Lost in Translation

I bet you've been waiting for that title. Speaking of which, I'm sorry about my last title - terrible French, but I'm sure you still got the meaning. I'd like to draw your attention to an article my friend sent me, "Why Chinese is So Damn Hard", which can be found in my links section. You probably won't find it entertaining or interesting unless you've studied Chinese, and if you've studied Chinese you'll just realize what a loser you are.

Anyway, I was hanging out the other day and this Chinese guy was showing me the English music he listened to. One of the songs was Bob Marley's Buffalo Soldier. Good song, but he'll never get it. Even if he understood every single word in the song, he'll never understand the meaning. And there is no way that I could ever convey the meaning to him. Just like I'll never understand the Chinese song he chose to give me. It was about Macau. It was written before Macau was handed back to China. It mostly just states that the child - Macau - needs to come back to the rest of the family, China. That it had lost it's identity all these years (because Macau isn't it's Chinese name.) Anyway, I understand the whole patriotic aspect, what I don't understand is why a 23 year old guy would give someone his own age this song and think she'd have any interest in it at all. Seriously. I don't get Chinese patriotism. I think it's much worse than American. I'm fine with loving one's country, but in China it's like Brave New World devotion.

Just about every Chinese textbook I've studied from mostly talks about China's accomplishments and why China is so great. I get really sick of it. I thought it was just something they gave to foriegners to sell the country, but the other day I was at this little girl's house I tutor. I started reading her textbook and it was the exact same crap I've been reading in Chinese since I started studying. She's 11 years old, so it's not too basic stuff, but she was still reading about why the Great Wall is such an accomplishment and why "Uncle Deng" (Deng Xiaoping) was such an amazing person. I'm telling you, Aldous Huxley was writing about China. Only he got the sex part wrong (maybe I'll get into that in a different blog). And MSG is the drug.

Religion came up the other day while I was teaching. My students asked me if I knew about the evil religion. What evil religion? Fulan Gong. The Fulan Gong were only banned in China about 6 years ago or something and already everyone is brainwashed into thinking it's evil. I had to change the subject when they started asking why America protected the evil leader. They all looked like they were about to get violent. It's pretty unbelievable. Like one day I drew a map of China on the board. The class made me put in Taiwan, Macau, Hainan, etc, it was pretty ridiculous. I was just drawing it to point out something about the border between South East Asia and China.

Anyway, sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's annoying. As someone put it to me the other day, "They're just all robots with little hands to make our consumer goods." Terrible comment, I don't condone it at all.

Also, Clinton is so cool.

I would also like to point out, that during a time when almost every other leader of the world puts aside their differences to attend the funeral of a major peace promoter (Iranians and Americans, Indians and Pakistani's, Irish and English, France), I am in one of the few countries that has refused to send a representative. I've barely seen it in the news here. In fact, most the other English teachers didn't even know he'd died until about 3 days after the fact.

If it' s made in China, don't buy it.