你看他穿得多土!
Just look at this fucking dork！
Getting Buff
I sometimes work out at the gym on the
college campus where I live. You have never seen a more troubling
assortment of overused gym equipment. The keen Chinese business-sense
of the woman who manages the place includes the strategy of
“never-upgrading-anything-ever,” while gladly collecting
membership fees. There really aren't any other options for me if I
want to get my hands on some free-weights, aside buying my own.
The leg press makes me fear for my
life. It's like sitting under a guillotine, and whenever I climb out
of it, I imagine the rusted steel restraints breaking. The weighted
press would easily slide down and crush my legs. It's funny, because
since I've been going there, I've seen more than one machine with a
busted cable. One was a leg extender, another a row machine. I
wondered exactly how much stress it takes before one of those cables
wears out. Thirty years worth? Well, it wouldn't be a shock to
discover some of those items have been there since the 80's.
The place is decorated with these oddly
dated photos of body builders. Not sure if they're meant to be
inspirational, but I noticed very few of them (if any) are photos of
bulked-up Chinese males. Are males of European descent the only ones
capable of exhibiting a desirable physicality in their opinion?
The Chinese dudes that go there do some
pretty interesting things. Some of them arrive to work out wearing a
jacket and jeans. I guess they don't own workout clothes or
something. Other guys, after they have had the slightest bit of
muscle development, start walking around with their shirts off. In my
opinion, they are nowhere near the stage where they've got anything
to be proud of, but that doesn't stop them. I sometimes feel
embarrassed for them. Put a fucking shirt on.
I heard a couple of Chinese dudes by
the bench presses making the loudest grunts as they worked, and when
I turned, I saw they had the lowest amount of weight possible on the
bar: five pounds on either side. I guess it was high time for them to
graduate from lifting heavy writing utensils, like sharpies and
highlighters and such. But that's the saddest part of the gym: many
of the dudes there aren't getting the nourishment they need to
support muscle growth. Protein is hard to come by in China, as they
sprinkle meat into meals like a seasoning as opposed to a crucial
source of nutrients. It seems they much rather fill their bellies
with cheap rice or noodles. As it happens, I think most Chinese folks
I come across are malnourished. If you saw the standard garbage
considered edible on this campus you would understand why.
Every once in a while, I'll see the
true Chinese meat-heads strolling into the gym. These guys have
actually have found a way to bulk up despite the nourishment and
environmental constraints that come with living in China. Needless to
say, performance enhancing drugs are a likely explanation. I don't
think that kind of growth would be possible without them. It really
makes we wonder about substance control in this country. Someone told
me recently in one of my classes that steroids are not illegal here.
Zhong Guo Hua
They say that moving to China is the
best way to learn Chinese, hands down. After studying the language
for a few years, I'm going to report on some of my personal
experiences, and how my decision to live abroad has affected my
learning:
I used to have a much more methodical
learning process with which I approached the language. I would follow
along with coursework, spend hours practicing my characters, and sit
with a tutor. But as I realized the probability of mastery would call
upon an astronomical degree of memorization, and I would never
achieve a useful grasp unless I was able to absorb several words and
characters at a time, I started to feel a bit overwhelmed.
It's not just the problem of reading a
word, it's also memorizing the tones. And after you've memorized the
tones, you still have to think about your accent and the way the
Chinese traditionally use the word. And even if you've got that down,
it doesn't mean that when a Chinese person says the word to you,
you'll recognize it. And then you've got the whole issue of multiple
dialects to consider.
Television tries to make things helpful
by providing Chinese subtitles at the bottom of the screen. Even the
Chinese don't always understand each other, but they hope that
characters (different blotches of lines and shapes) will unify their
experience. There have been times when I've been able to read whole
strings of characters, and know the tones, and still not understand a
damn thing. It's because different combinations of characters have a
different meaning, and then the challenge is compounded by slang or
weird idioms. Sometimes it feels practically impossible to figure
shit out. “Get a Chinese girlfriend,” some people advised.
Let's just put it this way: if the
Chinese language was graded by the criteria of how effectively it
facilitates meaningful communication, it would get a D minus. Let's
say that one day someone decides to create a language for the sheer
purpose of concise and efficient expression: No one would come up
with Mandarin. The language is a tradition of bad ideas that have
been compounded by more bad ideas, strained through a sieve of
simplification, then stratified by regions and hopeless variations. I
visualize Chinese as a system that ties together circular strings of
logic where English is designed to provide sturdy rectangular shapes.
The manifold learning capacities it calls upon are so different, it's
like practicing to ride a unicycle over a tightrope (while spinning a
plate on your nose and juggling fish).
And it's unavoidable: after you come to
know a few phrases and have the most basic vocabulary, Chinese people
will attempt to engage you in conversation. And then you get to
experience the joy of understanding only half of what is said, and
looking like an ass when you try to reply. It never fails, whenever I
get in a cab, I'll end up riding with Chatty Chang. He'll always want
to tell me his whole life story. Or worse, he'll want me to describe
the intricate details of my own. There are basic, stock phrases that
I always have on hand, but I have to be careful. Inevitably, the
conversation crosses into nebulous territory, where only the most
skilled Chinese linguists may apply.
I was standing at a food stall, getting
some grilled chicken. Some Chinese kid came along and started making
snarky comments to the owner about me. I couldn't understand exactly
what he was saying, but I knew that he was talking shit. He kept
looking over at me, in that kind of loathsome manner that comes with
Chinese player-haters. Eventually the food owner asked me a question
about whether I wanted my chicken spicy or not, and I replied in
Chinese.
The shit-talking-kid's eyes bulged. He
said with incredulity, “你会说中文吗?”
“You can speak Chinese?!”
I just said, “会.”
“Yep.”
The kid swallowed,
his face suddenly red. Lacking the courage behind his contempt, his
buggy eyes darted back and forth before he nervously stepped away.
Lesson learned. Don't assume that just because I'm foreign that I
can't understand what the fuck you're saying. Even if most of the
time I can't.
Comparisons
The kids in one of
my classes wanted to ask me about comparisons of expenses between the
US and China. I was explaining to them, “Unless you live in a rural
area, where no one wants to live, and there are very few jobs, it is
nearly impossible to get by without making over fifty-thousand
dollars a year. At least that has been my experience. You can survive
on about forty-thousand a year, but it would be difficult. And I'm
talking about living comfortably at least, in a cheap apartment, with
basic internet, utilities, a cell phone, some student debt, and
making car payments. You would still live in toxic conditions, with
some crime, surrounding poverty, and dangerous neighbors on drugs.”
My students were
shocked. “Forty-thousand dollars a year?” they asked. “That is
so much though!”
I shook my head.
“That's not really anything. But it depends on where you live,” I
told them. “In most places in the US, you will be broke making
forty-thousand a year. And let's just pray that you can find a job
that provides basic medical insurance, because if you don't have
that, illness can destroy your financial life.”
“I guess that's
one of the things I like about living in China,” I explained.
“Things are relatively affordable. You can sustain yourself on
about three hundred dollars a month if your rent is covered. Take for
example this Pepsi bottle.” I held up a plastic bottle of “百事可乐.”
In the US, you may spend as much as two dollars for this item. In China,
you pay about three yuan (about fifty cents). Same goes for several
other things in China. When I was living in the US, I was lucky to
keep myself fed and healthy on less than one hundred and fifty
dollars a week.”
“I guess China
isn't such a bad place to live after all!” one of my students said.
I almost snickered,
because in my head it was the equivalent of someone saying, “I
guess the smell of poop isn't so bad after all!”
But that's just the thing: maybe it isn't, in comparison.
