October 2009 Archives

One of the nice things HuaFu provides for its teachers is free breakfasts. I usually get noodles, maybe an egg tart, a bowl of zhou, and then hope the buns du jour are filled with red bean and not pork floss. Pork floss is probably the only food item that literally makes me angry when it accidentally touches my tongue. Hard to explain, but just trust me; pork floss can go f*** itself.

One day the bun offering was not really a bun at all but some kind of hot carl-shaped biscuit filled with what I can only assume to be clown blood:

I'll eat a lot of things just to say I've eaten it, but I stop at clown blood (those poor clowns!). I think that day I had just a spoonful of noodles and my trusty cup o' zhou.

Tomorrow begins the week-long HuaFu tradition of 学农 (agricultural study) during which our Senior 2 students go to the countryside to experience the peasant life. In spite of some of our cuter students' pleas, Jon and I will not be experiencing the grueling rice harvest along with them. Instead, we're leaving tomorrow morning for Nanjing to visit David and explore southern Jiangsu province.

Here's a photo of David that somehow found its way on the the walls of the main classroom building of South China Normal University last month. See if you can pick him out:

Still looking? Maybe this will help:

Pretty hard to miss, now. Looking through my past entries, I realize now that I failed to blog about the time David and I acted in SCNU's international culture performance night even though we were not enrolled there, which I thought was a fun story but somehow a year ago I thought organizing photos of my food would be a more worthwhile investment of my time. Another day, perhaps. Right now is packing for Nanjing time, so this is probably my last entry for a week, unless Jiangsu turns out to be so boring that I go find an internet café and log back into Movable Type. But seeing as though that's almost definitely not going to happen, adios until next week.

In the continuing saga of the missing "black brother", well, no one is looking for him anymore. Two young Jordanians (plus their Xinjiangese translator) who were also present at the cement truck rescue have become the first foreigners to win the Guangzhou Award of Heroism, which is accompanied by 3000 yuan each which, according to the article, is about an average worker's month's salary in Jordan. And probably WAY more than the average worker's month's salary in China.

What I think is interesting is that none of them, in their account of the rescue operation, mention anything about the black man which the Guangzhou Daily was so eager to locate just a few days ago. Somewhere out there is an African who deserves 3000 yuan, dammit!

In other news, I tried to make a joke in Chinese today. Actually, this isn't news, because, either from force of habit or sheer masochism, I do it all the time even though it never, ever works. This time was no exception, but the results were somewhat more surprising.

First, you should know that Jon and I are addicted to milk tea. Jon likes tapioca bubbles in his, I don't, and we both get low sugar. The woman who works at the place (and who always wears a cute but almost comically quizzical expression) knows this, so pretty much all she has to ask us when we walk up to the counter is: "Standard or large? (标准杯还是大杯?)"

Today we got the smaller, "standard" size, and as we sat there waiting for the shaky-mixy machine to shake it on up, she asked us where we were from. When she found out, she said "Wow, your Chinese is so standard!" (We get this literally all the time. It does seem a little 1984 that the traditional compliment for someone's speech is not "fluent" or even "good" but "standard", but we take what we can get). To which I replied,

"Standard cup! (标准杯!)" as I gestured toward my cup of cold creamy caffeine. I know, it's not funny, but that's just how my mind works, and it's something that an American would at least acknowledge as silly.

She (of course) didn't parse it, and after looking at me blankly for 1.3 seconds, motioned toward Jon and said,

"He speaks more standard than you. (他说得比你标准.)" Ouch.

Jon said it made his day. I guess it's karma to cancel out the time the students at English corner told me, in full earshot of Jon, that when I wear glasses Jon is handsomer than me, but when I take my glasses off, I am more handsome than Jon. Double ouch. Are Chinese people just less worried about bruising each other's egos? Or maybe the lesson here is that, if I had taken off my glasses before punning with the milk tea woman, she would have giggled and suggested that we dump this loser who gets bubbles in his tea and go make out somewhere. Yes. There it is.

Quick! What is the funniest way to change one letter in each word in the phrase "lotus root soup"?

I dare you to do better than "litus poot soap".

How do menus like this even get made? This couldn't have been done using an online translator unless the writer didn't know how to use copy and paste. I'm going to say they got someone with good English  (and shitty handwriting) to write the translation of each dish down on paper, then handed that paper to someone unfamiliar with the alphabet or the English keyboard and told them if they didn't have this typed up in less than 60 seconds they're fired. And yet even that doesn't explain how two of the other menu items became "fragrant/sizzling pigfarms":

I would make this another translation puzzle but I can't figure it out. The "fragrant pigfarm" isn't even pork; it's duck. Hmm.

Also in the "silly sign" department, here's a tea stand apparently owned by a man named Herb:

That was taken today (look how fast I blog now!) at the Chimelong (长隆) Water Park in Guangzhou, which, according to the(ir) website, is the "largest and most advanced water park in the world". Despite those dubious claims, I had approximately 4.7 metric shit-tons of fun there, as did the four Yale-in-China'ers I slid, splashed and sloshed around with for almost 5 hours. The best (and unexpected) part was that the park was nearly empty, because it's the last day of the season before they close for winter. So hardly any lines! Not bad for 95 yuan (would have been 108 but I pretended my driver's license was a student card).

Among the funner rides was a circus-colored funnel called the Behemoth Bowl, in which you and three companions are dumped into a roulette wheel and eventually flushed out the center. [Literally] Tons of fun. I had to take a photo of the park map, though, because they spelled it "beemoth bowl":

Sing this to the tune of Five for Fighting's shitty song Superman: "I'm more than a bee; I'm more than a moth; I'm a.... beemoth!"

Okay, I stole that from this.

Oh wait, turns out they exist!

Last week a group of excited young people with red hats and clipboards convinced us to subscribe to a 30-day trial period of the Guangzhou Daily. Jon and I agreed that getting a daily dose of Chinese news would be good for our reading comprehension, and having a plastic mailbox hanging from our screen door would make us feel like a real Chinese family. Thus we were very excited when our first issue found its way to our door Tuesday morning, and even more excited when we saw what was on the front page:

The headline next to this computer-generated man reads: "Cement bags trap six workers, black brother saves people but doesn't leave his name". Black brother: their words, not mine.

The original text is available at the Guangzhou Daily website, but if you're not a sinophone you may enjoy the following PDF, a translation courtesy of Jon and Tate Plus Eight (collective years  of Chinese experience)®.

blackbrother.pdf

Besides the amazing food and the surreal neuro-linguistic adventures, off the top of my head I can think of one other major perk of living in China and that's the glorious non-stop parade of casual racism. It's sometimes dangerous (Xinjiang riots), usually benign ("Hallo!"), but always shameless, and this is a prime example. I'm not so much talking about the fact that they keep calling this guy a "black brother" (fun fact: the phrase 黑人兄弟 is translated at nciku.com as "soul brother"). That's not [that] racist. I mean the fact that, although there were obviously many people who contributed to the rescue effort, the fact that a foreigner was among them is somehow incredible and praiseworthy. Why don't they just title the article, "Foreigner sees Chinese laborers as human beings worth saving!" or "Black man acts compassionately toward member of our humble race!". Granted, a single mention might have been appropriate ("Eyewitnesses report that one of the rescuers was an African man attending the Canton Fair"), which gives readers a chance to say something like "Hmm, good for him," but this is veering into satire territory. Compare:

"The black brother's heroism was corroborated by other witnesses" / "Area homosexual saves four from fire"

"I would like to personally thank this black brother, as well as the others who rescued us." / "Two young people and their companions are missing today..."

I know I shouldn't be so hard on Chinese people for being racist because Americans are racist too and the Chinese have more reason to be racist because they've lived in a homogeneous society for thousands of years blah blah blah. But wait, there's more: the next day the GZ Daily offered a hotline (020-81900123) that you can call if you have any information as to the whereabouts of the mysterious black hero. They want to know because the editors are going to nominate him as "the first foreigner to be awarded Guangzhou's Award of Heroism", which comes with a 3000 yuan prize. Also posted were responses from Chinese netizens:

Bravery is totally independent of nationality; respect to this brave black brother and the other rescuers!!

-netizen ""Big Desert Zhang Gong"

After hearing this news, I felt a warm feeling in my heart; thank you black brother!!!!!

-netizen from Chengdu, Sichuan

In this world, no matter what nation, race, or province, there are always good and bad people, always people with character and those without it. I've met a lot of black brothers and they are all very friendly!

-Dayang.com netizen "Mouse"

On the third day, there was a feature on page 2 about two Jordanians who also helped with the rescue effort, and it looks like they may be the first foreigners to win the prize after all. But the search for the "lovable, heroic black brother" is still on.

But seriously, is this racist? Does harmless racism still count, or is there such a thing? Help me out, here.

In other news, Jon and I are thinking about naming our budding translation company "But that's what it says, I swear!"® And somehow I've conditioned myself into wanting to practice my speed clapping whenever I step into line at the milk tea place. Quite a strange organ, the human brain.

My sister June says I'm obsessed with poop. We can dispute this at a later date; right now I want to tell you about my trip to the toilet restaurant:

Modern Toilet (便所主题餐厅) is a bathroom-themed restaurant born in Taiwan with branches also in Hong Kong and now Shenzhen. The idea is, you sit on toilets, eat out of toilet-shaped bowls, drink out of urinal cups, and often the food is kind of poop-shaped (we didn't the order "braised sirloin hot pot" but you can probably imagine). Jon and I visited Hong Kong's Causeway Bay branch with my friend and fellow '08er Heidi, who was in town vacationing with her parents, and I am happy to report that the experience was pleasant, the ambiance swank, and the food completely devoid of E. coli or any real human fecal matter.

Heidi had some sort of casserole baked in a bathtub:

Jon and I both had a duck salad plated on a flattened sink:

Heidi and I both had milk tea in blue urinal cups:

And Jon had a coffee in a good old porcelain throne:

Jon didn't know it when he took that sip, but there were chunks of brown coffee jelly floating around the bottom of the mug.

After saying goodbye to Heidi, Jon and I met up with my friend Rory at Kowloon Tong and had a completely un-poop-related evening (unlike the last time I saw Rory). The restaurant we went to was called The Noodle Pizza Experience. Rory and I had both passed by it before, and agreed that noodles on pizza would indeed be an experience not to be forgotten soon. Alas, they don't serve noodle pizza, only noodles.... and pizza.

And dragonfruit/blueberry juice.

Would eat again.

Like many web loggers (or as I like to call them, "bloggers"), I keep tabs on my stats through Google Analytics. One of the neater features is that you can see what search terms are leading people to your site. And here's a fun fact I learned recently:

On Friday, September 25th, 2009, one individual clicked through to Cantonstinople after googling the following keyword:

"babiesinbondage.com"

Granted, I did post about "babies in bondage" once, so it's not crazy that my blog would show up when someone searches for that, except wait a second it is crazy, because that's gross.

Let's all go to babiesinbondage.com right now (SFW as of this writing). What it says is:

"Coming soon (or not so soon): What is Babies in Bondage? Check back some other time and you may be surprised (or not). Hint: it's a positive thing."

What? Positive for who? People who want to see hot baby-on-baby action?

Prediction: in two weeks this blog will be the #2 Google result for "hotbabyonbabyaction.com".

Jon and I recently visited the Tomb of the Nanyue King, discovered right in the middle of the city while somebody was trying to build a hotel in the 80's.

As the Frommers guide quote from the top of Jon's blog goes:

"Visitors seeking nature, history, or even culture are going to be sorely disappointed [by] Guangzhou."

But the Lonely Planet guide does list a few sites of note, and this is one of them, so we decided to check it out. I have to say I was a little disappointed. Not quite sure what I was expecting (maybe a Chinese Graceland?) but all I learned was that the jade armor which clothed the king, though intricate and impressive, did not magically preserve the body and soul of the deceased in the manner anticipated by his morticians. At least the body part didn't make it, and we know this because he didn't come out looking much better off than his concubine here:

Now that's one sexy smattering of bone dust!

If there's one thing I love photographing more than crumbly dead chicks, it's food. And if there's two things I love photographing, that second thing would be insects. Just outside the tomb, we climbed a small spiral staircase swathed in vines to find a shady lookout point, and Jon noticed a clump of bees writhing in unison ostensibly under the direction of a much larger bee/wasp hovering off to the side:

Are these bees being hypnotized by an invading wasp? Are the bees banding together to mesmerize the interloper? Or are they rehearsing for a parade marking the 60th anniversary of the Beeple's Republic of China? In any case, terrifying.

Fun fact: the Chinese character for "river" (江 jiāng) originally referred only to the Yangtze river.

Nowadays they call it the Long river (长江 chángjiāng). And after walking across the Wuhan Changjiang Number 2 Bridge during Day 3 (technically Day 4 but who's counting? (answer: Jon is)) of our trip to Hubei, I can tell you that the Yangtze river is not just long but wide. Fun fact #2: Chinese "yo' mama" jokes often employ a reference to the Yangtze river following the clause, "Yo' mama's ass is so wide...". Fun fact #3: the last fact was false. There are no jokes in Chinese.

But seriously, it's a wide-ass river (or as some would say, a wide ass-river). Crossing it on foot took us (me and Jon and Michael, a Wuhan PiAer) a good twenty minutes, leaving plenty of time to contemplate photo opportunities, for instance, of ourselves:

But I also got to take some photos of the bridge itself, and in doing so I did something culturally significant (a.k.a. bloggable!) that I completely forgot about until I was reviewing my photos back at home. Take a look at the following three pictures (in chronological order) and see if you can guess what it was:

Is it as obvious as I think it is? I think a lot of Western tourists in China do this too: When taking photos, if possible, I try to include something "China-ey" in the frame. In the first frame there's Chinese characters on the bridge, but as for the traffic it may as well be Cleveland. Then I saw a guy on a bike (riding bikes is a Chinesey thing, right? answer: it is if the biker is Chinese). Then I saw a guy on a motorized bike with three large cardboard boxes on the back. Bingo! Everyone knows that carrying oversize loads on two wheels is an Asian Thing! If there had been a man jogging right behind him carrying fifty-two sheets of drywall on his back, then I'd have had to wait for a fourth photo-op.

This photo proves, if it weren't already obvious, that the Yangtze's got some muddy-ass water down there. Speaking of muddy ass-water, I now no longer have diarrhea. Just thought anyone who reads this might want to know.

Back at the provincial museum, Jon and I were pleased to discover that the line was no longer ridiculous, and finally we reaped the benefits of free admission (free admission probably being the reason this museum is so popular).

Read the end of the description above this ancient ceremonial vessel:

I laughed pretty heartily at that, because that's exactly the kind of stuff David used to show me after meeting with his tutor to talk about the Analects, and I'll be darned if he isn't off at Nanjing University right now still doing it. More power to him, I say. By, the way, "King Zhou of Chu, now there's a motherfucker who knows how to observe decorums!" is how I think that last line should have been translated.

This set of bells are the real draw of the museum, purported to be one of the oldest (or possibly the oldest) musical instruments on earth:

Also, I thought this was a pretty neat way to display a collection of arrowheads:

Since you were probably wondering about the title of this post, finally, I should tell you about this girl we saw at the museum snack bar with a terrible drinking problem:

Hey-o!

Are you familiar with the Wu-Tang Clan? Although I could not tell you the name of even one of their songs, the widely-recognized unfuckwithability of the RZA, GZA and their ilk has not escaped me. Like most white people, I believe that doing almost anything associated with the Wu-Tang Clan will be considered cool by other white people, including making W-shaped hand gestures and/or dating someone with the last name Wu.

But even those more fluent in the Wu-Tang discography may not know that the Wu-Tang Clan got its name from a 1981 film called Shaolin and Wu-Tang. To quote Wikipedia, "The film is about the rivalry between the martial arts schools Shaolin and Wudangquan." Shaolin is what we usually think of as kung fu, and Wudangquan is what we usually think of as tai chi. Which was invented deep in the mountains of northwestern Hubei province in a mountain range called Wǔdang Shān (武当山). 

And we went there! Take that, other white people! We went to a place unheard of by fans of or even the Wu-Tang Clan themselves, to a place where to even begin to explain to a local who the Wu-Tang Clan are would be an exercise in futility, yet itself is the birthplace of the Wu-Tang name. How is that not the very epitome of cool? If I'm being completely honest, this is kind of why we went to Hubei in the first place. Beautiful vistas, Taoist temples blah blah blah; essentially we just wanted to tell people that we went there. You can bet your ass I'm informing the next person that even tangentially references the Wu-Tang Clan that I climbed the eponymous mountain.* Also, tai chi was invented there, and that's mildly bad-ass as well.

But street cred aside, it really was beautiful. And completely worth the five-hour train ride from Wuhan. Plus the three hours spent trying to find the actual mountains from the train station (a year in China has trained me to ignore anyone that shouts at me from a strange car attempting to take me somewhere, and yet, at Wudang Shan, that's evidently exactly how you're supposed to get there. We spent a good half an hour ignoring a dozen confused bus drivers). Plus by the time we finally got there it was too dark to head out on the path so we had to spend the night on the mountain. But it all turned out fine because we woke up at the [butt-]crack of dawn and we climbed that sucker in three hours flat, leaving just enough time to barely catch our train back to Wuhan. Isn't it great how the endorphins earned from hiking up a mountain just happen to coincide with the treat-for-the-eyes you get at the top of said mountain?

Also, in the funny English department, the following sign appeared at the parking lot at the base of the tallest peak:

"When you are in the scenic spot, the fireproofing must be recorded in your heart."

And that's exactly what it says in Chinese.

*Thanks to my good friend Henry Smith, I actually own a Wu-Tang shirt. But, in an unbelievable lack of foresight on my part, I failed to bring it on this trip. Sorry, Henry.

Rolling into Wuhan at the crack of dawn on October 4th, our first item on the agenda was to catch a glimpse of Wuhan University, famous for the #1 most beautiful campus in China. It was indeed very pretty, and even more so for its primo location next to the East Lake, yet somehow I managed to find zero Flickr-worthy shots of it on my camera. Apparently we also went at the wrong time to see the cherry blossoms which coat the campus in the spring. But really, it was a delightful shady green place to watch old people move slowly and determinedly, as they are wont to do in the mornings.

We also really wanted to check out the Hubei Provincial Museum:

But the line was out the wazoo (seriously, couldn't even find a good place to photograph it, it was so long), so we went to the art museum instead, where an exhibition of the winners of a national modern art competition were on display.

The guy taking the photo probably doesn't realize that there's a real live foreigner right behind him, either that or he's actually interested in the brushstrokes. As it happens, I get photographed by Chinese pretty regularly, but it's not often I get an opportunity to take a photo of someone taking a photo of a painting painted from a snapshot of a foreigner!

We also saw some interesting sculpture.

After that we went off to Yellow Crane Tower, which we paid 50 yuan to see, because it was supposed to be famous. I guess it was okay.

The man in the left foreground is engaging in the traditional Chinese pastime of photographing-your-girlfriend-next-to-something-naturey. Look it up, it's a thing!

I, meanwhile, prefer to take my travel snapshots next to golden busts of controversial heads-of-state:

Usually Mao likenesses are gargantuan, hardly-huggable statues, so naturally I had to seize this opportunity. But seriously, what is a Mao bust doing at the base of Yellow Crane Tower? That would be like putting a bust of Jerry Falwell at the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Sort of. Okay, that's not my best analogy.

Finally, we called the Wuhan PiA fellows and had a nice meal near Wuhan University of Technology, where they are employed. And by "nice" I mean we had a private dining room with a full time attendant and private bathroom. With a Western toilet. So, pretty opulent by our normal standards.

On our way to Wuhan Tech, Jon and I saw this western restaurant named "Jane Eyre Time":

I could make another translation puzzle out of this, but I'll go ahead and spoil the surprise. The standard translation of "Jane Eyre" in Chinese is "简爱" (jiǎn ài) because of the phonetic similarity, but the phrase also means "simple love". So the restauranteurs probably wanted to name their place "Simple Love Time" (which is still a pretty weird name, actually) but it came out "Jane Eyre Time". Which, like most funny translations, would be a great band name.

The next day we traveled to Wudang Shan, a Daoist mountain in northwestern Hubei. I already have the witty title for that post ready; it's going to knock your flipping socks off.

Sometimes it's hard to come up with witty titles for blog posts. A lot of people ask me "Gus, you are the wittiest motherfucker on the planet; how do you make it look so easy?" But the truth of the matter is, it's not easy, and sometimes you really have to hunker down in front of the computer for a good 25 minutes before you eventually decide that "hurei for hubei!" is a better title for a post about a trip to Hubei province than "hooray for hoobay!".

But getting right down to it, Jon and I just came back from Hubei. We braved the Golden Week crowds, I braved the onset of diarrhea (this post was almost titled: "hoobay, where my poop-ay was soup-ay"), and we put ourselves on a comfortable 14-hour train to Wuhan city, spending a total of three full days in Hubei and one hellish bus ride (also 14 hours) back to Guangzhou. Jon took a lot more notes than I did (I wrote two lines, both about funny t-shirts I wanted to remember), so interested parties should be sure to check out his blog too. I'm using my photos as notes, so if I didn't take a picture of it, it didn't happen.

The only thing I'll say about the train and bus rides, before getting to the meat of a Hubeidubei experience, is about babies. Most babies I see in China are wearing some sort of assless chaps which allow them to defecate with ease, kind of like the anti-diaper. Their parents can be seen holding them over trees, gutters, corners really anywhere that isn't right out in the middle of the sidewalk and just letting the baby do it's thing (which is pooping, in case that was unclear). This is all fine and good, but having now seen not one but two babies being held in this manner and urged to defecate into a bucket on a moving vehicle, I've learned what exactly these mothers and fathers are doing to induce bowel movements: they're whistling. Whistling a single tone right into the baby's ear. Who would have thought? And judging by the smell on the bus, it works! My question is, does hearing that same whistle provoke the same reaction in later years? Can I sneak up behind one of my students in the lunch room, whistle in his ear and let the humiliation begin? Can I hijack the microphone during morning announcements and cause the entire campus to foul themselves? Including the teachers and staff and Party representatives, even the curmudgeonly Headmaster Wu!? I can't believe no one has thought of this before. Somebody tell the U.S. military to prepare the recording of a gentle monotone woman's whistle to broadcast on the front of tanks in the event of World War III.

In my last entry I forgot to mention one name we thought of for our new translation company:

"American Eye for the Chinese Guy"

Again, completely unacceptable as an actual name.