This is part three of my professor’s lecture on speech acts. This part is even more of a digression than the thoughts on race and “the weak,” but it’s related to the Confucian quote, and, more specifically, ideas about history.
My professor was saying that he thought that social order required there to be a “final judge” (最后审判者). For the West, that “final judge” has been the Judeo-Christian God and the accompanying system of morality. However, China’s …
The group of ECNU international students that went to Wuyuan last weekend was composed of undergrads and above (no language students). So that meant everyone could communicate in Chinese pretty well already. There was a whole busload of Korean students and half a bus of Japanese students, however, so you still heard a lot of Korean and Japanese on the trip.
It was nice hearing Japanese again (it’s been a while), and even nicer knowing I still understand it pretty …
I recently learned that a grad student at my university worked hard over the CNY vacation and earned 8000 rmb. That’s about US$1000. That might not seem like a lot if you don’t live in China, but that is quite an impressive sum for a college student to earn in two months. To put it in perspective, my university teaching job in Hangzhou got me only 3000 rmb per month to start. Many Chinese laborers earn less than 1000 …
I am a grad student, and I’ve been doing part-time English tutoring and translation work to pay the bills. As a tutor, I sometimes have English sentences to correct. I recently got this sentence (more or less):
It’s common for people to envy the people who are better than them.
During the lesson, I told my student that the sentence was grammatically correct and the vocab word “envy” was used correctly, but I couldn’t help but find it funny. It …
With Chinese New Year comes many annoyances. Nonstop fireworks for a week ranks up there pretty high. But another thing that annoys me is that during the Chinese New Year season, Chinese people lose the ability to refer to dates using the normal calendar. I use the word “normal” not in an ethnocentric way, but in the sense that it is the calendar that all of China uses for the other 50 weeks out of the year. When Chinese New …
How is living in China like an RPG? You’d be surprised at all the similarities. Examples: “It takes place in a magical world where people believe in mystical concepts like qi and fengshui,” “The people take legends very seriously (even 5,000 year old ones),” and “The word ‘peasant’ doesn’t seem out of place.”
My time in China has exposed me to my fair share of public spitting, peeing, and snot rocketing. Thoughtful fellow that I am, this makes me all introspective. What are the effects of five years of phlegm? How potent is the power that all that pissing poses to me, personally? Let us examine.
PART 2: INDOORS
I hope I’m not disappointing anyone, but I’m not going to tell stories about Chinese people spitting on the floor or peeing in the …
My time in China has exposed me to my fair share of public spitting, peeing, and snot rocketing. Thoughtful fellow that I am, this makes me all introspective. What are the effects of five years of phlegm? How potent is the power that all that pissing poses to me, personally? Let us examine.
PART 1: OUTDOORS
Spitting
It’s no secret that freedom of expectoration is a widely held ideal in the PRC. Some of the enlightened city folk of this …
It’s pretty well-known that Chinese college boys love computer games. When I taught in Hangzhou, I saw firsthand how those guys would spend every free minute in internet cafes playing CounterStrike or whatever the latest network game was. The reason for the obsession was hard for me to grasp.
Then I saw two eye-catching entries on Bingfeng’s Teahouse which offered a possible explanation:
Bingfeng’s large collection of “Chinese Internet Girl” photos (click on both photos above for more) — evidence …
A Chinese story:
At 8:40am I called her on her cell phone. “Are you headed off to work?” I asked.
“Sure am!” she laughed back.
Choking back a sob, I said to her, “Wen… I’m sorry.”
After a moment of stunned silence, she replied, “why are you apologizing to me?”
“It’s nothing,” I explained.
“Xiao Nuo, you…” she started, but I quickly hung up.
At ten minutes past noon I dialed her office number.
“Why isn’t your cell phone on?”
…
John has lived in China for
12.7
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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