Uncategorized – China Bungles

Cow puns: they’re neat

February 14, 2021February 14, 2021 chinabungles_qz2pa2Leave a comment

As you are probably aware, the lunar year has recently turned, and much of Asia has celebrated the arrival of the Year of the Ox. Ox, or cow, is 牛 in Chinese, pronounced “nyo”. Remember this. It will be important later.

Some New Year decorations by the lifts of our building. No comment is offered.

The change of year provides a circuitous opportunity to introduce to this blog one of the (many) challenges presented by the Chinese language: the high density of homophones. Of course, homophones are hardly unknown in English (new and knew, air and heir, through and threw, and so on) but Chinese has a lot more of them.

A Chinese character usually represents a one-syllable word (e.g. 牛, nyo, cow, as we saw above).* From the various consonants and vowel sounds of the Chinese language, something in the region of 400 unique one-syllable sounds can be created (ignoring the effect of tones, of which more some other time). I’ve no idea how many unique English one-syllable words there are, but dawdling to the metro after a rather large brunch (i.e. not in the sharpest of mental states) I could think of 80 or so one-syllable words just beginning with b.

Chinese does also contain many polysyllabic words formed by combining two or more characters. For example, 牛油, phonetically nyo yo, is butter, literally “cow oil”, and 牛油果, nyo yo gwor, is avocado, literally “butter fruit”. Even considering this, though, it is not hard to see that with only 400 single-syllable sounds available, there are going to be quite a lot of homophones.

Residents of our community making calligraphic New Year posters.

For the student of Chinese, this can obviously be confusing. Just this morning B read me the following: wo zai ye bu hui likai ni, which I made sense of as 我在也不会离开你 and took to mean “I cannot leave you”. In fact, the second character was not 在 (zai, indicating an action currently in progress) but 再 (zai, again), meaning that the translation was actually “I will never leave you again”. B would like it emphasised here that she was reading me, for interest, a snippet of graffiti viewed via Chinese social media.

This sort of confusion is not insurmountable. Just as in English the context tells us which of a pair of homophones the speaker must mean – no-one sits around stumped wondering about the actions of the “air to the throne” – so too in Chinese. If my Chinese were better, I would have realised that my original interpretation of the sentence above wasn’t really grammatical.

Anyway, the prevalence of homophones means that Chinese lends itself to puns, and this leads us back to the Year of the Ox and the character 牛. English being the international language of commerce and academia, English language education is a big thing in China, so there’s no shortage of people with good English, and even more who can read a fair bit even if they can’t say much. This creates the opportunity for interlanguage puns, such as this one, which I’ve spotted all over Shenzhen of late: Happy 牛 Year!

Decorations near the main gate of our compound.

*B, who has been doing a lot of academic reading lately, points out that a character is usually a lexical unit rather than a word.

Machine people

February 7, 2021 chinabungles_qz2pa2Leave a comment

An interesting little cultural difference came to light yesterday. During my Chinese lesson, my teacher asked if my day would be busy, and I hesitated before replying. My list of chores included hoovering the apartment, and I didn’t know the verb for vacuum cleaning.*

He had to give some thought to how to best describe this action, so I admitted that actually I wouldn’t be vacuuming at all. Rather, I would be running the robot vacuum cleaner to do the job for me – but this seemed harder to express, and I was trying to avoid saying it.

On the contrary, said he, this is a much easier action to describe,** because China has largely skipped over hand-held vacuum cleaners, instead passing straight from brooms and mops to robot vacuum cleaners (which is not to say that brooms and mops are not still in common use, only that robot vacuum cleaners are much more common than hand-held vacuum cleaners).

Now this has been pointed out, I do struggle to remember seeing a single person using a vacuum cleaner in the 30 or so months we’ve been here. B and I speculate this leapfrogging transition might be due to some combination of three factors: the general absence of carpets; the limited storage space in many homes; and the fact that significant disposable income was not commonplace for very many years before robot vacuum cleaners became available.

I tried to take a nice picture of our own robovac to illustrate this entry, but getting an exciting image of a robot vacuum cleaner turns out to be quite hard.

*Mention of this specific lack of knowledge is not to suggest that my typical Chinese lesson is anything other than, essentially, a long string of hesitations.

**Floor is 地 (dì), to sweep is 扫 (sǎo), and to mop is 拖 (tuō). To sweep the floor is therefore 扫地 and to mop the floor is 拖地. Meanwhile, machine is 机器 (jīqì) and person is 人 (rén), with robot pleasingly being 机器人, machine person!

A robot vacuum cleaner is a 拖地机器人, a floor-mopping robot, and to express the idea of running a robovac, one might say 我用拖地机器人扫地, I use a floor-mopping robot to sweep the floor.

Stone towers of Dongguan, Yet well I love thy mixed, incongruous piles…

January 24, 2021 chinabungles_qz2pa2Leave a comment

Somehow, quite a long time has gone by between blog posts! It’s been an intense year or so work-wise. Hopefully things are calming down now and there’ll be a bit more space to talk about life here.

On a trip to a school construction site yesterday, I realised a long-held ambition to catch a glimpse of Huawei’s Ox Horn Lake campus in Dongguan, a lesser city bordering Shenzhen to the north. In contrast to just about all architecture for hundreds (thousands?) of miles around, the campus is not a glittering expanse of steel and glass, nor concrete, nor built in any more traditional Chinese style. Rather, it’s a collection of “villages”, each modeled on a different European city, complete with tram services between them.

It’s hard to articulate how strange and exciting it was, having not been back home for nearly two years, to see Christ Church, Oxford appear out of the blue by the side of the road. According to Wikipedia, the Germanic pile we spotted further on was a replica of Heidelberg Castle, and the tram is modeled on the trains that serve the Jungfrau Railway. The whole thing has the air of a film set or theme park, rather than the main research campus of one of the world’s largest communications companies.

We thought the part to the right was a replica of Christ Church Oxford’s Meadow Building. Not sure about the bit on the left.

It’s not open to the public, but apparently we are only two degrees separated from someone who works there, so perhaps a trip is not off the cards.

Our conveyance around the construction site. Nothing to do with the Huawei campus, but I thought it quite the wagon.

Beijing

October 7, 2019October 7, 2019 chinabungles_qz2pa2Leave a comment

We spent a large part of the summer holiday exploring China: Beijing, Qingdao, Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Guilin, and Yangshuo, all by 高铁 (bullet train).

I could write a vast tract about how much I love the comfort, efficiency, and value of China’s high-speed trains, but I don’t imagine anyone would be terribly thrilled by that, so I’ll settle for noting that at about time we were zooming from Shenzhen to Beijing, my brother was taking a train from the south of the UK to the north. Our journey was 1200 miles, his was 300; his took six hours, ours took eight; and ours was cheaper, even though he was wedged into second class while we were lounging in first.

In the vestibule of the high-speed train.

Anyway… Beijing.

We stayed in a tiny set of rooms in a hutong near the Drum Tower and the Bell Tower. The hutongs are the historic neighbourhoods of Beijing: vast warrens of alleys and courtyards between low grey-brick buildings. They’ve more of a feeling of community than the high-rise areas, with older people sitting and watching the world go by, and families running tiny restaurants in their front rooms.

Swathes of the hutongs have been razed and replaced with more modern housing. It’s easy see why this has been done – the hutongs are a profoundly inefficient use of space in a huge city, and awkward to upgrade with modern utilities – but to feel at the same time that the remaining ones are rather lovely, and hope they survive.

Beyond this, it’s hard to know what to say of Beijing. It’s a city of 25 million (!) and we were only there for five nights. We visited various cultural relics (the city has no fewer than seven UNESCO world heritage sites) and other parks and such. They were all splendid to varying degrees, and all unbearably warm, but I’ve nothing original to report about any of them.

What does perhaps bear comment is how very safe we felt in Beijing.

Actually, that’s misleading. Really, what bears comment is how safe we have felt in our daily lives in China generally. It struck us powerfully early on, but I hesitated to write about it for fear of over-extrapolating from life in Shenzhen. Now we’ve taken in nine quite different cities, it seems reasonable to conclude that Shenzhen is representative of quite a lot of the country.

One simply doesn’t encounter, for example, groups of loud, belligerent drunks; some people do enjoy a drink or five, but it doesn’t seem make them aggressive, or even particularly raucous. B feels much safer coming home at night here than she did in our last UK city, which was by no means a comparatively deprived or crime-ridden area. We can wander where we will, rich areas and poor, day and night, vague and confused and obviously out of place, and never feel nervous.

More widely, low-level anti-social behaviour simply does not seem to exist. We have never – literally never, in more than a year here – noticed evidence of vandalism. Perhaps half a dozen instances of graffiti. Litter is more prevalent, though it’s hard to make a comparison to the UK, because public spaces here are so frequently cleaned. Teenagers are largely indoors doing homework, studying for the famously hard zhongkao and gaokao examinations; public spaces are filled with people having dinner after work, older men playing cards, older women line dancing, groups of intensely earnest small children having roller-blading lessons.

A few aspects of Chinese manners can grate a little on Western sensibilities. Spitting in public is not considered rude. Queuing can be dicey. Modes of speech can be blunt. But in some quite important ways, daily life in the big cities we’ve visited here feels more civilised to me than back home.

Segue

April 27, 2019 chinabungles_qz2pa2Leave a comment

Shortly after we arrived, someone gave us vouchers for a nearby coffee shop. It’s inside the lobby of an apartment building, sharing this small space with the apartment complex’s reception desk and a florist’s shop. These entities are separately staffed, presumably separately owned, visited by different groups of people, and open and close at different times, but there is no barrier to movement between them.

Next door to this happy collection is a noodle bar. Walk in and stop and you can order noodles. Walk in and keep going, and you find that it doubles as a corridor into a shopping mall (the improbably named “Pengrunda Global Clothing Trading Plaza”).

Pengrunda is a vast concrete construction of several stories and considerable girth, from which rises a half-dozen apartment towers, including the one discussed above and the one in which we live. Leaving our apartment, I can take the lift to floor 3, and here exit the building onto a cyclopean landscape of stone, concrete, and small trees, with the immensity of the towers weighing down upon all. This is the roof of the mall, which is laid out as a huge stone garden, white and gleaming and spotless, and invariably empty. Our apartment staff call it the sky garden. The first time I crossed it, I felt I had strayed into Shadow of the Colossus or The Last Guardian, alone under the sun in a stone space meant for hundreds.

Walking across this alien field, up two flights of steps, and under a pagoda, I can enter the top floor of Pengrunda. On the right is a buffet function space full of tables and chairs. It is usually dark and empty – but it is not enclosed. Anyone could wander into it – but no one does. A hundred paces further on, I reach our local gym. There are no doors. Go a different way, and I can descend into the mall. Anyone wanting to come the other way, can. You can enter the mall from the street, climb through the floors, walk onto the sky garden, and access the strange liminal space of the buffet-adjacent corridor (though apparently no-one does). Where are the edges? Who is the sky garden for? The occupants of the apartments? Shoppers in the mall? Anyone who wants to wander up there? Does it matter?

This phenomenon is everywhere. Shops segue into common areas and staircases. Furniture sits in the streets. The office of a real estate company near us becomes a fruit shop by night. I hadn’t realised how precisely most spaces are delineated in the UK before encountering this contrast, and I haven’t travelled enough to know which is more normal.

Red Mountain

January 6, 2019January 6, 2019 chinabungles_qz2pa2Leave a comment

Before I saw the advert for my current job, I’d never heard of Shenzhen, which in hindsight is quite amazing.

Its official population is nearly 13 million people (cf. Greater London: just under 9 million) and it’s estimated that the true population might be closer to 20 million due to the large migrant workforce. It’s China’s high-tech hub and in 2016 generated four times as many patents as all British companies put together, or about 40% of China’s total for the year. It has the third largest economic output of any Chinese city, $338 billion in 2017: bigger than Ireland, Denmark, or New Zealand. In summary, it’s big, rich, brand new (see first post), and brimming with innovation. To ice the cake, the climate is sub-tropical. We were sold on coming here very quickly.

Outline of Shenzhen. We live along the red metro line, a little above its intersection with the purple, in Minzhi Residential District. From here, it’s about 20 minutes on the metro to the city centre (Futian district), approximately under the *Shenzhen* annotation.

In shape, Shenzhen is wider than it is high. The richest, trendiest parts of the city (Fútián and Nánshān) are in the south, near the coast, giving way to residential suburbs and manufacturing districts as one moves north. We’re near Hóngshān ( 红山 – Red Mountain) metro station in the Lónghuá (龙华) district of the city. This is up beyond the Tanglang mountain park and well outside the trendy bit of town, though the area around Hongshan is admittedly a wealthy enclave within Longhua.

So, what’s Hongshan like?

Tall. The great majority of buildings are tower blocks of 30 stories or more. There are no houses.

Getting taller. We can see 22 construction cranes from our balcony.

Green (ish). Shenzhen makes a strong effort to be a liveable city, and there are little parks all over the place. Similarly, the pavements are wide… which is just as well, because it is an article of faith for moped and motor-scooter riders that roads and pavements are interchangeable.

Tasty: packed with restaurants. Eating out is cheap, so people do it a lot. We guess there are 50 or 60 eateries within a five minute walk of our building. Some of them screen films in the evenings for passers by.

Startlingly Western in parts. Nearby is Nine Square (九方 – Jiŭ Fāng), a mall swisher than most of its UK cousins, and home to Starbucks, Uniqlo, a small Vanguard (Chinese offshoot of Tesco) and Muji (the Japanese John Lewis – irresistibly bland). It also contains about half of those 60 restaurants, a couple of bakeries, innumerable clothes shops, and a 12-screen cinema where we recently saw Fantastic Beasts. Five minutes’ walk away in another direction is a vast Walmart.

If you really squint, you can see Toys “R” Us at the back.

Best of all: though Hongshan has quickly come to feel like a sleepy suburb, really it looks like something out of Blade Runner.

A wind rose on the slopes of Tanglangshan

January 1, 2019March 19, 2020 chinabungles_qz2pa2Leave a comment

Stepping from the terminal at Hong Kong airport into the humidity and heat of early August was like walking face-first into a wall. We fought to stay awake on the journey across the border and through downtown Shenzhen to our new home in Hongshan, with intermediate success, so that our first glimpses of the green mountains and grey towers of Hong Kong and Shenzhen came mixed with jet-lagged dreams. The weeks that followed, as we learned to navigate our new world, are imbued in memory with a similar unreality.

Four and half months later, the temperature has dropped sharply (I actually wore a coat to the supermarket this morning) and the sky is grey, so we’re thinking of England. We’ve also, in the meantime, segued without noticing from being confused by everything to feeling moderately at home. Thus we find ourselves in the mood, and with the leisure, to begin the blog promised months ago.

One of my Christmas presents from B was a Shenzhen photo book. The introduction is titled “Shenzhen, the charming city where dreams begin”, and lays out the roots of Shenzhen’s appeal, listing among other things its youthfulness (from market town of 30,000 people to city of 13 million in 30-odd years), miraculous growth (25% annual average economic growth over that time), and lush greenery.

The tagline might be a little OTT, but the word “charm” is aptly used. We hope that, in our probably occasional and irregular posts here, we’ll manage to convey some fraction of the confusion, pleasure, and wonder that this vast, alien metropolis engenders in us. Stay tuned for some actual content next time.