My Dad Has a Blog

My Dad is starting a blog, about art and magic. There aren't any articles on there yet but I'm sure it'll be interesting. Dad is a really good writer, painter and getting pretty good at magic too, so I'm sure it'll be interesting.

It's called The Tricks of Art and the Art of Tricks.

Earthquake, and the Three Bigs of Chinese Speaking Foreigners.

My earthquake story is kind of bland; I was lying on my bed waking up from an afternoon nap and then started getting that feeling like the room was spinning. “Weird,” I thought, “haven’t had anything to drink for 2 days”. Then I realized that the room was not spinning, but my building was swaying. Then I went down to get some lunch and noticed everyone was standing outside in the courtyard, and I heard everyone speaking about an earthquake.

There is something else I’d like to mention though. I was in the elevator the other day, and just before the doors close I hear the pattering sound of someone in a hurry. I press the ‘open door’ button and a haggard woman approaches pushing a bicycle, which despite my efforts still gets crushed by the closing doors as she enters.

“Which floor?” I ask.

“Oh, thank you, 28^th, thank you”

“It’s nothing”. There was a short pause here and I thought for a moment we’d just ride the elevator up like normal folk.

“Your Chinese is really good-“

“No, no-“ Really, I’m thinking, I’ve said all of four words, and she’s complimenting me?

“-you could be like Dashan if you stay in China a while. This is your talent.”

“No no no”

At this point I arrived, and most curiously of all she called out in an odd, mystic tone,

“Goodbye, baby!”

***********************

It’s been said lots elsewhere, and it’s true. Regardless of whether you speak a little or a lot of Chinese, get ready for the Dashan comparison. I went to Tianjin on the weekend, and on the train one of my mates made a good point.

“Chinese is so competitive man. Every new foreigner you meet, you rate their Chinese. It wouldn’t happen with Spanish or something, why Chinese?”

I reckon he has a very good point. People seem to bestow a massive amount of awesomeness on non-Chinese (especially non-Asian) Chinese-speakers. Now, I admit, I also admire people who have put in the large effort required to get good. But I actually don’t really admire Dashan, Daniu, or Zhulian that much*. That is, 大山 (big mountain)， 大牛 (big cow) and 朱力安， who for the consistency of this blog could be called 大朱(big red) or even 大猪 (big pig- homonym, you see). I don’t really admire them that much because I don’t think being a professional crosstalk performer is a particularly cool thing (I have had to perform a joke once for a competition; it was very painful). Ah, you say, but they’re smart, look at their ability to make witty jokes.

Look, Dave Chappelle is funny. And in Chinese, I think Stephen Chow is funny, as is the Chinese dub of GTO that I watch (those crazy Japanese). But Dashan merely has a few clever jokes, Daniu is just up himself and has perfected his 'audience gaze' (hard to explain but it's infuriating), and Dazhu is not really that funny nor witty- he just speaks with a flawless accent.

On the other hand, I have lots of respect for some guys who write their blogs in Chinese. Such as: Brendan O’Kane, Alaric, John, and so on. I think there's just something cooler or more authentic about writing essays than performing stand-up.

Oh, and if we include Kevin Rudd in the Bigs, then he’d be 大陆- the motherland.

*In my eyes, the three most famous Laowai in Beijing, though the last two are more recent additions.

Time, Flying

The new semester has started, and it's like last semester except slightly better with the computer class being replaced by a film/tv class (this is not as hard as it sounds, it's just watching films with a vocabulary list in front of you).

The worst is the Spoken Chinese class, as it's more of a Reciting Textbook class in actuality. This seems to be a method which is held in great esteem by my university, evidenced by the scores of students reciting their textbooks every morning in the campus gardens.

Fortunately we have some good classes, the Intensive Reading and Newspaper ones, where we talk about current events, and actually spend more time conversing than we do in the Spoken class.

The HSK is coming up next month, and as usual I'm refusing to do any specific preparation for it.
Perhaps it's laziness, but I just find the materials too boring to engage with for any useful length of time. I'd much rather just read Chinese books, magazines and newspapers, and watch films and tv shows.

We'll see how it goes. It's all flying by very fast.

Finding a New Blogspace?

I've been spending some of the university holidays here in Hong Kong, and it has been brilliant to get away from Beijing. The air quality here is so much better than Beijing- that's how bad the Beijing air is.

It's been a frustrating couple of months since I've been writing heaps but had no where to post it all. I might consider a new blog. We'll see.

But in any event, I've definitely come across lots of stuff which I hope to share at some stage in the near future.

Moving

Man, that trip was awesome. Going to be a struggle to describe it faithfully and justly.

Anyway, I did some experimenting there and Wordpress is, for now, unblocked in China. So I'll move this blog there, to coincide with my own move.

iBlog

iBlog is looking like a possible alternative to the dreaded MSN spaces. There seems to be a massive amount of Chinese blogs hosted there.

Anyway, had some follow up injections today (3 of them) and now I'm off to meet up with a friend to explain some of the more confusing lines of Chinese poetry I've come across.

Blogging from China

When writing a China blog, one is not only concerned with the title, but also which blog service to use.

I'm still in Australia now, so I've got a bit of time to figure this out.

The question is: which services are, shall we say, available in China? Blogger, Blog-City, Blogsome, Wordpress, LiveJournal and Xanga are apparently not too good in this regard.
Which leaves MSN Spaces- the truly horrid, baron wasteland of the blogging world.

Surely there must be a better option.