March 2010 Archives

The gāokǎo (高考) is China's harrowing college entrance examination, the big bad brother of the SAT. I used to imagine myself taking the gaokao one day, perhaps writing a book about my experience ("Gaokao!: One man's struggle for Chinese high school equivalency"), but every peek I take at my students' practice workbooks flushes that dream a little farther down the (squat) toilet. Just trying to parse the grammar of the questions in the Physics section makes my brain ache, so I can only imagine how hopeless I'd be in the Chinese section. I'd probably do okay in the English section (though a lot of the questions I've seen appear to be written by non-native English speakers, so even that wouldn't just be a walk in the park).

But what about the zhōngkǎo (中考), the high school entrance examination? Could a foreigner such as myself pass for a middle school student? Let's see what I'd be up against: the Guangzhou version of the zhongkao includes Chinese, Math, English, Chemistry, Physics, Morality (品德), and a P.E. test. So, I think I can outrun a group of 10-year-olds, and maybe in a few more years I could learn enough grammar to bumble through the Chinese part... wait, Morality? They have a test for that?

Yes, they do: While browsing through a bookstore (as I am wont to do) the other day I happened upon a set of zhongkao practice tests, and, not realizing it was only for the Morality section, decided to try a question or two:

Question 6: Now that more and more cell phones can access the internet, in 2009 cell phones have become a tool for "yellow" [pornographic] browsing. One student believes "Looking at a few pornographic websites from time to time won't cause addiction; there's no need to make a mountain out of a molehill." This viewpoint

1) is ignorant of the harm caused by pornographic information as well as its illegality

2) expresses a poor ability to resist harmful temptation

3) benefits the development of young people's curiosity

4) may lead us down the path of crime and lawlessness

A (1234), B (234), C (134), or D (124)?

If you answered anything but D (124), it's probably because you are a filthy capitalist masturbator.

But seriously here, regardless of how you feel about pornography, can we all agree this is a little creepy? Here's another question, this time from the essay section:

When Zhou Enlai was a student in Shenyang, he was just 12 or 13 years old. One day, Headmaster Wei gathered all the students together and asked "Why study?" One student replied, "To give us more opportunities in the future." One student said, "To get rich." One student said, "To help our parents with their accounts" (his father was a businessman). Headmaster Wei turned to Zhou Enlai and asked, "And you? Why study?" Zhou Enlai stood up and said loudly, "For China's rise to prominence." Zhou Enlai studied his whole life for his nation's independence, for his country's revitalization. It was a lifetime of struggle.

Using the material, discuss what our concept of "study" should be.

I would love to further investigate the criteria for this kind of essay and this test in general. I'm no pedagogical expert, but even if we could somehow agree on a standard set of ethical values we want our children to espouse, can we really depend a test like this to determine moral "level"? As my esteemed colleague Jon has pointed out, if there's anything that "amoral" people are good at, it's pretending to be "moral", so how is any sort of paper examination going to weed them out?

I'm starting to suspect that fluency in Chinese language and culture requires nothing less than a Chinese education. What I need is some sort of Chinese Billy Madison project. Who will fund me? Surely there are wealthy investors among my readership! Who will publish my book and direct my subsequent movie starring Adrian Brody as me and Gong Li as the sexy second grade teacher who eventually warms up to my childish antics and falls in love with my brutish determination?

When I first started this blog, I never thought I'd have use for "categories". Divide my thoughts into themes and subjects? No way, Jorge. My thoughts will be like water, reflecting my inner and outer life perfectly, transcending any attempt at definition.

Not quite, as it turns out. Read any of my posts from the last year and it will almost certainly fall under one or more of the following headings:

• cross-cultural gaffs
• my students say the darndest things!
• puzzles
• language acquisition woes
• vacation travelogues
• things I am proud that I ate
• bad-ass insects
• making fun of Chinese printed material

The post which you are now enjoying falls under that last category. I want to make it clear, first of all, that not all of the books and newspapers one finds in China are as bizarre as the things I tend to photograph (before the bookstore staff can catch me and tell me to put my camera away). In fact, the vast majority of it is either way boring or way over my head. That being said, when I am lucky enough to find enough fish to fill my barrel, so to speak, shooting them with my golden gun of satire is as easy as stomping grapes in a bucket.

So anyway, the following is from an illustrated book of riddles for children. It's full of the same silly "gotcha" riddles ("Q: Jane has four fingers on her left hand, why? A: Everyone has four fingers on their left hand!") that one might find in an American book, but I've dog-eared a few pages here that stick out to me as particularly head scratch-inducing:

Q: What is "black eating black?" (黑吃黑, an Chinese expression meaning a conflict between two rival mafia organizations)

A: A black person eating black sesame paste. (Get it? Because he's black. And the sesame paste is also black. And because the black man's lips are huge. Get it?!)

Q: Mr. Feng goes around saying lots of things to lots of people, yet somehow hasn't annoyed anyone. What kind of person is he? (Why is he approaching a bureau of records with a file and saying "I want to understand."? Is the artist or the writer trying to say that visiting government offices asking too many questions is "annoying"?)

A: Mr. Feng is a translator. (Looks like the artist got a little lazy here).

Q: A thief and a murderer share a prison cell. The thief is imprisoned for a year, but the murderer is only there for a week. Why?

A: The murderer was executed! (Get it? He died!)

Q: Who never committed any crimes, yet is imprisoned for life? (Another jail-themed riddle for you here)

A: An animal in a zoo. (Get it? Animals have no freedom!)

Q: Sam is a law-abiding citizen, but he frequently runs red lights when he drives. Why?

A: He's color-blind; he can't tell red from green. (So... he can't do what other color-blind drivers do and check which light is brighter than the others? A more appropriate answer here would be "Sam is a dumb-ass.")

Chinese journalists seem to have a thing for superfluous infographics. Behold this computer simulated reenactment of Tiger Woods's car accident, or this rendering of a heroic (yet, paradoxically, black) man, or the following illustration I discovered in the Guangzhou Daily the other day:

When I first saw the blue strip with the stick figures, it reminded me of those signs designating Olympic events. And since the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games is just around the corner, I briefly imagined these nine figures might represent, from left to right:

"running, running, cricket, running, breakdancing, running, running, running, running"

As is often the case, my first instinct was... not correct. As I unfurled the paper I saw the headline to which this graphic was attached:

"Unemployed doctor hacks to death 8 elementary school students."

Er... whoops. But, besides the fact that I need to learn to read from top to bottom, let's think here. Is the Guangzhou Daily really paying someone to illustrate bloody neighborhood tragedies with silhouette figures? Is that someone's job? Shoddy work if you ask me. Couldn't they at least have drawn in little speech bubbles, make it a little more fun? Can we get scratch-and-sniff cartoons for coal mining disasters?

Last weekend Jon and I ransacked our apartment for fourteen interesting items. Each of us took seven of these items to our respective English classes and asked seven groups of four students each to create sixty-second TV advertisements for these products. Jon has had great success with the gnome that Gristle gave me/us one day for reasons I can't remember now, and now here are my seven items:

• swim goggles
• pink waterproof money container from Chimelong water park
• yellow bike helmet
• dreidels (3)
• black baseball cap
• Jacob's ladder with anthropomorphic vegetable illustrations
• knife/spoon/fork (yes, a three-in-one)

The kids have produced some great stuff, including one boy holding up the knife/spoon/fork and announcing to the audience "I am a rapist," a girl covering her head in a jacket so as to resemble an old Jewish dreidel-fairy, and a boy proudly informing a girl that he can see her internal organs with his x-ray goggles (her response: "Wow, that's so magical!"). But the best moment came after the Jacob's ladder commercial:

One of the groups had just demonstrated that the Jacob's ladder could also function as a hand strengthener, but after their performance I asked one of the girls for clarification. "How can it strengthen your hand muscles?" I asked. She made a palm-up fondling motion with her hand and said "It's like balls."

Anyone who knows me personally knows that this is enough to send me into a crippling giggle fit in most situations. But I had a reputation as a teacher to uphold, and let's not forget that to my students a teacher is a 老师, a venerable "old master." So I bit my tongue and turned the smiling side of my face away, trying to change the subject, but it was too late. Another student spoke up, again making the same hefting-a-bunch-of-grapes motion:

"She means like old man balls!"

I lost it. I giggled myself silly like an an actor on a blooper reel for a full thirty seconds (at least). I laughed until I cried and had to take off my glasses, while the rest of the class (90% female, mind you) gradually realized what this poor girl had said and joined in the hahapalooza. Anyway, as a teacher, I never thought I'd have to tell a whole class of high school students to stop thinking about old people's genitalia, but there you go. Luckily this girl is one of the most extroverted students in all my classes, otherwise I'd be afraid she might never talk again. Please don't fire me, PiA.

P.S. she was talking about these, of course.

Even in China, everybody's working for the weekend. And for Jon and me, that weekend starts a little later than normal, since each of us teaches two optional classes every Saturday morning. Jon does film theory and graph theory, and I do wordplay and juggling. I knew juggling would be fairly popular, but I was a little worried about wordplay, since appreciating anagrams and palindromes and spoonerisms and other word puzzles require a feel for the "slipability" of English that non-native speakers just don't possess. Or do they? Let the great experiment BEGIN!

The news story here is that my wordplay students totally knocked my on my arse with their mad Bananagrams skills (the goal was to work together to connect more letter tiles than the other team). The funny thing is, when I was telling them about how the words aren't allowed to graze each other unless a new word is formed (the implicit warning being: spread the words out so there's less chance of that), they apparently took it as a challenge to leave as little white space as possible, which, as all of us Scrabble players out there know, is quite a dangerous game. But check out the photo above; with the exception of "LV" ("low viscosity?"), this group from Team 1 totally nailed it. 50 points for using my name, guys; even if you did choose to intersect it with fecal matter.

And it only got better as the smaller groups banded together to combine their tiles. Here are the efforts of two groups from Team 2:

Again, overlooking some questionable two-letter formations here, not bad for Chinese high-schoolers.

Above is the beginning of Team 2's collaborative work. And in case you were wondering, "lido" is a British term for an outdoor swimming pool.

This group of guys from Team 2 took a more pragmatic approach, but unfortunately the girls in charge ultimately rejected their efforts to hook up with them. Typical.

The following is the final Team 1 board, which I think we can all agree is commendable in its multi-directionality:

Is that a K turned on its side to become the X in "Xanga"? Or are they making a reference to Kanga, the mother of Roo from Winnie the Pooh? In any case, 100 points each for the words "viny," "dick," "bible," "fuck," and "sars," because you just gave me an opportunity to use them all in one sentence on my web log.

And here's the also impressive though slightly more dubiously-spelled final showing from Team 2:

"Arenaline"... "nutils"... "devr".... I'll forgive those because that's an awesome northwest corner you've got going on there, team 1. That kind of word overlap density is verging on crossword design skill, which is something I've never even tried myself, let alone tried to teach. So way to go, Bananagrammers!

Jon and I really are lucky to have such a whip-smart, super-cute crop of students. When lesson plans don't work the way I expect, I sometimes forget how great most of them are, but then all it takes is an occasional shot of arenaline to my nutils like this to remind me.

What would you say is the weirdest thing you've ever picked up with chopsticks? For me, the answer would probably be "dead baby squid", but for this guy, the answer better be "live scorpions", otherwise I don't even want to know what he's chopsticking off the clock:

Scorpions at this shop just off Shangxiajiu Pedestrian Shopping Street come in a variety of shapes and sizes:

And a variety of deadnesses. The bin of scorpions you see at the end of the the clip above are mostly dead, with just a few small survivors at the top of the dry, congealed heap of biomass.

By the way, the reason I jerked the camera upwards in the second video is not because I wanted to get a wider shot. It's because I thought the clambering scorpions had formed a conscious entity and had figured out how to escape the bin and on to my hand. That may sound dumb, but evidently such are the thoughts that control my voluntary muscle groups.

In other news, today I nap-dreamed that I was cradling a snapping turtle against my chest with one hand while trying to photograph its face with the other. It kept jerking its head away, like an obstinate baby refusing to let the spoonplane in the mouthhangar.

Continuing in the "Chinese Women Perform Tricks I Taught Them" video series, I now present Fangfang making a subway token disappear as we hurtle through underground Guangzhou:

Not a bad French Drop, if I do say so myself. Which I do. I, myself (me), do say that.

If you're a regular reader, you may be wondering why I haven't been a regular poster recently. Well, the time has finally come when I can reveal what's been taking up so much of my time, what I've been hard at work on since Thursday:

Tomato and egg soup. Literally the easiest Chinese recipe in the book. Stew the tomatoes in a pot with a bowl's worth of water, beat an egg, pour the egg in the pot, stir it around for five seconds, and serve. There you go, everyone-that-has-asked-me-if-I-can-cook-Chinese-food-yet: YES I CAN. And in case you were wondering, It counts as Chinese food because I used chopsticks for everything. Also because I did it in China (biatch)!

I saw the following in a hip new library on Beijing Lu Pedestrian Shopping Street. It's a picture book, a page-by-page illustration of a classic bed-time story we're probably all familiar with:

I want that to be my Indian name when I go live among the Navajo.

Let's see: food, awkward non-native English.... what else do I post about here? Oh right, puzzles. The answer to the puzzle I gave last week is "BITE" for all the horizontal clues. So the vertical answers are "bees," "eyes," "tease" and "ease."

So I'm teaching an optional class called Wordplay for Senior II students, and this is the extra credit assignment I gave them after the first lesson:

Put one letter in each box.

Keep in mind that I didn't make this one up, therefore I'm not giving away any prizes. This is just for fun, and also because it's past my bedtime and I don't want to get into my usual hard-hitting political commentary.

Since 2008, CNN's coverage of events in Tibet has earned the network a special place in the spleen of Chinese nationalism. Though I myself can hardly claim to be well-informed about the issue, I still can't help being automatically suspicious of any accusations of "bias" on the part of CNN, especially coming from angry Chinese netizens (like the kind you can see translated comments from on ChinaSMACK (which must have been named because the comments they translate make you smack your forehead with your palm and go "China...")).

But this video just made me lose a little faith in the Cable News Network.

First, is this really news? I thought everyone knew that Cantonese people ate dogs and cats. Second, I don't like this reporter's attitude. She didn't give us any reason to believe that Chinese food dogs and cats are treated any worse than livestock in the US, so why does she have to make Mr. Wang over here look like a pederast for chopping up a puppy? "This is kind of hard to watch..." Your face is hard to watch, Emily Chang!

Who's up for dog noodle soup?

Guess what's for sale at the corner of Shangxiajiu Pedestrian Street and Baohua Lu here in Guangzhou:

Ahhhh! Get it off! Get it off! It's in my hair get it offf!!!!!ohwait. It's still in the glass case. Whew. So, apparently these are shrimp. Terrifying, imported Thai shrimp about as long as my forearm (which, lest we forget, is longer than the average forearm). These things must scare the shit out of lobsters; being right there in the uncanny valley of lobsterdom and everything. Actually when I first saw them I thought they were something like those walking stick bugs in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The one in Willie's hand that she thinks is a broken nail:

Man, I love that movie. "We... are going... to DIE!" might be the best line Harrison Ford ever delivered. Besides all the ones in this supercut, of course:

Last year, at a restaurant on top of Taishan in Shandong province, David and I were preparing to eat a rather late meal, practically starving after spending the better part of four hours climbing what Chairman Mao once described as "a shitload" of stone stairs. Despite its location at the top of "a freaking mountain" (as Confucius records in his Analects), this restaurant was hopping. Rowdy tables of Chinese businessmen were shouting out orders for round after round of baijiu, perhaps celebrating the fact that they too had just climbed this "kilometer-and-a-half-high son-of-a-bitch" (a term from the official UNESCO website), and sooner or later we noticed that one of the nearby tables contained a young foreigner, whose face was nearly as red as his older Chinese tablemates. He was clearly having a great time, clearly the life of the party, and clearly had a Chinese vocabulary of 15 words and pronunciation to match. I think I actually heard him say "Whoa see huan Zhangwhoa noo hai zee" ("我喜欢中国女孩子" "I like Chinese girls!") to roaring applause.

Let me be clear that I'm not trying to bring this guy down. We met him later and he turned out to be a really nice guy, even while hungover at breakfast the next day. What I am trying to do is crush this myth that seems to exist among Americans who have never been to China, the myth that one's Chinese language competency is directly proportional to one's popularity among Chinese people. "Oh, you speak Chinese? You must be like a rock star over there." Yeah, right! Maybe to my students, but obviously that has nothing to do with my Chinese (more like my rippling pectoral muscles).

The fact is, Jon and I are in kind of a weird place in our Chinese development. I think our pronunciation has improved to the point where up to 45 seconds of engagement with a stranger will convince that stranger that we are perfectly fluent and thus able to handle a normal native conversation. But as soon as, for whatever reason, people realize we're not fully sinified, shit gets weird. Eyebrows raise, mouths contort, nervous giggles abound and people start edging away. There are a few patient souls out there, but it's more common that my encounters end with the Chinese party trying to close the conversation by awkwardly nodding and smiling and trying to catch the eye of one of their friends or coworkers. And with the help of a certain concept from modern robotics (as opposed to ancient robotics?), I think I know why. Enter the uncanny valley.

The principle of the uncanny valley is that humans generally respond better to inanimate objects the more they resemble humans, but only up to a certain point. Things that look almost like humans are actually terrifying, like sex dolls and zombies and this rendering of Homer Simpson. I believe the same is true of oral Chinese ability.

Think of the foreign man in the restaurant as a chimpanzee (let me reiterate that he is a great guy). A group of rowdy businessmen would love for a chimp to come in and have a couple rounds. You know, bounce off the walls, smoke a cigar, bust out some sign language, throw some feces; who wouldn't love that? Now imagine in walks an australopithecus, stone cold sober. "Excuse me gentlemales, I observed you persons having a festive gathering at this eating locality. Can I to join you in the digestion now?" Definitely more human, but more than a little creepy. Bienvenidos a mi vida.

Here's a little illustration I made of what I believe to be "the uncanny valley of Chinese fluency". Click it for a larger image:

I threw in the bit about ethnic Chinese learners because I know some of my ethnically Chinese friends get a lot of criticism from their family for not being able to speak "proper Chinese" whereas I can charm the pants off just about anyone with "Nee how!" This injustice is inverted, however, later in the game when the fact that they look like native speakers gives people a face to match up with the decent accent, while obvious foreigners like me and Jon and even David remain a source of serious cognitive dissonance. But that's just my theory, based on zero empirical data. I would love to know what other more educated people think about this, especially if I'm way off. Is this valley really that uncanny? Does it happen with other languages?

It's easy to do. Just follow these steps:

One: cut a hole in your pants.

Two: put your turtle in those pants.

Three: make her open the pants.

And that's the way you do it.

This illustration is from a book on Chinese slang I picked up in Hong Kong called Niubi: The Real Chinese You Were Never Taught in School by Eveline Chao. It's extremely educational. For instance, guītóu (龟头) literally means "turtle head" but it also slangily refers to the glans penis. I highly recommend it (the book, not the glans penis) to anyone whose Chinese friends are too polite to use any dirty words around them.

As much as I begrudge the inevitable "Hey, that foreigner can speak Chinese!" I get from passersby whenever I open my mouth in public, my first reaction upon witnessing another foreigner speaking Chinese is always, "Hey, that asshole can speak Chinese!"

After the initial territorial rage dies down, however, I am comforted by this new piece of evidence that I am not crazy, that other rational human beings have made this decision to cross a treacherous linguistic bridge against the current of millions of people stampeding in the opposite direction. It's just nice to know that in a world where... hey wait, is that Michael Phelps?

That asshole. No wait, I mean, good for him. At least he's trying, right? Actually the real asshole here is Rosetta Stone. The voice recognition software sucks so bad it's giving Michael Phelps a green check mark and a pat on the back for mispronouncing "fruit juice" (果汁 guǒzhī) so brutally that I couldn't even tell what he was trying to say at first (neither could Jon). If anything it sounds more like guǎqī, which is definitely not a word, though with the help of an online dictionary I can make it sound pretty misogynistic. And it only gets more laughably bad from there. Again, not making fun of Michael Phelps here, just.... oh wait no yes I am:

"People say I'm pretty obsessesswisspeed." HAha! Also, clearly they were afraid to let Michael Phelps actually speak any Chinese in the ad, because he doesn't. Wouldn't that have been the most effective advertisement for language software, hearing the student actually speaking the target language? Anyone remember those airplane magazine ads?: "He was an Iowa farm boy. She was an Italian supermodel. He knew he would have just one chance to impress her." Fuck you, Rosetta Stone!

In this clip from Fox News, it's pretty obvious that Michael Phelps didn't exactly stick to his training regimen. "Masculine and feminine" terms? (Chinese nouns have no gender). He was probably just referring to the boy/girl words he learned in the first video, but still. If I used the word "fail!" as an exclamation that's where I would exclaim it, right there at the 1:18 mark.

(editor's note: these videos are part of a shame[ful]less reblog, via streetsmartlanguagelearning. I linked it here at the end so you'd have to read my comments first. Ha!)

Finally, in honor of this being my 100th entry in Cantonstinople, I'm indulging myself with another condescending swipe at a mistranslated menu item:

Haha! Manliness of a...Oh wait, actually that's a great translation. Damn! "男儿本色" really does kind of mean "the inherent qualities of a male", plus it's the title of a 2007 Hong Kong action movie. In any case, it beats my first-glance translation, which is: "Essence of Manboy". You win this round, Xinjiang restaurant menu!

Last week's puzzle has been solved! Congratulations again to Ben F. and his collaborator Sabrina S. This earns Ben the Lifetime Achievement Award, which, though very prestigious and definitely worth putting on a resume, also effectively bars him from winning any more prizes.

First column:

yàn

燕／咽

swallow

Second column:

qiān

牵／铅

lead

Third column:

chōng

充／冲

charge

The key to this puzzle is "simultaneous homography", which in this case means two Chinese characters that not only share the same pinyin reading but also the same English translation. For instance, "swallow" as both a noun (燕) and a verb (咽) happen to share the same pronunciation in Mandarin (yàn). The second column is a little tricky because "lead" the element (铅) is pronounced differently than the verb "lead" (not so much 牵手 but 牵牛 was what I was going for here). And the third column is especially tricky because neither 冲 or 充, when looked up in the CE-DICT dictionary, will yield the word "charge." But I think if you took a Chinese speaker and an English speaker and asked them the questions, "What does a bull do when it's angry?" and "What do you do to your cell phone when it's out of minutes/battery?", the answers would sound the same in both languages.

Does anyone know any other examples?

Ever wonder why most people speak Cantonese in Chinatown even though most of China speaks Mandarin? That's because it wasn't until relatively recently that Mandarin speakers began arriving in large waves; the first Chinese immigrants were from the Pearl River Delta. Those first few Cantonese who arrived and built our railroads, mined our gold, invented our fortune cookies etc; some of them made a lot of money in the 1920's and went right back home with it. That's where their story ends as far as America is concerned, but haven't you ever wondered what they did when they got home? What does a Chinese immigrant-turned-emigrant do with his money after getting off the boat, walking up to his farmhouse, kicking some chickens out of the way, putting down his suitcases, setting down his Italian felt hat on the coat rack and shouting "Honey, I'm home!"?

Answer: he builds a fucking castle.

Who knows who did it first, but the idea of building a fancy Western-ish tower where your house used to be, and fortifying it with crossbow windows and holes for pouring boiling hot oil (in case of bandit attacks), really caught on in the town of Kaiping, just two hours away from Guangzhou. There's veritable shit ton of towers (called diāolóu (碉楼)) here, popping up out of the countryside like mushrooms.

I visited the diaolou in January with Jon...

... and David...

... and Stephanie, another former PiAer, who stepped in goose feces:

It was pretty surreal. Not only to you get to walk right into people's nine-story former residences, complete with family photos on the walls and century-year-old cans of Quaker oatmeal, but you can also walk on their roofs and just kind of space out as you look out into the distance at what would otherwise be just sort of a flat green and gray quasi-jungly expanse, except for the goddamn diaolou. It's easily the closest I've felt to the experience of time-traveling since playing "Mario's TIme Machine" on SNES. What a wonderful video game.

Anyway, I could paste all the pictures in here, but I may as well just send you to my flickr set on Kaiping. Or, better yet, directly to the slideshow. If you're too lazy to click the link (seeing as I'm too lazy to write a proper blog entry, this really is the pot calling the kettle lazy), then just watch this video of geese in a pond, and you'll sort of get the flavor of the diaolou day-trip experience:

Our friend Gristle is someone who literally loves to learn. Despite having graduated from university at least six years ago, he's been sneaking into classes on ancient Greek and attending public English corners for as long as I've known him. His interest in pronunciation borders on perverse (just today we had an impromptu half-an-hour drill session on the distinction between "towel" and "tower" (his idea)) (though you'll never hear me complain (one of my dream jobs is to be an English pronunciation coach for Chinese actors in Hollywood movies)). Anyway, "loves to learn" is about the nicest way I can express what I'm trying to say here, which is that Gristle learns like molasses. Just masochistically slow. When he told me he wanted to learn how to play the ukulele (his idea), I obliged but quickly found myself doing nothing but alternating between repeating the mantra "down, down up, up down", and obeying Gristle's shushing motions as he closed his eyes and randomly thumbed the strings trying to "appreciate" the ambient sounds. For four weeks. Just when it seemed like we were finally going to get through "Country Roads" (his idea), he suddenly pointed to a spot halfway down the fretboard and said "Oh, I've discovered that this is the highest note." I showed him where the real highest note on the ukulele is, and he did not believe me, even after hearing the difference. As you can imagine, teaching him how to juggle (his idea) went about as well. He refused to try three balls until he mastered two, which admittedly is an admirably patient approach, though only effective if the student then proceeds to concentrate on mastering two balls instead of holding the balls in one hand and lecturing the teacher on the difference between America and China (here's a good example of the type of questions we regularly field from Gristle: "Why does America have so few universities?"). Anyway, needless to say, Gristle still does not know how to juggle and this entry is not about him.

It's about Serena, our Cantonese tutor, who in a little over a month has gone from this:

to this:

to this:

Of course I can't really take credit for all of that; I didn't fill the vessel I just lit the fire blah blah blah. But not too shabby, right? And how weird is the human brain that the person in the third video has the exact same DNA as the person in the first video? Put that in your pipe [and throw a lit match behind your back and catch it in your mouth and light the pipe with it] and smoke it.

Side note: Since these videos were taken both Jon and Fangfang have started juggling three balls, thus my self-congratulatory headline here is a little outdated. But until we start making some more videos Serena remains the only documented case of the success of my missionary work here in the People's Republic of China.

Post side note: Sinophones may note that in the third video you can hear Jon sort of distractedly agreeing to give Gristle German lessons. Viel Glück, Jon!