Since moving to the “Coastal City” neighborhood, I’ve become much more adept at riding the bus. I was a little skeptical about moving to Coastal City, having been so dependent on the subways before.  But, I’ve adapted well.  The busses, despite having a few with English announcements, are generally a tougher form of transportation than the subways.  The main reason is that all of the routes “maps” are not really maps; they’re just ordered names of locations.  And, those location names are only in Chinese characters.  So, if you only know how your destination sounds, you’re out of luck.

However, since I committed to sending text messages in Chinese to Chinese people, my character recognition has gotten good enough to where I can go to a bus stop, read a route map and generally know if a bus can take me roughly where I want to go.  I haven’t made a mistake yet and taken a bus to some bizarre location (that happened to Daryl on his most recent trip out here.  Took a couple of hours in hard rain to get back.  Daryl’s one of the few people I know who doesn’t speak Chinese brave enough to try the busses).  It’ll probably happen to me eventually.

Since returning, three new subway stations have opened along the main line, extending westward into the High Tech Park where the MS office is located.  There are many other stations still under construction and are set to open in a year or so (dang!).  The new stations are very nice.  Shenzhen is still rapidly transforming and it’s going to be a great city once all those subways are opened.  Fix the air and this will be a world class place.

Many people have been telling how good of a show that HBO’s Deadwood is.  Since I had no new DVD material that I was regularly watching, I decided to pick it up.  Not to mention, it would be a good diversion from working into the evening.  I scouted around the DVD places and learned that the name of the show is a direct translation:  “Dead” and “Wood”.  In Chinese, it’s “Si”, tone 3 (we don’t have this “i” sound in English; it’s not the same as the Spanish word for “yes”!), and “Mu”, tone 4 (Basically like a cow:  “Moo!” with a strong downward inflection (that’s what “tone 4″ means)).  So, this is pretty easy to pronounce correctly.

I didn’t buy anything right away.  But, I came back a week later to the place that had all three seasons with good quality and a good price.  I couldn’t find it, so I asked for “Si3 Mu4″.  Confused looks.  I explained a little more, “It’s an American TV show.  It’s called ‘DeadWood’.”  Instead, I was directed to someone else.  More confused looks.  I know I was pronouncing it correctly.  Eventually, someone handed me a piece of paper and a pen asked me to write it down in English.  Then we translated it.  “A!!!  Si Mu!”  Yeah, that’s what I was saying!

Anyway, I bought it, but as a continued experiment, I asked a few English-speaking Chinese if they could understand what I was saying.  Most of them weren’t sure.  One good response was “Dead Deer?”

See, it’s not that I was mispronouncing anything.  It’s just that Chinese is such a damn weird language that without the context, you can’t tell what I’m trying to say!  The sound “si”3 and “mu”3 are represented by multiple characters, so with so few words, how do you know for sure what I’m saying.  If I were better at Chinese, I would have said something like, “‘Si’ as when you die and ‘mu’ as what trees are made of.”

Some seventy or eighty years ago, as I understand it, there was a movement to do away with the Chinese characters and adopt some sort of alphabet, like the Western alphabet.  To demonstrate how necessary the characters were, a professor in Beijing wrote a nonsensical story that told about someone named Mr. Shi who lived in a stone hut and was addicted to eating lions.  Sounds weird, but the point was that although he used numerous characters to tell the story, there was only one phonetic sound (excluding the tones):  “Shi”.

See how messed up that is?  People who read the story can understand it fine, but if they hear it, they have no idea what’s being said.  Pretty crazy, huh?  Outside of maybe a short sentence, this isn’t conceivable in English.

The Chinese language is optimized for subterfuge, double meanings, and confusion.  No wonder Westerners here often get frustrated or just plain perplexed.  Maybe this is why Chinese have such a great reputation in negotiation and business; they are accustomed to wearing down opponents just by using frustrating language.