I don't know much about the states anymore. The speed with which things change (and the fact that I never had a smart phone until very recently) means that in the two years since I last visited the USofA so much has changed that anything I know about US culture is already horribly out of date. Maybe someday I'll spend enough time stateside to catch up on things like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and whatever other 'apps' the kids are using these days, but keeping up with the trends in China while also writing a dissertation is plenty taxing in the meantime. China, of course, has its own equivalents of many of these. Weibo (微博, literally 'micro-blogging'), for instance, is like China's Twitter. The extremely popular "WeChat" (Ch: weixin 微信) seems to be a kind of all-purpose application, used for socializing directly with people in your friend network via either vocal or written media, leaving status updates for everyone to see, and even make video phone calls to other users, while weishi 微视 lets you make and share videos of 8 seconds or less (like a video instagram?).
One of the most interesting apps (in my mind at least) is chang ba, an app in which people sing into their phones, and then put it up for anybody (and I mean literally everyone in China just about) to listen. Earlier incarnations of the app only let you sing, karaoke-style, into your phone as it records. You can use the internal microphone, or anything with a 1/8" jack that plugs directly into your phone. More recently the makers have added video capability, such that people can make and share videos of them singing favorite Chinese and Western songs. Some of the people posting videos are incredibly talented. There's a group of kids from Sichuan who rap in Sichuanese (which is awesome), and make sing a variety of popular songs in dialect (as opposed to putonghua, which is far more common these days). The songs on chang ba are karaoke version. You have the background sound, but no singer, leaving you to take care of the singing, unmolested by that pesky original track. The advantage over traditional karaoke, however, is that you have the leisure of singing from the comfort of your own home. Singing a song numerous times until you feel like you've done a good enough job to share it with the world. I suppose this is not entirely unlike the phenomenon of putting such videos on youtube (the very same phenomenon that gave us such cultural luminaries as Justin Bieber). Some people, have begun using these for purposes other than singing. With background music, they might show someone how to put on (obscene amounts of) make-up in under 4 minutes. Or they might use them to make quick commercials, hoping that some viewer might randomly stumble upon their video and choose to buy their products. Still others, lonely souls indeed, pour their hearts out for the chang ba community to hear: young lesbian couples, girls dealing with heartbreak, etc. In these cases, it seems that people are drawn to this technology for a range of reasons: the sheer enjoyment of singing a song and making a music video, the sense of community derived through the wireless world of chang ba, a simultaneous feeling of anonymity (among the masses of users) and notoriety, the potential for fame, and the chance to turn a profit, to name but a few. I am supposed to be becoming something of an "expert" on this country (and particularly its Western regions), but sometimes i still feel flummoxed by the technological things going on here. Whether it's the emergence of new terms like tuhao 土豪 (which is sort of like 'nouveau riche,' but refers specifically to the sort of opulent and garish consumption of certain members of this group), or of new technologies that I'm supposed to be able to fit into my life. Personally, I don't like being accessible so often. It's very distracting. At the same time, there does seem to be one general urge tying all of these together: the desire to avoid anonymity to be anonymous or alone in China's megalopolises, and the 1.34 (or so) billion people living in the country.
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I don't like that I'm making a habit of apologizing for the amount of time between posts. This time, however, I have a decent enough excuse: a recent news item informed me that Qinghai has the slowest internet speed in all of China. I have been trying for days to open weebly. I finally managed to today.
Anyway, on to the post: the title of this post is true. I caught myself saying this to a friend the other day, and realizing that this is the kind of sentence that really makes no sense in American English. How on earth could there be any causal link between my nephew being hospitalized and the amount of milk in our home? Well, it just so happens that out here there is a logic to the sentence. While people in America give flowers and hallmark cards to people in hospitals, people out here (at least in Western China, I can't speak for other places) give milk and fruit. This is a much more practical gift than flowers or hallmark cards. When I discussed the differences with my wife, she said: what good are flowers? There's more to this, however. In the States, hospitals are more or less full service places for those unlucky enough to need to stay in them. People in the USofA also have insurance and credit, which allows people to (at least temporarily) delay the full impact of the high costs of healthcare. In Western China, neither of these exist, all people in need of medical advice must pay for the tests before they can have them done. Not being able to defer these costs means the burden on these families is extremely heavy, particularly because one nurse remarked that most of the hospitalized come from poorer families. Hospitals here also don't exactly provide food for people who are ill. Hospital food has a bad reputation in the states, but at least they serve it. In light of this, I suppose it makes perfect sense that people should give milk and fruit to the families of ill people. They are (supposed to be) guaranteed to be healthy, and so may perfect sense as gifts for convalescents. The following recently made the rounds on WeChat:
རྗེ་རིན་པོ་ཆེས། བསམ་པ་བཟང་ན་ས་དང་ལམ་ཡང་བཟང་།། བསམ་པ་ངན་ན་ས་དང་ལམ་ཡང་ངན།། ཐམས་ཅད་བསམ་པ་དག་ལ་རག་ལས་པས།། རྟག་ཏུ་བསམ་པ་བཟང་ལ་འབད་པར་བྱ།། 心善地道赤贤善 心恶地道赤恶劣 一切依赖于自信 故应精勤修缮心 ——宗喀巴大师 This is what has been sent. Here's an unpolished translation. Rje rin po che (Tsong kha pa): If you have a good heart, then your place and your path will be good. If you have a bad heart, then your place and your path will be bad. Since everything depends on you, you should work to cultivate a truly good heart. A note: bsam pa is translated here and in the Chinese with "heart," but it's a very complex term having to do with thoughts, attitudes and more. Dear world,
I'm going to step away from my usual semi-academic format for an "I told you so" moment. The Super Bowl is half over. The Seahawks (with the NFL's number 1 defense) are leading the Broncos (who boast the NFL's number 1 offense) 22-0. In my life as an athlete, I've firmly believed that a team is only as good as its defense. Defenses are underrated. They have to work harder than offenses, and leagues generally change as many rules as possible to favor the offense. Offenses fill the stadia. But when a defense is just that good, they change everything. This is why I don't buy into the Peyton Manning legacy malarkey. Even if the Broncos are unable to mount a comeback, it doesn't diminish Peyton Manning. The twenty-four hour news cycle will argue that it does. Baloney. Instead, it's a continuation of a trend and confirmation of an old sports adage: offense wins games, defense wins championships. Let's look at recent super bowls when a top offensive team took on a great defense: Patriots stopped by the underdog giants, Steelers stop the Cardinals, looking further back, the Ravens teams that won with mediocre offenses.* There are some games that buck the trend, but I believe this to be true. *As a Browns fan, it pains me to give credit to both the Steelers and the Ravens. They provide, however, some of the best data to back up my current point. 你怎么把我们的一个中国女孩儿,骗到美国去了。
ni zenme ba women de yi ge zhongguo nvhai'er pian dao meiguo qu le. How did you trick one of our Chinese girls into going to America. This is the first thing people say when they learn I married a woman with Chinese citizenship. When a friend says it, it is simply a slightly uncomfortable joke. When a stranger says it, it is a significantly more uncomfortable joke. At first, I thought that this was slightly xenophobic. Then I learned that this really has nothing to do with nationality (other than that it makes the saying slightly more fantastic). It is also said when two Chinese people get married. So instead of suggesting anything about foreigners, this phrase proffers the rather more unsettling notion that Chinese people have a fairly low opinion of women, as the reverse is never said. Are women really that easy to "trick"? I think not. In a country with rampant corruption and dangerously "fake" goods, I find women to be incredibly shrewd. Certainly not silly or thick enough to be "tricked" into marrying anyone. It's kind of insulting, both to the women themselves, and the people who marry them. That's sad. |
About TimAs you can see elsewhere on this webpage, I conduct research on ethnic minorities in western China. This blog offers semi-academic musings on the minutiae of daily life out here--the sort of information otherwise destined for footnotes. Categories |