My New Favorite Book

Some months ago I found a book in the school library. The Longman's Visual Dictionary of Chinese is a treasure trove of laughs. I tried to find my own copy on the internet, but to know avail. So I have instead scanned a number of pages, and I will share them with you, dear reader, whenever I feel like it.

The pages cover almost an amazing range of topics. Some are absurdly specific. Most are useless. To say more would be to deprive you of the joy of discovery, so you will just have to wait until I make a new post. If, however, are visiting a Chinese machine shop anytime soon, and really need to know how to say "geared headstock" or "wheel flange" anytime soon, just let me know.

In the meantime, I will start with a page that teaches you necessary vocabulary that is much closer to home: underwear and baby clothes.




Now as you can see, there is a wide variety to choose from. All appear extremely uncomfortable. By the way, this book was published in Hong Kong in 1997, which was the year of the handover from Great Britain. I suspect that they just recycled pictures from some older book, however there are a few pages that almost appear to be calculated insults of the mainland Chinese as backwards and provincial. More on that later. The resolution on the page is good enough to see all the illustrations and text clearly if you click on the image. I will highlight just two.

This was my personal pick for "most uncomfortable looking underwear" (unless it is number 13). In fairness, I would hazard a guess that no one in China under the age of 75 is wearing anything remotely similar.




Now if the picture above looks like something Medieval, what you see below is actually still widespread in China. "Widespread", of course, is a very bad pun in this case, because that is exactly the pose in which you see a whole lot of Chinese toddlers, as their mothers hold them over gutters, tree wells, and sometimes the middle of the sidewalk. Sometimes the toddlers just decide to take care of business on their own schedule. A friend of ours got peed on by a little boy standing in a shopping cart next to her in line at a store.




Disposable diapers are for sale in the stores these days. They probably remain too expensive for most Chinese. If you want proof that bare baby butts are still a common sight in China, here is a photo for you. In case you are wondering, the front of those pants is just as wide open as is the back.



Occasionally, I feel guilty for taking surreptitious pictures of people, but they certainly don't have any compunction about doing it to us, so I guess it is all fair.

Finally, this one reminds me of another little saying we have around here: "China doesn't have a five-second rule".

Think about it.

Take That, Chinese Net Nannies!

You may be aware that in three weeks it will be 20 years since one of the major events of modern Chinese history. I shall refer to this as the anniversary of The-Square-That-Must-Not-Be-Named. The Chinese authorities, of course, would prefer that no one remember the anniversary at all, but barring that, I suppose that they are trying to make do with the Must-Not-Be-Named part. If there is one word that you just can't say in China, that is it.

There are elements of absurdism in this. Several weeks ago I read a report from a China blogger that signs for public squares were quietly being taken down around the country.* It was surmised that the rational was that, if you keep people from thinking about the "Square" part, they won't think of the "Must-Not-Be-Named" part, and that will keep them from thinking about all that unpleasantness with protesters and tanks.

When we were in Beijing two weeks ago, we had to get our bags searched just to go into The-Square-That-Must-Not-Be-Named. I don't know if that is a normal thing, or if it is just precaution for the anniversary. What I do know is that some time ago I started to say to people that we could all expect to see a whole lot more net censorship as the day approached.

Unless we just had a huge coincidence, it appears I was right. You may be aware of "The Great Firewall of China", a partly derisive term for the sporadic efforts of the Chinese government to censor and restrict Internet access. On Friday, May 15th, access to popular blog hosting services like Blogspot (which I use), Wordpress, Typepad, etc., suddenly disappeared. So far, outlets like Facebook are still working, but I expect that a lot more sites will go down over the next couple weeks. Nevertheless, enforcement is completely capricious and arbitrary. For example, as far as I can tell, news of the newly published memoirs by Zhou Ziyang, the one government official who sided with the protesters (and spent the rest of his life under house arrest for doing so) has not been restricted at all.

Of course, you might note that I am writing on a Blogspot hosted blog right now.... That is because I just purchased a subscription to a VPN (Virtual Private Network). Given what they just did for me, I don't at all mind giving the good folks at Witopia.com a free plug. The service costs $40 a year, and it routes me through an IP address in Washington D.C., making it appear to the Chinese authorities that my computer is located there, not here.

It might seem obvious that the Chinese government would move on to blocking access to VPN services like this, but they don't really, and here is my theory. I think they don't care. The Internet is a very unruly beast, and they can't control the whole thing anyway. However, they can make things difficult, and they can keep people reminded that they are paying attention. Also, subscription sites like this one are not an option for a lot of Chinese anyway. A typical schoolteacher, for example, makes around $500 a month, which makes even a $40 subscription prohibitive. Not to mention that I don't know if they have a way to make the payment with a Chinese credit card.

There is also the fact that the Internet enforcement is sporadic. Based on some quick research of mine, this is at least the third time Blogspot has been blocked (the others were 2005 and 2007). So, rather than really make an effort to beat the system or plot revolution, people just wait for the rules to unexpectedly change again. It is like being a lab rat in a classic Skinnerian behavioral psychology experiment. Why should one have a plan when the results are random anyway? Just keep pushing that lever until your food pellet comes out, or your web page loads.

Nothing quite like random reinforcement to keep the lab rats occupied. Well, here is my own small revolution. Take That, Chinese Net Nannies!


The unknown "tank man" takes a stand on June 5th, 1989, on a street leading to Tiananmen Square.

Post Script: 18 hours later, and Blogspot is up and running again, sort of.... it is working, but all of the pictures are blocked, except that I found one blog that wasn't.

Like I said, random reinforcement!

P.P.S: 36 hours later, and Blogspot is down again. Why I outta.... Oo! food pellet!



* Note. It is some time later, and I wanted to clarify the comment made above. I am still quite sure that I read somewhare that the authorities were physically taking down signs for "squares", however, the closest I can find is a comment that it was speculated that they might take down signs. On that note, I have now included a link to a blog post by James Fallows of The Atlantic Monthly. I really need to branch out on my sources, because I think this is the third time I've quoted him.

I had a hard time finding this link for some reason, and I emailed Mr. Fallows with a question about it. He was gracious enough to reply. The following is a quote from his email to me:

On the “square” business, yes, here was my story: I appeared at both the Shanghai and the Beijing Literary Festivals this year. They had a very nice description of me in the program, picture, and all the rest. But one thing was different in my write-up and that of the other 30+ writers: I was the only one whose book wasn’t named. That was because (I was told by the person who produced the programs) they considered the title “Postcards from Tomorrow Square” too “sensitive.” You know, “Square” and all.

I asked the guy (a Brit) whether they planned to rename the Tomorrow Square building in Shanghai, or for that matter People’s Square, which takes up half the downtown. He said, “Don’t get me started…”

Miscellany

Some more photos that, considered individually, are not interesting enough to get their own blog entries.

The Suzhou train platforms. On the right is one of the high-speed (150+ mph) trains that runs the Shanghai to Nanjing line.

Left: Taken in Hangzhou. The ugliest outfit ever. It looks like it is made of dead Muppet babies. The purse is a nice touch.

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Right: Taken in Nanjing. The only American-style punk street tagging I have ever seen in China. I'm hoping it never catches on.

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If your Big Mac wasn't enough, treat yourself to a red bean pie next time you go to Mac do do (more or less how it is pronounced in Chinese).

Cover the kids' eyes

Okay, here's the deal. Because this is a family-friendly blog, I've been putting off this post for some time, but I'm going to go for it. Parents, you are at your discretion.

I'm throwing a bunch of little stories into this one, so I'm going to be rambling. Here we go...

One of the things one eventually starts to notice about China is how chaste everything is. You don't really realize it right away, because it isn't about what you see, but rather what you do not. Then finally, one day, you see a woman dressed like a typical American out on the town, and you are suddenly shocked to realize that she looks half naked! Chinese women are, by comparison, very modest dressers.

This goes for advertisements as well. For those of us like myself who have spent extensive time in Europe, the difference is especially jarring. Ah, France, the land of topless women on family television, postcards of sex acts on souvenir stands, and condom ads towering above you on billboards... By contrast, in downtown Suzhou I have noticed exactly one store with a display of a naked woman. It is very incongruous.

Traditional moral values are still very strong in China, and but I'm under no illusion that a good part of this is also enforced from above by the government. In fact, there has been a recent well-publicized crackdown on online pornography. I don't have enough cultural experience to give a real opinion as to how much if this is reflects a real difference in what actually goes on in the Chinese mind, or whether this just reflects reserve as to what gets displayed in public. However, I have done some reading that suggests a certain level of naivite about the "birds and the bees" (particularly in rural areas).

I do have one funny little anecdote I can tell relative to that. A co-worker was telling me that last year he suddenly began to get a lot of, shall we say, inappropriate e-mail spam. He went to talk to our tech person to see if she could do something about it. She is a very sweet and friendly, very competent young Chinese woman. My friend tried to explain what the problem was, but he just could not get her to understand. He kept offering variations of "bad pictures" and "dirty pictures", but she just didn't get it. Perhaps it was just a language barrier, but in the end, he decided that he didn't want to risk being the one to shatter her illusions about the world, and he just let the matter drop (eventually, the spam tapered off on its own).

So, with that as an only marginally relevant introduction, I have some pictures. I return to a theme on which I have posted before: the fact that so many Chinese produces are anthropomorphized in some way. This includes even household products that are not intended for children. Here is another example:

These are two humidifiers (which the Chinese love) for sale in a local shop. Aren't they just adorable? They look like they should have their own Saturday morning kids show, and maybe they do. The one on the left had me quite confused with the horns and all, until I finally made the connection that we are in the "Year of the Bull". That disappointed me, because up until that moment I had a better name for him, to which I was quite attached, which was "Satan's Humidifier".

So now I come to the two pictures that got me thinking about this post in the first place. They bring together the two threads of thoughts that I have been rambling about so far, the apparent gentle naivete, and the "cuteness" of consumer products.

Now.... I want to know, in all honesty, is there anyone out there that looks at these two products and does not think the same thing I do? Do the Chinese not notice, not care, or do they think it is funny?

Finally, now that I've brought up the whole topic, take a look at these packages of prophylactics.

Copulating while parachuting? That should come with a warning label of some kind.

Nooooooo! Not the Cheese!

Okay, maybe this isn't such a good place to live after all. Apparently the Chinese authorities have recently declared war on imported cheese. Who knows why? Do even the people enforcing it know why? James Fallows speculates that it might have something to do with the big milk contamination scandal from last fall. It would be a real stretch to connect the dots between those two, but it makes as much sense as any other explanation. It also reminds me of the big DVD crackdown last fall, which I wrote about here. For myself, I don't know anything I haven't read, although I did notice that the usual selection of imported cheeses was available last night at the grocery store (not that I bought any, the good stuff is far too expensive to be anything more than a very rare treat).

The more I learn about Chinese bureaucracy, the more it reminds me of that old legend about J. Edgar Hoover, the first director of the F.B.I. Supposedly, he once wrote "watch the borders" in the margin of a memo. Rather than question him and face his wrath, his underlings ordered increased surveillance on the U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada. Only later did they learn he was referring to the width of the margins on the memo itself.

So, did someone high up in Chinese customs and immigration enforcement say something to the effect of "don't cut the cheese", and everyone got confused? The world will never know, but by this time next month, it will probably all be forgotten.

China News Story: don't dis' your mistress.

Okay, so it is a tragic tale, but just try reading it without laughing. This short little story has got it all: sex, money, revenge, deceit, humiliation, greed, stupidity, suicide, murder (attempted), all around strange behavior (they all took a vacation together!?), and finally, a heaping helping of just desserts.

You just can't make this stuff up.

Post Script: March 2nd. I'm following some leads that indicate that perhaps you can make this stuff up. There are rumors that this story is a rumor. My skeptism started with the notion that they all got in the car together for some sort of group outing, which is a very hard scenario to imagine. Who would ever think that a major news outlet could fail to check its sources and run a story just because they hoped it was true? I am shocked! shocked I say!

I'll keep you posted.

Putting the "Fire" in Fireworks

Some of you may have caught this on the news. On the last day of the Chinese New Year celebration (15 days after it began), fireworks set off a devastating fire in a Beijing hotel. The hotel was under construction, which limited the loss of life to one unfortunate fireman. It could, have course, been much, much worse. As everything in this country is built by migrant workers, they always have housing on the job site. They live in these distinctive white and blue modular buildings. Sometimes, I have seen those buildings set up within a highrise building itself while it is under construction.

Here is some YouTube video of the fire.

I would like to clarify that when I wrote about the thrill of the Chinese fireworks in a celebratory tone, I was not blind to how dangerous such a pyrotechnic free-for-all can be. There is, despite what I implied, something to be said for having safety regulations. The Chinese (and Asian) obsession with fireworks is nearly psychotic. One other example is a particularly tragic/absurd incident that occured in a nightclub in Thailand. Who on earth doesn't realize it isn't a good idea to set off fireworks indoors? According to some reports, they were actually set off on a dinner table!

I'm not going to commentate on it further, but I will refer to a few links here. The first is from James Fallows, one of the editors of The Atlantic Monthly, and a resident of Beijing. It is his picture that I borrowed above, and I'll link you to his blog post here. His blog is wide ranging, but often includes really interesting commentary on China. As for the fire and fireworks, I'll just second what he has to say:

"it might be hard to believe that they set off a major building fire if you haven't seen how much ordnance is set off; it's all too plausible if you have"

Amen to that.

From his blog, you can follow out some additional links that give some other insight as to how the Chinese are reacting to this incident, which is quite interesting and enlightening.

Happy New Year

10 pm: It is the eve of the Asian New Year. The fireworks have been going since before nightfall, and intensifying by the hour. There are bursts to be seen from all windows, 360 degrees around us, across the entire city. They explode over, around, and between buildings. Distant lights flash over and behind the horizon of layered apartment blocks, which are made to appear more distant by the obscuring smoke. From our vantage on the 5th floor, nearby rockets often explode at eye-level, just outside our windows.

Men below are lighting fireworks with a shocking recklessness. With cigarettes dangling from their lips, they scurry to light new fuses among the skipping firecrackers and flying rockets lit moments before by their fellows. They carelessly lean over the rockets as they light them, as if they are tempting them to launch prematurely. A patch of grass was on fire, but now they have stamped it out.

The sharp crack of rockets mixes with the ripping roar of endless firecracker chains, and the occasional thunder of something really big. As the sound of each explosion fades, the silence is filled by the constant wail of hundreds of car alarms.

I was about to write that it would be cliche to say it sounds like a war zone, but that made me think of the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War. In 1968, the Vietcong invaded Saigon in the midst of the New Year's celebration. An excellent plan, as how could anyone possibly have heard them coming?

As for tonight, there is no sign that supplies are going to run out anytime soon. People must have been storing this things by the crate in their little apartments. We should be glad the entire building didn't explode.

Updates to come as we progress through the evening...

12:30 am: I said earlier that it would be a cliche to call this a "war zone". That was before it turned into a war zone. There was a lull between about 10:45 and midnight, but that was just set up time before the main event. At midnight, the entire city went off.

When I was a kid, back before America was fully in the grip of the "nanny state" culture which now tries to protect us from every possible danger (and lawsuit) and is inexorably turning us into a nation of coddled adolescents, we had great fireworks shows in Benson, Arizona.

It really wasn't the fireworks that were that great. Actually, the rockets themself were kind of lame; the best a small town could afford, I guess. It was the atmosphere that was special. Everyone would gather on the high school football field with blankets and picnic dinners. The show was put on by the local volunteer fire department. They didn't have much to work with, and they didn't seem to really know what they were doing. There was no showmanship or timing to the launches, they just kept lighting them randomly until they ran out. The great part is that the launches were no more than thirty or forty yards from the audience. The fireworks would burst at low altitudes, sometimes right overhead. The embers often were still burning strong when they hit the ground, and dads were always anticipating the need to move blankets before they hit, and stamp out fires after they did. It was kid heaven, and it didn't even last my entire childhood before the town didn't do it that way anymore, and it faded into history.

Tonight brought back those memories, and multiplied them tenfold. We didn't watch the fireworks, we were in the fireworks. They launched from every street, sidewalk, balcony, and rooftop in the city. They sometimes burst mere feet from high rise apartment buildings, with sparks ricocheting violently off of the windows. Sometimes they deflected off of trees, causing them to explode just overhead, or even within the tree itself, blowing leaves everywhere. The sound was a constant roar, this time we couldn't hear all of the car alarms. Smoke lay in heavy blankets, even drifting into doorways. Meanwhile, people wandered the streets everywhere, while dogs barked and stray cats ran all directions in panic.

I suggest you come to China for New Year's Eve someday. They probably still have a lot of years left before the nanny state takes over and makes sure that no one does anything dangerous (or fun).

We don't have any cameras that would capture the full effect of the chaos in the darkness, but I'm going to set my alarm so I can get pictures of the aftermath before the army of little-old-lady street cleaners beats me to it. It's a war zone of paper and cardboard out there.

8 am: The fireworks died out around 2 am. I don't know if they ever went away completely, or did so just enough that we could sleep. At 6 am, they began again in earnest, so now I'm up again.
Unfortunately, even by then I had missed the chance to take the pictures that I really wanted. I beat the little old lady street sweepers to the action (they were already working, but there is too much debris for them to even make a dent so far), but I forgot to account for the roving cardboard recycling guys. With their battered little bicycle/pick-up trucks, they are constantly on patrol for anything that they can get a bit of cash for, and they must have cleaned up all of the spent launch tubes and casings during the night.

I did go out and get a few pictures, and I'll post them later. There hasn't been any big explosions nearby for a while, and I'm going to try for some more sleep. John woke up just enough to move to the couch. Lee and the girls appear to have slept through it, and Janet (who is visiting) isn't up and about. I can't imagine she didn't wake up for a while, because there was a guy setting off rockets on that side of our building an hour ago, and as I've said, they often explode at window level for us.

Jan. 30th picture update, 9:15 pm:


Two scenes of the aftermath. The scene doesn't do the mess justice, because as I said, the cardboard recyclers had already done their work. Here is one guy still at it at 7:00 am. He was not the only one. In fact, they are all still going strong, as their are fireworks going even as I write. Last night was the 5th day after New Years, which is a holiday in its own right, and had fireworks almost as big as the first night.



One of the army of street-sweeping ladies, who was on the job by 6:30 am.

This last thing is a little video montage I strung together without too much care into it. I'll work on getting better video technology sometime. I tried to capture the fact that the fireworks were going on all around us, but it doesn't in any way capture the true feeling of close proximity. Note the constant flashes on the horizon, John yelling right at the beginning, and the guy shooting a Roman candle out of his window near the end.

note: video won't save right now.... I'll try again later.

Monday Miscellany

It's not actually Monday, I just thought I would try to get back in the groove of more regular posting. We went to Hong Kong for Christmas; partly for the vacation, and partly to be able to do American-style shopping for American-style goods, which we sorely needed. We now have a good handle on day-to-day shopping in China, but shopping for durable items like clothing, electronics, etc., is often just too daunting here. There are just too many variables and questions: Where do I find it? How much does it cost? Is it real or counterfeit? How does this item really compare to that item? I made half a dozen shopping outings for a laptop computer for Allyne's birthday, and then finally gave up (a friend helped my out by ordering one through the IT department at his corporate employer).

I may post some pictures related to Christmas, but Lee and I decided that I was going to post about Thanksgiving, and she would take Christmas. Therefore, I'll give her first choice of the photos and the stories. In the meantime, here are some more miscellaneous pictures:



A giant Buddha statue somewhere west of Suzhou. It seems to me that Buddha statues get built as sort of an municipal economy booster. If a place really needs to get some tourist dollars, what better than building a big statue and hoping for some piligrims? I don't begrudge it to them. In the same vein I actually admire how the town of Roswell, New Mexico, found a way to turn the whole "crashed flying saucer" tale into a way to actually have a viable local economy. Side note: the traditional fat "laughing buddha" of China is not Siddhartha, the Indian Prince and origin of Buddhist religion. The true Buddhas are always thin, to represent his self-sacrifice and freedom from the appetites of this world. There is a loose historical source for the fat buddha, which is something about a kind hearted monk of centuries past. I suppose you could loosely equate him to a Santa Claus figure.

I really amused myself with this next photo. It calls to mind on of those old cheesy/good monster movies, like the bronze statue monster in Jason and the Argonauts. Or perhaps the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters.

A spot on the shore of Tai Hu lake. (a redundancy for me to write it that way, since Hu means lake).

Seemingly every stinkin' consumer product in Asia has a cute face on it. It gets old sometimes.

Nature Calls

Western style toilets are becoming common in China. I'm not really sure how common, because I haven't had the chance to visit the homes of any local Chinese. The bathrooms in all of the modern apartments I have seen are equipped with familiar plumbing. In new areas like where we are, the plumbing can handle toilet paper. In older areas, there is always a little trash can by the toilet where you are expected to dispose of your used wipes.

There are, apparently, Chinese jokes about people trying to stand on a sit-down toilet. I doubt there is much reality to that. They are probably just jokes to make fun of country bumpkins. Then again, the great Mao Zedong himself refused to use western style toilets. When he made visits to Moscow, he would demand that a platform be built around the facilities in his hotel room, so he could stand above the toilet. Great visual image, that one.

Public toilets will typically have one stall with a western toilet, and the rest are squat toilets. That might seem like a nice concession to Westerners, but let me tell you it is not. If you think that you are horrified by the thought of using a squat toilet, it is only because you haven't personally been faced with the choice. At that moment of choice, you suddenly realize that they have done you a great service by giving you any option other than sitting on that thing.

So now it is time for your short quiz.

Question:

You are on vacation in China and you gotta to go. Which toilet do you use, Toilet A, or Toilet B?

If you are having any trouble choosing, let me give you a close-up view of Toilet B. This one is definitely worth clicking on the image so you can really see the details.

Yes, those really are maggots. And they are alive.

Answer:

:

None of the above. Avoid Chinese public toilets at all cost. Go before you leave. Go again before you leave. If you do have to go, go with the squatter. If, like our family, you like to go camping, you can just think of it like crapping in the woods. And if you are squeamish, you may want to consider not coming at all. Because in that case, your other options are: Don't drink water, don't eat, never get farther than half and hour away from home base, or bring a supply of adult diapers.

Little Sister is Watching You

I thought I would tell a little story that you all might find amusing. This one happened a few weeks ago, and it combines two facets of the daily life in China experience. First, the "hardware wars", my ongoing quest to find all of the little fasteners and doodads I would like to have to get our apartment set up properly. Second, the constant feeling that you are being stared at and talked about by scores of Chinese people.

I've explained that first issue in detail already, so I'll skip over it and go on to the second. We get watched all the time. Here in SIP (Suzhou Industrial Park) it isn't so bad, because there are a lot of Westerners. However, the deeper you venture into real China, the more intense it gets, and it is often no more than a street away. I've been riding my bike a lot, and whenever I leave the main streets and go into the side neighborhoods, what little Western Civilization there is here disappears instantly. People look at me like I'm the first gringo they've ever seen.

It can get a whole lot worse for others. We were in one local store with an African family in line in front of us, and they were stared at by everyone the entire store all the way to the door. Some friends of ours have a little girl with striking blue eyes, and she gets crowded by women wanting to pick her up. I hear the same kinds of stories from families that are very blond. Garden variety blondeness doesn't seem to attract much attention, but there are several Swedish and Finnish families here, and I can only imagine how much they get stared at (Lars and Ulrika, don't let that discourage you from visiting us).

Local people don't just stare at us, they stare at what we are doing. At the grocery store, they are often fascinated with what we are buying. I still don't understand much they say of course, but I'm learning. They will talk about what we are buying, how much we might be spending, etc. Friends have had incidents in which passers-by go so far as to dig through their shopping carts to see what they have in them.

Back to my story. One of the main hardware items I wanted to find were wall anchors. As I said before, even the Home Depot-type store doesn't have a hardware section. However, I have found that a few items of hardware are scattered throughout the store, placed with other items with which you might need to use them. That is the way I finally found some wall anchors, which were inconspicuously hung on a peg near some shelf brackets. I've since bought several packages, just to keep them on hand.

Chinese shopkeepers and cashiers can be real busybodies, and it is not unheard of for them to arbitrarily decide that you don't actually need to buy a specific something. An extreme example of this happened to a music teacher friend, who failed in an attempt to purchase an accessory for a musical instrument, simply because she couldn't convince the owner that she had one of those instruments at home. I've heard other stories from friends of not being allowed to purchase the last of an item! With such scenarios in mind, I bought my wall anchors only two packages at a time, as I didn't want them to think that I was depriving someone else who might need them for the shelf brackets they were specifically placed next to.

The last time I bought some wall anchors, I happened to also be purchasing some "floating" wall shelves, for which the mountings are invisible once they are installed. I had put the shelves in my cart first. When I picked up my two packages of wall anchors, a store employee happened to be right there. From the moment I touched the packages, it was clear that this small young woman was not at all satisfied with my selection. She really wanted to say something, and she continued to follow me from a distance as I went through the store.

Finally, I passed again by the same spot where I had picked up the anchors, and she made her move. She said something long and complicated that included the word "no", and then she reached into my cart and picked out the anchors and put them back on the peg!

I politely smiled, and I took them off again, saying in English that yes, I did want them. She took them out of the cart and put them on the peg again. This time, she reached into my cart and began to unwrap the shelves. I realized at this point what she was up to. She was trying to show me that the shelves already had anchors included.

I smiled, and took the wall anchors from the peg again. This time I kept them in my hand, which completely flumoxed her. By this time, however, a second, older woman had approached, and the younger woman began to explain the situation to her with a staccato urgency. With the assumption that the older woman was being dragged in because she understood at least some English, I said "I understand, I want to buy these for something different".

The older woman looked at me. The younger woman looked at her. Then, without warning, the older woman reached up and gave the girl a solid "you idiot" slap to back of the head. She said something, and then shuffled away shaking her head and muttering to herself.

The girl gave me a big sheepish grin with a shrug, and then slinked away.

I made it home with my wall anchors.

Chinese DVDs

I've been thinking about this new post for some time. It will take me a lot more work than most, but I just spent 90 minutes choosing and scanning the pictures for it, so I'm ready to go.

We've been buying quite a few DVDs here. There are barely any movie theaters, and they typically don't show any English subtitles (not that we have been to one to see for ourselves). However, there are DVD shops everywhere.

Well, they were everywhere at first. Then, they all shut down for several weeks. From some expat friends who are married to locals, I finally heard that there was a big police crackdown. Apparently, Suzhou received a government recognition as a model city of some sort, so their was a huge push to crack down on illegalities, both large and small. That was also why there was so much traffic enforcement at our nearest intersection.

For a while, there were guys out selling DVDs streetside off of temporary stands. Now all the shops are back in business. Obviously the shops were able to wait out the cops.

The DVDs are all, by definition, pirated. One could have ethical qualms about that if one wished, but there is literally nothing else to buy. A typical single movie costs 10 RMB, or about $1.50. A boxed set for a television show might cost anywhere from 70 to 150 RMB. Video games, buy the way, are even cheaper. Except that only about one in four will actually work.

The quality varies wildly, although it is often better than you would think. We have only purchased one that was just filmed in a theater with a camcorder, the movie 10,000 B.C. The movie was so bad that there wasn't much a bad pirating job could do to make it worse.

Despite being pirated, there has often been quite a bit of work put into the packaging. However, the packaging is photoshopped and cobbled together in truly bizarre ways. You now that old joke about enough monkeys at enough typewriters would someday write a novel? Maybe they would just produce a pirated DVD. It is better to show than to explain, so without further ado, I give you two items of evidence.

Exhibit A: Battlestar Galactica.

When I was a kid, the premiere of the original Battlestar Galactica was cut off so that President Jimmy Carter could give a speech. If there had been suffrage for pre-teen boys, his 1980 loss to Ronald Reagan would have been even worse (no, that doesn't count as talking about politics).

In any case, if you haven't ever watched it as an adult, the old show really stinks. It isn't as wretched as Buck Rogers in the 25th century (Lee and I once ordered it from our Blockbuster Online account back home to try and watch with the kids, it is worse than you can imagine), but it is bad.

However, this new Battlestar Galactica is really good, except that we had to buy it four times. In the first three sets I purchased, it was missing half of the second season. Apparently the pirates even pirate the pirates, because the copies were all coming from the same bad source.

Looking at a pirated DVD packages is a lot like one of those "Find everything wrong with this picture" features in the newspaper. So if you want to study it and see how many problems you can spot before I go on, by my guest.

Here are some of the more notable anomalies on this package:

Item 1: The front cover photo collage.

This truly is a photo of several of the principal cast members from the show. However...

The background image is taken from a completely different sci-fi TV show: Stargate Atlantis

and this section is from Star Trek

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Now we move on the back cover

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Item 2: The Reviewer Quotes

I'm quite sure that Battlestar Galactica is neither a "Tween Comedy" nor a horror movie. I'm also quite sure that there is not a city called "Geiroit". I'm doubtful that San Francisco has a newspaper known as the "Chronich".

Item 3: The Extra Features Box

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And this is obviously taken from yet another completely different movie. This sort of thing is extremely common on DVD packaging here. Maybe they think no one is going to read the fine print, so why bother making it match?

Exhibit B: Iron Man

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Once again, the packaging looks quite normal at first glance. However, study it closely...

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Item 1: The Reviewer Quote

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This time it isn't actually a review quote at all, just some random text that was cut-and-pasted off of IMDB, a movie info website. Sometimes, you can actually find bad reviews used on the cover, literally saying "This movie sucks".

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Item 2: The Proof of Purchase

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Maybe there is a market for counterfeit DVD proofs of purchase. Can I redeem these for a plush toy or something?

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Item 3: The Aspect Ratio description

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I always check to make sure I'm buying movies widescreen. When I taught high school and sometimes used movie clips to illustrate a point, I would invariably have a kid complain that the top and bottom were cut off. I would try to explain that it fact, to make a full-screen movie, they "panned and scanned", cutting off the sides of a widescreen movie. Some of the dimmer kids never could get the concept. However, in this case, they would have been right..

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A scene from Iron Man, in which Gwenyth Paltrow's chest talks to some guy's chin.

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As you can see, for this disc they took a full screen version (which was already cropped) and then literally chopped off the top and the bottom to make it "widescreen".

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Conclusion:

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Some of this is just typical Chinese bad English. Some of this is just lazy photoshopping over the top of a previous package. But I am convinced that some of this actually has to be intentional. One example that I don't have to show you is a Battlestar Galactica sets that I didn't buy (I'd already bought two at that point, and I wasn't going to buy another just for laughs). The title logo looked exactly the same, except that it was spelled GALACTIGA. Putting together a finished logo like that was not just a matter of typing, and it would have been much more work than just cutting and pasting. I think that there are guys out there amusing themselves by putting stupid things on DVD covers.

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Either that, or I'm back to the monkeys and typewriters explanation.

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Safety First

Last week I posted photos of the guy spidermanning the outside of a high rise apartment building installing an air conditioner. That is just the tip of the iceberg. There are lot of really good ways to hurt yourself in China. Uneven stairs, random holes, protruding metal... they are everywhere. On the one hand, it is refreshing to see a place that obviously hasn't succumbed to the American legal culture of litigation and paranoia. On the other hand, I'm not looking forward to the day that I forget to look for the sharp end of the parking shelter down by the shopping center that is exactly at the height of my forehead. When it happens, I'll try to have my camera on me, so I can give you a good posting about Chinese hospitals.

So here are three hypothetical scenarios for how you could really get hurt around here. OSHA was invented for a reason.


Let's say you are driving your car, which you are so proud of, down to Rainbow Walk to watch the fireworks on National Day. You feel very lucky to have found a parking space on the sidewalk. In your excitement, you jump out of the door without looking down. Hopefully you have a date with you, because otherwise it might be hours before anyone realizes that you are missing. (Low photo quality on this one, I only had my cell phone with me).

Let's suppose you are a city that is going places in the New China economy, and there is lots of construction that needs to get done quickly. Still, you can't afford to close all the roads, or commerce will be adversely affected. Solution? Just let the people and the machines live happily together.

So, you are a young communist-capitalist, out with your friends in your new Buick, which you have proudly decorated with pictures of Mickey Mouse. You are driving down the road, listening to decadent Western music, at a reasonable and prudent 150 km/hr. Just make sure you pay attention to any hazards near the road, or in it...

A note:

I'm sure that some people would look at that last photo and think it was photoshopped. It is very real. I took it about a quarter mile down the road from the previous picture. Obviously the locals know that it is a construction zone, because there is virtually no traffic midday on a Saturday. Still, there are no barriers, and no signs. The roadbed has been moved, but it seems that they have finished the road before going back to move the utility pole.

The picture invites a "man, those people are stupid" sort of ridicule that I want to distance myself from. If the hell-bent ambition for progress leads to weirdness like this, it is also what gave me a job here. I keep reading posts on news forums calling the Chinese "our enemies". Can't the regular people at least get paved roads and cholera-free tap water before they have to be the bad guys? This country is being very good to me, and that is why it is the only photograph that I have marked with a copyright note. I'm really hoping to never see it on another website used to the purpose of mocking the Chinese.