an imperfect pen

Chéngyǔ 成语

2011-01-18T07:35:00.003+08:00

The Chinese language is rich in idioms, and although it is possible to converse in non-idiomatic standard Chinese, a foreign learner with only a superficial knowledge of Chinese idioms will be at a serious disadvantage in reading, and even more so when taking part in discussions. Apart from idioms, there are also the allegorical rhymes, onomatopoeia words, words from regional dialects, popular sayings, proverbs, and most importantly the literature—the vernacular and classical Chinese, that will catapult your language to the next level.

By idiom I am referring to what is called 成语(chéngyǔ) in standard Chinese. Like an idiom in English, we can define a 成语 as a combination of words with a special meaning that generally cannot be inferred from its separate parts. The Enlarged Dictionary of Chinese Idioms 中国成语大语词典 I have on my table here lists over 18,000 entries. Many 成语 but not all, are made up of four characters and for this reason the term is sometimes translated as 'a four character idiom.'

Let’s take a look at a two random examples:

1. 车水马龙 (chēshuǐmǎlóng). If we literally translate the idiom it means 'chariots, water, horses, dragons.' Clearly, it is rather difficult if not impossible to figure out this meaning from the separate words. In other words, the meaning of the whole idiom is different from its parts. The sentence has two meanings, a literal one, which means very little, and a metaphorical one which is the idiom. This idiom can be traced back to the Han dynasty when an empress described a stream of horses and carriages on a busy street: 'the chariots are like flowing water, the horses moving to and fro like dragons.' ('车如流水, 马如游龙').

If we bring the idiom to the present, it refers to an incessant or endless stream of cars—heavy traffic on the road, for example, or a scene crowded with people and vehicles. Compare: 人山人海 (lit: 'people mountain, people sea').

2. 见钱眼开 (jiànqián yánkāi). Unlike the first example, if we literally translate this idiom we can guess its meaning: ‘see money, eyes open', in other words, avaricious. Another example of a 成语 that we can pretty well guess its meaning if we read each character literally is 人生如寄 (rénshēngrújì): living in the mortal world is like a sojourner in a hotel, that is, life is short.

If you read the news whether that be that actual news print form (how old-fashioned is that?) or online, start collecting idioms. Many of them will be bookish idioms in contrast to colloquial ones, but keep an eye for one’s that keep cropping up in print as well as one’s your Chinese friends use.

The Language Adventures of René in China

2011-01-17T08:00:00.001+08:00

In December last year, a large number of people contact me to ask who on earth is René and what exactly I was trying to achieve by writing 'The Language Adventures of René in China: Essential Expressions for Beginners, vol. 1.'

Below is part of the preface from volume 1 which should give readers a good idea of what I was trying to achieve.
-peter

Chinese language textbooks devote little space to explaining how the language is used in social situations or why Chinese people express themselves in such a way. This volume attempts to explain a number of greetings, common expressions, not to mention other speech acts, that will allow the foreign learner to understand the language better.

Why greetings and expressions might not be readily understood by foreign learners underscores the erroneous assumption that there are "equivalences" between languages. An equivalent of Ní hǎo can be found in the English "Hello" or "Hi", but there are numerous greetings and expressions that do not have equivalences in English.

Davies and Barmé have rightly pointed out this assumption 'presupposes the existence of a formidable metalanguage that has the capacity to match words, ideas, statements, and idioms across languages, according to some mysterious "law" or universal communication.' [1]

More than half a century earlier, the linguist and songwriter Chao Yuen Ren (1892-1982) expressed something similar:

Any utterance in an actual context can be translated fairly accurately, to be sure, but not necessarily by the same means of expression. Thus, the English phrase 'No, thank you!' can be translated more 'idiomatically' by a smile and a polite gesture than by the recent translation borrowing Duoshieh, buyaw le! [duōxiè, bú yào le 多谢,不要了] "Many thanks, I don’t want any more." [2]

The linguistic diversity of China and the large number of regional dialects that are mutually unintelligible to speakers from other parts of the country is aptly summed up in the popular saying 'speech changes every ten li' (shílĭ bù tōngyīn 十里不通音).

This saying highlights issues of comprehension among different regional speakers of the standard language or pŭtōnghuà (普通话) who may come across an initial 'impasse' or 'obstacle' (不通) when hearing standard Chinese spoken by dialect speakers, invariably coloured by local speech habits and accents.

For the foreign learner, accents and pronunciation do cause major practical problems, especially once they leave the classroom setting:

The great majority of Chinese speak standard Chinese with a dialectal accent, which may be so mild as to be scarcely noticeable or so heavy as to make normal conversation impractical. These accented speech variants are usually unknown even to advanced western students of Chinese until they arrive in China and find themselves experiencing much difficulty in communication. [3]

Each entry in this volume contains a common greeting or expression ‘acted out’ by a fictional character called René, a foreigner language student studying in Beijing whose course of study includes a part-time internship in a joint-venture market research company.

René encounters a number of difficulties in communicating with Chinese and makes a number of errors along the way, but he experiences an epiphany of sorts, a moment of understanding, where he realizes that he has expressed himself incorrectly or that a common expression in English finds a different medium of expression in Chinese.Numerous examples could have augmented each entry, but the challenge has been to condense the narrative to one or two pages and allow readers to grasp various aspects of the language quickly and easily.

References:

1. Gloria Davies Voicing Concerns: Contemporary Chinese Critical Inquiry (2001:xi).

2. Chao Yuen Ren Mandarin Primer (1961:50).

3. Liang, DeFrancis and Han, Varieties of Spoken Standard Chinese (1982:1).

Yang Yinliu and his Draft

2011-01-17T07:36:00.000+08:00

Yang Yinliu (杨荫浏) wrote a critique of his Draft History of Ancient Chinese Music 中国古代音乐史稿 (hereafter Draft) in the April issue of Music Research (音乐研究) in 1958. It was more of a self-criticism. Yang wrote that he had a far-from-perfect grasp of Communist doctrines and that he had not become ‘proletarianized’ enough.

Yang started on the Draft in 1959 and completed two volumes by July 1977. The two volume work was officially published February 2, 1981. In 1965 Mao Zedong instructed that Yang's book be published without delay and Yang worked frantically to complete the text. At the time, Yang was reluctant to make any revisions, politically that is, and the book ended up on the printing press shelves for another ten years.

References:

Micic, Peter, 'Gathering a Nation's Music: A Life of Yang Yinliu' in Lives in Chinese Music (Helen Rees, ed), University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 91-116, 2009.

Abing and the Webster Chicago Wire Recorder

2011-01-17T07:26:00.002+08:00

When I was researching the life of Yang Yinliu 杨荫浏 at the Music Research Institute in Beijing almost a decade ago, I was always excited to see what I could dig up from the reference library and sound recording archive. Yang was among the first musicologists to experiment with recording musicians in their natural environment and many of his recordings made in the 1950s are held in the archive.

It was Stephen Jones who drew my attention to the Webster Chicago wire recorder used by Yang and Cao Anhe 曹安和 in their fieldwork recordings in Wuxi in the summer of 1950 and the six ‘legendary’ recordings of Abing 阿炳, three each for pipa and erhu, respectively.

Two of these recorders used by Yang Yinliu and Cao Anhe are housed in the Chinese Traditional Music Sound Archive at the Music Research Institute in Beijing. According to Wang Yusang, an audio engineer who works in the sound archive, two Webster recorders were brought back from Hong Kong by composer Li Huanzhi 李焕之 in 1949. I was able to view the two reels used to record the six works of Abing in 1950 from a computer screen in the archive. Wang also told me that more recordings could have been made, but the team of musicologists ran out of wire.

References:

Micic, Peter, 'Gathering a Nation's Music: A Life of Yang Yinliu' in Lives in Chinese Music (Helen Rees, ed), University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 91-116, 2009.

A Brief History of the Auto Industry in China

2011-01-13T07:55:00.003+08:00

Another short piece from the auto archive, 2003-2004.
--peter

Ford Motors, GM and Mercedes-Benz set up auto plants in Shanghai during the Republican period. In 1902, Yuan Shikai bought a Mercedes-Benz from Hong Kong as a gift to the Dowager Empress Cixi. This vintage model is housed in the Summer Palace Museum.

China began to manufacture automobiles in 1955 with Soviet trucks, buses and tractors. The first commercial vehicle to roll of the assembly line was the 'Jiefang' (‘Liberation’) truck, manufactured by the Changchun No.1 Automotive Plant in 1956. The Plant started production Hongqi (‘Red Flag’) limousines, and a passenger car called Fenghuang (‘Phoenix’).

From the 1950s to the early 1980s, passenger cars were essentially the prerogative of China’s ruling elite. In the early 1990s, however, the Chinese government designated the automobile industry as one of the country’s so-called pillar industries making it easier for individuals to purchase motor vehicles.

In the 1980s, Steyr-Daimler-Puch (check this name), AMC Chrysler Jeep, Volkswagen and Audi had set up shop in China. U.S. component manufacturers Delphi, Ford, and Bosch soon followed. By the early 1990s, one million auto vehicles were rolling off the assembly lines annually. With China’s entry into the WTO in December 2001 the auto industry turned a new page. Foreign manufacturers were keen to grab a piece of the fastest growing auto market in the world. Sales of passenger cars soared from 750,000 units in 2001 to 1.2 million in 2002 and then nearly doubled to 2.1 million in 2003.

China's auto industry, however, was far from regulated. As Erik Eckermann writes in his book World History of the Automobile (2001): ‘

the auto boom of the early 1990s often generated chaotic conditions. High custom duties gave rise to organizations involved in smuggling parts and entire cars. Auto parts and dealerships sprouted in huge numbers, while a fragmented industry operated in an uneconomical and labor-intensive manner (p. 209).

Some 4.5 million cars rolled off the Chinese assembly line in 2004 making China the fourth largest producer in the world. By 2010, it is predicted that China will become the world’s number 2 producer after the USA.

Translating Modernity

2011-01-12T11:40:00.026+08:00

Foreign translators, lexicographers and their Chinese assistants were a busy lot in the late nineteenth century. Their collaborative efforts and their contributions to modern Chinese lexicology were profound, yet who really remembers their works? Although their achievements seem nowadays to be little more than curios relegated to the shelves of archives or rare book collections in libraries, they provide a unique trajectory of how foreign terminology, including musical terms entered modern Chinese.

The bulk of texts written and translated by foreign missionary educators and their Chinese collaborators at the Tongwenguan in Beijing and the Kiangnan Arsenal in Shanghai included science, history, geography, geometry, chemistry, law and medicine. As the translation of these texts had to be rendered into acceptable literary Chinese that was beyond the capabilities of missionary scholars, an oral transmission of the original text was read to a Chinese assistant who then wrote it down. This procedure was no different to what Jesuit missionaries were doing two and a half centuries earlier and if we comb the earliest translations of Buddhist texts in China, we will find that this collaborative process has a long history.

In 1877, a trumpet manual published by the Kiangnan Arsenal titled 喇叭吹法 was the result of a collaboration undertaken by the American Baptist missionary Carl T. Kreyer and his Chinese assistant Cai Xiling. Cai could have chosen a phonetic transliteration for trumpet, but he used 喇叭 presumably because the Chinese instrument (which is also called 唢呐) share a similar curved-back flaring bell.

Wang Tao (1828-1897), one of the founders of modern journalism in China, used the word dānchún (单纯) a phonetic transliteration of the English 'dance' in his Jottings of Carefree Travels (1867) to describe 'men and women in western countries' moving about rhythmically in fixed steps or sequences to music. He writes:

In Western countries men and women assemble for what is known in their language as 'Dancing.' It can perhaps be seen as a survival of the Miao custom of dancing in courtship under the moonlight, as is still practised in Japan and other countries to the east. To the British it is a form of amusement. Each year in June and July big gatherings are held, and what a sight they are! A hundred, or perhaps two or three hundred handsome boys and girls, twelve to sixteen years old, are chosen from the town and partnered up by age. They are first taught the steps by a female instructor, taking months of practice to master them. Each of the various dances is named according to step and rhythm.

Liang Qichao's 'new-style prose' was imbued with vocabulary from Chinese Buddhism, Daoism, the Yijing (I Ching), and vernacular novels. He also favoured the Japanese variants, what are often called 'graphic loans.' The loans as Lydia Liu writes referred to 'classical Chinese character compounds that were used by the Japanese to translate modern European words and were introduced into modern Chinese.'

A transliteration like Wang Tao's 'danchun' and foreign loanwords expressed an allegiance to something 'new' and 'modern,' but transliterating foreign names and words was far from standardized. Liang complained of names ‘being translated in a hundred different ways by a hundred people.' Robert Morrison, Elijah C. Bridgman, William Milne and other Protestant missionaries grappled with attempting phonetic transcriptions as did many of their Chinese collaborators. If we swing the lexical pendulum in the other direction, foreign lexicographers of English-Chinese dictionaries in the nineteenth century found a number of Chinese terms for the one English word.

In Lobscheid's English and Chinese Dictionary (1867) the entry for 'school’ includes the following Chinese words:

书房书馆学馆学房学堂学校

Each of the Chinese renderings of 'school' has slightly different shades of meaning. The word 学校 was reintroduced from the Japanese gakkō, but as Masini points out 学校 was already used by Mencius, employed by Guido Aleni in Zhifang waiji (Records of the Places Outside the Jurisdiction of the Office of Geography) in 1623 in Hangzhou and by Fan Shouyi in Shenjianlu (My Observations) ca. 1720 'to refer to the European school system.'

Liu Ching-chih describes the lack of uniform transcription rules in rendering foreign musical terms and names in the early twentieth century:

Most of the translations were for teaching purposes, especially during the first half of the 20th century during which there were practically no music text books on the development of European music, compositional techniques and aesthetics. In view of this, teachers at conservatories of music and university music faculties had no choice but to compile their own textbooks by rendering articles and books in foreign languages into Chinese...great difficulties were encountered in the work because:

1. names of musicians and musical terms and phrases are in Italian, Latin, German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Greek, English, Bohemian, Russian, etc;

2. translators form various parts of China favoured their provincial pronunciation and therefore it was difficult to arrive at uniform transliterations;

3. different foreign languages represented different cultures and different conceptual approaches might be required for the same term; and

4. the same terms in different periods of historical development might also have different connotations.

Let’s now have a look at some instruments rendered into Chinese taken from several texts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. These examples are taken from 'Appendix III' in my unpublished doctoral dissertation School Songs and Modernity in Late Qing and Early Republican China, Monash University, Melbourne, 2000.

1. 阿保笛 (oboe). Modern equivalent: 双簧管. Used by Xiao Youmei in ‘Introduction to Music '音乐概说', in 学报, no. 1, 1907.

2. 阿尔赓 (organ). Modern equivalent: 风琴. Used by Guo Songdao in London and Paris Diaries, 1876-1879 (伦敦与巴黎日记). 风琴 is used by Zeng Zhimin in ‘音乐教育论 (1904) and Xiao Youmei in '音乐概说,' 1907. Cf. 大筒琴 rendered as ‘European organ in Lobscheid English and Ch:inese Dictionary (1867, vol 3:1256).

3. 古拉料捏笛 (clarinet). Modern equivalent: 单双管. Used by Xiao Youmei in '音乐概说' 1907. Cf. 掂笛 in Lobscheid English and Chinese Dictionary (1867, vol 1, p. 395).

4. 洋琴 (piano). Modern equivalent: 钢琴. Used by Li Shutong in ‘Biographical Sketch of Beethoven,’ in 音乐小杂志, issue 1, 1906. Cf. 大洋琴皮亚娜披雅娜. 'Pianist' in K. Hemeling (1916: 1308) is rendered as 弹钢琴家and 大洋琴家. 钢琴 is used by A.H Mateer New Terms for New Ideas: A Study of the Chinese Newspapers (1913:70).

References

Hemeling, K, English-Chinese Dictionary of the Standard Spoken Language and Handbook for Translators, Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs, 1916.

Lobscheid, W, English and Chinese Dictionary with Punti and Mandarin Pronunciation, Hong Kong: Daily Press, 1867, vols. 1-4.

Liu, Lydia Translingual Practice: Literature,National Culture and Translated Modernity in China 1900-1937, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995:331.

Masini, Federico, The Formation of Modern Chinese Lexicon and Its Evolution Toward a National Language: The Period from 1840-1898, Department of Oriental Studies, University of Rome, 1993.

Mateer, A. H., New Terms for New Ideas: A Study of the Chinese Newspapers, Shanghai: Presbyterian Mission Press, 1913.

'Selections from Jottings of Carefree Travel by Wang Tao (trans. Ian Chapman), Renditions 53, 54 (Spring and Autumn): 2000, p 172.

To er or not to er

2011-01-12T11:27:00.004+08:00

"One of the hotly debated questions of language policy is to what extent rhotacization should be adopted as a feature of the standard language. Many nonnortherners are unable to pronounce such forms correctly and avoid the –r suffix as much as possible, even in those cases where it serves to distinguish different grammatical categories: for huà huàr ‘to paint a picture', many southerners will say huà huà."

--Jerry Norman Chinese, 1988:145.

The title of this piece is taken from Dayle Barnes ‘To er or not to er’, Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 1977 (5):211-36. The following is adapted from Zhou Jian ‘眼与眼儿’in Zicizhongde quwei (Humorous Chinese Character and Terms) Beijing: Xin shijie chubanshe, 1999:193-195.

In standard Chinese, particularly in colloquial speech, words or morphemes undergo a phonological process called rhotacization [also known as érhuà finals] which refers to adding a suffix -r to the final syllables. Rhotacized (érhuà) finals do not exist in isolation. In pinyin romanization, the suffix -r is placed after the original final syllable and the character 儿 is added after the word or morpheme.

Q: Does it matter if words or morphemes are not in their rhotacized form?

A: It doesn’t matter if some words appear in rhotacized forms or not. But for others it is essential because they function to semantically differentiate words.

Q: Why does fànguăn require a rhotacized form and not túshūguăn?

-Guăn (馆) does not appear in a rhotacized form for grand, dignified public institutions such as embassies, art galleries, museums, cultural history institutes or organizations, exhibitions halls and hotels.

The suffix –r can be added to informal places such as restaurants (饭馆儿), pubs (酒馆儿) tea houses (茶馆儿), and cafés (咖啡馆儿).

Rhotacized forms convey diminutive overtones and objects considered cute or familiar. Usually, cock and rooster do not habitually appear in rhotacized forms, but by adding a final -r to a small chicken or chick
(小鸡儿) it conveys something loveable or endearing.

The suffix –r can also serve distinguish parts of speech as in the following:

gài 盖 'to cover'
gàir 盖儿'cover'

jiān 尖 'pointed'; 'tapering'
jiānr 尖儿 'point'; 'tip'

Wind and Rain

2011-01-07T07:43:00.000+08:00

The planning of the imperial capital Peking melded traditional philosophy, yin and yang cosmic forces, religious thought, ancient mythology, and cosmology expounded in ancient texts. The Jade emperor's celestial abode was populated by stars and constellations. There were originally four palaces corresponding to four cardinal directions: east, south, west and north. The Han dynasty historian and eunuch Sima Qian attempted to shuffle the celestial order of palaces by adding another called the Purple Palace (Zigong), its domicile being the North Star.

These five palaces adopted symbolic correlations of the five elements with cardinal directions and colors:

Wood (east, green)

Fire (south, red)

Earth (central, yellow)

Metal (west ,white)

Water (north, black)

There were symbolic correlations with the number five such as musical pitches, stages of human growth and human virtues. Some of the symbolism had a significant impact on the architectural and spatial dimensions in city planning and the construction of palaces like those in the Forbidden City.

You can see yang odd numbers everywhere. Five and nine are especially potent numbers: the five-claw dragon, the five bridges. You'll see buildings divided into nine bays. The large gates with protruding bosses on them run nine across and nine down, nine being the most auspicious yang number and metonymy for the emperor. Dragons are virtually synonymous with the son of heaven, but in the Chinese cosmic scheme of things, there are actually nine. Nine also looms large in the music of the court. Numerous state sacrificial songs in late imperial China were composed with nine or less pitches and within the range of a ninth.

Dragons were also thought to control the wind and rain which is what fengshui means (literally 'wind and water'). Fengshui did not just refer to wind or rain but to cosmic or primordial energy which moved through the veins and vessels of terrains and winding watercourses.

Those gothic-like roof creatures that grace the eaves of the buildings in the Forbidden City--some of the figures appearing more than once and the number of creatures indicating the buildings' importance.The Hall of Supreme Harmony, the largest and tallest building in the Forbidden City and the first of the three ceremonial halls, has ten, not nine.

I have always wanted to get hold of a book that would give me eyes to look at buildings. When I first visited the Palace Museum many years ago, I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe the buildings in which a surfeit of servants and their masters lived and worked. I am not an architect, but it has always been a hobby of mine to be able to read a building or a conglomeration of buildings like those in the Forbidden City. The stones in the Palace grounds can tell us much about the construction history, damage and reconstruction, extensions and repairs in times of prosperity and so on.

How does one go about reading something as gargantuan as the Forbidden City? The simple answer is to do it step by step. I could imagine spending a few days examining a cathedral in Europe, but the Forbidden City could take months. How to read the Forbidden City—it’s a book that needs to be written—would include examining the general orientation of the place, buildings and furniture, numbers and shapes, colours, construction, the roofs, columns, domes and ceilings, animal, bird and plant symbolism, and looking beyond the objects and images of the Palace to examine the history and symbolism of imperial dress, the ceremonial attire of the emperor, for example, or the dress of tributary envoys or the Mongol nobility.

Republican Blues

2011-01-07T07:28:00.000+08:00

It was January 1912.The newly-formed Ministry of Education needed a national anthem for its new Republic. Letters were sent out to modernizing elites to start drafting suitably soul stirring texts.

A committee had read over three hundred submissions, but they were tossed out because there were not 'suitable.' It came down to the Republic's new boss Yuan Shikai to decide. He chose Song of the Green Clouds 'green clouds' being an ancient metaphor in Chinese for purity and loftiness. Choosing an anthem that would encapsulate the narrative of a new republic was not as easy as selecting the best stories of the nation or its best writers.

The new Republic was beset with factional fighting and local elites declaring their independence. Yuan never got the unanimous support to govern and when he died in June 1916 not before announcing that he would become the emperor in January, the country was run by warlord commanders and regional governors who carved out their own power bases. A number of national anthems circulated depending on who aspired to govern the nation. Yuan chose another anthem for the Republic in 1915 called China’s Strength and Power Strand Firm in the Cosmos. The epochal transformation from dynasty to republic is praised by none other than the mythical emperor Yao in the closing lines of the anthem.

Before the founding of the Republic, schools across the country had the own version of a anthem. Even the crumbling Qing Empire had its own anthem. In a diary entry dated September 28 1911, one of China’s pre-eminent translators wrote that he was off to the 'Imperial Qing Guard Public Office to decide on a suitable anthem.' Strengthening the Golden Bowl, was penned by Yan Fu, the aforementioned translator, and set to music by Pu Dong, a military training officer with the Imperial Guard. The empire would need more than an anthem to strengthen and unite the 'golden bowl' for within two weeks of selecting the anthem, the Qing Empire, and China’s last imperial dynasty, collapsed.

In setting a preexisting melody to a text, Yan and Pu adopted the models prescribed by the fashion of their time, but this compositional process went back much further, a practice that has its provenance in Chinese poetry. As early as the southern Song (1127-1279), it is recorded that poems were first chanted then set to a melodic line which became a song.

The process of taking 'old tunes and adding text' has striking parallels in liturgical and plainchants in medieval Europe. Contrafuctum which literally means 'to imitate,' 'to forge,' referred to the practice of a pre-existing melody set to a new text, a practice that continued well into the seventeenth century. The constant re-use of tunes, old and new and setting them to text—old and new—is so fundamental to Chinese vocal music that it barely needs to be called 'special.' We find it in narrative genres, revolutionary songs and in Chinese pop 'n' rock music.

In May 1921, Sun Yat-sen and the Nationalist Government in Canton issued their own anthem. Three years later, delegates to the First National Party Congress unanimously endorsed another new anthem penned by Sun Yat-sen and composed by Cheng Maojun performed as part as a cadet ceremony at the Huangpu Military School June 16, 1924. The anthem remains the national anthem of the Republic of China, Taiwan.

Before 'March of the Volunteers' became the official communist anthem after 1949 in mainland China, Mao Zedong’s arsenal of songs included Shaanxi folk songs set to revolutionary texts. There was no shortage of 'cultural workers'—left-wing writers, intellectuals, songwriters and folk singers that would turn Yan'an into hallowed 'red' ground and inscribe the Communist story in songs.

On Dr. Psychology

2011-01-05T07:51:00.003+08:00

'I did a show some time ago on why married men cheat on their wives and what goes on inside the mind of the other woman. Today we are talking about the subject in China. I am joined by two young women who are writing books on extramarital affairs in China, one with me in the studio, the other online from Shanghai. Thank you for joining us today.' Thunderous applause from the studio audience.
'
'You told me Susan that the modern equivalent of the mistress in China translates literally as 'second breast.' A pretty graphic word I must say to describe a woman who cohabitates with a man but is not married to him. Susan brought to my attention something a Chinese netizen recently said about the differences between prostitutes, 'second breasts' and wives on an online forum. I’d like to share that with the audience and our home viewers.’

All eyes on a huge plasma television screen in the studio:

Prostitutes are a bit like a paid public toilet, they’re there to fulfil a basic need and anyone who has the money can use them. An ernai [second breast] is like a private toilet – you need to be fairly well off to have one, no one else can use it, and you take much better care of it than a public toilet. And a wife? Well, you wouldn’t want to compare her to any kind of toilet at all, because she is your equal.

'From what I’m reading, says the doctor, 'I take it the taking on a lover or mistress in China, for those men who can afford it, is pretty common.'

'There’s plenty of talk of mistresses kept by wealthy Chinese elites,' intones Susan, 'the least being that they are idle women kept in gilded cages. Some are extremely rich, others are not. Some sign mutual agreements, while others are given broken promises. I’d love to be the fly on the wall when 'business' is discussed or when the cock of the roost lays down the rules. What interests me and disturbs me at the same time is that it is seems to have become an accepted practice among certain men and women.'

'I’d like to pick up on your point of how prevalent it has become among China’s rich elite', says the host., 'but I’d like to bring in Rebecca in Shanghai to get some historical perspective on mistresses and concubines. Can you tell the nation about concubines in China, the antecedents of those second breast?'

There is a brief pause before we hear Rebecca.

'In imperial China', Rebecca begins, 'men could have several women though most men could only afford to have one wife. The Chinese graph for concubine describes the position of subservience, made up of two characters meaning ‘a woman who stands.’ Men’s wives were commonly called ‘rooms’ or ‘persons of the room’ and while she was not caged in the room 24/7 like some captive bird, a room had a particular connection to the husband’s wife, the bedroom where they procreated and had children.'

'Does that mean that men of means in China could have more than one wife?', asks the good doctor.

'If we turn back the clock to twelfth century China and earlier, a man was legally permitted to have only one wife,' continues Rebecca. 'Monogamy did not mean that a man could only have one woman, but it did mean that he could only take one wife. There were very strict legal codes at the time defining a wife and a concubine. So there a tradition of married wealthy men in China having other women, but I should point out, that it is a tradition that is obviously not unique to China. I’m thinking not just of concubines, but imperial harems in other cultures, the Eurasian empires, particular those of the Romanov empire in Russia and the Ottoman empire in Turkey as well as harems among the Mughuls.'

'Powerful men who kept harems as part of their conquests,' chimes in the host. 'What particularly interests me about harems is what strategies women used to cope and survive considering their circumstances.'

'You raise an interesting point there, if I may interrupt, says Susan, 'and one that does not really stray from our topic at all. Concubinage was—and is in China a highly lucrative avenue for some women, some receiving allowances from one or more men, as well as gifts like apartments, and cars as well as other perks. They can do what they wish with the money: spend it recklessly, invest it, or use it to start a business. Rebecca and I have a mountain of personal stories between us that we could share with your viewers, but I'm fascinated how open the topic is discussed among people in China and that if you are a married man or woman and you don’t have a lover on the side then something is wrong with you.'

'Yes, is does seem to be rare these days if two people can stay together and not be tempted to play around,' says Rebecca. 'There’s a joke here that everyone here in Beijing has a lover regardless of their socio-economic status, including those itinerant workers who collect the garbage.'

'When men or women tell me in America that there having an affair I never know how many people they have told the story to', says the doctor..

'After the break,' continues the host, 'we’ll talk to one Chinese mistress who waited six years for 'her man' to divorce his wife, but he ended up married someone else instead..'

The Bodyguard

2011-01-04T07:33:00.000+08:00

I am assigned to be the emperor's bodyguard. It’s mayhem here these last couple days with the largest fall of snow in years and the attempted assassination on the emperor’s life by a group of palace ladies. They were cut up into bite-size pieces yesterday. A detective is on the case. The emperor’s mind is distracted. His thoughts piled higgledy piggledy in a vast mound.

Waiting for the water to boil, I watch the palace servants make up the emperor’s bed. The son of heaven is next door with his barber. 'My life has become one protracted ceremony', says the son of heaven. 'I’m sick of playing the emperor, weary of all the banquets, and tired of hearing those bells and drums. My doctors keep reminding me the importance of coitus reservatus in prolonging my health and longevity. Everything I do is minutely scrutinized including my sex life.’ All the emperor’s resentments are suddenly being projected on a huge billboard and he is convinced that everyone is in the know about it.

I am bodyguard-cum-retainer-cum-comrade-in-arms. I am also a eunuch. I had more balls cut off by one of the certified cutters in the city in my teens. I was given a narcotic herbal tea and my memory of that morning was that my penis and testicles were numbed using a paste made from hot chili peppers. I do remember the imperial cutter grabbing my genitals and then the wounds bandaged. I was not allowed to drink any liquids for three days.

We eunuchs get a lot of bad press. Most of us are illiterate. Some like me have climbed up the rungs of the imperial ladder to become stewards in the Imperial Household Department. Some of us meddle in politics, others feather their pockets by doing shady deals in antiques, treating the palace like it was their own imperial gift shop. And then there are the pyromaniacs.

Remember the last emperor Pu Yi? He had ordered his eunuchs to make an inventory of antiques in the Palace of Established Happiness, but an audit would reveal that many of the imperial treasures had vanished, sold off to buyers and dealers outside the Forbidden City. Eunuchs burnt the Palace of Established Happiness to the ground. Firefighters from the Italian legation came in to extinguish the flames. A foreign couple who were standing on the roof top of what is today Raffles Hotel witnessed the fire and spirited off to help. When they arrived the last emperor was covered in soot among the cinders trying to salvage his treasures.

Before I became a bodyguard my daily tasks included cleaning chamber pots, and getting up at some ridiculous hour to beat drums in the drum tower. There’s a lot of bullying among us—we are as stratified as the palace women. When we are punished we are usually beaten by a eunuch lower down the ladder. A eunuch that once served his master is now in charge of beating him.

But you know we are as different from each other as chalk and cheese. There was a historian, one of our finest .He offended the emperor and chose castration rather than death. I can understand that having your lower parts tampered with is better than being killed, but this guy argued that his castration could enhance his masculinity by pouring his energies into literary texts. For the emasculated scholar-official, the writing brush, as one contemporary writer puts it ‘was a substitute for the penis.’ Not having a phallus does not make us lesser men or heroes, but if things were different, I’d rather have my brush and my phallus as well.

The emperor has mounted his horse. He has just received a letter from one of his closest retainers. My job is to guard his body and mine.

References

Huang, Martin, W. Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China , Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006: 24.

Menzies, Grant- Hayter. Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling, Hong Kong: Hong University Press, 2008:132.

Rawski, Evelyn S. 'Palace Servants, in The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998:162-166.

China's Car of The Year

2010-12-31T07:24:00.000+08:00

I wrote a quite a lot of articles on China's auto industry in 2004 in Beijing. Here is part of a longer article I wrote for an auto research company on China's car of the year.....

Cars are perhaps not as salacious as pop idols or create nationwide hysteria when a new model rolls into a showroom, but the launch of a new car, an Auto Expo or Auto Award can cause auto mania among demanding consumers in China.

The Car of the Year Award in China has become an important barometer on what is hot and what is not in the auto industry. The annual event began in 2002 and has become a permanent fixture of the auto scene. So what are the most popular cars in China? Auto surveys and reports show that the Beijing Hyundai Elantra, the Shanghai GM Excelle and the Guangzhou Honda Accord are among the most popular passenger cars.

According to an article on cn.hubei.com titled ‘Trendy cars Driven by Successful Men’ (May 9 2003), eight cars are listed alongside different types of ‘modern’ Chinese men. Audi is the preferred car driven by successful businessmen. Your rugged, outdoors intrepid Chinese male drives a Cherokee, while Polo is the preferred car driven by white-collar workers.

When choosing a car, Chinese women look not only for ‘trendy colours’, but enough space or special compartments to store an extra pair of shoes, and the versatility of a smaller car like the QQ 0.8 ‘when you have to make a dash to a party or visit friends.’ And what do the stars drive? Xu Fan, a famous movie star and wife of the film director Feng Xiaogang, drives a gleaming white Golf, while the Hong KongCantopop singer and actress Kelly Chen drives a Citroën because they are ‘safe and spacious like German cars’.

Silk and Bamboo

2010-12-30T07:47:00.008+08:00

Shanghai, a bridge, a park, a lotus pond, a pavilion. Lovers, couples, children and the elderly stroll past, others sitting on benches. Some exchange the latest gossip or news, while others observe courtships in the making or broken hearts. The wind carries up leaves and fallen willow, marking its course as it sails across the lotus pond. A solitary bird dips its head in the water. Music as the writer Indra Sinha reminds us ‘does not all have to be with strings and bows and pipes, it can also be made by drops of rain or wind cut by a leaf.’

I could tell you that silk and bamboo music is performed on bolts of silk in a bamboo grove or music of bygone dynasties performed by lithesome maidens for the emperor’s pleasure. It is in fact music that comes from the south of the Yangtze River. It is hugely popular in Shanghai but some of the repertory is staple for conservatory-trained musicians around the country. Silk refers to the string instruments that once had silk strings and the bamboo mostly flutes. The music includes percussion instruments, usually played by one musician holding a wooden clapper in his left hand and a drumstick in his right.

This afternoon I’m listening to silk and bamboo performed by a group of men in a pavilion. This is not a concert hall so there are no obligatory silences before or during a piece. Tables are full of tourists, Chinese and foreign, tea attendants running around filling pots of green tea. A piece ends and some of the musicians leave their places while others take their places. Above the constant chatter of voices, I hear the leading instruments, the bamboo flute and two-string spiked fiddle playing florid ornamented melodic lines, at times together, at times anticipated or delayed.

The homogeneous blend of instruments has a striking polyphonic texture with a strong harmonic feeling in the cadences even though I know that its musical architecture has no harmonic foundation. Its embroidered musical textures are what musicologists call heterophony. 'Hetero' means 'other' or 'different' and 'phony,' 'sound.' The texture present in many types of Chinese music, vocal and instrumental, has 'different sounds' or 'different voices,' but it would be more correct to say that there are different instruments performing the same tune at the same time. There are also heterophonic relationships between voice and accompaniment found in regional opera genres as well as Peking opera.

Heterophony in Chinese literally means 'branch-sound polyphony,' and it is often explained as Lawrence Witzleben points out, as 'resembling small branches of a river that continually diverge from the mainstream then return to it.' The branching tributaries analogy is pretty much what goes on when musicians decorate or ornament a melody, 'adding flowers' as it is described in Chinese, then bringing their oars back to join the other rowers. The ornamentations are never the same, and there are variations among performers.

I have always been fascinated by the changes that happen from one rendition to the next that are accepted within the tradition. More difficult to pin down, however, is trying to understand how the physical and mental state of the performer—that is—emotions ranging from happy sad to anxious and indifferent—influence the subtle execution of 'flowers.'

Any explanation will not be simple. Connections between music and mood are so idiosyncratic to make any explanation unsatisfactory. It’s a bit like asking a chef what he added to a dish that has transformed it into a dazzling culinary experience. I have not infrequently spoken to bamboo flute performers in the bamboo and silk tradition after a rendition of a piece and said: ‘I really like the way you added flowers in that piece', which is another way of saying, 'I really liked the way you added melodic ornamentations and used neighbouring passing pitches to create momentary deviation.' Whether it is a chef or a musician, what is made different or changes with each dish or the rendition of piece of music has become thoroughly internalized through years of practice. The intuitive stuff is never easy to pass on.

Variation is such an integral part of silk and bamboo music that transcriptions and published scores need to be handled with care,especially when so much of the spirit and nuances of the music are initially transmitted between teacher and student. The adding of flowers is what brings the tradition to life. It starts in a practice room with a notated score and teacher and incrementally blossoms into intuitive variation.

References:

Lawrence Witzleben Silk and Banboo in Shanghai: The Jiangnan Sizhu Instrumental Ensemble Tradition, Kent: Kent State University Press, 1995:106.

Membrane Flute Mystery

2010-12-16T08:48:00.014+08:00

At some point in Chinese music history, the idea of boring a hole on a flute between the blow hole and the six finger holes and covering the hole with a membrane became aesthetically valued and desirable. Enter the dizi, a transverse bamboo flute. It’s been around for centuries in China, but we still don’t have ay idea exactly when and where the membrane started.

One of the crumbs of evidence is found in Chapter 148 of a music treatise by Chen Yang, a scholar and theoretician of the northern Song dynasty (960-1127 C.E). This treatise was presented to the throne in 1104. We find reference to an instrument called the seven-star pipe and its maker Liu Xi.

During a trip to Shenyang in China’s northeast province of Liaoning in January 1993, I was able to read the chapter in question, a Qing dynasty handwritten copy housed in the Special Repository Section at the provincial library. There was only threadbare information about the instrument and Liu Xi. While Liu is attributed to single-handedly inventing the instrument, the fact remains that dubious and rather murky figure does not appear in any of the standard musical dictionaries or encyclopedias. Nor do we have the foggiest idea of where Liu was born or when he died.

Chen’s reference suggests to me that he merely recorded what was considered by the northern Song—and by others much earlier—as the popular or accepted account surroundings the origins of the instrument like Hermes in Greek mythology is attributed to inventing a tortoise-shell lyre. If Liu was the brainchild of a membrane flute during the Tang dynasty why is it mentioned some two hundred years after it was allegedly created? Is it possible that musicians and instrument makers at the Jiaofang, a performing arts academy established during the reign of the Tang Emperor Gaozu (r.618-626 C.E.) knew of a membrane flute like the seven-star pipe, but turned a deaf ear to its tone quality because it was not aesthetically pleasing? If so, what does this tell us about Chinese concepts of musical aesthetics during the early Tang?

I have always wanted to turn this organological mystery into a story with a hard-nosed sleuth around the early Tang dynasty and Southeast Asia as the setting. A young Chinese detective from China is called in to solve the membrane mystery and in the course of his investigations finds himself caught in a web of murder and international intrigue. But that would certainly be crossing the lines of fact and fiction.

Let me explain what we do have. We do have our aforementioned textual reference—Chen Yang’s music treatise, and we do know there are other membrane hole flutes found in parts of southeast Asia which cropped up around the sixth century and earlier. The taegum, for instance, a large transverse flute from Korea, was one of the three major flutes of the Unified Silla Period (688-935 C.E.), and an important instrument in folk and court traditions and many shaman ensembles. The instrument has six fingerholes and corresponds in structure to two other flutes of the Silla Period, the medium-sized chunggum and sorgum. Unlike the membrane on the dizi, the membrane on the taegum is protected by a metal plate 'laced to the instrument with leather thongs.'

We can also map membrane-hole flutes from Vietnam, the transverse cai on dic, the internal-duct vertical flute cai sao, and from China the wenbeng from southwest Yunnan province, the tongxiao of the Korean nationality in Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces in China’s northeast China and the limbe found across regions of Mongolia, and Qinghai in China’s northwest. In Okinawa, there is also a membrane-hole transverse flute which is known under at least four names.

There are also flutes found in East Asia that have membranes not applied to cover a hole but are exposed. The zhumoguan found among the Dong in China is an end-blown flute with no fingerholes. A strip of bamboo one-sixth the length of the pipe is cut and scraped away to expose a bamboo membrane. Among the indigenous aboriginal peoples of Taiwan, the modi similar to the zhumoguan among the Dong in China in that it also has an exposed membrane, is used by hunters to lure and capture wild deer.

Our organological map highlights cultural diffusion, migrating populations, artifacts, customs, ideas, techniques, political factors and so on. The tributary system which began as early as the Han dynasty in China played a crucial role in cultural diffusion as it was soon adopted by neighbouring countries like Japan, Korea, Burma and Thailand. We know that when the Japanese decided not to send any more envoys and missions to China in 894 C.E, the membrane had not become and indelible feature of transverse flutes used in court music in the imperial capital in Chang’an (present-day Xi’an).

The mystery hinges on one major question: Did the membrane originate independently in China around the sixth century or was it introduced to China from one of its southeast neighbours or among its ethnic peoples? Several Chinese musical instruments came to China via its northwestern border like the pipa, konghou and huqin, but what of a membrane-hole flute? There are no examples of such flutes found in Central Asia or India, and such a lead, while worthy of further investigation is in my view, highly dubious.

The rest is speculation until we have more tangible leads. And there will be many broken tiles to complete this mosaic puzzle.

Rockin’ the Stage

2010-12-07T07:53:00.004+08:00

On a hot summer’s evening on March 1990 a large group of students gathered outside the Eastern Lake Hotel in Wuhan demanding to see their rock idol Cui Jian. The hotel had once been a regular haunt and secluded meeting place for some of China’s most famous Party luminaries. Now it had another star. As Cui Jian sat in his hotel room, exhausted after performing to a capacity crowd at the Hongshan Sports Stadium, the stifling heat suffocated the city.

Cui Jian was the defiant pin-up boy who exploits were acted out not in the Jade Emperor’s peach garden or among the denizens of a deep like the Monkey King, but at venues in Beijing and across the country. He was the guy who triggered off rock music in the mid eighties or at least launched rockets to propel the movement further.

Rock was an animal that didn’t exist at the time. The West had done it, or it had up to date done so in an orderly fashion since the 1950s. It was now time for China. Cui Jian’s ‘I Have Nothing’ came out in 1986 and the rest, as they say, was history. Bands started appearing like birds released from their cages, voices that had been locked up far too long and wanting to be free: China Power, Brother, White Angel, Fly, Toto, Da, Da, Da, Acupuncture, and 43 Baojia Street, the home of the Central Conservatory of Music. I don’t call them imitators; Chinese rockers delighted in subverting the genre and making their own.

Some rockers were professional musicians like the band 43 Baojia Street, transferring their skills to Western instruments. Cui Jian had played the trumpet since he was a kid and had also played with the Central Symphony Orchestra. Cui, I imagine was bored shitless just playing trumpet and like many of his music friends was ready for change.

A torrential downpour of popular music genres from the West rained down on China’s youth thanks to what today might seem like antiquated technology, the humble cassette tape. Foreign expats, tourists, businesspeople, Chinese returning home all played their part in getting the music to China. It was now up to cassette tape recorders and the airways to disseminate it.

In 1986 in the provincial city of Shenyang in northeast China, Lionel Richie was crooning ‘Hello’ through speakers in a park that was the burial grounds of a Manchu emperor and his empress. I have no idea how the park authorities got hold of a Lionel Richie tape, but a foreign student at Liaoning University had apparently met someone who worked at the park and had passed on a copy of the song. It was also at the same time that China’s economy was getting ready for a growing consumer market and record companies in Hong Kong and Taiwan saw the enormous potential for popular music, including rock that would return them profit and prestige.

Rock music has always worn the 'anti-badge', but no matter how we want to talk of rock music’s deviance—the bad boy or bad girl—it’s still part of what it projects to beat up or move away from. Rock music in China obviously created a space for alternative voices like anywhere, but live public performances of rock music have always been 'sensitive,' especially if you were someone like Cui Jian. One summer’s evening in a jazz bar in Beijing, the authorities decided to gag the rock icon: he could play the trumpet but not sing.

More than once I have found myself in a run-down warehouse in the capital listening to rock and grunge bands finely alchemizing the technique, the group precision. These are musicians who spend many hours a day honing their musical craft. They practice, they rehearse, knowing full well that there are little if any financial rewards. But that doesn't hold them back. There's a collective raw energy that binds them, a devotion not to persuade an audience and a larger community of spirits but to connect. Timothy Rice’s influential model of ‘how do people historically construct, socially maintain and individually create and experience music’ is equally valid here in these warehouses as any other music.

Many years ago I went to a punk rock concert in the capital with an American businessman who had an extensive vocabulary of Beijing’s foul language. The lead vocalist was the punk-rocker He Yong. Going around my head after the concert were words from his song ‘Garbage Dump’:

This world we live in is like a garbage dump

The people are like insects.

Everyone’s struggling and stealing

We eat our conscience

And shit ideology.

During the performance of the song I was watching all the other non-verbal phenomena going on stage and the interaction between the audience and the band. The audience helped shaped the song expressing their own opinions with shouts and applause, punctuated all the while by pulsating rhythms, electric guitar distortions and all the other bits and pieces suggested by the instruments.

It was pouring outside, the sound of rain lashing against a long line of parked cars. I was lucky to get a taxi. The driver was playing a CD of the Taiwanese pop star Teresa Teng. I was now light years away, musically, from what I had experienced that evening. I had moved across the popular music grid as effortlessly as Clark Kent darts into a phone booth and comes out as Superman.

The Flute Player

2010-11-30T09:25:00.000+08:00

I’m sitting in a tiny apartment sipping jasmine tea and cracking melon seeds on a cold winter’s day. The window opens out to the conservatory grounds. Students carrying small enamel or aluminum lunch boxes are walking to the cafeteria. Kong Qingshan, associate-professor and bamboo flute teacher at the Shenyang Conservatory lights another Hilton cigarette while we ponder when the heating will come on. His wife sits on the bed with the latest member of the family, a small black Russian dog.

Kong was born in northeast China’s Jilin province in 1942. He was three years old when his father died. There was very little money and not enough of it to support his mother and four sisters so in the early 1950s, Kong took on part-time work as a way of supporting the family. He did all kinds of odd jobs.

He was assigned to a job as an electrician, but it was not in that work that he discovered his profession. Early on, Kong particularly loved the sound of bamboo flutes: the transverse dizi and the end-blown horizontal xiao. In the mysterious way something grabs you that you then spend the rest of your life doing that one thing, and nothing else, Kong was drawn to the sounds of these flutes, especially the dizi. In the early 1960 with the catastrophic Great Leap Forward bearing down hard on the nation, Kong joined a regional opera troupe in Jilin. In 1965, just before the beginning of those ‘ten years of devastation,’ he enrolled at the Shenyang Conservatory of Music.

Many years later he would talk of ‘those years’ as a young red guard, trying to make sense of what was going on around him, an increasingly confused and callous world, the political catastrophes, those wasted years. The country had economically, to twist an Arab saying, travelled at the pace of a camel. By the late seventies and early eighties China, the camel had now entered the brave new sand dunes of a market economy.

In October 1990, the TV soap Aspirations literally emptied the streets in Beijing and elsewhere. Set in the capital from the 1960s to the 1980s, the series found millions of sympathetic viewers around the country. An estimated 550 million people in China watched the soapy when it was first screened in late 1990. Kong could not stop talking about it. Many of his colleagues reminded me of the character Song Dacheng in the series, ready to pounce on any opportunity to flex some entrepreneurial muscle. One teacher in the education department at the Shenyang Conservatory was a part-time photographer, making and selling ocarinas to both local and international markets and earning some extra income as a freelance calligrapher.

None of which means Kong was not thinking of money. He was not impervious to self-promotion and making some extra income, but he has always been passionate about teaching, sharpening and honing his craft without having to tell the world about it. He is someone who has an air of reticence, of restraint, a refusal to put himself forward.

His practice room in the Folk Music Department has the simplicity of a military tent. The room’s furnishing consist of two wooden chairs, a long bench, a music stand, a piano, a small round table with an electric kettle and thermos, and a large desk covered with sheet music and bamboo flutes. Kong picks up a long flute in his hand. ‘This is where the real work is done. It’s about achieving the best results with as little effort as possible.’ He plays, I listen. He plays, I play. ‘It’s not about memorizing a piece.’ He briefly pauses before going on. ‘It’s about playing it over and over again until you become the piece. We learn a piece so well that you don’t need to think about it anymore. We have digested it, internalized it, and each time we play a piece or musical phrase we make slight changes to each performance of it.’

As we walk back to his apartment, braving sub-zero temperatures, he lights another cigarette, the flame throwing and orange glow across his face. That night I had some inkling of what it means to follow your bliss.

海内存知己，天涯若比邻 (If the world holds a friend who knows your heart, the sky’s end is a near as the next village)

2010-11-01T16:02:00.000+08:00

René had attended several farewell dinners in Beijing. On Friday night he was at a student farewell dinner at Beijing Normal University. Emotions were high as many foreign students who had been studying in Beijing for several years were ready to leave and return home.

As might be expected, students and teachers were drinking, toasting and talking about close bonds of friendship that had formed during their study. Several teachers at René's table began reciting lines of kindred spirits and friendship from Tang poetry. One teacher wrote the following verse in a student’s farewell notebook:

海内存知己，天涯若比邻。
hǎinèi cún zhījǐ, tiānyá ruò bǐ lín.
(lit: ‘within the seas exist an bosom friend, the sky’s end liken to a neighbour')

This verse taken from a poem by the Tang dynasty poet Wang Bo called 'Farewell to Vice Prefect Du Setting out for a Post in the Kingdom of Shu.'

His teacher explained the verse in Chinese writing it underneath the poem:

四海之内有你这个知心朋友，即使远在天涯也像近邻一样。

sìhǎizhīnei yǒu nǐ zhège zhīxīn péngyou, jíshǐ yuǎn zài tiānyá yě xiàng jìnlín yíyàng.

Within the four seas, where there is a bosom friend.

(lit: 'a friend who understands or knows your heart
Although [we are] far apart, the end of the earth is like next door').

These famous lines are often recited and written to express volumes of subtext on the subject of true friendship. Despite the distances that separate people, where there is a deep and intimate understanding between two people, time nor space cannot break or sever that.

这个季节的当季水果有什么？(What fruit is in season now?)

2010-11-01T15:45:00.000+08:00

René was tired of eating out and often went to his local market to buy fruit and vegetables. It was early April, and there was an abundant supply of strawberries (草莓cǎoméi) and mangoes (芒果mángguǒ).

René thought how do you say what fruit or vegetable is in season?
René knew the word for season (季节jìjié), but wanted to know how to express 'in season.' He called his Chinese teacher and after doing his best to explain what he wanted to say, she replied:

这个季节的当季水果有什么?

(lit: 'this season fruit that is just now have what?')

当 means 'just at a specific time.'

Having learned the expression René knew he could easily substitute 'fruit' for 'vegetable.' A couple of weeks later, he was taking a drive to the countryside and found the expression very useful when talking to some country folk in a village.
René had learned most of the names of vegetables and fruit in Chinese, but he had enormous trouble trying to recall the word for kiwi fruit and lime. Last night while shopping at Jenny Lou’s he came across these two fruits and decided to scribble them down on a piece of paper:

猕猴桃
míhóutáo
kiwi fruit

青柠檬
qīngníngméng
lime

While at the cash register, René received a text message from a German friend who was shopping in a large supermarket in the basement of a fancy department store and wanted to know coincidentally, how to say lime in Chinese. René sent off a quick reply.

Postcard from a Great Wall

2010-11-01T15:30:00.000+08:00

Another postcard from a Great Wall by guest contributor Damien Kinney.

'We didn’t sleep very well. We couldn’t get comfortable,' I say to the farmer whose terraced fields we have walked down. 'No sleep, eh? No, it's not very comfortable up there', he points out dreamily, sitting up on a slab of stone. He grins with good humour at our plight and I want to believe the idea that the mountains breed a more sympathetic kind of individual. He is helpful: there would be a bus to take us back towards Beijing, he tells us, but not until we hit the highway a thirty-minute walk further on.

We are well up to the task, despite having just been lashed by eight hours of rain on an exposed ridge. Nothing more than sleeping bags and each other, in the spooning position, for warmth, on a section of the Wall beaten back into the earth by the centuries. Knees tucked behind shivering knees. None of us had considered the possibility of rain or invested in a tent, even after receiving advice not to sleep in a watchtower. A den of rodents and other wildlife, we were told. Yet the rawness of this true 'night out' is rejuvenating. And so is this: standing there, I listen to the calm, and absorb the simple rain-soaked beauty of the hamlet in the early morning, and realize that if we weren’t friends before last night, we are now.

Postcard from Henan

2010-11-01T15:25:00.000+08:00

Here is a postcard from Henan written by guest contributor Damien Kinney.

The road to the Yellow River is rough and unsealed. We’re well out of town by now. I doubt my driver normally ventures this far, and before long he stops to ask a farmer for the best way to 'Huanghe shui.' Inquisitive also, the farmer looks over at him, then at me, with a gaze that suggests we are but specks on the horizon. The farmer's house is like all the others I've seen in the last ten minutes: its roof is ablaze with the yellow of ripening bananas. Whole hamlets are thus covered, as if to offset the bleak alluvial beauty of the region.

Sleepy waters, on a rainy day

Misty river, yellow earthen flow

Do the people need your latent fury?

From raised river banks

Raised a thousand times…

Do all your unsuspecting visitors

Leave so entranced?

Leave so entranced.

Kaifeng is south of the river. A thousand years ago it was the capital of the Northern Song dynasty, when the city was known by two other names, Bianliang and Bianjing. At its apex it was one of the largest cities in the world, home to a diverse population of traders and artisans from across Asia. They had arrived at the eastern extremity of the Silk Road.

Yesterday I went to Xiangguo Temple. The Buddha must have been a firm, guiding presence along my meandering path: the mere thought of walking through that temple continues to fill me with the calm and serenity of unexpected joy.

Come nightfall, the ancient city’s enduring bustle becomes more apparent. Kaifeng's night market sizzles with hand-made noodles and local delicacies. It is this kind of cosmopolitan variety that still brings in curious hordes from all corners of the known world, for as I sit down to dinner at a market stall that night the familiar tones of Australian English pierce the air. And then more of the same, mixed now with other varieties of English, and one or two other 'West Ocean' tongues. 'Xiexie mother one Australian says genuinely as he collects his meal from a frumpy forty-something stallholder. Australian irreverence meets the inherent, sometimes dormant know-how of the Chinese. And it was the self-same know-how, and a genius for civilization that allowed the Chinese to build cities such as Kaifeng.

Its location proved a double-edged sword. Kaifeng must have been, before the massive dykes were built last century, one of the most flood-prone cities in the world. Whole layers of ancient Kaifeng are buried in the yellow earth like submerged museums to human endeavour. The city once had sizeable and integrated Jewish and Muslim communities whose members were distinguished, perhaps with innocuous local humour, as the 'blue caps' and the 'white caps' respectively. They were among the pathfinders of transcontinental trade, the Jews in particular thought to have originally journeyed from Persia.

In another temple I picked up a copy of a mural, which I will one day proudly mount, depicting Kaifeng in its twelfth century splendour. Henan seems a land long-ravaged by the repeated trials of history, its dense population and intense farming—a place whose soul is anchored, as much as any Chinese province, firmly in the past.

我们的时间总是错不开 (We never seem to be free at that same time)

2010-11-01T06:52:00.000+08:00

René had been meaning to meet up with a friend for quite some time, but they never seemed to be able to synchronize their time. After repeatedly not being able to meet up—he was working, and she was studying at Peking University—Li Jun sent René the following text message:

我们的时间总是错不开, 我下午没有课。
Wǒměnde shíjiān zǒngshi cuòbùkāi. Wǒ xiàwǔ méiyǒu ke.
We never seem to be free at that same time. I have no classes this afternoon.

错不开 was an expression René had never come across in his language textbooks. From experience René had learned that looking up a word in the dictionary was not always that helpful. His English-Chinese dictionary did not have 错不开, but it did have 错开.

The entry in English read:

'stagger the holidays.'

Stagger is a rather unusual word which means 'to arrange otherwise than at the same time.'

If two people wanted to meet up or synchronize their time together, one could say in Chinese:

最好我们可以错开。
It’s best that we can find a time that we can arrange that suits both of us.

错不开means a period of time that overlaps or clashes with somebody else’s time period.

上班的第一个星期，她就搞定了一个客户 (She landed a client in her first week of work).

2010-11-01T06:32:00.002+08:00

上班的第一个星期，她就搞定了一个客户。
She landed a client in her first week of work.
One of René’s co-workers had recently joined the company and was somewhat of a sales guru. In her first week, she had already got one new client. During a late morning coffee break a few of his colleagues were talking about her:

上班的第一个星期，她就搞定了一个客户。
Shàngbān dìyīge xingqi, tā jiù gǎodìngle yige kèhu.
She landed a client in her first week of work。

搞定了gǎodìng le. literally means 'to do and then be fixed, 'decided', 'set.'

As was often the case, once René had learned a new expression, he heard it popping up in all kinds of situations. Here are some examples:

1.. 工作搞定了。
Gōngzuò gǎodìngle.
I’ve got the job

2. 合同搞定了。
Hétong gǎodìngle.
The contract is in the bag/I have the contract

3. 他们的婚礼日期已经搞定了。

Tāmende hūnlǐ rìqī yǐjing gǎodìngle.
The date of their wedding is already set/Their wedding day is set.

Sandra Sabatini

2010-10-25T06:32:00.000+08:00

Sandara Sabatini's Book Breath: The Essence of Yoga (Thorsons, 2000) remains a gem of a book. Some time back I posted a review of her book with some of her poems translated into Chinese by Li Nan.
Here are four more. The English texts are followed by the Chinese translation

1. fireworks

when the outbreath has burned all the impurities
wait...wait...wait...

then the inhalation is like fireworks
with sparkles, thousands of sparkles
dancing in the air around you
(p. 120)

焰火

呼气带出所有的杂质以后

等待…等待…等待…

然后吸气象焰火一样

带着火花，无数的火花

围绕你在空中舞蹈

2. snake charmer

the spine is not vertical
it is a snake dancing all the time

the breath plays the tune
and the spine dances...

there is music that goes on all the time
(p. 120)

耍蛇者

脊柱不是垂直的

它是时时刻刻舞蹈着的蛇

呼吸奏出曲调

脊柱跳起舞来…

音乐无时无刻不在

3. in shavasana: gold

at the end of the practice
lying in shavasana
the superfluous leaves the body
and disappears into the ground

only gold remains
(p.214)

在放松姿势中: 金

练习结束时

躺着呈放松姿势

多余的东西离开身体

消失在地面里

余下是金

4. from the song of mahamudra

at first, the mind tumbles
like a waterfall

in mid-course, it becomes calm
like a river flowing slowly

in the end, it is an ocean
where two halves merge into one
(p.215)

自摩诃穆德拉（大手印）之歌

起初，

头脑象瀑布一样翻滚

后来，

它变得象缓缓流动的河一样平静

最后，

它化成一片海洋

在那里两个一半融为一体

The Sikh

2010-10-22T13:48:00.000+08:00

This little piece called 'The Sikh' was written by my mother Rose Stanton in 2003. It describes her meeting with a Sikh man in the post-war period in Victoria in the mid 1940s.

----

There were three regular hawkers who raised my excitement levels when I was a child in a country town. I vividly recall their visits the year I turned eight.

There was the Rawleigh’s man in his little car with display cases crammed full flavourings, spices, ointments, unguents and other marvels. It was like seeing an Aladdin’s cave when he opened up the cases to display his treasures.

My mother always bought a bottle of vanilla extract from him. It had a marvelously heady scent and made a delicious flavouring for cakes, puddings, biscuits and icings. Occasionally, she would be tempted to add some soothing balm to her purchases.

There was the swarthy little Singhalese (Sri Lankan) in his old-fashioned little van full of intriguing rolls of material. He would unleash a swathe of exotic silk in peacock colours, or filmy gold-thread embroidered chiffon or workaday cotton prints across one arm and drape a mock skirt around his waist, causing me to giggle because he looked so incongruous.

Finally, there was the magnificent Sikh. Tall, black beard, neatly curling, flashing brown eyes, and those intriguing turbans in different bright shades each day. He drove an old-fashioned covered wagon with a placid, sturdy bay horse pulling it along. Its harness of red leather was trimmed with little silver bells that jingled enchantingly as he drove up to the front gate.

He used to park his wagon and tether his unharnessed horse in the park next door to our house when his day of door-to-door sales was over. I could sneak out and join him at his campfire as he cooked charparti in a pan and ate them with his long brown fingers. Dusted with cinnamon and sugar, they were delicious. He would cook more and more of them until I had had enough. He ate his charparti with a vegetable in a blackened pot. Then he boiled his billy and made tea. This too, he would share with me.

The novelty of this brown-skinned gentleman from beyond the seas enchanted me. He was welcoming, kindly, and very correct in his manners and behaviour. When my mother saw what I was doing, she brought him little gifts of vegetables from our garden or fruit from the orchard just so she could check up that it was safe for me to visit him. Sometimes she brought him hot scones or bread rolls from the oven or a pot of homemade jam. As time went by, it was I who brought the little gifts to him. Meticulously, he would give me a little trinket in return—a jangly bracelet, a hair ornament, a dainty necklet, an exquisite lacy handkerchief. I felt like a queen.

Always, I was full of questions. Why did he wear a turban? How did he make charparti? Where did all those trinkets and treasures in his wagon come from? Patiently and politely, he would answer my questions. But as the sun began to set and the sky darkened, he would send me home bursting with new facts I’d learnt and wanted to share with my family.

One evening as I left him and his wagon, I remarked that I was going home to have a bath. 'You Australians think you are so clean!' he declared. 'You sit in your dirty bathwater to rinse yourselves. That’s dirty, not clean!' I gaped at him, a little stunned by his surprising attack. ‘How do you get clean?’ I demanded. ‘You don’t even have a bath or bathroom.’ ‘But s/.till I clean myself every morning and every night,’ he told me with a smile. Intrigued, I asked 'How?'

He turned and went into his wagon and came out moments later carrying an enamel basin. In it were a dipper and a cake of soap. A fresh white towel was draped over his shoulder. He went to his water barrel which was lashed onto the back platform of his wagon, and half –filled the basin with cold water.

He set the basin down on the grass beside the wagon and fetched a billy of hot water from the campfire hook. He removed his full-length shirt and squatted beside the basin, scooping some of the water over first his head and then, his body with the little dipper. Then he lathered his head, body, and limbs with soap. This completed, he scooped up more water and more water in the dipper and rinsed first his head and then his torso. To rinse his limbs, he stood up and ladled dippers of water onto his legs and his arms. Then he spoke for the first time since I had asked him how he bathed. 'See. I am clean with clean water.' Then he began to towel himself dry.

I couldn’t get home fast enough to share with my family the fact that Sikhs had clean baths and we had dirty ones. My mother was decidedly unimpressed.

Looking back at that moment, I think it was probably the thought of what the Sikh was or wasn’t wearing as he demonstrated his clean bath for me that had my mother worried.

By the time I went to high school, the Sikh had stopped his regularly visits to my little country town. We thought nothing of this. The war, with its petrol rationing and with so many men going off to fight in one of the armed services, saw many resident and itinerant men disappearing from the town.

I never thought about the Sikh again until one day, when I was walking down a busy city street, I noticed this tall turbaned gentleman. He was elegantly dressed in a business suit waiting at a tax rank. 'Heavens!' I thought. 'Doesn’t he look like my Sikh hawker?' Then I chuckled because I guessed that just as all Chinese are suppose to look alike to we westerners, all Sikhs probably did too. While these thoughts flitted through my mind, I had stopped dead in my tracks staring at the turbaned stranger.

Suddenly, to my embarrassment, I realised that I was now being stared at. The gentleman walked towards me, hand outstretched, saying, 'Rose? Can it be my little Rose?'

'Not so little now,’ I laughed, as I took his hands in mine.

'Isn’t it silly?' I said. You remember my name and I don’t even know yours. You never told me. I always called you ‘The Kind Sikh Hawker.’ ‘Well,’ he said with a smile, ‘It’s Dr. Kind Sikh Hawker now. I’m a doctor at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

'How come?' I demanded. 'That’s quite a transition!'

'It’s a long story. Put briefly, my mother died when I was just a toddler so my father took me on his hawker’s wagon and I made his rounds with him. A little white goat provided the milk I needed and my father did everything else. He always wanted me to become a doctor and he began to save to make my education possible. He died when I was just sixteen so I became the Sikh hawker until I had enough saved to go to school to qualify for university.'

'I always remember the night you told me that I had a very dirty bath, like all Australians. It started me thinking about attitudes to other peoples’ cultural backgrounds. It opened up my mind to accepting with an open mind and heart, the practices of people of other cultures. That was a wonderful gift you have me that night.'

'Do you still sit in your dirty bathwater?' he teased.

'No I clean myself under the shower first and only climb into the bath to soak myself once I’m clean.' Dr. Sikh laughed. 'And I just shower now, not bathe. We both learned from the other.'

He took my arm and said, 'Would you like to join me for a cup of coffee, my old friend?' 'I’d rather have tea,' I replied. We both laughed as we walked off to a nearby café to renew our friendship.

Langar

2010-10-21T09:24:00.000+08:00

Langar literally means refectory of the Guru and is an integral part of every Gurdwara or Sikh temple. It shares food with everbody, regardless of who you are---a CEO, a king, a shoemaker, school teacher, lawyer, tax collector or an unemployed youth. All Sikhs are expected to contribute to the community kitchen either by donating food or by participating in the cooking, serving the food or cleaning the utensils.

Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, set up the first langar at Kartarpur (present-day Pakistan) where people brought corn and firewood and worked together in the preparation and serving of the food. Guru Angad, the second Guru, extended the concept further and personally served the food. The third guru, Guru Armadas, institutionalized the community kitchen and made it mandatory that all visitors who wish to visit him must first eat together. The act of eating a meal together in turn brought a community or ‘sangat’ together. Guru Ramdas, the fourth Guru, made it obligatory that water and meals be served to travelers and squatters.

Akbar the Great, the third Mughal Emperor who came to visit Guru Armadas was not exempt from first sitting with the Guru and sharing simple fare. The historical record tells us Akbar reclined form having bolts of silk spread out for him by his servants when he paid a visit to the Guru. Instead he walked to the langar barefoot.

Akbar was so impressed with the community kitchen that he offered a great amount of land and wealth to maintain it. Guru Amardas refused the gift so Akbar offered the land and wealth as a wedding present to the Guru’s daughter. Story has it that the gift of land presented to the Guru’s daughter was the city of Amritsar, the holy Mecca of the Sikhs.

The idea of a community kitchen was revolutionary at the time. Sikhs and others would sit in the pangat where the food is served, without distinctions of caste or status. Pangat literally means ‘row’ or ‘line’ and when you enter the langar you will often see rows of carpet lay out on the floor.

The langar was for all intents and purposes designed to strip away a rigid Hindu caste system prevalent in India during Guru Nanak’s lifetime. The idea and its practice were designed to uphold equality between all people regardless of religion, caste, colour, gender or social status. Even the food served, strictly vegetarian, ensured that everybody, irrespective of their dietary restrictions, would feel welcome as equals.

Before the food is served a small portion of each of the dishes is put on a plate or in bowls and placed in front of the Sri Guru Granth Sahib and a prayer called the Ardas is performed.

The Sikh holy book may not always be present as I observed while doing seva in the langar at the Khalsa Diwan Sikh Temple in Hong Kong. Every morning just before twelve o’clock noon, the head cook and any of the volunteers working in the langar who helped in the preparation or the food or were ready to serve it, came together to bless it.

It is also common to hear the chanting of Waheguru during the preparation of food or the cooking process to infuse the food with a divine vibration. The prayer for blessing the food is said to pass through the entire sangat through the large iron cauldrons of the langar.

A Sikh blessing amply illustrates the importance of the langar as a focal or anchor that unites humanity performed with selfless love, devotion and humility:

May the iron pots of the langar be ever warm (in service).

Seva, conventionally translated as ‘selfless service’ occupies a central place in Sikhism. The word comes from the Sanskrit root sev,—‘to serve,’ ‘to wait or attend upon,’ ‘honour’ or ‘worship.’

Most if not all of us have experienced doing something from the heart without anything in return. Guru Nanak and many others wanted to integrate seva not as something we do once in a blue moon, but into our daily lives.

Yogi Bhajan did not mince his words when he said:

You are here to serve, here to lift, here to grace, here to give hope and action, here to give the very deep love of your soul to all those who need.

The spirit of seva in the langar, to put it quite simply, is to serve the planet, to cook for humanity. Seva in the langar is not just about preparing the food, washing up or serving it. Seva is saying: 'I'm here to serve,' 'I'm here to help and serve you from my heart.' It could also be just a simple smile or a volunteer in the pangat serving food and asking someone if they would like some more water or a cup of Indian tea. It could also just be the sweetness of your words and much, much more.

The last words uttered by Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth guru, before he passed away were apparently 'keep the langar open.' In the Dasam Granth, the tenth Guru wrote: 'may langar (charity) and the sword (justice) prevail in the world.' As the langar brings together people from all walks of life, it is truly a global community kitchen, a kitchen that serves everyone, free of prejudice and discrimination. One global community kitchen and one God—Ik Onkar—the foundation stone of Sikhi.

References

1. ‘Origins of the Word Langar—Truly is a Great Virtue’
http://ashthefoodie.wordpress.com/2008/07/13/the-origin-of-the-word-langar%E2%80%94truly-is-a-great-virtue/

2. Entry for ‘Langar’ Sikhiwiki Encyclopedia
http://www.sikhiwiki.org/index.php/Langar

3. Entry for Seva in Sikhiwiki Encyclopedia
http://www.sikhiwiki.org/index.php/Seva