I took my textbook down to the little barbecue shop underneath my flat for a quick bite to eat and some quiet study. At a neighbouring table sat a Chain-Smoking Beer-Swilling Local. As I waited for my order to arrive, he started reading from my book.
I looked up and smiled. CSBSL stuttered before asking
"Where are you from?" in the curiously over-pronounced, but inaccurate way that Chinese students of English often speak.
"England" I replied in Chinese. This got him very excited, and I explained once again the distinction between overseas-born Chinese, Caucasian English, and Chinese migrants.
I invited him to sit at my table and asked if he's a student.
"Yes" he replied.
"Which University? Heilongjiang? HIT?"
"No, no, no, I'm a middle-school student. Senior Three." He replied. My eyes widened as I looked at him, his dirty paper packet of cigarettes, and the beer he'd just downed.
"Do many high-school students drink?" I asked.
"Northeasterner". He replied, as if that explained everything. He didn't seem like a nutter, so I called the waitress over and ordered two beers. CSBSL insisted on paying.
"Oh no, no. You can't do that. You're still a student". I extended a ten towards the waitress.
"No, no, no!" CSBSL shouted. He wrestled me away from the waitress, with alarming strength, and stuffed his own ten into the waitress's hands.
"I should have paid". I insisted.
"No. Because you are from England. I'm very happy to talk to you." CSBSL shot back in his stilted English.
We got to talking and CSBSL grinned inanely the whole time, apparently enormously satisfied at meeting a foreigner. Despite being a high-schooler, he was already nineteen - only four years my junior but still with another five years until he would graduate.
I asked him why he felt so privileged to meet me, and why foreigners were always so well-received here.
"In England, foreigners aren't treated as special. Quite the opposite in fact." I told him. He struggled to think of a reason, but quickly gave up and resorted to his fixed inane grin.
He asked for my number, which I gave him, glad for the Mandarin practice, and in turn he told me his name was Yu Yang. Conversation turned to his future study plans which included getting away from parental influence in Harbin and studying Economics, and I ordered another pair of beers.
Halfway through telling him Economics was a good choice, Yu Yang flipped back to English to say
"You are very lovely".
I wiped the beer dripping from my nose and told him that while it might be perfectly acceptable to say that in Chinese to another guy, this would get him punched out if he ever tried it in England. Especially on a first date.
He looked crestfallen so I hurriedly tried to explain how friends expressed affection back home.
"Chinese friends don't express themselves very physically when they meet each other, right? But at home, we'll normally shake hands, maybe a quick bit of back-slapping, even if we've seen each other recently".
At this, Yu Yang grabbed my hand tight and wouldn't let go. His rigor mortis smile started to alarm me.
"My friends wirr be happy to meet chu, because you are very lahverrly".
"Uh huh, that's good". I started to look around for the exit.
Yu Yang ordered more food and two more beers. I didn't really know how to turn him down so poured the beer and refused the food.
"No! Eat!" Yu Yang implored me and looked like he was about to cry. He grabbed a chicken wing and thrust it repeatedly in front of my nose.
"I'm really full". I noticed he'd knocked his cup in the excitement and a bit had slopped over the edge.
"Where I'm from, if you waste alcohol, you get fined".
"A cup or a bottle?"
"What?"
"Do you want me to drink a cup or a bottle?"
"Umm, a cup will do just fine".
Sure enough he downed his cup, spilling a good third of the beer down his chin and onto his jumper in the process.
"You spilt it again. Another fine". I poured him another cup, eager to get through the remaining beer and get out of there.
Yu Yang was in the middle of explaining how much he could drink (one crate in a single sitting apparently) when he once again blurted in English.
"I lahk you very maaatch".
I tried to explain different social norms in English usage, but he looked at me blearily and slurred.
"My friends. They will lahk you very maaatch or-so".
I cursed my terrible judgement of character and told him that I had to leave as I had class tomorrow. Come to think of it, didn't he too? He replied in the affirmative but said that meeting me was a very special occasion for him, and his mother would understand why he was late.
Yu Yang followed me out and repeated his hand-grabbing trick, beaming at me and pumping my hand vigorously.
"I must take you home. You are a guest here".
"Oh, it's no bother". I didn't really want him to know where I lived.
"No! I must!" He really wouldn't let go of my hand and his pudgy grip was alarmingly firm.
"Seriously. Go home now. It's getting late". He finally let go of my hand but stood on the snice waiting expectantly.
"I live right here! Now go home!" I shouted at him and pointed at the door no more than ten metres away.
A pause.
"Niiice to meet chu?"
"Yup, you too". I ran for it, fully expecting him to follow me, fumbled with my keys and slammed the door shut. As I leaned against the door and breathed a sigh of relief, I resolved never to talk to strangers again.
Then my phone went off. It was Yu Yang.
"My friends will lahk you very maaatch. I will core you."
I hung up.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
开学典礼
Today signalled the opening of a new term. The ceremony was held in a lecture theatre on the fourth floor of another of HIT's vast and anonymous buildings.
What had I missed out on by living out of dormitories? By now, it seemed most students had coalesced into cliques along gender and country lines. Big groups of Korean girls engaged in animated chatter, played with their pink mobile phones, and snapped pictures of each other and the stage. Meanwhile, smaller groups of Korean guys horsed around, and a few pairs of of Russians entered together. A gaggle of girls from some oil-rich Central Asian country, easily identifiable by their ostentatious displays of wealth and their enormous sense of entitlement arrived late, and found seats in the row just behind me. A group of young Pakistani men sat dead-centre in the theatre, and talked through the whole presentation, interspersing their conversation with deliberately incorrect Mandarin.
The head of department took the stage, drawing laughs and claps at his statement that
"To learn 中文 (Chinese), come to China.
To learn 普通话 (Mandarin Chinese), come to Harbin.
But to learn 标准普通话 (Standard Mandarin Chinese), come to Harbin Institute of Technology".
He continued to praise the strengths of Harbin, of the University, and of the University's students, striking me as preaching to the choir somewhat.
Then up stepped a young teacher, probably no older than I, who rattled off a speech to rally the troops. Quoting 老子's "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step". Halfway through, I was impressed to realise that her entire speech was from memory. She finished off with an inspirational song, sung a capella, which drew laughs from some quarters, but encouraged a clap-along elsewhere.
Three students were invited to the stage, one after another. The first was a cheeky Korean guy who had arrived at HIT from Seoul just six months ago. Incredibly, he delivered his speech in extremely unaccented Mandarin, although some of his mispronounced initial-sounds betrayed him as a foreigner. He gave his tips on studying (essentially, practise a lot), and as he left the podium, a teacher revealed he'd already earned the HSK Level 6 qualification - enough to qualify him for entrance to a Chinese University.
Next up was an unexceptional Korean girl who talked about why she liked Harbin and HIT, followed closely by a nervous Russian man who had just arrived in Harbin having previously studied elsewhere. He tried to free-style his speech which was ambitious but suffered from quite a heavy accent.
Last order of the day was running through some information such as the date of mid-term exams, a few rules, and reminders. This was accompanied by a totally out-of-sync slide-show which repeated twice, and was written in Chinese, English, Korean, and Russian, reflecting the ethnic mix of the student body.
There seemed to be a good sense of school spirit. A group of three girls greeted a particular dapper teacher with a shy "Good morning" and flirtatious giggle, and the arrival of both Korean students on the stage was greeted with loud applause. An insider nod to what I gather is a local bar left me feeling like something of an outsider, but it was reassuring to see how good the Chinese was of a couple of the students, and to see the effort that HIT was putting into encouraging good results. In contrast to East China Normal University, which often seemed to treat its foreign students as a bit of a money-spinner, the impression I was left with was that HIT stake a lot of its reputation and provincial pride on turning out quality Mandarin among its students. What implications that will have for the quality of my individual teachers, and my classmates remains to be seen.
Afterwards, everyone streamed out, with a sizeable number of people returning to the student centre. While I waited to pick up my timetable, I checked back with Teacher Guo to see if he'd found me any flatmates.
"I've asked a few, but the problem is that they aren't willing to pay."
"Oh, is the rent I'm asking too high?"
"Oh no, they don't want to pay at all." I gave Teacher Guo an astonished look and he hurriedly carried on. "So, I'm still looking. Not all the students are back yet, but I'm confident I'll find some flatmates for you by next week." I told him I might try to put up some adverts myself before excusing myself.
Posted on the wall was a class list. Names were suffixed with a country marker, so mine was followed by (英) - literally hero, but disappointingly more likely denoting 英国 (England). Because of the Korean population, which comprises a sizeable majority, Korean students were not suffixed. Among the remainder, I spotted India, Pakistan, Argentina, Poland and a single Japanese name. Class G had just three students (a Pole, a Korean and myself), while Class F below had eighteen! I'm sure this will change though, as some students have yet to be sorted, and as people move up or down in the first week.
If attendance at ECNU is anything to go by, a class of three people will mean quite a few classes of a single student (and some with none at all). I'm in two minds if that's a good thing. One-on-one tuition with a professional teacher seems like a no-brainer, but the way texts are structured, and exercises set, it can be awkward. The top class (one above mine) at ECNU which was small to start with, suffered from chronic low attendance and I can't say I was too impressed with their Chinese. When we took a mock HSK exam, our class's results compared more than favourably to their's.
My timetable listed twenty hours of classes a week, in two two-hour sessions, either morning or afternoon every weekday - a slight increase on ECNU's three-hour days. At ECNU, classes would finish every day at noon, and then a whole bunch of people would walk down to a local restaurant district and eat together. Now though, I'm starting to have concerns that I won't make enough friends among my (two) classmates to eat with! (Yes, food does occupy my thoughts for much of the time).
I'm going to hit the books hard and 预习 (pre-prepare) as much as I can, although it's always a bit of a gamble that the teacher starts halfway through a book, or whips out some supplemental material to work with. I used to feel like a bit of a fraud in the third-year level at ECNU, feeling like I was relying on my messy spoken Chinese and 语感 (language-feel), borne of 18 years living in a Chinese household to blunder through. When exam results started to come out, though, I realised I was at a decent level. HIT seems more hardcore, but with enough work I hope I can avoid embarassing myself.
What had I missed out on by living out of dormitories? By now, it seemed most students had coalesced into cliques along gender and country lines. Big groups of Korean girls engaged in animated chatter, played with their pink mobile phones, and snapped pictures of each other and the stage. Meanwhile, smaller groups of Korean guys horsed around, and a few pairs of of Russians entered together. A gaggle of girls from some oil-rich Central Asian country, easily identifiable by their ostentatious displays of wealth and their enormous sense of entitlement arrived late, and found seats in the row just behind me. A group of young Pakistani men sat dead-centre in the theatre, and talked through the whole presentation, interspersing their conversation with deliberately incorrect Mandarin.
The head of department took the stage, drawing laughs and claps at his statement that
"To learn 中文 (Chinese), come to China.
To learn 普通话 (Mandarin Chinese), come to Harbin.
But to learn 标准普通话 (Standard Mandarin Chinese), come to Harbin Institute of Technology".
He continued to praise the strengths of Harbin, of the University, and of the University's students, striking me as preaching to the choir somewhat.
Then up stepped a young teacher, probably no older than I, who rattled off a speech to rally the troops. Quoting 老子's "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step". Halfway through, I was impressed to realise that her entire speech was from memory. She finished off with an inspirational song, sung a capella, which drew laughs from some quarters, but encouraged a clap-along elsewhere.
Three students were invited to the stage, one after another. The first was a cheeky Korean guy who had arrived at HIT from Seoul just six months ago. Incredibly, he delivered his speech in extremely unaccented Mandarin, although some of his mispronounced initial-sounds betrayed him as a foreigner. He gave his tips on studying (essentially, practise a lot), and as he left the podium, a teacher revealed he'd already earned the HSK Level 6 qualification - enough to qualify him for entrance to a Chinese University.
Next up was an unexceptional Korean girl who talked about why she liked Harbin and HIT, followed closely by a nervous Russian man who had just arrived in Harbin having previously studied elsewhere. He tried to free-style his speech which was ambitious but suffered from quite a heavy accent.
Last order of the day was running through some information such as the date of mid-term exams, a few rules, and reminders. This was accompanied by a totally out-of-sync slide-show which repeated twice, and was written in Chinese, English, Korean, and Russian, reflecting the ethnic mix of the student body.
There seemed to be a good sense of school spirit. A group of three girls greeted a particular dapper teacher with a shy "Good morning" and flirtatious giggle, and the arrival of both Korean students on the stage was greeted with loud applause. An insider nod to what I gather is a local bar left me feeling like something of an outsider, but it was reassuring to see how good the Chinese was of a couple of the students, and to see the effort that HIT was putting into encouraging good results. In contrast to East China Normal University, which often seemed to treat its foreign students as a bit of a money-spinner, the impression I was left with was that HIT stake a lot of its reputation and provincial pride on turning out quality Mandarin among its students. What implications that will have for the quality of my individual teachers, and my classmates remains to be seen.
Afterwards, everyone streamed out, with a sizeable number of people returning to the student centre. While I waited to pick up my timetable, I checked back with Teacher Guo to see if he'd found me any flatmates.
"I've asked a few, but the problem is that they aren't willing to pay."
"Oh, is the rent I'm asking too high?"
"Oh no, they don't want to pay at all." I gave Teacher Guo an astonished look and he hurriedly carried on. "So, I'm still looking. Not all the students are back yet, but I'm confident I'll find some flatmates for you by next week." I told him I might try to put up some adverts myself before excusing myself.
Posted on the wall was a class list. Names were suffixed with a country marker, so mine was followed by (英) - literally hero, but disappointingly more likely denoting 英国 (England). Because of the Korean population, which comprises a sizeable majority, Korean students were not suffixed. Among the remainder, I spotted India, Pakistan, Argentina, Poland and a single Japanese name. Class G had just three students (a Pole, a Korean and myself), while Class F below had eighteen! I'm sure this will change though, as some students have yet to be sorted, and as people move up or down in the first week.
If attendance at ECNU is anything to go by, a class of three people will mean quite a few classes of a single student (and some with none at all). I'm in two minds if that's a good thing. One-on-one tuition with a professional teacher seems like a no-brainer, but the way texts are structured, and exercises set, it can be awkward. The top class (one above mine) at ECNU which was small to start with, suffered from chronic low attendance and I can't say I was too impressed with their Chinese. When we took a mock HSK exam, our class's results compared more than favourably to their's.
My timetable listed twenty hours of classes a week, in two two-hour sessions, either morning or afternoon every weekday - a slight increase on ECNU's three-hour days. At ECNU, classes would finish every day at noon, and then a whole bunch of people would walk down to a local restaurant district and eat together. Now though, I'm starting to have concerns that I won't make enough friends among my (two) classmates to eat with! (Yes, food does occupy my thoughts for much of the time).
I'm going to hit the books hard and 预习 (pre-prepare) as much as I can, although it's always a bit of a gamble that the teacher starts halfway through a book, or whips out some supplemental material to work with. I used to feel like a bit of a fraud in the third-year level at ECNU, feeling like I was relying on my messy spoken Chinese and 语感 (language-feel), borne of 18 years living in a Chinese household to blunder through. When exam results started to come out, though, I realised I was at a decent level. HIT seems more hardcore, but with enough work I hope I can avoid embarassing myself.
Local Living
Another reason I'm so keen on living outside of dormitories is to soak up a bit of local living.
Living on campus, and eating canteen food is all well and good, but back in Shanghai there was something I liked a lot about the daily commute to East China Normal University.
I'd get on my bike, and ride through the housing compound.
Crowded round the fountain would be the mums with their babies and toddlers. Nappies are expensive and polluting, so a common alternative is to wear bottomless dungarees. The mummies hold out their babies at arm's length over a bush or up against a wall, and make shushing noises until the kid does their business.
Continuing along the tree-lined streets, old people would be out doing their morning exercises. Tai Chi on a grassy verge, or a brisk walk - clapping their hands to aid circulation, or walking backwards to improve longevity.
I'd zip out of the gate waving at the guard as I went, who, if I was with Dan, would call out "Dan Yi Er! Dan Yi Er!" as we flew past. Maybe I'd pop into the convenience store on the corner, perpetually staffed by motherly figures who'd announce the total in a thick Shanghainese accent, and signal the amount with their fingers to accentuate the point.
This is actually a shot of the canal heading away from school. On the near-side is the 'poo factory' - where trucks loaded with cargo from local septic tanks unload onto boats which then cart the stuff away to be treated (or dumped into the sea. I couldn't say). The far-side is representative of the kind of characterful houses (more properly 'shacks' in many cases) on the route to school.
Traffic was always heavy at that time of the morning, so I'd ride alongside the canal, weaving in and out of the cement mixer trucks, the taxis, and bicycles of both pedal and electric varieties. Bouncing off the sides of vans, or yelling "Wei! Wei! Wei!" at oblivious pedestrians, I'd stop to pick up some breakfast - meat-filled buns, crispy pancakes, and a cup of fresh soya milk - and hang the little plastic bags on my handlebars.
Then it'd be time to go off-road to reach the back entrance of University where the Foreigner section was located. Dodging potholes and skidding along a dirt-road, dust spewing up in a plume behind me, I'd be through the gate (another wave at the guard), duck under some low-hanging branches, then coast into the bicycle park trying not to overuse my brakes (which had a nasty habit of coming detached at crucial moments).
The ride in alone was enough to make it easy to get out of bed in the morning, and the jolt of adrenaline from surviving traffic "with Chinese characteristics" was better than any ice-cold shower at sharpening me up for getting my learn on.
Even if it's massively dissimilar, there's lots to recommend the route into school here too.
Here's a shot from my window. These guys are here all day, every day. They'll stamp their feet against the cold, hands deep in their pockets, as they call out their wares and the prices per 斤 (500g) - a Harbinese version of "Get yer bananas! A paaaaauhnd fer a paaaaauhnd!"
Bizarrely enough, some decidely summery fruits such as strawberries and pineapples are extremely well-represented here. Locals claim that it's possible to grow them in greenhouses this far north, but it seems more likely to me that they're brought in from somewhere like the subtropical Hainan Island in the south.
There's some fresh vegetables, potatoes and tomoatoes. Directly below, it looks like dried melon seeds, peanuts and other bits and bobs. There's even a little tray of individually-wrapped sausages, a bit like pepperami. If I'm quiet, I can hear the hubbub of commerce from my desk.
Hawkers line the street as far as the eye can see. It's mostly foodstuffs on the left hand side, but across the road there are boxes of clothes and shoes. One stall sells a bunch of plastic stuff - combs, sandals and the like.
It's probably too close to bother with a bicycle. I take a shortcut through a gap in the school fence too, and I'm not sure a bike would fit through there. Besides, it's too slippery at the moment, and the route's hilly.
As I've said, Harbin has much less food cooked by street hawkers, as the cold weather makes it difficult. There's lots of dumplings and noodles sold in small shops along the way though, and I'll try to check each and every one of them out by the time I'm done here!
Living on campus, and eating canteen food is all well and good, but back in Shanghai there was something I liked a lot about the daily commute to East China Normal University.
I'd get on my bike, and ride through the housing compound.
Crowded round the fountain would be the mums with their babies and toddlers. Nappies are expensive and polluting, so a common alternative is to wear bottomless dungarees. The mummies hold out their babies at arm's length over a bush or up against a wall, and make shushing noises until the kid does their business.
Continuing along the tree-lined streets, old people would be out doing their morning exercises. Tai Chi on a grassy verge, or a brisk walk - clapping their hands to aid circulation, or walking backwards to improve longevity.
I'd zip out of the gate waving at the guard as I went, who, if I was with Dan, would call out "Dan Yi Er! Dan Yi Er!" as we flew past. Maybe I'd pop into the convenience store on the corner, perpetually staffed by motherly figures who'd announce the total in a thick Shanghainese accent, and signal the amount with their fingers to accentuate the point.
This is actually a shot of the canal heading away from school. On the near-side is the 'poo factory' - where trucks loaded with cargo from local septic tanks unload onto boats which then cart the stuff away to be treated (or dumped into the sea. I couldn't say). The far-side is representative of the kind of characterful houses (more properly 'shacks' in many cases) on the route to school.Traffic was always heavy at that time of the morning, so I'd ride alongside the canal, weaving in and out of the cement mixer trucks, the taxis, and bicycles of both pedal and electric varieties. Bouncing off the sides of vans, or yelling "Wei! Wei! Wei!" at oblivious pedestrians, I'd stop to pick up some breakfast - meat-filled buns, crispy pancakes, and a cup of fresh soya milk - and hang the little plastic bags on my handlebars.
Then it'd be time to go off-road to reach the back entrance of University where the Foreigner section was located. Dodging potholes and skidding along a dirt-road, dust spewing up in a plume behind me, I'd be through the gate (another wave at the guard), duck under some low-hanging branches, then coast into the bicycle park trying not to overuse my brakes (which had a nasty habit of coming detached at crucial moments).
The ride in alone was enough to make it easy to get out of bed in the morning, and the jolt of adrenaline from surviving traffic "with Chinese characteristics" was better than any ice-cold shower at sharpening me up for getting my learn on.
Even if it's massively dissimilar, there's lots to recommend the route into school here too.Here's a shot from my window. These guys are here all day, every day. They'll stamp their feet against the cold, hands deep in their pockets, as they call out their wares and the prices per 斤 (500g) - a Harbinese version of "Get yer bananas! A paaaaauhnd fer a paaaaauhnd!"
Bizarrely enough, some decidely summery fruits such as strawberries and pineapples are extremely well-represented here. Locals claim that it's possible to grow them in greenhouses this far north, but it seems more likely to me that they're brought in from somewhere like the subtropical Hainan Island in the south.
There's some fresh vegetables, potatoes and tomoatoes. Directly below, it looks like dried melon seeds, peanuts and other bits and bobs. There's even a little tray of individually-wrapped sausages, a bit like pepperami. If I'm quiet, I can hear the hubbub of commerce from my desk.
Hawkers line the street as far as the eye can see. It's mostly foodstuffs on the left hand side, but across the road there are boxes of clothes and shoes. One stall sells a bunch of plastic stuff - combs, sandals and the like.It's probably too close to bother with a bicycle. I take a shortcut through a gap in the school fence too, and I'm not sure a bike would fit through there. Besides, it's too slippery at the moment, and the route's hilly.
As I've said, Harbin has much less food cooked by street hawkers, as the cold weather makes it difficult. There's lots of dumplings and noodles sold in small shops along the way though, and I'll try to check each and every one of them out by the time I'm done here!
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Bureaucracy Battles II: Red-tape Rigamorale
Remember how when you're growing up, policeman is one of those career options beyond reproach. Like Doctor, Fireman, or Astronaut, there is no such thing as a bad policeman. After all, who else would volunteer to serve their community in this way? Catching bad guys, rescuing kittens from trees and directing traffic, the policeman in the childhood imagination is a towering superhero, with an moral compass that unerringly points North by North Justice.
Remember the first time you saw Keystone Cops? Police Academy? Oh, those bumbling fools. Hollywood and their silver screen lies. It's funny because, of course, real-life police aren't like that. Not at all. It's like seeing Frank Bruno dressed up as the Fairy Godmother, or a clown riding a very small bicycle. Funny precisely because it's so absurd.
Remember the cop from Die Hard? Chief Wiggum from The Simpsons? Those twinkie-chomping, doughnut-dunking, coffee-slurping heavy-set figures of fun? There's nothing wrong with a bit of self-indulgence is there?
Remember the first time your dreams were shattered?
My estate agent 'Auntie' Pan was no help this morning, even after I brought a bottle of wine to grease the wheels of 关系. She refused to take me to the police station and made up an absurd excuse that I needed a notice of permission from my landlord. Even after I insisted that I'd registered in Shanghai before, and that I had all the documents I needed, she persisted.
No alternative but to return to the local police station unaccompanied, fully expecting to face the same lectures about going to live in school. 10:30 in the morning was too early for Lecturing Male Cop, so I went to see Surly Female Cop instead - one of only three people present in the whole building.
"It's too late to register now. It's been too many days". My jaw hit the floor. I'd come the second weekday after I'd moved in, TWICE, and now it was too late?
"Go here, and they'll deal with you" SFC continued, scribbling an address down on a scrap of paper.
"Will they let me register?" I asked.
SFC turned back around to her writing pad. I waited... and waited.
"Thanks. Bye." I forced myself to say.
The address SFC gave me was a ten-minute taxi ride away, and the driver chain-smoked his way through three cigarettes in silence, throwing his Jetta around corners like it was dodge 'ems.
At 11:35am I stepped up to the front-desk of the district police station.
"Foreign Affairs Department, please".
Bored Male Receptionist looked up from his pork and rice.
"It's the lunch break. Noone's here. Come back at 1:30pm".
I gave my best look as if I was about to cry (because I was) and BMR's face softened.
"Look, leave your number and I'll get someone to call you as soon as they get back."
BMR rifled through a stack of papers looking for a number for five minutes before I said I'd just come back at 1:30pm.
I had a bowl of spicy beef noodles, ate a small plate of peanuts with my chopsticks one by one very slowly, then walked around a huge local WalMart to kill the time. A few minutes past 1:30pm I was standing in front of Only Good Cop who leisurely filled out a complicated registration form. I more than half-expected him to stop at any stage, and tell me that this was impossible. That I just didn't have the authority to live outside of school. But then, unexpectedly, it was all done, and he handed me my copy of the registration form.
"Can you sign this form from school too? It just says you approve of my living out". I tried pushing my luck.
"You'll have to go back to the local police station for that. It's nothing to do with us". OGC said.
Ten minutes on a white-knuckle taxi ride later, I was back in the police station. Fourth time in two weeks. SFC was surprised I'd managed to register. I showed her my registration receipt and the form from school.
"Go see, Sun Lu downstairs". SFC turned around and ignored me again.
Sun Lu turned out to be Lecturing Male Cop. I explained my situation. I'd registered now, and at the district police station no less! I was residing legally and all I needed was his signature and stamp in the little box in the school form that said police station's 意见 (view, opinion).
LMC didn't look happy that I'd gone over his head. I could see him turn over this news in his head. He resorted to lecture-mode.
"You're very special, not like a regular citizen, so I can't allow you to live outside".
"Oh, no, you don't understand. I've registered already - I've got permission, I just need you to sign the form".
"What happens if something happens to you? Without being able to speak Chinese, how would you cope?" I wondered exactly what language he assumed we were currently speaking to each other, as the lecture continued for another five minutes.
"Look. I. Just. Need. Your. 意见."
"You. Want. Our. Opinion? Impossible." LMC replied.
As I turned to leave, he reiterated the main points of his previous lecture, and threw in a few extra digs at my inability to cope with the dangers of small-town Harbin on my own.
"Fine. I'll move back into the dormitory then". I lied. "Thanks".
"Did you understand everything I said?" LMC asked, beaming.
I grunted in the affirmative, and willed his head to explode with my mind as I made my exit.
I'm a strong believer in the school of thought that anything can be turned into a positive experience. It would be too much to say I believe everything happens for a reason, because that suggests fate plays a role. As a secular humanist, I just think even the biggest head-ache should be looked at in a positive light in hindsight. So, in conclusion, a quick assessment of what I've achieved here to cheer me up.
1) Practised lots of bureaucracy-related vocabulary. Registration, permit, local and district police-station.
2) Dealt with red-tape and unbudging opposition, and reached a compromise solution. Although the school regulations haven't quite been fulfilled, the more important legal registration procedure is over with. As long as I keep my head down now, I should be alright. There's no way I'll be able to get that police station 意见 now.
3) Learned to believe everything Hollywood tells me.
4) Learned not to trust the fuzz.
Tonight I'm going for hotpot again! I'm going with Auntie Xiao and family, and maybe her crazy Russian friends too! Can't wait!
Remember the first time you saw Keystone Cops? Police Academy? Oh, those bumbling fools. Hollywood and their silver screen lies. It's funny because, of course, real-life police aren't like that. Not at all. It's like seeing Frank Bruno dressed up as the Fairy Godmother, or a clown riding a very small bicycle. Funny precisely because it's so absurd.
Remember the cop from Die Hard? Chief Wiggum from The Simpsons? Those twinkie-chomping, doughnut-dunking, coffee-slurping heavy-set figures of fun? There's nothing wrong with a bit of self-indulgence is there?
Remember the first time your dreams were shattered?
My estate agent 'Auntie' Pan was no help this morning, even after I brought a bottle of wine to grease the wheels of 关系. She refused to take me to the police station and made up an absurd excuse that I needed a notice of permission from my landlord. Even after I insisted that I'd registered in Shanghai before, and that I had all the documents I needed, she persisted.
No alternative but to return to the local police station unaccompanied, fully expecting to face the same lectures about going to live in school. 10:30 in the morning was too early for Lecturing Male Cop, so I went to see Surly Female Cop instead - one of only three people present in the whole building.
"It's too late to register now. It's been too many days". My jaw hit the floor. I'd come the second weekday after I'd moved in, TWICE, and now it was too late?
"Go here, and they'll deal with you" SFC continued, scribbling an address down on a scrap of paper.
"Will they let me register?" I asked.
SFC turned back around to her writing pad. I waited... and waited.
"Thanks. Bye." I forced myself to say.
The address SFC gave me was a ten-minute taxi ride away, and the driver chain-smoked his way through three cigarettes in silence, throwing his Jetta around corners like it was dodge 'ems.
At 11:35am I stepped up to the front-desk of the district police station.
"Foreign Affairs Department, please".
Bored Male Receptionist looked up from his pork and rice.
"It's the lunch break. Noone's here. Come back at 1:30pm".
I gave my best look as if I was about to cry (because I was) and BMR's face softened.
"Look, leave your number and I'll get someone to call you as soon as they get back."
BMR rifled through a stack of papers looking for a number for five minutes before I said I'd just come back at 1:30pm.
I had a bowl of spicy beef noodles, ate a small plate of peanuts with my chopsticks one by one very slowly, then walked around a huge local WalMart to kill the time. A few minutes past 1:30pm I was standing in front of Only Good Cop who leisurely filled out a complicated registration form. I more than half-expected him to stop at any stage, and tell me that this was impossible. That I just didn't have the authority to live outside of school. But then, unexpectedly, it was all done, and he handed me my copy of the registration form.
"Can you sign this form from school too? It just says you approve of my living out". I tried pushing my luck.
"You'll have to go back to the local police station for that. It's nothing to do with us". OGC said.
Ten minutes on a white-knuckle taxi ride later, I was back in the police station. Fourth time in two weeks. SFC was surprised I'd managed to register. I showed her my registration receipt and the form from school.
"Go see, Sun Lu downstairs". SFC turned around and ignored me again.
Sun Lu turned out to be Lecturing Male Cop. I explained my situation. I'd registered now, and at the district police station no less! I was residing legally and all I needed was his signature and stamp in the little box in the school form that said police station's 意见 (view, opinion).
LMC didn't look happy that I'd gone over his head. I could see him turn over this news in his head. He resorted to lecture-mode.
"You're very special, not like a regular citizen, so I can't allow you to live outside".
"Oh, no, you don't understand. I've registered already - I've got permission, I just need you to sign the form".
"What happens if something happens to you? Without being able to speak Chinese, how would you cope?" I wondered exactly what language he assumed we were currently speaking to each other, as the lecture continued for another five minutes.
"Look. I. Just. Need. Your. 意见."
"You. Want. Our. Opinion? Impossible." LMC replied.
As I turned to leave, he reiterated the main points of his previous lecture, and threw in a few extra digs at my inability to cope with the dangers of small-town Harbin on my own.
"Fine. I'll move back into the dormitory then". I lied. "Thanks".
"Did you understand everything I said?" LMC asked, beaming.
I grunted in the affirmative, and willed his head to explode with my mind as I made my exit.
I'm a strong believer in the school of thought that anything can be turned into a positive experience. It would be too much to say I believe everything happens for a reason, because that suggests fate plays a role. As a secular humanist, I just think even the biggest head-ache should be looked at in a positive light in hindsight. So, in conclusion, a quick assessment of what I've achieved here to cheer me up.
1) Practised lots of bureaucracy-related vocabulary. Registration, permit, local and district police-station.
2) Dealt with red-tape and unbudging opposition, and reached a compromise solution. Although the school regulations haven't quite been fulfilled, the more important legal registration procedure is over with. As long as I keep my head down now, I should be alright. There's no way I'll be able to get that police station 意见 now.
3) Learned to believe everything Hollywood tells me.
4) Learned not to trust the fuzz.
Tonight I'm going for hotpot again! I'm going with Auntie Xiao and family, and maybe her crazy Russian friends too! Can't wait!
Monday, February 26, 2007
在家万事好， 出门事事难
I saw a phrase that I wanted to share on the blog.
在家万事好， 出门事事难 (literally "At home 10,000 things good, (Going) out (the) door all things difficult".)
I thought it encapsulated nicely my situation. I'm not exactly struggling, but it hasn't been as smooth going as maybe I deluded myself into thinking it would be. I like my creature comforts like hot water on demand (instead of having to fiddle with a gas canister and then wait ten minutes for the boiler to get going), English-language television, and a well-stocked fridge.
The phrase above has the neat symmetry and metre of any good catchy saying. Looked at as an AABBC structure, the AA represents a verb-object, thus "Being (at) home" and "(Going) out the door" respectively. Next, BB is a description of magnitude of "issues". Respectively, "10,000 issues" and "issues-issues". In the latter, the repetition of a noun is used to signify "all" of that thing. It's quite a common structure, so there is also 人人 ("all people) and 家家 ("all homes/families"). Lastly, C describes the situation as "good" or "difficult" respectively.
It's so well-structured in fact, that it has some variants such as:
在家千日好， 出门一时难 (roughly "It's easy to spend a thousand days at home, (but) going out for an hour is tough"). That first part can also be rendered "There is no place like home".
Wendy offered the version:
在家千般好， 出门万般难 (roughly "All things are good at home, (but) going out all things are difficult"). Neatly, both 千般 and 万般 both signify "all sorts of things" but the former expresses it using the word 千 (1000) while the latter uses 万 (10,000). In other words, both in and outside the home all things are tough, but outside, it's an even bigger "all". This style of numerical hyperbole is quite common in Chinese and is made easier (and probably encouraged) by the monosyllabic nature of all those multiples of ten. "Ten thousand" in English somehow doesn't make it into that many idiomatic phrases. Compare how often "dozen" and "score" make it into expressions as against less concise figures, such as "five hundred".
Another example using both the characters 家 and 万 is 家书抵万金 (literally "home letter is-equal-to 10,000 gold) or "A letter from home is priceless".
There's a wealth of character information there that I haven't even touched too. For example, 家 the character for home, depicts a roof over the literary/archaic word for "pig". A home is where you raise pigs! That'll do for today though. Here endeth the lesson!
在家万事好， 出门事事难 (literally "At home 10,000 things good, (Going) out (the) door all things difficult".)
I thought it encapsulated nicely my situation. I'm not exactly struggling, but it hasn't been as smooth going as maybe I deluded myself into thinking it would be. I like my creature comforts like hot water on demand (instead of having to fiddle with a gas canister and then wait ten minutes for the boiler to get going), English-language television, and a well-stocked fridge.
The phrase above has the neat symmetry and metre of any good catchy saying. Looked at as an AABBC structure, the AA represents a verb-object, thus "Being (at) home" and "(Going) out the door" respectively. Next, BB is a description of magnitude of "issues". Respectively, "10,000 issues" and "issues-issues". In the latter, the repetition of a noun is used to signify "all" of that thing. It's quite a common structure, so there is also 人人 ("all people) and 家家 ("all homes/families"). Lastly, C describes the situation as "good" or "difficult" respectively.
It's so well-structured in fact, that it has some variants such as:
在家千日好， 出门一时难 (roughly "It's easy to spend a thousand days at home, (but) going out for an hour is tough"). That first part can also be rendered "There is no place like home".
Wendy offered the version:
在家千般好， 出门万般难 (roughly "All things are good at home, (but) going out all things are difficult"). Neatly, both 千般 and 万般 both signify "all sorts of things" but the former expresses it using the word 千 (1000) while the latter uses 万 (10,000). In other words, both in and outside the home all things are tough, but outside, it's an even bigger "all". This style of numerical hyperbole is quite common in Chinese and is made easier (and probably encouraged) by the monosyllabic nature of all those multiples of ten. "Ten thousand" in English somehow doesn't make it into that many idiomatic phrases. Compare how often "dozen" and "score" make it into expressions as against less concise figures, such as "five hundred".
Another example using both the characters 家 and 万 is 家书抵万金 (literally "home letter is-equal-to 10,000 gold) or "A letter from home is priceless".
There's a wealth of character information there that I haven't even touched too. For example, 家 the character for home, depicts a roof over the literary/archaic word for "pig". A home is where you raise pigs! That'll do for today though. Here endeth the lesson!
Dodgy DVD Distributors
A trip to China wouldn't be complete without stocking up on DVDs. When I first arrived in Shanghai, in the summer of 2004, discs were typically 8RMB (53p) apiece, but technology has moved on, and Harbin in 2007 typically sells them for 6RMB (40p) each!
Big supermarkets like Carrefour sell DVDs too, but these range enormously in price from 5RMB for unheard of Z-movie's, through to upwards of 100RMB for multi-disc boxsets. The difference between 盗版 (fake) street-sellers or small hole-in-the-wall shops, and 正版 (real) editions is that legitimate copies are more likely to be dubbed into Chinese, with correct subtitles, and in high quality.
Pirate DVDs are almost always a lottery, with completely unrelated subtitles, Russian-language versions of Hollywood films, and telescreen editions being some of the worst problems a careless buyer might face.
Mitigating the difference (apart from the obvious price advantage) is the 'try before you buy' policy most pirates are happy to indulge; the huge range that most pirates carry; and occasional censorship on state-sanctioned movies. Notoriously, the mainland Chinese version of Infernal Affairs (无间道 - recently remade as The Departed) had a completely different ending to the HK version. Andy Lau's bad-guy character is robbed of his happy ending in the mainland version, lest the morality of the story corrupt the country's youth!
I bought a stack of ten DVDs at just such a pirate stall near University. As I paid, I tried to haggle.
"Buy nine, get one free?" I asked?
"We only make 5 jiao (50c) on each disc, so that's impossible" the shop-girl claimed, apologetically.
"Come on, how about a little cheaper? I'll be a regular customer". I tried my best cheeky grin.
"57RMB (£4.80) then?" She replied, knocking 20p off the asking price, and shaving her (alleged) profit margin to less than 2p a disc!
I pretended to consider it, then paid up with a suitably annoyed expression, living by the adage that he best haggling comes from the buyer and the seller both thinking they've cheated the other.
All this serves as preamble to saying that I've just seen two fantastic films. "Children of Men" and "Pan's Labyrinth".
There are some similarities. Both are 2006 films by Mexican directors (Alfsono Cuaron and Guillermo del Toro respectively) that make extensive use of 'invisible CGI' to tell their stories. I griped about the state of film-making in a previous post, so I was pleasantly surprised by these two, which are (relatively) big-budget, yet thoughtful and thought-provoking pieces of cinema.
Pan's Labyrinth is the story of a little girl in 1940's Spain and the fantasy world that she creates to deal with the horrors around her. Or is it? Del Toro deliberately leaves ambiguous the question of whether the fantasy world is real.
Del Toro's vision is incredible. There are some creature designs that are just out-of-this-world, and yet he gives equal weight to the story portions set in the real-world. I can't recommend this film highly enough. The film is entirely in Spanish, but don't let reading subtitles, or the fact that it's billed as a fairytale, put you off.
I'll try not to journey into spoiler territory here, but Children of Men is a strongly political science-fiction picture, set in a near-future England. London is depicted as a gritty, dirty, crumbling version of today's city, in which terrorism and social breakdown have led to an increasingly militarised police-state.
The whole thing is shot in a washed-out realistic style using plenty of hand-held cameras and mind-blowingly long and intricate tracking shots. The effect is to give an almost documentary feel, and it's all eminently believable and scary stuff.
[Update: I forgot to say that science-fiction can be grouped into two categories - I'll call them stories and fables. In a story, you might have an entire alternate or future Universe, which has its own history, people, and even economics. In a good story, it'll all be logically consistent, and offer a glimpse at what could have been, or what might happen. See Neal Stephenson's novels The Diamond Age or Snow Crash for his great depiction of a future world, complete with its own culture, social structure, and lingo.
A fable, in contrast, is a story that holds up a mirror to the world we live in today. Typically allegorical or metaphorical, it will try and reveal a deeper truth. Try Alan Moore's original graphic novel V for Vendetta, which was written in response to his concerns about the Conservative government of 1980's Britain.
The very best science-fiction, then, combines both. It'll weave a story in a world that is at once fantastic and believable, then within that story attempt to teach or warn us about something that is relevant in the here and now. It's why I live the genre so much, despite its less than pleasant connotations of dorkiness. Anyway, now that I've had time to think about the film, I would say Children of Men is a successful example of both story and fable, and I've been struggling to get it out of my head.]
Big supermarkets like Carrefour sell DVDs too, but these range enormously in price from 5RMB for unheard of Z-movie's, through to upwards of 100RMB for multi-disc boxsets. The difference between 盗版 (fake) street-sellers or small hole-in-the-wall shops, and 正版 (real) editions is that legitimate copies are more likely to be dubbed into Chinese, with correct subtitles, and in high quality.
Pirate DVDs are almost always a lottery, with completely unrelated subtitles, Russian-language versions of Hollywood films, and telescreen editions being some of the worst problems a careless buyer might face.
Mitigating the difference (apart from the obvious price advantage) is the 'try before you buy' policy most pirates are happy to indulge; the huge range that most pirates carry; and occasional censorship on state-sanctioned movies. Notoriously, the mainland Chinese version of Infernal Affairs (无间道 - recently remade as The Departed) had a completely different ending to the HK version. Andy Lau's bad-guy character is robbed of his happy ending in the mainland version, lest the morality of the story corrupt the country's youth!
I bought a stack of ten DVDs at just such a pirate stall near University. As I paid, I tried to haggle.
"Buy nine, get one free?" I asked?
"We only make 5 jiao (50c) on each disc, so that's impossible" the shop-girl claimed, apologetically.
"Come on, how about a little cheaper? I'll be a regular customer". I tried my best cheeky grin.
"57RMB (£4.80) then?" She replied, knocking 20p off the asking price, and shaving her (alleged) profit margin to less than 2p a disc!
I pretended to consider it, then paid up with a suitably annoyed expression, living by the adage that he best haggling comes from the buyer and the seller both thinking they've cheated the other.
All this serves as preamble to saying that I've just seen two fantastic films. "Children of Men" and "Pan's Labyrinth".
There are some similarities. Both are 2006 films by Mexican directors (Alfsono Cuaron and Guillermo del Toro respectively) that make extensive use of 'invisible CGI' to tell their stories. I griped about the state of film-making in a previous post, so I was pleasantly surprised by these two, which are (relatively) big-budget, yet thoughtful and thought-provoking pieces of cinema.
Pan's Labyrinth is the story of a little girl in 1940's Spain and the fantasy world that she creates to deal with the horrors around her. Or is it? Del Toro deliberately leaves ambiguous the question of whether the fantasy world is real.Del Toro's vision is incredible. There are some creature designs that are just out-of-this-world, and yet he gives equal weight to the story portions set in the real-world. I can't recommend this film highly enough. The film is entirely in Spanish, but don't let reading subtitles, or the fact that it's billed as a fairytale, put you off.
I'll try not to journey into spoiler territory here, but Children of Men is a strongly political science-fiction picture, set in a near-future England. London is depicted as a gritty, dirty, crumbling version of today's city, in which terrorism and social breakdown have led to an increasingly militarised police-state.The whole thing is shot in a washed-out realistic style using plenty of hand-held cameras and mind-blowingly long and intricate tracking shots. The effect is to give an almost documentary feel, and it's all eminently believable and scary stuff.
[Update: I forgot to say that science-fiction can be grouped into two categories - I'll call them stories and fables. In a story, you might have an entire alternate or future Universe, which has its own history, people, and even economics. In a good story, it'll all be logically consistent, and offer a glimpse at what could have been, or what might happen. See Neal Stephenson's novels The Diamond Age or Snow Crash for his great depiction of a future world, complete with its own culture, social structure, and lingo.
A fable, in contrast, is a story that holds up a mirror to the world we live in today. Typically allegorical or metaphorical, it will try and reveal a deeper truth. Try Alan Moore's original graphic novel V for Vendetta, which was written in response to his concerns about the Conservative government of 1980's Britain.
The very best science-fiction, then, combines both. It'll weave a story in a world that is at once fantastic and believable, then within that story attempt to teach or warn us about something that is relevant in the here and now. It's why I live the genre so much, despite its less than pleasant connotations of dorkiness. Anyway, now that I've had time to think about the film, I would say Children of Men is a successful example of both story and fable, and I've been struggling to get it out of my head.]
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Hedonistic Hotpot Happiness
Sad but true, I've been dreaming about having hotpot for months, since getting back from China the last time.
According to the Chinese Zodiac, people born in the Year of the Pig are inclined towards leading contented lives, filled with simple pleasures, particularly deriving happiness from food. Now, I'm no great believer in Astrology in general, but if that's my destiny, then being a pig suits me just fine.
Chinese culture also places a huge emphasis on food. Textbooks here teach students that Westerners will engage in bizarre small-talk involving the weather or sports-related news, rather than (naturally) enquiring if one has eaten yet; and business is as likely to be concluded around a Lazy Susan piled high with food, than around a boardroom table stacked with briefs and contracts.
There are a myriad colourful fixed expressions and idioms that refer to food, often pertaining to completely unrelated issues. Ones that I've heard include "Throwing a dumpling to hit a dog" (to describe the futility of petitioning Government); "Even a talented wife cannot cook without rice" (or "You can't make something out of nothing"); "Don't tie your shoes in a melon field" (advice not to do anything to arouse suspicion); and there are thousands more I'm itching to discover.
All this is to rationalise my (possibly) excessive happiness at going out to eat hotpot. Being new in town, it's been tough finding anyone to eat with, so when Wang Da Peng called to suggest meeting up later that evening for a bite to eat I didn't waste a second in saying "好!"
Hotpot is an inherently communal activity. A huge pot of soup is placed in the middle of the table, and heated with coals, gas, or in less traditional joints, an electric hob. Fresh ingredients, and occasionally partially cooked items such as meat balls, are brought to your table, and you throw them in to boil. While you wait, you can snack on cold appetisers like salted peanuts, pickled vegetables, and pig-skin jelly, or if you have some seniority, you can make elaborate toasts and get everyone to drink lots on an empty stomach.
Here's the pot: As you can see, this actually has two types of soup - a spicy red variety, and a regular soup-coloured type. Seen from above, the S-shaped divider and the two distinct colours gives the whole pot the appearance of the Yin and Yang symbol. Normally, the naming alludes to that symbolism, but this restaurant opted instead to name it something extremely practical, like "Ordinary and Spicy. Two types of soup"!
Underneath you can see the electric hotplate which has fancy buttons and an electronic display. Purists would argue this takes the art out of regulating the temperature and the cooking times, but I reckon this makes it easier to concentrate on stuffing my face.
This is a big pile of raw lamb. It's sliced paper-thin and cooks in seconds, soaking up plenty of flavour in the process.
The restaurant, 鼎鑫火锅 is part of a decent-sized chain. While 'chain-store' might be a dirty-word in the world of good eating back home, here it signals that the produce is fresh. In my experience, and at the risk of making a sweeping generalisation, the Chinese are very discerning eaters, so its popularity itself suggests that the food is good. Case in point? Typically, despite the preponderance of small family-run hotpot restaurants where I live, we walked a good mile or more for the superior dining 鼎鑫火锅 had to offer.
This is a bunch of mushrooms. Nothing special but I liked the presentation - they arrived in a heavy vase.
As a big chain, the restaurant ran a tight ship. The waitress held a clipboard filled with barcodes in one hand and a little scanner in the other, and beeped through orders as quick as Da Peng could read them out. They presumably went straight to the kitchen (or, more accurately I suppose, 'preparation rooms') because food started arriving almost immediately.
This is a big plate of what I thought were intestines. Turns out that it was actually 骨髓 (bone marrow), but I have no idea how it gets extracted so cleanly. The texture is soft and fibre-less, halfway between a marshmallow and Mr. Whippy ice-cream, and it has a juicy, slightly meaty flavour. More importantly, it's great for your immune system!
I should explain. There's an idea in Chinese that eating something will improve the corresponding part on the eater. Thus, eating heart will improve the heart, eating skin might improve complexion, and so on. There's even a succint phrase to describe it, namely 吃什么， 补什么 ("eat what, nourish what"). I suppose there's some scientific basis to it - after all, the nutritional composition of, say, a pig's brain, is going to be pretty similar to a person's.
I've also been told, with a straight face, that eating something that just looks like something else also has a positive effect, so eating walnuts (which look like brains) will boost brainpower. To this day, I don't know if that's a case of mock-the-foreigner, or a genuine case of Chinese medicine gone fantastically awry.
There's a fanatical devotion to freshness in much of Chinese cooking, and many larger restaurants have a collection of large fish tanks at the entrance. Da Peng wanted to order a 黑鱼 (snakeheaded fish), but the smallest they had was two kilograms, so we opted for an eel instead. This place was no exception in its devotion to freshness. The waiter turned up a few minutes after we'd placed the order, clutching a little red bucket in which an eel was flopping about. Da Peng examined it, brow furrowed, like he was tasting a particularly complex wine, then nodded his approval. A few minutes later it came back as pictured. Note that they include the head. The eyes are meant to be the best bit! Once cooked, the fish peeled apart into thick, creamy chunks.
We also had an order of duck's blood. It's partially dried then strained to form a solid block, before being sliced into cubes or thick slices as shown here. The texture's comparable to tofu, and the taste is quite subtle, but with a hint of meatiness. Not as outlandish as it might seem at first sight. Black pudding, after all, is a relatively popular foodstuff back home, and a breakfast one at that. Whatever the case, however you cut it, this dish is never going to look good.
A final quick note about conversation, lest I give the impression I'm neglecting my Chinese practice. Topics ranged more widely than I can hope to recall - the Olympics, Harbin's benzene spill, local wage rates (apparently, a shocking 2.5RMB/hour at KFC), the difference in sporting cultures around the world, learning languages, the best places to live in China, local and government-level bureaucracy, and food, food, and more food. I reckon I kept up quite well, but needed reiteration on the more technical vocabulary. My Chinese definitely improved after a few beers though!
So four gluttonous hours and five beers each later, we stepped into Harbin's winter streets, the icy air cutting through the wooziness of the food and warmth. Da Peng, harking back to an earlier conversation, tried to buy me some unusual, and unidentifiable meat-on-a-stick from a street hawker! This I had to decline, at serious risk of doing permanent damage to my stomach. Ming Yue offered to treat me to dog-meat next time, and with that, we headed our separate ways.
According to the Chinese Zodiac, people born in the Year of the Pig are inclined towards leading contented lives, filled with simple pleasures, particularly deriving happiness from food. Now, I'm no great believer in Astrology in general, but if that's my destiny, then being a pig suits me just fine.
Chinese culture also places a huge emphasis on food. Textbooks here teach students that Westerners will engage in bizarre small-talk involving the weather or sports-related news, rather than (naturally) enquiring if one has eaten yet; and business is as likely to be concluded around a Lazy Susan piled high with food, than around a boardroom table stacked with briefs and contracts.
There are a myriad colourful fixed expressions and idioms that refer to food, often pertaining to completely unrelated issues. Ones that I've heard include "Throwing a dumpling to hit a dog" (to describe the futility of petitioning Government); "Even a talented wife cannot cook without rice" (or "You can't make something out of nothing"); "Don't tie your shoes in a melon field" (advice not to do anything to arouse suspicion); and there are thousands more I'm itching to discover.
All this is to rationalise my (possibly) excessive happiness at going out to eat hotpot. Being new in town, it's been tough finding anyone to eat with, so when Wang Da Peng called to suggest meeting up later that evening for a bite to eat I didn't waste a second in saying "好!"
Hotpot is an inherently communal activity. A huge pot of soup is placed in the middle of the table, and heated with coals, gas, or in less traditional joints, an electric hob. Fresh ingredients, and occasionally partially cooked items such as meat balls, are brought to your table, and you throw them in to boil. While you wait, you can snack on cold appetisers like salted peanuts, pickled vegetables, and pig-skin jelly, or if you have some seniority, you can make elaborate toasts and get everyone to drink lots on an empty stomach.
Here's the pot: As you can see, this actually has two types of soup - a spicy red variety, and a regular soup-coloured type. Seen from above, the S-shaped divider and the two distinct colours gives the whole pot the appearance of the Yin and Yang symbol. Normally, the naming alludes to that symbolism, but this restaurant opted instead to name it something extremely practical, like "Ordinary and Spicy. Two types of soup"!Underneath you can see the electric hotplate which has fancy buttons and an electronic display. Purists would argue this takes the art out of regulating the temperature and the cooking times, but I reckon this makes it easier to concentrate on stuffing my face.
This is a big pile of raw lamb. It's sliced paper-thin and cooks in seconds, soaking up plenty of flavour in the process.The restaurant, 鼎鑫火锅 is part of a decent-sized chain. While 'chain-store' might be a dirty-word in the world of good eating back home, here it signals that the produce is fresh. In my experience, and at the risk of making a sweeping generalisation, the Chinese are very discerning eaters, so its popularity itself suggests that the food is good. Case in point? Typically, despite the preponderance of small family-run hotpot restaurants where I live, we walked a good mile or more for the superior dining 鼎鑫火锅 had to offer.
This is a bunch of mushrooms. Nothing special but I liked the presentation - they arrived in a heavy vase.As a big chain, the restaurant ran a tight ship. The waitress held a clipboard filled with barcodes in one hand and a little scanner in the other, and beeped through orders as quick as Da Peng could read them out. They presumably went straight to the kitchen (or, more accurately I suppose, 'preparation rooms') because food started arriving almost immediately.
This is a big plate of what I thought were intestines. Turns out that it was actually 骨髓 (bone marrow), but I have no idea how it gets extracted so cleanly. The texture is soft and fibre-less, halfway between a marshmallow and Mr. Whippy ice-cream, and it has a juicy, slightly meaty flavour. More importantly, it's great for your immune system!I should explain. There's an idea in Chinese that eating something will improve the corresponding part on the eater. Thus, eating heart will improve the heart, eating skin might improve complexion, and so on. There's even a succint phrase to describe it, namely 吃什么， 补什么 ("eat what, nourish what"). I suppose there's some scientific basis to it - after all, the nutritional composition of, say, a pig's brain, is going to be pretty similar to a person's.
I've also been told, with a straight face, that eating something that just looks like something else also has a positive effect, so eating walnuts (which look like brains) will boost brainpower. To this day, I don't know if that's a case of mock-the-foreigner, or a genuine case of Chinese medicine gone fantastically awry.
There's a fanatical devotion to freshness in much of Chinese cooking, and many larger restaurants have a collection of large fish tanks at the entrance. Da Peng wanted to order a 黑鱼 (snakeheaded fish), but the smallest they had was two kilograms, so we opted for an eel instead. This place was no exception in its devotion to freshness. The waiter turned up a few minutes after we'd placed the order, clutching a little red bucket in which an eel was flopping about. Da Peng examined it, brow furrowed, like he was tasting a particularly complex wine, then nodded his approval. A few minutes later it came back as pictured. Note that they include the head. The eyes are meant to be the best bit! Once cooked, the fish peeled apart into thick, creamy chunks.
We also had an order of duck's blood. It's partially dried then strained to form a solid block, before being sliced into cubes or thick slices as shown here. The texture's comparable to tofu, and the taste is quite subtle, but with a hint of meatiness. Not as outlandish as it might seem at first sight. Black pudding, after all, is a relatively popular foodstuff back home, and a breakfast one at that. Whatever the case, however you cut it, this dish is never going to look good.A final quick note about conversation, lest I give the impression I'm neglecting my Chinese practice. Topics ranged more widely than I can hope to recall - the Olympics, Harbin's benzene spill, local wage rates (apparently, a shocking 2.5RMB/hour at KFC), the difference in sporting cultures around the world, learning languages, the best places to live in China, local and government-level bureaucracy, and food, food, and more food. I reckon I kept up quite well, but needed reiteration on the more technical vocabulary. My Chinese definitely improved after a few beers though!
So four gluttonous hours and five beers each later, we stepped into Harbin's winter streets, the icy air cutting through the wooziness of the food and warmth. Da Peng, harking back to an earlier conversation, tried to buy me some unusual, and unidentifiable meat-on-a-stick from a street hawker! This I had to decline, at serious risk of doing permanent damage to my stomach. Ming Yue offered to treat me to dog-meat next time, and with that, we headed our separate ways.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Health Hazard II: Cracker Combustion Craziness
鞭炮 (literally 'whip-cannon') or firecrackers are traditionally used at Chinese New Year to scare away evil spirits, but they scare the 地狱 out of me too. 'Cracker' is a bit of a misnomer, with the larger, more powerful varieties packing a concussive blast that is as much felt as heard. Every time one goes off, I suffer an involuntary ducking/flinching motion, and reveal myself to the Chinese world as the outsider that I am. They've been going off with a particular enthusiasm tonight, and I'm not sure if it's a special day, or a case of using up stocks before the festival ends in a week's time.
Kids can be seen in giggly crowds around the street corners where hawkers sell their fireworks. They spend their pocket money on a few kuai's worth of explosive ordinance at a time, hurrying back after each pop to try something newer, louder, whizzier.
As I trod the local streets, once again looking for somewhere new for dinner, a girl stood up from where she was crouched at the curb, and ran at me, shrieking and covering her ears. I froze stiffer than an Englishman's upper lip in the popular imagination of a Chinese school child raised on Jane Austen novels and Hugh Grant movies, before scurrying for cover. The explosion never came, and shockingly the girl returned to pick up her firework after a few seconds, and squinted down the end of the tube expectantly.
Later, I stood watching a group of two middle-aged couples as they detonated a pile of crackers larger than the most well-fed of London's street urchins (in the popular imagination of Chinese school children raised reading Dickens). After a percussive eternity the pik-pak pik-pak died away, only to be replaced by an annoying ringing in my ears, and the wee-woo of alarms from several cars and a van, distressed by the clamour. In the still winter air, the smoke lingered close to the ground, smelling like a thousand burnt matches.
Kids can be seen in giggly crowds around the street corners where hawkers sell their fireworks. They spend their pocket money on a few kuai's worth of explosive ordinance at a time, hurrying back after each pop to try something newer, louder, whizzier.
As I trod the local streets, once again looking for somewhere new for dinner, a girl stood up from where she was crouched at the curb, and ran at me, shrieking and covering her ears. I froze stiffer than an Englishman's upper lip in the popular imagination of a Chinese school child raised on Jane Austen novels and Hugh Grant movies, before scurrying for cover. The explosion never came, and shockingly the girl returned to pick up her firework after a few seconds, and squinted down the end of the tube expectantly.
Later, I stood watching a group of two middle-aged couples as they detonated a pile of crackers larger than the most well-fed of London's street urchins (in the popular imagination of Chinese school children raised reading Dickens). After a percussive eternity the pik-pak pik-pak died away, only to be replaced by an annoying ringing in my ears, and the wee-woo of alarms from several cars and a van, distressed by the clamour. In the still winter air, the smoke lingered close to the ground, smelling like a thousand burnt matches.
Friday, February 23, 2007
Educational Issues and Race Relations
I enrolled and picked up my textbooks today. I've opted to try out the highest class out of 9 which is lettered G (for some reason, classes A and C also have A+ and C+ counterparts). My reasoning is that it's normally got fewer people and (difficulty swallowing my pride aside) it's always easier to move down.
The six textbooks aren't hugely reassuring though, with names like Newspaper Listening, High Level Chinese Listening (3), Ancient Chinese (2), and Chinese Traditional Culture and Modern Life (II). Ancient Chinese in particular looks like it'll be tough, with each text's notes alone outweighing the text itself.
According to the dormitory staff when I first got here, of students studying Chinese, 60% are Korean, 30% are Russian, and the remainder are Europeans and Americans. Notably, there was no mention of any Japanese (unlike in Shanghai, which had a sizeable contingent at East China Normal University).
At enrollment, of the dozens of people milling about, I counted exactly two Russians, someone that I guessed was Central Asian (she looked Chinese but was speaking to the Russians in Russian). The rest were all Korean! Now, I've got nothing against Koreans at all - the Korean 太太 (house-wives) in Shanghai were willing to adopt you as their own son and feed you snacks at the drop of a cheeky smile - but it does seem a little unbalanced.
Wendy theorised that there are fewer Japanese in Harbin because of wartime atrocities such as those committed by the notorious Unit 731. Sentiment does seem to bubble to the surface on occasion. I remember all too vividly the anti-Japanese marches a bit over a year ago, in which mobs ran riot, Japanese cars were overturned and sushi restaurants attacked.
Then again, those events were country-wide, and now that I think about it, the reasons for the imbalance here are probably more economic - there are plenty of Japanese multinationals in Shanghai - and geographic - Heilongjiang province does, after all, border Korea (albeit the 'Democratic People's Republic' bit).
Certainly, locals have brought up the topic unbidden and stressed that most Harbiners today feel no ill will towards the people, although feelings towards the government are a different matter altogether.
... And then I saw the inside cover of my Culture textbook. Bear in mind that this is published by 北京大学出版社 (Peking University Press) which is an arm of the government, and that controversy over Japanese textbooks has in no small way fuelled previous popular uprisings.
The captions state the characters' names in character and romanised form, their gender, and their nationality. Notably, they are all rendered in fairly realistic line drawings...
...except for the fifth character 山本惠, who, apart from originating from the Land of the Rising Sun, has been drawn as a potato-faced monster. An editing mistake? An illustrator's joke? Or something a bit more deliberate and vicious?
The six textbooks aren't hugely reassuring though, with names like Newspaper Listening, High Level Chinese Listening (3), Ancient Chinese (2), and Chinese Traditional Culture and Modern Life (II). Ancient Chinese in particular looks like it'll be tough, with each text's notes alone outweighing the text itself.
According to the dormitory staff when I first got here, of students studying Chinese, 60% are Korean, 30% are Russian, and the remainder are Europeans and Americans. Notably, there was no mention of any Japanese (unlike in Shanghai, which had a sizeable contingent at East China Normal University).
At enrollment, of the dozens of people milling about, I counted exactly two Russians, someone that I guessed was Central Asian (she looked Chinese but was speaking to the Russians in Russian). The rest were all Korean! Now, I've got nothing against Koreans at all - the Korean 太太 (house-wives) in Shanghai were willing to adopt you as their own son and feed you snacks at the drop of a cheeky smile - but it does seem a little unbalanced.
Wendy theorised that there are fewer Japanese in Harbin because of wartime atrocities such as those committed by the notorious Unit 731. Sentiment does seem to bubble to the surface on occasion. I remember all too vividly the anti-Japanese marches a bit over a year ago, in which mobs ran riot, Japanese cars were overturned and sushi restaurants attacked.
Then again, those events were country-wide, and now that I think about it, the reasons for the imbalance here are probably more economic - there are plenty of Japanese multinationals in Shanghai - and geographic - Heilongjiang province does, after all, border Korea (albeit the 'Democratic People's Republic' bit).
Certainly, locals have brought up the topic unbidden and stressed that most Harbiners today feel no ill will towards the people, although feelings towards the government are a different matter altogether.
... And then I saw the inside cover of my Culture textbook. Bear in mind that this is published by 北京大学出版社 (Peking University Press) which is an arm of the government, and that controversy over Japanese textbooks has in no small way fuelled previous popular uprisings.The captions state the characters' names in character and romanised form, their gender, and their nationality. Notably, they are all rendered in fairly realistic line drawings...
...except for the fifth character 山本惠, who, apart from originating from the Land of the Rising Sun, has been drawn as a potato-faced monster. An editing mistake? An illustrator's joke? Or something a bit more deliberate and vicious?
Ethnic Eats
新疆 (Xinjiang, literally 'new border') province is a vast, predominantly Muslim, oil-rich territory that occupies the far Western reaches of the Middle Kingdom.
Just as well-meaning non-Harbinese like to tell travellers not to visit Harbin ("The Ice Festival is nice, but don't go. It's too cold"), tourists are warned not to go to Xinjiang ("The scenery is great, but don't go. It's too dangerous".) This warning is attributable not to the teeming masses of sheep, for which the area is known, but rather for the reputation of the locals, who are described as "short-tempered, and fond of knives".
That said, they produce some of the best food to be found in China - surprising, considering it's not well-known outside of the region. Like Dongbei cuisine, Xinjiang food is meat-heavy. Its specialities include a variety of 拉面 (pulled noodles), and the best meat-on-a-stick to be found, anywhere. Ethnic minority Uyghur hawkers stand on street corners, fanning the coals on their portable barbecues. Wearing a distinctive type of hat, they make alarming ululating sounds with their mouths to attract customers.
Elsewhere, outside the front of noodle shops there is typically a big pot of boiling water, in which the aforementioned pulled noodles are cooked. Alternatively, one can order noodles 切削 ('cut' or 'chipped') style. The chef holds a big lump of raw dough, and using a giant cleaver quickly and continually swipes at the top, each time releasing a sliver of noodle which, as if by magic, flies into the boiling water. If he's feeling particularly showy, the chef might step back as he cuts, getting further and further from the pot, as the dough continues to cascade piece after piece to its watery grave.
On a side note, and oddly, for an overwhelmingly Muslim population, 新疆 beer isn't half bad. It's a black beer, in some ways similar to, but lighter and sweeter than Guinness.
All this serves as prologue to my finding a decent Xinjiang restaurant near University. Disappointingly, there wasn't a big pot, bubbling away outside, but there was a little barbecue. I ordered a few sticks of lamb, and some 烧汁牛腩 (roast juice beef tenderloin). The lamb was incredible. Melt-in-the-mouth chunks, cooked to perfection and dripping with spices. The beef less so, with cubes of meat of variable quality cooked with green peppers and carrots. Its one saving grace was the quality of the sauce which was very more-ish. The dish was served with rice, which to my mind isn't very authentic.
The proprietors were a Xinjiangese couple. Given its Central Asian location, the indigenous people of Xinjiang typically have the appearance of an Asian-European mix, with brown hair and wide eyes. For some reason, the Xinjiang youth in Shanghai all had terrible acne - poor hygiene, a reaction to Shanghai's humidity, or a genetic predisposition?
The dominant ethnic group (to which I and almost every chinese you're likely to have met belong), Han Chinese (汉族), don't seem to regard Xinjiangese as Chinese at all, referring to 新疆人 as if they from were a different country, and rarely, if ever, mixing with them socially. I don't know if this is a product of the aforementioned fondness for knives, because of cultural, historical and linguistic barriers, or because of the political tensions in that part of the country, and I'm certainly not qualified to comment any further. These guys seemed friendly enough though.
A mixed first taste of Xinjiang food in this city then. I'll break the no-repeat rule and give it another chance in a few days.
Just as well-meaning non-Harbinese like to tell travellers not to visit Harbin ("The Ice Festival is nice, but don't go. It's too cold"), tourists are warned not to go to Xinjiang ("The scenery is great, but don't go. It's too dangerous".) This warning is attributable not to the teeming masses of sheep, for which the area is known, but rather for the reputation of the locals, who are described as "short-tempered, and fond of knives".
That said, they produce some of the best food to be found in China - surprising, considering it's not well-known outside of the region. Like Dongbei cuisine, Xinjiang food is meat-heavy. Its specialities include a variety of 拉面 (pulled noodles), and the best meat-on-a-stick to be found, anywhere. Ethnic minority Uyghur hawkers stand on street corners, fanning the coals on their portable barbecues. Wearing a distinctive type of hat, they make alarming ululating sounds with their mouths to attract customers.
Elsewhere, outside the front of noodle shops there is typically a big pot of boiling water, in which the aforementioned pulled noodles are cooked. Alternatively, one can order noodles 切削 ('cut' or 'chipped') style. The chef holds a big lump of raw dough, and using a giant cleaver quickly and continually swipes at the top, each time releasing a sliver of noodle which, as if by magic, flies into the boiling water. If he's feeling particularly showy, the chef might step back as he cuts, getting further and further from the pot, as the dough continues to cascade piece after piece to its watery grave.
On a side note, and oddly, for an overwhelmingly Muslim population, 新疆 beer isn't half bad. It's a black beer, in some ways similar to, but lighter and sweeter than Guinness.
All this serves as prologue to my finding a decent Xinjiang restaurant near University. Disappointingly, there wasn't a big pot, bubbling away outside, but there was a little barbecue. I ordered a few sticks of lamb, and some 烧汁牛腩 (roast juice beef tenderloin). The lamb was incredible. Melt-in-the-mouth chunks, cooked to perfection and dripping with spices. The beef less so, with cubes of meat of variable quality cooked with green peppers and carrots. Its one saving grace was the quality of the sauce which was very more-ish. The dish was served with rice, which to my mind isn't very authentic.The proprietors were a Xinjiangese couple. Given its Central Asian location, the indigenous people of Xinjiang typically have the appearance of an Asian-European mix, with brown hair and wide eyes. For some reason, the Xinjiang youth in Shanghai all had terrible acne - poor hygiene, a reaction to Shanghai's humidity, or a genetic predisposition?
The dominant ethnic group (to which I and almost every chinese you're likely to have met belong), Han Chinese (汉族), don't seem to regard Xinjiangese as Chinese at all, referring to 新疆人 as if they from were a different country, and rarely, if ever, mixing with them socially. I don't know if this is a product of the aforementioned fondness for knives, because of cultural, historical and linguistic barriers, or because of the political tensions in that part of the country, and I'm certainly not qualified to comment any further. These guys seemed friendly enough though.
A mixed first taste of Xinjiang food in this city then. I'll break the no-repeat rule and give it another chance in a few days.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Sand Sweeping
Something new to me, but which I've seen quite a lot here, is the method of cleaning when it's wet outside. It makes sense not to mop the floor with soapy water, with the amount of foot traffic going through, but this is a solution that I've never seen before.Buckets of sand are tipped onto the floor, then pushed around, picking up the footprints and water left by customers. It's just a small example of slightly different local practices, I suppose, but I was mystified at first. Had the builders left a mess?
Milk Tea Meanderings
奶茶 or 'milk tea' is a popular drink, originating in this form in Taiwan (Province). The brand of choice in Shanghai is 'Be For Time', often with the additional title 'Jack Hut'. The BFT initials of the main brand correspond with 避风塘 ('Bi Feng Tang' or 'Safe Harbour') and there seems to be some sort of connection, but I'm still not sure what relationship the two brands have.
When I spent a summer in Taipei, I got addicted to this stuff, piling on 7 kilos in 7 weeks! Why is it so fattening? Well, the main variety is known as 珍珠奶茶 or 'pearl milk tea'. The 'pearls' in question are made from tapioca, which is normally a white powder made from cassava root. In drinks they're formed into black or dark brown balls less than 1cm in diameter. Like beancurd and bamboo shoots, 珍珠 are another essentially flavourless ingredient, added for texture. I don't really know how they're made, only that boiling is involved, and that they're pretty starchy.
That's not the end of it though. The milk tea itself is made from an alchemist's lab of ingredients, including some suspiciously garish powdered flavourings, condensed milk, and a dark tea mixture. Calorific! It all makes for a filling combination, and a large cup of the stuff could easily substitute a medium-sized meal.
This is the main brand in Harbin. As far as I can tell it holds a monopoly on the market. The characters are 快の客. 快 means 'quick' but holds the additional suggestion of 'happiness'. 客 means 'guest' or 'customer'. の is the Japanese possessive particle, normally read as 之 in Chinese. For some reason, the small print on the cup renders の as 的 which is the commonly-used version of the somewhat archaic 之. Whatever word used, the meaning is 'Happiness's Customer' or 'Customer of Happiness'.
The English name is 'Koco' which implies that the の is ignored. The way the middle character is written smaller than the others on the cup seems to support this idea. In that case, the name is the much less appealing 'Quick Customer'. Maybe the lesson is not to read too much into names!
Every milk tea shop I've ever seen has had the exact same pictures pasted on the counter and on to the walls. The two drinks pictured are 玉米浓汁 ('jade rice thick juice' which is a dessert-style sweet-corn soup) and 水蜜桃奶茶 ('water honey peach milk tea' which is the more straightforward honey peach milk tea). Just underneath you can see the characters for 木瓜奶茶 ('wood melon milk tea' referring to papaya milk tea).
The not-unattractive girl serving me thought I was taking a photo of her. I felt stupid enough with my camera out at a tea stall, so I scurried away with my drink before she could say anything.
From looking at the posters you would be forgiven for thinking that the shop offers a cornucopia of cups of different shapes and sizes, each one perfectly suited to your beverage. In fact, every single drink is served in an identical plastic cup.
Strangely, the photos are the same whichever shop you might be in (whether a small family-run shop to the largest branch of the largest chain). This to me suggests a far-reaching national conspiracy - a unified New World Order of beverage shops. Another suggestion is that the concept of Intellectual Property Rights has yet to be fully embraced here.
I ordered a papaya pearl milk tea, only to be told that they'd run out of pearls, so I substituted them for a crunchy fruit jelly instead. Apparently, papaya is not a suitable flavour for a man to drink. It's a widespread view and, depending on who you ask, it's because of papaya's nutritional properties (although this doesn't stop men from eating it in fruit form), or because the drink is a 'girly' colour. Sure enough, my drink was a nice orangey-peach colour.
A so-called small cup is 3RMB (20p) and a large cup 5RMB (33p). In reality, the small cup is more than enough for all but the thirstiest desert island strandee at 500ml. The large cup is a frankly obscene 700ml or so of milky goodness. As I write this, I also notice that the economics of either the size or pricing system look to be way off.
After messing about with a bewildering array of little pots, taps, and ladles, the drink is put in a little cupholder in a big machine. A one-armed bandit style lever is yanked down (it's traditional to do this with excessive force), sealing on a film lid. Then the cup is shaken, making sure the magic is evenly distributed. Finally, the customer is handed an oversized straw (needed to pick up and drink/shoot the 珍珠), which he'll expertly pierce straight down through the centre of the lid.
That's what's supposed to happen anyway. If that customer is me then the scene might be a bit more like this: I'll make several clumsy attempts at using my straw, achieving little more than putting tiny dents in the lid. A sizeable crowd of bystanders will then gather, calling up relatives, covering their children's eyes, and snapping photos of my struggle, before I succeed in unleashing a spray of drink into their faces. Then I'll sidle away, red-faced and with half a milk tea remaining. Maybe that's what the large size is for?
When I spent a summer in Taipei, I got addicted to this stuff, piling on 7 kilos in 7 weeks! Why is it so fattening? Well, the main variety is known as 珍珠奶茶 or 'pearl milk tea'. The 'pearls' in question are made from tapioca, which is normally a white powder made from cassava root. In drinks they're formed into black or dark brown balls less than 1cm in diameter. Like beancurd and bamboo shoots, 珍珠 are another essentially flavourless ingredient, added for texture. I don't really know how they're made, only that boiling is involved, and that they're pretty starchy.
That's not the end of it though. The milk tea itself is made from an alchemist's lab of ingredients, including some suspiciously garish powdered flavourings, condensed milk, and a dark tea mixture. Calorific! It all makes for a filling combination, and a large cup of the stuff could easily substitute a medium-sized meal.
This is the main brand in Harbin. As far as I can tell it holds a monopoly on the market. The characters are 快の客. 快 means 'quick' but holds the additional suggestion of 'happiness'. 客 means 'guest' or 'customer'. の is the Japanese possessive particle, normally read as 之 in Chinese. For some reason, the small print on the cup renders の as 的 which is the commonly-used version of the somewhat archaic 之. Whatever word used, the meaning is 'Happiness's Customer' or 'Customer of Happiness'.The English name is 'Koco' which implies that the の is ignored. The way the middle character is written smaller than the others on the cup seems to support this idea. In that case, the name is the much less appealing 'Quick Customer'. Maybe the lesson is not to read too much into names!
Every milk tea shop I've ever seen has had the exact same pictures pasted on the counter and on to the walls. The two drinks pictured are 玉米浓汁 ('jade rice thick juice' which is a dessert-style sweet-corn soup) and 水蜜桃奶茶 ('water honey peach milk tea' which is the more straightforward honey peach milk tea). Just underneath you can see the characters for 木瓜奶茶 ('wood melon milk tea' referring to papaya milk tea).The not-unattractive girl serving me thought I was taking a photo of her. I felt stupid enough with my camera out at a tea stall, so I scurried away with my drink before she could say anything.
From looking at the posters you would be forgiven for thinking that the shop offers a cornucopia of cups of different shapes and sizes, each one perfectly suited to your beverage. In fact, every single drink is served in an identical plastic cup.
Strangely, the photos are the same whichever shop you might be in (whether a small family-run shop to the largest branch of the largest chain). This to me suggests a far-reaching national conspiracy - a unified New World Order of beverage shops. Another suggestion is that the concept of Intellectual Property Rights has yet to be fully embraced here.
I ordered a papaya pearl milk tea, only to be told that they'd run out of pearls, so I substituted them for a crunchy fruit jelly instead. Apparently, papaya is not a suitable flavour for a man to drink. It's a widespread view and, depending on who you ask, it's because of papaya's nutritional properties (although this doesn't stop men from eating it in fruit form), or because the drink is a 'girly' colour. Sure enough, my drink was a nice orangey-peach colour.A so-called small cup is 3RMB (20p) and a large cup 5RMB (33p). In reality, the small cup is more than enough for all but the thirstiest desert island strandee at 500ml. The large cup is a frankly obscene 700ml or so of milky goodness. As I write this, I also notice that the economics of either the size or pricing system look to be way off.
After messing about with a bewildering array of little pots, taps, and ladles, the drink is put in a little cupholder in a big machine. A one-armed bandit style lever is yanked down (it's traditional to do this with excessive force), sealing on a film lid. Then the cup is shaken, making sure the magic is evenly distributed. Finally, the customer is handed an oversized straw (needed to pick up and drink/shoot the 珍珠), which he'll expertly pierce straight down through the centre of the lid.That's what's supposed to happen anyway. If that customer is me then the scene might be a bit more like this: I'll make several clumsy attempts at using my straw, achieving little more than putting tiny dents in the lid. A sizeable crowd of bystanders will then gather, calling up relatives, covering their children's eyes, and snapping photos of my struggle, before I succeed in unleashing a spray of drink into their faces. Then I'll sidle away, red-faced and with half a milk tea remaining. Maybe that's what the large size is for?
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
No Repeats!
Even after walking around for a good half hour, I couldn't find anywhere local open for lunch, so headed back to the local Carrefour complex to find some chain food.
In direct violation of cousin Hong's "No Repeats" rule - no going back to the same restaurant or cafe twice when in a new country - I found myself eerily drawn back to Sakura Delicious Foods.
Worryingly hungry (I think all that MSG really hollows me out), I ordered a bowl of 辣辣拉面 (spicy-spicy pulled noodles), and a 俄式肉肠比萨 (Russian Style Sausage Pizza).
This is the pizza. Oddly enough, it used the slightly sweet, preserved Chinese-style sausage, despite its name. I don't know if the 'Russian-style' refers to the sausage, or to the pizza, but either way, there's no place for Chinese sausage in a thing like this. In keeping with an odd Chinese habit of sweetening certain foods, the tomato sauce also had a bit of a sugary tang, although it could have been the chopped onions that did this. The cheese was nothing exceptional - no better or worse than anything you could find at Pizza Hut or Domino's (but inferior to Papa John's dangerously creamy formula).
A couple of words about the name. 俄 is an abbreviation for 俄罗斯 or Russia. It might come as a surprise that abbreviations are possible in a character-based (rather than alphabet-based) language, but they're all over the place. University is called 哈尔滨 工业 大学 (literally Harbin Industrial University) but this is almost universally shortened to the first characters of each component, i.e. 哈工大.
式 signifies style. It's often used in conjunction with an abbreviated country name, so 英式台球 signifies England （英国） style 'platform-ball', in other words snooker. Similarly, 美国 is America, so 美式台球 signifies pool.
This is my second main course. I couldn't get a good photo without using the flash, unlike above. I think light coming off the oddly bright cheese might go some way to explaining the shorter exposure needed.
辣辣 in the noodles means 'spicy spicy'. It sounds a little childish repeating things in this way, but in this case I think it's used to maintain the AABB metre of the dish's name. 拉面 means 'pull noodles' and refers to how the dough is made. Usually, it will be pulled into lengths, doubled over, and pulled again for several iterations until the cook is left with a handful of thin strands which he throws into bowling water. This stuff was probably made by machine though.
If you thought that the stuff on top looks like a big mass of chilli, you'd be right, but once again it's pretty mild, despite its colour. It's mixed in with little chunks of pork mince which is a trick quite common in Chinese cooking. Meat is historically scarce and expensive, so mincing and adding small amounts to dishes makes it go a little further. It also makes things a nightmare for strict vegetarians who can't get away from the stuff.
This is a pretty strange concoction actually. There's a culinary standard among noodles called 炸酱面 ('deep-fried sauce noodles') which has a spicy meat-based sauce which mixes nicely with a heap of dry noodles. 拉面 itself is often served with soup then sprinkled with toppings, such as a few shavings of beef or lamb. This dish was like the two dishes' hybrid offspring.
At home, I like to grab a couple of strands of noodles and twirl it round and round until there's a heavy chunk of noodle wrapped round the end of my chopsticks. I guess it's quite childish but I reckon it tastes better that way, and the method serves two purposes. The noodles cool down enough to eat, and I don't splash myself with the sauce.
The Japanese, however, believe that when eating noodles, slurping serves the same cooling purpose, while enhancing the taste. (As a brief aside, the Japanese word 'ramen' is a loan-word from the Chinese 拉面 (la mian). Now you know.) The idea is that oxygen rushing over the tongue enables it to appreciate different flavours more easily. I put this theory to the test, enthusiastically slurping down the whole bowl as loudly as I could. Noone batted an eyelid. In fact, I'm almost certain that a middle-aged woman at the next table was trying to compete with me in the noise stakes. Sure enough, the noodles *were* delicious, and equally as inevitable, I spattered my clothes with a healthy quantity of soup.
In direct violation of cousin Hong's "No Repeats" rule - no going back to the same restaurant or cafe twice when in a new country - I found myself eerily drawn back to Sakura Delicious Foods.
Worryingly hungry (I think all that MSG really hollows me out), I ordered a bowl of 辣辣拉面 (spicy-spicy pulled noodles), and a 俄式肉肠比萨 (Russian Style Sausage Pizza).
This is the pizza. Oddly enough, it used the slightly sweet, preserved Chinese-style sausage, despite its name. I don't know if the 'Russian-style' refers to the sausage, or to the pizza, but either way, there's no place for Chinese sausage in a thing like this. In keeping with an odd Chinese habit of sweetening certain foods, the tomato sauce also had a bit of a sugary tang, although it could have been the chopped onions that did this. The cheese was nothing exceptional - no better or worse than anything you could find at Pizza Hut or Domino's (but inferior to Papa John's dangerously creamy formula).A couple of words about the name. 俄 is an abbreviation for 俄罗斯 or Russia. It might come as a surprise that abbreviations are possible in a character-based (rather than alphabet-based) language, but they're all over the place. University is called 哈尔滨 工业 大学 (literally Harbin Industrial University) but this is almost universally shortened to the first characters of each component, i.e. 哈工大.
式 signifies style. It's often used in conjunction with an abbreviated country name, so 英式台球 signifies England （英国） style 'platform-ball', in other words snooker. Similarly, 美国 is America, so 美式台球 signifies pool.
This is my second main course. I couldn't get a good photo without using the flash, unlike above. I think light coming off the oddly bright cheese might go some way to explaining the shorter exposure needed.辣辣 in the noodles means 'spicy spicy'. It sounds a little childish repeating things in this way, but in this case I think it's used to maintain the AABB metre of the dish's name. 拉面 means 'pull noodles' and refers to how the dough is made. Usually, it will be pulled into lengths, doubled over, and pulled again for several iterations until the cook is left with a handful of thin strands which he throws into bowling water. This stuff was probably made by machine though.
If you thought that the stuff on top looks like a big mass of chilli, you'd be right, but once again it's pretty mild, despite its colour. It's mixed in with little chunks of pork mince which is a trick quite common in Chinese cooking. Meat is historically scarce and expensive, so mincing and adding small amounts to dishes makes it go a little further. It also makes things a nightmare for strict vegetarians who can't get away from the stuff.
This is a pretty strange concoction actually. There's a culinary standard among noodles called 炸酱面 ('deep-fried sauce noodles') which has a spicy meat-based sauce which mixes nicely with a heap of dry noodles. 拉面 itself is often served with soup then sprinkled with toppings, such as a few shavings of beef or lamb. This dish was like the two dishes' hybrid offspring.
At home, I like to grab a couple of strands of noodles and twirl it round and round until there's a heavy chunk of noodle wrapped round the end of my chopsticks. I guess it's quite childish but I reckon it tastes better that way, and the method serves two purposes. The noodles cool down enough to eat, and I don't splash myself with the sauce.
The Japanese, however, believe that when eating noodles, slurping serves the same cooling purpose, while enhancing the taste. (As a brief aside, the Japanese word 'ramen' is a loan-word from the Chinese 拉面 (la mian). Now you know.) The idea is that oxygen rushing over the tongue enables it to appreciate different flavours more easily. I put this theory to the test, enthusiastically slurping down the whole bowl as loudly as I could. Noone batted an eyelid. In fact, I'm almost certain that a middle-aged woman at the next table was trying to compete with me in the noise stakes. Sure enough, the noodles *were* delicious, and equally as inevitable, I spattered my clothes with a healthy quantity of soup.
A Word On Water
Many homes here have a water-cooler - not something I've ever seen outside of an office in the West.
This is mine. It was the cheapest model they had at 苏宁, and even though it's from a well-established reputable chain-store, I still managed to haggle it down a bit, rom 95RMB (£6) to 92RMB (also £6).
It's pretty basic. You plug it in at the back and put the big 18.9 litre bucket of water on the top. Lights at the front tell you whether the water is 加热 ('increase heat') or 保温 ('protect warm'). After a few minutes of leaving it on, the water from the red tap is just under boiling temperature. Perfect for making a cup of tea. As far as I can tell, nothing you do makes a difference to the water from the blue tap. It seems to somehow stay just below room temperature whatever happens.
You can also get fancier models than this. 苏宁 stocks stand-alone beasts that not only heat water but also cool the other side. Some come with little cool boxes that I think are for keeping other drinks, some can hold a stack of cups, and others have intimidating mechanisms running through special buckets at the top which are meant to purify the water further.
You can call up the water company any time from 7am to 8pm and some guy will come round with a fresh bucket and take away your empty one. You can see them pedalling away sometimes, pulling several gallons of H2O
This tub here cost me 11RMB (73p). The normal price is 16RMB (£1.07) but the landlord cut some sort of deal with the company so I could get a discount. Such is the way business is done here! When I ordered it, some late middle-aged guy came huffing up the stairs, sweating despite the cold. He hefted the tub onto the floor and leaned against the wall, taking dramatically deep breaths for a while, before asking for his money. I think he might have been fishing for a tip!
There's quite a lot of text crammed on this thing so here goes:
五大连池: This is the company name and also the name of a volcanic spa near Harbin. It literally means 'Five Big Joined Ponds' and the Rough Guide describes it rather uncharitably as 'an unattractive place that draws mostly elderly Chinese to its supposedly medicinal hot springs.'
There are four bits of advertising fluff too. 世界名泉 means 'world-famous springs'; 药泉湖 means 'medicinal spring lake'; 滴滴天然 means 'drip drip natural'; and 天然矿泉水 means 'natural mineral spring water'.
Whereas in English 'mineral water' and 'spring water' are two legally distinct things, it seems there is a bit of linguistic confusion in Chinese. I doubt some of these claims would pass muster in the English legal system but, hey, we're not in England.
The word for 'spring' is 泉 (quan). It's another great example of the cleverness of the Chinese language. It is composed of the radicals 白 (white) and 水 (water). In other words, water gushing from the ground, or 'a spring'.
Underneath this is a bunch of addresses and telephone numbers of what looks to be the main office, and a local branch (for ordering your refills).
Running down the side is a list of 注意事项 ('pay attention to items'). These are:
一） 避免阳光照射
二） 避免接触花粉
三） 避免高温存放
四） 避免长期存放
五） 建议十日饮完
六） 提前一天订水
In English:
1) Do not expose to sunlight
2) Do not (allow to come into) contact with pollen
3) Do not store in high temperatures
4) Do not store for a long time
5) (It is) recommended (that you) drink within 10 days
6) Order water a day before (you want it)
An important part of natural Mandarin is its metre or rhythm. Here, all six instructions are six characters long, and they are paired in an AABBCC structure - i.e. three sets of two-character words each. For example, the first four begin with the two characters 避免 ('refrain from'), the fifth is 建议 ('suggest') and the last is 提前 ('in advance').
There's an enticing almost poetic symmetry to the whole thing, and as you can see from the translation, it's something almost impossible to replicate in English. The closest thing I can think of would be the pithy warnings you sometimes get in shops saying things like 'You Break, You Buy'.
Anyway, enough of this time-wasting. I'm off to make another cup of tea.
This is mine. It was the cheapest model they had at 苏宁, and even though it's from a well-established reputable chain-store, I still managed to haggle it down a bit, rom 95RMB (£6) to 92RMB (also £6).It's pretty basic. You plug it in at the back and put the big 18.9 litre bucket of water on the top. Lights at the front tell you whether the water is 加热 ('increase heat') or 保温 ('protect warm'). After a few minutes of leaving it on, the water from the red tap is just under boiling temperature. Perfect for making a cup of tea. As far as I can tell, nothing you do makes a difference to the water from the blue tap. It seems to somehow stay just below room temperature whatever happens.
You can also get fancier models than this. 苏宁 stocks stand-alone beasts that not only heat water but also cool the other side. Some come with little cool boxes that I think are for keeping other drinks, some can hold a stack of cups, and others have intimidating mechanisms running through special buckets at the top which are meant to purify the water further.
You can call up the water company any time from 7am to 8pm and some guy will come round with a fresh bucket and take away your empty one. You can see them pedalling away sometimes, pulling several gallons of H2O
This tub here cost me 11RMB (73p). The normal price is 16RMB (£1.07) but the landlord cut some sort of deal with the company so I could get a discount. Such is the way business is done here! When I ordered it, some late middle-aged guy came huffing up the stairs, sweating despite the cold. He hefted the tub onto the floor and leaned against the wall, taking dramatically deep breaths for a while, before asking for his money. I think he might have been fishing for a tip!There's quite a lot of text crammed on this thing so here goes:
五大连池: This is the company name and also the name of a volcanic spa near Harbin. It literally means 'Five Big Joined Ponds' and the Rough Guide describes it rather uncharitably as 'an unattractive place that draws mostly elderly Chinese to its supposedly medicinal hot springs.'
There are four bits of advertising fluff too. 世界名泉 means 'world-famous springs'; 药泉湖 means 'medicinal spring lake'; 滴滴天然 means 'drip drip natural'; and 天然矿泉水 means 'natural mineral spring water'.
Whereas in English 'mineral water' and 'spring water' are two legally distinct things, it seems there is a bit of linguistic confusion in Chinese. I doubt some of these claims would pass muster in the English legal system but, hey, we're not in England.
The word for 'spring' is 泉 (quan). It's another great example of the cleverness of the Chinese language. It is composed of the radicals 白 (white) and 水 (water). In other words, water gushing from the ground, or 'a spring'.
Underneath this is a bunch of addresses and telephone numbers of what looks to be the main office, and a local branch (for ordering your refills).
Running down the side is a list of 注意事项 ('pay attention to items'). These are:
一） 避免阳光照射
二） 避免接触花粉
三） 避免高温存放
四） 避免长期存放
五） 建议十日饮完
六） 提前一天订水
In English:
1) Do not expose to sunlight
2) Do not (allow to come into) contact with pollen
3) Do not store in high temperatures
4) Do not store for a long time
5) (It is) recommended (that you) drink within 10 days
6) Order water a day before (you want it)
An important part of natural Mandarin is its metre or rhythm. Here, all six instructions are six characters long, and they are paired in an AABBCC structure - i.e. three sets of two-character words each. For example, the first four begin with the two characters 避免 ('refrain from'), the fifth is 建议 ('suggest') and the last is 提前 ('in advance').
There's an enticing almost poetic symmetry to the whole thing, and as you can see from the translation, it's something almost impossible to replicate in English. The closest thing I can think of would be the pithy warnings you sometimes get in shops saying things like 'You Break, You Buy'.
Anyway, enough of this time-wasting. I'm off to make another cup of tea.
Traffic Tribulations
I love music, and I'll listen to my mp3 player all day every day walking around in London. I can be fairly confident that the pavement is reserved for people and maybe the odd kid on a tricycle, and that there are laws against crushing pedestrians, should I ever have the need to step onto the other bit. The bit with the fast-moving big bits of whizzing metal.
In contrast, the law of the road here has been replaced by the LAW OF THE JUNGLE. Trucks will happily rock up onto the curb if it means bagging a choice parking space in the middle of the pavement, and red lights are treated as suggestions at best, pretty lights at worst. Don't even get me started on zebra crossings. They don't mean the same thing as they do back home.
So I haven't had any music on at any point while out and about so far. I can't afford to use up a sense, and in fact a couple of extra senses would come in handy too. The ability to detect the invisible road-markings that make it alright to mount the pavement at speed, and some sort of telepathy to make up for the non-use of indicators would be a great start.
I snapped this while crossing the road near 红博广场. It's uncharacteristically calm right then, but you can still see that it's a multi-lane roundabout system with not a traffic light in sight. Locals have a knack of weaving their way through 30mph cars, dragging their toddler or tiny yappy dog behind them, and emerging unscathed on the other side. It's a skill which I have yet to develop. I normally start off strolling, then panic halfway and sprint the rest, flapping my arms while emitting a terrified strangled screech.
When I told Sarah I was avoiding Beijing because I didn't like the dilapidated, run-down feel to it, she laughed. She's been to both cities, so that was hardly reassuring. Harbin's not half as bad as I thought it would be, though. Perhaps it's a case of being pleasantly surprised against low expectations.
This is the main feature of the central square downtown (if there is such a thing - Harbin seems very spread out). It's not the most-impressive thing, but it's well-maintained and I like the snowflake! You can see in the background that at least parts of town are pretty modern. That's not a moat running around the bottom, by the way, that's black snice.
On this particular trip, I paid a visit to 苏宁 (Su Ning), which is a big chain store that sells household electrics and electronics. A Chinese Curry's or Dixon's if you will. I didn't buy anything, but this sign on the second floor made me laugh.
The first character, 由 means 'because of' or 'through' as in 'through this method/process'. The second character, 此 is a literary word for 这 or 'this'. The last three words 下一楼 are straightforward enough, saying 'down one floor'. So, the English translation should be 'By this [method you can] go down a floor', or more naturally 'This way down'. The first two characters 由此 taken together, though, can also be read 'thus', or 'therefrom'. This is why 'Therefore go to the first floor' is printed underneath.
I know I'm a massive dork but it felt like I was in a poorly written computer role-playing game. A gravelly voice narrates: "Your +1 Discount Card of Azeroth has Expired. Therefore go to the First Floor." Yet another case of a dictionary translation gone wrong.
In contrast, the law of the road here has been replaced by the LAW OF THE JUNGLE. Trucks will happily rock up onto the curb if it means bagging a choice parking space in the middle of the pavement, and red lights are treated as suggestions at best, pretty lights at worst. Don't even get me started on zebra crossings. They don't mean the same thing as they do back home.
So I haven't had any music on at any point while out and about so far. I can't afford to use up a sense, and in fact a couple of extra senses would come in handy too. The ability to detect the invisible road-markings that make it alright to mount the pavement at speed, and some sort of telepathy to make up for the non-use of indicators would be a great start.
I snapped this while crossing the road near 红博广场. It's uncharacteristically calm right then, but you can still see that it's a multi-lane roundabout system with not a traffic light in sight. Locals have a knack of weaving their way through 30mph cars, dragging their toddler or tiny yappy dog behind them, and emerging unscathed on the other side. It's a skill which I have yet to develop. I normally start off strolling, then panic halfway and sprint the rest, flapping my arms while emitting a terrified strangled screech.
When I told Sarah I was avoiding Beijing because I didn't like the dilapidated, run-down feel to it, she laughed. She's been to both cities, so that was hardly reassuring. Harbin's not half as bad as I thought it would be, though. Perhaps it's a case of being pleasantly surprised against low expectations.This is the main feature of the central square downtown (if there is such a thing - Harbin seems very spread out). It's not the most-impressive thing, but it's well-maintained and I like the snowflake! You can see in the background that at least parts of town are pretty modern. That's not a moat running around the bottom, by the way, that's black snice.
On this particular trip, I paid a visit to 苏宁 (Su Ning), which is a big chain store that sells household electrics and electronics. A Chinese Curry's or Dixon's if you will. I didn't buy anything, but this sign on the second floor made me laugh.
The first character, 由 means 'because of' or 'through' as in 'through this method/process'. The second character, 此 is a literary word for 这 or 'this'. The last three words 下一楼 are straightforward enough, saying 'down one floor'. So, the English translation should be 'By this [method you can] go down a floor', or more naturally 'This way down'. The first two characters 由此 taken together, though, can also be read 'thus', or 'therefrom'. This is why 'Therefore go to the first floor' is printed underneath.I know I'm a massive dork but it felt like I was in a poorly written computer role-playing game. A gravelly voice narrates: "Your +1 Discount Card of Azeroth has Expired. Therefore go to the First Floor." Yet another case of a dictionary translation gone wrong.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Sports Surprise
Out and about today, I noticed it's warmed up a lot. The hard snice underfoot has become a messy brown slush (which I like to call 'slown') and I even took off my hat for *several minutes* without my ears hurting too much.
Swaddled in a scarf, hat, and under a good five layers the other day, Ming Yue laughed at me, saying it was obvious I was from out-of-town. I don't know how locals do it, but even without scarves and hats, they seem to get along their daily business just fine.
As I've said before it's too easy, and much too much of a cliché to continually ramble on about the weather, so one last comment before the Ice City melts into the City Paved With Slown.
The sport compulsory in middle-school here is not football, not rugby, not even table-tennis, badminton, weight-lifting, or Wu Shu but... ice-skating. Skating on ice.
Setting aside my opinion that that's not even a real sport - and I can't really talk because snooker/pool was offered as a Games option when I was at school - that fact just blows my mind.
[Edit: Just as I hit Publish, a TV program pops up on HLJTV - the local station. Schoolkids in uniform are skiing, a group of dancers does 'jazz hands' while sliding down a slope, and families are competing in what I can best describe as pushing-an-enormous-ball-of-ice-up-and-down-a-track. Coming to an Olympics near you soon.]
[Second Edit: Something else I've noticed about local TV. They love getting Westerners on telly saying stuff in (invariably poorly-accented) Mandarin. And when I say stuff, I mean anything - reading out New Year's greetings, advertising medicine, reading out a recipe... Maybe I can get me a job doing that?]
Swaddled in a scarf, hat, and under a good five layers the other day, Ming Yue laughed at me, saying it was obvious I was from out-of-town. I don't know how locals do it, but even without scarves and hats, they seem to get along their daily business just fine.
As I've said before it's too easy, and much too much of a cliché to continually ramble on about the weather, so one last comment before the Ice City melts into the City Paved With Slown.
The sport compulsory in middle-school here is not football, not rugby, not even table-tennis, badminton, weight-lifting, or Wu Shu but... ice-skating. Skating on ice.
Setting aside my opinion that that's not even a real sport - and I can't really talk because snooker/pool was offered as a Games option when I was at school - that fact just blows my mind.
[Edit: Just as I hit Publish, a TV program pops up on HLJTV - the local station. Schoolkids in uniform are skiing, a group of dancers does 'jazz hands' while sliding down a slope, and families are competing in what I can best describe as pushing-an-enormous-ball-of-ice-up-and-down-a-track. Coming to an Olympics near you soon.]
[Second Edit: Something else I've noticed about local TV. They love getting Westerners on telly saying stuff in (invariably poorly-accented) Mandarin. And when I say stuff, I mean anything - reading out New Year's greetings, advertising medicine, reading out a recipe... Maybe I can get me a job doing that?]
The Curse of the Golden Armor
I just saw 黄金甲 (literally '(Yellow) Gold Armour') and thought I'd get some of my thoughts down while it's still fresh in my mind. If you're planning on watching it (and I wouldn't particularly recommend it), then *SPOILERS AHEAD*. You have been warned.Firstly a couple of linguistic points. 金 means 'gold', as does 黄金 (literally 'yellow gold'). The distinction arises because apart from 'yellow gold' you can have 'white gold' (白金) which is platinum.
甲 means 'helmet' or 'shell'. It also has the meaning 'first' and is used in grading school-work and so on. In fact, the first four of the 'Ten Heavenly Stems' (甲乙丙丁) are commonly used to denote grades A, B, C and D respectively. I remember getting lots of 乙's and 丙's in my Chinese studies.
As it's a historical epic, 黄金甲 has plenty of suitably archaic dialogue. The Emperor refers to himself as 朕 which is a little like the Royal 'We' in English, and his princes suffix themselves with 臣 meaning 'royal subject'.
Flowery 'Shakespearean' Chinese is hardly the best medium through which to supplement my studies. However, as I'll explain below, there seems to be a serious lack of alternative genres coming from the mainland apart from perhaps derivative melodramas or transparently low-budget police dramas.
One excellent language nugget I did pick up came towards the end of the movie.
'What's the punishment for rebellion against the Emperor?', Chow Yun Fat asks.
'车裂' (literally, 'car tear-apart') replies one of his subjects.
I hit pause and scramble for my dictionary, thinking 'Surely he's not going to rip apart Jay's Honda Accord?'.
Apparently not. 车裂 describes a punishment used in ancient times in which a cart (车) is attached to each of one's four limbs AND one's neck, whereupon they drive off in different directions, dividing (裂) the punishee into five messy chunks. I bet that would cut down on the number of ASBO's back home.
For some reason the movie has been named "The Curse of the Golden Flower" for English-language markets which I don't think makes much sense. The 'Golden Flower' plays only a tangential symbolic role in the movie, and can't fairly be described as cursed as such.
The invaluable Internet Movie Database further gives the title as "The City of the Golden Armor". This is slightly better. The Imperial Compound does indeed have lots of people in lots of Golden Armor. It's hardly the city's defining feature though.
More accurate (if less marketable) names might include "The City of Chrysanthemum Flowers", or perhaps "The Golden Armor Which Lacks Any Real Relevance to the Storyline".
This fanciful naming is symptomatic of a wider ailment in the Chinese movie industry, namely the pandering towards the international art-house circuit. Forgive my going off on a little rant.
Ever since the worldwide success of 卧虎藏龙 (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), it seems Chinese directors have been churning out movie after movie following the same template. Large scale battles; elaborate costumes; ancient musical instruments; rolling land-/desert-/mountainscapes; and of course that all important evocative name have been used to greater or lesser effect in House of Flying Daggers, Hero, and The Promise. It seems that every notable film nowadays is chasing recognition and prizes by retreading the trail blazed by CTHD, and the sad thing is, the formula seems to be working.
Meanwhile, Hong Kong has been turning out one fantastic film after another. Even while sticking to its familiar themes of cops and robbers notable efforts of the last few years have included Infernal Affairs, Sha Po Lang and Exile.
Korean cinema's development also continues apace. Despite its attachment to soppy melodramas, Korean directors have had successful forays into every genre, and big hitters such as directors Park Chan-Wook and Ryu Seung-Wan, and actor Choi Min-Sik have been busy laying the foundations of a cinematic legacy, smacking hit after hit into the stands of the international market.
So it's all the sadder that a film like 黄金甲 can not only get made but also earn international plaudits. The film totally lacks imagination or passion. For example, the prominent incest theme appears to have been thrown in to add some depth and to bring the characters closer (much too close - are there any main characters who haven't discovered that they're related by the end?).
The use and over-use of crane shots and extreme close-ups on flowers or running feet are used to establish the movie's art-house credentials, but only serve to highlight how few truly original ideas there are here.
And the battle scenes, though impressive, look like they're there to create some employment and make use of the allegedly massive budget. Plenty of shots of hordes of soldiers running, not so many of any quality martial arts.
I can't help but feel that the whole project would have been better suited to the stage. Apart from the masses of extras in the background, the heavy-handed presentation of themes and small-scale family drama would have been a lot cheaper and a lot more palatable in the theatre.
That's not to say that there is nothing of redeeming value here.
周杰伦 (Jay Chou) makes the transition from pop-star to movie-star with a decent effort, having made huge advances on his underwhelming performance in Initial D. Despite some unfortunate facial hair, he holds his own against an over-acting Chow Yun Fat, and opens an unholy can of whoop-ass in the concluding battle scene. It's not fair, because his opponents are under orders not to kill him, but he still manages to rack up a Robocop-esque personal body count.
Meanwhile, the Imperial Doctor's daughter, 李曼 (Li Man) makes for some tasty eye-candy, and is definitely going to be one to look out for in the future.When people talk about big-budget Hollywood flicks against art-house, the distinction often seems to centre around intelligence. Smaller pictures live or die on the strength of their ideas, whereas a Hollywood blockbuster is consumable - a forgettable spectacle.
Yet, it is fully possible to have an intelligent Hollywood blockbuster - the epitome of this must be the first Matrix movie - and there are plenty of insipid independent movies out there, such as the abysmal Little Miss Sunshine.
Increasingly, the Chinese movie industry is tending towards a third category - the big-budget, insipid, art-house movie. I eagerly await its corollary: the intelligent, low-budget, Hollywood blockbuster.
Monday, February 19, 2007
Ice-Cream Insights
Most restaurants are closed for a couple of days so I had to go further afield for my nutrional needs today.
Near the central Hongbo Square (红博广场) I sighted a cosy little place, and while I examined the specials in the window, a little old lady beckoned me in.
It specialised in 火锅 or 'hotpot' - raw ingredients boiled in a big pot of often spicy soup; 烧烤 - those barbecued meats again; and stir-fried dishes 炒菜. I opted for a big plate of the latter - 鲜笋羊肉 or 'fresh bamboo shoots (and) lamb'. Worried that this might not constitute a balanced meal, I ordered an additional couple of meat-on-sticks.
The little old lady wandered off to the kitchen then came back and proceeded to double the quantity of all my meat stick orders, presumably because it wouldn't be economic to run the barbecue for such a small quantity. A few minutes later, she wandered back to tell me she'd jacked up the price on my lamb dish by 2RMB (12p) alleging that it was the holidays so there was a special holiday charge. Fine, I reasoned, support local family-run businesses and all that - it's hard to get mad when the difference is less than the spare change you can find down the back of the sofa.
The main dish came - shredded flakes of fatty lamb with thin slices of young tender bamboo. I don't know that bamboo is used in any cuisines outside of the Far East. It doesn't have much flavour of its own, so much of the pleasure lies in its texture which is crunchy and not fibrous as you'd expect from eating what is basically tree.
笋 or 'bamboo shoot' is often prefixed with 鲜 the word for 'fresh' but, as far as I know, it's not practical or economic to offer tinned vegetables when the fresh version is so cheap and readily available. Perhaps it's just a bit of marketing fluff to make eating what is essentially the young offspring of a building material more palatable.
But I digress. The food was hearty and rich, with a thick, sour flavour which lingered in the mouth. When my meat-on-a-sticks came, the old lady had annoyingly doubled the order AGAIN and I ended up eating a good fifteen or so (albeit small) items. I left uncomfortably full and 37RMB (£2.60) lighter, and hankering for some ice-cream to cut through the grease!
Remarkably, given the outside temperature, all the small family-run convenience stores I have seen so far, however small, have had a freezer, sometimes more than one, filled with ice-cream. It's said to be a legacy of Russian influence that Harbiners have a taste for pastries and dairy products, but it still seems shocking, even upsetting, that people would expend so much electricity and valuable retail real estate on cooling things at this time of year.
Flavours run from the usual vanilla and strawberry ice-creams, to ice-lollies flavoured with sweetcorn or peas! Sweetcorn in China is treated more as a dessert than as a salad component. You can often find it topping shaved ice desserts. It seems odd to my Western tastes, but logical. It is sweet after all.
In the little shop opposite my flat, I chose this bad boy. It says 巧克力味 in big letters on the front. The first three characters are a phonetic rendition of chocolate (qiao ke li), with the fourth meaning flavour. Underneath in smaller letters it says 雪糕 which I think is a beautiful translation. Literally it means 'snow cake' which I find much more evocative than the flat 'ice-cream'.
The alternative translation of ice-cream, more commonly used in the south I believe, is 冰淇淋. 冰 means ice, as described in an earlier post. So far, so good. 淇淋 (qi lin) though, is a frankly awful rendition of the English word 'cream'. I had heard this before but checked again with my dictionary - the ever-excellent 文林 (Wen Lin) - which editorialises with the scathing comment: "A good illustration that it's just as well that Chinese has generally avoided borrowing words phonetically from foreign languages."
The packaging goes on to add 新配方，更香滑 or 'new recipe, even more fragant (and) smooth', and 附赠小勺 or 'small spoon given away free' - just as well too given the sad contents of my kitchen. Nothing unusual here.
The translation of Nestlé is a little odd. The usual tactic when transliterating Western brands is to use auspicious words (like 'power' or 'wealth') and find a phonetic approximation. Good examples are 百威 (Bai Wei = Budweiser, literally 'Hundred Power') and 可口可乐 (Ke Kou Ke Le = Coca Cola, tricky to translate but something like '(It's) delicious (and) makes you happy'). Alternatively, sometimes the meaning of the brand is conveyed with a more direct translation, so Volkswagen (the People's Car in German) becomes 大众 (the masses) and Samsung (Korean for Three Stars) becomes 三星 (again, Three Stars).
In Chinese Nestlé is rendered 雀巢 (que chao). 雀 means sparrow and it is composed of the characters 小 (small) and 隹 (a radical now signifying bird, and found in words such as 'chicken' 雞 and 'hawk'). 巢 means nest and can be 'read' as a feather-filled nest atop a tree, even if the 田 and 巛 radicals in their form here mean 'field' and 'river', rather than 'nest' and 'feathers' respectively.
Well, something seems lost in translation here, as it seems the advertising boffins at Nestlé's China headquarters in Guangzhou have seen fit to take the 'nest' part separately from founder Henri Nestlé's name. Whatever the case, the ice-cream was good!
[Edit: Even though the origin of the name Nestlé is indeed from the company's founder, the corporate logo does in fact, for some reason, prominently show birds in a nest. Mystery solved!]
Near the central Hongbo Square (红博广场) I sighted a cosy little place, and while I examined the specials in the window, a little old lady beckoned me in.
It specialised in 火锅 or 'hotpot' - raw ingredients boiled in a big pot of often spicy soup; 烧烤 - those barbecued meats again; and stir-fried dishes 炒菜. I opted for a big plate of the latter - 鲜笋羊肉 or 'fresh bamboo shoots (and) lamb'. Worried that this might not constitute a balanced meal, I ordered an additional couple of meat-on-sticks.The little old lady wandered off to the kitchen then came back and proceeded to double the quantity of all my meat stick orders, presumably because it wouldn't be economic to run the barbecue for such a small quantity. A few minutes later, she wandered back to tell me she'd jacked up the price on my lamb dish by 2RMB (12p) alleging that it was the holidays so there was a special holiday charge. Fine, I reasoned, support local family-run businesses and all that - it's hard to get mad when the difference is less than the spare change you can find down the back of the sofa.
The main dish came - shredded flakes of fatty lamb with thin slices of young tender bamboo. I don't know that bamboo is used in any cuisines outside of the Far East. It doesn't have much flavour of its own, so much of the pleasure lies in its texture which is crunchy and not fibrous as you'd expect from eating what is basically tree.
笋 or 'bamboo shoot' is often prefixed with 鲜 the word for 'fresh' but, as far as I know, it's not practical or economic to offer tinned vegetables when the fresh version is so cheap and readily available. Perhaps it's just a bit of marketing fluff to make eating what is essentially the young offspring of a building material more palatable.
But I digress. The food was hearty and rich, with a thick, sour flavour which lingered in the mouth. When my meat-on-a-sticks came, the old lady had annoyingly doubled the order AGAIN and I ended up eating a good fifteen or so (albeit small) items. I left uncomfortably full and 37RMB (£2.60) lighter, and hankering for some ice-cream to cut through the grease!
Remarkably, given the outside temperature, all the small family-run convenience stores I have seen so far, however small, have had a freezer, sometimes more than one, filled with ice-cream. It's said to be a legacy of Russian influence that Harbiners have a taste for pastries and dairy products, but it still seems shocking, even upsetting, that people would expend so much electricity and valuable retail real estate on cooling things at this time of year.
Flavours run from the usual vanilla and strawberry ice-creams, to ice-lollies flavoured with sweetcorn or peas! Sweetcorn in China is treated more as a dessert than as a salad component. You can often find it topping shaved ice desserts. It seems odd to my Western tastes, but logical. It is sweet after all.
In the little shop opposite my flat, I chose this bad boy. It says 巧克力味 in big letters on the front. The first three characters are a phonetic rendition of chocolate (qiao ke li), with the fourth meaning flavour. Underneath in smaller letters it says 雪糕 which I think is a beautiful translation. Literally it means 'snow cake' which I find much more evocative than the flat 'ice-cream'.The alternative translation of ice-cream, more commonly used in the south I believe, is 冰淇淋. 冰 means ice, as described in an earlier post. So far, so good. 淇淋 (qi lin) though, is a frankly awful rendition of the English word 'cream'. I had heard this before but checked again with my dictionary - the ever-excellent 文林 (Wen Lin) - which editorialises with the scathing comment: "A good illustration that it's just as well that Chinese has generally avoided borrowing words phonetically from foreign languages."
The packaging goes on to add 新配方，更香滑 or 'new recipe, even more fragant (and) smooth', and 附赠小勺 or 'small spoon given away free' - just as well too given the sad contents of my kitchen. Nothing unusual here.
The translation of Nestlé is a little odd. The usual tactic when transliterating Western brands is to use auspicious words (like 'power' or 'wealth') and find a phonetic approximation. Good examples are 百威 (Bai Wei = Budweiser, literally 'Hundred Power') and 可口可乐 (Ke Kou Ke Le = Coca Cola, tricky to translate but something like '(It's) delicious (and) makes you happy'). Alternatively, sometimes the meaning of the brand is conveyed with a more direct translation, so Volkswagen (the People's Car in German) becomes 大众 (the masses) and Samsung (Korean for Three Stars) becomes 三星 (again, Three Stars).
In Chinese Nestlé is rendered 雀巢 (que chao). 雀 means sparrow and it is composed of the characters 小 (small) and 隹 (a radical now signifying bird, and found in words such as 'chicken' 雞 and 'hawk'). 巢 means nest and can be 'read' as a feather-filled nest atop a tree, even if the 田 and 巛 radicals in their form here mean 'field' and 'river', rather than 'nest' and 'feathers' respectively.
Well, something seems lost in translation here, as it seems the advertising boffins at Nestlé's China headquarters in Guangzhou have seen fit to take the 'nest' part separately from founder Henri Nestlé's name. Whatever the case, the ice-cream was good!
[Edit: Even though the origin of the name Nestlé is indeed from the company's founder, the corporate logo does in fact, for some reason, prominently show birds in a nest. Mystery solved!]
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