Who Holds the Power?

Last night the power went off at midnight. Which is nothing to get too upset about, except that no-one knew anything about it. Televisions and clocks reset, computers ran out of power, electrical appliances went uncharged, and freezers leaked all over the floor. About two minutes after it happened I angrily stormed down stairs to find out what was going on.

The security guard was sitting there, reading under candlelight. I asked if this was unexpected. He said that he knew it was going to happen due to engineering works. His supervisors had told him. It just so happened that him and his colleagues had not bothered to tell anyone else. Whether out of laziness, unwillingness to enter into conflict and anger, or orders from above; we were left, well, in the dark.

And what a marked difference this is from the UK, where a letter is sent out months in advance of any power cut (in fact this is a legal requirement). British Method: Warn before, deal with the consequences and complaints, then cut the power. Chinese method: Give no warning, cut the power, then shrug off the consequences and complaints saying that what's done is done and there is no going back.

Still, there were rare advantages. It was incredible to see all the student accommodation plunged into blackness; but even better still was to hear all the student accommodation plunged into silence. No televisions, no microwaves, no air conditioning, no speakers, no computers. Just the gentle brushing of the wind across the trees and through my window.

What's a Gift and What's a Bribe?

When I originally intended to move from my home-stay family to live in accommodation at university halls of residence, I was quite convinced that I wanted to stay in a room of my own.Knowing that single rooms were in high demand and hoping to curry favour with the accommodations office, I gifted a box of Rose chocolates to sweeten the dialogue. The ruse worked, and I have hardly thought any more of it since.

Until my friend recently decided that he too would like to live in the Halls of Residence. On account of being in the middle of term time, and realising that single rooms would now be as rare as hens teeth, he took my idea and upped the ante a little, gifting a bottle of Japanese Saké. And it worked...

Furthermore, a Chinese friend recently showed me the gift which she was planning on giving to one university department with the intention of receiving favourable treatment in changing her major. As if the perfume were not enough, inside was a gift card for 2000RMB (£200)

In itself this gift card is of particular interest. There is no name attached to it, so it is clearly not for personal use like a credit/debit card. But it is also not the same as a store gift card (i.e. for sole use in HMV, Topshop, Waitrose...) Rather it is issued by a bank, to be used in the same way as a credit card, to be given as a gift, and which can only be topped up in large denominations. If ever there was a card more conducive to being given as a bribe (in lieu of cash, of course, which is too overt is its sinister implications) then this was it.

There is an interesting point to be made about what the difference is between a gift and a bribe. Is it dependent on some kind of fiscal trait? Or is it a moralistic difference based on intent? Perhaps it may be considered that a gift is given out of innocent kindness, whereas a bribe has the expectation of something in return. But this is no doubt an overly simplistic simplification, and it has also been said that nothing is a purely selfless act, and gift-giving provides feelings of self-contentment and one-upmanship. What if there is no devious intention at the outset, but the giving of gifts merely provides foundation for latter requests?

On this note, one thing I have heard suggested is that corruption is engrained within Chinese culture, as this "Perceived Corruption Index 2010" map illustrates. Perhaps time spent here has biased my stance and made me apologetic of Chinese faults, but it is important to remember that there are few world economies with such growth as China, as well as associated high inflation. Wages in public and government institutions often considerably trail the increase in the cost of living; and the gift/bribe culture is a simple way of compensating for such discrepancy.

Do your ears hang low, do they waggle to-and-fro?

China has often been labeled as an expert at imitation, a master at infringement of copyright law, and inept at nurturing it's own creative voice. During my time spent in China I have learnt that whilst the first two accusations do hold water, the later suggestion is simply not true. I have seen artistic innovation here which can only marveled at...

However, there are indeed times when even I am taken aback at the invocation of Western culture. On the radio yesterday I heard this song by a Taiwanese pop-hip-hop group. I couldn't help but notice how the first 30 seconds had a remarkable resemblance to a tune I heard quite a lot when I was younger. Well, they do say imitation is the finest form of flattery...

UPDATE (30/06/11): Just the other day I was watching an online television show, and this ad came on. It is ostensibly for 黄金酒 （Huangjiu, A Chinese alcoholic beverage particularly popular in southern China) Yet despite the poor quality of the clip, the tune used is unmistakably familiar. Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells...!

(Chinese Periodic Table) There's 锑,砷,铝,硒...

For those of you interested, the Chinese above is the first line from Tom Lehrer's song "The Elements".
"There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium.." and so on, a song which I became very familiar with when I was younger. I have fond recollection of an event revolving around the chemical elements when I was in my formative years. At this time I was perhaps 12 years old, and I had just moved from junior to senior school. For the first time, instead of having a mixed science class, the three sciences of chemistry along with physics and biology were segmented into specialised subjects.

The chemistry teacher set us a paper in the first class as an observation of our understanding of chemistry, and there was one question imploring us to "Write down any chemical elements that you know of." Most students managed 10, some perhaps 20. I tirelessly wrote down more than 80 elements, in the exact order and more-or-less the exact lyrics of Tom Lehrer's song. I will cherish the bemused and surprised look on the chemistry teacher's face for the rest of my life...

And this brings me on to the topic of this blog entry. See, when I left school I thought that I was done with chemistry, but recently I have started to develop quite an interest in the Chinese periodic table. A while back I suggested that new Chinese characters could not just be created out of no-where since most people would not understand them. Well, in fact, I was wrong. In very specialist cases they can be, and one example of this is the periodic table.

Early Chinese characters had already been found for the Five Traditional Metals: Gold, Silver, Copper, Iron and Tin; along with Lead and Mercury; but around the industrial age there was a need for the creation of characters to depict the recently isolated elements.
And the technique used is a fascinating one. Depending on the state of the element at room temperature, firstly one of 4 different radicals (this is not the sound part, it just contributes to the meaning) were used. 钅(metal/gold) for solid metals, 石 (stone) for solid non-metals, 氵(water) for liquids and 气 (air) for gases.

Some of the time a sound is then given which most of the time would correspond to the Western description of the element.
For Example: Sodium, depicted in the periodic table as Na, when translated into Chinese derives it sound from 内 and its metal state钅to make 钠. This is pronounced na in Chinese, an intentional similarity to Na

Aluminium, in the same way, utilises the character 吕 for the sound and pairs it with the metal radical 钅to make 铝. This pronounciation is lǚ, with strong correlations to Aluminum.

Other elements are purely meaning based. Hydrogen for example, since it is the lightest of elements, takes the character for light (轻) and pairs it with the radical for air (气）to give 氢.

One other kind of elements invokes a concept I mentioned in an earlier blog article, that of re-inventing obscure characters with a new meaning. The characters 镤,鈹 and 鉻 originally meant respectively "raw iron", "needle" and "hook", but these meanings have long been lost to most people and re-invented by chemists/translators as protactinium, beryllium and chromium.

So, to come to some sort of conclusion; it is in fact possible to invent new characters, but only under certain conditions. The creations must come to represent something which is agreed on and definitive. As a representation of Western elements already in some finite structurural template it is do-able, if it was an advertiser wanting to invent a word not so easy. And in today's technological climate there are some strange reprecussions. Tom Lehrer at the end of his song pointed out that
"These [elements] are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard, there may be many others but they haven't been discovered."

And indeed, some of the newly discovered chemical elements, and new creation of characters for them are just new. Copernicum, for example. This is simply too new an element and character, so new that it has not been added to my Chinese input system. Even if I wanted to type it, there is simply no way of doing so. Good thing I'm not writing a paper in Chinese on the discovery of Copernicum...

Chinese Internet Slang

My Chinese is starting to reach a level where I am interested in browsing internet forums. But Chinese slang is quite a barrier to fully understanding what is going on and what is being said...so I thought I'd post just a few of the vast array of Chinese slang terms I've come across...

One thing which never ceases to fascinate me about the Chinese language is how the meaning of an obsolete or lesser used character may be reworked the into something else.

This character's 囧 actual meaning is "Abutilon Avicennae, a plant of the jute family." But the majority of the population (particularly youth) use it as is an emoticon meaning embarrassed or frustrated. That Chinese characters contain this inherent potential as proprietary internet symbols is remarkable. Perhaps you can work out what this character's alternative pop cultural meaning is : 凸 ！

Often slang usage shares similarities with Western usage. The phrase n多的 , where 多的 means "many of" simply comes to mean "a lot of something, a quantity to the power of n". Other memes invoke stories from Chinese history. The number 250 has the alternative meaning of "stupid". The story goes that a historical king put a bounty of 1000 gold pieces on the head of one of his rivals. 4 people came forward, all claiming that they had killed the rival. The incredulous king asked how all 4 of them could possibly have murdered him, and asked what should be done with the bounty. The 4 replied in tandem to split the money, 250 gold pieces each. The king, realizing the latent idiocy of the 4, ordered for them to be removed from his court and executed for deception. In this way the figure 250 has come to be mimetic of stupidity and thoughtlessness...

One other slang expression, admittedly rarely seen on internet forums, but of interest nonetheless is 5213344. The pronunciation "wu er yi san san si si" bears a strong resembleance to "wo ai ni sheng sheng shi shi" meaning "我爱你生生世世” In English: "I love you, you are my everything..." Try writing 5213344 in a text message or card to your partner and see the curious look on their face...

Smile For Japan

As previously mentioned, I have a fair few Japanese friends in Beijing; most of them quite shaken up by the effects of the Sendai Earthquake, ensuing tsunami, and several aftershocks.

Two days ago my Japanese friend suggested a project to help out the Japanese people in the small way that he can: by canvassing the messages of support from Chinese and foreigners here in Beijing. Together we developed a plan to take a white board, ask people to write messages of support on it, and then take their pictures.

The weather has been beautiful the past couple of days so we started the project without hesitation; and the pair of us have taken pictures of messages of support in several areas in Beijing: Tiananmen Square, The Olympic complex, and several universities in the Wudaokou area.

It has been an experience far more interesting than I imagined. Many Chinese people harbour a deep respect and concern for Japan: most Chinese people asked if my friend's family was OK, taxi drivers gave free lifts when they heard about our project plans, and I never realised so many Chinese people could speak at least a little bit of Japanese.

Non-Asians were equally good in helping us fulfill our undertakings; and there were some very nice messages of support for Japan. Seeing is believing, and the uploaded YouTube video is well worth the time spent watching....

For anyone with an interest in my Japanese friend's blog it is well worth a look

What's in a Name?

Last September, when I was fresh off the plane in China, and just moved into the house of my homestay family; I was asked by my homestay mother (a teacher), whether I would be interested in teaching English to a group of Chinese schoolchildren from ages 5-7 in her local primary school. Eager to score brownie points with the family, and naturally interested in helping share my mother tongue, I agreed.

On the first day at the school, the Chinese teacher supervising my spoken English class asked me to take the register. I picked up the list of those who should be in class, and began to read out the names. Chinese names are generally constructed of 3 characters: the first character a surname, the last two characters the given name. I read the first surname, and then instantly became stumped on the given name. Those two characters I had never seen before, and I had no idea how to pronounce them. A familiar pattern came to emerge; that being I was often familiar with the surname, and completely ignorant to how to read, let alone pronounce, the given name. Clearly there was something going on here...

And as it turns out, there is. In Great Britain, the 100 most common surnames are found in around 20% of the population. Yet in China the top 100 surnames are found in more than 90% of the population. Even more; in a country the size of China, and with a population as numerable as it is, that means that a lot of people have the same surname. So in order to provide a unique and distinctive surname for their progeny, Chinese parents resort to choosing names rare and uncommon. In the UK this would be no particular problem; the Latin alphabetic denotation of the name explains more or less the pronunciation of lesser used names. But in China, where names are denoted by characters; those names which are denoted by rarer characters are simply unpronounceable unless the reader knows what that character is.

My Chinese name is given in this format: the surname is common, and the given name is rarer. When I first arrived in China I could not understand why teachers, and people who I showed my visa or student card to were unable to pronounce the Chinese characters. I assumed somewhat naively that they must not be as educated and learned in Chinese characters. But I was wrong; and recently having spoken to some of the brightest people in the country at Peking University, they assured me that they have just the same problem with many surnames: they are simply unable to pronounce the rare characters which make up the name.

Perhaps it is a poor reflection on me that it has taken this long to cotton on to the nature of Chinese names; but it leads me to think...Next time I complain about being rubbish at remembering what someone is called, I should spare a thought for the Chinese. One could be the brightest spark in the country and would still struggle with names...