25
Jun 2005
Out with the Old
Last December when I first moved into my current apartment near Zhongshan Park, I take one look out the 20th floor window at the old buildings across the river and thought, “those won’t last long.” It wasn’t just that they were old; they were clearly of low quality as well. What’s more, on every side were highrise apartment complexes. I felt pretty sure those structures were doomed.
Here is the only picture I have of that whole area. (Unfortunately it’s a bad picture of Chinese New Year fireworks, so you can’t see the buildings very clearly.)
Here is another picture of the same area, taken last month. The demolition began in early May, I believe.
If you look carefully you can see which buildings were taken out. The residential area at the left is still intact, but I’m certain it’s only a matter of time.
It seems to be popular among some expat circles to mourn the loss of these “traditional” dwellings. Personally, I think that’s ridiculous. I’ve seen the buildings on the left close up, and they are constructed extremely shoddily. You hear about third world living conditions in Shanghai — well, this is one of those places. Those buildings–like most buildings in Shanghai–are not even very old. They were just built with inferior materials, so they seem like they have real history. If Shanghai wants to modernize, it really needs to tear down as many of this kind of building as possible and start building quality structures in their places.
I’m not completely heartless, though. There’s a tragedy here, and it’s about the people. (Isn’t it always, in China?) The people that live in that area live in those wretched conditions because they’re poor. Knocking down their homes doesn’t help them at all; it just means they’ll be forced to relocate, while rich people move into the new highrise that’s built on the ruins of their old homes.
You know this kind of thing goes on every day in Shanghai, but it feels strange, watching it happen bit by bit from my very own home…
23
Jun 2005China's New Reality
Time has a new “photo essay” called China’s New Reality.
Is there anything new about this? Lame, lame, lame. I can find more interesting China photos browsing Flickr or even friends’ sites.
Via AAIC.
22
Jun 2005好久不写
不好意思，我已经很久没写中文blog了。我不是不想写。问题是这里不能留言了，我得换blog软件。我已经换了英文blog的软件，挺麻烦的。我目前没有时间换中文blog的，但没有留言功能就没劲。但我一定会换blog软件并继续写这个blog！
好消息：考试通过了。看来我从9月份就是华师大的研究生了！
22
Jun 2005The Mummy in Shanghai
The entrance of Zhongshan Park
Ever since the May holiday, Shanghai’s Zhongshan Park has been housing a big The Mummy Returns promotional activity. It’s like a mini Egypt-themed fair. The main entrance of the park is all Egypted out, and a huge-screen (but low-res) TV has been installed which shows nonstop The Mummy Returns clips, interspersed with advertisements for the mummy fair going on inside the park. Each ticket costs a ridiculous 80 rmb per person.
After you pay, you head into the park and find the mummy section. If you’re unlucky there’s a line. (There were really long lines all throughout the first week of May, but there rarely are now.) You’re herded into the mummy’s temple, a sort of Egypt-themed haunted house. The haunted house was actually quite well done. The best part was all the workers inside dressed up like statues (they really did look like statues). They would remain motionless for a while, and then suddenly come to life, totally freaking people out. Good stuff.
Carnival games
When you come out you’re in the familiar carnival setting. You are surrounded by booths selling everything from National Geographic videos to The Coffee Bean Tea Leaf refreshments. There are lots of impossible games you can play, paying with expensive tokens for a chance at impossible odds to win a virtually worthless “prize.” The familiar favorites were there: shooting (ridiculously small) hoops, fishing, ring around the bottle, etc. The one game with decent chances was a dart game. You just had to pop balloons with darts to win your crappy prize.
If you’re there at the right time, you may also get to see a live show. Yes, it’s Shanghai’s version of the Egyptian craptacular! When I was there the performances alternated between dances which tried to stay on theme, using Middle Eastern music and costumes, and dances which seemed to appeal to teenagers, using flashy clown colors and pop music. Guess which are which!
All this is somewhat odd, of course, but the big question in my mind is: WHY? The Mummy Returns was released in 2001! Why go to all this work to promote a movie that’s already four years old? (I think the event has increased sales of pirated copies, though.) Is it a coincidence that Shanghai started whoring out Zhongshan Park to carnivals the same year that it stopped charging park admission for a lot of its parks?
P.S. Did anyone think it strange that there were Egyptian designs behind the video Coke machine I wrote about? Didn’t think so. Well, it was at this Mummy Returns carnival.
21
Jun 2005The Simpsons on China
First the hilarious South Park dodgeball episode (I hear that one provides great discussion material for the classroom), and now this! I’m definitely going to have to see this episode.
Via Wayne.
20
Jun 2005Video Coke Machines
Is this common back in the States now, or is this marketing trick being tested here in Asia? You can’t tell from this shot, but that screen at the top right is displaying nonstop Coca-Cola advertising.
The people at Coca-Cola are pretty much universally regarded as marketing geniuses. What, then, were they thinking when they thought this up? Apparently it’s supposed to work something like this:
You’re walking by a Coke machine. You don’t feel like a Coke. But then you notice something new: a video screen on the Coke machine! You are lured in by the familiar glow, then entranced by the saccharine smiles of the pretty people on the screen all going gaga over Coca-Cola. Suddenly you’re thirsty…
KA-CHING!
Yeah… somehow I don’t buy it. It is sort of a novelty the first time you see it, but after that, you ignore it as usual. I’ve never seen anyone watching the screens. Seems like an awfully big investment, considering I am seeing these things all over Shanghai now.
Does this make any sense at all?
19
Jun 2005Shanghai Jobs for Caucasians
It’s happened again! My company needs more foreigners. Last time I whined about this on Sinosplice for several months Micah ended up working here. Success! As the company grows, however, two foreigners are not enough. They’re looking to hire up to four more.
Anyway, if you have some English teaching experience and you speak Chinese, you might be interested in the position. Check out Sinosplice Jobs for the details and shoot me an e-mail if you’re interested.
Now for the bad news. Not only does the company hire only native speakers of North American English, but they want them to be white as well.
At first I denounced this as just blatant racism, but it’s actually a little more complex than that. My company has actually hired Chinese Americans before. The problem is that when clients hire a teacher or a teacher trainer from our company and they pay extra for a foreign teacher, they are looking for the “whole foreigner experience.” That means not Asian, because other Asians look too much like the Chinese, and that’s just boring. And it means not black or Indian simply because a lot of Chinese people are racist. If the company actually tried to use non-whites as teacher/trainers, most of the clients would just reject them and demand a white one.
Yes, it’s still a racist hiring policy. It’s clear that the bottom line is money, and if being anti-racism means less profit, then the company isn’t going to do it. This attitude is pretty prevalent. What’s really needed is to attack prejudices at their roots — in households. Then demand will change and businesses will respond. The sad thing is that foreign teachers in kindergartens are a great way to give kids positive exposure to foreigners at a young age, and it would be much more beneficial if the foreigners weren’t limited to mainly white ones.
17
Jun 2005Trojan!
Somehow I’ve got a trojan on my home computer. I’m always very careful, but being caerful wasn’t enough. I’ve gotta stop doing dumb things.
I downloaded a file via BitTorrent. I scanned it with AVG, and it said the file was clean. When I opened it, my system got infected. Now AVG very helpfully reports every 5 minutes that I have this trojan in my system, but it can’t get rid of it.
The most annoying thing about this trojan is that it prevents me from going online. So I can’t even get the necessary information/fixes to get rid of it without using someone else’s computer. Today at work I’ve downloaded a bunch of trojan/worm removal software. Hopefully at least one of those programs will do the trick. In the meantime I’ll be posting a little less than usual.
15
Jun 2005Free Power?
I moved into my current apartment in Shanghai on December 10, 2004. That means I have been living here for over half a year. In all that time, not a single electricity bill has showed up.
At first my roommates and I didn’t mind; we figured it came every few months. As the months started to add up, however, we got nervous. The three of us used the heat a fair amount during the winter, which, with three people, could easily amount to 500 rmb or more per month. We didn’t want to get slammed with that all at once.
I told my landlord about the problem, and she told me to check with the apartment administration. They said they didn’t handle that. I relayed this to my landlord, and she said she’d handle it. More time passed.
Recently my roommate Carl has landed a new job that will necessitate his relocation to another part of Shanghai. Carl has never been one to waive any power consumption rights, so we definitely wanted to settle the matter of the electricity bill before he moved (and before the sum got too huge). So recently I asked my landlord about it again, stressing the urgency. This time she got answers.
What she told me is that the power meter has been broken all this time, and she’d have it fixed soon. Furthermore, we wouldn’t have to pay for the power we have used in the past six months!
I find it a little hard to believe. Could the power company make such a mistake? Power just doesn’t get given away for free. Could it have been my landlord’s mistake, and somehow she won’t be able to determine how much we’ve used, so she’ll have to pay the sum herself? That doesn’t seem likely, because the power company should be able to tell her the amounts.
If we really don’t have to pay those six months of power bills and the power meter has still not been fixed yet, then I think it’s time to get busy using some more free power. Somehow, though, I think this bill will find its way to us down the road. In the meantime, it’s nice to think we got six months of free power.
14
Jun 2005Backstroke of the West
Winterson.com, a recent addition to the CBL, has an awesome entry entitled “episode iii, the backstroke of the west” (the title will make sense when you read the entry). I had a really good time writing my “Closer Subtitle Surrealism” entry, and it gave me ideas for other similar subtitle-related posts. Jeremy has beaten me to one of them: hilarious English subtitles on Hollywood films. This phenomenon comes about when pirates do their own shoddy English subtitles to new releases. Here is just one example (and not the best):
Be sure to read Winterson.com’s original entry for more. He also has an older entry with funny subtitles for Fahrenheit 9/11.
13
Jun 2005Animal Names from Animal Names
Not long ago at work I was part of a team working on an educational cartoon about sea creatures. The term 鲸鱼 was used in the script. Someone pointed out that the correct term for the mammal is actually 鲸, since a whale is, in fact, not a fish at all (the 鱼 character in means “fish”). I found this quite interesting. In English we don’t need to worry about the actual name of a whale; its name doesn’t carry that information. Still, you hear some of the same kind of nomenclature lecturing from the zoologist crowd when people say “panda bear” or “koala bear.”
I think probably every language has funny words for animals that are based on other animals. In English we have guinea pig, groundhog, hedgehog, prairie dog, jellyfish, and sea lion. I don’t think those are going to change. The ones targeted for “revision” seem to be the ones that are actually potentially misleading due to great similarity.
If you’re a foreigner just learning the Chinese language, however, there are a lot of animal names that could be misleading. Some of the ones that come to mind:
– 鳄鱼 (lit. “alligator fish”) — alligator or crocodile
– 熊猫 (lit. “bear cat”) — panda
– 龙猫 (lit. “dragon cat”) — chinchilla
– 河马 (lit. “river horse”) — hippopotamus
– 长颈鹿 (lit. “long neck deer”) — giraffe (hey, some deer do have long necks!)
– 荷兰猪 (lit. “Dutch pig”) — guinea pig
– 海豚/海猪 (lit. “sea pig”) — dolphin
– 豪猪/箭猪 (lit. “badass/arrow pig”) — porcupine
– 壁虎 (lit. “wall tiger”) — gecko
– 田鸡 (lit. “field chicken”) — (edible) frog
I’m sure there are more, but I’m not a Chinese animal name encyclopedia.
Maybe I’ve left out a lot, but it seems to me that Chinese does a lot more “borrowing” of animal names to create new animal names than English does. Could it be related to Chinese characters? (A large number of animals have their own characters, but at some point that practice becomes impractical.) It seems that a much greater proportion of animal names in English are loanwords.
I’m not really trying to prove anything here… Just throwing out a few thoughts. Also, I think it’s names like the Chinese examples above that make learning a new language interesting, so it’s a fun thing to share.
12
Jun 2005Precious Propaganda
Changning District Propaganda Handbook
The other day on the way home I checked my mail. There was no real mail; it was mainly just flyers for satellite TV installation. There was also a little booklet which was quite clearly unrelated to satellite TV, however. It was a Changning District propaganda handbook issued by the government. “What do you want that for?” my girlfriend asked. “Just throw it out.” She doesn’t really get why I would find something like this interesting.
What I find most interesting is that the government still goes to such trouble to even publish something like this. The little booklet is obviously very professionally printed. It’s glossy, in full color. How many people were involved in its publication, and how much money was spent on its production? Was it distributed to all residences in Changning District? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but the government is clearly still putting a lot of money into traditional forms of propaganda that seem ineffectual to a new generation of Chinese.
I’m not about to read the whole booklet cover to cover, but it does have some amusing sections. I recommend the Q&A section (30 questions) and the Slogan section (50 slogans). Be sure to click on the “ALL SIZES” button at the top of the photo to see the pages in a readable size. I find Chinese propaganda particularly difficult to translate, so I’m not going to bother. If you read Chinese, have a look. If someone wants to put up a translation, that would be even cooler.
10
Jun 2005Out of the Rice Zone
In China, eating rice is manly. It goes with smoking and drinking. Every time I turn down a cigarette with a “I don’t smoke,” people are disappointed. When I drink with them, they are very happy, nodding in approval. When I don’t eat much rice (like only one bowl), they demand I have another bowl. They don’t want to hear any of that “we don’t eat this much rice in the West, especially not at the very end of a meal” crap.
So I was happy once I got into my “rice zone.” I was capable of eating two to three (smallish) bowls of rice with every meal. Normal whiteys fresh off the boat cannot do this. It took me years to get to that point.
Lately, I’ve lost it. I’m not sure what it is. A few months ago, when Ayi gave me a heaping bowl of rice (and that’s a big bowl, not the restaurant size), I would eat it all in the course of my meal. Now, I take one look at that bowl and I’m sure I can’t finish it. When I put back half the bowl, she scowls in disapproval, the “a big tall guy like you should be eating more rice than that” written very clearly on her face.
Maybe I’m just ready for a visit home.
09
Jun 2005Inscrutable Characters
Last week Tian at Hanzi Smatter had a really cool post on the “Book From The Sky,” an art exhibit consisting of a book printed from hand-carved wood blocks. What makes the book so special is that the thousands of characters in the book were all created by the artist, Xu Bing, using existing character elements — a sort of “faux Chinese.”
This sort of reminds me of a game I used to play with my tutor back when I first started studying Chinese at UF. I would “make up” a Chinese character based on existing elements I knew and write it out, and my tutor would tell me what character it was. The idea was to “stump” my tutor by coming up with a nonexistent character. The simpler the character, the more glory. It was very hard for me to stump my tutor as a first year Chinese student (although I had had two years’ study of Japanese). I was amazed at how many characters I could “invent” that already existed. Xu Bing has done it thousands of times and made it into a book. None of his characters appear to be very simple, however.
Visually, the characters remind me of the characters of China’s Western Xia civilization (西夏文字). They, too, look like Chinese characters, but are, on average, much more complex.
Here’s a corny picture of me posing with some 西夏文字:
The name of the script in English is apparently Tangut.
I tried to find a good book on Tangut script in Yinchuan, but I couldn’t find one. I did learn in the museum, though, that the Tangut script was created by a king of the short-lived civilization. They were also extremely complex — possibly needlessly so. For example, why does the character meaning “one” need to be 5 strokes (in Chinese it’s simply “一”)? You may say, “sure, it’s 5 strokes for ‘one,’ but the script makes up for that in other ways.” But no, I don’t think it does. According to the information at the museum, all the Tangut characters were at least as complex as their Mandarin equivalents, most being more complex.
Not all civilizations value simplicity and efficient orthography, I guess. And not all civilizations survive. (By this logic, the Koreans will be our overlords one day.)
08
Jun 2005Visa to the USA (Part 2)
The interview appointment time was 8:30am. We were both nervous, worried we’d forget something, worried all the work would be for nothing. Here is our checklist of things to take:
– The four forms, two with attached photos
– The receipt for the 830 rmb application fee
– Her passport, national ID card, and official employee identification
– The “proof of intent to return to China dossier”
In addition, I had to take my bookbag so that she could give me her purse, cell phone, and watch before going in. You’re not allowed to take in bags, cell phones, or cameras, and the less metal you’ve got on your body, the simpler it is for you when you go in.
We got to the Isetan building on Nanjing Xi Road at about 8:10am. The building was not officially open, but one of the side entrances was. It had this sign in front of it:
Leading up to the sign (see it at the left?) was a really long line:
It didn’t take long to figure out how the system worked. The “appointment times” did not need to be kept at all. They were simply a means of distributing applicants throughout the day. Those with an appointment at 8:00am arrived the earliest and got in line. Whether they had their actual interview at 8:00am was irrelevant.
Everyone had to wait in line outside because there were too many people to wait inside. It wouldn’t be worth the Consulate’s time to argue with each person that they’d arrived too early, so they simply make all applicants wait outside and come in on first come first serve basis. Who comes first is indirectly controlled by the Consulate through appointment time. You have to wait in line outside because without the special card that you receive from the guy at the head of the line, you can’t get into the Consulate.
We waited in line from 8:15 am until 10:00 am. Fortunately it wasn’t too hot.
We were at the front of the next group to be admitted, so my girlfriend didn’t have to wait in the second line outside the Consulate on the 8th floor. It was there that I said goodbye and wished her luck (I wasn’t allowed to accompany her). Since she had submitted her form online and had the barcode already on her form, she was admitted immediately.
While I went upstairs to the movie theater lobby to study for my exam, my girlfriend was waiting in yet another line inside the Consulate. It was a pretty nerve-racking wait, but the longer I waited, the surer I was that she had gotten it. Applicants that pass the interview are then passed on to the visa issuing line, which obviously takes even longer. She came out at 12:15 pm.
I hadn’t gotten much studying done while I was waiting. Deprived of her cell phone, my girlfriend didn’t have a way to locate me when she came out, so I was waiting near the exit almost the whole time. As soon as I saw her come out, I did the “did you get it?” face and hand gestures. She tried to pretend to be dejected, but she couldn’t help smiling.
I asked her about the interview. I had been told it could be in Chinese if the applicant prefers. She said the guy spoke to her in English, but let her reply in Chinese. (Sounds kinda lazy.) What was she asked? Basically, he wanted to know how she met me, how long we’d been together, and if we were engaged yet. Then he wanted to see the documents related to her job. Aside from that, he wasn’t interested in any of the “proof” we had meticulously compiled. I think the multiple trips to the United States she has already made for her job was all the proof he really needed to see.
She also said that it seemed like most of the applicants were being granted visas. She had heard on the inside that it’s way easier to get a visa now than it was six months ago.
So, was she a shoo-in all along? I still honestly don’t know. I do know that her job (which allowed her to make previous trips to the USA) counted for a lot. I’m not sorry we went to all the trouble of preparing all those documents — it made it all the sweeter when she was granted the visa.
We already bought our plane tickets. Right now all we have to worry about is a fun two-week itinerary for Florida in July.
See also: Visa to the USA (Part 1), To the Consulate.
07
Jun 2005Crossover Complete
So, do you notice a big difference? Hopefully you don’t. That’s the whole point of converting templates. There are a few small changes, though:
– Tags. I am in the process of switching from category-based classification to tag-based. Why? Well, there are a lot of reasons, but it all comes down to: tags are awesome. If you use del.icio.us or Flickr, you know what I’m talking about. The entries on the current page have all been properly tagged, but you won’t be able to see the true potential until the whole system is tagged.
– Comments. They look a little different now, including the “Reponses” box in the left sidebar. They work pretty much the same. Your first comment on the new system may need to be moderated before it displays.
– Archives. The archives are pretty different now. The individual entry links are all different. I’ll do my best to preserve old links. I’m relying mostly on tags for organization. My theory is that blog archive indexes are hardly even used, so they don’t need to be prominently displayed or labored over too much. Most people find what they want with Google anyway.
– RSS. There is a new RSS feed. Rather than just deleting the old MT one, I’ll manually put in one last entry in the RSS feed that tells you the new feed links. I’ll also be updating the feeds page. When I get around to it.
OK, that’s all for now. Sorry for broken stuff. Let me know what’s broken. And comment!
Oh, and here are the entries that lost out on comments. Give them some comment love:
– Visa to the USA (Part 1)
– WordPress it is…
– DONE with exams!!!
– A Taste of Shanghai
– To the Consulate
– Noodle School
– Star Wars Set
– No Comments
06
Jun 2005Visa to the USA (Part 1)
Last Thursday was my girlfriend’s appointment with a State Department official here in Shanghai about getting a tourist visa to the United States. Fortunately, she got it. For the benefit of others who might be in a similar situation, I’ll describe the process we went through.
My girlfriend had a pretty big advantage from the start: she has been to the United States quite a few times on business. Every time it was to L.A. for a few days. The fact that she has never run off and become an underpaid dishwasher when she had the chance is a big plus.
Still, that’s far from a guarantee. Preparing for this interview in the past few months I’ve heard quite a few horror stories. It seems nothing guarantees a visa.
But let me start from the beginning.
When we decided we wanted to try for a visa, we went straight to the Visa Services page of the US Consulate in Shanghai’s webpage. The page is available in both English and in Chinese, but it’s not well organized at all. It’s downright confusing. After reading through the different sections several times, we got the gist of what we needed to do:
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Obviously, Chinese citizens will need a personal passport. There is a fairly simple application procedure to get one issued by the Chinese government.
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Buy a CITIC Industrial Bank pre-paid PIN card for 54 rmb, good for a measly 12 minutes of titillating conversation with the Visa Information Call Center.
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Use the card to schedule a visa interview appointment with the US Consulate. Expect the interview to be about a month from when you call.
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In the meantime you have some things to get together. Download the four forms (DS-156 English, DS-156 Chinese, DS-157 English, DS-157 Chinese) you need from the Visa Services page in PDF form. To make the process go as smoothly as possible at the Consulate, the four forms should be filled out in three different ways:
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DS-156 English: Fill it out online and submit it to the system. It will process the form, generate an image file with a bar code, and insert it all into a handy PDF file. Download this PDF file right away. (If you wait too long it’ll expire and go away and you’ll have to do it all over again.) Print it out. Don’t forget to sign it.
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DS-157 English: Download to your computer, open (Adobe Acrobat required), and fill out. Save and print out. Don’t forget to fill in the Chinese name by hand (the form doesn’t support Chinese) and to sign it.
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DS-156 Chinese and DS-157 Chinese: Print out and fill out by hand. The PDF form doesn’t support Chinese input yet.
Note that if you don’t have a printer, you may have a little trouble finding a place to print it for you that (1) has Adobe Acrobat installed, and (2) can print out a quality copy. I ended up at the Portman Ritz-Carlton on Nanjing Xi Road paying an outrageous 10 rmb per page because I had already failed at about five print shops. Most didn’t have Adobe Acrobat and couldn’t even download it because they had no internet connection. I’m not sure if they would have been willing to install it if I had thought to bring the install file. The one shop that was able to print out the form produced such poor quality that I couldn’t use it.
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Attach a 2 inch by 2 inch passport photograph to both the DS-156 English form and the DS-156 Chinese form.
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“Each applicant must pay a non-refundable 830 rmb application fee at an authorized branch of the CITIC Industrial Bank before coming to apply at the Consular Section.”
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You will also need to get together proof of employment. “Every applicant must be able to prove that he or she works in and/or is a resident of our Shanghai consular district, which includes the Shanghai Municipality, and the provinces of Anhui, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang.”
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Finally, the really important extra credit: “In addition to the above requirements, you are advised to present documentation and other evidence establishing social, economic, and other ties that would compel your departure from the United States after a temporary and lawful stay.“
It’s pretty much impossible to prove that you’ll come back, but you’ve got to give it your best. The way I saw it, we had to demonstrate three things:
- Our relationship was real.
- My girlfriend had good reason to return to Shanghai.
- I had good reason to return to Shanghai (i.e. the two of us hadn’t decided to go live in the USA).
In order to “prove” these three points, we put together a big thick file:
With all that information, good organization was essential. The visa officer wouldn’t have long to do the interview, and he’s certainly not going to sift through a big mess of loose papers. The file contained the following:
0. Handy table of contents, in both English and Chinese.
1. Letter of Invitation from me on behalf of the Pasden family, and three pictures: (1) the two of us, (2) her with my sister Amy, (3) my family picture (“proving” that the girl in picture #2 was, in fact, my sister).
2. My girlfriend’s proof of employment, proof of decent income, and employer’s written permission to make a short trip to the United States.
3. Proof of her Shanghai home ownership and mortgage.
4. Proof of her car ownership and driver’s license.
5. Proof of her prior trips to the United States and other Western countries in the form of visa photocopies.
6. Proof of her financial security in Shanghai (certificate of deposit).
7. Proof of her ongoing pursuit of higher education.
8. Proof of my long-term residence in China (photocopies of passport, visas, work permit).
9. Proof of my residence in Shanghai (lease lasting through the end of 2005).
10. Proof of my financial security in Shanghai (account statement).
11. Proof of my Chinese ability (HSK certificate).
12. Letter from the administration attesting that I am currently finalizing enrollment in a graduate program in Applied Linguistics at East China Normal University.
Whew! That’s a big heap of information! The thing is, none of it guarantees anything. In fact, we knew from the beginning that the visa officer would probably not look at much of it at all. But we still had to take it to strengthen our case. So with all that going for us, we still didn’t feel confident going into the interview.
P.S. I declare this entry the listiest Sinosplice entry ever!
Note: This is my last entry published with Movable Type. I should have the new WordPress blog up in the next 24 hours, after which comments will be back! The weblog URL will not change, but the RSS URL will change.
See also: Visa to the USA (Part 2), To the Consulate.
05
Jun 2005WordPress it is…
As I mentioned recently, I’m changing my blogging platform. Originally I had been shying away from WordPress because neither of my two “IT advisers” recommended it, but after doing my own research, it seems that the switch from MT to WP will be the easiest, and especially since the release of WordPress 1.5, it’s a very solid PHP-based blogging platform. Plus my two advisers kinda changed their views and they’re not so against it.
What you’ll never see on this blog
So I made my choice, but the actual switchover will take some time. I will keep my current design (well, maybe some small changes), but WP templates are very different from MT templates. Instead of inserting HTML-esque MT tags, I’m playing with includes and loops and stuff in PHP. I’m in for some headaches.
Looks like I’ll be heading home to Florida for a visit on July 3rd (with my girlfriend!), so I aim to get it done before then.
04
Jun 2005DONE with exams!!!
My entrance exams for grad school at East China Normal University are finally over. It’s hard to believe that I’d been preparing for them for eight months. I’ve been studying quite a bit harder this past month, I’ll admit. But what a weight off my shoulders!
I probably won’t find out the results until next week some time, but I feel pretty good about how I did.
Part I: Modern Chinese (2 hours)
I think I did OK. There were 10 questions, all asking for some kind of explanation, analysis, or comparison, and always with examples. (No multiple choice, no fill in the blanks.) Of the ten, eight of the questions concerned content which I pretty much fully anticipated. They weren’t tricky. A lot of regurgitation was involved for some of them. One of the unanticipated ones called for a full analysis of synonym groups. I had studied that a little and then decided that it probably wouldn’t be tested on, so I disregarded it. I probably got some partial credit there anyway, though.
I guessed correctly that there would be exactly one 修辞 (“rhetoric,” involving fancy topics like literary devices) question on the exam. That’s 10% of the exam. And yet the 修辞 section took up 100 of the textbook’s 500 pages. So I pretty much skipped it entirely, aside from briefly looking at the main terms. So I just BSed that one question on the exam. I bet I got a few points.
Overall, I think I got a B.
Part II: Composition (1 hour)
The topic was really general, like “do some comparisons of American and Chinese language and/or culture, based on your experiences.” Wow. They were obviously being nice to me. And it only had to be 700-800 characters instead of the 1000 the teacher had told me before.
Based on educated guessing, I had prepared for the topic “based on your experiences, compare and contrast the Chinese and American university systems.” So I was able to adapt that, as well as use some of the particularly well-crafted sentences and phrases that I recalled. I wrote about my experience of learning Chinese as an American, compared to the typical Chinese student’s experience learning English in China.
I’m sure there were mistakes, but my structure was solid and the conclusion is one the Chinese will like (basically 各有所长: “both have their strong points”), so I probably got a B overall.
So now I’m just waiting to be notified that I’ve been admitted to grad school and they want my tuition money.
02
Jun 2005A Taste of Shanghai
Browsing Flickr’s Shanghai-related photos, I came across A Taste of Shanghai, a “food photo diary” by user yusheng. The intro states:
> Let me just say, right off the bat, that aside from maybe Beijing and possibly the Pearl River Delta region, Shanghai has, by a wide margin, the best food in China. Of course, the rest of China’s food is barely edible (IMO, obviously), so it’s not that difficult be the best.
> That said, Shanghai’s Chinese food is still far, far behind HK and Taipei. And Western cuisine? Let’s just say Shanghai isn’t even good enough to hold New York’s jock strap when it comes to Western cuisine. Of course, to be fair, New York’s Chinese food stinks to high heaven as well (with a few exceptions, of course).
> On the plus side, if you know where to look, you can find incredibly cheap (and I mean incredible) good eats.
Whether or not you agree with the guy’s opinions, the point is the pictures of the food. Note that each picture has its own detailed description which you can read if you click on the thumbnail.
Update: Yusheng also has a xiaolongbao survey on his blog.