I am a much lazier blogger than I am a photo uploader. This occasionally causes problems when I upload photos that make no sense. Like this most recent one:

My poor mother has had to think about this picture for more than 24 hours now with no explanation. It's probably time for me to fill in the gaps.

First, those are boobies on my head. 21 boobies, made of inflated condoms covered in pantyhose, tangled up with plastic dress-up necklaces, and stained with tomato sauce but which is probably supposed to represent menstrual blood, or placenta.

What, you're still confused? Geez! Okay, fine. The girl with bloody hands licking the crown-boob is Fangfang. I knew Fangfang only tangentially through the English writing workshop I attended a few times last year, and was aware that she was an artist but not exactly sure what kind of art she did. The best kind, as it turns out: performance art! Which, interestingly, is called behavioral art in Chinese.

Fangfang asked Jon and I to translate the background information for her first solo experimental art show in return for some sort of design (which is now going to be in the form of handmade t-shirts). Jon and I like to think that we pretty much nailed it, and we were proud to see our work printed and distributed to the uber-hip shaggy-haired art-loving crowd at the uber-hip shaggy-haired art-loving Ping Pong Space bar, where Fangfang's piece went down. Watching this show was pretty much the first thing we've done in Guangzhou thus far that might be considered "cool" by other people, so, needless to say, we were excited.

Adorned in the aforementioned latex boobies and accompanied by a black lab, Fangfang spent a half an hour in alternately playful/territorial dog mode, eventually climbing the small stage and eating something that looked like a chicken leg covered in blood, then gradually prancing into glamorous woman mode (mouth still full of tomato blood), finally coughing up a small plastic baby and asking the audience whether it was a boy or girl (it was a girl) and ending with a forlorn aside about Chinese girls and their parents' expectations. It was fucking great. And then we found out it was all improvised (except for the boobies; I think she prepared those beforehand). Chatting afterwards with the artist and her sister, we were (not) surprised to discover that Fangfang's father has been rather unsupportive of his daughter's career path. Which is a bit sad, since after seeing the show it's very hard for me to imagine her working in an office or store or slaving over a hot wok for her husband, but not so difficult to imagine other creative girls who for a thousand financial/cultural reasons never got the chance to get up on a cement block and vomit baby blood for people drinking margaritas and wearing thick black glasses. So I really hope Fangfang can actually make a living out of it somehow or even make it big in the art world. Also because then Jon and I can casually mention that we sort of helped with her first solo performance. And got to touch her [tangled clump of 21 bloody] boobs.

Based on this recent endeavor, Jon and I are also seriously considering starting a two-man translation company. The problem is marketing ourselves to Chinese students/store-owners/artists who may not want to pay Americans to translate something that their son who has taken English off and on for 6 years in the public school system could translate for free or cookies. Plus, everyone knows that Americans can't speak Chinese, so what's the point? But we're going to try it anyway, and right now we're trying to think of a good name for ourselves:

"Translators, Traitors"

From the Umberto Eco quote. Probably too obscure of a reference.

"Jon and Tate plus Eight (combined years of Chinese experience!)"

As much as this is obviously the greatest name for a company ever, once again, probably no one is going to get the reference.

"Two WHITE Guys From PRINCETON"

Bingo.

But seriously, any suggestions?

Jon and I were coming back from dinner today when we decided to buy train tickets to Wuhan. How spontaneous we are! No, just kidding, that's not when we decided to go to Wuhan, just when we decided to buy the tickets. Hoho!

Anyway, the man who sold us the tickets was sitting in a fluorescently lit booth on a busy street, a booth protected by iron bars and plexiglass, containing two computers and two people and not much room for anything else. Our conversation went something like this:

Me: "Do you have tickets to Wuhan on the 3rd?"

Ticket man: "Yes, at 4:30pm."

Me, glancing at Jon, who nods: "Okay, that sounds good. Do you have hard sleepers"?

Ticket man: "Yes. Do you want top bunks or bottom bunks?"

Jon, glancing at me, who nods: "Top."

Ticket man: "Okay, so, two tickets to Wuhan on the 3rd of October, departing 4:30pm and arriving 5:00am on the 4th, top bunk hard sleeper, you're sure?"

Me, distracted: "It seems there's a gigantic spider on your wall."

Ticket man: "What?"

Me: "Right there by your knee; there's a huge spider. It seems to be really big."

Ticket man, unfazed: "Oh yeah, he's always there. Doesn't move."

Me: "He's not dead, though, right?"

Ticket man: "I don't know."

Me, glancing at Jon, both of us suddenly glad the ticket booth was so well-protected: "Okay, two tickets then."

I swear this thing was as big as my hand, brown and hairy. I've never seen a spider that size outside of a zoo or museum. How can you sit in a tiny room for any amount of time ignoring a spider not even a horse could eat in its sleep? How?

But anyway, we're going to Wuhan during National Holiday! And we're going to climb a mountain.

Let's talk about spiders again. Do you ever have dreams where you suddenly "awake" (but not really)  to find a spider inches from your face so you leap out of bed, throw your covers in the corner, flick on the light and wake up (for real) to find yourself standing by the door panting and staring at your (of course) spiderless bed and pillow? I do, and I've had this experience more than five times but less than ten.

Also, I just found out about clock spider. Don't click that unless you're either not afraid of spiders or don't own any wall clocks.

Last week I mentioned a piece about regional ladies from the China Hush blog (this one, in fact), which I found to be ridiculous. But obviously I can't read because the author of China Hush clearly states that the article is merely a translation from a Chinese website (Netease), and thus, has every right to be ridiculous. I'm very sorry, China Hush.

I realized this when CH published another top-ten lady-list, this time about the top ten universities in China with the most beautiful women. Again, there's some seriously dubious generalizations going on here:

About Shanghai Theater Academy girls: "...each of them is smart and beautiful in every way of life."

About northern men: "...Beijing is still a northern city, therefore even in the big city like Beijing, you can still easily see men beating up women on the street, that’s why men do not score very high here. Therefore most of the Central Academy of Drama girls like to find their husband from another part of the country."

About Beijing International Studies University girls: "...most of them because were rejected from BFS, spent money and went through people they know (or their family know) to be admitted to BISU. Therefore every time during festive holidays, BISU basically becomes girls’ free market and heaven."

About Xinjiang University girls: "though not fashionable, but the women of central Asia look half-breed, curvy and tall."

I don't know why I'm so fascinated with these lady-lists. Maybe it has something to do with being a heterosexual male, but I like to think it's also because they are ridiculous. Again, not something we can really blame the translator for. Every crazy word like "half-breed" in the English versions of these lists is actually present in the original articles; if anything they are translated too well. I think we often assume that bad English is the result of something getting "lost in translation," but I disagree. The hilarious broken English we all know and love is more often the result of nothing getting lost, and conversely, that's exactly what makes learning Chinese in China so much fun: Chinese actually is a crazy language. Every day I get to read something like a public announcement for a new law banning dogs that "inspire visual terror" or a quote from a schoolteacher being pleased at his "peaches and plums filling the earth" which is funny to me no matter how you translate it. It's like reading Chinglish, but in Chinese!

Last weekend, in a rare convergence of people-I-know-from-Australia, I visited my friends Rory and Natasha in Hong Kong. Neither of them are actually Australian (Natasha lives in Singapore and was just in HK for a few days visiting her sister, and Rory is Scottish and recently moved from India to HK), but we did share one end of the first floor of a dormitory at Trinity College in Melbourne for 5 months). Unfortunately the circumstances were such that I did not actually get to see both of them at the same time. I had one Rory day and one Natasha day. But not necessarily in that order.

This is Rory and Ira, who very graciously invited me out to Ocean Park for the day:

Rory is in the front with the hat. Ira, his boo, is in the background. I mean the girl of course, not the dangling bloody head (Rory doesn't date dismembered heads anymore). The Halloween decorations were up early at Ocean Park, an amusement park in Hong Kong whose seaside location makes for some pretty spectacular views, especially when your body is being whipped around by a big mechanical car full of other people screaming "Wooooo!". Apparently Chinese people shout the same thing as Americans on roller coasters, or at least it sounds the same. What they're saying is probably "Wuuuuuu!" Anyway, it was fun.

I've actually visited Rory in Hong Kong before. This time he asked me, quite seriously, why I didn't write about him in my blog the first time. I told him my blog isn't really a chronicle of my life so much as a record of certain cultural or linguistic things that I find interesting or funny or bone-shatteringly awkward. Thus there wasn't really a precedent for me to write about anything about him, unless he were to do something extremely surprising or culturally remarkable. Rory immediately made a hooting noise like an owl, dropped his pants and defecated on the sidewalk right there at the bus stop! I guess it must be part of Scottish culture or something. (There you go, Rory!)

I had spent the previous day in central Hong Kong with Natasha:

Natasha brought me a tin of peanut butter cookies from Bengawan Solo, all the way from Singapore (I'm literally eating them right now and they are both saliva-absorbing and delicious), and that's the only reason I agreed to go with her to get a foot massage. Actually, that's not true; I would have gone anyway. Plus it's not gay if you call it "foot reflexology" (I'm pretty sure I read that somewhere), which she did.

When I tell my students about this, I exaggerate my pain when the man runs his palms up and down my hairy legs (Chinese students are like the easiest stand-up audience in the world). But actually, it was not so bad. None of it was bad, actually, at all; in fact it was awesome. Next person to visit me in Guangzhou: forget dim sum; we're going to get the soles of our feet prodded and squeezed by old men!*

*Seriously. **

**For real.

I once wrote about an unintentionally hilarious article on a Guangzhou expat website called "Where to Meet Fair Ladies in Guangzhou." Oh, non-native English! Truly a bottomless pool of poetry, a quantum foam of glee!

The other day I found this article (written with a similar "our ladies our ripe for the pickin'" angle but this time for the entire country of China) by China Hush, which is usually very insightful and topical and... well, usually doesn't talk about fair ladies. Highlights include "Changsha: Beauty of blandness," "Suzhou & Hangzhou: Pretty girl of humble birth" and "Chengdu: Pure as the eye solution."

I'm proud to say I live in #10: Guangzhou, city of girls who are "soft inside and hard outside". That's what she said?

Speaking of things that she said, I'm trying to think of ways to say "that's what she said!" in Chinese and it's not quite working:

"那就是她说的!" Literally, "that's what she said!" Doesn't work because 她 (tā) meaning "she" is a homophone for "he", and this isn't something you'd want to be ambiguously gendered.

"那就是一个女的说的!" Literally, "that's what a woman said!" Better but now that the noun is generalized the tense of the verb is too. So this could also mean "A woman might say that!" Which is actually very close to what we're trying to convey, but I feel the past tense needs to be clear, otherwise a woman hasn't necessarily said it to me, which is crucial.

"那就是一个女的说过的!" Literally, "that's what a woman has said!" Definitely past tense now, but it feels kind of unnatural. Maybe that's just me.

"有一次，一个女的也那么说!" Literally, "One time, a woman also said that!". Though it sounds terrible in English this is probably as close as it gets.  If you speak Chinese and have any suggestions, please let me know so I can finally start this hilarious meme in China.

Disclaimer: This entry has nothing whatsoever to do with China or Chinese. I normally don't write about things that only involve me and no one else, but this was straight crazy (son).

Two nights ago I had what is most certainly the weirdest dream of my life. I don't mean weird like building a go-kart with my ex-landlord weird (© Mitch Hedburg). I mean this dream was connected to reality like a tendon connects to bone. It started out like a normal mid-morning nap. I napped for one hour, snoozed for ten minutes, snoozed for ten more minutes, then laid in bed in a supine position deciding whether or not to reset my alarm for the third time. Like an ATM that eats your card if you hesitate longer than 20 seconds, my brain soon sucked me back down into unconsciousness. Anyway, pretty typical nap so far. But a few minutes later (who knows how long really), shit got real.

Sleep paralysis. "Often referred to within African communities as 'the Devil on your back.'" says Wikipedia. Sleep paralysis is when the normal, healthy paralysis that your body maintains during REM sleep (so you don't flail around and hurt yourself) fails to disengage before your conscious mind returns. It's like you wake up and can't remember how to move your limbs. This has actually happened to me several times before. Once in Beijing (which at the time I blamed on a bowl of possibly-hallucinogenic ramen noodles), once at Princeton (but only for a few seconds), and once on an airplane (I woke up while the plane was descending and couldn't shake myself loose until the wheels hit the ground and provided a jolt).

So basically I was prepared for this kind of situation, and while it isn't everyday that I open my eyes and find my muscles unable to flex, I knew that it was a temporary phenomenon and I didn't panic....much. I still wanted very much to get up and start moving around and show my nervous system who's boss, so for what felt like about ten minutes, I attempted to lift my neck (nope), move my arms (nope), roll over onto my stomach (while doing this I hallucinated and believed for a second that I had succeeded, but upon noticing that my pillow for some reason looked exactly like my ceiling, realized I hadn't flipped over and was back at square one), call out (nope, though I think I made some squeaky noises), bang my arms on the wall in an attempt to get Jon in from the other room and shake me (nope, because my arms don't work (duh)). Finally, and for no apparent reason, I snapped out of it with a big gasp. Wow, I thought, surely that was the longest episode of paralysis I've ever experienced. I opened the door of my room and stepped out into the hallway to ask Jon why he didn't hear me (not) banging on the wall.

Strangely, the hallway did not look anything like our hallway. It was swank and there were mirrors everywhere, and people in nice brown suits were laughing and smoking cigars. Jon appeared in a tan bathrobe to my right with a very pretty, silvery and scantily-clad Las Vegas showgirl on his arm. He seemed glad to see me despite what must have been utter terror on my face.

"Oh good, you're up," he said, smiling. "Kayla was looking for you. She's been eating breakfast." I looked to my right and another showgirl (not quite as beautiful as Jon's, I remember) took me by the arm. [Although you, the reader, must surely know at this point, based on what you know of my actual lifestyle, that I am still dreaming, keep in mind that I do not know. For me, this is really, actually happening, and I am flipping... a... shit].

"Holy fuckballs, Jon, what happened last night?" Not that anything even remotely like this had ever happened to me as a result of a drunken late-night-out, but it was the only explanation I could think of.

"We blacked out, dude! You don't remember?"

"No! This is insane! We didn't go out last night, we... we... we... went tutoring and then came back and read books and then....."

"And then went out and got wasted! I blacked out, too; it's okay!" At this point I had started warming up to the idea that my life was suddenly exciting enough for glittery prostitutes to jump into bed with me and make themselves eggs and toast in the morning.

"Is this what blacking out is like?"

"Yeah, dude! Come on, let's go get mimosas."

Still incredulous about having woken up in a bed that was not my own, and also about Jon using the word "dude" unironically, I followed him around the corner into what was later revealed to be the dining room of the U.S. consulate in Guangzhou, except it was more like a scene from Mad Men. Jon pointed out that the two men sitting diagonally from us were the governor of New Jersey and his Secretary of State.

"Cool," I said. "I'm going to go take a taxi, because I've got to take a dump."

"I'll come with you," replied Jon.

So we hailed a taxi and rode a few blocks over to a four-star hotel which I happen to know has a great public bathroom. Except everyone who works there told me that the bathroom was inside a Xinjiang restaurant in the lobby. That was ridiculous of course, but I pooped there anyway.

As Jon and I rode back to the consulate to finish our brunch, the phone rang. I sat up, swept off my covers and walked outside to our living room and picked up the phone. It was our foreign affairs officer Lisa giving me a message for Jon: he has to come back to her office to re-sign an insurance form because the Bureau of Health Insurance doesn't accept blue ink.

"Okay, I'll tell him when he wakes up." I hung up, walked back to my room, opened my computer, and right in the middle of reading the New York Times newsfeed, suddenly remembered everything that just happened and whispered "holy shitty mcshitterson". Then I went to go ask Jon why he didn't hear me (not) banging on the wall.

So yeah, pretty much the most mind-bending dream (though I guess part of it was real) I've ever generated. I don't know what's more unbelievable, the dream or the fact that there's an office in China that doesn't accept forms written in blue pen. I mean, come on!

Don't tell my Chinese teachers, but I am slowly losing the ability to write characters. Not that I was ever a calligrapher or novelist extraordinaire in Chinese, but I certainly remember writing two-page essays every week while I was in Beijing. Now that all my Chinese correspondences are electronic (thus affording me the luxury of pinyin-based input), I'm getting close to worthless. There are characters that I see and recognize dozens of times per day, yet if you asked me show you on a piece of paper what they look like I would regress to the level of a two-year old (e.g. get distracted and try to stick the pencil in my nose).

I've known about this decline for some time, always meaning to brush up on characters, but yesterday was the breaking point: Jon and I were picking up our salaries from the financial office, and after we had each received our sums, the woman behind the desk asked me if Jon was David. I responded that Jon was not David (her assumption that Jon was David was an especially chin-scratchable one, considering that she had personally handed money to the real David for two years, watched him sign his name, made small talk with him, etc. but no harm done, I suppose). She showed us a piece of paper indicating that Gus and David are to be paid 200 yuan each (it's true, last year we were shorted 200 for an optional class we co-taught, but we had brushed it off being the magnanimous cultural dignitaries that we are). I pointed to David's name and said "He's not here anymore." The reply was, "Oh, then let's forget about it. Here's your 200...." Whoa whoa whoa, miss (was she just going to throw it away?!) I told her I would take it for him. "But he's back in America." Nope, still in China. This is another typical assumption of the faculty and staff at HuaFu. Once we're done teaching, we're packed off and shipped back to our country of origin. She eventually said it would be okay if I took responsibilty  the money, as long as I signed my name next to his and wrote "dài", indicating that I was accepting it on his behalf. "Which dài? (there are maybe five common homophones)... It was this one:

代

(and, just so we're all on the same page, this character has five strokes,which makes it exactly as difficult to write as the word "cat" in English)

Oh, that one. Yes, of course, let me just write it here......" But I f'd up. Got about three strokes in and screwed the pooch. The woman behind the desk took the pen from my hand and wrote it for me on a piece of scratch paper. I tried again. I hesitating on the fourth stroke for several seconds, nearly had it then made a superfluous stroke and gave that pooch another screwing. Jon obviously knew how to write it. The woman behind the counter was practically having a fit. Both of them watched in agony as I s'd the p two more times. The comedy driving this scene, by the way, is that even though everyone in the room is better at this task than I, it has to be me and no one else that performs it. Oh the irony!

Finally I managed to squeeze out a good 代, collected David's money, and tried to avoid the gaze of the woman, whose suspicions that foreigners can't write Chinese are now gloriously confirmed. Jon laughed and shook his head. "Not really 11 material there," he said. Jon was referring to the score of 11 on the HSK Chinese Proficiency Test, which is the highest possible score. Not moments before entering the financial office, I was regaling Jon with my scores from the practice test I just took, which appears to indicate that my "official" Chinese level is on track to jump straight from 8 to 11. Oh the compounding irony!

Anyway, it's about time to start practicing writing characters again.

I know what you're thinking. First gastro-beastiality, now babies in bondage. I must be getting pretty close to the bottom of the barrel. But I swear, this poster really exists, for sale on one of the skybridges outside our school. The text at the top reads "Future Warriors". I don't know what "warriors" dress like this (maybe Arcadians), or why they are wearing police hats, or what kind of Chinese person would want this hanging in their room, but.... well, yeah, I just don't know.

Yesterday on Beijing road we also saw a "Blood Donation Center" (the translation there is absolutely correct):

Jon remarked that he would never, ever in his life give blood there. I don't know what he's talking about. What is it about a rusty yellow cage in the middle of traffic that doesn't make you want to open your veins and give give give? Jon can be kind of selfish sometimes.

In other news, Jon and I finally got a Cantonese tutor! So now when people ask me "So, I bet you're learning a lot of Cantonese over there, eh?" I don't have to say, "Actually, the official language isn't Cantonese so we usually get addressed in Mandarin anyway, plus there are so many migrants from other provinces in Guangzhou that about half the conversations we overhear on the streets is Mandarin, plus it's hard blah blah blah". Now I can just say, "Yeah."

Although I certainly experience new things every single day in China, I can't say that I learn new things every single day in China. In fact to keep sane I've had to learn to ignore a lot of things like the screaming and stomping noises that occasionally come from upstairs, or hundreds of electronics hawkers begging me to buy a netbook, or just the constant surge of humanity in general, just because to try to rationalize them all at the same time makes my head hurt. For instance, how did the homeless woman with broken feet get a spot at the top of the sky-bridge? Did someone carry her there and then set her down to beg for the day? Did she literally drag herself and her cart up the stairs? Sometimes I feel like Harlan from the old Nickelodeon show Space Cases when he got Radu's superhuman ears and his head nearly exploded because unlike Radu he hadn't yet learned to ignore the massive influx of perception. I'm sure we all remember that episode.

Anyway, days when nothing makes sense are occasionally punctuated with modestly-sized but gloriously golden shafts of insight, shiny and useful tidbits for my everyday life that help put the pieces together. And somehow I've gotten three of them in the past week, which is a pretty good haul:

1) The Cantonese (but apparently not pan-China) gesture for "I don't really mean what I'm saying right now" (along with the more familiar crossed fingers) is a hand over the heart. Which is really interesting, because that's the opposite of what that gesture means in America. But here it's like you're covering up your true feelings with your hand. Our students told us this at the last English corner and it blew me away. Why wasn't I informed of this sooner? This is important to know if you live in Guangzhou! What if I wanted to tell someone I was very sorry for causing them harm, and to indicate my sincerity I put my hand over my heart? Is that like me saying, "psyche!"?

2) The bank lets you print out transaction histories from their ATM (actually not the ATM but the multipurpose unit (which is just my translation; in Chinese it's 万事机, which means "machine of ten thousand things")). This is not actually that interesting, but it's very useful to me because I lent a Japanese student some money before summer vacation but I forgot exactly how much money I had in my account so I couldn't tell if he had repaid me or not and this was bothering me for some time. As it turns out, he has not paid me back.

3) My friend Suijiang says that when I say "nice to meet you" in Chinese upon shaking someone's hand for the first time, people think I'm prematurely ending the conversation. That's because Chinese people only say "nice to meet you" at the end of the meeting, right before they say goodbye and part ways. What they say at the beginning is "nice to see you here." I've been doing this wrong for more than a year now and no one has said anything, though surely people must notice. This is exactly why learning Chinese (language and culture) is such a glacially slow process. It's not so much from the complexity of the grammar but from the fact that most Chinese people are too polite to ever correct you. It's a listener-centered language (so I hear) which means that unlike English the onus of comprehension lies solely on the listener, i.e. "if you didn't understand me, it's not my fault for not being clear, it's your fault for not opening your ears wide enough so don't you dare ask me for clarification". I experience this every day: I'll say something to the water-cooler man that I immediately realize makes no sense and he nods his head and looks down. Anyway, pure luck that Suijiang and I were looking at his old English textbook and the first lesson happened to be about greetings and introductions and we started talking about the difference between Chinese and American introductions, otherwise he probably wouldn't have thought any other context was appropriate to tell me and there I'd go shaking hands and making slightly odd first impressions for the rest of my life.

Urban legend has it there's an underground restaurant in Japan which allows you to have sex with an animal of your choice before it is cooked and served to you as food*. I imagine that, if you were eating while you read that sentence, you probably lost your appetite. But surely there's got to be some vegetarian out there who heard this rumor while making love to a goat and thought, "oh my god, they kill animals and eat them?" and lost his erection. Which crime is really more morally depraved, rape or murder? As far as humans go, you can't get the death penalty for rape in the United States anymore, but you definitely can for murder, and I'm guessing that cooking and eating the victim afterwards doesn't win you any sympathy with the jury.

Anyway, the point of this entry is not that I'm becoming a vegetarian. I still eat meat (and have sex with animals, provided they're over 18 and consensual). I was actually trying to lead in to brief discussion of carnivorous Americans and how we've doublethinked ourselves into believing that meat is just a substance (a delicious, juicy and satisfying substance) and not biological tissue that once breathed and pooped and clucked and had a mother and possibly emotions and definitely nerve endings. We English-speakers even have separate vocabulary like pork/pig, beef/cow, veal/tortured-baby-cow that protect us from visualizing the animal as an animal. American food animals are almost never even remotely recognizable by the time they arrive at the table, which is why even now it's still a bit of a shock to me when something like this hits the ol' lazy susan:

This crispy piglet was just one of almost a hundred served up at our Teacher's Day banquet last weekend. Only the skin and the subcutaneous fat is eaten, and you can see other members of the English department in the background here dipping what is basically fried bacon into plum sauce then and wrapping it up in a little crepe (not unlike Peking duck). It was probably the most delicious monstrosity I've ever participated in eating.

Other highlights from the banquet include this placard indicating our placement at table 44:

Jon's name, funnily enough, is not Daniel. It is his middle name, though, and when we asked our foreign affairs officer why she didn't simply put Jon (which she has used thus far in speaking with him for two weeks and emailing him for months), she explained that (unless my Chinese listening skills are faulty, which they are) "Daniel is a name that the other teachers will recognize. People know that Daniel is a name." Of course, that makes sense, you're right; is what I said. As a cultural ambassador, I have to stop myself from arguing about stuff like this. I hope the U.S. State Department appreciates it.

Jon (Daniel) actually won a door prize that night. A sideways stair-stepping exercise machine:

That's about as happy as he looked when he opened the box and started using it, too.

One last ghastly, soon-to-be-scrumptious horror from last Sunday (June, eye-muffs!):

Bam! Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say is that Chinese people definitely have no illusions about what they eat. I swear one of these days I'm going to turn my Sino-American observations into a stand-up routine and it's going to be just as big as those "black people do it like this and white people do it like this" bits.

* This is still my favorite conversation starter(/stopper?) about Japan.

I didn't really share enough funny English last year. In the spirit of righting that wrong, here's a page out of a book for foreigners on Chinese romance (from the "discussing music" section):

Also note that the following question is "What do you think of Chinese folk music?", well known among expats as a killer pick-up line. I'm seriously considering buying this book.

Here's a sign from a bus station:

碰头 (pèngtóu, literally "bump head") also has the colloquial meaning of "meet", as in "Why don't we bump heads tomorrow over lunch?". But despite the reasonable explanation, the ominous horoscope-y dread accompanying this message is hard to shake.

I took that photo on a day trip to Humen ("tiger's gate"), our (Jon and me) first excursion outside Guangzhou. Humen (a.k.a. Bocca Tigris) famous for being the site of a few battles in the First Opium War. Although we missed the opium pits (sites of mass opium incineration at events not unlike the Boston Tea Party in America), we did hit up the Naval War Museum.

It's actually a pretty nice (and free!) museum, though there were a few oddities like a portrait of Queen Victoria with the caption: "British Queen Victoria fond of eternal colonial expansion". Very tangible anti-British vibe there, which I suppose is understandable. As the only white people at the museum that day we felt a little like Koreans at the USS Arizona Memorial (i.e. ready to whip out the passports at the sign of any aggression). Outside the museum you can fire a beanbag cannon at a two-dimensional British warship:

Most interestingly, a very large (and heavily-funded) section of the museum was devoted to an anti-drug abuse campaign:

"Let's not let that opium thing happen again" was definitely the theme in this exhibition, at which bloody photos of mob hits and real deformed babies floating in formaldehyde featured prominently. Intriguingly, most of the descriptions of drug-related incidents in this exhibition were not translated into English, unlike everything else in the museum, which means either that the organizers believed sharing this information with foreigners would be embarrassing, or that they ran out of money to pay the translators.

There was also no English for this cartoon, but I think you can get the gist from the picture (which of course is: under the influence of drugs, the Abominable Snowman will leap on your back and bully you into beating your grandma with a stick and stealing her TV on tiptoe).

Notice that the video refers to the "average reader", as if the vast majority of humans on earth read with their larynx. What I think it should say is "average reader of an alphabetic language", which actually excludes at least 15% of the world population.

I'm pretty sure the average Chinese person doesn't read with his/her larynx. Not that I have any evidence for this, but David and I talked about it a lot last year and it would explain why it still takes us agonizingly long to read headlines at the newsstand that Chinese people only glance at without breaking stride (also why closed captioning for the cartoons in the subway whiz by at what seems like a superhuman pace).

Not only are Chinese characters not phonetic (usually), but I have a suspicion that the Chinese character is somehow more culturally significant than the English written word. In English a printed word is just a placeholder, a reminder of how to birth that word into existence with your lips, tongue and breath. But Chinese, as I understand it, is the opposite: the spoken word is the placeholder and the written "word" is the thing itself. When Chinese people speak it's like they are saying "well it's a shame we can't be writing this all down but if I use the agreed-upon vocal cues, you'll know which characters I'm referring to, right?".

Anyway, the school year is officially underway. Jon is quite popular with the students (and the teachers; one teacher in the copy shop wanted to take him out for dinner (which I would be way more jealous if only that teacher were female)). Our co-planned intro-lesson has also gone swimmingly. I've tried really hard not to laugh at some of our new students' English names (seriously, you can't make these up), but then again they all laughed when I told them my Chinese name (which I share with a semi-famous Hong Kong pop star, Hacken Lee, sort of a Chinese Clay Aiken, I guess) so maybe I shouldn't try so hard....