Chinese National Holiday 2007

国庆节 Guó Qìng Jié

Chinese National Day Festival

Well, it definitely feels like I have been in China for over a year now. I've experienced the same chinese holiday twice. And already I'm feeling much more chinese. Last year Joel, Jami, Steven and I fought the crowds of chinese at Shengtang mountain, Longsheng rice terraces and Yongshuo. But this year I knew not to try to be a tourist during the national holiday. I spent most of the week in Liuzhou and then went to visit my little sister's village.

A week or two before the holiday Ken, who used to be Joel's and my driver opened a bar. It is called C-Vista. He says he named it after Microsoft Windows new operating system. Hahaha. Ken credits Joel with giving him the idea to open a bar. Before he left to return to America, Joel said to Ken one night "you should figure out what you want to do with your life Ken". And so he opened a bar. Fish (on the left of the picture) and I went to Ken's bar on the opening night. And Ken (right of the picture) calls me all the time asking me to come visit his bar. Having a foreigner in his bar is apparently good for business. :)

I have some Chinese friends that are English teachers in high schools and they asked me to go to their classes and talk to the students. It is good listening comprehension practice for the students. First I went to Warren's classes - two classes at #3 middle school (really it's a high school). The students were kind of shy but they were very excited to have a foreigner in their classroom. Then I visited Andrew's classes. He teaches at Liuzhou High School, the best high school in the city. It is very modern and looks like a college campus.

Chinese high school life is very different than American high school life. At some schools like Liuzhou High School most of the students live in dormitories at the school. They start class at about 8am and finish at about 10pm. In the afternoon they have a break for a couple of hours to rest or sleep. There are usually about 60 students in a class and they sit in the same classroom all day - the teachers come to them. Since the chinese are only allowed to have one child, the classmates become like a family. I'm amazed at how many people stay in close contact with their classmates from elementary, middle, high school and college or university. They spread out all over the country but whenever they or their friends like myself go to a city, they always know somebody in that city who can help you or show you around. The Chinese guanxi (relationships) network is so fascinating. I will have to write about it sometime in detail.

When Ray came home for the national holiday we went to his former high school too. One of his high school friends is a teacher there now. Ray suggested I bring some American dove chocolate to the class and hand out to the students if they asked questions. Of course this was a very popular suggestion and these students were not so shy. They were very friendly and welcoming.
One day my little brother (Ray) and my little sister (Qiufeng) and I went to Long Tan park. The park is now free as are most parks in Liuzhou. We climbed to the very top of one of the mountains on the sceret path I discovered last year. It was nice to sit on top of the world and talk and enjoy the scenery. Ray got his hair all cut off the day before so he now thinks he is really Michael from Prison Break. :)

We all rode on the pirate's ship. Ray wouldn't take his hands off the bar in front of him. Haha :) I know that's losing face, but come on!!! This one is small compared to the one Qiufeng and I rode on at Merryland (the mini-disney world near Guilin). That one would give Ray a heart attack!!!

We all went to Ray's grandmother's house for lunch and my little sister got to meet my little brother's whole family.

Later that night we all met again for dinner at a new Sichuan hot pot which was just opened by Rays friend or cousin or something - he calls her his little sister. This sister/brother thing really is out of hand. Hot pot is really cool - basically a huge fondu pot full of boiling spicy oil. This place was kind of unique. It's a buffet. All the meat and other foods are out for you to pick what you want. And you can eat and dring as much food and beer and coke and other drinks you want for about $6 per person!!!

So, one more LaoWai (foreigner) bites the dust. Mike Hannigan from EDS went back to Canada/America. He's a great guy and everybody in Liuzhou will miss him. When I landed back in the China in August I asked Mike what was new and he casually said he got married the day before. WOW! His wife is Mindy ( in the right of this picture). So Mindy will go back to Canada soon too. They are working on the paperwork now. She will do great in Canada!

Ray and I went for a bicycle adventure in Liuzhou. We rented bikes and rode to a park south of Liuzhou. It is called a Luowei Sightseeing Agricultural Scenic Spot. I thought it would be a farm. But it was really a big orchard. They were having a Youzi festival. Youzi is a big sweet grapefruit. I like them very much. They are not bitter like an american grapefruit.

You could pick your own youzi and eat as many as you want - just couldn't take them with you.

They also had these walkways covered in vines with all kinds of gourds hanging from them. Very cool. :)

After the park we rode back to Liuzhou to eat Luosifen (local Liuzhou noodles in a soup made from snails). We both love Luosifen. Now we will both really miss it since I too am leaving Liuzhou too.

After lunch we rode our bikes to the Liuzhou zoo. They don't have a lot of animals but they have some shows - lions and tigers riding on horses, monkeys balancing upside down on goats horns while they walk tight ropes, bears riding bicycles and jumping rope, sea lions playing basket ball,... funny stuff. More like a circus than a zoo. And they had holstein cows and ostriches or emus and camels and deer and other animals all in a big pen with a raised walkway above it. Pretty cool. And the FATTEST bear I have ever seen!!! But maybe the most popular attraction at the zoo that day was the lao wai (me). Ray said maybe they had a cage for me. :)

The next day I was even more of a curiosity to the locals. I went with Qiufeng to her home town a small village southeast of Liuzhou about 5 hours by bus. She said that I was the first foreigner ever to go to her village. Of course there was lots of staring and talking in their local language (not mandarin chinese). Her father and mother are farmers. They grow rice (that's rice in the foreground of this picture) and other vegetables and fruits.


Qiufeng's family.

We walked across the rice fields, visited the village elementary school and then climbed a small mountain. Good view from the top but still the haze. Many people say it is smog in Liuzhou but I think there are not many factories around her home town. I think it is very much caused by the weather and humidity too.

We all got a ride on the family motorcycles to back from the mountain.

This is the family in her cousin's small doctor's office which is below his house. He studied medicine from a master. They have a big house in the village. That is where we lived. In the countryside like this, people are allowed to have more than one child to help with the farming. Her cousin has two boys. There are 4 children in Qiufeng's family. She has two sisters and a brother.

We found a Luosifen restaurant in PingNan the nearest big town. It wasn't as good as Liuzhou luosifen but it was fun to find it so far away from Liuzhou.

So, I came back from the holiday and FINALLY I have a new job offer.

I will move to Ningbo a city near the sea south east of Shanghai. Ningbo is a major export city for china and that is why I am going there actually. Through one of my former Ford colleagues I got a contact at a company that is making a new part for Ford. They were interested in hiring somebody with Ford experience. So, I will now work directly for a Chinese company instead of being a contract employee. This is sure to be an interesting experience.

I will miss Liuzhou. I have many great friends here and my Chinese family. Ray's family has kind of adopted me and given me a chinese name. 帅伶俐 (Shuai Ling Li). Shuai is the family name and means handsome. Ling Li is my given name and means smart or clever. I like it much better than my first chinese name because it was given to me by my new adopted family. All of his aunts thought for a week or more what they should name me. It's not just a made up name that sounds good.

So, for now,I must say goodbye to Liuzhou.

I think it is a beautiful city filled with beautiful warm people. It will always be my hometown in China.

I will soon start the next stage of my China adventure. A new city, a new job, probably a new language (or at least a different local dialect).

Stay tuned...

Study Chinese for 2 months

Studying Chinese

I have been in China for almost 15 months now. For the first 11 months I was working a lot and trying very hard to study chinese in my free time but I always felt tired when I finished work and wanted to get outdoors and do something. So I only made a little progress.

Then in June my contract ended unexpectedly and I suddenly had lots of free time. So, after travelling around China for a few weeks and then going back to America for a few weeks I returned to LiuZhou at the beginning of August and hired a private tutor to teach me chinese.


Her name is Wendy and she is a great teacher. She is very patient. I have had many friends try to help me learn and other teachers i have paid. They were very nice but it has been really cool to learn from a professional teacher. Also nice to have the time to concentrate on it full time and really make some progress.



When I was in Shanghai I found a box set of books and CD's called Interactive Chinese. It had 8 books and 16 CDs. The first book teaches Phoenetics and the basics of Chinese Characters. Then there are 3 text books containing a total of 62 lessons. There is a mock HSK proficiency test and 3 books for practice reading which are not all that useful actually. The box said that if you finish this course you should be able to pass the first level chinese language proficiency exam called HSK. Each lesson started with a new conversation. It introduced some new vocabulary and also had a grammar lesson.

For the first 3 weeks I studied for 3 hours in the morning with the teacher and then spent 5-8 hours in the evening reviewing what I just learned and all the previous material and prepared for the next day's class. I really want to learn to read and write chinese as well as speak chinese, so this was a big challenge since I was learning about 40 new words every day. After 3 weeks my head was so full of chinese words that I just couldn't learn anything new.

I took a week off and just tried to review and maintain what I had already learned. Then I decided that learning to write so many characters wasn't realistic and I stopped trying to write, but continued with reading and speaking. After 2 months I finished the 62 lessonsand I have a vocabulary of approximately 1500 words. I can definitely get by in normal conversation and chinese people are so surprised to hear me speak good chinese. My vocabulary is still pretty small but if I can get them to speak slowly to me I can do ok.

I haven't tried to take the practice tests yet but I have looked at them and they still look really hard. There are a lot of words I don't recognize. I have two books now (maybe 4 or 5 practice tests). I plan to keep reviewing my vocabulary and try one of the tests. See how well I can do on it. Then learn all of the new vocabulary that I find in it. Then try again... Hopefully I will eventually be ready to take the test. :)

I want to tell you a few things about the chinese language now.

Like everything in China, the chinese language is ancient and has a whole culture behind it.

Spoken Chinese

There are 1.3 billion people in China. The official language of china is Mandarin or Pŭtōnghuà. This is the language I am trying to learn. This language basically comes from Beijing, the capital. It is taught in the schools and should be understood by all chinese.

Haha!! Read on...

There are 56 nationalities in China. 92% of the people are of the Han nationality but there are 55 minorities as well. These minorities are like the American Indian tribes. They have their own language, customs, festivals, dance, music, crafts, foods, and traditional clothing. As well as the nationalities having different languages different regions or even different cities have their own dialects.

From city to city or city to countryside the people speak different dialects. People from the north can't understand the southern dialects. In some areas (in the South and East), you can cross a hill or a river from one village to the next, and the inhabitants will not be able to understand each other. The differences between the spoken languages of the South and the North are greater than those between Italian and Spanish.

These are the major dialects:

• Pŭtōnghuà (Mandarin): the common language (over 1 billion speakers), based on Beijing dialect. The official language of China since 1913.
  
• Wú: spoken in Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces and in Shanghai and Hong Kong by about 77 million people. I should learn something about this language since I will be moving to Zhejiang province.
  
• Yuè (Cantonese): spoken by about 66 million people in Guangdong, Guangxi and Hainan provinces, and also Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Malaysia and many other countries.


• Mĭn Nán (Southern Min): parts of Fujian, Guangdong, Hainan, Zhejiang and Jiangxi.


• Jìnyŭ: Shanxi province and also in Shanxi and Henan provinces by about 45 million people.


• Hakka: south eastern China, parts of Taiwan


• Xiāng (Hunanese): spoken by about 25 million people in Hunan, Sichuan, Guangxi and Guangdong provinces.


• the list goes on...

I live in the city of Liuzhou in the province (state) of Guangxi. Most people who were born here don't speak Mandarin in daily practice but a dialect called Liuzhou hua or (Liuzhou language). The nearest big city is Guilin (2 hours away) and they speak Guilin hua. They both share some words with Putonghua so I can understand a little. But in the capital of this province, Nanning, 2-1/2 hours away, they speak Cantonese which is very different.

Last weekend I went home with my friend. She is from a small village east of Nanning. In that area most people can speak Bai hua which is maybe like cantonese. But in her specific village of shuang ma they speak Shuang ma hua. I have to say I didn't understand them and they didn't understand me. :) Made me feel like maybe I was wasting my time with Mandarin. It is mind boggling!

Chinese Characters

However, there is one common written language which is pretty amazing. Hanzi is the name for the chinese characters. There are supposedly about 80,000 chinese characters. But only about 3000 are commonly used. Chinese characters are basically one syllable, and many words are made up of two or more chinese characters or syllables, like in english. So I may know 2000 words but only 500 or 600 characters.

Chinese characters are not phonetic. Just by looking at a character you do not know how to say it.

Pinyin (pronounced 'peen-een')

Pinyin is the english (or romanized) spelling of the chinese words. Pinyin is a phoenetic system that tells you how to say the Chinese words. Learning pinyin is the first step in learning chinese. Pinyin is pretty easy to learn. It is interesting that even chinese children learn Pinyin before they learn to write chinese characters.

The hardest thing about speaking chinese is tones. There are 5 tones.
1 neutral tone... high, not rising or falling
2 rising... like english uses for questions "huh?" rises at the end
3 falling... then rising like we would say "well..." when we are thinking
4 falling... like we would use when angry "damn!" or a command "stop!"
5 no tone... very short, not rising or falling

Here are a few examples:
English .........Character..... Pinyin ..........Note:
thing..............东西............... dōng xi ........netral tone and no tone, the characters mean 'east west'

thing............. 事情............... shì qing....... falling tone, no tone, a different word meaning 'thing'
to be............. 是................... shì................ falling
but................ 但是.............. dàn shì......... falling, falling
laboratory... 实验室.......... shí yàn shì... rising, falling, falling

The really confusing thing is there may be 80 thousand chinese characters but the english spelling pinyin for many are the same. My favorite example is the pinyin word shi. I gave a few examples above.

Shi can have 4 different tones, but in my 1300 page chinese dictionary there are 18 pages of the pinyin spelling 'shi' . 8 characters with neutral tone (but used in 108 words), 9 characters with rising tone (used in 208 words), 6 characters with falling-rising tone (used in 52 words), 28 characters with falling tone (246 words). That's over 600 'shi' words or words with a 'shi' character or syllable in them. When you hear somebody say 'shi' it could mean 600 different things!!!

Learning Chinese is a fascinating experience. I remember how proud I was when I first got here and made friends with some chinese people. They all spoke good english, but as I got a little more confident with Pinyin, I started sending them pinyin text messages. And they often didn't know what i was saying because the pinyin spelling can mean so many things.

So i had to learn the characters. And now i have to remember which of those 41 shi's is the right one. Shi is just one example - I have to do that with every word. And then I have to get the words in the right order because of course chinese grammar is not the same as english. I try to practice my chinese with my chinese friends but they want to help me and they always correct my many many mistakes. That just frustrates and depresses me. I actually get much more reward from talking to people who don't speak english. We may not be able to understand each other very well, but they can't do any better in english, they appreciate my efforts, and best of all, they can't correct me. HAHAHA

So, my goal for my next adventure in Ningbo, is to find some friends who don't speak good english to practice my chinese with. It shouldn't be that hard. I am surrounded by them. There are over a billion mandarin chinese speakers in this country. And maybe less than 5% of them speak better english than I speak chinese. I have a billion teachers!!! I just have to get over the fear of failure and talk!!!

Stay tuned... I am sure I will keep learning interesting things about this language, culture and people.