利大于弊
29. October 2006: My name must be really memorable. Someone sent me a parcel with no house number, flat number or postcode on it, and after it had been forwarded to the university and back, our postman remembered that a 刘凯琴 lived in this flat.
Stop shopping! The toll this week: Bag, 440RMB. Winter coat, 120RMB. Purple cords, 150RMB. Shoes, 478RMB. It's RMB, not leaves! Okay, you needed all that stuff, but - you hate shopping.
Going out for fennel baozi. I love huixiang baozi. If you don't know baozi: they're white steamed dough balls with tasty meat or vegetable-and-meat centres. Baozi is written 包子 - "bao1" even looks like the act of wrapping or containing. The baozi woman knows I always ask for 茴香包子 - "hui2" for "fennel" is a herbacious radical over the phonetic component 回 hui2, to return. I think it's cool. 茴。
My second guzheng lesson was good. It's hard to hear over the raucous accordion lesson next door, and the qins are always going out of tune, but I learned how to walk up and down the strings, how the notation works, and how to do vibrato. It's a grand resonant bit of log, the guzheng.
To get to my lesson every week, I go through the crowd of unemployed people waiting outside the employment office in the same courtyard. It's the only time in the week when I really want to be invisible, especially today as I was poncing about dressed as a gatecrasher (see below) in new girly flats. The "hellos" sound like hopeful sleepy people answering the telephone.
"Would you like to feature in our training video?" said the man on the street to me this morning. Actually he seemed to be lying in wait at the xiaoqu's entrance plaza. To quote Gary Larson, "Here come one now, Thog." He says he works for China Electric in Dalian (or something) and they want to teach workers how to answer calls in English. I'll probably be too busy but I gave him my number anyway. I told my mafia boss about it later and he reckoned I should tell such people to ask for his consent first. We had a good laugh about that.
The wedding. But first we went to his friend's wedding. Strike me down as a rude cow who can't be taken anywhere - I didn't make up a 红包/red parcel of money. There were conflicting views beforehand about whether I should or shouldn't, and in the end I went dressed as a gatecrasher. I'm uneasy about weddings as it is - I don't get nightmares, but my most irritating dreams are about weddings. Weddings and tidal waves. Anyway, I suppose it was quite fun, but I'd make a rubbish anthropologist: instead of studying the guests around me or even chatting to them much, I spent the whole time nervously drinking Sprite, talking to the Don and wondering how the bride managed to change from a white dress into a pink dress into a red dress in the space of an hour without messing up the orchids in her hair. White is a sad colour, traditionally - the white wedding dress is a recent import. Chinese weddings are culturally confused. This one had the Backstreet Boys on a loop in the background; is this Earth, she says dully.
On the traditional side, a wedding is still the assumption of the responsibility that's hitherto been the parents': the couple bowed three times to both sets of parents and undertook to support them and each other. If I had a kid, I wouldn't want it to bow to me at its wedding. That's if I had a kid who was traditional enough to get married in the first place. But Chinese weddings are no weirder than other weddings. I wonder about the 纳西族 Naxi minority in (I think) Yunnan, who are matriarchal and whose women don't keep their men in the same house, but are visited by them at night. (I haven't checked my facts here.) The kids have "uncles" instead of fathers, and the women raise the kids communally. I think they're also kind of polyandrous. Sadly, I always thought polygamy made better evolutionary sense than polyandry. So maybe large-scale polyandry would be good for population control. Oh, stop that girl from talking.
For those readers who expressed concern: no horse heads forthcoming at print time.
And about solar power: 虽然首先安装很贵，但是未来的益处很大。 I usually have sloppy usages, but the Godfather thought this was pretty good Chinese. Way to give LKQ ideas above her station! So I'm putting it here. "Although it's expensive to install at first, the future benefits are very great."
Stop shopping! The toll this week: Bag, 440RMB. Winter coat, 120RMB. Purple cords, 150RMB. Shoes, 478RMB. It's RMB, not leaves! Okay, you needed all that stuff, but - you hate shopping.
Going out for fennel baozi. I love huixiang baozi. If you don't know baozi: they're white steamed dough balls with tasty meat or vegetable-and-meat centres. Baozi is written 包子 - "bao1" even looks like the act of wrapping or containing. The baozi woman knows I always ask for 茴香包子 - "hui2" for "fennel" is a herbacious radical over the phonetic component 回 hui2, to return. I think it's cool. 茴。
My second guzheng lesson was good. It's hard to hear over the raucous accordion lesson next door, and the qins are always going out of tune, but I learned how to walk up and down the strings, how the notation works, and how to do vibrato. It's a grand resonant bit of log, the guzheng.
To get to my lesson every week, I go through the crowd of unemployed people waiting outside the employment office in the same courtyard. It's the only time in the week when I really want to be invisible, especially today as I was poncing about dressed as a gatecrasher (see below) in new girly flats. The "hellos" sound like hopeful sleepy people answering the telephone.
"Would you like to feature in our training video?" said the man on the street to me this morning. Actually he seemed to be lying in wait at the xiaoqu's entrance plaza. To quote Gary Larson, "Here come one now, Thog." He says he works for China Electric in Dalian (or something) and they want to teach workers how to answer calls in English. I'll probably be too busy but I gave him my number anyway. I told my mafia boss about it later and he reckoned I should tell such people to ask for his consent first. We had a good laugh about that.
The wedding. But first we went to his friend's wedding. Strike me down as a rude cow who can't be taken anywhere - I didn't make up a 红包/red parcel of money. There were conflicting views beforehand about whether I should or shouldn't, and in the end I went dressed as a gatecrasher. I'm uneasy about weddings as it is - I don't get nightmares, but my most irritating dreams are about weddings. Weddings and tidal waves. Anyway, I suppose it was quite fun, but I'd make a rubbish anthropologist: instead of studying the guests around me or even chatting to them much, I spent the whole time nervously drinking Sprite, talking to the Don and wondering how the bride managed to change from a white dress into a pink dress into a red dress in the space of an hour without messing up the orchids in her hair. White is a sad colour, traditionally - the white wedding dress is a recent import. Chinese weddings are culturally confused. This one had the Backstreet Boys on a loop in the background; is this Earth, she says dully.
On the traditional side, a wedding is still the assumption of the responsibility that's hitherto been the parents': the couple bowed three times to both sets of parents and undertook to support them and each other. If I had a kid, I wouldn't want it to bow to me at its wedding. That's if I had a kid who was traditional enough to get married in the first place. But Chinese weddings are no weirder than other weddings. I wonder about the 纳西族 Naxi minority in (I think) Yunnan, who are matriarchal and whose women don't keep their men in the same house, but are visited by them at night. (I haven't checked my facts here.) The kids have "uncles" instead of fathers, and the women raise the kids communally. I think they're also kind of polyandrous. Sadly, I always thought polygamy made better evolutionary sense than polyandry. So maybe large-scale polyandry would be good for population control. Oh, stop that girl from talking.
For those readers who expressed concern: no horse heads forthcoming at print time.
And about solar power: 虽然首先安装很贵，但是未来的益处很大。 I usually have sloppy usages, but the Godfather thought this was pretty good Chinese. Way to give LKQ ideas above her station! So I'm putting it here. "Although it's expensive to install at first, the future benefits are very great."