KTV

I remember when I was in middle school, someone who had a karaoke machine was presenting us with a novelty. Later in college, I remember going to a party where there was karaoke, with the theme of the party being something like, "Blast form the Past". Americans regard them as antiquated, do we not?

Not so here. Within the block of campus there are three karaoke bars that I know of. In China, karaoke is called KTV for short, and has been hybridized with the chic metropolitan club scene. The other Friday night I was passing by this particular one, Windsor KTV that is just acrossed the street, and notice they had men in sharp suits serving as bell boys, concierges, and bouncers. There were a couple of VIPs that night, given away by their stylish Audi and Corvette cars park out front. It's just weird to imagine all of this glitz focused around lip singing.

A lot of foreigners will go to a KTV bar to experience it the way the Chinese do, but a word of caution. Despite the cheesy connotation it has for Americans, KTV is often a front for drug trafficking or prostitution. In fact, most KTV places have female liaisons that accompany the male patrons everywhere in the club, liasons who will provide additional services for an extra fee. It is not by coincidence that two of the KTV bars in the block are attached to a hotel.

Yay or Nay

I imagine that some of you have been wondering what I think about China. True, I have been providing a lot of commentary about little interesting things I run into in my quotidian life, but I think that I have failed to summarize my generic reaction to the whole experience. Any relationship with China is a complicated one, because in truth we’re not talking about the dynamics between you and your honeymoon getaway. This is no island to been summarily experienced in a week, and really this isn’t even a country; it is a continent.

I think that Rob Gifford in his book China Road put is best. After just having had a conversation with a doctor who worked for the family planning department (i.e. she went around performing abortions for families who were having more children than they should) he was livid with indignation. Of that moment he said, “It’s one of those days when I am simply glad that I am leaving [China].” To be perfectly honest, I have had plenty of such days, and perhaps they have been more frequent because we have been going through our first pregnancy here.

However, Gifford also rants about the enamoring things of China, and there too I agree. There is something about being in this country that has an irresistible tidal effect. I noticed it most poignantly when I was walking through a random suburb. Even though the apartment buildings stand within one kilometer of the campus, I had never seen them before. Apartment complexes really seem to stretch in every direction with unnamed silence. It was a Friday evening, near dusk with a lot of people either coming home from work or heading out for weekend festivities. I passed so many faces that betrayed emotion normally less apparent with mixed expressions of relief, fatigue, and excited anticipation. The simple realization that each of them had life-stories contributing to their current state in tandem with the satisfaction that I was in some miniscule way a part of it, was at once gratifying.

This does not mean I am going to spend my and my family’s whole lives abroad. Even to come back to China, both Lacey and I have agreed that the situation would need to be dramatically different (having an income and a kitchen would be a great start). However when you come to China, it is difficult to be neutral about the encounter. With so much context behind the title “Chinese” it instills in me a feeling of privilege to be among them. Furthermore, the gargantuan magnanimity of everything continues to blow my mind, and when I think about the future of this land, the ends of my fingers itch, as if to grab at it. Contemplation of China in and of itself I have found to be a moving experience that fills me at times with angst, but also with both compassion and awe. You could say that my relationship with the Middle Kingdom is complicated, but I confess to world at large that I am falling in love with China.

Word Confusion II

Again, the disclaimer on this is that there may be some humor that is subject to the ‘you had to be there’ condition. But, it's a part of my China, which is validation enough.

This particular day in class, we were discussing different types of competitions— everything from academic decathlons to footraces. So while in the area of sports, skiing naturally came up. The professor was talking about the popularity of skiing in China (it really isn’t that popular), and then I became curious if water-skiing had much of a presence here, so I asked. I will relate the conversation as it seemed from my perspective.

Me: “So do many in China people water ski?

Teacher: “Only in the north really, where it is cold enough.” (That should have been a hint, but when you only get the gist of the statement, you tend to disregard incongruous statements as your own inability to understand).

Me: “Is that because not many people have boats? I mean, I imagine they’re expensive here.”

Teacher: “Boats?!”

NOTE: The word for boat in Chinese is chuán, which is certainly close enough my previous word confusion so as to be nostalgically frustrating.

Me: “Yeah, boats.” (I made sure I said the tone right)

Teacher: “How would you use a boat to water ski?”

Me: “How would…?! How else will you move on the water?

Teacher: “Are you sure you use a boat?”

Me: “Positive. Let me show you.”

I went to the marker board and proceeded to draw a boat with a line pulling a skier. Notwithstanding, the teacher stared at the picture with a perplexed look, and muttered something like, “What kind of a boat would cross snow…”

Teacher: “In China they don’t use boats to water ski. The have the two poles on both sides that they use to push along.”

I barked out a laugh, and an American classmate asked what was going on. I translated quickly, to which he replied in English, “Woman! How do you expect a man to move on the water without a boat?!”

At this point an Italian girl, Mariana, chimed in saying, “No, I understand what the teacher is saying. You don’t need a boat.”

Another Italian girl, Elena, exclaimed in animated Italian, “What do you mean you don’t need a boat? That’s ridiculous, honestly Mariana, what do you think they’re going to do, climb a mountain and go sailing down until they reach a lake and then…” At this Elena, with the whole class watching, did a demonstration of said hypothetical skier going down the mountain and then hitting the water with an expectant and eager learning forward on the skiis, like someone about to do a jump, and then proceeded to imitate someone then hitting the water and floundering.

During this whole discussion, the tone, volume, and incredulity had been increasing dramatically. We were all so confused and yet so defensive of our points that after Elena did this little enactment we all simply burst into outrageous laughter until we were literally crying. The raucousness died down and then the teacher said, “Well, this would all make so much more sense if we were talking about water skiing…”

I don’t need to detail my explosion of confirmation and ‘of courses’ that followed, but I did my best to make sure that the teacher understood that water skiing was what I was talking about the whole time.

This time the confusion was not because of tones, in fact the tones on each word are identical; it was the slight difference of vowel sounds. The translation for snow skiing is 滑雪, huáxǔe (Hwah-shweh). Húa literally means to slide, and xǔe is snow. The translation for water skiing is 滑水, huáshuǐ (Hwah-shway), which is literally to slide on water. Well, apparently I was not putting enough ‘-ay’ at the end of the word that what the teacher though I was saying those whole time was snow skiing.

Word Confusion I

One of the most common mistakes a newbie to the Spanish language is the attempt to say ‘I’m embarrassed’ by way of a cognate and end up saying ‘Estoy embarrazado(a)’ which means, ‘I’m pregnant’. While Chinese doesn’t have that same type of complication, the same sound like wo (said whoa) has the potential for four different inflections, and each is a different meaning altogether. As if that weren’t enough, the same inflection can have several different meanings too, an issue usually resolved by have the written character present as well. If you ever watch Chinese TV or movies, you’ll notice the show is always subtitled with the Chinese characters, and it’s not for the foreigners’ sake. It is so the Chinese can be sure what meaning is implied by a sound has diverse characterizations and definitions.

One of the more obvious mistakes that can be made at the beginning of one’s study of Chinese is the use of qíng wèn (ching [upward inflection] when [downward inflection]) which means, ‘Might I ask…’. Westerner are used to putting upward inflections on all question words, and so it would be easy to say both of those syllables with an upward inflection (qíngwén), but be warned that if you do so, you are actually asking ‘might I kiss…’

None of my blunders have been too embarrassing… yet, but they have been the cause for some good laughs. I’m not entirely sure how clearly the humor will come through in translation. There is a good chance that these will be ‘you had to be there’ scripts, but I am willing to take that chance.

So two days ago we using a grammar pattern to talk about what things we found satisfactory and unsatisfactory when we came to China. I said that I thought that Beijing noodles were very satisfactory, but that the dorm room beds were really unsatisfactory. I didn’t know that tones for the word bed, but I knew that the phonetic sound was chuang (ch-wong[said like WAND]); this was my attempt to use it.

Me: “I am unsatisfied with the dorm chuang.”

Teacher: “The chuang? What is wrong with the chuang?”

Me: “They are very… hard.”

Teacher: “Hard? Do you mean they are hard to use?”

Me: “No, as in they are not soft.”

Teacher: “Not soft… hmmm, that’s very confusing. I’ll talk to you during the break.”

Me: “Okay.”

15 minutes later

Teacher: “Okay Michael, what was it you didn’t like?”

Me: “The chuang.”

Teacher: “And why don’t you like them?”

Me: “Because they are very hard.”

Teacher: “… Michael, all of the chuang in China are hard. Do you mean to say that in the US you don’t have hard chuang?”

Me: “Well, I imagine that there are, but for the most part we have very soft chuang.”

Teacher: “Really?! How is that possible?”

Me: “Well, they make them more like a pillow.”

Teacher: “A pillow?! Then what do you do when it gets cold, or if there is too much of a breeze?”

At this outcry she points towards the large panel of windows on the south side of the classroom, and it clicks. Since I didn’t know the word very well I tried to say it with a neutral tone, but I was accidentally saying it as chuāng (straight toned, no inflection) which means window. Once I realized this I was able to circumvent the definition of a bed so that she understood what I was trying to say. The word for bed is chuáng, with an upward inflection. I’ll leave it up to you to go through the conversation again and replace all of the chuang words with either window or bed, whichever you prefer. We both had a good laugh, and it was one of those experiences that helped engrain the word into lasting remembrance.

No Secrets Here

In one of my classes we had a brief discussion about secrets (秘密 [mìmì]) that are the norms for our respective cultures. For Americans, this would be things like age, weight, family planning, etc. However, as my teacher said, “Chinese people don’t have secrets.”

This was never more apparent then our conversation in class today. Our chapter covers some ailments of the body, intended to be a lesson in case we would need to go to a doctor or the hospital. One of the phrases is 拉肚子 [lā dùzi], or diarrhea. For mature persons there is nothing wrong with learning such a word, but to my surprise the teacher begins going around the class room and asking each student to share when they have had diarrhea in China and why! No one was exempt, not even the cutsy little Korean girls that make the peace sign in photos. Hearing this topic broached by them made a few of my American classmates contort their faces in odd ways. Lacey somehow got away without answering the question, but the worst was when one Korean kid confessed that he has lā dùzi everyday.

None of the Asians (including Koreans and Indonesians) seemed to mind the topic at all. And perhaps this demonstrates a little unwillingness to embrace the culture, but these are secrets that I don’t ever really need to know about anyone. Oh well, TIC (This is China).