Huolong’s

My wife with a portrait of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, first president of the Republic of China, in the background. (Oct. 3, 2006)

This is me with the Beijing Olympics mascots in the background. (Oct. 3, 2006)

With no specific plans for the National Day holiday, my wife and I made a foray to the Tian’anmen Square at night on Oct. 3, the third day of China’s weeklong holiday.

A small replica of the giant Three Gorges Dam at the Tian’anmen Square (Oct. 3, 2006).

I’ve known Mostafa Elmasry for around 6 years. We used to chat over Yahoo messenger when I worked in Harbin, Heilongjiang province.

I wanted to say sorry to him about me not contacting him just because I’ve been quite busy with life since I came to Beijing. But, being busy is always an excuse. Everybody is busy, or at least busy with doing nothing!

Things seem okay over here. Though my wife and I live in different cities: she is now in Guiyang, Guizhou province for graduate studies in medicine and I work freelance as translator in Beijing, we never feel we are not together. Good communication between us is a two-way street that keeps us connected. I’ve come to know that good communication is part of the recipe for keeping a happy marriage.

I seem to like thinking and writing big. Cut! Let me write something small.

Mmm…

Today, without notice, or without other guys in this apartment seeing that notice, my apartment building had a water outage that started after I brushed my teeth this morning. When it finally occurred to me that I hadn’t washed my hair and face, I found there was no water coming out of the faucets. So, I didn’t wash my face until water supply was restored around 6:00 pm. Today, for once in a blue moon, I didn’t wash my hair. And, I bet it was a bad hair day for me!

* Like in any country, you need to have enough literary, historical, artistic and philosophical knowledge to appreciate the culture that nurtures you and the people admired in your society. I want to appreciate the cultures of the English-speaking world and their roots and origins. And I want to be admired. One old friend of mine, who used to be my colleague back in Harbin where we both worked for his brother’s company, teased me: “You continue learning and studying English? You want to teach Englishmen English?”. I wish I could. But, not to be mistaken. Such deeds have been accomplished by others whose native tongues are not English at all and whose books on the English language have become authoritative ones in the English-speech world. I can set my goals as ambitious as theirs. After all, as I said, or rather I quoted another person as saying, “Nothing happens unless first a dream.” Who can be sure you, Chang Guohua, are not to become Guohua the Great for Something?…

* Let me now preach a little about the European culture to those with little knowledge of it. Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian elements characterize the culture, just as Confucius and Buddhism have deeply influenced the Chinese culture, though maybe to a lesser extent.

* I now know that, after reading, the term “Bible” means different things to different people. For Judaism, it is the Old Testament as known to Christians. Judaism only accepts the Old Testament as the true Bible and rejects Jesus Christ as the Son of God. But, for different denominations of Christians, it is a collection of different books or different versions or translations of them divided into the Old and New Testaments. (20050920)

* “You know what you’re doing?” I have found myself facing a totally different world of cultures, histories and arts. There is too long a list of strange people, events, places, wars, styles of buildings and culture-charged passages I want to understand, appreciate and remember. I’ve decided that I must be a man knowing almost every facet of the cultures behind the English language. Without this knowledge, no major process can be made in my preparing to become a competent interpreter. When I opened the book that introduces me into the wonderful world of European culture, I might be as happy, pleasantly surprised as a famous man when he for the first time came across the ancient Greek mythology.

* Renaissance is a “rebirth of classical learning and knowldge through the rediscovery of ancient texts and also a rebirth of European culture in general”. ( Wikipedia.org) The term Renaissance (文艺复兴) seems to me a happy, historical period in the West during which a large number of artists (Leonardo da Vinci, etc.), buildings of different styles (Gothic, etc.), paintings, sculptures, music and others combined to create a great age that built up a great force leading to the Industrial Revolution. In my mind’s eye, the Renaissance was the turning point when the West started to overtake China. I was very sad to find in my reading no Chinese thinkers, philosophers, scientists or artisans that were matches on their Western counterparts when the West was doing their “Renaissance”. Renaissance refers to the period between 15th and the mid 17th century in Europe and roughly corresponds to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and early Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) in China. The Chinese people were busy trying to fossilate their long-accustomed feudalism glory and refused to be jolted by a rude awakening from their pipe dream of prosperity and fool’s paradise-like pride. China was actually rotting inside with its outside appearance buoyed up only by its accumulation of the past, including tradition, wealth, knowledge, ideology, and burden of thousands of years, instead of innovations, inventions, and discoveries that might grow out of the past.

Now, I’d like to give you some more information you might need to make you updated on the idea of Renaissance. This term is now often replaced by “Early Modern”. Renaisssance, like the Bible, means different cultural movements that started “at different places at different times”. In addition, the period did not seem so happy to all the contemporary people, especially the poor, who even felt their Renaissance life worsened, compared to the dark days of the Middle Ages. ( Wikipedia.org) (20050925)

* I believe I have chosen the right way to grow to be an interpreter or a simultaneous interpreter. First, establish a strong foundation on which I can build an empire of whatsoever knowledge and skills I need. Second, build this empire with whatsoever I can find and need.

* Here is what I want to tell myself: Set a goal and work towards it, and you will achieve it. Set another and approach it in the same way, and you will achieve it, too. WORK, DO NOT WAIT FOR TIME. (20051112)

*Good homework is what I need now. I know this might sound a little strange or disappointing after having spent so much time working and studying for a goal I’ve always failed to define. Yes, this is in fact what I’ve always wanted to do—good homework that is purely a phase I must go through before anything else. Two or three years are not long. Just look back at how many years I’ve been in Harbin (2 years and 9 months) and in Beijing (3 years and 7 months). And consider all my failed New Year resolutions or attempts to finish the Collins, a wonderful source of information on the English language.

I also bought dozens of Chinese classics, all in paperback. These perfumed books are churned out by a Jilin province-based publisher and feature, unfortunately, proofreading and editing under par. I’ve always understood the importance of a good publisher in producing quality books. This is easy to figure out: Sony’s cameras are better than Aigo’s, and they are all cameras though under different names. Nonetheless, I’m reading one of them, a collection of Bai Juyi’s poetry, and have finished a collection of Su Dongpo’s works. The books still have their own values and serve as a source of literary information.

I placed an order of another Longman dictionary to Joyo.com. The book offers a great source of information that is encyclopedic up to a point, which is different from the Collins. And I want to finish it, too. (20060617)

*I know what my problem is. I don’t have the means by which to communicate in the language with native speakers: I don’t know what to say when I’m supposed to say something. For example, I don’t know how to decline an invitation to lunch at lunchtime, and have no small talk and always get right down to business in phone conversations. I even deliberately avoid conversations with a British man also working for the newspaper. My philosophy here seems to be a pursuit of perfectionism: if I don’t know how I can sound sociable in these situations where pleseantries are exchanged, I don’t even bother about them.

It is a painful realization that I have inadequate communications skills when I speak English. In the Chinese context I’d be even thought of as talking too much sometimes.

Reading can help me again. Now I’m planning to read a dictionary of spoken English. That might be a good start.

I met a couple the other day when they were referred to me by a friend of mine for translating a letter and a certificate to be presented to the French Embassy for visa application. The couple are Amway’s Executive Diamond distributors. One of my former colleagues later told me that Anway’s Diamond distributors hold high positions and earn a lot without having to work. It didn’t came to me as a surprise when the couple later approached me by inviting my wife and me to their home for a “simple meal”. I thought they had their own ax to grind. But, I nonetheless accepted their invitation because the meeting might give me something inspiring.

After a meal prepared by his family’s cook, Chen, the husband, introduced my wife, me and the friend to how Anway operates to benefit its members, or Independent Business Owners (IBO) in Amway’s parlance.

I was moved by his successful presentation. Before reading what its critics say about Amway and other multi-level marketing (MLM) companies, I almost thought Anmay would provide me with an opportunity to create “my own business” that benefits my “customers” and myself. I was disillusioned to find that higher-rank Amway distributors earn most of their incomes by providing books, tapes, and other “tools” to their “downlines” and maybe by conducting brainwashing “seminars” where existing and potential IBOs gather religiously. All these are paid for by the distributors’ “downlines”. I hate this. I don’t want to take advantage of my friends and Anway reminds me of pyramid selling.

“Amway (and its online incarnation, Quixtar) have been controversial for years because of allegations that these companies are pyramid schemes. Critics claim that most of the products sold by Amway are to the Independent Business Owners (IBOs) themselves for personal consumption rather than to retail consumers who aren’t enrolled as IBOs. Buying products from Amway or Quixtar gives IBOs points and they are paid back on the number of points that they generate from personal consumption. It is claimed to be a business opportunity and hence an existing IBO can help others to get an IBO number and divert their buying habit from other stores to Amway or Quixtar. Thus the business grows as a greater number of people join the group. The share of profit is based on the leverage that an IBO has.

Typically, IBOs spend a large amount of money on tapes, books, and seminars (known as “tools” in AMO parlance) which are ostensibly “required” to “hone the business skills of the IBOs”. These are not provided by Amway itself but organizations often described as Amway Motivational Organizations (AMO) in general run by people in the higher ranks of the organization. Claims regarding the support material range from “can be of help to an IBO ” to “are absolutely required” to “build a big business”. However, undercover investigations like one done by MSNBC Dateline in April 2003 suggest that most of the money being earned by these successful individuals was coming from the hidden “tools” business rather than through selling the company products. Critics also claim that the materials are specifically geared towards encouraging IBOs to continue working for a non-economic return, rather than improving their actual business skills.

Dexter Yager’s organization, the International Dreambuilders’ Association/Digital Alliance (usually simply referred to by the abbreviation IDA) is arguably the largest and best-known of the AMOs, and is probably the one most commonly associated with Amway. ”

(Source: Wikipedia.org as quoted at Answers.com, http://www.answers.com/amway, accessed on August 26, 2006)

P.S. Recently, I’ve been thinking about what I should and could do to make a better life for my family…

*This is my book report for reading Global Competitiveness-Getting the U.S. back on Track.

*This is a book written by some worrying people in the late 1980s about the seemingly likely decline of the United States. They were afraid that the U.S. was losing its competitive edge out to its international competitors, such as Japan and Germany. (Of course, no China-relating issues were mentioned in the first chapter depicting those days when Japan was the star performer, except the fact that China was one of the biggest exporters of immigrants to the U.S.) In the first chapter, author Richard D. Lamm insisted that everything in the U.S. ranging from its legal system to its political system, tax system, and even Americans’ “hubris” be changed to regain the U.S. dominance over its competitors. The United States needs a “generation” to conduct institutional before it can lead in the pack again, he declared.

Well, it sounds quite strange to me. What I knew was that in the 1990s the United States led a revolution called Information Technology that saw a nearly decade of strong economic growth in the U.S. It did not, as Lamm believed, take a whole generation for the country to lead the world again.

The book was published in 1988 and probably had been in the making during the 1980s. Things happened beyond his wildest dreams almost in the wake of the book’s publication. In the 1990s, things tipped in favor of the U.S. productivity and economy though its institutions or problems remained there, which he clamored to change or correct.

What on earth happened after the publication of Global Competitiveness-Getting the U.S. back on Track? The awfully sounding predictions, having a doomsday-of-the-U.S. air to them, made in the book proved upside down. I will read other books to find it out. But, as the first step, let me see what about the U.S. made Lamms squirm so uneasily in their chairs in the whole 1980s.

(Considering the upside down predictions, I have one more point to add, that is, predictions are no more than predictions. They just charter future changes based on current changes. They are all about changes. So, if predictions go awry, I’m amused, instead of amazed. They also remind me of the recent “Peaceful Rise of China”. Will it last? Is it something we can take for granted? What can hinder it, stop it, or even reverse it?)

Of course, they are two greatest languages in the world. One exerts the most powerful synchronic influence over the face of the Planet. The other, on the contrary, is the strongest diachronic language that has been weaving together the history of a single largest country in population and later its much smaller neighbors since its first emperor froze the writing system of the language for the first time when the country proper came into being in A.D. 221.

Which one is more difficult for a foreign learner to learn to speak and write? I believe it is Chinese. Someone has commented that one needs three months to learn good English, three years to master French and at least thirty years to be proficient in German. As I see it, he has to double his efforts he has put in tackling German to speak and write good Chinese, and those foreigners who manage to speak and write good Chinese must be geniuses.

Does this sound a little too exaggerated? I believe not.

For one thing, most of native Chinese speakers (e.g. me) find it hard to write things in decent Chinese because they have long been isolated from the traditionally accepted and correct way of writing and do not know what rules to follow in their writing. When it comes to foreigners learning Chinese, they have to find decently and elegantly written Chinese texts and use them as examples. In everyday life in China, they may find that good Chinese writings are in short supply. It seems to me that the correct, smooth and natural tradition of writing Chinese was broken somewhere (during the Great Cultural Revolution?) so that its modern speakers are at a loss to know how to write their language. For example, earlier dated writings, more often than not, sound too old-fashioned, especially those written before 1949, and even before 1978. You can easily come across badly written news reports, government documents, corporate files, etc. Experts, or rather those of at least writing good Chinese, are hard to come by these days, I’m afraid.

For another, as far as I know, no complete and generally agreed Chinese grammar system has been established out of the language and the current system, if it is one, is believed to be a poor relation of its Western counterparts.

What you do is somewhat good—reform and openning up. But what you are talking and writing bores any sensible and thinking people stiff and sometimes I feel like vomitting because of what you say or write, meaning to “educate” me. First, the well-known “Three Represents”. OK. You represent me. That is good though I have never voted you for one single time. But do you have to regurgitate the Represents every time you do something that you should do by law and by duty? For example, tax collectors collect taxes (and just to line your good regurgitating comrades’s pockets), corrupted investigators investigate rotten “people’s public servants” (the most powerful and richest “servants” in relation to their “masters” in the world!), or police officers police the red light district and keep it morally good and hygienically clean for a while.

Shut up! Keep quiet! I do not want to see your idiotic tongues wag.

One more thing. You should hire more sober-minded ghost writers, at least to make yourselve believe what you’re bullshitting. Your present ones are awfully retarded and I bet they’re delirious sometimes at night and give me for translation what they’re dreaming about in their constantly disturbed nightmares.

Because I think translation is a stupid thing to do. I would like to reserve the difficult job for someone else to do. Tie him or her to my way of wild thinking in Chinese. Make s/he crazy, curse, and feel themselves to be idiots to be translators. And even worse, make them doubtful about their abilities of using the two languages involved and about the reason for their being.

I always seem to associate a song or several songs with a period of my life in which I listen to them a lot.

Time is racing ahead. I can’t stop it. Neither can anyone else. Nostalgia.

When I listen to songs such as Le Jour s’est Lev, one of the three incomprehensible French songs I got in exchange for three songs by Luo Dayou with a Frenchman, it never fails to reminds me of those days at Brightsun in Harbin, when I just began to learn of the Internet as a new guy at the company with the brand-new status of being an employee after years of being an English student.

Wei-ai-chi-kuang (Crazy About Love) by Liu Ruoying brings me back to those days when I was beginning to learn love, yet another brand-new topic to a freewheeling, awkward, and stupid boy.

And shengxia-de-guoshi (Fruits in Midsummer) by Mo Wenwei comes to me as a reflection of those lovely summer days in Harbin.

Now, new songs, which now I’m not aware of, will serve, when I listen to them again in the future, as nostalgic ones associated with my beginning days in Beijing. Even Delta ForceⅠwill come to me as my first ever computer game I have played for years, when mom is Beijing to see me and US and Britain are invading Iraq.

Time, you don’t stop continuing and we don’t stop aging and dying.