Hey Foreigner!

Something I hear a lot from new expats in China is "did that guy just call me a foreigner?!?" Yes. Yes he did. And yes, you are a foreigner. Get over it. Maybe in our society its rude to point out the obvious in such a way, calling people foreigners. In fact, its often somewhat racist, indicating that someone isn't from around here and doesn't belong. But in Chinese, its just what it is, and can even be a term of respect. It depends on the vocabulary, doesn't it.

There are three different ways of saying 'foreigner' in Chinese (that I know of):

老外 (Laowai)

Laowai is the term for foreigner used in the title of this blog that you are reading. It literally means 'old foreigner', where 'old' is a term of respect (isn't it funny how the opposite is implied in English). If someone calls you a laowai, you shouldn't be offended, because you are one. When someone calls you this, it's almost like you're an honoured guest. 

外国人 (Waiguoren)

Waiguoren literally means 'foreign country person'. It is neither particularly respectful or disrespectful, but neutral. It is what it is. A foreigner is a foreigner, whether you show respect or not. It might be offensive or it might not be, it depends on the tone of the voice of the speaker, and the context of the conversation. Usually there's nothing offensive about it, unless you hear other keywords in the same sentence such as "stupid", "ugly", and "should go home".

洋鬼子 (Yangguizi)

This is the one you should watch out for and be offended at if you hear it. Try not to pick a fight. It literally means 'foreign devil' and is a pretty rude word, not to be used in front of children. I was discussing with my workmate once, that it might be a cool name for a sports team, The Shanghai Yangguizi, with the team mascot being a demon wearing a basketball singlet, say. But then, the word is more inappropriate than that and could have gotten people in trouble.  Pity. It would have been pretty cool.

Today's Mem:
In America foreigners are referred to as 'Aliens', which the rest of the world take to mean, 'a creature from another planet'. In Chinese, such a creature is called a 外星人 (waixingren), which is literally 'foreign star person'. I would much rather be called a 'Laowai' any day.

The character 外 (wai) can be broken into two radicals, which mean 'dusk' and 'magic' respectively. 

And A Word From Our Sponsors...

... Well they're not exactly sponsoring me, but if I give them a mention on my blog, they'll give me 5000 free hits of web traffic. If you're in America, and you're reading this as a recent post, chances are high that you were directed here because of them. Give it up for MaxVisits.com! And give it up for random free stuff! Yay.

Anyway forget about that and read the rest of my blog already. Pphht. Yes I know, I'm a sell-out.

Today's mem is for 自 (zi4), meaning 'self'. It just so happens that this character looks like a photocopier. So when you see it, just remember this chick photocopying herSELF and you'll remember what the character means. SELF. 

Technically ths is just a character and not a word in it's own right. If you want the word that means self, it is made of two characters: 自己 (zi4 ji3). The second character represents the woman who just jumped off the photocopier.

PS: Chinese is awesome. If I didn't love it, I wouldn't make a blog about it. If this picture offends anyone, just let me know politely and I'll take it down. My Chinese wife didn't seem to disapprove, and she disapproves of almost everything I do, so I figured it'd be okay. --Brad

Shanghai Subway

While obviously not as fun as motorbike taxis, the Shanghai subway is the epitamy of convenient public transport. My expat friends have told me that they prefer it to the subway systems in London, New York, and Paris, which apparently smell bad. Heck, all I knew before was the Wellington bus system which has buses half an hour late on a good day. To a small-town Kiwi like myself, the Shanghai subway is exceptional! If you miss the train, dang, gotta wait another 3 minutes for the next one. Woe and betide.

The London subway, my English friends tell me, has so many suicides that passengers are desensitized to it. They would often hear an announcement that there's going to be a 15 minute delay because someone jumped in front of the train again, and the first thing they think is "dammit, why can't he jump off a bridge instead? Now I'm late for work". But I never heard such an announcement in Shanghai.

...Oh wait. I can't understand Chinese. So technically it could have been happening while I was blissfully unaware (there's a perk to not understanding the local language), but I don't think so. Most stations have a fence to stop you from doing that anyway.

One can go all over Shanghai via subway and never learn to drive in ten years. There's just no need. Just bring a book, or an ipad or something, because you may be spending two hours on the train every day. I suppose you could look over the shoulder's of other people and get a few silent clips of a movie out of context, or an annoying ipad game without the volume turned off so everybody on the carriage has to listen to the sound of exploding spaceships, but its better to read a book or listen to a podcast or chinese lesson or something.

Remember the beggars I told you about? They like to spend the day on the subway even if they're not going anywhere. They walk up and down the trains begging to the passengers, and once they've covered a train they'll get off and jump on another train, and repeat the process. They must travel all over Shanghai doing that - paint the town red, underground! Other people like to hang out in the subway station, simply because of the free air conditioning during the intense summer heat. "It's nice and cool at the subway station boys! Bring your sleeping mat, let's go!"

Today's mem was a reminder I made for myself about the tones for the word di4 tie3, meaning 'subway'. It works, because you really can transfer from line 4 to line 3, but you have to remember the order in which the numbers come.

A Bad China Day

Today I'm having a Bad China Day. 

Don't misunderstand, I love China. I married a Chinese girl. But in Shanghai-Expat slang, this is a common expression. It means something along the lines of, "all those little things that I can usually put up with just fine all happened at the same time today and I can't handle it anymore".

There are other expressions like it, such as "TIC" (This Is China) which means "things are different here, don't expect things to make sense like they do in your home country"; and "Only In China", meaning, "in all the world, you'll only see things as crazy as this in China".

Jeepers, why so negative? If they don't like it there, they should just go home, right? Well, a lot do. But it must be noted that most of the time, it's okay living here, especially if you can speak a little Chinese. Often times, it's freaking awesome. A Bad China Day is only one day, it is not a week or a month. They just come every now and again, and are not usually enough to send an expat packing.

Today's Mem: 我吃饱了, wo chi bao le, I'm full

I don't want to tell you anything negative, because its totally awesome here and everybody should come. It just has, how to say, some character. But that's what makes it so interesting! Shanghai expats have got to learn not to let the little things get to them.

Here is a mem I made from the famous Monty Python scene, which brings revelation to the character 饱, meaning 'full'. When you are really full, first you spew (left radical饣), then you explode (right radical包).

Culture Clash #1: The Egg McMuffin

Today's Mem: 近, Jin4, Near

My first great culture clash was on my second day in China – incidentally, it was also the day I got married. We had taken a train from Shanghai to Huaibei, my wife’s hometown in Anhui province, and my (at that time) fiancée’s mum picked us up from the train station in the morning. My dear mother-in-law-to-be wanted to look after me, so imagining that I was missing western food, she bought me an Egg McMuffin for breakfast from the golden arches (in reality, I had only spent one night in China and was eager to try some Chinese food).

I’m not a big fan of McDonalds. In fact, I don’t even like using the name here on my blog in case it inadvertently works as advertising for them. But I gratefully accepted it and thanked her.

But before I could tuck into my breakfast, a beggar came to me asking for money. I had never seen such a thing before. New Zealand doesn’t have this kind of beggar. NZ has bums, who hit the streets as a way of life after they take too much drugs. China doesn’t have bums, it has beggars. These guys bring poverty to whole new levels. If the average NZ bum came to China and saw the beggars there, they’d be ashamed of themselves for their easy living.

New Zealand Bums Have No Idea

So I gave the poor cripple my Egg McMuffin. He’d enjoy it much more than I would! But I hadn’t realized the significance of this gift to me, because my mother-in-law was so shocked that I had given it away that she snatched it out of the hands of the beggar and gave it back to me. Needless to say I was flabbergasted, and certainly not so hungry anymore.

What looked to me as shameful and cold-blooded at that time, however, was in fact her caring for me. I hadn’t seen that kind of beggar before, but she had grown up with them around her whole life, and it’s understandable to be a little de-sensitized. I have been de-sensitized too, after living here only 3 years. So I didn’t realize at that time, but she wasn’t angry at me but angry at the beggar, and was caring for me. What she did for me was in fact a very nice gesture, another thing I hadn't realised was how expensive the food actually was and how 'fancy' it was considered in China as a foreign dish. To me it was an Egg McMuffin, to her it was posh foreign haut cuisine.

It takes a little retrospect to understand some things. This was my first big culture shock in China.

小皇帝: The Little Emperors

Primary school kids can be vicious in any society. When I was in primary school in New Zealand I was teased by my classmates for all sorts of things. As I grew older, and as my classmates and I gradually learned social skills, the bullying slowly faded away.  

Primary school is more political than parliament. I considered as I was growing up, that as schoolwork starts off basic and gets harder as the years go by, social life starts off impossible and gets easier, until you get to university where the schoolwork is really advanced, but everybody is your friend. I call this the "Inverse Proportion Between Social Skills and Class Grade”.

So I thought I had graduated from being called names and being repeatedly insulted and disrespected for hours on end. Apparently not. But wait a minute, I’m the teacher. I’m the boss. 老师是老板, 对把. However as a teacher, if I so much as snapped a child's pencil in trying to scare them, I would risk losing my job. We must take it on the chin. They say we're fat, they tell us our noses are big, we just gently tell them they shouldn't be rude and continue the class. Sounds easy, but try eight hours of it every day for three years.

In China there is a one child policy, to keep the population down. Two parents and four grandparents, all putting their hope in the one child, will do anything for that one child as long as he does his study and becomes successful when he's older. There’s no retirement pension in China, the children support the parents when they get old, so they put all their efforts into that one kid to make them as successful as possible, so they can retire in peace. Now, that's reasonable, but for some reason many parents (and especially grandparents) treat their children like royalty. Thus the rise of the 小皇帝, the Little Emperor.

It is not unusual for a foreign English teacher, in trying to teach a child one-on-one, to find that the child seems to have never been disciplined in his or her life. Nor is it uncommon, say, on the subway, to see a small child yelling at his parents without being scolded.

(I just want to point out that this isn't racist, any more than saying that Beijing has a pollution problem. Its a fact, a social problem that many people already know about. There are many very well-disciplined children, but they are the exceptions rather than the rule).

Mem: "That was the last time. If you call me bread again, I'll hit you"

My name is Brad. Brad sounds exactly like bread (does it really? Perhaps if English is your second language it might). So, of course, I have countless children shouting “BREAD, I WANT TO EAT YOUU!!!” throughout the year. My workmate Ryan had it better, he was Lion :).

So who knows what this will mean for the future of China. I hope that my principle of the "Inverse Proportion Between Social Skills and Class Grade” will set things right. We were all like that to a certain degree at that age, right? Right?

I made this mem to practise use of the word 次 (ci4), meaning 'time'. 第一次 = first time; 最后次 = last time (last as in final, not previous); 再次 = again, another time. I made it a long time before I wrote this blog.

Rat Meat Shish Kebab or Chicken?

Mem: 生病, sheng1 bing4, to get sick. Don't eat street-food.

In my first few months of living in Shanghai I was warned by my wife’s local friends never to eat street food. The meat is 老鼠肉 (rat meat), they say. The oil they cook it with comes from the dirty plates of uneaten food in restaurants, they say. It was filled with cigarette butts before they filtered it, they say. But damn, that stuff tastes good. Is it really worth avoiding such delicious food just for the sake of a few wives’ tales?

Apparently, yes. Rats are a very cheap source of meat, are easy to farm and can be made to taste like other meat if marinated for long enough in the blood and fatty juices of another more appetizing animal. No joke. Especially not funny after you’ve eaten it, or when you’re in the toilet praying for flow, or when you’re in hospital squirting nothing but clear water out from both ends because you’ve flushed everything else out of your intestines by vomit and diarrorhea. Yes, my wife and I have both been there, and on separate occasions too: my wife, by eating a KFC burger, and me, by pizza bread from a bakery. Admittedly, not by rat-meat shish kebab sold on the street corner, but that only makes it scarier, because you realize you’re still not safe even if you avoid the obvious dangers. For a while it was on the news not to eat any chicken, and so people all over China were avoiding the stuff. I still do.

Now I’m not a drinker, but neither am I a fan of the dreaded laduzi, or dire horror as they say in English (diarrorhea). If it looks dodgy but you still want to risk it, have a few mouthfuls of strong liquor with your meal, and the alcohol content will kill any germs. Try 'baijiu', the drink of choice among the locals - it'll make your eyes water, but you'll have the assurance while it kills your brain cells that its also killing the parasites in your stomach. One mouthful is enough, no need to get drunk. I made a mistake when I first heard this advice, I drank the liquor a few hours after lunch when my stomach was already starting to hurt. But it was too late, you have to drink at the time of your meal. This is a matter of preparation in advance! 

All in all, this is pretty universal stuff for travelling, go anywhere overseas and you’ll have similar problems. Just remember to avoid the street food no matter how yummy it may be, and the chicken. And for the love of Mike, don’t touch street food chicken with a yard pole; it’d be safer to stick with the rat meat.