We just finished up our “Call Me in China” January retreat.  My business partner, Peter, who is also a former MS employee was in town for around two weeks.  After leaving Microsoft, Peter moved to Shanghai for the more stimulating social environment and cosmopolitan feel.  Me, I still like Shenzhen.  Peter’s brother, Chris, accompanied him.  Chris, a computer engineering student at Carnegie Mellon, accompanied him and will be spending a semester in Shanghai learning Chinese.  Chris’s capacity with “Call Me in China” was officially intern and his contributions were greatly appreciated.  To learn a little more about the retreat, read more here.

We ate many meals together.  Peter and Chris leaning more towards the Northeastern style cuisine featuring dumplings and me preferring the spicier offerings of the Sichuan and Hunan regions.  Our final meal together was at a fairly small Sichuan restauarant.  Peter heard a suggestion from the waitress of what he though was “sweet chicken”.  The conversation was too fast for me to catch, unfortunately, for I knew what this “sweet chicken” really was.  Actually, it was “field chicken”.  Both “sweet” and “field” have the exact same sounds:  “tian” tone 2.  But, the characters are completely different and thus the meaning is completely different.

“Sweet Chicken”, aka “Qin1 Wa1″,  is another word for “Frog”!  I’ve grown to like frog actually and this was a tasty dish, but it was a bit to realistic for Chris’s liking.  The bodies of the poor frogs were almost intact.  The heads were missing thankfully, but the cute little hands and feet were still intact.  The underside looked otherwordly too; “Alien” was the term that Peter used.  Chris didn’t eat too much of this dish, but at least it made for some good pictures.

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My first flight ultimately bound for Hotlanta was scheduled to depart Hong Kong at 8am sharp.  This was the best ticket I could find when searching for a flight to return to the US for Christmas, both by route, layover, and price.  I assumed it would be pretty easy to get to Hong Kong by 8am.  Turns out it’s not.  Well, I should correct that; it is easy, but it took me a long time to figure it out.  I asked lots of people and none of them could confirm anything.  I’d pretty much decided that I’d just go into Hong Kong late the night before, nap some, and then check in around 6am.  Going without good sleep for more than 24 hours is not my strong suit.

But, thankfully, the day before my flight, I happened to ask my Philippino friend who pointed me to “Sky Limo”, claiming that they left at 5am, maybe even earlier, for the Hong Kong airport.  Turned out that I also had a business card of theirs too (I can’t remember when I last used them).  I called the Hong Kong number and asked in Mandarin if they had any English speakers (I don’t understand any Cantonese).  I got someone who was OK and between Mandarin and English, got it all worked out.  However, there was still some doubt when she first told me that the earliest departure was 6am.  When, I said I needed 5am, she just responded, “5am, no problem!”  Well, I trusted my friend.

I’m not writing this little airport journey story because it eventually turns funny or horrible.  Everything worked out fine.  I just enjoyed the ride from the taxi to the Huang Gang border in central Shenzhen, the only 24-hour border, and thought I’d write about that (and now I’ve got it documented should I need to take an early flight again).

I left my apartment complex around 4:20AM and interrupted a taxi driver’s sleep.  He sprung to life when he saw me leaning over him and we were off.  On the way in, I was amazed at the number of “Ming2 Gong1″ folks I saw on the streets.  These are the people in the aqua and yellow outfits, with those traditional Chinese hats, who are cleaning up the messes that everyone else makes during the day.  I got the distinct impression that, much like how money, goofy gifts and card, and wrapping paper is the lifeblood of the Christmas economy, trash is the economy of the night for these folks.  Maybe it’s halfway a good thing that a lot of Chinese people will think nothing in tossing trash carelessly on to the street; the ming gongs will spring to life after hours and get the city sparkling, despite the stains, again for the morning.

In my basic Chinese, I sort of joked that “ming gong” (tone 2, tone 1) probably translated as “tomorrow industry”, meaning that the sweat from the common laborer was the one who’d provide the muscle to bring the country into a better world, day by day.  Well, no, it doesn’t have anything to do with this.  In fact, this is not the “ming” which means “tomorrow” or the “gong” which means “industry”.  I’m not really sure what it means, dang.  I’ll have to research this some more and add comments later!  Man, speaking of with, there are so many “gong” words which are tone 1.  It’s really hard to keep up:  “industry”, “public”, “company”, and “palace” are the ones that I’m aware of.

Well, might as well finish the story.  I arrived at the Huang Gang border.  Some guy, of course, saw me and said, “Airport?” and tried to take my suitcase.  Obviously, this wasn’t right; I had to cross over the footbridge just in front of me.  A quick, “Bu yong” and I was off.  The stairs leading up the bridge were lined with old beggars; I hadn’t seen such a pitiful scene in a while.  Arriving on the other side, I asked where the Sky Limo window was.  It was just a few booths down though, being 4:45am, they hadn’t arrived at the office yet.  The “limo” ride, actually a mini-van,  was quite comfortable, though we were held up at the Hong Kong border for about 45 minutes because one of the women in the van was pregnant.  I wasn’t sure exactly what she needed to do to pass through, but fortunately the journey from Huang Gang is only 25 minutes.  So I still arrived with enough time.  Thankfully, the security lines were short.

Right around 7:30 am, as I was working on some shredding exercises, I looked up at the video map and noticed that we were flying right over the North Cascades.  I opened my window hoping that I’d see a little sunrise.  There was enough sunrise at just the right time.  I spotted Mount Baker just as there was enough light.  After that, all the other peaks fell into place:  Glacier Peak, Johannesburg, Forbidden Peak, Columbia Peak and so on.  It was great looking down on my old stomping grounds and I had a sensation of the smallness of the world.

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.

I learned my first Chinese “slang” character, for lack of a better term.  Apparently, this is around a year or two old.  Amazingly, it’s already part of my input method on my PC at work (it’s not on my Mac).  Anyway, the character is “Jiong” (tone 3).  It means something of a cross between unhappy and embarrassed.  Notice the character below.  All of the strokes are “legal”, for lack of a better term, Chinese strokes used for writing the script.

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(above) Miss Li will make you feel “jiong”.

Here’s an update for my “Small step” post below. After studying the phrase a little more and getting clarification from a colleague, I realize that the translator of this phrase got lucky by translating it in the style of the great Chinese philosopher, Confucius. Doesn’t this sound something like, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” to you? But, is “small step makes big success” an accurate translation of the text (“Qian2 jin4 yi1 xiao3 bu4, wen2 ming2 yi1 da4 bu4″).

No!

Here’s a more accurate translation: “Small step closer, big step for civilization.” (I got lucky by discovering the word for “civilization” a few days before (“wen2 ming2″))   And there’s a good reason why it’s in front of the urinal. The intention, according to my colleagues, is “Step closer to the urinal and don’t make such a mess. That small gesture of cleanliness will do wonders for our civilization.” Big let down my first Confucian interpretation, I guess. It reminds me of the 2008 Olympics advertisements running in China. I often see them when riding on the subway. They encourage all sorts of good social behavior like sharing an umbrella, not spitting, and waiting your turn.

(above) I wonder if this was put up by the Beijing Olympic Committee.

For the guys in the audience, you are all aware of restaurants practice of displaying the days newspaper at eye-level behind glass in the men’s room, right? Well, what did I notice in the men’s room at my office today, on April Fools Day of all days, but another communist reminder of the important things in life. It’s a good message I guess, just funny that I see it every day now at eye level. I’ll have this saying, including the characters (I know all but three), down in no time:

Here’s another neat example of Chinese characters conveying their meaning through pictographs. I learned this one from a colleague and was able to apply it when visiting Tiger Leaping Gorge. The character itself is the character for “gorge” or “canyon”. Phonetically, it’s pronounced “Xia2″, the “2″ indicating a medium-pitched tone rising to a higher pitch. “Xia” is pronounced something close to “Shyah” in English. Here is the character:

The character above is actually made up of two other characters. The character on the right is “Jia1″, where “1″ is the high level tone. This character can be either a noun or a verb. As a noun, the character (most commonly with a “zi” sound after it) means “clip”, “pliers”, or something that can hold two things together with a force like a clip. As a verb, it means to “pinch” or “clip”. Here’s the character:

And, the character on the right is a simple one:

This character is “shan1″, which means “mountain” in Chinese. So, you see what happens when you put them together, you have a mountain that pinches…or a gorge. Pretty neat. Even if someone doesn’t know the character for “gorge”, they can most likely guess the meaning by the combination of characters to form a new word.

In Chinese, the word Fu2 means “Fortune”. That’s pronounced “Foo” with an ascending tone (tone 2). When you say Fu2 dao4 le, you’re saying that “fortune has arrived”. All around China, especially on the doors to peoples home, you can see a Fu character displayed upsided down. Huh? Why upside down? The reason is because the word for “upside down” is dao4, pronounced with a strong downward tone (tone 4). It just so happens that the Chinese word for “upside down” shares the same pronunciation as the Chinese word for “arrived”. So, literally turning the character Fu upside-down is a play on words that implies that fortune has arrived. Neat, eh?

This is Fu rightside up:

福

If you’re on a laptop, please turn it over right now. Maybe comments on my blog will start working. OK, now I feel strangely superstitious. Here’s a photo of my front door (yes, an upside down Fu):

Sorry for my neglect of the blog lately. There are visitors from the US in town now and I’ve spent most every night entertaining and being entertained. But, I found some time to squeeze in some fun “Engrish”. This plaque is found in the elevator of our building. All of the quotes have errors but two are especially bad. One is unintelligible to the point of qualifying as solid Engrish comedy. I need to submit it to the Engrish board.

From top to bottom:

• Don’t use lift when fire happens.
• Don’t smoking in the department and prohibit swinging acutely.
  
• Don’t touch the safety panel during shutting doors.
• Children need to be accompanied with adult.
• Press the alert call button of <bell> for help in case of trouble

And the winner is…

• Carrying cargo by lift rust make the gravity evenly and adopt the effective package.

Top notch.