Back on the Train

Chances are if you're reading this, and it's not Friday yet, I'm somewhere on that red line going up or coming back. Again.

Haircut, Round III

I'm an alley rat. I get some weird pleasure taking random turns through the alleys near my apartment with loosely defined missions of finding some random service or product. Little business districts pop out of nowhere - an entire alley of seafood with water running out of a hundred tanks and into the streets, a used-furniture alley, the chopping block alley with live ducks and chickens awaiting your execution orders. Dotting the alley's are people running phone rooms, tailors, game rooms with 80's arcade games, neon lit brothels, cigarette & baijiu stores, and salons. I was on the prowl for a massage joint. It costs about $3 for an hour long and thoroughly strange massage and I figured I'd treat myself for no particular reason.

Bright lights caught my eye reminding me that I needed a haircut. I detoured into an alleyway salon and took a seat. I whipped out my pocket dictionary and pointed to the side of my head and said, "short", then pointed to the top and said "not short." Hopefully that would do and they'd get my point - which explicitly was to not shave my head like had happened in Tianjin. I made little visual cues as to how short I wanted it.

I was bombarded with a long, fast stream of Chinese. "Wah boo hway shwaw Hanyu [not pinyin, I know]/ I don't speak Chinese," I told them in a horribly mangled accent. More Chinese. Not even a little bit slowed down. I repeated myself. I gave up. Maybe the inflections in my English would get the point through: "Dude, I don't speak Chinese."

They got it.

A young lady grabbed a clearly marked "shampoo" bottle off the shelf in front of my chair with proceeded to spray four inches of white foam on the top of my head. She began a 15 minute process of massaging it in.

It began again. A million questions in Chinese. I picked out one I thought I was hearing correctly and told them I was American. I told them I was an English teacher. Confusion. People start walking into the salon from the street to see the laowai getting his head massaged with white foam who doesn't speak crap for Chinese.

A man kept getting closer in closer. Without my glasses I could only see a blur of him in the mirror. I turned right and he was staring at me from about six inches away with the wild eyed joy of a six year old poking a dead alligator with a stick. We both broke into maniacal laughter.

For the remaining 12 minutes of my massage was a endless sequence of someone asking me a question in Chinese, me shrugging, and then uncontrollable laughter - especially from the girl rubbing her hands through my hair with the white foam. There's some strange acid trip of a feeling of having someone else touching your scalp and there being no ability to communicate. It gets weirder when sharp objects enter the picture and the actual haircut begins.

Now is a good time to point out a big cultural difference between Americans and Chinese. The Chinese viewed my presence with curiosity and benign humor. Never did I feel like I was being made fun of. Everyone felt bad for not being able to speak in each others language. In America, most barbers would be profoundly annoyed if a Chinaman came in speaking hardly any Chinese and wanted a haircut. You're in America, speak English[!], right?

I think that's been one of the biggest buffers keeping me sane in China as a non-Chinese speaker. The Chinese seem to have endless patience for foreigners, want to be helpful, and what comes off as rude - the endless staring - really is just an inordinate amount of curiosity. It's nice living somewhere where a sense of humor can come across even without words.

Tags: Treyopia short stories stories haircut hair cut language humor China Chinese Shenzhen alleys streets salon

Chinese Ratings

Inspired by the Book of Ratings, and in desperate need of new material besides short stories and photos to post, I present...

The China Book of Ratings

Fengyoujing
I must confess that I don't know what exactly it is, but I suspected it involves concentrated menthol. It's green, it's cheap, it comes in oddly shaped bottles, it's Chinese traditional medicine. It acts as mosquito repellent, headache cure, and an agent to awaken the user. Apply on temporal lobes, forehead, and underneath your nose. If you're lucky, a little bit will get in your eye and it won't exactly hurt, but you'll be more alert than your last cappuccinos. Bottom line: I like smelling a little minty when I'm not feeling so fresh. A-

Baijiu:
Chinese grain alcohol. Imagine the worst qualities of gin and Everclear mixed together. Imagine this being the national drink of China. Imagine it being so powerful and foul that you can still taste it in a cup that's been washed. The mere smell of it puts this college veteran out of service. You see businessmen tearing it up during lunch for sport. Bottom line: National drink? Try again. F


Chinese Wine:
Great Wall, my preferred brand, is about on par with your typical $7 bottle back home. Except that it costs 32 RMB / $4. I've tried spending a little bit more for aged Cabernet, but it was hideous. For about 60RMB / $7 you can find an excellent bottle of cheap French wine. I've found that if you drink it out of a dixie cup instead of a wine glass, expectations drop drastically enough that you begin tasting the delicate fragrance of strawberry and perhaps a dab of lavender. Bottom line: there's no reason not to find a bottle of French wine. C-

The Chinese Language:
"Car water horse dragon." Is this a sentence to you? No? It is for 1.2 billion people. It means that there are so many cars on the road that it looks like a horse trying to cross a river that is shaped like a dragon. No, you're not going insane. There were no verbs. There was no subject, no object. Just four nouns. Add to this that it is a tonal language. The word "ma" means five different things, it's all in how you say it. You could be asking a question, talking about your mother or even marijuana. The written part is worse. It's non-phonetic. Every single character represents a syllable. Every one. There are 5000 plus characters. It's even worse in HK and Taiwan. A curious idea, sure, but you know what would be really handy with the most precise oral language ever devised? Cues on how to speak it by looking at the word. Bottom line: Mao was on the right page when he thought about replacing characters with pinyin. "A" for creativity, "F" for sticking with it for 4000 years. F

Tags: Treyopia China Chinese ratings book of ratings baijiu wine Fengyoujing traditional medicine language characters

Chinese Wedding

My roommates description of a Chinese wedding...

I accompanied two friends to a Chinese style wedding this past weekend. I figured, why not go? I've never been to a Chinese wedding and I haven't seen my friends in awhile. The bride is Chinese and the groom is actually British. He doesn't understand a word of Chinese and the bride's guests don't do so well with English.

There was free wine and beer. Everyone was drunk before the event even began.

So, the ceremony, if you will, was conducted by two friends of the bride, half in Chinese, half in English. The happy couple were then asked to exchange something like vows. The bride give a heartwarming speech about how she met this fat, ugly, boring Englishman and fell in love with him...awww isn't that sweet. Then the groom's turn. He explains how he couldn't stand the bride when they met. He thought she was bossy and annoying....but he loves her! awww

Then for the dinner. The groom goes around to every table (about 8 of them with 10 people each) and does bottoms-up with every person. His face was the color of the red wine by the time he got to our table.

The dinner was followed by "games". These included a line of females and the groom, blindfolded, had to feel each one and guess which was the bride. You'd think it would be easy to tell which one was wearing a wedding dress but, he was so far gone he had no clue.

The rest of the evening is a blur. (not because I was drunk. No, I was quite composed. But because everyone else was so drunk and off the wall that I couldn't keep up with everything that was happening) Let's see, the groom tackled the bride and they were rolling around on the floor, the groom decided to chew out a work colleague for acting above everyone else at work (I thought I saw a fist fight coming), and the bride, who knows why, got angry and started to smash plates on the floor. She then took a large knife, slashed her wedding cake in half, threw the knife against the wall, and stormed out.

As entertaining as this was, I thought it was a good time to leave.

tags: Treyopia China Chinese weddings weddings stories short stories