.
It was a fun conversation, but another sign that I’ve become too much of a shut in. I need to get out and about and talking to random people a lot more. Shit, back when we first started dating, I used to give taxi drivers very specific directions to lzh’s school when I took her home of an evening- very specific directions, and totally unprompted. Nowadays I just sit back and let her do all the talking. I used to know this city like the back of my hand, now I feel like a resident of Nanmofang Village who travels into the city by donkey cart once in a blue moon. I need to get out and re-explore and mix it up and talk to random people like I used to. I used to have huge amounts of fun with taxi drivers, even way back when my Chinese was limited to basic directions and “No, I’m not a bloody Yank, I’m from New Zealand!”
[totally irrelevant tangent: I always found Taiyuan cabbies to be a million times more chatty and friendly than their Beijing counterparts. That may have something to do with the large number of Dongbeiren driving cabs in Taiyuan back when I lived there (yes, I know, Dongbeiren moving to Taiyuan to drive cabs, including one who had spent three years in Japan)]
In fact, I learnt a huge amount of my Chinese from taxi drivers.
Anyway, dragging my lazy arse back out into the big wide world out there is one of the plans I have for this winter holiday. There are parts of Beijing I’ve always wanted to visit, but haven’t yet got to (as absurd as that may sound), many, many parts of the city I want to re-explore, and anyway, I can’t just continue as a shut-in. I don’t want to turn into a crusty old misanthrope just yet, not when I haven’t even made it to the grand old age of 32.
new bright sky earth
Posted by wangbo in life in Beijing, mianxie on January 14, 2008
lzh and I decided to get out of the house and do something yesterday. It’s been a hell of a long time since we went anywhere. Well, we went out on Christmas Eve… anyway, getting out of the house and doing stuff- any kind of stuff- has become quite a rare event in our household, a depressingly rare event considering the super-happening, mega-exciting city we live in.
Anyway, after the usual long and tortuous round of indecision, we eventually settled on going up to Bawangfen and doing some DVD shopping at that awesome little store we found on Christmas Eve. And so we jumped on the first bus up to Bawangfen. We got off at Bawangfen North, and lzh, on seeing the shiny, new 新光天地/Xinguang Tiandi shopping mall, decided she wanted to go inside and look around. We settled on DVDs first, mall second. So we crossed the road and wandered through the maze of lanes that runs through and between Blue Castle (appropriately coloured brown), Sunshine 100 and Wanda.
Unfortunately we took a slightly wrong turn- we were heading in the right direction, we just added an extra 100 metres to the journey- and found ourselves walking down a street between Sunshine 100 and what looks like a Western branch of Blue Castle (looks like, because it’s the same brown as the main part of Blue Castle on Xidawang Lu), running westwards from Blue Castle along the northern side of Wanda. This was a most unfortunate detour not because of the extra 100 metres it added to our journey, but because for some reason this particular road stank like the worst old-style, short-drop poopchute public toilet, and neither of us could figure out why. There was a small garden with paths running through it to our left, which would’ve been a pleasant place to stroll if it weren’t for the stench. Up ahead, at the northern end of Wanda, the roads were pretty rough and incomplete, thanks to the ongoing construction on the northern side of the road, but there was no sign of any broken sewer or any other possible source of this stench. But for whatever reason, it reeked to high heaven. If I were buying an apartment in that area, I would point out the coal-fired power station not 500 metres to the east and the sheer reek of that particular road and demand a hefty discount.
Anyway, stinky roads were not enough to prevent us from accomplishing our mission. We pressed on in dogged determination, icy wind tearing at our skin, stench melting our nostrils, and we made it into the relative safety of Wanda and around to Tiger’s DVD store. And our first impression was given reason to last. That is an awesome little store. Somehow they manage to combine an incredible range of films, perfect quality (so far, at least) and low prices. And if the price is ever higher on one film or another, it’s only marginally higher, and they tell you straight up why. And they’re happy to discuss films or make a recommendation. And when asked when Feng Xiaogang’s latest 《集结号》/Assembly would be out, the said on the 18th.
And the first thing I saw when I walked in the store was Martic Scorcese’s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan. Of course, I immediately grabbed it, although I did insist on carefully studying the cover, just for form’s sake. lzh ran around and chose a few films while I browsed. My only contribution to our haul was Bob Dylan and a Hayley Westenra CD- hey, it’s hard enough to find Kiwi films here, let alone Kiwi music. I was not going to let this chance slip. We watched two last night, The Home Song Stories, and 《命运呼叫转移》, which apparently has the English title Crossed Lines, and, I was surprised to discover, is actually four short films. Four quite separate short films, although one character does crop up in three of them. I’ll save the reviews for later, for now I’ll just say that both films are well worth watching.
The Home Song Stories is not light or fluffy viewing, though. Just as a warning: It contains five or six suicide attempts by three different characters, two of which are successful. And it is, apparently, based on the childhood of the writer and director, Tony Ayres. I also found it linguistically odd- Joan Chen plays a Shanghainese nightclub singer who wound up in Hong Kong and then emigrated to Australia with her two small children. But later in the film it is revealed she is actually from somewhere else, and was a slavegirl in some rich family, later married off to an old man. The thing is, in that flashback to her early years, everything looks decidedly Southern to me. And yet she speaks mostly Putonghua to the children. She does switch into Cantonese when talking to the other adult Chinese, but back to Putonghua when she’s alone with the children. Anyway, I’m trying to avoid actually writing the reviews right now.
DVDed, we wandered back over to Xinguang, taking the slightly shorter southern route, avoiding the stinky road.
I dunno, for some strange reason I actually enjoyed walking through that area, with all the shiny, new buildings and fancy cars and yuppie housing around me- and that small section of old housing, a school and a branch of Jingkelong on the northwestern corner of the Dawangqiao intersection. And I actually wanted to go inside Xinguang and see what it was like. I hate shopping malls, loathe them, and I hate fancy rich shopping malls even more, but for whatever reason I actually wanted to see the inside of this one.
Perhaps it was because I was wearing my nice, comfortable 棉鞋/cotton-padded shoes.
Anyway, we went inside, and the first thing we were confronted with was huge, shiny signs with all the big names of all the famous foreign brands. I think Prada was the first one. I also found the place surprisingly empty, considering the crowds on the streets outside. The cafes on the first and second floors were pretty close to full, but the rest of the place was almost empty. And sterile. Still, I was almost enjoying the stroll around the mall. And then I noticed something: All of the shop signs were in English only. No Chinese names. I’ve only seen this once before, in the preposterously named The Place. I don’t understand: We’re in China, and even though the CBD has a large number of expat residents, foreigners still make up only a tiny percentage of the population. What could possibly explain the lack of Chinese signs on these stores? Are rich Chinese really so desperate to pretend they’re really not in China or really Westerners that they have to minimise any possible reminder that they are Chinese in China? Do they really consider their own culture and language so tiredly second rate that, in addition to peppering their speech with English words, they have to remove all Chinese from store and brand names? Weird. And ridiculous, too.
Of course, all of the smaller signs, like those directing people to lifts and escalators and toilets, and those announcing hefty discounts in most stores (discounts my arse! Discounted from ridiculously inflated price to still far more than its worth, but more or less what would be charged elsewhere) were either bilingual (and with its fair share of Chinglish) or mostly Chinese. But still, to see all those shop signs and brand names in English only was strangely disturbing.
And then we went down to the basement, which was a whole different experience. There were people- not quite crowds, but enough to make the place look busy. And there were lots of stalls and stores and cafes and restaurants. And the supermarket, of course. And the supermarket could be a dangerous place for me to be left unattended, there was so much good food and drink. We wandered through and picked up a couple of things, but not too much, it wasn’t cheap. Then I was getting tired, grumpy, and incredibly thirsty.
We found Charlie Brown’s cafe, got some drinks, and sat down. Actually, I was impressed. It felt comfortable and light and relaxed, a nice atmosphere to sit and rehydrate and recuperate. And of course, there was lots of Peanuts stuff all over the place.
And I noticed in the O2Sun bookstore a translation of Iris Chang‘s The Rape of Nanking for only 28 kuai. I’m not sure if it was timed for the recent 70th anniversary or not, and I’m in no position to comment on the quality of the translation, but I was interested to see it displayed prominently there. And I was the only person to pay even the slightest bit of attention to it… I wonder if there’s any connection with the lack of Chinese shop signs on the floors above?
Oh well, then we headed home and settled in for a lazy night of DVD watching.
But I’m intrigued by yesterday’s wander around that small section of the CBD. I’m intrigued because I actually enjoyed it, and I’m intrigued by what I saw there.
One of my plans for the winter holiday is to get out and about and reacquaint myself with this city. I think I’m off to a good start.
Another plan is to spend at least two hours each weekday, with the possible exception of Friday, studying Chinese, preferably from 10 am to midday. Failed this morning, but there was a contingency for today written into that plan, because I had to hand grades in. They’ve been emailed, so starting tomorrow or possibly this afternoon, considering the airborne crud the southeasterly has brought up from Tianjin… And there are a few other things I intend to keep myself busy with, too. In other words, I do not intend to slack off. We’ll see how successful I am. And if I am successful, and provided my timetable for next semester doesn’t change between now and the end of February (and I hope it doesn’t- it’s a pretty sweet timetable), I should be able to keep that study timetable going, with only one minor alteration.
congratulations
Congratulations to these two for their successful trip by kayak across the Tasman Sea.
A legend has gone.
So I woke up to some sad news this morning. Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mt Everest, has passed away at the age of 88. My sympathies are with his family.
how stupid can you get?
No, really, how stupid can you get, and still get to be president of the world’s most “powerful” country?
Just to make my point clear: if Bush wants a contiguous Palestinian state, he’s going to have to fuck over Israel. If he doesn’t want to fuck over Israel, he’s going to have to fuck over Palestine. You don’t need a PhD in geometry or geography or anything else to figure that out: Just look at a map of the Middle East and you’ll know what I’m on about.