Xiaokang2020

In a February blog post, Yao Dunlin compared five well-known contemporary Chinese poets to fingers:

• Hai Zi (海子), the middle finger: The middle finger is the longest of the five, and Hai Zi was unquestionably the most poetically talented of these five individuals.
• Yu Jian (于坚), the thumb: The thumb is short and thick, just like Yu Jian. But it is also the most powerful.
• Yi Sha (伊沙), the little finger:  The little finger is the weakest of the five, just like Yi Sha has the least skilled qualifications of these five people. However, the little finger is often used for disdain, satire, mockery, and defiance. It is the crankiest, most stubborn, most dislikable, and showiest.
• Xi Chuan (西川), the nameless finger: The nameless finger is the one that wears the ring, and without a doubt it is the most dignified of the five for fitting reasons. Yet the name “nameless” itself involves thought, philosophy, depth, and reason.
• Bei Dao (北岛), the index finger: The index finger is the hero that “points to the mountains and rivers” and “sets people afire with words.” A hero ought to have a hero’s indomitability. This Bei Dao most certainly possesses. He is a unequivocally a genuine hero.

Via Yi Sha’s blog, which tends to repost anything that mentions his name, however briefly.

Only 65 yuan for the secrets to the universe

The Changsha Evening Newspaper recently devoted a full-page article to one Tan Shusheng (谭暑生), a scientist at the National University of Defense Technology who is challenging special relativity with his own theory of space-time. Tan’s monograph, From Special Relativity to Standard Space-Time Theory (从狭义相对论到标准时空论), was supposed to have been published several years ago, lists its publication date as July 2008, but seems to have been delayed until just this January.

“Chief reporter” Chen Guozhong wrote up the article, which goes into detail about the acclaim Tan has been given by his colleagues in the field but which doesn’t really explain what all the fuss is about. However, it concludes by saying “the rationality, simplicity, and internal logical consistency of the fundamental propositions of standard spacetime are all superior to those of special relativity.”

In a more enlightening interview conducted in 2007 by the Science and Technology Daily, Tan explained that his theory is an improvement on the Lorentz aether theory, which postulates an absolute frame of reference and a non-constant speed of light. Tan says that his contributions were to work out the spacetime coordinate transformations and formulate the whole thing into a standard spacetime theory, which includes standard spacetime electrodynamics.

He’s quite confident in his accomplishment:

I can state with certainty that if the theory of standard spacetime had been published at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, humanity would have accepted it over special relativity. If you carefully read my book you will discover that this is not some wild claim but is in fact the truth.

The 570,000-character work starts off with a thorough account of historical approaches to spacetime and the natural world, from ancient China’s five elements, to various understandings of aether, and finally to special relativity, before explaining his superior theoretical framework.

CNBeta’s daily summary snidely remarked that Tan’s theories would be “proprietary intellectual property rights.” Chinese particle physics will at last be free of the tyranny of foreign licensing fees.

Life as a blind masseur

Bi Feiyu’s Tuina (推拿, a traditional form of theraputic massage) won acclaim and awards in 2008 for its portrayal of the lives of blind masseurs in Nanjing.

Tuina is a slow-moving, character-driven novel in which nothing much happens in the first third beyond introductions and background information, but once you get used to the pace of the author’s plain prose, it’s a hard book to put down. Each of the dozen or so masseurs has a story to tell about being blind in China today. Some are touching love stories, others are tragedies in which personal desires go unfulfilled in a society that has certain expectations of people with physical disabilities, and still others are harshly cynical about a culture that is blind to the interests of people who cannot see.

One of the bleakest, and funniest, stories is about Du Hong, a late arrival to the massage business who started out as a piano prodigy. After discovering she had a talent for music, her teacher set her straight about the way the world works:

Du Hong, you don’t know, you don’t understand! You’re blind, so where’s the future in becoming a singer? You’re not deaf, and you’re not mute, so where will you get by singing? Where’s the special education? Ah, how can you understand? In special education you’ve got to find something difficult, do something you’re unable to do. Like a deaf-mute singing, or like a physically-disabled person dancing, or like a mentally-challenged person inventing something. Each of these shows off the school and the miracle of education. In short, a disabled person only has the power to touch people’s hearts, to move a generation, and to shake society when she endures incredible hardship and puts herself through the fire to do something that is difficult or even possible for her to do, and does it well. What’s so special about a blind person like you singing? All you have to do is open your mouth. But playing the piano is hard. The hardest thing for a blind person is to play – the – piano. Understand? [62]

Du Hong eventually quits her studies after learning first-hand exactly why her playing touches people’s hearts. At a benefit concert, she chokes and turns in an awful performance, yet the crowd gives her a standing ovation. Afterward, the host interviews her for the cameras:

And then with a flourish she asked the big question: “And why did Du Hong come to perform for you all today?” Yes, why? Du Hong  herself wanted to hear the answer. A hush fell over the gallery. The host answered her own question in words that would bring a tear to your eye: “Poor Du Hong” came “to repay of society — all of you grandfathers and grandmothers, all of you aunts and uncles, all of you older brothers and sisters, all of you younger sisters and brothers — for the love you have shown her!” The violin music that had been playing in the background swelled up underneath the host’s words and echoed through the hall and throughout every corner of “society.” [64]

Language plays a noticeable role in the novel. Speech registers separate blind from sighted, although it’s not made clear exactly what that means. For example, Doc Wang, a masseur who returned to Nanjing from a high-paying job catering to foreign clients in Shenzhen when the economic downturn at the turn of the century evaporated his business and torpedoed his stock investments, often describes his old friend Sha Fuming as “talking like a sighted person,” and occasionally the narrator will observe that a statement that would have seemed entirely normal coming out of the mouth of someone who could see was surprising to hear from a blind person.

Written language also shows up briefly. The back story of Sha Fuming, who co-founded the massage business where most of the book is set, involves an episode in which he skips class to visit a bar with a sighted woman who introduces herself by writing her name on his hand with a piece of ice. He has to tell her, “I…can’t read.”

Sha Fuming was telling the truth. He spoke Chinese, but it wasn’t genuine Chinese, it was a special language. More precisely, it was braille. He had never spent any time learning Chinese characters, even though he knew the Three Hundred Tang Poems by heart. [123]

Chinese Braille is printed twice in the book: once when Sha writes his name in droplets of water for the woman (“That’s…so cool!” she says), and once on the cover. It’s mentioned a few other times, but Bi Feiyu isn’t really concerned with the mechanics of surviving as a blind person in Chinese society so much as the feelings that are created by the experience.

search results

The Hong Kong Film Archive’s search tool is an invaluable resource when you’re faced with the task of translating movie titles that may not be well-known enough (or involve enough Internet-savvy westerners) to be listed in the Internet Movie Database. It’s also great for finding out the standard English names of tiny production companies and major production staff, as well as Chinese translations of foreign movie titles.

After spending hours combing the Internet for obscure movie titles and common transliterations of the names of particular crew members for use in director bios and other festival materials, this will be the first place I’ll look from now on. It’s not perfect, but it’s a great starting place.

The whole world wanted the rights

The story that drives the five volumes (so far) of The Tibet Code (藏地密码) revolves around a grand quest for the wonders of Tibet’s legendary past: the treasures of a lost temple, the race of mystics who guarded it, and a massive, ferocious variety of Tibetan Mastiff, known in the historical records as the Purple Qilin.

Although the mythology in Volume I is dispensed with a regularity that keeps the story moving at a decent pace, the plot is really nothing more than a wild goose chase: after traipsing back and forth across Tibet in search of clues that won’t be revealed until later volumes, our heroes assemble their elite adventure team and, in the final pages of the book, are finally prepared for the true quest to begin. Unfortunately, judging from the table of contents for Volume II, that appears to be a trip to the Amazon, a plot twist for which Volume I laid absolutely no groundwork.

Mandarin is the dominant language of conversation for the characters in The Tibet Code, and when they switch to Tibetan it’s noted in the narration but not marked in their speech, with one interesting exception. Early on, Tibetan mastiff breeder Chomo Jampa is telling his mentor, professor Fang Xin, about the legend of the Purple Qilin. He begins by translating the texts into Mandarin. This reads perfectly well, but his pauses frustrate the professor, who asks him to continue in Tibetan.

So he switches to Tibetan (which for some reason the author chooses to describe as “fluent,” even though that should go without saying for an ethnic Tibetan born and raised in the region). Tibetan conversations in the rest of the book are rendered in straightforward Mandarin, but in this case, the character is reciting an ancient text, presumably in classical Tibetan of some sort. To convey this, the author uses classical Chinese for this portion:

大藏王朗达姆，好狩猎，喜逐狼荒原，即位，宣布废佛，迫僧脱袍狩猎，灭佛首，天道不容。

The emperor Langdarma loved hunting and delighted in chasing wolves across the wilderness. When he ascended the throne he declared Buddhism abolished, dismissed the monks and forced them to go hunting, destroyed images, and did not submit to the will of heaven.

The Tibet Code was originally published online and appears to actually have been edited somewhat before appearing in print, at least judging by the polished and expanded classical Chinese passages. I’m not all that eager to read any more of it again, however.

A Survey of Chinese Children’s Songs

童谣 is often translated as “nursery rhyme,” but the rhymes discussed in this KDNet article are really examples of folk doggerel in general. Some of them are pretty dirty:

Arising among the people, rhymes unavoidably had a good deal of sexual content. This was particularly the case in the countryside, where the wanton rutting of cattle, horses, pigs, and dogs greatly contributed to children’s awareness of sex. Children in modern cities do not have this sort of opportunity.

In those days lots of nursery rhymes contained sexual overtones. Children were not overly concerned with all the details; they merely thought them funny, and reciting them was something new and different.

Xu Jinru (徐晋如), a self-described “poet, scholar, and conservative thinker,” writes a rant against simplified characters and pinyin that’s good for a laugh. Like a number of Xu’s other anti-simplification pieces, Character Simplification, Spread of Pinyin Leave an Awful, Lasting Legacy quotes part of the 1927 essay “A Literacy Problem?” by Pan Guangdan, a noted sociologist.

In places where society has reached a certain level, the average person’s reading material, even if it is worthless, is not absolutely harmful. In the US, for example, the topics of endless interest are instructions on how to succeed, how to improve your memory, how to be a clever speaker, and laments over public misfortunes: none of these accomplishing anything more than duping a few of the more eager believers. In places where society has not reached a certain level, you don’t even want to know about what’s being read. Wickedness, theft, evil, perversion, and everything else that stimulates people’s base impulses. Anything, regardless of whether it is true or false, can be used as material. This is the extreme end of a social phenomenon we can see wherever we look in China today. Conspiracy novels flourished a few years ago, and the “new knowledge and new culture” now constantly pouring forth demonstrates that under today’s policies that promote education, day by day more people will be able to read, yet day by day the standard of our reading material will drop.

Pan’s argument, or at least the parts of it that Xu most frequently quotes, boils down to: “The more literacy spreads, the further culture declines” (Xu’s formulation from an interview with BQ in 2007). It’s an argument against the use of simplified characters that I’d never read before: the increased literacy that results when characters are made easier to learn is ultimately responsible for destroying Chinese culture.

At the end of the essay, Xu writes in phrases that echo familiar ideological dogma that traditional — complicated — characters are a historical inevitability:

There’s a noted scholar of ancient Chinese at Zhongshan University who applauds simplification for the reason that Chinese characters in the age of oracle bones were very simple. But on the other hand, he also explains how from the Shang and Zhou dynasties through today, the development of Chinese characters has followed a law of increasing complexity. Using an administrative edict to simplify characters is precisely in opposition to this law.

» Essay Towards a Dictionary, Tibetan and English, by Sándor Kőrösi Csoma, Saṅs-rgyas-phun-tshogs. Google Books has the whole thing online (and available for PDF download). It’s an 1834 publication that the author wrote during on a journey he originally undertook to discover the origins of the Hungarian language. Consequently, the book’s preface contains an interesting digression into the relationship between Sanskrit and Hungarian. The author also makes the bold claim that “the literature of Tibet is entirely of Indian origin,” and continues:

The immense volumes, on different branches of science, &c. being exact or faithful translations from Sanscrit works, taken from Bengal, Magadha, Gangetic or Central India, Cashmir, and Nepal, commencing in the seventh century after Christ. And that many of these works have been translated (mostly from Tibetan) into the Mongol, Mantchuo, and the Chinese languages; so that, by this means, the Tibetan became, in Chinese Tartary, the language of the learned, as the Latin in Europe.

I discovered this dictionary while searching for an online glossary of Chinese phonetic transcriptions of Tibetan words (especially names). Any idea what Zhuomu Qiangba (卓木强巴) corresponds to? The author of The Tibet Code says it means “one who wins great victory over the ocean,” which may or may not be correct.

» Dictionary of Chinese Character Variants, by the National Languages Committee, Taiwan Ministry of Education. An awesome compendium of strange and obscure character variants — over 100,000 in all — with facsimilies of the old lexicographic works that index them. The MOE has a number of other dictionaries online, too.

Ten Year Impression
(via Joyo)

At the bookstore the other day looking for the new Han Han novel, I came across this Li Bingbing photobook. Two things struck me about it when I opened up the package after I got home:

1. The printing. It’s actually two separate volumes. The small, squarish volume in the front is a mini-autobiography — snippets of life lessons, really — with a forward by Yu Dan and short comments from other people in the movie biz. Behind it in the image on the left is the photobook itself.

What’s interesting about the print job is that the covers of the two volumes were made from a single piece of card stock. You can’t really tell from the image here, but the cover of the smaller volume is mirrored, yet I had to fold it down slice it apart from the non-mirrored cover of the larger photobook. Impressive, except that somewhere in the process the printers got disoriented and put Li Bingbing on the back cover, and upside-down.

2. The translation.  It’s nothing unusual for a book like this to have titles translated into English. Carefully deployed, foreign words and phrases can serve as another useful tool available to the book’s designer. Sure, maybe there’s a better way to translate the 灿烂 section than “Effulgence,” but the double-f and those ascenders and descenders do look fine on the page.

No, it’s the translation of selected passages that’s bewildering. Most of the text isn’t translated, but particular paragraphs have been rendered into English (by Cheng Zhaojun, who previously translated Can You Teach a Goat to Dance? into Chinese for the same publisher) and used as another design element.  Are the publishers really expecting this book to sell many copies to non-Chinese-reading audiences, or even to audiences outside mainland China? And if they are, wouldn’t they have been better off finding someone to do a competent job?

Tales of Tarsylia

Tales of Tarsylia (塔希里亚故事集) by Wu Miao (吴淼) is a fantasy comic strip drawn in a stylish silhouette style.

Linked here is “The Search,” a nearly-wordless story about a wizard who is looking for lost love.

The comic is hosted on Zongheng, a publisher of comics and genre fiction.The company’s Novoland-related fantasy magazine 幻想纵横 (which it translates as “Zongheng Imaginations”) published an interview with Wu Miao in its December 2008 issue, which is where I first heard of him.