Here is my first short story in Chinese. The title is “Lost in Translation”, and it illustrates the potential consequences of bad mandarin pronunciation. If you don’t read Chinese I left a little summary in comments, or else use G Translator to get the enhanced experience [1].

UPDATE: I have reposted this on Tianya to give it some air time among Chinese readers. By now the post has stabilized at around 3000 reads and 50 comments, I don’t think it will go much further. It was a nice experiment in Chinese BBS propagation, I will analyze the results soon.

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译不达意

帮助迷失于中文中的老外找回爱之路

卖抠是我的好朋友。我们在美国老家是小学同班。虽然好几年没见面，但是我们的关系还是很密切。所以上个星期收到他的求救信让我很惊讶。他居然在中国！ 还说他一个人无友可靠！

我马上回邮请他来上海我家住几天，看看能不能帮助他。

他写的让我太诧异了。更奇怪的是，居然我发现他会中文。我迫不及待的要他说这是怎么一回事。他说一年前，在我们美国的老家，因为那个金融风暴他的公司倒闭了。他失业了不知道该怎么办，有一天在路上看到了一个广告说“学会中文掌握未来！”就决定了报名上中文课。谁想到卖抠爱上了他的老师曹晓琳，一个来自江西的留学生。不到三个月他们就谈了恋爱。 Click to continue »

NOTES:

1. that is, you will be lost in the translation of Lost in Translation [↩]

Yesterday I went for a walk on Nanjing Lu and I witnessed a strange phenomenon I had not seen before: the mooncake brokers. It was last Saturday of mooncake picking season, so they were all busily walking up and down the street, scanning the crowds for potential buyers and sellers.

A bit of background: Every few moons, the Chinese celebrate some important festival dating back to the dawn of history, which they spend visiting their extended family and enjoying traditional activities together. The core of these activities involves, of course, eating things, which is why every festival is associated to some particular edible present, generally small, sweet, and roundish in shape.

Of all the very commercialized Chinese festivals, the Autumn Moon is probably the most profitable for the companies involved. The mooncake, particular snack of this festival, has the advantage of being relatively durable, and so well adapted to spectacular red and gilded packaging in the Chinese style. Under these circumstances, there is virtually no excuse for a Chinese not to give and receive the traditional present. Company to employees, neighbour to neighbour, cadre to “ernais”, for a fortnight the beautiful boxes circulate freely in the country, always given in pairs.

A lonely box of mooncakes separated from its partner

Now, the funny thing is that, as far as I have ascertained, mooncakes are not to the taste of many Chinese, who rarely eat more than half in one sitting. But this is of little importance, because few by now see mooncakes as foodstuffs. Rather, they treat them as legal tender of the Face Reserve. Failing to give and receive the appropriate amount and value of mooncakes before the Autumn moon is akin to social bankruptcy. Everybody knows the price of the major brands, so this “face currency” is as reliable as 24 carat gold.

The final result of all this is that most families end up with a surplus of mooncakes. Of course, knowing the keen commercial character of the Chinese and their aversion to “langfei”, you don’t expect them to sit on their piles of boxes. They don’t, and the whole season turns into a curious race to get rid of mooncakes before the Autumn Moon is gone and they loose all their social value (the edible value lasts a bit longer, but that is secondary). And so, the boxes received from the company are given to a neighbour, the ones from the neighbour quickly handed to old auntie Li, who gives them to her park dancing instructor and so on, each pair of boxes passing through many pairs of hands.

Fortunately for the families in Shanghai, mooncakes have an extraordinary liquidity during their 2 week trading time, partly fueled by the habit of the large public corporations to hand out mooncake vouchers instead of giving the boxes directly. All the major mooncake companies have outlets in the commercial streets to redeem vouchers. It is in the vicinity of these points, particularly on Nanjing Lu, that the street brokers set up shop. They buy the vouchers at a discount from passing employees, and then sell the redeemed mooncakes to the less fortunate self-employed and to other bargain hunters.

Saturday, the asking price for the main brands was at 50% of face value, and selling price was at 70%. The difference between these numbers is the spread, which is also the net profit of the broker.

The Nanjing Lu mooncake stock exchange

As I walked in Nanjing Street I was analyzing this phenomenon with my friend Little Yi, who was also there to redeem some vouchers.

“Wouldn’t it be better,” I said, “if the companies just gave money directly?That 20% spread is a net loss for both employees and company”

“No, no,” she assured me, “the mooncake voucher is essential, companies wouldn’t give money”

“But they do give envelopes of money in the Spring Festival!”

“But this is the Autumn Festival,” she sighed, giving me the silly laowai look. “No family wants to be left without mooncakes in the Autumn Moon!”

One of the things I learned this Summer is that, while I may leave on holidays to Europe, China doesn’t really leave me anymore. More than just a country, it is a force of nature, the other face of mankind that is now part of my life. China is always there, and she is everywhere, showing up in unexpected circumstances.

Take Spain, for example. The Chinese community there is largely new, not fluent in languages, and originated from one single point in China: the tiny county of Qingtian, upriver from Wenzhou. When it comes to languages, the Spanish are not much better than them, and the whole situation is full of opportunities for the literate laowai. While a simple “nihao” is usually enough to be the hero of the day, some preparation yields better results. Just wander into a Chinese shop casually dropping a Qingtianese greeting, and comment on the remarkable history of the old stone-carving county, home of the Chinese-Spanish. This makes you popular. And you can drink tea and practice your Chinese conversation for hours on end.

What follows is a true story that happened in my last day of holidays. It includes a Chinese family with extraordinary sleeping abilities, and a team of adventurous Spanish ducks. I hope you enjoy it:

It was the first morning flight from Bilbao to Paris, where I was scheduled to connect with the Air France to Shanghai. As I entered the cabin of the A319, I marked immediately a Chinese family sitting in one of the front rows: a middle-aged mother with her son.

She was wearing a shapeless purple jacket in the style of the hundred names, and her teenage son covered his head in a Korean hip-hop hoody. They stood out in the business atmosphere of the early flight. But what made me notice them—and I couldn’t help a smile—is that they were already fast asleep before I even got to my seat. As far as I could see, they didn’t switch their positions for the duration of a rather eventful flight.

From the start, the journey proved trying for my nerves. As we were taking off, there was a loud bang coming from the back of the plane, followed by a vibration that grew stronger as we flew. For a while nothing else happened, but then, as we were approaching France, the plane suddenly leant to one side, and the Pyrenees mountains turned 180 degrees around us, until we were headed back West from where we came.

The noise grew worse, and the passengers with notions of geography were increasingly anxious. The town of San Sebastian appeared below us for the second time, only this time the ground seemed much closer. All the service call beeps went off one after the other. I looked around to the other passengers and they were all looking around. Nobody spoke.

Finally, the cabin crew appeared on the aisle, delivering row by row the official version of the facts: during take off a flying object had collided with the blades of engine 2, producing the bang and subsequent vibrations that we were experiencing. It was a common occurrence, and there was no danger. As part of the normal safety procedure, the captain had decided to return to the home airport for maintenance.

“It was probably a bird,” said the stewardess when she got to our row.

“A bird?” laughed the steward, “that was a team of big fat ducks!”

I figured he must have been instructed to keep a light mood. I tried hard to laugh, picturing circles of ducklings turning in the turbofan as we struggled to get past the sharp Basque valleys.

***

After an endless flight we were safety landed back onto Bilbao airport. As we were waiting to disembark, the pilot confirmed that the airplane was done for the day. We had to pick up our luggage first and then go to the Air France office on the second floor to request a new ticket. As usual, my suitcase was one of the last to appear on the rolling band, and by the time I got to the office there was already a long queue, about the length of a duck-stricken A319, and every bit as noisy.

The crowd was growing unruly. Some French passengers harangued the masses with true revolutionary spirit, launching slogans against all winged creatures, including ducks, airbuses, and Air France pilots. Since I was last, there was not much point in queuing, so I just stood on one side in a way to signify my disapproval. Then I noticed the focus was gradually shifting, as the keen Robespierres directed their anger to some unidentified target at the front of the queue. I walked over to have a closer look.

It was the Chinese family.

Clearly, they hadn’t understood the instructions to pick up the luggage, and they had come straight to the airline office before anyone else. They were first, and they showed no intention of giving up their position.  On the contrary, they were holding it admirably. The mother covered the rearguard with her fierce eye, while the son held fast to the desk. They were obviously well trained in conflictive queues, and they seemed unimpressed by the mob.

Linguistically, the situation was not ideal. The mother was screaming in Qingtianese, the son translated into Chinglese and an Air France employee replied in elaborate Spanglish, while the French head of office stared in disbelief. I was alone, and my faithful friend the Electronic Dictionary & Thesaurus was out of reach in the bottom of my bag. But the time was to act, and I did not falter in the hour of peril.

I cut right to the front and put in a “Qué pasa? 什么事?”. All four faces turned to me at once. The queue became suddenly quiet.

“They want to go to China!” cried the employee in Spanish.

“We want to go to China!” cried the son in Chinese.

The positions of the parties seemed to me very much unanimous, and ripe for an easy consensus. But further enquiry proved that it was not exactly so. I managed to reconstruct the following facts:

The family had slept through the flight, right until we landed back in Bilbao. Then they had not understood the strongly accented message of the pilot and they had dashed out of the plane straight to the connections desk, where they had been redirected to the airline office. And they acted so urgently because they only had one hour to catch the connecting flight. All they asked is to board their plane immediately, and they were pretty suspicious of this whole attitude of the staff in Paris.

Because they actually thought they were in Paris.

The problem was not an easy one to explain. Not only the mother’s mandarin was as bad as mine, but also she was determined, and she had a deep rooted common sense. They had just flown into Paris and therefore this was Paris, she would take no nonsense from a laowai. I used all my persuasion. I noted how the souvenir shops were selling bullfighters, and not tour eiffels. Finally the young son understood, and he helped me convince her. The fact was settled: We were in Spain, and there were no direct flights to Shanghai from this airport.

The rest was fairly easy to manage, and after a few minutes the three of us left the office with a new ticket. Once their infinite gratitude had been sufficiently expressed, I couldn’t help asking the son:

“But, how could you not realize that this is the same airport as before?”

“Well,” he smiled shyly, “Mum was just telling me that she finds all airports in Europe look strikingly similar!”

And his mother, who was tough but good-humoured, found it rather funny, and we all joined in a face-saving laughter. Then I knew I was engaged as official interpreter of the sleeping family.

***

In the end, my work as a translator served my interests well. We got our new tickets before anyone else, the last three places left to connect with the evening Paris-Shanghai. The revolutionaries were so stunned by the performance that they forgot to guillotine us, and the Air France employee gave us some free lunch vouchers for the VIP lounge. To make our wait more pleasant, she said, the company was offering one of their specialty dishes in the “Restaurant des Mondes”.

It was still far from the Spanish lunch time, so we had to wait while they opened the kitchen for us. The prospect of a free lunch worked well to improve the mood of my Chinese friends, and we had a lively chat in the VIP sofas. I took the chance to impress them with my baidupedic knowledge of their hometown. After that they opened up to me, and the last lines of suspicion finally vanished from the woman’s brow.

I listened distractedly as the son informed me of the state of the rap scene in Zhejiang. A terrible state that was, apparently, and I waited for a chance to switch topics. It was his mother that I found most intriguing. All the while she was sitting very still, as if lost in her own thoughts. She had an outside appearance that in China would be classified as “peasant”, but her proud, resolute eyes didn’t quite fit in the picture. What was she doing flying around with her single son? I finally asked him.

As it turned out, she was a renowned chef back home. Qingtian is the origin of thousands of Chinese restaurants across Europe, and their extended family had made a fortune with a popular chain of Chinese food. She had come as an expert to establish new recipes in the family restaurants in Spain, all the while teaching her son the secrets of the Chinese cuisine. They had toured the country for three months, making the company’s food “more delicious, more authentically Chinese”.

“Her most famous recipe is Beijing Duck,” said the kid, licking his lips, “You have never tried anything like that!”

“I would love to have a chance to try it,” I answered, suddenly hungry for duck.

Then the mother, who hadn’t said a word all this time, looked at me with a strange smile. I felt there was an invitation coming. Instead, she opened her eyes wide and nervously shook her son’s shoulder.

“Heavens!” she cried, “we still haven’t picked up our luggage!”

***

When I took them down to luggage collection, their belongings were still lonely turning around on the band, a number of shapeless pieces covered in woven tarpaulin. As we loaded them one by one onto a trolley, the son suddenly found something was wrong. It was the last packet, a cardboard box with some strange little holes pierced on the top. He held the box on his knees and showed me one of the corners where it had been torn open. The box was empty.

The woman was very upset. She started moving her arms up and down and speaking in her sing-song dialect at an alarming speed. I couldn’t understand a word of what she was saying, but the replies of her son were more composed, and I could more or less make out the gist of it:

“I told you we couldn’t take them on a plane, mum!”, he was saying.

“But how can we pass the long winter without them?”, she replied.

Suddenly I had a very dark premonition. While they were busy arguing, I walked over to the broken box and examined it carefully. As I held it up in front of me, a small, delicate object floated down from the broken corner. It was a feather.

I dropped the box as if it burned my hands, and I kicked it behind the rolling band were it wouldn’t be seen. I was in panic now, and I joined the arguing party with my own version of alarmed mandarin:

“We have to het out of here, NOW!”, I said.

“What? But the box?,” said the mother.

“Forget it!” I pushed the trolley towards the door, “we will see to that later!”

“What? But we have to file a complaint. They might have found …”

“No!”

I tried to control my nerves, as I envisioned charges for terrorism, and the dire diplomatic consequences of China’s national dish being presented as evidence of the crime. I tried to relax telling myself that at least there hadn’t been any human casualties.

“Please help us,” she said.

“We can’t do this now! Spain is a bureaucratic country, these things take a long time…” I muttered. “And anyway I’m sure your little friends are going to be fine!”

She gave me another inquisitive glance, like the first time I suggested she was not in Paris. She was clearly reconsidering about my sanity.

“Well, excuse me,” she said, “but they are important to me, and if you don’t want to help me I will have to file the complaint myself”

Just at that moment the airport PA system cracked with a life-saving announcement. All the passengers of the cancelled flight were asked to go back immediately to the second floor, were new information was awaiting us from the captain.

“Quick, this must be our lunch, let’s go before we miss it!” I translated, and this argument finally seemed convincing enough for the stubborn lady.

***

On the second floor, the slick French captain was putting in practice the company’s open information policy. The maintenance staff had just confirmed—he said—that  it was indeed the impact of external objects on the engine that had caused the vibration. The strange bodies had been already extracted and brought in from the hangar for analysis. The decision to return to the airport had proven a good choice, as it was the chief engineer’s opinion that we would have never made it to Paris.

A drop of cold sweat fell down my right temple as I considered the chances of those little animals finding their way into the turbine. Even if they managed to tear open the box and then break free from under the piles of luggage, even if they could unlatch the hold door with their little beaks, still,  how could they fly over to the engine? It seemed impossible. I remembered the laws of fluid dynamics, and how turbulent airflows exhibit nonlinear, chaotic behaviours. For the first time in my life I felt I understood the real meaning of the Chaos Theory.

In the meantime, the mother had sent her boy to inquire about lost objects, and he was explaining their problem to the captain in such a perfectly unintelligible English that the brave man could only smile politely. They looked around at a loss, only to see that their laowai friend was nowhere to be found. I had just in time slipped into the gentlemen’s restroom.

At this point, the airport loudspeakers buzzed again:

Passengers of the AF2435 to Paris, please proceed into our VIP lounge. As a special attention, we are offering you the chef’s specialty in our exclusive “Restaurant des Mondes”

***

I joined the family again as they walked down the corridor to the VIP Lounge. It seemed that the luxury meal kindly offered by Air France had conquered the heart of the frightful woman. Her expression showed no more pain for the loss of her beasts, and I hoped she had decided to give up the search. Presently, she was impressed by the quality of the service, and her mood was chatty.

“They know how to treat a client, in France,” she said conversationally, “back in China it’s not even comparable.”

“Oh, sure, great service here,”

“Even if they don’t have any proper backup plans,” she noted, “they are just great at doing nice surprises.”

“Oh, yeah, you can count on the French for surprises”

“It is all in the attitude, isn’t it?”, she said, and her only child nodded in agreement.

As we approached the “Restaurant des Mondes”, the atmosphere was so relaxed that I thought we had passed the worst. I just had to get them on our plane right after lunch, and there would be no more nonsense of lost object complaints. Then I saw the stewardess at the restaurant door, smiling. She held a large sign written in all the major languages of the World, including mandarin. It read:

TODAYS SPECIAL DISH:

“Thin-sliced duck Beijing style”

In case there were any doubts, underneath the text there was a colourful picture of a team of ducks thinly sliced as if by fast rotating blades, swimming in the dark sauce of the traditional Beijing recipe.

I tried with my body to hide the sign from their view, but I was too late. There was not much point anyway, the pictures were all over the place, and the food was coming out any minute. As we sat down, I peeped at her out of the corner of my eye. Her expression was enigmatic, the initial apprehension had turned into something more lofty. Was it triumph? I trembled.

The dishes were served and, unexpectedly, nothing happened. I glanced at my two friends. The were obviously enjoying their meal, emitting now and then favorable grunts and other judgements with the assurance of the true connoisseur. Then, halfway through their ducks, they looked at each other with an understanding smile and, following some mysterious signal, the lady suddenly stood up, knocking her chair behind her, and crying out loudly:

“I want to speak to the person who cooked this!”

There was a spark in her eye as she glared at the kitchen door on the other side of the dining room. I could not think of anything to say this time, so I just sat still, helpless as the slings and arrows flew swiftly towards their target.

Seeing that no help was forthcoming from my side, the mother ignored me and took direct action. She strode across the room and, without further preambles, she thrust open the kitchen door, roaring in Qingtianese. In a minute, the cook came out sporting a high chef hat and howling even louder than her. To my surprise, he was also employing some variety of Zhejiang dialect.

Then something strange happened. The moment he saw the chef, the son stood up and ran across the dining room charging like a fighting bull, and when the three of them were at a close distance, they came together in a long, warm hug.

I stood rather awkwardly next to them, wondering what was next. The chatter of the adults had risen to undecipherable speeds under the flow of emotions. I looked at the teenager for an explanation, but he was too absorbed speaking to the cook. Finally, I managed to catch some fraction of the conversation:

“Uncle Li, we knew it had to be you, nobody else in the World can cook Beijing Duck like mother! What are you doing here?”

“You know, I got a catering contract with Air France, didn’t I tell you?”

“Uncle, you really need to help us, mother is really worried! This laowai is with us, but his Chinese is so-so, and he just doesn’t get it!”

“Say, my boy, what is the problem?”

“It is the new down-filled coats that mum bought to take home for the winter. She was so upset when we found out that they’ve been stolen from our luggage…”

It has been a while since I last wrote, and now I feel the typical blogger’s guilt, the same that drives some weaker souls to start all their blog posts with unasked apologies. But worry not, we are not that kind of blog. We don’t ask for forgiveness here, and that is because we already punish ourselves even before facing the public. What better penance than playing the role of a lab rat for a sociological experiment? Using our own body to test in the open some potentially lethal phenomena?

What follows contains shocking images made public here for the first time. Sensitive readers are advised to close this website now before reading on.

The laowai phenomenon

Everyone familiar with China has heard of this phenomenon. When a person with non-Asian features wanders in the country he gets hundreds of local fingers pointed at him, as he is promptly and thoroughly informed that he is a foreigner (“laowai !”). Even in the 21st century, after 30 years of reform and opening, this behavior is prevalent in most areas out of the foreign-populated centres of Shanghai and Beijing.

Although some foreigners still take offense, it is by now widely acknowledged that the “laowai call” is just  a neutral form of expressing curiosity in a country that is almost entirely uni-racial. It has also been explained as part of a socializing device that consists of stating the obvious to each other, like “Hey, you are back from work!” or “hey, you are a laowai”.

Fig1: Standard testing equipment: “laowai has come!” - “laowai has left!”

But enough theory now. This Summer we took a completely different approach and decided to test the Chinese people’s humour by entering some of the most dangerous bumpkin infested areas of the country wearing the garment in Fig 1. The sampling areas selected were: the tourist village of Zhujiajiao and a fake market in Shanghai.

The challenge was phenomenal, and the reaction of the public was correspondingly massive and spectacular, with whole streets turning their heads or popping out of windows to share in the excitement. It was a great performance of what I believe is called “Kazakh humour”, its main characteristic being that nobody is sure who is laughing at who.

Among the passers-by we discerned and duly registered in the log book the 3 following attitudes:

1. Conspirational –  Those who were laughing with us.
2. Malicious –  Those who were laughing at us.
3. Annoyed – Those who felt they were being laughed at.

Fortunately, the Chinese passed the humour test remarkably well, falling mostly into category #1, with some children and local lowbrows accounting for the #2s. We didn’t encounter any crazy patriot accusing us of hurting people’s feelings, which confirms my previous notion that those people can only be so silly when under the anonymity of the internet. In any case, this T-shirt is a must if you want to be famous in a mid-size Chinese town in the first 5 minutes of your arrival.

Some more pictures of the experiment:

In the fake market

Relaxing facial muscles after hours of being pointed at

The next challenge

If you liked this performance stay tuned for the next experiment. We have obtained the necessary gear to boratize this time an altogether different social group. Equipped with the 7” mangy moustache and the genuine garment in Fig 2, this specimen will make its appearance at the next fashion show in the exclusive M1NT bar. How will the high society in expat Shanghai (more than 50% clad in fake Paul Smith) fare in our test?

Fig 2. Whiskered specimen used for laboratory testing

Last Saturday we went down to Anar to watch the Lions of Puxi. This is a reggae band recently formed in Shanghai, with some familiar faces of the expat music scene, including some of the guys we usually see at JZ. 

I am not much of a music critic, but I can say this band sounds good and it makes you dance. They are all great musicians, with a powerful frontman called Gauthier that rocks the place. We met them outside the bar during the break and they are a friendly bunch. 

We especially enjoyed and sang along the Laowai song, which is in the process of becoming the anthem of an expat generation in Shanghai. Now there is also a videoclip, based on the original Sting. Judge by yourselves. (H/t Xiao Lu for sending me the link.)

Click to continue »

Last weekend, as I was browsing the net for some material to get over my post electoral withdrawal, I came across this iconic Obama.

I didn’t know exactly what it was, but something in it looked very familiar. Very Chinese. I saved it in my Obama bookmarks, and didn’t think of it again until Sunday evening.

That was the evening when I went to the barber’s to have my hair uncut.

I like the barber down the road, I’ve been going there every month since I came to Shanghai, and by now he knows exactly what I like. This is a great advantage, because I am always at a loss when giving instructions to a Chinese hairdresser. I feel even more embarrassed when they proceed to show me pictures of men supermodels, and rather optimistically ask me to point at one of them.

But Wu Shifu will do none of that. He is a no nonsense professional, and he delivers 20 kuai worth of real styling value. A true perfectionist, he takes care of every detail and will not give up until every single hair is at the right lenght.  Every now and then he stops cutting and reaches for the little mirror with which he shows me around my own head, asking eagerly if all sides are well shaped, and secretly hoping that I will request some virtuoso manoeuvre, perhaps a re-balancing of my temples.

Like usual, last Sunday the man was doing a great job. When it was almost finished and he came up with the little mirror for the 5th time, I thought I might as well give him some little bit of satisfaction for the trouble. And, since we are at it, why not test him for Chinese characteristics.

- Is it OK this side? And here? And the top?

- Um, no, no. Too short over the top, I will have it a bit longer this time.

- Uh, er… longer what, here?

- Yes, please, can you do that?

- Yes we can!-  Snap, snap, snap.

And there he goes snapping away with his scissors, cutting the air close to my head in his efficient fashion, and probably thinking that if he goes on for long enough, my hair will have actually grown longer by the time he is done with it. After 5 minutes of cutting the air thin, while I watched the ultra boring Shenhua-Tianjin  on his TV, I decided that my hair was long enough already, and informed him thus.

- Thank you, master Wu, it looks much better now.

Click to continue »