I actually included a little section on squatting toilets in my book Suzhou Basics I hadn’t seen this video at the time, or I might have included a link.

When one of my Singaporean friends saw that I’d included this in the Suzhou book, she just rolled her eyes and said, “I just don’t get what the big deal about squatting toilets is.”

Maybe there will be some comments left here that will help explain it to her…

ooops…. seems my recent trip to Alaska kept me from posting here a little longer than I expected.  Apologies!

I’m back and hope to be posting more regularly now.  In the meantime, I’ve put a few pictures of Alaska at my main blog.  You can view them there if you’re interested.

Watch for more China-related posts here coming up soon!

When I was visiting with my new friend at the little noodle shop outside of the grounds of the Terra Cotta Warriors, I asked her what this character displayed on the wall was:

She told me it was “biang” — or maybe “bian” or “bang,”  she wasn’t quite sure.  She only knew it was read  as “biang” in her dialect, and that was really all anyone would need to know.

When I asked her what it meant, she just said, “It’s the biang we use in biang biang mian.”  She went on to describe the local specialty, a type of noodles called biang biang mian.  They are handmade noodles, and very thick.  There’s not much to the soup the noodles are cooked it — just vinegar, soy sauce, and chili oil, I think — but it is a local favorite.

For me, I didn’t get to try the noodles, being that I was too full at the moment and left the city early the next morning.  But I did notice, after she’d told me what the character was, that I saw it all over Xi’an at the little noodle shops lining the roadside.

So there’s a local specialty I missed.  Perfect excuse to go back.

When I was preparing for my first trip to Xi’an, everyone told me to try the local specialty, Shaanxi pao mo. It is a different dish from the Lanzhou version that I like so much at little shops in Shanghai, but I liked the Shaanxi version as well.

I didn’t eat at one of the big, famous spots for pao mo.  Instead, I took the advice from a Xi’an native who I met on the plane and tried it at a little hole-in-the-wall shop, right outside the grounds of the Terra Cotta Warriors.

The dish is a thick soup with bread broken up in it.  The bread gets all soggy sopping up the stew, but the inside remains a little bit firm.  It’s a little spicy, and quite rich. Just the way I like it.

Shaanxi Pao Mo

My recent trip to Beijing and Xi’an with friends was fun all around.  I had great traveling companions, and got to visit a city I’ve not been to in a long time (Beijing) and a city I had never been to before (Xi’an).  None of my fellow-travelers spoke Chinese — which is a big part of how our trip came about.  I was there as translator and guide.

Being a guide in Beijing was pretty easy, as was the Shanghai leg of the trip.  Xi’an was a little different, but not because it was the only of the three cities I’d never visited before.  What made it odd was the fact that many of Xi’an’s members of the tourism industry didn’t seem to like the fact that I spoke Chinese and could find my way around without a guide.  We did hire a driver, and he seemed to enjoy my ability with the language and comfort in the culture, but all the guides I met along the way as we visited the sites in Xi’an were less congenial when they learned that we could manage without their services.

That attitude was the only disappointment I found in Xi’an, and I loved nearly everything else about the place, especially the rich history that is hidden underground in the area  around the city.  The Terra Cotta Warriors are, of course, the most famous, and are every bit as amazing when visited in person as you’d expect from the pictures you’ve seen.  There is an air of mystery about them, and it makes for a very nice place to visit.

After my friends and I spent a whole day visiting the Warriors and the huge grounds — very nicely set up for visitors — we made our way out of the exit and decided to finally grab a bite to eat for our lunch, just as the sun was beginning to hint that it would like to sink below the hills that surround the ancient burial ground.  My friends saw a Subway sign, and thought sandwiches sounded good.  Having not been to Xi’an before, I was anxious to try some local specialties, and so we made our way to separate facilities for lunch.

As I sat down to finally try Shaanxi pao mo,  a very different dish from the pao mo I find in Lanzhou la mian eateries in Shanghai, the shop keeper sat down across from me, and we began to chat.

“You’re a tour guide?”

“Well, for now, yeah.  I brought some friends here to see the Warriors.”

“I could tell.  You don’t look like a typical tourist.”

And from there, we continued on, her telling me about local food, and me telling her a little about my first impressions of Xi’an and the Terra Cotta Warriors.  She gave me a good bit of insight into Xi’an in the 20 minutes or so it took me to eat the pao mo, and I really enjoyed the visit.  It made me glad we’d decided on such a late lunch, when there were no crowds to keep my new acquaintance busy.

As I finished my meal, I began to sort through some things I’d bought for friends back home, souvenirs of the Warriors.  The lady who had cooked my noodles came out to join me and her co-worker as we continued our chat.  After a few minutes, the new arrival asked me, “How long have you been in China?”

“I’ve been living here part time for the past 6-7 years.”

The friend who had been chatting with me for the past half hour looked surprised.  ”What?” she said.  ”With your Chinese, I thought you grew up in China!”

Whoever said food is the way to get to someone’s heart only knew half the story.  Flattery is so much more effective.

There’s a nice relief of Surgery on Kuang Kong’s Arm. It’s an interesting piece, depicting an event that took place somewhere around the first century BC.

The only thing I find odd about this piece is the location where it is displayed.  At Mount Elizabeth Hospital.  Right outside of the operating theatre.

Not exactly a comforting sight when entering the ward, nor when you are waiting for a loved one to finish surgery.

I’ve been putting in a lot of work on translations this past few weeks, having gotten a few free lance jobs to work on.  The only type of translation I work on is literary translation from Chinese to English, since it is the only thing I am moderately good at, and I have found it to be both challenging and fun.

Some thoughts on the whole process have been in my mind since the projects came in.  For people who are monolingual, the whole experience of translation might seem to be something that anyone who knows two languages should be able to do easily.  After all, if you are fluent in both languages, you just transfer the ideas from one language into another, right?

Well, no.  It’s not like that, really.  It’s not as if we’re addressing a math problem here, where one language system is equivalent to another, and all you have to do to translate is to set up the appropriate equation.  Language doesn’t function that way at all, because language uses a completely different set of faculties than math does.

I’ve been trying to identify my process of translation while I was working on these projects over the past few weeks.  For me, especially with literary translation, the first step is probably the hardest.  What is required in the first step is understanding — not just getting the definitions of words (that’s easy), but really absorbing into your own mind how they are put together.  You have to let the images dance around in the head, and see how they interact in the text you’re working with.

From there, it’s about finding the words to bring those images into your target language.  My first drafts of translations usually come out very odd, as if I’ve suddenly become extraordinarily fluent in “Chinglish.”  After  a look through my first draft, my first thought is usually, “I didn’t even know I could use such broken English….”

From there, I usually go back and find the spots that are troubling just from a language perspective — things that are clearly not relaying the idea that was intended in the original piece.  Well, let’s be honest — they’re a bunch of words put together that really don’t say much at all.  I spend a lot of time with dictionaries here, seeing what angles of certain phrases I might have overlooked.  It’s really, for me, a very fun part of the process, requiring a stretching of the mind to include things that it has seemed to ignore on its own initiative, without me realizing it has done so.

When I’ve begun to iron out the worst of the language problems, I usually try to get a little feedback from someone who understands both languages well.  A second set of eyes often turns up more places where I’ve either made wrong assumptions about certain phrases, or perhaps not worded them very clearly in the translation. Armed with the feedback, I go back to work on tuning up the piece.  By this time, I usually find that I am beginning to feel a good deal of attachment to the author’s original work, even if it was something that did not particularly jump out at me on my first reading.  It seems that the ideas become a little more my own as I try to capture them for the friend who is helping me with my proofreading.

The next step, for me, is working on smoothing out awkward phrases, and also tweaking transitions so that the whole flows the way it should.  It’s more a matter of polishing here than really doing a lot of writing or translating.  I find, at this stage, that my thoughts are becoming more natural in English, and much less foreign.

After this brush-over, it is nice if I have someone who does not understand Chinese to help read the piece.  I’ve found it very helpful to have a non-Chinese-speaker give feedback on whether or not the piece works to English-only (or at least English-predominantly) readers.  And, I’m very lucky to have some friends who are nice enough to offer assistance here!

It is interesting to think through how the process works for me.  I have other friends who have described their translation process rather differently (especially if it is not literary writing).  For me, though, there is something very unique that happens in the process of attempting to take hold of someone else’s thoughts and make them available to other readers.  It’s as if I have to make the thoughts my own in order to express them, but at the same time have to be extremely careful to make sure they remain the author’s thoughts in transmission.

It is really hard work, but something I find myself enjoying more and more as I get further into it.

Usually hearing the phrase “religious games” would bring a different idea to mind for me, but this looks kind of fun!

I came across this guy in Singapore last week, and couldn’t help but post his picture here. Especially since he was nice enough to pose for me.

Using on a recent post here, I pasted the text in at I Write Like, a site that analyzes your writing and tells you which famous author it is most like.  Here’s the result….

Whew!  Don’t I wish!!!

That’s way better than the answer I got on one of my other blogs.  Based on the most recent post there, I was told I write like Dan Brown.  :-(