It's Not a Language Problem... 不是语言的问题...

The toughest problems communicating in Beijing arise not when a foreigner can't speak enough Chinese to explain what you mean, but when your meaning is so foreign it can't be explained. It's not a language problem, it's a conceptual problem. Or, as one of my colleague's teachers told him on a painful day, "Your language is fine. It's your thought process that's wrong."

One example is the American who asked me to help him translate his request to return a good to a salesman on the street for his money back. He realized he'd been overcharged (by about 1000%) for an item he purchased that he suspected all along was counterfeit, but he had believed would at least be better quality. He believed product failure within 12 hours was sufficient reason for a return. He also believed the reason the vendor wouldn't comply with his request was my inability to explain it in Chinese. He was wrong on all counts.

Such miscommunication is understandable between a street vendor and a fresh-off-the-boat China newbie, I guess. I was much more surprised when it happened with a very with-it, educated, open-minded Chinese friend who speaks excellent English and often hangs out with Westerners. When I mentioned a fundraiser I attended for the 2007 Special Olympics World Games 特殊奥运会, which are going to be held in China, my friend said, "Ah, right, the 'Handicapped Olympics' 残疾奥运会."

I pointed out the term "special" in English - and in Chinese, for that matter - highlights the special qualities the athletes demonstrate in daily life and in competition. The word "handicapped," on the other hand, suggests being held back by something, when clearly athletes who train for a long time and come from all over the world to compete are not letting themselves be held back.

"Oh, there's nothing negative about the word handicapped," was the response, "It just means that their body is broken or they are weak in the head." I'm not particularly PC, but I couldn't take that definition any more than my friend could understand why it bothered me.

In general, any portion of the population that is markedly different from the other 1.4 billion people around here has a tough time. I was glad to see the enthusiasm at the fundraiser, as well as the other events in the leadup to the Special Olympics, which should increase awareness. The government has made some effort in this regard. On May 20, mobile phone customers in Beijing received a SMS blast message notifying us of the 17th annual National Help the Disabled Day (全国助残日), which is held on the third Sunday of May. The message encouraged Beijingers to consider the situation of disabled people in society. I'm sure all the international attention approaching the Olympics does not hurt the effort to shine some light on this aspect of human rights in China.

For more information about the 2007 Special Olympics, follow this link to the web site. The fundraiser, by the way, was to raise money for an website that will show results and live and archived streaming video of each athlete so friends and relatives can watch from anywhere in the world.

"Water goods" (水货) All Around...

I recently dealt with two electronics markets in Beijing: the cleverly named "Buy Now" (百闹) computer mall, whose name means "100 Computers" in Chinese (literally "100 brains", because the word for computer is "electric brain"); and the 2nd-hand appliance market, where every type of machine from the Atari onward rests in various states of assembly and disrepair. My goal was to obtain a replacement power cord for my Apple iBook G4 at a reasonable price. In the end, it turned out to be cheaper and more convenient to wait for my mother to send the replacement part from the States and to purchase a tiny little used laptop to hold me over until my Apple is functional again.

How could this be, you might be wondering? After all, these things are all made in China, right? Plus, one look around at the uber-connected Chinese youth (and older people too - even peasants use SMS text messaging), and you know there is no shortage of mobile, wireless, and other computing technology in country. But "Made in China" is not the same as available in China, and the brand name you see is not necessarily the brand name you get.

Most of my belongings are part of a free-trade life cycle: they were produced in China and sent to the US, and now they have returned here with me. But unlike immigrants, these goods likely never saw the light of day in their home country. Most goods for export are sent directly from production to shipping and stop only for customs inspection before heading overseas. Despite what vendors might say, the ubiquitous, inexpensive look-alikes of famous Western brands here are rarely, if ever, over-runs, mistakes, or genuine goods authorized for sale on the local market. They are usually completely counterfeit knock-offs, local products with a recognizeable brand's label slapped on. Those that are not entirely fake night be unauthorized runs made at the real factory with some of the real materials purchased under the table from a real supplier.

If you want to buy the real product, you can get it, but not cheaply - it's been exported and re-imported, so your price tag includes two directions of shipping and two countries' customs duties. And if you're not absolutely sure you're buying a genuine product, you'll always have the nagging feeling you paid a fortune for something that's only worth a few dollars. That was my experience searching for my power cord at Buy Now. Last week, I bought a power cord at an Apple Authorized Reseller stall there - one of only a handful of Apple stalls in a sea of HP, Dell, IBM, Canon, and local knockoffs of the same. I had to bargain hard to get the price down to almost $100 USD, still more than the $80 price on the Apple web site. I needed the cord, though, and I was willing to pay for a product I knew was genuine. You can imagine my frustration, then, when the precious power cord, worth more than I usually spend on a pair of nice shoes, broke within a week of purchase.

I returned to the stall and was told they would sell me a replacement for the same price. But why should I have to pay, I asked, when it's clearly a problem with your product? Since I hadn't specifically negotiated a guarantee at the time of purchase, I was out of luck on that front. This time, I insisted on one-year guarantee. "No possibility! 不可能！" I was told, "This product can only be guaranteed for three months." I happen to have learned from the Apple web site their products are guaranteed for a year, so I fought.

Eventually, the sales manager came back with the following solution, "This can be guaranteed only for 3 months, but we have a better one that can be guaranteed for a year, which is a bit more expensive." By a "bit" more expensive, he meant over twice the price. I hit the roof. I know there is "no possibility" that Apple makes two versions of an accessory, a still-not-so-cheap one that will break in three months and a ridiculously expensive one that will break in a year. The vendor explained that one was domestically produced, and one was "original," and of course the one I had bought the week before was domestic.

I have no idea whether the power cord I had previously purchased from them was a "domestically-produced" Apple product, a used item that had just reached the end of its lifespan, or a fake. The stall does carry genuine new Apple products, but that doesn't mean they don't deal other stuff on the side as well. All I knew for sure was, there was no way I wanted to pay these guys another $200 or more for a possibly unreliable version of an $80 product. What else could I do, though? Hardly anyone in mainland China uses Apple computers, and this was pretty much the only place in Beijing to buy accessories for them.

Possibly sensing impeding meltdown of my own not-so-electronic brain, my friend Mark offered a suggestion: what about the second-hand appliance market? You could buy a cheap computer to hold you over for the three weeks until you get the power cord from the States (Mark had recently done such a thing himself).

I had been to that market once before, to purchase a cell phone for a friend who didn’t speak much Chinese. On that visit, I learned that 2nd-hand was sort of a misnomer – there were plenty of brand new cell phones and other electronics to be had. When I asked one vendor if his phones were so inexpensive because they were second-hand, he looked affronted, "I wouldn’t sell you a used product!" he exclaimed with pride, "It’s 水货 'water goods'! Quality guaranteed."

"Water goods" means smuggled goods, which slip into the country over water without stopping at the ports, or looking at it another way, flow through every corner of the country like water. There is virtually no social stigma against owning smuggled goods, any more than fakes. Another time, my hairdresser commented that the price I spent on my own cell phone was so cheap, it must be smuggled. "No way! I cried, I bought it at the China Mobile store, I wouldn’t mess with smuggled goods!" He looked surprised at my outburst and grumbled, "Well, it was a good bargain anyway."

I don’t have to get into the many reasons reasonable foreigners, especially diplomats, would want to avoid purchasing smuggled goods or counterfeits. The thing is, in many cases, illegitimate is the only option. The water goods, along with their their counterfeit and pirated brethren, flood the market so thoroughly, they drown any legal, genuine products. Frugal, recently-risen-to-middle-class consumers easily become accustomed to the products and low prices, making it extraordinarily difficult for the legitimate producer, who invested heavily in research to develop the product, to compete and turn a profit.

One US movie company, for example, opened a store in Beijing selling DVDs for around $2, almost the same as a DVD on the street, specifically to encourage Chinese shoppers to buy the real thing. But even at the same price, the genuine DVDs were not worth the effort to walk past dozens of guys selling high-quality pirated movie, software, and music DVDs from all brands and all countries, just to go to a store that sold only one label of American movies. I understand the store has since closed.

On this visit to the second-hand appliance market, I took care to browse at only stalls with old, beat-up looking products, both because I wanted something cheap and because I wanted to make sure I was getting truly a second-hand, not smuggled or pirated, product.

I doubted it would be worth the time and money to get an additional computer instead of a power cord. The idea sounded so ridiculous and wasteful, there must be a Chinese four-character idiom to describe it. But it turned out not to be that ridiculous at all. After less than a half hour of looking, I found a slim, light, mini-laptop for the same price as the 3-month guarantee power cord at the Apple Reseller. It was fairly old, and pretty basic, but it can do what I need – word processing in Chinese and English, and of course wireless and DSL internet access. I noticed it had Windows ME and asked why it didn’t have Windows XP as the sticker in it indicated. "Oh, ignore that, I just put it there to make it sell better," said the vendor. Well, at least he’s honest – sort of.

So I am blogging at this very moment from my new gadget, no match for my beloved iBook G4, but certainly functional. I researched the model and found it was originally made strictly for the Japanese market, it’s pretty old, and the operating system cannot be changed from Asian languages to English, all of which makes me feel like the price I paid was about right. If I were a Japanese person buying this new several years ago, this would have been a pretty hot item. Now, it simply fills my requirements: genuine, not smuggled, and capable of going online.

Kenya - Nairobi

"Kairibu Kenya!" exclaimed the driver who collected me from Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, "That means welcome to Kenya."

When he pointed to the car, I immediately stepped around to the front right side and plopped myself down into... the driver's seat. Oops! Former British colony, wrong-side drive. On the drive to Melissa & Tim's house, navigating some fairly heavy traffic populated by drivers who steer their car in the same winding, fast-stop-slow-fast-slow way they might walk down a country lane while chatting with friends, I wondered a couple of times why the driver was shouting, "Use your head!" to passengers in the other cars. Then I remembered, right-hand drive - those are the drivers.

"Hakuna Matata," laughed the driver, "do you know what that means?" I hesitated. I do in fact know what that means, but wouldn't it sound condescending, or maybe just plain silly, to say, "Sure, I know your language because I heard it in a Disney movie?" So I responded in the negative, to which the driver replied, surprised, "Oh! Really? Most Americans who come to Kenya know that Kiswahili word already. It means 'no problem'."

The traffic in Nairobi's city center was pretty terrible. Beyond to the aforementioned liberal interpretation of speed and lanes, the car exhaust was overwhelming, even more so than in Beijing. As we crept past Uhuru (Freedom) Park, it occurred to me that implementing any kind of emissions limits in third-world African countries like Kenya would mean completely halting any economic progress. Not many people can afford their own automobiles, and even fewer can afford cars that are less than a decade or have any functioning emissions control system. Most people get where they need to go in old, beat-up matatus (we called them bush taxis in The Gambia), 6- to 10- passenger vans into which they cram as many people as possible. Since the drivers don't spring for seat belts, or often even new seats, it unrealistic to expect them to purchase an ecologically responsible exhaust system, the cost of which would price their taxi out of the market.

The other horrific aspect of driving safety in Nairobi is not the drivers, but the carjackers. The State Department Travel Warning for Kenya reads:

"Violent criminal attacks, including armed carjacking and home invasions/burglary, can occur at any time and in any location, and are becoming increasingly frequent, brazen, vicious, and often fatal."

I knew that, but somehow I hadn't imagined what the reality of living in such a city would be like. My first evening there, as we drove home from a friend's house - a friend who had recently convinced the men who carjacked him not to drive to his house, fearing a lethal gunfight between the carjackers and his security guards - my hosts schooled me in the best protocol for surviving such an attack. (Arms over head and shout very loud, "Whatever you want you can have. I'm unbuckling my seatbelt." Don't resist.) Another colleague was carjacked during my stay in Kenya. Even people with SUVs who live in safe neighborhoods don't visit their friends in other safe neighborhoods after dark because they aren't sure of their safety on the road between.

The effect of this stress on a diplomat's well-being and, I believe, judgment on the job, is one of those costs of Foreign Service life that are extremely difficult to calculate. US diplomatic housing compounds and many other places Westerners frequent here are certainly safe, there are many relatively safe (but not carjack-immune) places outside the capital, and a US diplomat's statistical chances of getting carjacked in Kenya still stand at less than 2%. Moreover, most carjackings are not fatal. But I can just imagine my mother's state of mind if I were living in a place where I had a 2% (and rising, unfortunately) chance of being even a not-fatal carjacking victim. I don't know how people who have spouses and children can possibly concentrate on work in such an environment. Even more amazing to me is the fact that officers remain at post, including with families, after being carjacked. This kind of threat is one thing at a danger pay or unaccompanied post, but I wonder how many Americans are aware that USG bureaucrats and their families serve under such conditions in places other than the well-known war zones and high terrorism threat countries.

One sad result of the safety situation, in my opinion, is that foreigners miss out on the local culture. My tour in The Gambia was unbelievably rewarding in large part because there was no escaping the fact of where I was. I lived in a luxurious, huge, pink house with tile floors, three balconies, a pool, a kitchen that would make any cook drool, and plenty of other amenities. As soon as I walked out of my compound, though, I was on a dirt road next door to a half-built cement house full of squatters, chickens, and trash. Gambians were highly curious about foreigners in their community and equally willing to include us in local gossip and stories, if we had the interest - which I did. It was both safe and socially acceptable to go to a "local" bar, attend a gathering at a Gambian's home, or just hang out for a long while a market stall if I happened to be there when the lunch time food bowl appeared. Without that connection to the community and constant cultural education (often more properly termed "entertainment!"), it might have been a long two years in an isolated place with only a few friends. It saddens me that some US diplomats will serve somewhere like Nairobi, where they experience a high degree of inconvenience and danger paired with very little interaction with locals, and they will likely decide not to return to Africa at all.

I do not mean to imply that my experience in Nairobi was entirely negative, nor do I want to whine on behalf of my very professional colleagues there. This introspection is completely peronsal: my tour in The Gambia was so rich and left me with such a strong desire to return to Africa, that I can't help comparing the two experiences and considering how they both will affect any future plans to work there.

As I mentioned earlier, there are safe places to go in Nairobi, and I saw a number of them. Before going to the elephant orphanage at David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, which I mentioned in my earlier post, we stopped by the Langata Giraffe Centre. Since we had not yet been on safari, this was my first up-close experience with giraffes - and boy did we get close! Not only can you feed the giraffes, but staff encourage visitors to rest a food pellet on their upper lip and allow a giraffe "kiss" you by taking it from you with his or her tongue. On top of pictures I know she has of some of my less elegant behavior in Shanghai, Melissa now owns photographic
evidence of a female named Daisy giving me tongue. It's a good 4 years until my security clearance needs renewing...

The giraffe center had Rothschild giraffes, a different breed from the Reticulated Giraffes we would see on safari. They have different markings, but they are all beautiful creatures. For more pictures, follow the photo link below:

Nairobi 4/27- 5/4

Learning Linguistics from a Masseur

One joy of living in a place that is wildly different from home, is that you can learn a lesson anywhere you go, at any time. One lesson I learn every time I go for a massage, for instance, is that I should never wait such a long time (10 whole days!) before going to a massage. At the incredibly low cost ($5-$20/hour depending how deluxe you go), it's really ridiculous not to treat my muscles to a massage at least once per week.

Recently though, my favorite massage professional at Bodhi, #93, also treated me to an explanation of the origin of the various Chinese dialects.

Here's a little background for those who need it (if you don't need background, skip down 2 paragraphs; if you're a linguist, my apologies in advance - I'm not a linguist, and this is just a simple explanation for those of us who are not experts). The official language of the People's Republic of China is Mandarin, a northern dialect. Since this is the language officially designated by the state for everyone to speak and learn, it is also referred to as 普通话 pu3 tong1 hua4 “ordinary speech," or 国语 guo2 yu3 "national language." However, there are anywhere from 7 - 17 different language or dialect groups in China, depending who's counting, and each of those groups has multiple dialects. Whether they are dialects or languages and how many exist are apparently matter of some heated debate among people who study these things, but I am not one of those people. Suffice to say this: there is more than just your favorite noodle shop's Chinese language out there.

The different Chinese languages are written with the same Chinese characters, but they all sound very different. Cantonese is the one you hear in Kung Fu movies that sounds like everyone is angry, even when they're not; Mandarin doesn't sound quite so angry, but each syllable is very distinct; Shanghainese flows much more smoothly and, to those of use who hear both often but understand neither, seems to have a rhythm more like Japanese than Mandarin; etc. So if you write a word in Chinese on a piece of paper in front of a bunch of Chinese people from different places, they will all think of the same meaning, but if one of them said the word out loud the others might not understand him at all.

My masseur covered the reason for these disparate pronunciations in a brief lecture of less than 5 minutes, all while working the lactic acid out of my shoulders.

Per #93, the mutual intelligibility/ unintelligibility of Chinese dialects is dependent on the similarity of the foods the speakers eat. In Sichuan, #93's home province, hot red peppers characterize most dishes. Thus, Sichuanese speakers can understand people from Hunan and Guizhou, the nearby provinces where spicy food is also popular, even though their dialects are a little bit different. (Note the Chinese saying 四川人不怕辣，湖南人辣不怕，贵州人怕不辣, "Sichuanese don't fear spice; Hunan folks - spicy, don't fear it; Guizhou people fear un-spicy.") Shanghainese people, on the other hand, eat a lot of sweet food and are unique in China for how many sweet dishes they like; not surprisingly, almost no one can understand Shanghainese, especially people from Sichuan. Got it?

After hearing this explanation, I realized it makes a lot of sense that I learned Chinese, because my family all enjoys Chinese food and we ate it often when I was growing up. Moreover, the Chinese food we ate was "Americanized" Chinese food, and I speak Chinese with an American accent! Just imagine if I had eaten dumplings every day...

The Dolls Formerly Known as Friendlies

Below are the 2008 Olympic Mascots, the FuWa (福娃). Fu (福) means good fortune, and Wa (娃) means baby or doll, making these "little good fortune babies," indeed a good choice for Olympic Mascots.
There are a lot of reasons why the Fu Wa (there are no plurals in Chinese, so it's one FuWa, two FuWa) make good mascots, and a lot of reasons why FuWa is a great name for them. Before I get to that, though, I'd like to ask, do you think FuWa is a better name than "The Five Friendlies"?

You see, the FuWa were originally announced with an English name, the Five Friendlies. Each Friendly had a different name, and they represented the Olympic flame plus four popular China animals (the fish, the panda, the chart-topping Tibetan antelope, and the summer sleeper hit swallow bird).

If you go to the official 2008 Beijing Olympics website and click on "Image & Look" then "mascot" now, the name Five Friendlies is nowhere to be found, and the good fortune babies are called only, "FuWa." Someone on the Chinese Olympic Committee realized (imagined?) that foreigners - foreigners, mind you, not Chinese people with hastily acquired Olympic English skills - would misread the word Friendlies, which has a very positive meaning, as Friend Lies, which has a decidedly negative meaning. China would not want to be the Friend Who Lies, nor would it want to propagate the belief that Friends Lie, thus the name had to be changed. Apparently, they did not consult any foreigners on this change, since foreigners certainly would have pointed out the potential mis-readings of a name that starts with F-U.

So, the Friendlies are now the FuWa, still a group of small children each representing a different animal/ symbol and the color of a different Olympic ring. I have to say, although I think the thought process of ditching the name "Friendlies" is laughable, I think the result is a good one: the Olympic mascots for the Beijing Olympics should have a Chinese name, or at least a name that reflects China in some way.

In case anyone out there doubts the Chinese are capitalists to the core, I assure you, these dolls were made to sell. Not only are they charming, but there are five different ones, forcing the enthusiastic consumer to purchase five times as many products. Some previous Olympics have had bi- or tri-mascots (Athena & Phevos from Greece, for instance), but leave it to the Chinese to have the most ever. I believe there are also plans to have a mascot image for each sporting event, for instance, YingYing the Tibetan antelope playing table tennis, and Nini the swallow kite diving for a volleyball. I know I will not be able to resist buying several (how on Earth to choose between HuanHuan, the Olympic flame whose name also means "welcome", and JingJing, the panda with a lotus flower on his head?).

I definitely recommend anyone with even the slightest interest check out the Beijing Olympics official mascot page. There is a lot of information there, and like so many things in China, a mind-boggling amount of reflection went into the design for these little stuffed animals. The selection of their names really illustrates a lot about Chinese language and culture. Most notable:

• Each FuWa has a double character name: Beibei, JingJing, HuanHuan, YingYing, NiNi. Chinese love 2-character words, especially nouns, and particularly when referring to cute or familiar things. Thus, "Thank you" is "xie xie" 谢谢, a repetition of the same word, because to just leave a single "xie" hanging out there would be somehow incomplete, lacking. Likewise, nicknames are rarely ever a single-character name. Addressing a friend with a single word might sound harsh. Soft, round, 2-character words sound much nicer to the Chinese ear.
• Take the sound of the first character of each of the FuWa's names and string them together, and you get the sentence, "Beijing welcomes you!" The actual characters don't have that meaning (the "bei" in BeiBei the fish's name for instance, actually means treasure or baby, not "north" as in Beijing), but as I mentioned when talking about tigers, a symbol that looks or sounds like the real thing is often as good as the real thing in Chinese traditions.
  
• The stringing together of the FuWa's names also brings up another point: Chinese often refer to groups of things or complex concepts by abbreviating each component from it's 2- or 3-character word to it's first character. For example, the administration and policies of President Hu JinTao and Premier Wen JiaBao is called the Hu-Wen Xin Zheng (胡温新政): Hu 胡 is short fo Hu JinTao, Wen 温 short for WenJiaBao, xin 新 means new, and zheng 政 is the first character in the words for government, politics, and policy. So four syllables represent several concepts and a very long English phrase.
  

As Professor Yu, my first Chinese teacher, would say, "Chinese is so elegant, so logical!"