Week 1
Now the odyssey of schoolshape has truly begun. With version 1 now finished save a few finishing touches we have a couple of months of testing ahead with little work on my part to do. So it’s time to start the preparations for stage 2, opening an office in china to get the next version made.
After some research on comparative salary levels, economic concessions and other conditions my attention focussed on a large island in the south china sea called Hainan (meaning, originally enough, ‘in the south china sea’).
The plan for this time round is to raise my mandarin to a level where running an office is feasable, cost out office space salaries and other employment costs, get contracts translated. To find a good lawyer, ensure that IP can be sufficiently protected, make contacts in the university, expat community and chamber of commerce, open a bank account. That’s for starters. Hmm I’m gonna be busy.
The 737 makes a perfect touchdown on the palm lined runway and suddenly memories come rushing back as I step into the departure hall and am immediately mobbed by a crowd of taxi touts. Language immersion from the first 60 seconds I knock down the price of a ride into town by a factor of 4 and am soon whizzing past banana plantations towards the skyscraper dotted skyline ahead.
Week 2
Only 16 days on chinese soil and it already feels like a milennium. My list of newly learned chinese words has just passed 500 entries and I’m feeling happy with myself. I’m sat in the university coffee shop surrounded by students knocking back beer or green tea & fruit juice. They seem to be avoiding the extraordinarily strong coffee which I have learned to be wary of after one nearly sleepless night. Glancing behind the bar the next day I see them filling up mugs from an expresso machine.
Flashing the latest dvd-playing mobile phones, punk hair styles and ragged cut jeans it’s hard to believe their parents might have been members of the red guards or been cut down in
The very name of the coffee shop ‘XinQi’ translates as something like ‘drink in the new and strange’, capturing something of the atmosphere here.
And of course as tall & white guy I get my fair share of attention. Just sitting at a table with empty seats will sooner or later attract a pair of curious students at a loose end keen to practice english or just to find out why I’m here and what I’m doing, often followed up with an invitation to dinner or for a few beers. It’s hard to get lonely in china, they must be the most hospitable nation on earth.
If you don’t believe me, you just have watch an episode of chinese qiang dan or “bill-wrestling”. Thrusting 100 yuan bills into startled waitresses hands, two good friends raise their voices in what sounds like anger and threaten each other with cutting off contact for ever. Sometimes this drags on for several minutes before one backs down and lets the other pay. Last Saturday, eating hotpot with a friend who’d already beaten me to the checkout on the last three consecutive occasions I jumped up half way through my meal on the pretense of using the bathroom to sneak over to the counter to pay… only to hear ‘sorry, the bill’s already been paid’.
Only a couple of weeks more and I’m off to
Learn chinese and you have 1,321,851,888 new friends (according to wikipedia).
This is very much encouraging me as a quick division tells me I’m making 40,000 new friends every time I learn a new word.
I’m wondering if the latest one will make me any. One of the most squelchily delicious things about chinese is chengyu or ‘stories that became language’. Take a traditional proverbial story (of which the chinese have many, many thousands accumulated over 4000 years of history) then condense it into four syllables. You can then use those four syllables like a verb, adjective or even a noun in the middle of a sentence.
So for example, there’s the story of poor old Ye Gong who was mad keen on dragons, decorating his house with pictures of them and spouting on about them to anyone who would listen. But when a real dragon hears about him and comes to visit he’s scared out of his wits and scarpers as fast as he can. You take four characters that more or less capture the essence of the story:
叶公好龙
Ye Gong hao long
‘Ye Gong likes dragons’
Then, whenever you want to express the concept of hypocritically professing to like something when actually you couldn’t or are unwilling to cope with the practicalities of it, you just drop these four characters into an appropriate grammatical slot in your sentence. So, for example if someone tells you they love dogs but don’t actually own one you can say,
“Stop yegonghaolong-ing and go and buy one!”
Or maybe if they’re a city lawyer and tell you that “money isn’t everything” you can retort,
“You’re just a yegonghaolong-er! Quit your job and go volunteer for greenpeace then!”
It’s mainly because of these chengyu that attempts to translate anything that Chairman Mao said mainly produce gobblegook about rabbit holes, rice and needles.
I suppose I should be careful about what I write about Mao on the web… and say about him to my teacher Mrs Mao. Yes, she shares a surname with the venerated communist giant. Definitely one of the old guard, she’s a lovely gentle lady with 30 years experience teaching foreigners and capable of explaining the most inscrutable turn of chinese grammar in simple terms. And definitely very traditional. Homework is handed back to you with two hands and a little bow. Example sentences given out include the difficult-to-swallow-with-straight-face ‘America obstructs the economic progress of developing nations’, ‘after marriage I cooked three meals a day for my husband’ and ‘Chairman Mao was a great and glorious leader’.
Week 4
I stare at the scrawled calligraphy on the little bottle of transparent orangeish oil. ‘living-something-orchid-something-something-oil’. My first encounter with chinese medicine, a friend thrust it into my hand while extolling its virtues after I put my foot in a rabbit hole while running. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the hypothetical kind of rabbit hole that the chinese seem to always be talking about but one inhabited by a probably scared witless but very much literal rabbit and I ended up with a sprain approaching the size of a large mango.
It smells a little like lemon & vinegar and when I rub it in I get a peculiar tingly burning sensation. I guess that’s what yang cancelling out yin feels like. Or maybe yin cancelling yang? I have another go at the tiny characters impressed into the glass.. ‘against wet-wind-type closing-knot-something-fever, urgent bone-ache-hurting-something’… I soon give up. I guess next episode you get to hear whether it worked or whether my foot shrivelled into a lentil overnight.
I proudly hang up my new mosquito net. I know there’s exactly one mosquito in the room as it’s been keeping me awake for two nights in a row now and there were none before but despite turning the room upside-down in the morning was unable to unearth its cunningly concealed daytime hiding place. It seems ridiculous for a 60kg man to be hanging up 2kg of netting to protect himself against a little creature that probably weighs around 0.001kg and might have died of old age by now anyway, but a man’s gotta sleep.
I’m sipping a cup of really GOOD green tea. Bi-luo-chun for those of you in the know. Not the pathetic little packets of stuff you use to avoid drinking just hot water you get in Tesco’s, but real leaves you drop into the cup and unfurl as they imbibe the hot water. The art is getting the temperature right – too hot and the leaves burn and spoil the flavour. A lot of people come to china and complain about the lack of good coffee, bread and chocolate. But I don’t reckon you’ve got the right to grumble until you go home and miss really great green tea, dumplings and chicken cooked in chili peppers. And
“Wow, you really can order food!”
Not until you’ve been sat, twenty page menu in hand, in front of an impatient waitress with pen hovering and surrounded by your expectant guests will you truly know what this means. Hovering your eye down the first few items you find a couple whose characters you can read but this brings no mercy as you try to imagine what ‘three earthly freshnesses’ or ‘west lake fragrance’ could possibly be. Admitting defeat you hand the menu over to a colleague muttering excuses and watch in awe as pulls from his seemingly encyclopaedic knowledge of dishes and expertly selects matching combinations of balanced flavours and textures which soon arrive to speckle the big round table with a wonderland of colours and aromas and everyone begins to tuck in.
This is a far cry from the something-something-something-meat dish you’ll end up with if you go alone.
Week 5
Term has finished and most of the students in the university have headed home for the holidays leaving the place oddly empty and quiet, though postgrads and a few of us foreigners are left. We’re a motley crowd, all different in why we’re here and what we’re doing but probably all a little wackey in the eyes of the other students. They all seem to know who we are and even if they’ve never met us seem to know a disturbing amount about our lives as if we all snowball our own little personal legends as we move through university life. I guess we do stick out like sore thumbs. For example there’s pijiu Tom (beer-Tom – they seem to have invented epithets for some of the more eccentric characters, I dread to think what they call me behind my back) who, admittedly, does very much like to drink and is seen disproportionately often with bottle in hand. A chick I chatted to who had never so much as said hello to him could even tell me his favourite brand of beer. Then there’s ‘the Turk’ who everyone knows is dating a cute little chinese girl. And ‘basketball man’. And so on. After meeting these figures in the flesh I felt a little like they’d just stepped out of a manga cartoon. What do they say about me? Am I hobbling man after my encounter with the rabbit hole? Goes-swimming-when-it’s-ice-cold man? (apparently 20 degrees (C) is considered ice cold and unswimmable but I’m lapping it up as it means I get an unheated but gorgeous olympic size outdoor swimming pool all to myself all winter). It can actually be quite a nice feeling sometimes though. While I was sat in the coffee shop a girl I’d never met came in and after casting around for a spare space took the only one available opposite me. After a few minutes with head down in a book she glanced up shyly and I smiled at her. She asked, ‘how is your foot?’.
It gives me the feeling that I’ve got a whole university full of people mothering me.
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