Just when you thought it was safe...

I know this post is a little bit late for Halloween, but may I humbly present...



Yet more scary looking kiddie rides!  Yes, it has been a long time since I've featured them on this blog, but the profusion of scary childrens' rides continues unchecked on the streets of Chengdu, with yet more species being discovered (and more flagrant copyright violations..) every time I go into town.  Besides the Skitch copy above, if that's what it is, there has also been a notable Transformer upswing.  I'm pleased to report, however, that the ever-popular Xi Yang Yang and his cartoon sheep companions continue to hold their own.
 


Also of note - no matter where you go in China, or what the ride, the color palette remains exactly the same.  Don't believe me?  Check out the earlier installments of the series here and here. 

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Both Sides Now

Front:


Back:

Done

The Done Manifesto:

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you're done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

(From Bre Pettis.  Posted more as a reminder to myself than anything else...)

Put me in the middle for the time being...

Jet Lag (among countless other situations) in a nutshell..

Image: Null Set, by James Barron

Two Years Ago - Errr, does this symbolize anything?

Our "township" of Hongguang (红光) means "Red Light" in Chinese, and no, that phrase does not have the same connotations here as it does, say, in Amsterdam. (Though I've been told that there is a small, err, business district outside of the University's side gate) Chairman Mao visited a collective farm in this neck of the woods in the sixties, and in his honor, the locals decided to rename their town to reflect the triumphant and illuminating red light of Communism.

When we first got here, the main street from the highway into town was flanked by a large public square on both sides, followed by a roundabout with a statue of the Chairman surrounded by followers and eager nation-builders, like so:



Then came the road construction. For the next year and a half, our walk to the bus looked something like this:





And now we have a nifty brand new underpass!



Notice anything missing?



No word on if the Chairman and crew will make a future reappearance in the public square next to the road, which is still being refurbished...

Life is FUNNY How much I love you

I require my students to keep class notes and journals, which I review at the end of the semester. Some of the covers, like this one, are quite poetic (intentionally or not...).

(see also my post on Chinglish / bilingual found poetry here.)

Books of Note

A while back, I posted pictures of a few of my Chinese notebooks here, along with the inspirational quotes that grace their covers. A week later, the entry start getting tons and tons of hits from Notebookstories.com, a web site devoted entirely to, you guessed it, notebooks, and people who collect, save, and fill them. Who knew? (Though, given the nature of the internet, not entirely surprising.)

Being as I'm into sketchbooks, notebooks, journaling, cool graphic design, and found poetry, (intentional and otherwise), I've got a few photos of notebooks lying around the archives myself. Sooo - here's wishing everyone a happy Asian notebook week! Or month. Or couple of days. Whatever. Hey, they're notebooks, okay..?

First up: some cool books that I picked up in Thailand, featuring vintage ads on the front and excerpts from old textbooks on the back:







As always, click on the image to enlarge. Enjoy!

Three teas

Some nice bits of graphic design from Indonesia...

Variations on a theme

From a single store in Singapore's Little India, a small sampling of the many representations of the Hindu god Ganesha....





Ganesha, among other things, is the protector of the household and the remover of obstacles. More pictures here.

A whole lotta pink

Another picture from the Lotus wholesale market in Chengdu. And yes, pink is a girly girl color over here in China as well.

Incidentally, did you know that in the late 1800s in the US, pink was used for boys and light powder blue was considered a girls' color? As a shade of red, pink had the meaning of energetic, healthy, and powerful - as in the phrase "in the pink" - and therefore masculine. Meanwhile, blue was considered to be a more docile, relaxed, and melancholic, with more feminine overtones.

The original meanings, if my memory serves, faded around the turn of the century, and our current system of pink for girls and blue for boys started to catch on in the twenties and thirties. Anyway, that's what I remember from an incredibly interesting article that I read once and am too lazy to look up at the moment... (Would somebody care to Google it for me and get back to me with the results?)

Hello, everyone...

Arrrr!

Speaking of time, the local cycle of construction / accelerated aging / demolition / new construction that I've blogged about previously does leave some interesting, almost painterly, remnants from time to time. I thought this wall, with its waterstreaked partial trademark and mysterious hovering "®" was particularly lovely, in a Mad Max kind of way.

Ordinary Stuff - Scary Lookin' Kids' Rides

One universal wellspring of surrealism is childhood, or more specifically, our often ambiguous adult views of childhood. There's a strange disconnect between our sentimental view of childhood as a time of safety and innocence, and the half-remembered feeling that we were ourselves once quite tiny beings with very little control over the strange world around us.



So it's nice to know that even here in China, on the other side of the world from my home, you can still find coin-op kiddie rides that are a) not only slightly creepy looking, but also b) play incredibly tinny annoying sing-song music!



"Mommy? Why's that duck looking at me like that? Mom...? Mommy...?"



"Hey, son, I've got to go into the liquor store for a sec. Would you like me to sit you down on the smiling pointy-eared demon, or the two-headed dog?"

(Don't worry - China also has a large supply of cute fluffy kittens and baby ducklings to make you feel good again.)

Confessing to Chinglish

It's time for me to come out and say it in public. Hi, my name is Dave, and I, I... I love Chinglish. Heck, more than that - I'm addicted to it. There. I said it. I.. I...

I am a Chinglishaholic!
(...muffled sobs and gasps as the weight finally lifts from my shoulders...)

Did you spot the hidden poetry latent in this sign?

China, as you may know, is loaded with Chinglish - bad, often funny or strange translations of Chinese into English. For a long time, I've had an anti-Chinglish policy on this blog. After all, after a year of being in this country, my Chinese is still at what I've taken to calling the Teletubby level*. Who am I to criticize another person's flawed, but better knowledge of English?

All too often, most mentions of Chinglish on the internet (mine included) come across as snarky and rude. It seems as if the speaker is so overwhelmed by the new culture that they need to find something, anything to say to make them feel superior again. So they take a picture of a strange T-shirt or a bizarrely misspelled sign, post it online, and call it a day.

As a result, it seems to be an unspoken rule in the long-term expat community (both in person and online) to not comment on Chinglish too often, if at all. Admitting that you love Chinglish is like - hmm, I don't know - admitting that you have a secret stash of Archie comic books that you still read daily, maybe.

So what, you may ask, sparked my Chinglish conversion? In a word, Surrealism. Specifically, thinking a lot about surrealism in art, and why I love it so much. Surrealism usually gets a bad rap in the art world. It brings to mind geeky teenage boys poring over a set of Salvador Dali prints. "Whoa, dude, that giraffe is on fire, man. Trippy!" It seems very adolescent and self-absorbed.

Surrealism at its best however, does something entirely different. It allows us to consider that the mundane world is, in fact, much more extraordinary than we think. It takes ordinary objects and re-images them as fantastic creations. It reminds us that what we see is often more strange and wonderful than anything we can imagine. It suggests the possibility that the dream has the potential to become real.

So, I invite you to enter the world of Chinglish - a world which contains Famous Scissors and an actual Love Medicine Company. A world where golf is an acronym, and you can always go hang out in the "Resent Place" if you're feeling particularly surly. Instead of "Lost in Translation", it's more like "Spontaneously Generated in Translation." Enjoy! And remember - Civilization and Tourism are Together. You too can have a Peace and Harmonious Win-Win.

(*Yes, I mostly understood one entire episode of the Chinese equivalent of the Teletubbies, which, being even more surreal than the Western version, is worthy of an entire post in an of itself. You all may send me adoring notes of congratulations now.)

T is for Tommy Gun

Here at Slow Boat Central, three-fifths of us are now deep into the process of learning our Hanzi (Chinese characters). Xander is, of course, now in the first grade, which for Chinese students is the beginning of a six or seven year Long March to master a good portion of the ten to twenty thousand of the characters that are out there. This fall, Jane, in addition to teaching three classes, is also an official part-time student, studying Chinese for foreigners three days a week at a university on the west side of Chengdu. After a year of ignoring Chinese writing as much as possible, she's now biting the bullet and making Hanzi flashcards as well. (Me, I've been plugging away at them for the last year now - I'm kinda geeky that way.)

Of course, the Hanzi learning process bears very little resemblance to the "A is for Apple" routine that us Latinate alphabet users have to figure out in Kindergarten. The main difference, besides scale, is phonetics. While many Hanzi have phonetic elements built in, the main emphasis in the beginning is learning strokes and radicals, which are small symbols that you combine together to make more complicated characters.

The radicals usually, but not always, give you a clue to the meaning or pronunciation of the character in question, which leads to some strange juxtapositions in elementary textbooks. For example, what better way to learn the "ice" radical, pictured above, than to learn the words for cold drinks, sandals (literally, "cool shoes"), and ... tommy gun? Not the first image that I'd choose to educate my first grader, but then again, once you strip away the phonics, an alligator munching on an apple doesn't make much sense either.

Other strangely poetic combinations that I ran across:

• Tennis, hillock, dried meat floss
• Monster, fast-noodle, pocket watch
• Certificate of merit, cosmetic, general
• Guard, seal, measuring tape
• Casket, doctor, horse (my favorite, because the doctor looks so mean)
• Drawing, rope skipping, toilet paper
  

How do we create meaning in the world? One way, it seems, is by making connections between random objects, and then going on from there.