Chengdon't

Christmas here in China approaches!  Rosy-cheeked babies wrapped up in ten layers of clothing stagger along the street, the smell of roasting chestnuts hangs in the air and the Christmas decorations are up – actually, they’ve been up all year, old Mr. He in my local shop just couldn’t be bothered to take them down…

NOT old Mr. He

As a westerner in China, it’s easy to be sniffy about Christmas here.  Cynics point to the fact that the vast majority of the Chinese population are not practising Christians, so why are they celebrating the festival marking the birth of Christ?

However, if we’re going to be picky here, the vast majority of the British population are also not practising Christians and yet we still go gift-buying crazy in December.  And wasn’t there an enormous Spring Festival parade on the streets of London this year?

Fifteen or twenty years ago perhaps a Chinese Christmas would have been a somewhat muted affair – but not now.  In 21^st century Chengdu the festival seems to have been taken up with verve and enthusiasm – especially by a more international-savvy younger generation – and what they lack in the knowledge of Christmas traditions, they more than make up for in er, festive spirit…?

Christmas is generally celebrated here by singing Karaoke, going to concerts and generally partying it up.  A more extreme example of Chinese yuletide innovation is Chengdu’s famous (and now officially outlawed) Christmas bat wars: in recent years the city’s main shopping street and square on Christmas Eve has resembled part Mardi-Gras part full-scale riot, as beer-fuelled youngsters smash each other on the head with plastic inflatable bats for 2 hours.

Ho ho ho!

Not particularly in the conventional spirit of Christmas – at least I don’t recall the part in the nativity where one of the wise men attacks a Shepard with a blow-up Hello Kitty club.  Sadly a large p0lice presence somewhat restricted the revelry this year, but no doubt other, slightly less bizarre Chinese Christmas will arrive to take its place.

Whatever your view on Christmas in China, in this increasingly globalised world you have to accept it is very much here to stay.  So wherever and however you plan to celebrate your festive season, have a very mao-ry Christmas and a happy new year!

Good luck and good tasty, zaijian!

Number 2 – Cupboardy

A pyjama-clad man takes to the stage.  He matter-of-factly ties another man up and puts him carefully into a large bag.  He then proceeds to his second victim, tying him – complete with raincoat – face down to a table with a contact mic attached to his throat.  For his final act, he gaffer-tapes a girl, naked to a chair, putting black insulating tape over her mouth, eyes and, er, sensitive regions and places her in front of a stand microphone.

The latest pictures from Guantanamo Bay?  Previously unreleased footage from the dungeons of Abu Ghraib?  Nope, it was actually Shanghai’s 20^th monthly Noishanghai music festival, and the man on stage was Beijing sound artist Yan Jun, who was quite logically recording the sounds of torture, running it through his laptop and making sweet sweet music.

Torturing torturing nurse

Welcome to the world of Shanghai’s own Torturing Nurse – the subjects of Mr. Yan’s experiment.

The band is a contributor to Shanghai’s world of ‘noise art and performance’.  Founded by Shanghai locals Misuzu and Junkyy in April 2004, they have since masterminded over 20 releases and gained a cult following and reputation both at home and abroad.

They don’t tend to use laptops or music-making software, instead choosing only microphones, turntables, pedals and out of tune guitars, along with other more unorthodox methods of sound making – at a gig last year one of the members took to the stage playing the umbrella.

Their work has been described in the music press as “harsh noise saturated with hate and attempts to express oneself and destroy the usual idea of music”, and “noise that is so monotonous that it doesn’t seem to made by humans”.  Here is a modest example, and here is a slightly more extreme one.

The eponymous nurse

US avant-garde rockers Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore is reportedly a big fan of the band, having caught them on their recent tour of China.  Sadly the feeling is not reciprocated.  In a recent interview with SH Magazine, TN founding member Cao Jian Jun (Junkyy) responded to Moore’s praise by simply stating, “I don’t like him or his band. They are too rock’n'roll. I don’t care if he’s a fan. What we do is totally different. I don’t care if they like us”.

In the same interview Mr. Cao goes on to portray his music as ‘noise’ and ‘full of hatred’, talking about how his group don’t need musical instruments, “I’ve played a hammer in an abandoned factory before”.

Whatever you feel about TN and the world of noise art in general, you have to admit that fame hasn’t changed their path to the pursuit of noise.  It’s fair to say that this is probably one non-commercial band that won’t ‘sell out’ their fans by releasing a 12-minute ballad with the London Symphony Orchestra… Although that would be some collaboration!

So listen if you dare, and if you hate it, don’t feel bad – they couldn’t care less.

Until next time blogwatchers, good luck and good tasty, zaijian!

This would be mildly amusing if it wasn’t placed in our West Indian client’s bathroom…

National stereotypes, don’t you just love ‘em?  From the romantic, cheese-eating French to the brash, war-mongering Yanks, we all secretly love a good pigeonhole for our brothers and sisters from around the world to neatly fit into.

Perhaps it’s a good thing, but the oft-held European view of the binge-drinking, rosbif British has yet to hit these shores.  A lot of Chinese – especially when they first meet me – tend to land on the ‘English gentleman from the foggy city’ (most of the information on the British appears to be gleaned from school textbooks that don’t appear to have been updated since the Clean Air Act was passed).

Oxford Street yesterday?

In a slight aside, the literal Chinese translation for Oliver Twist comes out as ‘Foggy Capital Orphan’, which I think conveys so much more than a clumsy transliteration like ‘ow lee wa ter wiss ter’ ever could.  But I digress…

Apparently the Brits are also all loaded (one stereotype that is definitely misconceived!).  I’ve actually adopted a Polish alter ego for bargaining in shops because I find you get better prices that way.

All this begs the question – is there a uniform Chinese stereotype around the world?  Until fairly recently (at least in Britain anyway) we haven’t had much to build a good solid stereotype on, so we’ve drawn our inspiration from Chinese immigrants and films from Hong Kong, giving us an odd, slightly contradictory stereotype of studious, slightly nerdy high-kicking kung-fu masters.  But as the country opens up and it’s people have more dealings with the world, will this perception change?

One of the main stereotypes that may become obvious to the world is Chinese bluntness.  Although I feel it’s almost too simplistic to say blunt in the “a spade is a spade” kind of way that we perceive the word, it’s fair to say that the Chinese are more straight-talking than the average Brit in areas such as physical appearance and personal finances.

Lydia was one of my favourite students when I taught at Beijing Number 12 School a couple of years ago.  Every lesson she was delighted to see me, every question I asked her hand was up and after every class she had queries for me about the vagaries of the English language.  Towards the end of my tenure I set the class some writing to do, and was wandering around rather aimlessly when I saw Lydia had her hand raised:

“Mr. Herbert, can I ask you a personal question?”

“Of course”, I replied with a slight sense of unease.

“Can I ask, why have you become so fat recently?  Is it because Chinese food is so delicious?”

There are also regional variations within China that almost the entire population (including some of those stereotyped!) agree on.  Beijingers are snobs, Shanghainese only care about money, Chengduers are more ‘relaxed’ (for relaxed read lazy), while Chongqingers are hot-tempered due to the fact they eat so much spicy food.  It seems odd that people try and stereotype a nation of 1.3 billion; it makes more sense for  people to look for similarities in their compatriots rather than differences.

Right – long post!  I’ll sign off now.  Watch out for the new ‘photo of the week’ coming soon, and until next time blogwatchers, good luck and good tasty.  Zaijian!

To push, or not to push: that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

A 4-foot grandmother to jump the queue in the supermarket

Or to take arms against a sea of queue-jumpers,

And by opposing, confuse them? To squat: to spit;

No more; and by a spit to say we end

The head-ache of a thousand different vehicles in the street

All trying to run you over

It’s not something I wish’d to see. To squat, to sleep;

To sleep: perchance to be woken by thy neighbour doing DIY at 7:30 on a Sunday morning:

ay, that’s annoying;

For in the sleep of a shop assistant after lunch, what dreams may come?

When we want to buy something in the shop,

We must pause and go to pay at another counter: before we collect our purchases

There’s the respect;

For who would bear the whoops and “harrow”s of men on the street,

With rolled-up t-shirts, smoking and eating lamb kebabs

The pangs of smelly tofu, the smell of baijiu,

The insolence of staff who turn up an hour late.

That patient merit of the mother takes,

When she herself her baby makes

With a bare bodkin? Dangle over a drain,

To whistle and sing to encourage the baby to urinate,

But then the dread of something after that…,

The just discover’d country from whose bourn

Like to question travellers, puzzle their will

And ask them about their personal finances and marital status

Even though they know them not?

Thus politeness does make cowards of us all;

And thus we eat the pigs trotters given to us at the banquet

And drink the sickly baijiu

And regret it for 3 days.

With this regard some cowards turn away,

Leave this country and lose the name of laowai.

Soft you now!  The fair Ophelia!

Nymph, why are you carrying an umbrella when it’s sunny?

And wearing outrageous hot-pants…

Office work in China is rarely dull.  There are French lessons, films and football highlights blaring out at top volume from colleague’s computers, roars of approval or indignation when the box meal man comes with lunch (at 11:30am), and of course the shouting, singing and exercising that seem to be part of the working culture here.

However, Monday raised the bar on office-based entertainment in my short career here.  Around 3 o’clock in the afternoon two fresh-faced young chaps came marching into the office unannounced and demanded an interview.  As the company is currently looking for sales staff we decided to give them a crack, and three of us (one English, one Spanish and one Chinese) trouped into the meeting room to pose our questions.

First up was a nervous young man dressed in an all-beige suit and trainers, who kept digging his little finger into his ear and squinting.

The heat is on...

I’ve had to abbreviate the conversation a little, but I think you’ll get the general idea:

Q. “So, [looks at application form], Himalaya… er… why did you choose that as your English name?”
A. “I choose it today.  It is a very tall name”.
Q. “Ok… If I asked your friends to describe you, what do you think they would say?”
A.  “Frank”.
Q.  “Er… you mean you’re honest?”
A.  “Yes.  A very good man”.
Q.  “And how about one weakness you feel you have in your personality?”
A.  [Himalaya turns to our Chinese colleague, and in Chinese says something along the lines of]… “I don’t like obeying company rules, like coming to work on time”.
Q.  “Right… moving on, what experience do you have in sales?”
A.  “I sell women’s clothes on internet”.
Q.  [long, long silence] “Could you expand on that?”
A.  “On tao bao” [Chinese internet auction site similar to ebay].  “E-commerce”.

We wrapped it up with Mr. Himalaya shortly after that bombshell and moved on to his friend, who was also a sight to behold, dressed in an all white shell-suit with the longest, dirtiest fingernails I’d ever seen:

Q.  “Good afternoon um…”
A.  [shouting] “Mike Dale!”
Q.  “That’s two names – your surname is Dale?”
A.  “Yes, like Dale computers”.
Q.  “Ah.  I think you mean Dell.  D-E-L-L”
A.  “Yes-yes-yes”.

Q.  “Uh-huh.  Onto some slightly more tricky questions, if I asked your friends to describe your personality, what do you think they would say?”
A.  [At this point Mike Dale begins to unzip his jacket and look inside his t-shirt].  “white shirt, white pants…” [Chinese colleague cracks, puts her head between her knees and begins to laugh hysterically.  Spanish colleague ejects her from the room]
Q.  “I’m really sorry about that.  Do you think you could describe your perfect manager for me?”
A.  “A boss who loves his assistant – a lot”
[Spanish colleague loses it, and begins to silently sob on the desk]
Q.  “Ahh… your role would be in sales, so for your final answer I need you to convince me that you are the right person for this job – sell yourself”
A.  “Frankly speaking, there is no reason why you should hire me, because my oral English is very poor, but if you wait three months then it will be better.  I like computers”.

That about concluded the interviews.  I guess in a way it was quite refreshing to have people speak their mind in an interview situation.  I’ve conducted interviews in Britain where people have been so coached that they have absolutely nothing of interest to say.  However, I do feel for Himalaya, Mike Dale and the hundreds of thousands of recent graduates in China who are trying their luck with Western companies, and haven’t got the first clue about how to conduct themselves in the pressure-cooker environment of an interview.
I do wish Himalaya and Mike Dale the very best of luck with their job hunt, and to the rest of you blogwatchers out there, good luck and also good tasty.  Zaijian!