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GRARGRARFUCKEMHARD

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I have this theory. Basically it's this: foreigners in China, excepting those with their own businesses, hired abroad for fairly difficult jobs at foreign firms, or who are just insanely good negotiators, will generally top out their earnings at 20,000 a month. Ask around - this seems to be the number above which people a) stop telling you their salary, and b) don't get raises above at Chinese-owned companies. Yes, yes, confirmation bias, I know this reeks of it, but go ahead. Ask around. I think you'll find it's true.

The exceptions to that rule that I know all have something that is very marketable. One guy I know is a Businessman through and through, and he's got money to burn impressing people. Gold watch, gray hair, beer gut, and a game so slick he'll have you convinced you don't even need money. He blows thousands in RMB a night to impress people and make deals. Another walked straight out of the dot-com bubble and into Chinese startups, where he gets $10-$20,000 (dollars) a month when he's not even trying hard. Dude's a genius. There are also your film agents and importers/exporters, who, from what I can tell, got what they have through knowing the right people. There's another guy who makes quite a good chunk of cash managing the school his uncle set up.

So there it is, hackneyed and unscientific as it is. I am of the firm opinion that if you come to China with only your good name and a capable mind to boast of, 20,000 RMB a month is the upper bound to the rewards for your hard work. Even if you know Chinese.

It's not like that's a disrespectable number. My calculator says that's $2941.17, which, (usually) tax-free, puts you at about $36,000 a year, and well over $100,000 in three years, if you can keep it up. If you're willing to live simply (not in dire poverty, just, y'know, not like Hugh Heffner), you can bank 90% of that. Say you're 21 and you've just graduated and you teach English for 3 years, that's a nice kitty (assuming you can get it out of China, which is a whole different topic and involves some illegal things that I don't really approve of). That amount, however, will not buy you a house, will not buy you a business, and might just maybe pay for grad school if you're careful with it.

Just something to think about.

"That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place."

- From

To me, it reads true for China. Very, very true. This is an incredibly broad brush to paint with, but it seems to me that the China of today is one that's still coping with the collapse of the imperial order. The Nationalist government was an abolition of the forms of power of the old society, and the Communist government was an abolition of the cultural power of the old society, with the Cultural Revolution the height of it. The old order is smashed, the pieces are being ground to dust underfoot, and society is trying to replace what it's lost, which will take decades, if not centuries to do. Not that this is a bad thing - the old culture wasn't the nicest place to live. But more than any other characterization of China (if any such thing is possible), that's the one that clicks for me. Things are changing, fast, but not as fast as unsuccessful coping mechanisms are being rescinded.

This blog is part of a vast conspiracy to discredit Obama.

20,000 characters of the worst kinds of hell Chinese can throw at a translator. We're talking classical and resume and gushing opining about nothing and Hollywood and lists and lists of who visited who.

2 days.

Done and delivered on time, with no spelling mistakes.

I clicked send, put the laptop down, collapsed on the couch, and slept for 12 hours straight on the most uncomfortable couch in the world. Then I woke up, changed my stinky clothes, and I'm about to slaughter these leftovers wife has heated.

I do not remember how real food tastes. I do not remember having the time to savor the scent of coffee in the morning. I do not remember what it's like to have my phone on, and have people calling me. I do not remember the sun.

It feels like I'm back from the dead. It feels good.

I don't like the way it's translated. Rites, civility, propriety, code of honor, ritual, politeness, rightness (yeah, I've seen that), ethics, morality...I mean, pick one. But you can't, because, y'know, none of them are really accepted definitions. Nor do I like that crappy loanwordy translation where they're all "Dude's guan strap gets cut so he un-mianed his guan and died a junzi." I'm sure he did. The fact that it's LI! doesn't help me understand why it wants me to be nice to my neighbors and sacrifice a goat and bow at my boss's door and pay for my parents' retirement.

Point is, li isn't mysterious, it's not incomprehensible to Western audiences, and it's not a nebulous gloss of "propriety" or "civility" either. In its most well-known form, the one Confucius kept blabbering about, I kept wondering why this guy kept invoking this thing over and over. Why should you do what I says? 'Cause look, 礼, see? It was his answer to pretty much every question, and he only expounded on some of them. The rest of the time I kept imagining him like Leroy Brown, with that diamond ring he liked to wear on everybody's nose. Confucius's ring had 礼 reverse inlaid in big sparkly pimp diamonds, and he would just plant that sucker right in your face if he got any backtalk. A dude's friends would find him unconscious in the bushes smelling of urine, with a big red 礼-shaped welt on his forehead. "He must have asked Confucius too many questions."

Then I figured it out. The 礼 Confucius liked to talk about was actually a book, the 周礼 (Rites of Zhou). It takes a little context to figure this out if you don't know (if you do, c'mon, just read along, I'll try to make it fun), that being that in the Spring & Autumn and Warring States periods, all those little countries you see on the map of China were actually one country. 3000 years ago, the Zhou family kicked ass all across the Yellow River plains, laying down the law and Civilizing the Fuck out of Barbarians, which, in the parlance of the day, was pretty much anybody they didn't like. Once you were conquered, well, it was Borg time. You're in this empire, you're playing by their rules. And just in case you were confused, they published a handy guide for how to be a citizen of their empire and avoid getting your ass kicked. It was called...dun dun dun, the Rites of Zhou. People read the book, did what it said, and after 300 years of that, the whole empire was pretty much assimilated into the Zhou culture.

Once the first few kings of their family line had conquered more than they could really handle, the kids settled in and lived the good life of kings. They built up a court and aristocracy and armies and luxury goods and a script and all that good stuff. But, after 300 years, the 12th king of the line was a spoiled brat who liked to pretend the capital was getting attacked so he could get a laugh out of his concubine, who has gone down in history as a humorless, manipulating bitch. She would laugh at the army showing up and looking all confused. Well...one day the capital, which was located just west of Mongolia, where there be nomad hordes, was indeed attacked. King sounds the alarm...and nobody shows up. Now the king's dead, the queen's captured, and there's nobody in charge. The king's son was installed by a few nobles in a new capital far to the east, who then proceeded to rule in his stead. Other nobles didn't like that, claimed that they were the ones truly loyal to the king, and then there were 400 more years of that same crap, everybody fighting over who was the Zhou emperor's BFF, while the Zhou king sat on his throne and sulked because nobody listened to him anymore. That would be your Spring & Autumn and Warring States periods.

That ended when Qin Shihuang had had enough of this shit and killed everybody who even looked at him funny. But in the intervening years, the Zhou had this book, but the king didn't have the power to enforce his own interpretation of it. Now, it was a good book, kind of like the Boy Scout manual. There were lots of specific rules in there, what to sacrifice, how to walk, where to bow, to whom and how to bow, who was in charge of who, who owed who how much of what, and there were other parts about how to be a good citizen, and a good person in general. It covered a lot of territory. The Zhou were your typical late-Bronze Age/early-Iron Age civilization, and they had some interesting stuff to say, but they also, like many other powerful governments of the time and later, held their founding documents close to their chest and brooked no alternative interpretations. If the king says this is what the book means, then that's it. And when the Zhou Civilized the Barbarians, they Civilized them hard. That book became the law of the land. You did not fuck with the Rites. It was the paradigm of legitimacy under the Zhou, and even after Zhou power collapsed, the paradigm and claims to legitimacy using that paradigm provided remained.

For 400+ years, scholars and nobles alike weren't just using vague claims of principle to argue their right to power/accuracy/whatever, they were actually invoking a very specific set of instructions left by a still-living dynasty that had saturated the empire with their own traditions. The edifice of Zhou power rested on a huge, detailed handbook of etiquette and strictly defined behaviors that they themselves created and imposed, and they did a good job of making people listen. Even when they lost political power, the microstates and independent feifdoms that emerged to fill the vacuum of power used that same political framework to legitimize themselves. Scholars were brought up in the same intellectual tradition, and since they were all scrabbling to be heard by the nobles in charge of this or that patch of territory at the time, had to argue within the same framework even if they didn't agree with it if they wanted their work read.

That's why 礼 is so ubiquitous in the period writings. Scholars may have had their own interpretation of it, but The Rites were laid out right there in The Book, and you had to start from that framework if you wanted your ideas to enter mainstream political discourse.

Of course, with all that decentralized political power and the ease of migration between states, scholars were relatively free to write anything they wanted, and the record shows they pretty much did. Nobody was around to flay them alive and enslave their daughters for departing from the Zhou family's interpretation of acceptability, so 礼 got contorted into all sorts of new shapes and ideas. The Rites covered a lot of territory, most of it not particularly odious for the time, and it wasn't difficult to simply say that most of the Rites were correct, it's just this one part we should fix. That process compounded over time, and more and more ideas were justified by saying X's interpretation of Y's interpretation of Z's commentary on Za's interpretation of 礼 is correct, except for this one part that we should fix.

Later regimes with centralized power then, of course, glommed onto the philosophies that emerged from this era, and tweaked interpretations of interpretations even further, and this time with the weapons and reach to back up their versions, and more importantly for us, keep the framework alive.

That's why it's hard to translate. If it were up to me, I'd just call it "The Rites (of Zhou)", capital R, and it would just be this neat little package that we wouldn't have to mine thesauruses to translate. It's The Rites. They come from The Book, and subsequent debates within the framework for legitimacy that The Book created. It's probably a good thing it's not up to me though, because my version of scholarly research is wikipedia and my version of peer review is livejournal, where I have editorial control over comments and sock puppets to mention how handsome I am in addition to how right I am.

Plus, I'd be tempted to do stuff like "Confucius say: 礼 dictates that you will relinquish your females and tacos and gold to dorkboysayswhat" and "礼 dictates that you will extend your translation deadline for as long as it takes dorkboysayswhat to type on his livejournals".

It's a proven fact that human carbon emissions aren't comparable in scale or impact to that of natural factors, such as volcanoes. Therefore, I will be eating red meat, turning the air conditioner up to full, and starting coal-and-dung fires for the happy, giddy thrill of it. I'll still come out carbon neutral.

Why? Because I make sacrifices of incense and bulls to Vulcan, and we're talking about some eruptions that can be deferred a few thousand years. Sponsor your own volcano deity today!

the unwashed proles? seriously? social darwinism, white man's burden, eugenics, man, you've got it all. good thing your chinese is so freaking sweet you can read a book when all the "plebian masses" get sick of listening to you.

okay. that was mean. and i do think you're making a good point in here somewhere. as someone more eloquent than me said:
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/you-dont-have-a-foreign-language-problem-you-have-an-adult-literacy-problem

it frustrates the hell out of me, too, when people say, "oh, i'm not learning the characters, they're too hard, and i can talk to people just fine without them." they are hard, but that's no excuse to stay illiterate and expect the people who did learn the characters to have sympathy for you when you can't read a menu or find your way on a subway map.

more often than not, though, the part of me that gets pissed off at those people is the same part of me that gets pissed off at MYSELF for not be able to keep up with a conversation that goes over my head or running into a character that i know i've seen a million times and can't quite place it or a chengyu that i can't make heads or tails of. there is no need to put other people down to make ourselves feel better. because they only bug us because they ARE us, however many years of dictionaries and flashcards earlier.

-nick

That last entry of mine really seems to have hit a nerve, and it's best expressed by this comment. I guess I've always had to answer this question one way or another, so here goes.

"How did your Chinese get so good?" Locals and expats alike feel the need to inquire about this several times a day, even as my Chinese is nothing I feel like I have any qualification to wave around and club other people with. The trigger for my last post was an unsolicited message on my long-warehoused OKcupid account where I posted a snarky dogwhistle-type screed in my profile in Chinese, and a less-so one in English. I got a message from yet another college student in the States who was all "OMG you learned Chinese I'm so jealous". I answered as nicely as I could, with a "Yeah, kind of, but it's never something you're done with, so don't get all idol-worshippy, I'm always down to hang if you make it over." (For the record, yes my profile says in big loud letters that I'm married and mean it).

But I sent it, and then I looked at it, and then I squinted at it, and then The Rage came upon me. GRARGRARLAOWAI and I let The Rage loose upon an unsuspecting internet, and I guess I should have expected what came next. But the thing is, people ask me that question, and they don't know about The Rage. They don't know how crucial it is to my language-learning process, and what lessons they should take away from that. It's not something I can explain in 5 minutes in a bar. I can say read a book, I can say the key to remembering vocabulary is forgetting and remembering, I can say it takes patience and determination and you've gotta get yourself in that headspace...but it's the rare man who actually listens. You can find all that crap anywhere in the CFL sphere, on blogs and advice sites and forums. Nobody needs that advice from me.

Don't be all looking at me like I'm James Frey, yo. The Rage is my secret, and it's intensely personal, and it's hard to generalize from it lessons and advice that you can take home and use. 99% of it is about me and my personality. And the 1% of it that you can use is a real long fucking roundabout. But now that I've posted it, I do owe an explanation in language that doesn't expect you to be inside my frame of reference.

First, the register I wrote that post in was put there partly because I'm frustrated with the EFL and CFL and foreign language studies all over the world. When you open your textbook and learn Chinese, Yuehan goes to the supermarket and comes home where Xiao Hong cooks dinner. And then they go to the museum and Tiananmen. The article linked in the comment above does a good job of expounding on how I feel about that:

How much of those frustrations have to do with language proficiency, and how much have to do with something else?

And alright, let's say you're not afflicted by the crazy. Let's say you're perfectly good and sane and aren't having an identity or confidence crisis (however small) because you're frustrated with trying to reach out and communicate across the cultural gap. The same principles still apply:
good thing your chinese is so freaking sweet you can read a book when all the "plebian masses" get sick of listening to you.

How'd you know? They do get sick of listening to me. My wife, however, seems not to. Then again, she's the woman who was wandering around with me the other night (remember she won't touch anything unhealthy, no alcohol, no caffeine, no drugs of any kind), asking strangers if they wanted any of Aunt Flo's Sprite. If you don't want to talk about the kind of communication dynamics that fudge up 2L acquisition, the communication dynamics that make that funny to her (and me) are just as interesting.

Personally, I'd call it a frame of reference issue. And I'd wager that whatever your reaction to that might be, it's not boredom (well, ok, you had to be there). It's the kind of intimate, ingroup-affirming communication that friendships and relationships are built on. The larger your frame of reference, the more capable you are of forming those connections. So how do you expand your frame of reference to things outside of language proficiency in such a way that they're helpful to you in communicating across cultures, or subcultures, or whatever in-groups you aren't a member of yet?

Well, for me, it was The Rage. Really. I have no secret to learning a language. Instead, I have...anger issues. We need not go into the details of how I got them, but suffice it to say I got them early and got them alongside a pleasure in details. And that makes me: a snob. I am the hate camel, and I hate with an attenuation impenetrable to the average angermonger. I hate tech house, I hate Ben Gibbard, I love garbage house, I love American Analog Set. I hate fish on the bone and will not eat it, but gimme that tuna. I don't share a lot of love for The Onion, but I love McSweeney's like nobody's business. xkcd is passe, achewood is timeless. I am compelled, I am driven, I am addicted, I must analyze and separate and compartmentalize and then, ever so gingerly, turn my nose up. Obviously that didn't earn me many friends, but it did leave me with a stronger sense of self and a deeper connection to my culture. I cling to my sarcasm and my classification systems in English - to survive as I was in China, I had to learn to do the same. I came into China with linguistic goals entirely different from most. My goalpost was (silly, I know) to criticize, to be smarmy, to be a cultural critic the likes of which they'd never seen.

And that's it. That's my secret. An immature desire to be better-than-thou, even if I had to do it in a 2nd language. Referring back to my own culture doesn't work. Europe tried that in the colonial era...and it didn't work. They came out looking like asses and rightfully so, what with all that racial typology and bullcrap about civilizing other cultures. So that's right out. No, I was out for pwnage and lulz, pure and simple. Pwn the world.

Well...I didn't really manage to do it. But I did learn a lot in the attempt. And in my attempts to pwn China, I learned that the dynamics of their own culture are just as varied and complex as my own, and that I had to get up to speed if I was going to even come close. The ways of the pwn are myriad and profound, and they deserved study. But the rules governing the pwn are the same that govern all human interactions, and they are, as the reams of ineffectual eloquence on the internet prove, not limited to language proficiency. And that's why I knew, when I preened a joke for 3 hours and it fell flat, that it was probably not the joke. It was the frame of reference that needed fixing, not my grammar.

So. The takeaway from all that is that if you want to really learn a language to the point where you can use it effectively, for pwning and other purposes, you have to get inside the heads of people who speak it. Then, and only then, can you circumvent the culture gap. Until you do, your interactions are limited not only by how well you speak the language, but by how well you can engage your listener's frame of reference. Communication suffers when you can't. Books...are generally the easiest way to do that. Once you've had a conversation about all the kinds of 韭菜 there are with the lady who makes your dumplings, what do you have in common? Shared humanity? Please. You and 6 billion other people. I'm sorry, but it gets boring after awhile. Shared humanity is a good start, but it only gets you so far.

So what's to be done? Books are probably the easiest solution. Seeing as you're learning Chinese and are in China...

was my point.

This blog hasn't seen as much action as that post got in YEARS. I thought I was shouting into a void here. Thanks for reading, even if I pissed you off and you won't be back...

Right, so, a few comments on the, in truth, rather offensive tone, and more on that in a second, but first, a public apology for the Down Syndrome analogies. That was over the line. I'm a white guy in China who gets his lulz from brooking the inappropriate. By god but is that a fine line to walk. You don't have to stay classy, but you do have to not be an outright dick. You have to dodge colonialist and sexist and classist and religionist and racist and agist and any other number of things while still keeping your offensive wit sharp. That's part of the fun and challenge of it. Down Syndrome isn't even a place you should go. It was low and my standards have been lax lately. I'll blame Encyclopedia Dramatica (I was drunk and had been reading that site for a good 8 hours before I posted my snarly entry), but I also won't because I know why "'tardlulz" work there but not here. It's inappropriate because, at least here, targeted humor is what works, not broad swipes. They've got a whole website devoted to pissing people off, and building layered in-jokes, I don't. Even then, they make a good number of people angry. It's not humor that takes all comers, but I will say that, under the right conditions, I think there's a place for it. That place isn't here. I'm sorry.

It's also worth saying that I've worked with people with Down's Syndrome both in and out of China and made friendships I'll always treasure (http://www.blackpeopleloveus.com/ I know how weak this is, is what I'm saying). They're people with a disease is all. I know cancer patients and deaf people too...no different. So keep that in mind if you laughed. "They" are people with problems, just like you. Who knows, maybe you're afraid of water or heights. Maybe you can't talk about your feelings or have anger issues. We're all hobbled to some degree, and it's not always something we can help. The line between friendly jabs and dickish cruelty is when you mock something that the other person is incapable of laughing off. I crossed that line, and now I'm apologizing. I hope you'll accept it.

Do we want a more substantial update about ME??????????

Yes we do! Yes everyone do!

Ok. Since, um, what, I've been married to Yoga Teacher (look back). V, for record, has also married and made reproductions. I mean god damn had a baby. And I don't know why she did that, because the pre-child life for her, with the drugs and such, was enough, but now...there's a baby added to the mix. NOTHING REALLY CHANGED. Thank god it ended and all that.

So right, I'm married to Yoga Teacher. Existentially speaking, things go well, because she's, well, rich-ish. The -ish means that even if her parents die and stop making them incomz (look, I've been suffering from an overdose of encyclopedia dramatica, and I don't need your judgmentz, trust me though, I can write like a human being, I just need awhile to stop being so g1ddy from it allz (I do it to annoy you)), I'm set like a football star, but it's not like I'm bleeding cash. Her parents like me and were all, "Anything you need, we got you." But I've seen the bank balances, and with those bank balances, yes I won't starve, no I don't need E and hookers in Thailand.

So, I still have a job. Because, y'know, even though 4 properties around Beijing isn't so bad, should I ever, in fact, need E and hookers in Thailand, that's on me. So I'm still working the translation gig. Check this resume yo: 宁浩，谢晓东，薛晓璐，郑重，王坪，胡玫 - those ohsosexywhyNickwhy names are a list of the directors I have transnatored the fuck out of in 2009. You can look them up, you can see what's up with what, on the mighty of searches, googdu. That's a neopolitism from me, your host, me. Dude, it was awesome. I know so many directors now. And I'm totally hooked up in the movie translation biz for future profits.

The question on your mind, because it's the question on the mind of everyone who talks to anyone in China, is do you teach English and how is it. Yes in fact I do, I know I foreswore it in such an entry as this but, that was a year and a half ago, and the money is too easy not to take. I currently tutor (as in it's just me and who singular) a corporate consultant who kicks ass on investigating stuffs, a college grad whose mom produces movies and is my neighbor, a dog food executive who lived in Ireland, an insurance adjuster for BMW, a meedja exec, a talent agent in, surprise, movies, a Baidu legal exec, some random chick who seems determined not to learn, and some 60-year old chick who owns a sugar company who goes to India all the time. I tutor them and make teh profits while I also translate for real estate, books, and movies. Look, the English money is silly. They pay me for conversing. I can't not. But no classes, no way no classes. If I teach a class, get me out of there, because I don't belong in such for the damage I'll do.

What else. Bro is here, I said so in forever ago, and he's still doin' what he do. He's a sick, and when I say sick I don't mean the insurable type, DJ, and will rock your socks, shoes, and other, higher-placed garments off, because it's sexy sexy music. Dude is awesome. Wife...now what does she do. Not a Yoga Teacher anymore, but the effects still show. She's not gainfully employed, but she advises others on health matters and continues to assist in interior design matters (which she studied in college) and generally does Good in the world.

I got my people. I'm very health-oriented now, thanks to wife-naggage. Rui (that's her name, I can reveal that) has a patent on this. She is advanced, and will teach you to nag your husband for a fee. But, thanks to her, I feel way more...well, y'know what comes with the physical activity of sorts. I'm more awake, more aware, less achey. Seriously, start exercising, you dirty unwashed. And wash yourselves. It's not like it's hard.

I still smoke, though much less, and still drink, like I'm drinking right now. But, dammit, life's good, I'm good, and things are good. I have switched from a 15" monitor for my desktop to...duhn duhn duhn, a 32" TV. Get DVI for that. It's better. Also, get freenas (google such). You'll thank me. You rent movie, you copy movie, you have movie.

I know some crazy Python. And CSS. I will design the fuck out of your website. You won't even know. Get in touch.

Wanna know why? Of course you do, you LJ drama queens. I just got asked, for the gazillionth fucking time, how I got so good at Chinese.

Oh shut up. Books. I read. I have books. I read them. The books tell me things, and they just happen to tell me things that I'd never hear on the street, talking to the unwashed proles most foreigners strain to pat themselves on the back for being so able to hold a conversation with.

Look, no offense to the Chinese, who are some of my favoritest bestest friends ever, but man, most of them are just stupid. Not objectively, not mother dropped me at birth, not even compared to other cultures or anything. They're stupid compared to the smartest 20% of them.

You know what it's about. You've lived in or heard about the redneck masses in the US who use "gay" as awesome's antonym, who argue about whether Chevy or Ford makes a better truck, who haven't even heard of Pi, let alone could tell you whether they like it or not. The people who wear promise rings and Nike sweatshirts and Wrangler's and have a singing bass (the fish, idiot) in their living room. The people who talk about their fucking cats and only see the Eiffel Tower and Mona Lisa when they visit Paris. The people whose kids fuck off to Tijuana and laugh at Carlos Mencia and Dane Cook and get MBA's if they're lucky and drive uninsured Priuses because they want to get smarmy about it but who wouldn't touch a Metro if you paid them. They watch Fox, MSNBC if they're enlightened. They listen to everything but rap and OMG isn't "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy" like so ironically funny? Those people fucking suck. And most of the people you meet in China? They suck just as hard. They're nice enough people, but they're douchebags who can't hold an interesting conversation on more than a few topics for more than a few seconds. They're obnoxious breeders who, aside from the fact that they sell you dinner or fix your bike, you wouldn't even think about talking to, and you sure as shit wouldn't sit there kvetching at them about the weather for an hour unless your Sinotard glasses didn't make them look so rosy and profound, with all their deep authentic realchina knowledge of the language you're studying.

They're decent people. And this car I'm trying to sell you has not only brakes, but headlights! And a trunk! And radial tires that keep more contact surface on the road, even when the road is coated with the greasy slime of your standards!

Nobody but fucking nobody learning Chinese tries to pick up a book and read it. THERE ARE SO MANY OF CHARACTERS I HAVE NOT MEMORIES TO HOLD THEMS. Then fuck off and learn a language with a latin alphabet and cognates so you don't have to look at the funny pictures. I MUST READ THIS TEXTBOOK AND I WILL LEARN TO READ TEH MENU!! Just like my 10-year old neighbor! And she doesn't need a dictionary, fuckstick! I CAN CHATTING ON THE QQ TO LEARNING SO MANY KNOWLEDGES AND CURRENT SLANGSES TO IMPRESS LADIES. Y'ever read youtube comments? That's your ambition? To reach the same level in Chinese as a youtube commenter? And I'm sure you had a great conversation with the taxi driver about how you're used to China and how white women actually aren't easier. Congratulations. You are now a puerile twat who can objectify women.

And then people complain when their wives are Hello Kitty freaks/Chinese guys have no serious interest in them, and Chinese people don't take them seriously. Well what the fuck did you expect with those sources? You have, in the immortal words of Jim Lahey, taken a ride on the shitcoaster. You are one of the plebian masses who, in the US, you would avoid like the plague. And the interesting Chinese people? The ones who'll discuss ancient ship hull designs and how they clash with Jared Diamond's (yes, he's been translated, and people have been reading, were you aware) theories on cultural dominance, the ones who will laugh at your jokes about Chinese parents throwing chairs down the stairs to name their children, the ones who think Bob Marley needs to shut the fuck up because Elephant Man and Burning Spear are so much better, they will ignore you. They hate you and your hick ass.

You know why? Because unlike the 80% who at least speak the language at birth, you have started from zero. You don't even get the most basic of cultural references, or if you do, they're more played out than the grass mud horse. They were interested in English teachers and had "foreign friends" 7 years ago. They're through with that shit, they've been to NLGX, Lonely (China, which you know was added by their USian managers DON'T YOU) Day was cool when they came out, but Le Fly Pan Am did it better. On to bigger and better fish.

Just like you, you bad bad man, right? Your indie-peen could topple the Sears Tower, what with how you memorized Them songs in high school and know how a Virus With Two Shoes got their name. You read The Game and were all, "Yeah, PUA shit was cool when I was 14, but I ain't readin' none bitches palms." You were like Slumdog Millionaire? Nah dawg, Ashoka. You read World War Z and it's still so cash because it's so cash (do you like to drink my Pabst). Yeah. You're the shit. You're way beyond all that fuckoff Fox News Republibullshit and you might have a dog but you talk about how its nuts are dirty rather than how cute it is. Because you rule. Oh yeah, and you have a Wii.

But dude, you do the opposite of that in Chinese, even if you can throw down in the hutongs. Even if you're an erhu hero. Even if you're Da my-wang-awaits-your-tender-dictionary-selling-lips Shan, unless you make like unless you make like a mill and get them pulps. I do NOT mean no fuckoff textbooks. I mean 无土时代, I mean 中国凭什么不高兴, I mean 诺名信, I mean Edward Said's last book, whatever the fuck that was, in Chinese.

Now, I'm not trying to brag. I struggled through them just like I hope you will with a dictionary and notebook and it took me 3 months to finish the first one. But fuck you in your I-can-drink-straight-koubei face, you are just a parlor trick monkey if you can't talk about what was in those or other volumes. You may have read the translation of Anna Baby, but that is not Xing good enough! You are still, by dint of your ride on the shitcoaster, a dirty breeder pleb to the Chinese people who share your voluminous indie-peens and could actually have a conversation that wouldn't bore the flying fuck out of you if you weren't having it in Chinese.

Did you get that? You bore the fuck out of Chinese people, you white/black/Mideastern/Hispanic/AZN dooch. You are 无聊到家. You are on the wrong side of the Pareto principle. Because there are 280,000 books published here every god damn planetary circumnavigation, and your shit be's out of that club. Suplise, every single Chinese person you know is in that club, and they get more out of one day in it than they do from 50 days of conversing with a, face it, illiterate retard like yourself. That's why you get the polite refutations and history lessons and patronizing smiles and why everyone is suddenly busy once you get too drunk.

Look, if you don't read some, um, books, you're functionally illiterate. That makes you as interesting as a non-reader. You got jack shit to add. Unless you meet someone overbearing with a didactic streak, your conversations are going to be stale of anything relevant to your audience. So man up and Levar Burton, or shut up and accept that in China, your furriner ass is, at best, still, about 8 years old mentally. That's what you are unless you can read. You will fuck people that will date an 8-year old, you will have engaging conversation with people who will have engaging conversations with a 8-year old, and you, well...yeah. Shut up, you, and open a fucking book.

Jen Kwok - Date an Asian
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pG9vYZmoqmg

知无方有大用，无为方无不为。天下莫弱于水，而攻坚者莫之能胜。上善若水啊！
Sit on your ass. Hard work pays off tomorrow, laziness pays off right now. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.

先生微言大义，吾道一以贯之。先生的道是大象无形，超然物外，不限于世间……而我的道则在人间。
You're like a dull knife that just ain't cuttin' it, just talkin' loud and sayin' nothin'. I'm trying to have a system here. Jive talkin' got nothing to do with anybody anywhere. I'm a people person.

那就不要在意天下人的误解吧。富者赠人以金子，我没有金子，就赠你这几句话吧！
Sticks and stones is your MO then, bro. If I was a sculptor, but then again, no...Or a man who makes potions in a travelling show, I know it's not much but it's the best I can do, My gift is my song and this one's for you

"Battle of Cliches", an exercise in free association translation, by me.

Source material, Confucius and Laotzu. Douchebags.

and I know you do. If your question is, "Will you have this next payday?" I think you know what the answer is. Somehow, I just think you do.

I just totally rode my bicycle from Guomao all the way home. It's about 11 km, which google says is 6.8 miles, and red lights included at rush hour, dude, I rolled that shit in 24 minules. I was all pulling past electric bikes, dude. Fuckin' sweet.

If I do this for like a month, everybody who comes to this journal will think I rule, and won't realize that I was a total loser in 2007.

I own a house that I live in. This house has three bathrooms and two occupants. And the other occupant, my wife, is manic about her desire to use only the one in the master bedroom. So I have to cover the other two in addition to wakeup pees in the master bedroom. It's a lot of hard work, but not when you have frequent, low-viscosity stools, which is why I drink 5 cups of coffee a day.

Just got off some previous entry madness.

Misanthrope much? I'm like a real-life Roast Beef from Achewood. I am a walking punchline. Fear me.

Now I have to make a bunch of new entries to push all the crappy old ones to the back. And I don't even really have anything cool to write about.

I have a new hat. That is a thing I have that is cool to write about. It's like a grass fedora. I wear it and people walk slightly to the side of me.

Actually, y'know, being cut off from this was probably good for me. There's about a year and a half of drama y'all asses didn't have to read.

I have another thing that's a Treo, with Little John Palm, which you should install on your phone, because it emulates every retro gaming system out there.

I'm married now. I'm seeing a year and a half of drama being replaced with, "Yoga Teacher made me do the dishes at 6am today. We have a new showerhead."

Did you know that I know about 1/3 of PHP now? I do. It's pretty sweet.

All those promises to update more...how 'bout that huh?

Here's another one! I think I'm getting better at these promise things...