Because Chinese dramas are beh tahan. It needs some work. ( Read more... )

"Brainwashing [dates to] 1950, a literal translation of Chinese xi nao."

And I always thought it was the other way around :o

→ List of English words of Chinese origin (an example of a bad Wikipedia article)

Also, just for fun: Unlikely phrases from real phrasebooks.

I am never going to finish writing this fic in time AHHHH.

Anyway, taking a break—so I'll catch up with LJ posting. Rah? I've decided not to write about Japan and Suzhou, so that saves you all some reading.

This past week my mother went to Taipei to take (dubious) care of her sister, who's undergoing chemo. On Friday we took the High Speed Rail back to Taichung. At the train station I saw someone with a huge (at least A3 size) Hunter×Hunter Animax paper tote bag, with another folded up bag inside ♥

Friday was the 15th day of the 7th month on the Chinese lunar calendar—i.e., the 7th full moon of the year. The 7th month is also the month of ghosts, when ghosts are most active. Thus, on the 15th day of the 7th month is Zhongyuan Jie, the day when people make a grand offering to their ancestors for the spirits' goodwill. Houses, shops, even department stores participate. (My Taoist paternal family does.) By the front door, there is a table upon which are mountains of food and sticks of burning incense. (Large businesses sometimes have a row of tables a block long shadowed by tents.) There are large bonfires of joss paper money; the belief is that ghosts receive these burned sacrifices in their afterlives. A fine ash of this paper covers the ground, fills the air. After the ghosts have partaken of the food offering, the living get to eat it.

Anyway, since Friday happened to be a weekend and a major Chinese festival, it was travel pandemonium. At the High Speed Rail station, there were staff with loudspeakers telling us to line up in three lines (for compactness), forcing us to line up downstairs instead of on the platform (so that the platform wouldn't become a crowd of anarchy), and telling us which train was departing when, on what platform and going where. I felt sorry for the tourists who had no idea what was going on. People with reserved seats got to sit and lounge until their train left. The rest of us had to rush on board to grab a seat.

You know what? Forget everything I've said about smoking being a nuisance. Being Chinese Valentine's Day, the five star hotel's restaurant we ate in was packed. Which means: non-smoking section? What non-smoking section? The second-hand smoke translates my runny nose and sore throat into spectacular hacking fits.

(n)

On to other topics.

The Chinese have a phrase, "Shanghai men". There's no "Beijing men" or "Guangzhou women". It's always "Shanghai men". One woman related, "One day I took the bus in Shanghai. It drove past the back doors of residences. Through every back door, I could see a man working in the kitchen preparing dinner. And whenever I pass by the river, I see a row of men doing the laundry." Ah, the joys of female empowerment.

On TV the other day, a reporter from Hong Kong interviewed Beijing's volunteer community patrol. The reporter asked if the volunteers received any subsidies. A volunteer replied, "At first, they cooked green bean soup for us to drink. Now, they probably don't have spare time, so they give us a bag of green beans for us to take home and cook ourselves."

Next time: Suzhou history and Asian insults. Probably.

I really didn't expect it to happen - Nitta Youka plagiarising - out-and-out tracing - poses, clothes and scenes from fashion magazines (proof here might be NWS). Manga artists often use photos for reference, but not quite this blatantly.

The last time something like this happened, Suetsugu Yuki was accused of plagiarising several poses from the popular manga Slam Dunk. (Someone on 2ch discovered it. The internet does wonders.) The publisher of Suetsugu's work issued an apology, and ceased printing all of her work.

Nitta Youka's more popular than Suetsugu was, and the manga in question has been animated - pulling the plug won't be easy :x

(As an aside: Even with manga, Western fandom is usually pretty OMG stop being so hard on my favourite writer for plagiarising!! It doesn't matter if s/he did a little something bad. This is true even of other people like entertainers and their indiscriminaces. But Japanese fandom's always like: you did something WRONG, we will NEVER forgive you. The NewS underage drinking incident is a recent example.

The Chinese are like that too, I think. Everyone hates Zhang Ziyi and Gong Li for being "women who bring shame on the Chinese", "act completely like Westerners", "wear revealing clothing", "using their fame to get (Western) boyfriends", and "having multiple boyfriends". - There's another word for that last one, but let's not go there.)

Bathrobe's Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese language site, by the author's own description "an armchair excursion three fascinating languages of the Orient." I found this website while searching for the names of the days of the week in Japanese, although it also has amusing things like how Harry Potter has been translated into these three languages.

When I first tried to learn the Japanese days of the week, I memorized them using the French names (which are based on the Latin names for planets) and the corresponding Chinese planet names. The two have an uncanny correspondence:

Latin (and French) name for day of week	Corresponding celestial body	Chinese name for celestial body
dies solis	the Sun	日
dies lunae (lundi)	the Moon	月
dies Martis (mardi)	Mars	火 (fire)
dies Mercurii (mercredi)	Mercury	水 (water)
dies Jovis (jeudi)	Jupiter	木 (wood)
dies Veneris (vendredi)	Venus	金 (gold)
dies Saturni	Saturn	土 (earth)

This list of Latin day of the week names translated in Chinese is, in fact, the traditional Chinese (and current Japanese) day of the week system. Yet the traditional Chinese order of the elements is 金木水火土 (gold–wood–water–fire–earth) - it's completely different. So it's obvious that these names were imported. Fingers point to Sumer, Mesopotamia, or ancient Egypt.

"the number of women filing for bankruptcy since 1981 has increased 662 percent; women compose 87 percent of the impoverished elderly"
(stats from Money, a Memoir, presumably American)

Now that I'm back to GW fic (I read those?), I'm dearly missing Ponderosa.

Following in the footsteps of animagus:

I'm best at singing somewhat high anime themes without weird intervals :3 ← honestly it's the only stuff I know the lyrics for other than Disney. I love singing "fun" songs. Other than those, favourite songs to abuse include Full Metal Panic, Bleach, HikaGo and Tenipuri themes. I would love to sing some really obscure songs from things like the radio show Anime Tenchou B' and BL games, or even better—Gravitation.

I would totally practice my throat raw to sing songs by ALI PROJECT and either of the See-Saw duo. Utada's a bit of a given with "practicing" *facepalms*

( 2008 anime )

The LJ tags field is now proper fill-in-as-you-type! *did not notice eariler*

Because I am a geek (so there)

» Ancient Scripts, with an overabundance of writing systems which makes me happy.

Currently I'm looking for for a easy-to-write syllabic alphabetic system. I would like to learn Nushu, the writing system developed in secret by women (as the education system, despite all its meritocratic leanings, was male-only).

On that note I am reminded of my old school project on Wu Chien-Shiung, who went to a boarding school for girls, as there were no local girls' schools. (She was also the first female instructor at Princeton.) Modern Chinese history has Mulanesque* stories floating around on how a girl was secretly tutored by an older brother, or secretly studied an older brother's books. (Oh, I wish I had the guts/necessary free credits to take WMST+ASIA courses.)

Anyway, I can't believe how much particle physics I studied @_@. I'm—I'm incredibly non-academic now.

* I would like to state here that I did not like Disney's retelling of Mulan.

***

( I am easily amused by Mamo )
( Last Exile redux )

I've begun tying my hair up again.

You know how everyone's been saying this year is the Year of the Golden Boar?

Well, it's not.

1911 was Gold Pig. The next Gold Pig was 1911+60 = 1971, and the next one is in 2031.
Actually, 2007 is the year of the Fire Boar.

So, for quick reference:

Years ending in 0 and 1 are Gold.
2 and 3 are Water.
4 and 5 are Wood.
6 and 7 are Fire.
8 and 9 are Earth.

A (good) talk show on SET today invited 5 foreigners, from Dominica (?), the States, Russia, Korea and Slovakia, to talk about tourist attractions. They speak better Chinese than I do ;_; Hakka and Taiwanese too. ( A few amusing highlights. )

I finished the quick reference post [link fixed]. Yosha! The video post is coming up soon. It's a visual companion to the Quick Ref.