I've just found this in an article about PADD = Political Attention Deficit Disorder. Tasteless, I know...
“The symptoms of PADD are all around us and treating it professionally can do more for our country than any election,” said Dr. Mable Wank in the report's introduction; she is chairwoman of the Council and a professor at UCLA.
Thursday, 28 June 2007
Problem solving, Chinese style
In short, problems do not get solved. Case in point are my 2 Chinese flatmates, who have completely fallen out and cannot be in the same room together, which is unfortunate because they share a room. I think one of them has actually gone crazy. Let me explain...
I wondered why one of them had taken to sleeping on the sofa. It turns out they have had lots of little problems, and failing to deal with them, they turned into big problems, which all ended with death threats and the like. Things like the volume on FanQian's computer, XiaoMing turning off the fridge, XiaoMing recently having more foreign friends that FanQian, they just ballooned. FanQian was so scared he was nearly crying last week, and locked the door at night. XiaoMing has for the time moved out to God knows where, probably the stairwell where he likes to read.
Maybe I sound a bit patronising, but it's difficult not to. The stupidity displayed by these 2 is really something, I'm still laughing about it with Clemens (German flatmates). Their situation here is something that most of their classmates would give their right arm for - living with pretty easy-going, English speaking foreigners, way more freedom than in the dorms on campus, etc, etc. But they've messed it up royaly, because of a complete inability to even confront the smallest problem.
So this Sunday, us 4 get together to try and find out a) why is there a problem and b) what to do about it, because, after all, all 4 of us want to stay where we are. There were in fact about 12 people in the room, their friends decided to come along. This is so Chinese - when ever anything of interest happens, there's always plenty of people around to look or join in. There's a fountain display thing in a park round the corner, and its pretty average, but everyday a few thousand people turn up to watch it.
So we've got all these 20 year old male students sitting round with no shirts on (it wasn't as gay as it sounds). XiaoMing insisted on sitting on the floor (and he wonders why no-one respects him). All I wanted to know was 'what is the problem'. You'd think this was in easy question, but they are just so unwilling to face facts, I'm still not entirely clear. One guy even threatened to start a fight, which was hilarious, because he, like the rest of them, was weedy as anything. XiaoMing and FanQian both can't even open their own pineapple beer. After an hour, with almost zero progress, I just left because it was a waste of time.
So it looks like when they're both back from the summer holiday, XiaoMing will be leaving. He has actually gone crazy, I think. Recently he's been saying some really weird things - 'I am a superstar', 'I often tell lies to puzzle people', this having 5 minutes before telling me how honest he is. Some of stuff he comes out with and does, I just cannot understand this guy at all.
As always, never easy, always interesting.
I wondered why one of them had taken to sleeping on the sofa. It turns out they have had lots of little problems, and failing to deal with them, they turned into big problems, which all ended with death threats and the like. Things like the volume on FanQian's computer, XiaoMing turning off the fridge, XiaoMing recently having more foreign friends that FanQian, they just ballooned. FanQian was so scared he was nearly crying last week, and locked the door at night. XiaoMing has for the time moved out to God knows where, probably the stairwell where he likes to read.
Maybe I sound a bit patronising, but it's difficult not to. The stupidity displayed by these 2 is really something, I'm still laughing about it with Clemens (German flatmates). Their situation here is something that most of their classmates would give their right arm for - living with pretty easy-going, English speaking foreigners, way more freedom than in the dorms on campus, etc, etc. But they've messed it up royaly, because of a complete inability to even confront the smallest problem.
So this Sunday, us 4 get together to try and find out a) why is there a problem and b) what to do about it, because, after all, all 4 of us want to stay where we are. There were in fact about 12 people in the room, their friends decided to come along. This is so Chinese - when ever anything of interest happens, there's always plenty of people around to look or join in. There's a fountain display thing in a park round the corner, and its pretty average, but everyday a few thousand people turn up to watch it.
So we've got all these 20 year old male students sitting round with no shirts on (it wasn't as gay as it sounds). XiaoMing insisted on sitting on the floor (and he wonders why no-one respects him). All I wanted to know was 'what is the problem'. You'd think this was in easy question, but they are just so unwilling to face facts, I'm still not entirely clear. One guy even threatened to start a fight, which was hilarious, because he, like the rest of them, was weedy as anything. XiaoMing and FanQian both can't even open their own pineapple beer. After an hour, with almost zero progress, I just left because it was a waste of time.
So it looks like when they're both back from the summer holiday, XiaoMing will be leaving. He has actually gone crazy, I think. Recently he's been saying some really weird things - 'I am a superstar', 'I often tell lies to puzzle people', this having 5 minutes before telling me how honest he is. Some of stuff he comes out with and does, I just cannot understand this guy at all.
As always, never easy, always interesting.
Daily life
It wouldn't be in a post from Our Man In China without a comment on the weather. Hot, hot and hot is the best way to describe it - 38 bog ones today, and you can feel everyone of them. Last week was actually wet and cold, but I think the trousers have been firmly put into hibernation for the next few months.
Daily life is pretty relaxing and stress-free. The only stress is to ensure I continue to speak lots, listen lots and read lots. Weekday mornings from 8-12 is lessons, then afterwards I can do what I want. I don't need a job yet, so I have tonnes of free time. I see a tutor on Monday and Thursday afternoon, some friends on Monday, Tuesday and Friday to speak Chinese, but nothing much else pre-arranged. There is a tendency for random things to happen all the time, so I often end up speaking quite a lot. With the teaching being so awful, I often don't go to lessons, which doesn't really make much difference. I find its often more helpful talking to the lady in charge of the reference room.
The pace of life in Xian is pretty slow. Its funny, on the surface, it looks manic, with all the crazy drivers and hordes of people everywhere all the time. But in fact, everything happens quite slowly. People walk so slowly, its quite frustrating when you're behind a line of 3 or more. The traffic is so slow because its a bit of a free-for-all. Offices and the like are shut for a couple of hours around lunch.
I think I've been quite good in avoiding speaking English, I can often go a couple of days without speaking it. I don't go to any of the foreigner places, partly because it won't help the Chinese, and partly because it's too expensive. Although I often speak to a couple of Australian friends, and my German flatmate as well. Sometimes its good to talk English over a beer and some barbequed meat-on-a-stick on the pavement outside our flat.
I eat in small, cheap resturants every meal. I haven't really found a place I can go to everyday to speak the people who run it, as I had hoped, but I sometimes end up talking to the owners or other customers. There's quite a few other foreigners around, so I'm not really as interesting as I would be somewhere else in China.
The summer break is approaching, but it will mostly be more of the same - sweating, studying, speaking and sweating some more. Good times to roll on!
Daily life is pretty relaxing and stress-free. The only stress is to ensure I continue to speak lots, listen lots and read lots. Weekday mornings from 8-12 is lessons, then afterwards I can do what I want. I don't need a job yet, so I have tonnes of free time. I see a tutor on Monday and Thursday afternoon, some friends on Monday, Tuesday and Friday to speak Chinese, but nothing much else pre-arranged. There is a tendency for random things to happen all the time, so I often end up speaking quite a lot. With the teaching being so awful, I often don't go to lessons, which doesn't really make much difference. I find its often more helpful talking to the lady in charge of the reference room.
The pace of life in Xian is pretty slow. Its funny, on the surface, it looks manic, with all the crazy drivers and hordes of people everywhere all the time. But in fact, everything happens quite slowly. People walk so slowly, its quite frustrating when you're behind a line of 3 or more. The traffic is so slow because its a bit of a free-for-all. Offices and the like are shut for a couple of hours around lunch.
I think I've been quite good in avoiding speaking English, I can often go a couple of days without speaking it. I don't go to any of the foreigner places, partly because it won't help the Chinese, and partly because it's too expensive. Although I often speak to a couple of Australian friends, and my German flatmate as well. Sometimes its good to talk English over a beer and some barbequed meat-on-a-stick on the pavement outside our flat.
I eat in small, cheap resturants every meal. I haven't really found a place I can go to everyday to speak the people who run it, as I had hoped, but I sometimes end up talking to the owners or other customers. There's quite a few other foreigners around, so I'm not really as interesting as I would be somewhere else in China.
The summer break is approaching, but it will mostly be more of the same - sweating, studying, speaking and sweating some more. Good times to roll on!
Friday, 15 June 2007
Illnesses
Two and a half months of continuous mild illnesses - hay fever, cold, laduzi (diarrhoea) - have finally taken its toll and I'm currently in my 81st hour of having eaten precisely nothing. This pleasant virus - Latin name, biggus bastardis - has the amazing feature of allowing me to continue to be sick and have laduzi after having ingested zero food.
Without wishing to wither away so early in the challenge of learning Chinese, I went to the campus hospital yesterday. It struck me as quite Chinese - functional and dirty. The guy doing the blood testing insisted on spitting on the floor, mid-prick. Then they gave me some glucose drips to keep me going. But this morning, after facing the awkward bathroom problem of desperately needing to empty out both ends at once with only one toilet, I thought I should go back for some more glucose goodness. The doctors seemed to think I was bit wet, requesting more glucose, but I need something, damn it!
Why the illness(es)? I think it's a combination of China-related factors. Incredibly hot, stuffy weather with ever decreasing air quality. Recently the pollution really has been bad, everything is grey from dust. I've been reluctant even to go outside.
My frame of mind may also be a contributing factor. Along with the weather, the language is just crazy. It's so brain-mashingly hard. The realization that I will almost certainly never be able to read a book even remotely like I can in English is depressing. I'm still making good progress, but it's fraught. I can almost feel the words, characters, pinyin, sayings, all pushing and shoving for space in my memory, ejecting previously known things, such as 'What was the first major battle of the English Civil War', for ever.
Also, one Chinese characteristic has, for some reason, been driving me nuts recently. It seems a great deal of people here don't know how to think. The whole education here is designed to teach people what to think, not how to think, and it really shows. So often you'll see people doing things, and it just makes no sense. The main example is the traffic - a simple, well thought-out, thorough, system would make things so much better. But instead they opt for the 'do whatever we think of first' approach, which leads to predictable results. Even at university, students are expected to memorise page after page of information. If there is a problem at the flat, my Chinese flatmates just do not know how to deal with it. Then you suggest something, and it's treated as the best suggestion ever (it usually isn't). Our teachers are bad at this, as well. I wonder if, after a 2 hour speaking lesson in which the teacher has spoken for an hour and fifty five of those minutes, they ever stop to think 'Is this really the best way to teach?' Somehow I doubt it. This article here could possibly be considered an extension of this - money and short-termism. http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,2100622,00.html
So tomorrow I'll go back and get more energy in a drip, and hopefully be able to eat some solids later on. As Homer Simpson once said, 'but I love solids'.
Without wishing to wither away so early in the challenge of learning Chinese, I went to the campus hospital yesterday. It struck me as quite Chinese - functional and dirty. The guy doing the blood testing insisted on spitting on the floor, mid-prick. Then they gave me some glucose drips to keep me going. But this morning, after facing the awkward bathroom problem of desperately needing to empty out both ends at once with only one toilet, I thought I should go back for some more glucose goodness. The doctors seemed to think I was bit wet, requesting more glucose, but I need something, damn it!
Why the illness(es)? I think it's a combination of China-related factors. Incredibly hot, stuffy weather with ever decreasing air quality. Recently the pollution really has been bad, everything is grey from dust. I've been reluctant even to go outside.
My frame of mind may also be a contributing factor. Along with the weather, the language is just crazy. It's so brain-mashingly hard. The realization that I will almost certainly never be able to read a book even remotely like I can in English is depressing. I'm still making good progress, but it's fraught. I can almost feel the words, characters, pinyin, sayings, all pushing and shoving for space in my memory, ejecting previously known things, such as 'What was the first major battle of the English Civil War', for ever.
Also, one Chinese characteristic has, for some reason, been driving me nuts recently. It seems a great deal of people here don't know how to think. The whole education here is designed to teach people what to think, not how to think, and it really shows. So often you'll see people doing things, and it just makes no sense. The main example is the traffic - a simple, well thought-out, thorough, system would make things so much better. But instead they opt for the 'do whatever we think of first' approach, which leads to predictable results. Even at university, students are expected to memorise page after page of information. If there is a problem at the flat, my Chinese flatmates just do not know how to deal with it. Then you suggest something, and it's treated as the best suggestion ever (it usually isn't). Our teachers are bad at this, as well. I wonder if, after a 2 hour speaking lesson in which the teacher has spoken for an hour and fifty five of those minutes, they ever stop to think 'Is this really the best way to teach?' Somehow I doubt it. This article here could possibly be considered an extension of this - money and short-termism. http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,2100622,00.html
So tomorrow I'll go back and get more energy in a drip, and hopefully be able to eat some solids later on. As Homer Simpson once said, 'but I love solids'.
Friday, 1 June 2007
Celebrating Vietnamese and Chinese collaboration
On Thursday night, I was invited to a special singing contest at the university, put on to celebrate continuing ties between my university and one in Hanoi, Vietnam. There's about 20 Vietnamese students here, all in the same class, and all significantly better than everyone else at Chinese. They're also some of the nicest people I've ever met, so incredibly friendly.
I went with Clemens (German flatmate) and XiaoMing (one of my Chinese flatmates). Before we got there, XiaoMing was delving around in the breast pocket of his fake Adidas shirt, then offered me to have a look. Of course, he was keeping loose pieces of chewing gum in there. I mean, why use the packet? Actually the other day, we were eating a dinner together at the flat with some other people. A lot of Chinese food is bone and rubbish, so you can spit it out and leave it on the table. But where XiaoMing was sitting was a drawer fixed to the underside of the table, so when he wanted to spit something out, he'd open the draw, drop it in the drawer, close the draw and continue eating, with an expression that said this is the most normal thing in the world. I could not help bursting out laughing everytime he did it.
Anyway, the event was held in a small conference room in the foreign students' hotel, about 70 of so other students for the audience. All the desks that we sat at had snacks already laid out, including piles (literally, piles) of bird seeds that people here like to eat. All evening you could here the cracking of seed shells on teeth. If ever you managed to make even a slight dent in your pile, someone would come along and pour out a load more.
In between the Chinese and Vietnamese singing traditional songs, there were some party type games as well. One of these involed 8 people, in pairs, being blindfolded. One had a banana, and the aim of the game was to unpeel the banana, find your partner, then feed them the banana (all blindfolded). So you had these people wandering around, wafting bananas around in the air and poking other people in the eye/ear/nose with them. Absolutely hilarious viewing.
At the end, we had the obligatory mass photo session, I was fortunate not to get lockjaw. My friend suggested to the people around us we do a Mexican wave. To be fair, it was a beautifully excecuted, textbook example of a Mexican wave, but with only 4 participants in said wave, it lacked the emphaticness of, say, a Wembley stadium wave. However, my friend seem to think it was great, and insisted on another. Maybe it was the previous banana incident, but I thought this was hilarious as well.
Being a clever chap, it decided not to take my camera. Nice one.
I went with Clemens (German flatmate) and XiaoMing (one of my Chinese flatmates). Before we got there, XiaoMing was delving around in the breast pocket of his fake Adidas shirt, then offered me to have a look. Of course, he was keeping loose pieces of chewing gum in there. I mean, why use the packet? Actually the other day, we were eating a dinner together at the flat with some other people. A lot of Chinese food is bone and rubbish, so you can spit it out and leave it on the table. But where XiaoMing was sitting was a drawer fixed to the underside of the table, so when he wanted to spit something out, he'd open the draw, drop it in the drawer, close the draw and continue eating, with an expression that said this is the most normal thing in the world. I could not help bursting out laughing everytime he did it.
Anyway, the event was held in a small conference room in the foreign students' hotel, about 70 of so other students for the audience. All the desks that we sat at had snacks already laid out, including piles (literally, piles) of bird seeds that people here like to eat. All evening you could here the cracking of seed shells on teeth. If ever you managed to make even a slight dent in your pile, someone would come along and pour out a load more.
In between the Chinese and Vietnamese singing traditional songs, there were some party type games as well. One of these involed 8 people, in pairs, being blindfolded. One had a banana, and the aim of the game was to unpeel the banana, find your partner, then feed them the banana (all blindfolded). So you had these people wandering around, wafting bananas around in the air and poking other people in the eye/ear/nose with them. Absolutely hilarious viewing.
At the end, we had the obligatory mass photo session, I was fortunate not to get lockjaw. My friend suggested to the people around us we do a Mexican wave. To be fair, it was a beautifully excecuted, textbook example of a Mexican wave, but with only 4 participants in said wave, it lacked the emphaticness of, say, a Wembley stadium wave. However, my friend seem to think it was great, and insisted on another. Maybe it was the previous banana incident, but I thought this was hilarious as well.
Being a clever chap, it decided not to take my camera. Nice one.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
