I’ve had enough of this!

I want to speak really good English, like a really good native speaker.

Who can help me then? There is no way I can marry a native English-speaking woman now. Well, I’m talking (writing, to be precise) as though I can easily find one who is also interested in me!

I’m not the sort of guys women can have a crush on at first glance. People have to get to know me a lot before they can like me very much. Smacks of boasting then.

Now back to the topic of learning to speak a foreign language that your spouse speaks. If you’re lucky enough to have one and you don’t speak like a native speaker of that foreign language, you are wasting such a good opportunity and even your life!

But, I cannot justifiably blame you for that too much. It’s a human weakness. Me for one. I’ve been in Beijing for more than six years and I’ve never been to the Great Wall here though I’ve been to Qinghuangdao and sometimes I got really close to the city’s section of the Wall. I always think that if I really want to go to, say Badaling, I can do that on any weekend and so I don’t do it.

The most immediate reason why I can’t marry a native English-speaking woman is that I’ve already got married with and want to keep at my side the best woman in the world. But, she doesn’t speak English. It would be wonderful if she spoke English as a native tongue!

There must be a work-around, though.

Yep, a language exchange partner!

I’ve spoken Chinese for almost 30 years (I don’t remember when I started to speak it) and grew up in an area where Standard Chinese is spoken. My favorite books are ancient and modern Chinese classics. I can teach you some Dongbeihua  if you like, though.

So, anyone interested in my offer -  be my language exchange partner?

In this world where people are connected via visible and invisible networks. Our mutual help will be very easy, via Skype, MSN, or QQ, or even recordings (e.g. I record my translation lessons for some visually impaired students who want to be translators).

For more about me and my contact info, click here.

When the Chinese say someone else has shanghai le tamen de ganqing (伤害了他们的感情) and this expression is translated as they “have gotten their feelings hurt”, something is missing to native English speakers – the part of it that makes this expression really meanful to the Chinese.

How important is ganqing to the Chinese? If ganqing between Chinese people is hurt, it doesn’t simply make the victim “feel bad”. It makes him extremely disheartened. The victim interprets the hurt as a denial of all previously established rapport over a long and maybe very difficult time together and his past efforts to look after the inflicter’s well-being – it’s how you feel when a friend of yours betrays you, who you think you’re a loyal friend with and who you’ve always believed is a loyal friend with you, too, until the infliction occurs.

After ganqing is totally lost between two Chinese people, nothing else that matters in this relationship survives – either a romantic one or a long-time friendship.

*This post was inspired by Austin Ramzy, an Iowa, U.S.-grown,  Harbin, China-educated, and thus presumably Mandarin-speaking reporterHong Kong-born bastard writing for The Times Time, who again does his subtle China-bashing in the magazine’s blog.

Instead, if people understood the historical contexts in which the world has existed, they would have a much clearer and different view on almost everything. Reading history gives people a revealing historical perspective.

We the Chinese are justifiably proud of only our long history that has extended for thousands of years running. For most of our history, China was a world leader in science, technology, economy, and military power and maintained a regional hegemony dynasty after dynasty.

This, in fact, is a mixed blessing and was precisely why China’s leading advantage began to disappear when the people in West Europe were forced to revolutionize their technological, scientific, cultural, social, political, economic, and military systems under the huge pressures of invading nomadic tribes. After their land routes to the East had been cut off by roaming barbarians, they started to open up sea routes that they hoped would lead them to their trading partners in the faraway East. While being self-sufficient and self-centered, China, a haven tucked away in a safe Eurasian corner, was strong enough to repel or assimilate any invading nomads from only the north and didn’t feel the need to change at all.

Time went by, as it ever did.

Finally, when a static, agricultural China came into contact with a dynamic, industrialized West whose opium cargos and gunships arrived by sea from the other end of the Eurasian landmass, its world soon crumbled.

Then, it took China more than a century to gather itself and stand on its feet again only less than 60 years ago, which we should remember.

Every time I visit the library, I feel so good about being served by the government-funded institution because it makes me feel like a Chinese citizen being taken care of by the State. Wrong. The library is in fact financed by Beijing City rather than the State.

There is another library to the west a little closer from my department, the much larger National Library of China. This one is supported by the State. I once seriously considered starting to borrow books from NLC, but later was very disappointed to find that borrowing certain books there and taking them home to read required a card-holding borrower to have at least a postgraduate degree. They include imported foreign-language books.

Unfortunately, I’m not equipped with one of those required papers and the English books there in great quantities were the reason why I’d thought about changing over to NLC. I’d hoped I could take my favorites home to read!

When recalling my complaint about the discriminatory national library, my wife smirked over the phone, telling me that “You can wait for me to bring home my papers.” She now studies medicine at a postgraduate school of Guiyang Medicine College and will graduate about this time next year.

The top librarian at NLC seems to think people without at least a postgraduate degree cannot borrow take-away English NLC books for a meaningful purpose that his or her counterpart at BCL identifies with so much.

Last night, I completed Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress, the fourth Dan Brown’s book in my reading order. His thrillers are characterized by a day or so time span during which his main storyline unfolds. Generally, his heroes and heroines have to wait almost the whole book before they can go to bed again (sometimes on different ones) after they get up close to midnight or in the early morning. One of his heroes Robert Langdon, in two thrillers, all starts with a rude wakening by phone rings at ugly hours and then checks his clocks, “groaning and dazed”, before reluctantly getting up.

As I read it, among the four thrillers (The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, Deception Point, and Digital Fortress, in my reading order), his earliest one, Digital Fortress, the last one in my reading order, is the most stupidly written.

I doubt that Dan Brown himself was convinced by the ridiculous behaviors of his brainchildren. The story begins with the hero David being sent in an early morning to Spain in search of a mysterious ring, which spoils a planned romantic stay with his girlfriend, the heroine Susan, in a mountain resort that day.

Susan works for National Security Agency, a secretive U.S. code-breaking unit that intercepts communications around the world and stores top-class U.S. intelligence and all the U.S. engineering blueprints, atomic bomb designs, trade secrets, and everything in the world’s bestest database consisting of an enormous army of servers. Fontaine, the first-in-command of NSA is foolish enough to let Strathmore, the second-in-command, carry out a fishy yet seemingly well-intended scheme to publish a tampered algorithm (Digital Fortress) with a backdoor built in for the use of the unsuspecting world code-writing community.

Sadly, it turns out that Strathmore is just trying to get rid of David, the boyfriend of Susan, so that he can develop a love relationship with her and that the Digital Fortress Dan Brown has tried so hard to sell to his readers is in fact a clever, ruthless computer virus. Things go awry when the eager, deaf assassin Strathmore hires fails to kill David and Strathmore unknowingly and pig-headedly (so stupid for his position in one of the world’s most intelligent organizations) feeds the virus into the array of servers that store everything that makes the U.S. what it is.

Apart from the storyline, his descriptions of code-breaking, digital attacks and defenses, email tracing, computing languages and so on are simply unconvincing. Reading the novel is a little like watching a purportedly top-grade computer hacker who has to routinely check his keyboard when typing or uses an Internet Explorer with a local link in the address bar to supposedly browse an Internet site.

The best thriller in the box set is, of course, The Da Vince Code, which made Dan Brown. But my favorite is Deception Point. It’s clear that Dan Brown has did enough homework before writing this one. He presents a convincing, brainy, and exciting venture at a faster pace than that of The Da Vinci Code, whose characters often sit, talking, reading, reading, thinking, thinking, talking. Angels and Demons starts as the revenges of an old cult resurrected, which turns out to be a stupid blunder of a high-rank Catholic official.

Bad or good with his stories, Dan Brown gives everyday and intelligent language in his books that can serve as good materials for me to hone my translation skills.

I placed an order for two box sets, one containing six Harry Potter books and the other four of Dan Brown’s novels. This order costs me 532 yuan (about USD 70). Why so sad? Because this means that I earn Chinese wages to pay for U.K. books: Too EXPENSIVE. Though the money will well match what I’ll get in return.

I’m the kind of people who like buying books more than reading them. More than that, I like owning books better than borrowing them from libraries. I look on books as part of my family, not as come-and-go guests.

I’m not sure I can get around to reading them, but I persuaded myself to buy them by telling me that I could always transfer them to my kid in the future. (Note: No kids yet.)

Update:

The books were delivered home. I love them!

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.

* 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.

*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?)