Chinese stories

In southern China, at least. Here in Beijing the weather has been pretty good, but in my wife’s hometown in Hunan, they have gotten the worst snows they say they have ever seen. Apparently all the highways in Hunan are shut down, and so are the airports. The news this morning on TV said that over 10,000 people are stuck in their cars on the highways, and food is being sent to them while they wait until they can be rescued.

We had originally planned on staying in Beijing, because travelling to the in-laws would have been tricky with a three-month-old, but the decision has already been made for us, as it has been for millions of migrant workers who won’t be able to return home for the New Year. My friend’s mother came up from Hunan to visit him, and his dad had planned on coming up too, but now he is stuck at home alone with no running water, and intermittent electricity. My in-laws are doing alright–they just sit at home all day and eat what they have. I guess the big family get together will have to wait until things warm up a bit.

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Well, I’ve put a wiki up on my website (here). (I guess it’s called 维基 in Chinese?) The purpose of the wiki is to provide a home for links to online English-Chinese/Chinese-English translations. I got tired of going to google everytime I wanted to find one, so I figured I might as well make my own list. I am thinking of doing something like highlighting two (one C-E, one E-C) translations or websites each month.

So, to start off, here is a blog that accepts translations of English language media from volunteer contributors. For example, here is a translation of a Simon Elegant post from the Time blog (Time blog link bloated with blogspam) translated by ”Vindicated.”

And here (links to 4.6MB PDF file) is an amazing translation of all of Li Qingzhao’s ci poetry by Wang Jiaosheng.

I have no idea what will come of the wiki; I figure one of many things might happen with it, the worst being that it will be taken over by spammers who will bring it down, and the best being that it will somehow survive and grow. To be safe I turned off the email capabilities for now, but I will trust in the wikipedia maxim that there are more good intentioned people than bad. So go in there, check it out, and mess it all up!

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The other day I had to get a hole punched in a belt and grab some lunch, so I headed out to Chaonei Nanxiaojie 朝内南小街 (straight north from Beijing Station). I wanted to stop by a really good jiaozi shop that we had been to several times before, but after backtracking once and still not finding it, I figured it has closed down. Even though I couldn’t have my jiaozi, I liked the changes I saw happening along the street. They have replaced the hodgepodge of shop signs of different colors and sizes with ones that all use similar backgrounds–they just have different fonts. I think it looks a lot nicer that way, as some of the tackier signs can be quite ugly.

I also noticed that some chain stores had moved in, which is a good thing I think. When I was living in the suburbs in Huilongguan, huge chain supermarkets like Wumei, Jingkelong, and Hualian were popping up like moles everywhere, making the place look a lot like suburban US. Without a car there it was not easy to get around. But in the city the chain stores aren’t always big supermarkets, but rather small specialty shops that offer some local foods or custom services. One of the new shops I noticed on Nanxiaojie was a baked sweet potato store that had some sort of new sweet potato-baking technology, and that would deliver!! I bought a couple and they were excellent.

Of course there are always the roast chestnut stores, the most famous being 秋栗香 near Houhai, where you can wait up to a half an hour to get a bag. Beixiaojie also has a good one. There are also a lot of Hanhuang shoe polishing stores. When I visited the South I noticed there were shoe shiners all over the streets, who would do a quick shine for 1 kuai, but when I came back to Beijing I couldn’t find them anywhere. The reason is that they have all been kicked off the streets and only the stores are left.

That trend is already slowly happening with other street vendors like the sweet potato sellers with their recycled oil drums on the back of their three-wheelers. I think it’s not a bad thing, because the stores will most likely be more sanitary, and offer some good quality stuff. Other new stores I noticed that were really popular was a tofu shop and a shop selling Korean baked mantou, which always has a long line outside it for some reason. In the end I picked up some roast chicken legs to go along with my sweet potatoes and headed home. Now I just need to find another good jiaozi shop…

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Here is a funny post (series of pictures) that compares the Dabei Temple 大悲寺, a Buddhist temple in Shanxi that supposedly is the only Buddhist temple in China without a collection box, with the Shaolin Temple 少林寺, the flashy martial-arts training money-making “temple” in Henan. It shows the head of the Dabei Temple in his raggedy gray gowns and the “CEO” of the Shaolin Temple in his new yellow gowns. There are four pages of pictures, the funniest being the ones asking why the Shaolin Temple needs guards, and showing them using the wireless internet in the temple.

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As part of a Beijing government effort to spruce up old hutong neighborhoods, the tiaos around Dongsi are being rennovated. I first noticed this when they started repaving 东四三条. As you can probably imagine, repaving a hutong is not a pretty sight. First, they have to get all of the cars, bicycles, three-wheelers and whatever else is parked in there out. Now, I used to laugh to myself when I would see Beijingers trying so hard to parallel park in these huge spaces by the side of the road. I thought to myself, “they would never make it in places like Chicago where you have only two inches in front and behind to work with … if you’re lucky.” But after seeing how they park in the hutongs, I have a newfound respect for those drivers. Parallel parking in a hutong has to be just as hard, as the drivers aren’t only maneuvering around other cars, but trees, lightposts, piles of bricks and corners of buildings, all while avoiding all sorts of moving objects.

In any case, they get everything that can be moved out of the hutong and tear up the surface. They pile up all of the rubble at either end to be loaded onto a dump truck. (Of course, they do this late at night and early in the morning right outside my window.) Then they somehow manage to squeeze one of those huge road paving machines in there, and it goes to work:

I have no idea what they do when they come to the 90 degree bends!

They did this first with 三条, and then with 四条 and so on, right down the line. (For more on tiaos see this post.) They’ve also put in lamps all along 四条, so at night you can walk down it without feeling like you’re in a creepy back alley.

In the meantime new restaraunts have been popping up and rennovating, and the west end of 东四四条 has become something of a food street. They even started hanging flags saying 美食胡同 this week. Unlike the famous Nanluoguxiang, these are Chinese restaraunts that Chinese people actually go to. The most popular is probably a clam and chicken wing joint that you have to make reservations for ahead of time, and is a hit with the younger crowds. There’s also a Hunan restaraunt, and a Sichuan style private kitchen, or 私房菜, and some other places.

Supposedly the Beijing government has also set aside 1 billion RMB for rennovations of local courtyards and old houses, and construction and rennovation has been going on constantly for almost a year now. They are scheduled to finish sometime in 2008, just in time for the olympics. (Articles on it here and here.) Its nice to take a look around and see all of the traditional carpentry that is going on.

(When looking for stories on the rennovations I came across this interesting article about a lady from Holland who came to China in 1956, fell in love, got married, and has been living in a Dongsi courtyard ever since.)

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