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Kowtowing apologies for a link post, but this clever set of images (an exhibit by Yang Liu, a Chinese artist, living in Berlin) depicting the differences between Chinese and Westerners will strike a chord with any in the middle Kingdom, or raise a curious eyebrow among the foreign devils. For instance, shower times:
Or, even more head-noddingly, queuing:
And finally (an artistic pick) mutual stereotypes:
Again, sorry for being lazy. Somewhere between a hundred new Chinese words a day and my kitchen catching fire, my blog is meowing at me for attention. I’ll feed it before too long.
The other day, Leonidas invited me along to the opening of a Greek art exhibit in downtown Beijing. He in turn had been welcomed to the event by his old Greek teacher at Beida, and I finally heard Leonidas live up to his name and speak Greek – albeit modern, not ancient. I couldn’t understand a word of course (it was all Chinese to me), but Leonidas enthusiastically rolled his ‘r’s and clearly is not as rusty as he claims to be.
This elegantly incomprehensible third language adds to the mystique of Leonidas for me. His style of dressing reminds me of some young don at Oxford: cardigan over shirt, all tucked into brown corduroy trousers; keen eyes behind thin glasses; spotless shoes; briefcase heavy with god knows what (Plato’s complete dialogues?) in his hand. He is quiet mannered and springs philosophical paradoxes on you out of nowhere, like this one from Bertrand Russell (simplified!) which keeps me awake tonight:
Imagine a container in which everything which exists is contained. Is the container itself inside?
His English is one of the best of the Chinese I follow on this blog, together with Tony’s. This means that he often falls into the trap laid for those proficient at another language: over-using big and impressive words where little ones would do. The canapes aren’t tasty, they’re “succulent”. The event isn’t interesting, it’s “most stimulating”. That kind of thing. Each word pronounced carefully and with slow relish, not out of pretention (or only a little bit), but more – my guess – out of a kind of thinking which runs “I’ve just studied about 10,000 infrequently used English words for my GRE, here is a situation where one of them seems vaguely appropriate … so I’m damn well going to say it”.
On which note, Leonidas has just got the results back from the GRE exam he took a month or two back. I won’t publish them, obviously, but I’m sure he won’t mind me mentioning that he got 800 out of 800 in the ‘quantative section’ (i.e. maths). In the writing section, where his English was put to the test, he was disappointed by his score (though it didn’t strike me as too bad) and is uncertain if it will be good enough for his coming application to study in America. But – typical Leonidas thoughtfulness – he took this GRE a year earlier than he needed to, giving the option of another crack next year.
There is more to come on his plans, and probably more hidden skills of his I am yet to discover. For the moment, you may be wondering what relevance the title of this post has to all this. Well, it seems to be what the artist whose works were on exhibit had in mind: that is, a visual exploration of the shared whatever between ancient China and ancient Greece. In my eyes, and I’m no expert, this is a pretty lame, cigarette-paper thin concept – and the art struck me as something a kid did hastily on KidPix for his art homework. That’s why I wrote about Leonidas instead of it.
But, if your curiosity is still thirsty, here are some pics I took on my mobile. Galinihta!
The Greek ambassador to China (middle) leapt on this exhibit as an opportunity to fawn over useful connections in Beijing. Here he presents a painting from the exhibit to the head of the Ministry of Something-to-do-with-The-Arts-which-I-didn’t-quite-catch.
A typical example of the paintings on display. Maybe I’m a pretentious git, but I find this atrocious. The Chinese characters read “Greece” … “China” … “wisdom” … “knowledge”. The symbol next to the artists’ name bottom right is of his star sign, Uranus.
Zheng quan: “political power”. But what really, I mean, really, do Mao, Zeus (is that Zeus on the left?) and Atlas have in common? Outside of Mao’s imagination, and the concept of ‘pandering’, that is.
My personal favourite: Jesus’ disembodied head floating in the middle of four trippy-mirror-effect sleeping Buddhas*. The text on the left: “merge(d) together”; and on the right: “the afterlife”. Deep.
Today, Americans all over the world give thanks that the English invented them. Bu yong xie, it was our pleasure. In completely irrelevant celebration, here are six photos from a recent trip from spicy Chongqing down the foggy Yangtze to mind-crunchingly boring Wuhan.
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Everyone has time for a noodle pit-stop in Chongqing. Your worth in this city is judged by your tolerance for spice. That night, eating hotpot with friends, I held back tears at the hottest lettuce I have ever tasted.
Chongqing’s reputation is of a smog-smothered Gotham. But not far outside the city, the scenery is worthy of a classical painting. I came across this vase standing on a wall in just such a quiet spot, at dusk.
On my boat downstream, I felt like a cow being herded through over-grazed pastures. Here you may take a photo. Here you may pay an extortionate entrance fee to a temple. Here you may chew the cud.
At Yichang, we make port and the Yangtze is shrouded in mist. Behind me, I overhear a Chinese fellow traveller boasting “look, I took 409 photos in three days”. “More than me”, someone replies, enviously.
In Wuhan’s Yellow Crane Tower museum, I come across the most obviously photoshopped photograph ever. Brazenly displayed, with others just like it at either side. Seriously, who do they think they’re kidding?
The pagoda forest at Shaolin monastery … the only place on the grounds where fighting is discouraged. The first monk I came across in Shaolin, by the way, asked me how to say ‘shopping’ in English.
As a kind of sister post to my last, here are a few photos from a lecture at Peking University (Beida) titled “the Tibet question”. No sensitive topic left behind at Six … next up, FG practitioners commemorating 6.4!
As you can see, a packed room (my wide-angle lens would have added another couple of dozen faces). My sweat-glands get uncomfortable at the memory. It was an open event, in the evening, but I gather an unusually big audience even for these popular lectures. It seems that Tibet attracts the interest of Chinese students, just as with their Western equivalents.
This is surely out of the issue’s importance for China’s relations with the world, but also – I’d venture - for the same reason which gets the West shouting ‘free Tibet’: the romance and mystery of ‘Shangri-la’. ‘Tibet chic’ is a well established phenomenon in big Chinese cities – a well-off family might hang Tibetan scarves or tangka on their wall and enjoy showing jealous friends pictures of their trip to Lhasa (too expensive for most).
I’m afraid I had to leave after a half-hour of so of the lecture itself. What I heard before I left, though, was the thoughtful Professor Wang saying right off the bat that ‘the Tibet question’ can’t be understood without a solid grasp of the long history behind it – and launching into a potted summary. He did mention the West’s “different perspective” on the issue, which unless I misunderstood his tone was a euphemism for ‘they don’t get it’.
But it’s true – I couldn’t possibly ‘get’ the Tibet question without a lot more reading (not to mention that oxymoron, helpful Chinese archivists). And I didn’t get the impression from the students listening that they thought they did either. (Professor Wang clearly thought he did.)
Time and again, Beida students strike me not as ‘brainwashed’ on such sensitive issues (it’s embarrassing to use the term even to refute it), but keen to learn more, with a sceptical eye to the information given them to boot. And regardless of the obvious and unforgivable propaganda which still passes for history when it comes to Tibet in the last sixty years, lectures on sensitive issues like Taiwan and Tibet in Tsinghua and Beida are a far cry from poker-faced propaganda, if still hard to swallow at times.
Q: “Why doesn’t Marx drink good tea?”
A: “Because all proper-tea is theft.”
I’m back in Beijing after a spot of travelling, returning to a neglected blog and an overflowing tankard of new Chinese words to cram. As I begin to sip at the meniscus (oooh, get you with your fancy metaphor), here are two posts from classes I audited in China’s top two universities, where students are glugging diligently at their own studies.
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On a wednesday afternoon, international relations students at Tsinghua take diplomacy class with teacher He (for it is he). A friend suggested I listen in on one of these, as in the past, teacher He has “shown pictures of him wearing a slightly risque Japanese robe, an animated depiction of China as a rooster eating Japan as a caterpillar, and him standing with a bunch of African girls in their native dress”. He sounds interesting.
No ‘slightly risque’ pictures this time, but a lot of holiday snaps. Teacher He clicked through pictures of his various trips to Taiwan, eating local snacks and admiring the view of the sea, while introducing various basic facts. There was even a picture of him as a kid. And one of the Dalai Lama’s recent trip to Taiwan – the first time I have seen a public image of this personae-non-grata in China outside of ethnically Tibetan areas.
But most of the slides were packed with statistics, and I now get what Chinese friends mean by the ‘powerpoint’ style of teaching in Chinese universities – Tony often complains about this tendency to batter students with slides and facts without going into much detail on any one aspect. After this time spent in just such a class, I don’t doubt it.
As to what He was saying (the teacher, not God*), none of the content struck me as surprising or controversial – more boring than anything else. Here are a couple of the interesting moments I’ll pick out (NB at my Chinese level, a lot of the vocabulary was over my head and I was probably frowning in incomprehension at the most interesting bits):
- teacher He tells the class how we must “love and respect” Taiwan for both their ancient culture and achievements, and their modern “economy, democracy, and system of law”. He delivers this as if the norm for his students would be not respecting Taiwan.
- He relates an anectode when talking with a Taiwan resident, who tells him “I’m Taiwanese, you’re Chinese”. His response: “are we not both Chinese?” The way he says this – as a parent would to a child - gets a short laugh from the front of class.
While I’m listening to this, my attention is distracted by an intermittant tapping noise to my right. I look over. A grumpy-looking girl sitting next to me right at the back of class has her laptop open, and is online keeping up two QQ conversations (like MSN chat), writing a long email, and starting the homework essay teacher He set at the start of class:
Oh, and if you’re wondering what a giant missile is doing on the projection screen, Teacher He is about to explain the military build up of Chinese missiles aimed at Taiwan should a conflict arise. His next slide?
Not a blink from any of the Chinese students as this slide pops up, while my US friend and I exchange a raised eyebrow or two. This projection of a Chinese military strike, the class was assured, was made in Taiwan.
*apologies for excessive punning and any pronoun confusion
I’m smelly and unshaven in an internet cafe in Wuhan, and my computer is winking at me to tell me I have five minutes left before my two kuai runs out. Just enough time to point to this post I wrote for enoVate, experts in all things Chinese youth market. The question: do students in Beida, China’s top university, drink coffee or tea?
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