Dlilittle secrets

A very quick post to share this article. I met this woman called Chantelle, she was here when we arrived, and left several months ago I guess. I witnessed most of the things she describes in the linked thread. Thank god we are in a client position with DLILI, because the employee position sucks for sure.

I noted that I had upheld my responsibilities (teaching well prepared lessons and receiving praise from both students and the leaders of the English Department), but the school had not lived up to their end of the bargain.

It clearly reminds me of nothing :)

Sunny sunday, crappy paintball

Out of our dominical gathering at Dalian church, we organized a paintball afternoon in order to welcome the first warm spring day of Dalian. Surprisingly, the paintball field is not out of the city in a very hidden area, but in the Lao Dong Gong Yuan located in downtown near Sheng li Guang Chang. Besides the paintball field, the park proposes activities such as golf and a roller coaster I have never seen working. And as in every park in China, sunny days come with the sound of old friends singing and playing old Chinese music. The description should be enough to your imagination.


So we 12 frenchies made 2 teams: the flashy blue fashion soldiers and the dark green fashion soldiers. We were grabbing our semi auto second hand rifles as the Laoban shouted “It is a very dangerous game, please use your weapons carefully and remember keeping ‘em up to the sky when you are not on the field. You do not take your helmet off on the field!”. Wow they are taking it seriously, real rules and all, I was not expecting this. I thought the guy would do a “how to use demo”, aiming to his most hated employee as a daily ritual. We finally stepped on the field, with a briefer for each team, being also the referees. We were fully equipped with our uniforms and helmets, and these referees were standing on the exact middle of the field wearing jeans, a shirt and their sunglasses. Their “The bullets dodge me, I am the referee anyway” attitude finally chased away the so unbelievable strictly serious atmosphere. Each team followed its briefer to discover the field as he was doing some blabla talks about the rules. While guiding us through the field, the employee first warned us on basic paintball rules such as “remember the 10 meters distance before shooting”. Then he advised: “As you can see, we are in a public park and a 1 meter high wall separates the field from the public area. You may go out as you wish, but please be careful and do not shoot on pedestrians”. Alright, we are definitely in China.


The game finally started and strategies were settled, regardless of the naked referees and the pedestrians having a sunbath in the field. Covers were blown up by the so discreet spectators and the lack of pressure in the weapons was an excuse to drop the 10 meter rule. Two hours of extreme battle and we got out as clean as we came in. Somehow, I had fun playing paintball in a kinder garden scenery. Grazie mille per il caffè.

Happy Birthdays!

DLILI University has the best habit a university can have. Every time a French student’s birthday is approaching, he and 5 friends of his are invited to a fancy Chinese restaurant for a home made celebration. The first party of the kind was to welcome the 50 French students to Dalian, French reporters were also around, and all of us discovered rice alcohol, cockroaches, karaoke and delicious Chinese food seated at a huge round table. We met James that night; the head of DLILI’s foreign affairs office, the guy who killed 30 French students with rice alcohol, this Chinese pure alcohol mixed to a taste of fuel.
Past Monday, DLILI failed to his own trap: because of the whole holiday thing, we were late on celebrations’ schedule. Thus, we had to celebrate 6 birthdays at the same time last Monday.
As Chinese people have diner very early, we attacked the food around 6pm and we attacked rice alcohol as soon as the food was served. How to drink rice alcohol? Well, you fill up a half shot glass with the transparent liquid, you name one friend to drink with (that night the pair was 30 people), you shout Gambei, make some noise by hitting the table with your glass and you one-shot your glass. If the procedure is renewed 5 times at least, new friendships should appear here and there.


The food was flourishing on the huge turning table; sounds of chopsticks fighting around the plates were settling the Asian atmosphere and stomachs were welcoming beer and rice alcohol in this very lovely evening. James had no clue we had been working hard to improve our rice alcohol resistance skills, he was overtaken by the endless Gambeis. But since it is very hard to couple rice alcohol and Chinese, he had no chance to hear how fluent is our spoken Chinese, what a shame. Anyway, we were done with the diner at 8.30pm and our behavior was going very strange as the restaurant room was too small to contain us all. Thus, we kept our happy faces on our shoulders and headed to a night club to carry on the celebration. I would like to describe what does a nightclub in Dalian looks like at 9pm, but since the DJ is like a lonely 9 years old kid having fun in his playground, I guess there is no need for further descriptions.
My evening was over at midnight and my roommates rarely saw me in such a shape. What an awesome party, thanks DLILI.

Give me more of Suzhou

Suzhou introduced its magic to us with the night life, but clearly, more was to come. We were in the powerful capital of the Wu Dynasty, famed for its successful merchants, heavenly gardens, fantastic canals and 2500 years of history. We were about to discover a city size museum, thus, instead of moving by public buses from one place of interest to another, we trusted Lonely Planet and looked for a bicycle rent, keeping in mind that “You are lucky if you rent for 30 Yuan(3 Euros)/day”. Thanks for the advice Lonely Planet; we got our bicycles for 20Yuan a day. While we were pedaling through the narrow and car less lanes, we had no clue that the city was surrounded by a colossal industrial park which cherishes the citizens in a high leveled life standard and preserves the historical places.

Great artists and distinguished architects supported by wealthy families changed Suzhou into a temple of flourishing classical gardens since the 4th Century. Nowadays, only a dozen gardens have survived the destruction of wars and development. Julien and I decided to visit four of them, and I’ll describe only two of them, both descriptions will be melt in one. Nah I am not lazy at all, let’s say I shorten it because of political issues. This is the best excuse in China, if you don’t want people to ask you questions, you whisper “political issues” and they drop it, please do so.

The first garden is called Humble Administrator’s Garden. As most Chinese gardens are, this one is a 5ha microcosm of earth, reproducing natural elements such as forests and sea. However; Humble Administrator’s Garden is bluffing, the scenery is doubled in most places thanks to the water covering one-third of the garden area, reflecting pavilions as if they were unreal, transforming bridges into rainbows. The garden was thought in such a detailed way that constructions and trees do not disturb sight at all, providing a spectacular illusion of perspective, piling pagodas, massive shapeless rocks and water streams in a dream of harmony. A small museum describes the techniques of building Chinese gardens with plans and pictures. The Humble Administrator’s Garden’s pictures taken during different seasons give an idea of how each spot look wonderful and perfectly fit the natural environment no matter how the weather is.

Out of here, we grab our bikes and head to the Liu Garden, passing through very local neighborhoods, crossing canals, eventhough the rainy weather rinses our clothes. Once arrived to the Liu Garden, for the very first time since we had left Dalian, we felt the Chinese holiday around us. The garden was way too crowded; we were supposed to walk a 700meters long covered lane and discover this very rocky place trough perspective plays, but we had no choice but surfing on a human flow of visitors. The tricky thing is, in Chinese museums and gardens, you rarely see lanes for tickets (the lane concept does not exist yet), and so you cannot know how crowded it is. As a rookie, you think it is empty inside; and it is a hell of a surprise every time you step into the garden. They even manage to cut the sound off at the gate (Chinese are very very noisy tourists), so as you step in, your ears are immediately waken up and you see hundreds of Chinese going back and forth with their eyes: the foreigners – the garden, the garden – the foreigners, foreigners, foreign, for, f, p, pic, picture, take picture, take a picture of the foreigners...

Alright, the afternoon’s visit was a bit disappointing, and we were leaving the day after for Nanjing. So we enjoyed Suzhou a bit more, driving to the KFC first, to the train station right after. We wanted to see the bird market in this very bird flued period, but it was unfortunately closed, what a shame. We did not go back to the night club we checked up the night before. Instead, we fought with prostitutes who wanted us to have a beer with them, in their bar. We ended up in a foreigners bar around a pool for a calm evening.

I’ll meet you in Nanjing, reader.

What's in my hosts' bookstore?

I headed to the Dalian bookstore this afternoon. Near downtown, the store is settled in a 5 floor building and has a foreign languages section. I was looking for the Pen Tsao kang mu (About Chinese medicinal methods, you may buy it online at Amazon.com), hoping to find its English version: Utopia. So I spent time looking for some books aiming to help you out with Chinese writing practices. The shelves are pretty poor and propose books for kids; anyway it suits my needs well enough since my Chinese is way worse than a Chinese kid’s. So I got 6 little workbooks and started strolling around the huge book collection, some are in English, most of them are in Chinese though.

My tiny books to practive Hanzi!

Are the literature habits the same in Europe and China? I actually don’t know much even after visiting Chinese bookstores since I rarely spend time in French stores. The interesting point is that by observing what people read, you can have a clue on their interests, am I wrong? Moreover, the content is managed by the government which does not seem very sincere to me. Maybe I’ll discover books titled “How did the U.S. copy Chinese brands such as Nike and Adidas”. Anyways, some of the proposed books had to be pretty surprising and I kinda found what I was expecting.
First section, no need to read Chinese to catch the lessons of computer books, Java is Java and Windows is Windows for every geek on Earth. Thus I was staring at computer books as TinyDreadMan shouted “You must see this!”. He had bumped into a summary of every model of screen of every existing brand of CRT monitors. What’s so awesome? Well a brief look to the following pages is. This book simply describes how to assemble and create your own CRT monitor by copying original digital circuit designs, all you need to do is choose a brand and a model. It is not so much of a surprise tough, since China has copied everything. We even have a Sydney Opera look-alike construction right outside our campus.
Then I passed by the Encyclopedia sponsored by Google and the Universal Howtos shelves appeared. The first Howto responds to today’s many Chinese’s envy: be white. It might be because of their definition of beauty or to look more European maybe, but Chinese people want to be white. Some young woman use syringes to inject chemical crappy things into their blood in order to be whiter. Caroline Snow’s (the link is what Google gave me :) ) Yoghurt Lady takes 50 pages to explain how to become whiter, soft skinned and so on…
Even better in the Universal Howtos collection is the life for dummies set of books. These explain e-ve-ry-thing. Have some examples:

• Use a screw
• Learn how to sail
• Peal an apple
• Understand a wine bottle opener corkscrew
• Recognize weapons you’ve only seen while playing Counter Strike

Can we find this kind of books in Europe? Did I miss something? Even my buddy Google's results were not satisfying. I know Spud is the kind of websurfer who can find useless websites treating these subjects, I don't know if she's been reading me though. Meet her.

Chinese Lesson 2: Writing

Have you ever seen the TV shows proving the efficiency of innovating memory and mind training techniques? These programs where the 10 year old kid takes a quick look to a board on which 100 words are written, and turns his back. The showman randomly asks him “tell me the word at the Xth position”, the kid proudly answers “cardiograph” without wasting the least second for a thinking. And normal human beings like you and I watch it, trying to find the trick, looking for the cheat, following the kid’s eyes to catch where he reads the words. Once you have accepted the theory, you think you might be using 10% of your brain as most people do.

I’ve been dying to be able to use 2% more since I started studying Hanzi. Chinese writing looks like shape recognition at first, meaningless shapes shouting “Forget it faguoren, I’m unrecognizable anyway”. Some interesting similarities between French and Chinese appear with this writing thing. In Chinese, Xie Hanzi means "write chinese characters". Well if you have the right pronunciation for xie, it should sound like a "pooh hanzi" in French. I turn out to be stupid sometimes.
Even though some dictionaries claim 80 000 different characters, 3000 may be enough to have a classic Chinese life. The level of character knowledge mirrors the level of education though; a well educated person may master at most 5000 Hanzi. Why are there so many? Because a Chinese character orally represents only one sound, reported to French or English, it would be one syllabus. Every sound used in oral Chinese has its own written equivalent. Moreover, the same sound can be associated to more than one Hanzi, because its meaning is different from one context to another. A bridge from Latin alphabet to Chinese Hanzi has been set up in 1979. Thus, the Pinyin language was the first step of Romanization of Hanzi. But, as if Chinese was a spoken language only, it remains very hard to master tones as they are notified in Pinyin. The reason is simple; tones written in Pinyin must be backed up by pronunciation rules in order to fit oral Chinese: if there is more than one vowel and the first vowel is i, u, or ü, then the tone mark appears on the second vowel (Wikipedia) and so on.
I’ve started recognizing few shapes after two months spent in China, such a long time with the so heavy handicap of not being able to read anything around.
Yet, once I’ve started studying the characters I noticed shapes are recurrent, and they actually mean something. These parts are called radicals and give the main meaning of a character, in theory. Still, I have no clue of what do main parts of most Hanzi mean, but I guess they are evolution of drawings. I’m even sure, as this sweet website exposes, but there is no way you can link today’s character to its origin.
Moreover, if you start digging the Hanzi culture, you quickly discover the writing styles. There are 5 ways to write Chinese, zhuànshū being the standard one. I’m killing myself to learn one character; I also luckily have a Chinese friend who masters the 5 written styles.

My hanzi practices

Five Hanzi types - Tang Yuan

Although in written Chinese, each tiny spot and line seem very important and, thus, written Chinese seems to not allowing your freestyle habit you get when you write French or English, but somehow, hanzi is flexible. Everyone has his own handwriting style and I can hardly guess the character even if I know what is exactly written. I’m still a novice, while Chinese turn handwriting to an art by the means of calligraphy.

Street Calligraphy with watered brushes - Beijing

Hanzi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/hanzi
Pinyin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin

Chinese sayings

You'll probably need to install Chinese fonts to be able to read this post. I'll add more sayings as soon as I learn more, and push the post up.

1. 肚 子 疼 不 是 病，有泼 屎，没 垃 净 - du zi teng bu shi bing, you po shi, mei la jing.
   Stomach ache is not an illness, it means you haven't been to restroom yet.
   
   
2. 听 我 的，准 不 错 - Ting wo de, zhun bu cuo.
   Listen to me, you won't be wrong.
   
   
3. 一 日 夫 妻 百 日 恩 - Yi ri fu qi bai ri en.
   Once being a couple, even only one day, each person should be appreciated by the other.


4. 窈 窕 淑 女 ， 君 子 好 逑 - Yao tiao shu nu, jun zi hao qiu.
   Every gentleman like beautiful and gracious woman.


5. 船 到 桥 头 自 然 直- Chuan dao qiao tou zi ran zhi.
   Don’t be afraid when some bad things happen, if you meet some difficulties, don’t worry too much about the conequences, because everything will have an predicted answer and result. Just like the ship will be straight when it stops at wharf.
   This sentence is usually used when you want to comfort somebody at his difficult time.


6. 爱 屋 及 乌 - Ai wu ji wu.
   If you like someone, you will naturally like his or her surrounding people or things.


7. 心 急 吃 不 了 热 豆 腐 - Xin ji chi bu liao re dou fu.
   If you are worried very much, you still can not eat hot and mature bean curd. It infer that when you are in trouble, however you feel worried and anxious, it’s in vain. You should keep your heart quietly.


8. 好 好 学 习，天 天 向 上 - Hao hao xue xi, tian tian xiang shang.
   Good good study, day day up.

Shocking left handed young man

The back packs were heavier, drenched by the huge tropical rain drops. We all knew the Viets where hiding all around us, it was an early morning the fifth of august 1936…

..Oh this is not my story. It is not even a story at all.
Actually, it begun the very first time I had to practice my hand writing in front of my Chinese tutor. The moment I started shaping the hanzi, he took my pen off my left hand and pointed my right hand with his finger. “To write Chinese, you should use your right hand”, he said. I gently explained I was left handed as he and his friend giggled.
I had no idea it would be such a trouble to be left handed in China. Every single Chinese is right handed, and I am still looking for the exception. The frustration is here, they don’t understand why I use my left hand. Moreover, I feel like the thought “yeah, left or right, it may be the same” does not cross their mind, even one second.
Your reaction is probably “who cares”, but still, think about it. Each time you grab a pen in a public place, you get this weird look on surrounding people’s face. Each time you study Chinese characters in your room, your roommate drops a nervous smile and observes: “It would be easier if you used your right hand”. Moreover, he decides to teach you how to write. The feeling is way beyond the “oh! You are left handed” reaction I usually get back in Europe. Often, it sounds more like a “look! He is obese!”, shouted on a crowded Brazilian beach.

Thus I asked some friends if it was impolite to be left handed. The most gentles gave an answer conflicting with the facts: “No, it is okay, we rarely see left handed. We think they are cleverer”. The less gentles laughed and remained quiet.
Even the teachers noticed : “you look like you are drawing, not writing hanzi”. Such situations underline the gap there is between the country's evolution and its people's minds I guess. Please people, try to think a little, it is about time!

Reporters caught me naked

11am last Thursday, I was in my room doing nothing in my usual home wear: half naked, boxers only, when someone knocked my door. Of course, I immediately opened the door without thinking who might be on the other side. Two French students were standing there and left a "huh?!" come out when they saw me:

- Some reporters from Dalian news are preparing an article about our life in Dalian, would you mind being interviewed? They are waiting outside.
- That means I need to put a shirt on, do my bed and tidy up my stuff right?


This maybe the third time we, French students, have to deal with Chinese newspaper. They like us being around, I guess. The two women started to ask questions about my life here, what I like most, what are the unforgettable I've experienced around, what are the significant differences with European lifestyle and so on. I would have liked to take the interview all the way in Chinese but it is so hard to think and talk at the same time. On top of it, while you try to express yourself in front of a Chinese person, you are so slow that you keep thinking you are wasting his precious time, even though they are way too patient. Thus, you cannot focus; you mess words up, and switch back to English. Fortunately, that day, Yu Heng, our so loved French/Chinese student, was here to help me out.
It is quite difficult to have an interview like that, many things you better not say, not because Mao is a devil and it is dangerous, but just because if it is too “not normal”, they simply won’t publish it. I feel like you have to provide the media some regular information. However, it is frustrating to feel that you are giving them the answers they are waiting for. Thus, you work it around in order to balance the “my thought/their thought” equation.

The interview was interrupted several times by the F-16 taking off nearby our campus, at the airport. Even better, as some guys have been trying, since few months, to take down one of the mountains around our school, we experienced the charm of a huge explosion followed by a homemade earthquake. Houston, we are still alive. DLILI, what a fantastic place.

The article was published in today’s newspaper. And I had a kind of proof about the “give me what I want” rule. The reporter wanted to take some pictures of me faking some regular activities. Thus, I sat at my desk and faked I was writing a letter, she kept saying “Smile” as I was almost tearing my lips to give her satisfaction (Alright this sentence fragment sounds way too sexual, take a look to the Google search results, ahaha). I finally told her I stopped being a clown and she would get no monkey smile: picture not published :) . See the students on the picture below? There are so good fakers of “we are studying hard, altogether”. This is the most amusing game in China I guess: open the newspaper, observe the pictures and guess: what are they faking?

Listening to: David Guetta - Fuck me I'm Famous

Radio show - be my guest

The event is not the most recent one, but so particular I think, I wanted to have this memory written somewhere.

I met this Chinese student named Xiao Dong, we had to work together for DLILIs show presentation. To earn money, Xiao Dong handles a part time job at the Dalian TV & Radio Center, thus has professional relationships with "famous" radio showmen. As 50 French students arrival was the attraction of Dalian at that time, Xiao Dong asked me whether I would like to take part in a radio program as the foreign guest. Clearly, I accepted the invitation; the program was going to be produced 1 week before Christmas. Since the show is the most listened to, from 6pm to 7pm during the rush hour, we had to prepare our speech a bit. The main purpose of having me over there was to introduce one of the 50 French students to the Dalian Radio listeners, and moreover, to share some of the music we listen to back in Europe.
Therefore, Xiao Dong and I headed to the radio center with an USB key full of different kinds of music I listen to. We listened the songs while having a conversation on how I should act during the Show. The rules where mainly normal I guess: no slang, no politics and so on. One instruction shocked me though, the DJ warned me on not talking about Christmas. I asked for some explanation, he simply answered “It is forbidden to talk about Christmas on the Dalian Radio waves, I don’t know why”, the kind of answer which makes me want to chat about Christmas, but I cannot afford a dead man though. All I noted is that the show had to be the most serious thing ever, no going out of bounds, no doing freestyle.
Let’s choose the music we’ll play now. I anticipated the global atmosphere and took mainly soft music such as Manu Chao or Jackson Five. However, the DJ liked more my Dancehall Ragga songs and the band called Brooklyn Funk Essentials. “Bring me more ragga next time okay?” he said. Oh boy, if Mao only knew what these songs are about: sex, drugs, alcohol. What ever, Ragga it is!


Finally, we met again the following week for some live performance. My friend Tang Xuan (Betty is her English name), came along to do the Chinese/English translations. The show was just fine, we discussed of my life in China, and I took the clown out, spoke Chinese and sang a Chinese song, while Papa Tank was shaking the Dalian Radio waves with his kick ass Ragga vibes.
I sometimes listen to the show, making sure the DJ did not die because of me passing that kind of music. Everything is fine in Dalian.

If you want to hear some Chinese, download the programs mp3 here.

Chinese Lesson 1: Tones

The “Tones on words” concept is something we don't have in our occidental languages. Thus, we have difficulties applying tones, and somehow, we don’t get it when Chinese people don’t understand us if we mistake tones. But what are tones exactly? They are a kind of dictatorial language rule: a mistake completely isolates you and you cannot afford your voice to go out of bounds. There is nothing like the frustration you feel when you give your best pronunciation and nobody hears you. Moreover, you lol it so hard when you notice that Chinese people cannot whisper or shout because of the tones. You cannot mumble even when saying “hello”. Since I can observe 50 Chinese learners here in Dalian, I found out why most of us have the tones wrong. In most languages we speak, we don't spend more than half a second pronouncing each syllables of a word. However, you can barely apply a tone in half a second. Consequently, as long as we don't practice our syllable lengthening, we'll hardly acquire a good pronunciation.

There are five tones in the spoken Chinese language, illustrated by the following famous chart:


The fifth tone is our normal pronunciation I guess (I don’t even know where I am anymore). The tones are clearly written in Pinyin (Chinese written in Latin alphabet), but I can rarely catch them in Hanzi (Chinese characters). Why should we pay so much attention to tones? Because in mandarin Chinese, the tones are as important as the sound for determining the meaning of a word. Have an example:

Let’s take the word ma, the example you see the most:

ma
This ma stands for the question mark. You just place it at the of your interrogative sentence. Remember, as you are stuck by the tones, you cannot modify your tonality to mark a question, so our guys created the ma word.


mā
The first toned ma means mother (māmā actually). You may have noticed the character is made of two shapes. The first character, the one on the left, is the key for "female". It gives you a trick to easily find the meaning if you see it written somewhere. You get to find the trick to remember the shape of the "female" character. Yeah, this is what Chinese writting & reading is all about: tips & tricks. If I am drunk enough someday, I'll blog my tricks for keys for you guys to understand how my brain is done and, moreover, how fucked up it is.

mǎ

The third toned ma means horse. No key, just horse, since there are no additives, should we consider this is the original character? If we do so, something may have inspired Chinese people. At first, this character probably had a horse shape, than evolved. Brains, warm up, imaginations, wake up. Try to find the horse shape and comment me your drawings.

In case you still don't get the importance of tones, let me give you a hint: you don't want to call your mother a horse do you?
We are done with ma. Actually, I am done with it. I exposed three tones, there are still two more. It is enough for the following translation exam though.

Nǐ māmā shì mǎ ma?

Alright dear reader, I'll give something I haven't decided yet to the first non-Chinese who sends me the english translation of this sentence. I'll give something even more something to my reader who sends me the answer to this question, written in both, pinyin and hanzi. Two clues: Nǐ means "you" and shì means "to be".

Tones are hard, I confess. But what about the writing? Soon...