Chinese stories

I was just thinking this morning about how my location has affected the development of my translation career so far. Basically, when I moved back to the US in 2008 I had to start over new by finding US clients and agencies to work with while still taking jobs from old Chinese clients and agencies. Since I was supporting a family of three, I basically had to take any job that came my way, rather than setting my own goals for how I wanted my career to develop. After living in Michigan for nearly two years now, I have found that there are barely any interpreting jobs here (I have been contacted for two since I’ve been here, and didn’t end up doing either of them), which has meant that I have been doing translation almost exclusively. However, I have been contacted or heard about lots of interpreting jobs around New York, Florida, Philadelphia, etc., and I’m starting to think that if I had moved to one of those places, I might have become a full-fledged interpreter rather than a translator.

I spent some time with an artist I do some work for recently, and mentioned to her that I had gotten certification as a court interpreter, and she looked at me funny and said, “is that what you really want to do?” I guess I had never really thought about it, since at the time I was just doing anything I could to find more work, but now that I have enough work, I’m thinking that perhaps I should take more of an artist’s mindset and think more about what I want to do rather than taking everything that comes along. I think I just don’t hang out enough around artists–most of my friends and family are scientists and engineers, and that gives them a different outlook on things. Some people also take a business-minded approach to translation and tell me to start up a company. But I think taking an artist’s approach is the best thing for me at the moment, because artists love what they do and think carefully about what they want to do before setting out to do it. Hopefully its possible for translators to do that as well.

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than a weekend in the countryside.

Canola fields cover the Hunan countryside

No lack of water here

Planting starts soon

Helping out in the kitchen

Also, the food is hands down the best you can find in China.

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Article 9 of the Nationality Law of the People’s Republic of China says:

定居外国的中国公民，自愿加入或取得外国国籍的，即自动丧失中国国籍。

Any Chinese national who has settled abroad and who has been naturalized as a foreign national or has acquired foreign nationality of his own free will shall automatically lose Chinese nationality.

Apparently the “automatically” isn’t so automatic. Our son was born in China, but never got his official papers like a hukou or ID card, and got a US passport shortly thereafter. To leave China, he still had to get an exit permit, though, and it turns out that this has become his most important official Chinese ID. We went to the Chinese consulate in Chicago yesterday to get him a visa to China, only to be told by them that they still consider him a Chinese citizen until he renounces his Chinese citizenship. You can only renounce your citizenship at the PSB in China they said, and he would have to travel to China as a Chinese citizen on a travel permit. The good thing is that this permit costs a lot less than the visa for US citizens, but the bad thing is if he doesn’t renounce his citizenship before he’s 18, he might be stuck in some sort of bureaucratic limbo and never be allowed into China again. Also, the only way he can get this travel permit is with his old exit permit… good thing we didn’t throw it away.

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It seems like the autumn was all too short, and the long winter is already well underway. Michigan is somewhat of a land of extremes, which half a year of beautiful weather and sunny skies, and half a year of cloud cover and snow.

With moving back to the US from Beijing some things have been easier, and some things harder. I’ve been trying to make more contacts with US translation agencies since there still seems to be quite a large gap in rates between here and China. Rates that could provide good standards of living in China just don’t cut it with America’s high cost of living. I also have been trying to make the transition from part-time translating on the side to doing it full-time, and that takes some time. 

Today I came across an article in the NYT that I felt a strong connection to (link). It was written by a freelance writer who works a few hours a week in retail and says that the job helps her keep her sanity in the lonely world of freelancing. While I love the flexibility and time it allows me to spend with my family, I also get cabin fever here sometimes staying cooped up translating late into the night. I find that I do most of my work in the evening both because we have things to do during the day, and because that is when clients in Beijing will be online to talk about work. 

It all started a few months ago a friend of a friend who owns a Chinese import store out by Detroit asked me to give him a hand with the store he was renting for the holiday season near where I live. Now Chinese imports are everywhere here, and it’s almost as if all of the major stores are really just ‘Chinese import stores’. I like this one, though, because unlike most stores who just sit back and order what they want from wholesaling catalogs or hire MBAs to crunch the numbers and do the buying from the offices back home, this owner actually gets on the plane, goes to China, visits factories, and hand picks what he wants, shipping it back himself. And most of it is not what you usually find in markets in China. When we just moved back to Michigan last summer we visited northern Indiana to get some Amish cooking and happened to stop by a huge flea market that was in the area. It was kind of sad to see that almost the entire flea market was full of cheap Chinese imports, and that it was almost as if I had never left China. We had to do some searching before we could find a store with locally made items. 

I also liked the store because the owner spends a lot of time getting to know his customers and what they want.  At first when I was unpacking the boxes I thought “oh no, more cheap Chinese crap that nobody here really needs.” Now it’s true that nobody here really needs most of the stuff, but I was completely blown away when during the first week everyone kept talking about how beautiful everything was and how great the store was.

The store had an interesting mix of items that at first glance didn’t seem to really go together: anime paraphenalia, katana swords and pocket knives, big mass-produced looking artwork of animals, waterfall motion pictures, a bunch of random Asian stuff, and religions items (mostly Jesuses and Marys, but also some Hindu and Muslim stuff). For some reason, though, these things all fit together in ordinary American’s minds I think. It reminded me of when I was in elementary school and went with a friend to his church’s Halloween scary forest. While waiting to go through the forest the minister put on a show on stage where he would chop a watermelon in half on his son’s stomach with a katana sword (he was supposedly a black belt in karate). For some reason this “Asian” material culture is so popular here, even though it might not be representative of the real thing. It seems to me to be far more popular than any European or African culture here in the States. I can’t think of any other foreign culture where a middle-aged man who one might assume to fit the bill of a staunch Republican would say “Boy, this Asian stuff is just so cool!”

There were many different types of customers, too. A lot of people loved the swords and weapons, which I knew next to nothing about. I kind of pretended to know what I was doing, but I made a few blunders. Once I touched the blade of a sword and the customer gasped, saying “Blasphemy! You touched the blade!” Others would come in and casually say “Please hand me [insert name of Lord of the Rings sword]” and I would say “ummm…. which one?” Then others would tell me we had the flail mislabled as a mace, or the Bleach sword was given the wrong name.  We had several katanas worth over $300, but never sold a single one while I was there. The most popular swords were cheap katana sets of 3 for $50 that are really for display only (unless you want to be like this guy). The only Chinese swords in the store were Taichi swords, and I was surprised that these sold really well. Taichi is very popular here now, even my 90 year-old-grandmother has done it at her retirement home. 

Some people came in saying they were looking for stuff for their Chinese themed bedroom, then walk out with something Japanese. I don’t really want to be a jerk, so I go with the flow. One guy saw our calligraphy posters of Chinese words like 爱,　武, etc., and asked if we had one that says “recover” and showed me a tattoo on his back of the character 复. One girl had fallen in love with Japanese culture after watching “Memoirs of a Geisha”, so she got a kimono for Christmas.

I was also surprised at how much people knew about China. When the mall opens it’s usually full of senior citizens walking around in circles, and one of them stopped once and told me he had seen similar wooden chests when he was stationed in Shanghai in WWII. A lot of people asked for those Chinese cloth shoes, but we didn’t carry them. There was some business with American communists wanting to buy those old propaganda posters of Mao, and I think one even called me “comrade” once.

The anime stuff was interesting, but I have been completely out of the loop since Dragonball Z and Cowboy Bebop. Now the most popular ones here seem to be Naruto, Death Note, Bleach, and Inyuasha. The popular video games with paraphenalia are Zelda, Kingdom Hearts, and Final Fantasy. At first I had no idea who Cloud and Sephiroth were, but now I can pick them out easily. It’s the fans of this stuff that are the core customers, and some of them told me they would drive hundreds of miles to conventions to get those things, and were elated that we had them there now. 

I have always been curious why certain anime gets translated in the US and others make it to China. There is some overlap, and with online video the lines are blurred even more (Inyuasha is very popular in China). Before going to China I thought I knew something about anime, but had never heard of 樱桃小丸子, 蜡笔小新, and “Detective Conan”. Perhaps it is because these are non-violent and aimed at kids and could make it through the censors easier than the other ones might.

The thing I liked most about working at the store was just chatting with the people who would wander in, and a lot of people just started talking to me about whatever was on their mind. I think I freaked out this Chinese exchange student who is going to a high school here when I asked to see her ID to use the credit card machine, and when she didn’t have any ID except for her Chinese 身份证 I told her in Chinese that I could read it. Since the owner allowed bargaining, it was also fun to be on the other side of the coin and haggle a bit with people. 

The store was just a seasonal one, so it closed up at the end of January. Even though I hate excessive holiday consumerism as much as anyone else, it was fun a lot of the time, and at least got me out of the house once in a while and away from the computer. I still have a lot of catching up to do on the anime end though, and am looking to pick up another part-time job to see how it goes. In the spirit of asian weaponry, here are the twelve traditional Chinese weapons (or one version of them): 

刀、枪、剑、镋、棍、叉、耙、鞭、锏、锤、斧、钩、镰、扒、拐、弓箭、藤牌

Knife, spear, sword, forked spear, club, fork, rake (Zhu Bajie’s weapon of choice), whip, rapier, hammer, axe, hooked sword, sickle, pitchfork, cane, bow and arrows, and shield

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I had given up long ago, but it appears there is still hope. Unlike the coasts, which I haven’t visited, but hear have some authentic stuff, we live in a culinary desert when it comes to the good ol’ zhongcan. Nine times out of ten you go into any place and you get the same generic ‘Chinese food’ menu, which offers variations on the following recipe:

1 can of ‘oriental vegetables’

8 oz of sliced meat

oil, sugar, salt, MSG, and brown sauce

stir fry and serve

charge customer $8.99 and give them a fortune cookie

Even making the trek out to Chicago’s Chinatown and visiting the ‘authentic’ Lao Szechuan was somewhat of a let-down. Especially the hot pot, which is either $15.00 per person for a set menu, or $10.00 for the soup base and $4-5 for each dish. We opted for the second and got a type of hot pot neither of us had seen in China and ended up paying more than we would have for the set menu for two.

Unfortunately there is no good way of finding a place with decent food other than going there, asking for a Chinese menu or a ‘special menu’ (code word for edible food menu) and trying something out. It just so turns out that right here in Kalamazoo there is a restaraunt called Hunan Gardens (specializes in Sichuan food, run by Taiwanese it seems, and has nothing to do with Hunan, corner of Main and Drake) that has an authentic Sichuan chef, and some great stuff off of their ‘special menu’ that even beats out Lao Szechuan in Chicago. There are also reports of a good place in Ann Arbor and elsewhere, and our map is starting to take shape. For some reason it seems that one third of the restaurants here have the word ‘Hunan’ in their title, even though none of them have anything close to resembling Hunan cuisine. How did Hunan food get to be so popular here without ever being eaten?

Another search that took us to several asian markets was for the elusive 花椒, the little round Sichuan seasoning that turns your mouth numb, and that I have seen translated as ‘Sichuan pepper’ and dried prickly ash. The local health food store sells a small bottle of it for $6, but it can be gotten in Chicago for a lot cheaper.

We had gone out to Chicago to visit family and to pick up our shipment. The furthest the moving company would send it was Chicago, and with a quote from local shippers of $750 to get it home we decided to go get it ourselves. That included stopping by the Dept. of Homeland Security by O’hare, filling out some forms and getting the Bill of Lading stamped, then renting a U-Haul and heading over to the warehouse where it was kept. After paying the unloading fee and a little extra for the guys there to help me unpack it from the pallet and into the van, I took it away to where we were staying in town. Apparently everything was shipped, but when we got home we found some things that weren’t ours, like 2 boxes full of women’s shoes and an ironing board and wooden rack apparently meant to go to Bangalore, India. I’ve emailed the shipping company, but I have the feeling that they won’t care. I still can’t believe how much useless crap we shipped… at least it all got here, though.

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We left Beijing almost two weeks ago to move back to the US. I hadn’t been back home for two years, so I was long overdue for a visit. The move actually wasn’t caused by China’s new visa policies, surprisingly, but rather the US visa policies. We also decided that we want to raise our son in the US, and the choice was pretty easy to make seeing how Beijing’s air is steadily worsening. I don’t care what they say, it is much worse than when I first arrived in Beijing six years ago, and no matter how great Beijing is, I can only imagine the effects the pollution has had on our son. Some days I would ride my bike home from work and once I got to the 5th floor of our apartment building I could not stop wheezing. The baby also had a moderate rash all winter because it was so dry. I really like Beijing, and wouldn’t mind living there at all otherwise … but I feel like China’s still having a lot of growing pains, and while it was fun and all when I was single, I don’t want to stick around for the “interesting times” now that I have other people to worry about.

The move was hectic enough, and paying to have all of our stuff shipped back home made me realize that we had way too much stuff in our little 75 sqm apartment. I read an article about families that gave away all of their stuff and started living on the road, and I kind of envy them now that I realize we don’t really need it all. We’ve been living just fine while waiting for it all to get here.

The last week before we came a friend of mine visited and stayed in a great courtyard hotel (Double Happiness hotel) in Dongsi Sitiao, which I highly recommend.  I’d always wanted to stay in a traditional courtyard, but when I went to book a room at some other of the courtyard hotels around the Dongcheng district the staff were kind of aloof, unlike this one we went to. I also had to change our departure date, because the police told my employer that I had 10 days to leave the country from the date I resigned. “Beijing welcomes you” indeed.

The flight went as well as I could have wished, as the baby slept almost the whole flight. Immigration was a breeze too, as my wife could come with me and our son through the US citizens line, which I noticed was moving much faster and more efficiently than the Visitors line. I was particularly worried about this big ziplock bag of dried dandelion leaves that my mother-in-law had given us (when boiled the water cures the baby’s rash), which looks conspicuously like a big bag of another illegal substance. My wife only had to sign her name, give a fingerprint, and hand over the big packet of materials to the officer, then we put all of our bags through their big scanner machine thing, and I breathed a sigh of relief when they said we could take our things and go.

So now I’m back in southwest Michigan, still doing a bit of translating, and trying to enjoy the summer before winter and reality sets in. This state supposedly has one of the worst economies in the entire country, which is not too encouraging. I drove by the big company in town that had supported the community for decades, and all of the administration buildings had been closed down and were for sale. But a neighbor told me other companies were coming to town, so things aren’t all going downhill here. I’m really enjoying the faster, uninhibited internet, and the comforting thought that people here expect things to work right, not the other way around.

It’s also kind of sad going around seeing that everything in the stores is made in China (not that that is a surprise or anything), and realizing that we enjoy all of these things, but our environment and people don’t really have to pay the price of producing them all. But I also know from giving up all of our crap that we shipped home that we would get along just fine if us Americans had to give up all of our Chinese made things.

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My mother-in-law is staying with us for a few weeks, which means lots of good home cooking. It also means I can have home cooking for lunch, using a Chinese lunchbox:

It has three layers–the bottom is where the rice goes, and the top two are for different dishes. They can also hold soup. Even though there’s no place for a thermos, like in American lunchboxes, the food stays warm for a long time, and the soup can kind of substitute for a drink anyway.

And my wife brings it to me every day at work! She’s the best wife ever!

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Before I graduated my Chinese teacher told me that to really learn to speak Chinese I had to go live in China. So I decided to move there after graduation, and take whatever job I could find so that I could improve my Chinese. My current Chinese father-in-law says I came to China looking for love, but at the time I was just looking to get a better handle on the language. I had a friend in the Guangzhou symphony at the time, and I was a so-so horn player, so I sent them a tape, because they had some openings. That didn’t work out, so I scoured the internet for English teaching jobs. Eventually I found one in Beijing, which I decided was where I wanted to be, because it was known for its rich culture and having lots of good universities. This was a legit job with a real university, so the deal was that they would send me an invitation letter, which would get me a visa, and I would fly there and begin work.

So I packed my bags and flew off on my own for my second trip to China. This time there was actually someone to pick me up at the airport in a nice school-owned car. They took me to my apartment on campus so that I could get settled in. I didn’t have to start teaching for another week or so, and during that time I didn’t venture much further than the restaurant across from me or the school cafeteria. I think this was due to a combination of not being used to the stares and shouts of ‘hello’ from people, and not having anywhere to go.

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I spent about 2 years teaching English in China from 2002 to 2004. I have nothing against the profession, it takes a lot of work to be good at it, and I don’t think I would mind doing it again someday, despite the poo pooing it gets from the expat community. While I think I made a lot of improvements in my teaching, I never got to where I wanted to be. Perhaps its an unattainable goal anyway.

I first spent two months in Qingdao during the summer of 2001 at the Qingdao International School. I got the job through a professor in NY who matches teachers up with reputable schools (a necessity to avoid nightmare scenarios). For some reason I chose not to fly from Beijing to Qingdao and have them pick me up at the airport. So I arrived in China with just 3 years of college Chinese and tried to do it on my own. Looking back it probably was a dumb idea. After learning how the Chinese wait in line at Beijing station and getting a ticket, I made my way to Qingdao. Oh yea, and I had no idea how to get to the school, or what it was really called. So I started wandering around for a while, then I remembered the name of the school was written on some paperwork I had with me. Soon after that a girl came up to me on the street and offered to help me get to where I was going. I started to get skeptical after she took me first to some scenic spots to take my picture and then to a pearl market. She then suggested we go to Lao shan to have some fun. I agreed, having no idea that Lao shan was basically in the next county. Once we got there I was pretty fed up, so I had her turn our taxi around and take me to my school. When we finally got there I think the meter was at around 100 yuan, and I started pretending I couldn’t understand her protests that she had no way of getting back into town (the school is way out of town). Too bad for me it was the wrong school, and I had to get another taxi driver to take me to the right place.

I was helping teach the ‘summer school’ classes, and was assigned the k-2 kids. The number of students varied from week to week from 3 to 10. I had 2 full-time assistants and several volunteer assistants as well. Sometimes there were more assistants than kids in class. There were a lot of languages spoken, some Korean, some Japanese, a little half-German boy, and a few Chinese kids thrown in the mix. Most of our days we would spend on field trips. We went swimming at a nearby hotel, golfing at a driving range (not so fun for my kids), bowling (a nightmare without bumpers… “Jimmy, stop running down the lane! Stop playing with the ball return!), to the beach (um, where’s Tyler??), and we also visited a couple of factories. I soon learned I was basically a foreign babysitter for these kids during their summer months. I remember one smart mouthed girl’s daddy was the manager at the Shangri-la. 

I got suckered into a few English corners on the weekend, but tried to get away to travel around Shandong when I could. One day I was given Friday off in exchange for staying with one of the other foreign teachers who was in the hospital. This guy was one of the long-term teachers, and had gotten sick a while back with a cough. He didn’t get it checked out right away, and eventually got so bad that he had to have surgery and couldn’t go back home. They found he had cancer, and his lungs kept filling up with water, so he was in a pretty bad way. The school set him up with the best care in Qingdao, but the nurses were afraid to be in the same room as him. They thought they would catch it from him. So some of the teachers had to stay with him, as he was getting worse by the day. Eventually the poor guy died. I guess that’s a lesson to not let things get too bad before its too late to fly back home.

The next year I came to Beijing to teach at a university…

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It’s been about a year since I’ve last been to Hunan, and its been great to get a breath of fresh air for a change. In Beijing you tend to forget that you live in a giant smog bubble until you have the fortune to get on a plane or train and escape to somewhere else. I have escaped to Taoyuan to spend a couple of well-deserved weeks with the in-laws. We took a flight from Beijing to Changde, which is available 4 times a week via Air China. I have to say that despite Air China being cursed left and right a few years ago as being the worst airline in China, it has become a world class airline recently (at least compared to the nightmare stories I am hearing about China Eastern). Air China flies to 3 cities in Hunan: Changsha, Zhangjiajie, and Changde, the latter probably having the fewest visitors. I would guess that at most the Changde airport has 2 or 3 flights a day, and reminds me of flying into my hometown airport, the Kalamazoo/Battle Creek international airport. You walk down a stairway onto the runway and the two things I noticed were that I could actually see the stars from the runway looking up, and that I had finally escaped from the Beijing smog blanket. After getting our luggage and a thirty-minute ride we arrived at our destination.

We are staying in a high school, as my wife’s father is the school principal. That means that in the morning there is a huge gathering of students doing their daily exercises to the voice over the loud speaker. In China a school principal has a much higher status than in the US. In the US the principal’s house gets TP’d, and none of the students really interact with the principal after school, but here, due to probably both the higher importance placed on education and the college entrance exams, and the importance of guanxi, being the principal is a bigger deal. All the school’s former successful students are possible sources of future guanxi for the school’s administrators to use. 

Anyway, after who knows how long of not having a decent vacation it is good to be able to put my feet up for a while. I don’t know how long it’s been since I had a day off of work that I didn’t have to help look after our baby, and here there is an endless stream of friends and family who will look after him. I also don’t know how long it’s been since my wife and I sat down for a decent meal without one of us having to hold the baby while the other quickly scarfs down their food. So I was very happy to sit down for a feast at Taoyuan’s best hotel, the Hotel Fairyland, with a bunch of loud guys insisting I drink baijiu with them. I can’t remember the last time I actually enjoyed a big baijiu lunch with stangers.  (Is that even possible?) I also couldn’t believe that our boy was so tired that he slept through the whole thing, most of which was a heated discussion of the differences between the US and China. Unfortunately my grasp of the dialect coupled with my baijiu logged brain meant that I couldn’t really follow what was being said. All I managed to catch was the suggestion that someone open a casino in Las Vegas for playing the local card game Paofuzi. Most of the food was damn good, and I even managed to skip the goose foot that was served to everyone in an orange sauce, and the local delicassy, turtle. They say that when Jiang Zemin visited the area he had turtle every day.

Even though we are in a small city near what might be called a third-tier city in Central China, they have a baby products store that is stocked with more things than you can find in one of Beijing’s larger supermarkets. And a lot of the designer brands you see in Beijing can be found here too. So even though we might be in the middle of nowhere, the people are pretty well off I think. The only thing I would miss here is the western food you can get in Beijing. Maybe that will change soon though, who knows.

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