Which One of These Things is Not Like the Others?

Yep, it's that easy to pick me out in the crowd here. Kunming's foreigner community (the word expat is not really used here) is anywhere from tiny to huge, depending on whom you ask. I see other foreigners every day, but it's not uncommon for me to be the only one at a restaurant, on the bus, or at the grocery store. And I'm not exactly someone you'd mistake from behind for a Chinese.

I've gotten used to stares and comments. People will say "laowai" or "waiguoren" when I pass; mostly, I think they assume I don't know what they're saying. Schoolboys and grown men (never women) will test out their "Hello," on me. I like to answer in kind, but use American slang, something like: "What up, little homey." Sometimes I hardly notice; sometimes I am amused; sometimes I'm annoyed. It can be a good opportunity to study people. Normally, I'd feel awkward looking directly at a stranger on the street for more than two seconds. But with them all up in my grill, I feel free to stare back and get a good look at their face. Sometimes I respond a little aggressively; a woman or man looks me up and down, and I lock eyes with them, with an almost expressionless look that says, "I see you looking at me." (My tendency to do this seems to double when I'm on my way home from a workout. Somewhere in there is a study on testosterone and aggression waiting to never be conducted).

On the bus one recent morning, I was the entertainment for a little girl who was riding with her father. He smiled at me and said "Hello" in English. Then he tapped her shoulder and said, "Kan (look)," gesturing back toward me. She turned around to stare at me. "Ni hao," I said. When I failed to do anything interesting, beyond being laowai, they moved to a more entertaining seat at the front of the double-decker bus. The next thing that Dad pointed out to her was a giant papier mache elephant erected on the sidewalk in honor of the Chinese special olympics.

Sports Heaven: Installment 3 (I Love This Game)

When I wake up in the morning, the NBA Playoffs are on. Since I'm a student, and soon-to-be student/freelancer, I can watch Pistons-Cavs or Spurs-Jazz while enjoying a Chinese pastry from the shop across the street and glancing at my textbook. Time zones, I love you.
Curiously, there are very few commercials aired with NBA games here. I promise to get to the bottom of this; they seem to pick up in the second half. It might be the time of day that the games are on, a licensing issue, I'm not sure. Whatever it is, the ads for beer and financial services are mostly replaced with playoff highlight reels, set to the track of a Pharoahe Monche song. The commentary, of course, is in Chinese. I don't miss Dick Stockton or Marv Albert, and I get to work on my Chinese oral comprehension. NBA Action in China is Faaaantastic.

Air Quality Control

One of the many reasons that I decided to come to Kunming, rather than head straight for Beijing, was its reputation for better air quality than other large Chinese cities. I was mostly trusting rumor, because I had trouble tracking down a good source of information to confirm.

Today I found this site, which sheds a little light.

A quick look at the numbers for April 2007 show that Kunming averaged a pollution index of 68.5, with a high of 92. For the same month, Beijing averaged 93.7, with a peak of 190. Both cities' primary pollutant is particulate matter, but Kunming has some days where the primary pollutant is sulfur dioxide. I don't know much about this, but I sulfur dioxide is used in the production of bleaching agents, paper and pulp, flotation agents and heat transferring agents, according to pollution information site Scorecard.org

I don't know a good way to compare this to New York, but I can say that we do see blue skies pretty regularly here. And the streets in many parts of town are cleaner than NY's.

Literate Laowai

First, some housekeeping notes:

1. "Laowai" is Chinese for foreigner, literally "old foreigner." I don't know why.

2. The photo is not of myself, my teacher, or the Chinese language. I took it on a daytrip this weekend to Black Dragon Pond, about 20-30 minutes from here.

3. I wanted to write really eloquent posts about learning Chinese, as it's been so interesting, but I've decided to prioritize frequency over polish. I apologize in advance for their mediocrity (am I already acquiring a Chinese sense of modesty?? I didn't think it was possible).

Okay, with all of that said, here's my first post about learning Chinese. And the big news is: I'm learning to read and write. Before coming here, I thought I would just learn to speak and understand. I'd talked to Americans who had learned Mandarin for business, and they all told me they were illiterate in Chinese. It was just too hard to learn the characters, they said.

It's possible to learn to speak Chinese without really learning to read and write the language. That's because it's been phoneticized; there are a couple of systems, but by far the dominant system used for this today is the pinyin alphabet. So it is possible, and not uncommon, for anyone accustomed to the Roman alphabet to learn Chinese without understanding Chinese characters. I don't know too much about this yet, so if you want to know more, I suggest you visit www.pinyin.info and read up.

My first day of class, we opened the book, and there was the first lesson, in pinyin, Chinese characters and English. I was too jetlagged to broach the subject of adjusting my course to eliminate the characters, so we proceeded with the textbook’s prescribed lesson structure.

Much time in my first few lessons was dedicated to learning to correctly pronounce the syllables that are the phonic building blocks of the language. Just knowing proper pronunciation of the Roman alphabet is insufficient, as the pinyin rarely sounds how you would expect. Learning the subtle differences between sh, ch, zh and j, as well as the proper tones for everything, takes practice and time. I felt like a complete moron repeating hundreds of syllables after my teacher, and getting most of them wrong. I also got sore from using new mouth muscles.

Every day, my teacher shows me how to write about 25 new characters, and we read a dialogue and do exercises that use them. My second day in class, she opened by saying to me: "We learned 20 characters yesterday. Can you write them on the board." I most certainly could not. Every time you learn a new character, you are learning the character's appearance, the order of the strokes to write it in (important-- more on that later), the pinyin spelling, the correct tone to pronounce it in, and when and how you can use it. For one- and two-stroke characters that look exactly like what they denote such as yi (one) and ren (person), this is relatively easy. But it gets harder for words like rongyi (ironically, the word for easy, which is a 10-stroke, 2-character word) or duanlian, a 12-stroke, 2-character word for physical exercise. Add to this the genetic blip that is my failure to inherit the visual art gene that the rest of my family has in abundance, and you have one struggling laowai.

Despite my struggles, I'm fully on board now with learning to write and read as well as speak. There are several reasons. For one, I find the meanings of the characters fascinating (more on this in another post). For another, I am a writer in my own language. How can I learn a new language and be illiterate? Seems like that might be hypocritical. Also, I think if I'm going to learn characters, the time is now. It would be much harder to change my mind later and try to go back and learn to write. And as I travel around China, I may not be able to understand the many dialects, but if I can read, I should be able to get by. Finally, it should improve my overall understanding of the language and contribute to my ability to speak and understand.

So I'm still basically an illiterate laowai, but I don't plan to stay this way.

Well-Fed and Entertained

Keats School has done a pretty good job of keeping us fed and entertained. My first night here, the school treated the students to a delicious dinner featuring local dishes. Then about two weeks ago, Xue Feng, who runs the school, made us dumplings. At first, there were only five of us sitting at the table, and I didn't think anyone else was coming. Xue started bringing out plate after plate of hot, scrumptious vegetable dumplings. My mother raised me to be a polite guest, and polite guests do what they can not just to finish what's put on their plate, but to eat as much as they can of whatever their gracious host has prepared. I proceeded to eat about 30 dumplings, just to be polite. Of course, after twenty minutes, half a dozen other people showed up. There was still enough for everyone, which is good because that means I'll still be invited to school dinners.

Last week, we all went to a crazy restaurant down the street from here, that serves a variety show with dinner. Everything was in Chinese, but you don't need a translation for flamboyant costumes, exuberant dances or performers putting flaming torches down their pants, against a fake "pastoral Yunnan" background. Good times were had by all, and again, I misjudged how much food would be coming out and ate entirely too much of the first course.

Cotton Candy Cycle

I'm writing a post about learning Chinese. In the meantime, enjoy this short video of a very resourceful street vendor.

Sports Heaven: Installment 2 (Blind Soccer!)

Saturday was the end of China's National Handicapped Games, held here. It was hard to find games, but I made it to Blind Soccer and shot some crummy video with my digital camera. These kids are amazing! The game is played on a smaller pitch, maybe half the size of a full field. The players all wear blindfolds because some of them have a little bit of sight. The goalies can see. All of the players yell "Wei! Wei!" all the time so that their teammates know where they are. The ball makes a rattling sound when it moves, and there is someone behind the goal constantly hitting it with a stick so that the goal makes a ringing sound and the players can find it. The field is bounded by a blue wall to help the players feel their way around.