Occasional Tales

Wrong number. I don't know what it is about people in this country, but they seem completely unable to conceive that they've dialled a wrong number even although they've phoned you several times. I've just had a succession of phone calls in the past twenty minutes, all obviously from the same person or people. No matter how many times Uncle Angel is on the other end sounding slightly like the most total laowai in the country, they don't seem to grasp that they're calling the wrong number. There was a delay between the latest call and the preceding one because, it'd appear, that if you wait, the number magically becomes correct. Or I turn into the person they really want. I guess it's like when the coach becomes a pumpkin in Cinderella. (Yes, I really do mean it that way round.) This isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened to me here, although it's the first time it's happened since I got the mobile.

Experts claim that years still last 365 days on average. I set the alarm for 7am, but shut my eyes for the ten minutes between then and 7.35am. There was no rush to get to the school concert. We were the 14th act. The rest was the usual thing you expect to see at Chinese school concerts, which meant bunches of skinny girls doing sexy dances (I mean, dances expressing the love of the people for the ancient culture of Cathay); Canto-pop songs that are wetter than a pair of knickers hung out to dry during a typhoon; and more make-up than a caberet act performed by a troupe of drag queens – apart from the foreign teachers who had more sense to daub on anything for so little reason. Our playlet was about scaring away the devils who would turn up each year to disrupt the Spring Festival. To say that our performance must've been incomprehensible is to put it mildly. I was asked to be the narrator at the start, but because I had a hand-held mic, I needed Glen to hold the mic for me. On the

Eventually. I thought I'd try getting a VGA cable so that I could connect the laptop to the new TV. I found what I was looking for in Metro, but I wasn't absolutely certain I should be buying a male-male cable. I returned home and found that I was right, but I'd also noticed that the cable at Metro had a damaged end. I decided to try Yonghui Supermarket, but they didn't have any. I knew that there was another branch of Gome in the vicinity which I found by luck rather than certain knowledge. Once I managed to convey to them what I wanted (I had the manual with me, but they still seemed unable to grasp initially that I wanted a VGA cable), I was informed that they didn't have any. Huh? This is Gome. It's an electronics shop. I returned home and then headed to the branch of Gome on the mainland where the same thing happened, but with none of the what-the-hell-does-the- laowai -want-in-spite-of-a-Chinese-manual routine. They sent me to 大利 which turned out to be op

Could I be more humiliated? I can now watch the DVD player through the TV. I could've fixed the problem myself as I discovered when I looked at the manual again, but I relied on the diagram for information. I can read enough of the Chinese to know exactly which lead should've been plugged in to which socket. Actually, I should be able to wire up the external speakers as well. Right now, I'm feeling dumber than Class 13. I'm going to be charitable and suppose that this is due to being woken up early on a few too many occasions this week, and feeling flustered by various events that have happened this week and are yet to come. Thus I'm tired, and when I get tired my concentration flies out the window. It's either this excuse or the other one. The one I'd rather not contemplate. The one where I'm descending into the Slough of Stupidity which, I've observed, seems to affect middle-aged people. Not that I'm middle-aged yet. [ Keep telling yourself th

Getting carried away. 提 ( tí ) is another character that seems to have sailed into view quite a few times recently. It can mean carry (in hand with arm hanging down) move upward; raise; promote move up (a date); advance speak of; mention; put forward draw; take out; withdraw bring or take out from prison under escort; summon dipper; ladle It's also pronounced dī , but my big dictionary gives it in the words 提防 ( dīfang ) "be on guard against" and 提溜 ( dīliu ) "hold in hand". 提 ( tí ) is used in words such as 提出 ( tíchū ) "put forward; raise"; 提法 ( tífa ) "the way something is put; formulation; wording"; 提高 ( tígāo ) "raise; lift; improve"; 提名 ( tímíng ) "nominate". (Can I make a bad pun about nomination depending on timing? [ Not bloody likely . –ed.]) 提 is also used in the word 提琴 ( tíqín ) "any instrument of the violin family". The violin is the 小提琴 ( xiǎo tíqín ) "little tíqín "; the viola the 中提琴 (

And accelerating into oblivion. Today began so well. At about 6am, I was woken by the band (Naval School?) playing that incessant piece of music over and over again for about four hours. The symphony of the early morning was accompanied by the plinkety-plink music from the school, some traditional Chinese music in the form of those annoyingly high-pitched pipes, and then Happy Birthday which, like Jingle Bells , has ended up as kind of general purpose public music in this country. Both are typically played in the plinkety-plink style just to make them that extra bit annoying. I ended up sitting around here all afternoon waiting for a technician to turn up to get the DVD working, but waited in vain. I just heard a few moments ago that he went to the wrong place. The latest plan is that someone will come tomorrow morning some time before class at 11am. We'll see. I was having another look at the menu options to see whether there was anything that might hint at what needs to be set.

Never lie at a right angle. Today started strangely. I woke up some time after dawn and found that I turned myself 90° during the night so that my head was now pointing towards the window. Logical conclusion: it was the earthquake disrupting the earth's magnetic field. [ Hark at Mr Compass . –ed.] I got to school just before 9am, but with time for the delivery of the TV running out before I had to go to class, I got Tracy to phone Gome. I learnt that they don't start work until 9am, which meant a 9am delivery was never going to happen. Then while I was pretending to teach Class 13, there was a knock at the door. It was Tracy who needed to get the delivery receipt. Then during the next class I got a text message saying that the TV was in the gatehouse. I got it home and plugged everything in. Could I get the DVD player to run through it? No. I got some message saying "No sync detected", which means as much to me as the same message in Chinese. I went back to Gome with

I think it's the handmaiden. I went back to Gome to see whether I could get any explanations about why the DVD player(s) aren't working with the new TV. I was informed that a worker would come here tomorrow afternoon. Meanwhile, it'd appear from Chris's comment that Internet access is probably being limited from here. I'm not sure whether this is Nanny's local handmaiden (which seems likely) or an increase in local Internet traffic in the wake of the earthquake. There are no problems with national websites. I got straight on to China Daily, which is the reason why I'm back. The bottom side bar of the page about the earthquake has the following advertisement: Alibaba is the largest B2B marketplace in the world. Source model ship, wooden puzzle, one-piece toilet, RC hovercraft, photo album, prom dress, pocket bike, Vaginal Speculum, Samurai Sword, String Panty and PVC Pipe. Am I imagining things? Bugger. I've just had a text message to say that the IELTS

What's happened to the Net? Last night I noticed that the windows were rattling. I went out onto the balcony because I thought it might've been windy, but it was still. It wasn't until this morning when I saw a mail message from my father that I found that there'd been an earthquake in this part of the world. I saw that the epicentre was just south of Taiwan. My Internet experience this lunchtime has been abysmally bad. Not everything is inaccessible, but quite a lot is. I was surprised I was able to get onto blogspot because LJ and Spaces are both unavailable. The Guardian , which is normally reliable, is off the menu. So is ESWN . Danwei was all right, though. It seems that there's only partial access to international websites from China (just Fujian and perhaps Guangdong?) at the moment. I've been wondering whether this is a consequence of the quake being in such close proximity to Taiwan which has led to lots of people doing searches for "earthquake Ta

Holy matrimony! (All right, state-sanctioned matrimony.) I can report that Chris and lzh are finally married. They had a couple of tiresome bureaucratic hurdles to surmount, but it's now official. You can read all about it here .

How not to advance. Danwei has a piece about the call from the PhD students to reject Christmas. In particular, we believe that the on-campus, collective celebration of Christmas by students from kindergarten through college out of ignorance and a pursuit of fashion, even to the point of teacher-organized celebrations of Christmas among students, violates both the constitutional principle that religion must not "be an obstacle to the national education system" and the educational principle of "separation of education and religion," and we therefore urge the government to be highly vigilant and tighten its standards. It's a party, you bloody idiots. It's not an educational event. How thick can you lot be? (Don't answer that; I know how thick you can be.) But that's not the height of their idiocy. In particular, the need exists for a full development of the religious use in society of Confucianism, which was the backbone of traditional Chinese cultur

Get thee behind me, Bureaucracy. My friend Chris has just announced that he's finally marrying lzh – tomorrow. They've been together for the past, hmmm, three (?) years, and have lived together (illegally, I believe) on and off in that time depending on their circumstances. Chris is hoping that he has all the requisite documents to quell the demon of Chinese bureaucracy. I hope it all goes well for them tomorrow and that they be very happy together.

Down with Christmas! One of Chris's posts was about this article reporting a call by PhD students at several top universities calling on young people to be less excited about Christmas. PhD students from the most authoritative universities including Peking, Tsinghua and Renmin University hope to "wake up the Chinese people to resist the western cultural invasion". Is it really a cultural invasion? Yeah, lots of Western businesses want a piece of the action in China, and the Chinese themselves aren't averse to embracing them or things Wetsern. The statement also implies that foreigners are waging some sort of deliberate campaign to turn China into a Western society. I might be some dumb foreign boy, but this seems to assume that modernisation = Westernisation, and that it comes from without. Modernisation doesn't imply Westernisation for one thing; modernisation has deliberately come from within; it follows cultural trends within society. It's like clothing.

I'll give you open proxy. I've just tried to comment on a post on Chris's LJ blog only to be informed that it wasn't going to happen because, apparently, I'm on an open proxy which might be a source of spam. Contact your ISP, they say. Yeah, that's so not happening. I've been able to comment on other occasions without any problems so perhaps LJ has added some new software to detect possible sources of comment spam. I suppose the solution is to create an LJ account, which isn't going to happen because it would make things complicated for reasons I won't go into. Well, perhaps I'll be able to comment tomorrow; but right now, it ain't happening. Update : Tried posting a comment about the crapping Pope earlier this evening and had no problem. Dunno what the deal is.

All the cool kids are using it. In case you missed it: yiyin (n) – a word converted from some language into Chinese characters. yiyinise (vb) – to turn a word from some language into Chinese characters. yiyinisation (n) – the act of turning a word from some language into Chinese characters. I e-mailed the people at the OED. Dear Sir/Madam, I've invented a new word. Yours &c. Uncle Angel. PS All the cool kids are using it. I think they're really excited, because here's the reply. daer uncle angel, thnk u fr yr ml mssge. i'm ttlly tpng yur new wd into teh oed dtbse rght now. rly i am. yurs sncrely, adfaef igfiug. ps teh oed is too kewl for skool. Strange sort of name. I think he/she might be Ethiopian. Also interesting how the person uses that techie orthographers language. I can hardly understand it. So there. You now know someone who got a word into the OED.

A sound basis. I've been going through one of those phases when I keep seeing the same unknown character several times over. Today's character is 基 ( jī ) "base; basic". I first saw this in a shot of a Japanese book for learning English, but since then I've seen it here in China a couple of times as well. It's found in words such as 基本 (jīběn) "base; basic" 基础 (jīchǔ) "base; foundation" although I don't know whether there's a clear distinction to be made between the two words or they're synonyms. The latter looks like it might be used typically of the foundations of a building (础 means "plinth"), whereas the former seems, if the quantity of citations in the dictionary is a rough quantitative measure of its functions, mainly adjectival (e.g. 基本法 ( jīběnfǎ ) "basic law"). On the other hand, there's also 基础 课 ( jīchǔkè ) "basic (college) course". 基 is also used in the word 基因 ( jīyīn ) "gene&q

Finishing the job. My exposure to Chinese grammar came at a rather early age and by indirect means. When I was little, my mother would occasionally use the phrase "go have a look-see". I interpreted "look-see" as a hypcoristic form "looksy" (or "looksie"; the orthographers continue to debate the exact form) because the second verb was unstressed and seemed to be a mere suffix. What I wasn't to learn until some time later when, in the early 1980s, a woman who was to lecture me in English at university was interviewed on TV after she had come back from a brief stint in China teaching English, was that "go have a look-see" was Chinese Pidgin English. I encountered the actual phrase in Chinese in the antiquated version of Teach Yourself Chinese that I acquired in the two or three years after that. This book was clearly set in pre-Revolutionary China where servants would scurry off to do their master's bidding, and I remember the si

The things I find. The first character this week is 烂 ( làn ) which I saw in one of those magazines that's so popular among school children here. This was one of the small-format magazines with the picture of some cover model pretending to be a school girl, but looking more like Chinese jailbait. The story at the start of the magazine seemed to be all about some guy getting into Beijing University (北京大学) as far as I could tell. Further on, the header of the magazine had 星光仙烂 ( xīngguāng xiān làn ). I can actually read the first three characters, although I'm wary about saying that they mean X without consulting a dictionary. I didn't know 烂, though. That's composed of the fire-radical and the character for "orchid", which suggested something jolly romantic. [ Jolly romantic? I'm feeling queasy. –ed.] Actually, 烂 turns out to be a bit of a tramp with meanings such as "sodden; rot; messy; worn-out". I've seen the pejorative phrase "a worn

I don't recall an exchange of gunfire. Lord Stevens' report about the death of the Princess of Wales is out and puts to bed a bunch of nonsense about pregnancies, engagements, and conspiracy plots hatched by Phil the Greek. But what's this verb (in bold) doing in the article in The Guardian? Pictures were taken of the princess as she lay fatally wounded while emergency workers worked to save her. As far as I recall, Princess Diana wasn't in a gunfight. She was injured in a car crash. So why has some dim hack used "wounded", which you'd use of someone who'd been shot, and why has some dozy sub-editor let this pass? Who were the men known only as "the Greek" and "the Egyptian", and what of the old lady mysteriously referred to as "HM the Q", said to be the boss of The Firm?

Well, I hope. I mentioned somewhere that I couldn’t find anything about 得 in Chinese for Beginners. That surprised me, because although the book doesn’t cover all the different aspects of various grammatical constructions in Chinese, it’s quite comprehensive in the range of material it covers. I looked at the word index again. Ah, there was 得 and I was directed to Unit 6 which was about, er, 的. So I looked through the table of contents and found 得 was discussed in Units 39 and 47. I looked at the word index again and found that the numbers had been mixed up because under 的 the relevant units were given as 39 and 47. So what does the Chinese for Beginners say about 得? Unit 39 has (with minor corrections to the English) Post-得 adjectives expressing a comment on an action In the pattern "Subj. + V + 得 + Adj.", the adjective expresses a comment on the action indicated by the verb before 得. From the context in which this kind of sentence occurs, the action must be a

Double jeopardy. When I got to the office this morning Daisy, who is one of the English teachers and works in the International Office, was grilling Row about this sentence: Terri Schiavo was among at least ten thousand Americans with conditions their doctors say are beyond hope. I felt vaguely uncomfortable when I read the sentence and knew that the problem had something to do with "their doctors say". Remove that phrase and see what you get. Yup. The sentence is ungrammatical because there's a relative pronoun missing. It should read "...conditions which their doctors say are beyond hope". This is an instance of two phenomena in English. One is an instance of hypercorrection which occurs when some clause introducing reported speech (which has its own subject) is inserted into a sentence at a point where a subject relative pronoun should occur. Often, though, instead of inserting "who", some writers being familiar with the use of "whom" wil

Insanity, embrace me in that firm 34C bosom. As Chris's comments to the previous post reveal, this whole thing gets murkier and messier by the minute. (See, it's even making me alliterate. Not a good sign.) Obviously, the construction is [verb]得[verb] and, depending on the nature of the verb, we might be talking about a consequence or manner (the latter functioning pretty much like an adverb). Anyway, let me address the following from Chris's last comment to the previous post. No,no,no.... 很快地跑着，NOT 很快得跑着 This seems to be PC and R causing confusion by using pinyin . They say 14.1 Adverbials of manner consist of adjectives, normally two-syllable, followed by the particle de . From the index, I can only assume that the de of tā hěn kuài de pǎozhe is 得, although at first I thought it was 地 – and why not? I'm seeing something functioning as an adverb. It's telling me something about the action. But after I checked again, it seemed that the marker was 得. Huh? Yeah

A linguist muses. My hypothesis didn't survive after all, but that's the point of research – hypothesis, testing, new facts, revised hypothesis etc. Basically, 得 is a conjunction which means – roughly – "as a consequence; consequently; so; thus". 得 always follows a verb so that if the main verb is transitive, the verb is repeated after the dO. Thus we have such sentences as 他跑得直喘气 ( tā pǎo de zhí chuǎnqì ) "He was running; as a consequence he was out of breath." 他走得脚都软了 ( tā zǒu de jiǎo dōu ruǎn le ) "He was walking; consequently his legs went weak." 他打字打得很快 ( tā dǎzì dǎ de hěn kuài ) "He's typing; as a consequence we can see he's fast." The translations are meant to highlight the structure rather than be stunning examples of the translator's art. The first sentence has dynamic verbs in both clauses and the same subject. The clauses in the second sentence each have a their own subject (他 in the first and 脚 in the second). The

Perhaps I've been overdoing it. I'm taking a chance by starting a blog on blogspot. All right, if you've followed the link here from Green Bamboo [Defunct link deleted.], it's because once again I'm unable to post anything. I don't know why exactly, just as I don't know why I was suddenly able to post again this afternoon. I may learn the answer to at least one of these questions in due course. My current theory is that there's a limit on the number of entries you can post in a specific period on Spaces. I don't know whether there's also a limit on the number of RSS feeds you can have at any one time, but when I checked my stats, I'd had a whole bunch of 'em, and my hit count had reached 3214. Anyway, I suspect that it's the number of posts that's done for me. And why is starting a blog here taking a chance? Because Nanny in her infinite hysteria might block blogspot yet again [There was much on-off blocking of blogspot bef