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.

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.

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.

I had a very odd moment of confusion recently.  I was walking on the road, and saw a sign that had the pinyin “MI XING” written in huge letters.  The thought that came to my mind was to wonder why anyone would talk about superstition in such huge letters on a sign… and in pinyin.  I knew that it couldn’t be quite correct, and so started looking for the characters to see if it wasn’t supposed to be 迷信 (yes, I know… “xin,” not “xing”), but some other phrase that I wasn’t calling to mind.

It was only as I began looking for the characters that I realized that this wasn’t a Chinese sign, but an English one, and it wasn’t pinyin at all, but the word “MIXING.”

I think I’ve been in China too long.

I was very impressed over the weekend.  Just before my family members left Singapore, my niece asked me to take her downtown so that she could buy a Bible that had Chinese characters, Chinese phonetics (hanyu pinyin), and English.  It’s an expensive book, but she used the money that had been given to her in red packets during the Chinese New Year to buy it.  She said she wanted to use it to learn Chinese.  I know that it is possible to learn to read a language this way (and with the environment around you, to speak as well), but have not seen anyone do it.  Watching my niece was amazing.

The night they were preparing to leave, she took the Bible out and started reading.  By verse 2 of Genesis 1, she’d figured out that 神 is God (though that one might cause her some confusion as she goes on).  With a quick look back over the verses she’d read so far, she figured out that 地 was earth, and so 天 must be heaven.  She continued on this way, and put together everything in the first two verses.  She read them aloud for me several times, and then I read them and she repeated (without looking at the printed words) 2 times.  She plans on continuing this method, 2 verses a day, from now until the time she comes back to stay with me again, which she tentatively plans to do in August/September.  By then she should be somewhere in Exodus, and I am going to be interested to see how her language skills are at that time.

I’ve read that it was once pretty common to give kids a text in a classical language and a lexicon, and before you know it, they would be able to read the language without any problem.  I don’t think it is something that is done so often anymore — we are much more hands-on these days, and that is a real pity.  My 13-year-old niece is just the age that a lot of people started this sort of education, back in the day, and I am very intrigued to see how the experiment works out for her.  Watching things click in her mind the other day, I realized that this old-fashioned way of learning certainly has some merit.

If things work out as she plans, she’ll be staying with me for a few weeks in Shanghai toward the end of the summer or early fall.  If she is still interested in the language like she is at this moment, I am thinking I will sign her up to attend language classes every day.  With the environment, and the ground work she is going to do between now and then (and I do believe she will do it — she is a very motivated kid!), she could end up learning Chinese very well in a relatively short time.

Making me completely jealous.  And extremely proud.

Before I left Shanghai for Singapore a couple of weeks ago, I picked up a copy of  Think Like Chinese by Zhang Haihua and Geoff Baker.  The look of the volume was attractive (I know, I know… don’t judge a book by its cover!), and the idea of trying to get inside “the Chinese mind” appeals to me, so I picked it up.  I started reading it on the way home, and just finished it this week.

Overall, I have to say it is good, but it does tend to repeat itself more than seems necessary.  I think that if I were new to China and Chinese culture, this would not bother me so much.  But it seemed the repeated bits were things I’ve known for a long time, and so it got a little slow at times for me.  That said, if I were relatively new to China, I think that seeing the same ideas presented more than once in different contexts might be helpful, so I can’t really hold that against the book.  The only thing, then, that I have to complain about is the fact that there were several typing errors, which is always an irritation.  That’s a pity, because otherwise this book is really pretty good — and I say that despite the fact that my interests in China are not really geared toward setting up a business, which is the very clear focus of the book.

Anyway, I suppose I am not really looking for a reason to complain.  So, I guess I can move on to the good stuff.

Of particular interest to me was a discussion in the very early parts of the book on the importance of the Chinese language in shaping Chinese thought.  I’ve known for a long time that language is a fundamental shaper of Chinese thinking, but what I had never heard that Zhang and Baker bring to the forefront in this book is that in order to learn the Chinese language, one must use a form of “symbolic thinking” that uses both hemispheres of the brain almost simultaneously.  When using English (and most other Western languages), the left brain is primarily used.  For Chinese, both right and left brain are put into action together, with the right brain triggering a fraction of a second before the left.  This is apparently due to both the pictograph nature of the written language and to the tonal system of the spoken language.  It is pretty amazing reading, looking into how this shapes the way the Chinese mind works.  I have to say a big thanks to Zhang and Baker here, because they’ve given me leads for some other reading material I intend to pursue in connection with this idea.

Some other good points raised in the book include the reminders of just how vast a thing “Chinese culture” is.  Zhang and Baker compare it to Europe, with its widely differing cultures from country to country.  Though China’s provinces all lie within one national boundary, the cultural differences are still there, and that needs to be understood by anyone who wants to work in China.  And, even more importantly, this applies all the more to overseas Chinese, most of whom were brought up in a Chinese culture that can be seen as “of the past” in Mainland China, as most overseas Chinese were brought up without the influence of communism.  There is no getting around how big a difference that makes — often meaning that the cultural differences between Mainland Chinese and overseas Chinese is as great as between Mainland Chinese and those of completely different ethnic groups.  I think Think Like Chinese does a pretty good job of emphasizing this point, and it is one that is helpful to keep in mind.

Overall, I find Zhang and Baker’s Think Like Chinese to be a pretty insightful book for people wanting to do business in China, especially for those relatively new to China (more than a year or so, less than 10 years), or those who have limited direct contact with people born and raised in Mainland China.  It is an easy read, and probably worth picking up and giving some attention to before starting a big venture in the Chinese market.

When I first started coming to Shanghai, a Shanghainese friend used to tell me that she had never realized that Shanghai was beautiful until she saw it through my eyes. Having lived here all of her life, she just thought it was another big city. Seeing it through other eyes that were less accustomed to the place made it seem so different to her.

One of my friend’s mom is here visiting, and it strikes me that I might have become a little jaded to some of the things that are so fascinating about Shanghai. She’s been recording some of her impressions on her blog, and I’ve had a good time reading that — especially since her purpose in coming here was to be with her daughter during the birth of her first baby. That gives her an experience I’ve certainly never had, seeing Shanghai from the perspective of a delivery room.

Here are some links to the blog she’s been keeping.  I think you’ll find the stories of her experiences fun to read.

The Many Uses of a Bicycle

People’s Square

The Ancient City of Suzhou

The China that People Expect

Loopholes (- make sure and catch this one!)

Health Care

It Wouldn’t Be Shanghai

Just Enough

What’s in a Name

Speaking of Names

A Day Out

And one more with baby pictures

Sorry, I know that is 2 posts with lots of links within the past week, but I loved reading both sites, and couldn’t resist.

Bob and Claire Rogers have generously given me permission to repost some of the content from their site over here.  I thought I would put up a couple of sections from their narrative of their journey along the Silk Road for starters.  This is a continuation of the trip that began in Beijing (see my previous post), and has now moved out into the far reaches of Western China.   You can find the original piece in full here.

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Coming into Far West China

When touring on Zippy, it normally takes us a day to cover an hour’s distance by car, a week to cover an hour by plane and a month to cover a time zone. Except in China. We’d planned to take two to three months to ride our route across China, about the same distance across the U.S. Yet here we are in Western China still on Beijing time; China has one official time zone. Everyone seems to adjust their day to the daylight and daybreak is 6:30 while dusk is 9:30.

Her steamed buns were great.  Where did she learn that hand sign?

After some white knuckle taxi rides through Urumqi, we reckoned we’d take our chances on the bus. Not too bad. We had to quickly abandon one bus when it stalled on a hill, the replacement had a gap in the floor with a bucket of water. I suppose in case of a transmission fire. Bob got to ride in the fireman’s seat.

(Bob)

There have been times on this trip that we have been just about as low as we have ever been as a couple. Only those months when we were caring for Claire’s mother DeLee as she died of lung cancer were harder on us. We are accustomed to discomforts, to a level of uncertainty and unease in our travels; but never have we felt so lost as in trying to navigate though a culture and language so alien as China is to us. It is little comfort that the ex patriots we met in Beijing know little Chinese after years of living and teaching here or that they carefully arrange their travel through travel agencies, and travel in groups. I take full responsibility for getting us in over our heads. Claire, who made a valiant attempt at learning some Mandarin through CD’s before leaving, kept telling me how much trouble we might have with the language, kept telling me how I would have to learn more patience than I have exhibited on some past trips. Sure, sure, I promise. I’ll be patient. Well, I have had to learn to be more patient, and I have succeeded in that, but the logistics are still taking up all of our energy and time, and Claire is bearing more than her fair share; I am hopeless with the language.

In China you have no choice but to be patient. This is China; things happen in the China method of getting things done, whether you like it or not. I have never seen so many pieces of paper, each with a lovely little red rubber stamp, used to accomplish the most minor task: picking Zippy up from the baggage claim area takes at least four pieces of paper, carefully stamped and handed to you in the correct order, payment of one yuan (12 cents) as a processing fee I assume, four people handing off responsibility, checking the paperwork each time, until finally Zippy is rolled out and handed over, after one more check of all the paperwork. All this is done in a professional manner and a great deal of patience at our lack of their language, however it takes forever.

And then there are the little misunderstandings that take time. When we filled out the paperwork for our visas at the Kazakhstan consulate, after the fourth widow was finished with us she said to Claire to be here at 1pm. It was only 11:30 but we decided to wait, just in case the visas would really be done in one day. At 1pm, “Why are you still here?” said the best English speaker of the consulate staff. Claire explained. He shook his head. “Thursday. Thursday 1pm.” Two days hence.

We now are legal for Kazakhstan, a few hundred (not sure) miles west of here, assuming authorities along the way don’t know that cyclists are enemies of the state.

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Bob and Claire will be starting another exciting journey through Yunnan and southward into Thailand in September.  Watch the New Bohemians website for their narrative of that trip.  I can hardly wait to read their story!

Bob and Claire Rogers have generously given me permission to repost some of the content from their site over here.  I thought I would put up a couple of sections from their narrative of their journey along the Silk Road for starters.   You can find the original piece in full here.

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The Joys Of The Chinese Language

People here have been extremely patient in trying to communicate with us. Just listening to other conversations, I hear a lot of repetition, so I’m beginning to think that knowing the “common tongue” may not help. For some reason, the word bicycle is especially difficult: zìxíngche looks almost onomatopoetic, and we’ve tried pronouncing it several different ways while sitting on top of-and pointing at-a double zìxíngche no less, and we still get blank looks.

Thankfully, a few key words and gestures generally open the doors to negotiations peppered with many “duibuqi”s (sorry, or excuse me) from both sides.

Food, of course, is a main concern and we’ve only had the joy of the unknown dish once so far. We won’t go hungry and I’m looking forward to learning more about both food and language.

In Trouble Already?

The tall, stoic guard gave us the white glove wave, we were in trouble. A small crowd of 20 or so people had gathered around Zippy under Chairman Mao’s portrait. One man asked questions in broken English as the crowd grew. It was too much for the guard so we got the wave of dismissal. I asked the English speaker what it meant. Yes, leave.

We had come to meet Karen at the entrance to the Forbidden City for a ride around the hutongs. When she didn’t show up, we waited and people watched. That was when the crowd had gathered.

We had already ridden through one intersection with a policeman yelling and waving at us. It was a really big intersection and for some reason, no other bicycles were around. I suppose that should have struck me as peculiar. We’ll have to leave this town soon or officials will start to recognize us.

The Ex-patriot Tour of Beijing

Riding around the lakes and hutongs on a busy Sunday was a blast. Karen (who is generously letting us stay in her apartment), Denny and Sue, all teachers here showed us some of their favorite narrow, residential alleys. I was certain that at some point I would have to hug another cyclist or push them away to keep us both from crashing. We stopped at a busy park so Denny could pick up on a game of table tennis. The cherry trees are blooming and the willow leaves are a bright, light green. Sue exclaimed that we could see the mountains to the northwest of town. The American Embassy recommends Americans spend no more than five years in Beijing due to the pollution. On especially bad days, children are not allowed outside to play. One un-photographed sight was a little girl who appeared to be trying to put on her own diaper while workers nearby congregated on a digging project.

Don’t know why I’m surprised to see pet dogs about. No strays; here they are a sign of wealth. Why then, should I be further surprised to see that most of the dogs are Pekinese? So far, all dogs we’ve seen have been small, Pekinese, Pomeranians or Pugs. The few cats we’ve seen have been rangy, skittish toms.

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Bob and Claire will be starting another exciting journey through Yunnan and southward into Thailand in September.  Watch the New Bohemians website for their narrative of that trip.  I am sure it is going to be a lovely story!