The Customer Is Always Wrong

Yesterday the holiday continued and I saw one of the people from the compound walking her piglet. It was an unruly, spirited little creature that had her running around this way and that. Now I don’t know which category quite to file this under, other than the plain daft. Maybe if I have to force a category out I can consider this as the Chinese middle class catching up and in places surpassing the West in terms of fashions. Is that a category? Not really, at least not yet.

Things that were of greater obvious interest to my work were the observations on personal space. When taking the bus and being out and about I have noticed how I have a general sense of being among a greater density of people that I am accustomed to. Coming from a low, flat, wide, low-density city (relatively speaking) to a more built up and densely packed city this difference is clear. I get the feeling that space has a relation to class, as it does in most places, but more than that, that space feels more like a series of compartments rather than free flowing expanses. It is as if I have a greater awareness of boundaries. The exceptions here are the beaches and the mountains which are also a feature of Xiamen. What is more, Xiamen is relatively relaxed from what I see of other Chinese cities and it makes a comparison even possible. Shenzhen on the other hand seemed like such a different vision of a city that a comparison is barely possible.

I was looking at the way that the vast majority of infants are carried in public rather than pushed in chairs as they are in the West. One of my artist colleagues had a theory for this that it leaves a lasting effect on the child. This may be true. For my part I was mostly interested in the mechanics of carrying, studying how they are lifted and held, how the little ones hold on and how they are displayed.

We had an artist’s dinner in the evening and presented some of our work to one another in a salon type atmosphere. It was quite satisfying to have this opportunity to engage on a more than simply social level. To the dinner I brought an item I had been saving for a special occasion: a traditional British Christmas pudding. Incongruous though it was, the pudding together with the other Western dishes served were pleasant reminders of more familiar foodstuffs. Not that I pine for them, I don’t, but they have acquired a nostalgia they never previously had. For this dinner there were no goose feet or snake liquors anywhere in sight though some of the more adventurous omnivores amongst us traded strange food experiences, the silk worm cocoons being to my mind the winner.

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The new year celebrations have got going in earnest. For the first evening a big group of us from CEAC were fortunate to be invited to a family dinner which made an odd but convivial grouping of Western artists and Xiamen caterers. The food was abundant and varied, friends of the family dropped in to say hello and the telephone rang often with ‘xin nian hao!’ greetings exchanged.

As the night wore on the fireworks started up and the TV spring festival galas went into overdrive. The Olympic opening ceremony from 2008 did not come out of the ether, these Spring Festival shows have been working a similar line of high-tech syncronised group spectacle for a while. It is funny to observe that the street in China can appear quite chaotic and full of many competing, often amplified voices, yet these stage shows are the antithesis of all of that. They are self-contained, slick and reflect a single vision.

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Something I have come to enjoy is discerning the order in the seemingly free for all chaos on the roads here in Xiamen. The best vantage point to do this is from the front seat of the bus, opposite the driver. I will take some pictures next time to show what I mean as there is a quite different etiquette and system of priorities on the roads here than there is in the UK.

Last night I had another Chinese driving experience, this time viewed from the front seat of a car. A taxi driver in front of us halted abruptly without warning almost causing an accident. The driver beside me was quick enough to brake and avoided going into the back of the taxi. “Chinese drivers” my driver commented in frustration and resignation as we accelerated away and got moving again. Not a minute later the situation was reversed with my driver slamming on the brakes, bringing us to a halt, having spotted our destination on a side street to our right. We made a tight turn, this time without comment, drove up the slope and arrived.

Reflecting on this afterwards my first thought was that this was plain hypocrisy but that quickly gave way to the sense that as a driver you practically have to drive in such a way or else you are not comprehensible to the other drivers. An excess of deference would prove confusing and liable to cause problems. I believe the frustration that I detected came more from a sense that these were the rules of the road not from the particular actions of that one taxi driver, though I am not sure my driver would have expressed it quite this way.

Yesterday I also went out looking for verbs. Without being much more specific than that I made a list of things people do here that somehow identify me, either directly or indirectly. I may try to see how I can work these into the translated texts. Whilst out walking I also came across two outdoor performing sites. It may be worth seeing if either of these could be used to do a very public performance.

I’m reading a book by Yu Dan that is a popular contemporary interpretation of Confucius. It is adapted for her TV series which was a big hit here. While I see quite a variation between what is outwardly happening in China and the principles she outlines, in much the same way one can say the same about the West and Christianity, I can also see how these principles remain part of a commentary that shapes what is taking place and how people relate to it. I’m not sure quite what to do with this information yet, I’m still absorbing, but it does help explain a few things.

One thing that I have not had very well explained to me is significance of the twelve animal years. I get dribs and drabs from people here and there but it doesn’t add up to a coherent system yet. That said, what ever it does mean, it is practically impossible to not notice that we are now entering a rabbit year as there are rabbits literally everywhere I look. At first I regarded the cartoon boy and girl rabbits as simply kitsch ornamentation but the sheer volume and variety of them has forced me to look at them again. Additionally, not only are there rabbits everywhere I realised that pretty much everyone has put up red paper banners around their doors. It is simply the done thing. The apartment was becoming conspicuous on account of its absence of a banner so, to not play the Westerner too overtly, I decided to embrace this new Chinese year by getting a couple of rabbits and the red banners too and I put them up on the wall and around the door frame. The front door now looks much the same as that of my neighbours. While I’m not willing and fortunately not obliged to drive a car ‘Xiamen style’ in order to integrate myself into the life here, I am amused by my two new rabbit friends up on the wall. Who knows, maybe they will bring me good luck.

In any case, I feel I can now properly say HAPPY NEW YEAR!

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Yesterday I did a few translation experiments with different software, both that from English language websites and Chinese translation websites. So, first off was this simple instruction booklet type of sentence that distorts as it is bounced forwards and back between different language sites:

Open back compartment to insert batteries

对插入物电池的开背部隔间

The opening of the insert back the battery compartment

插入物的开头电池盒

Insert at the beginning of the battery box

在电池箱初的插入物

Early in the battery box inserts

及早在电池箱插入物

Early in the battery box inserts

Here is where it reaches a point of stability and agreement between the two languages and the two translation software programmes. This point of agreement is quite curious as it makes almost no sense at all. I will have to ask if it is as opaque in Chinese as it is in English. I then went onto a longer sentence, the start of my complaint letter to KLM, as a matter of fact:

I am writing to inform of a recent excruciatingly bad experience with Air France / KLM and to ask that you apologise and refund me for it.

我书写通知与法航/KLM的最近极痛苦坏经验和问您道歉并且退还我它的。

I have written notice and Air France / KLM’s recent bad experience and very painful to apologize and ask you to refund my it.

我书面通知和法航/KLM’ s最近坏经验和非常痛苦道歉和要求您退还我它。

I am writing and Air France / KLM ‘s recent bad experience and very painful I apologize and ask you to return it.

我是文字和法航/KLM ‘ s最近坏经验和非常痛苦我道歉并且要求您退回它。

I text and Air France / KLM ‘s recent bad experience and very painful I apologize and ask you to return it.

I like the way that this one ends with me apologising. Using Google translate alone to bounce the text to and fro, comes to the rather direct and charming:

I recently wrote a very bad notice, Air France / KLM and experience, you apologize, refund me.

So from this I can conclude that there are quite some variations between the different translation sites and that words and sentences evolve through stages as levels of distortion amplify one another. There are some further mechanics still to exploit here, time and tense gets very confused because of the differences between the languages.

Taking a walk a little later, a whole other form of language game also revealed itself yesterday: letter substitution, as this rug is a good example of. Also worth noting was the preponderance of amplified voices. There is not the same idea of noise pollution here as in the West and the streets and shops can be a bit of a free for all with voices and music in competition. The distorted headache inducing voice with the ever present threat of squealing feedback is something I am growing used to and might just lift from Xiamen and use myself.

After all this playing around with words and wandering about town we gathered and had a small afternoon party in the new CEAC gallery, which is looking very smart indeed. I heard another gallery will open on the floor above too so this could be the beginning of a new gallery district in Xiamen.

In the last language exchange I learnt quite a lot of new words, I only hope I manage to remember a few of them. Unfortunately, I have the impression I forget words as quickly as I remember them. Trying to extend my vocabulary feels like bailing out a leaking boat with a teacup, that is to say with effort I can get ahead of this problem but relax for a moment and I am in trouble. One word that I will remember, and hopefully not in the place of another, is the word for computer 电脑 the two parts of which are ‘electric’ and ‘brain’. So simple and so correct.

When I read and listen to Chinese I have the problem of not knowing the compound words like the two parter ‘electric brain’, so I don’t know where to cut the stream of characters or sounds coming at me into intelligible chunks. This is the same problem that trips up the translation software. It may be that in this problem there is something that can work for me. I’m not quite sure what it is but I feel like I have to explore my difficulty with the language and use this very directly rather than view it as an obstacle that is preventing me from making a more fluent performance. I will have to look for ways to translate words into actions and vice versa. I will probably start on a quite literal level and see different ways that this can be framed and then go from there. It should be intelligible as a system but it should also prove flexible enough so that it does not feel like a straightjacket after ten minutes. I hate one trick pony performances.

The ideas board is coming along and starting to register more of the things I am working with.

Finally, I saw a nice example of Chinglish yesterday CARVED IN STONE. It is so much better when the stakes are higher and you see this sort of stuff in stone rather than simply on a menu. Seeing how the different examples of Chinglish all have different flavours I think there is more to this than simply Google translate. There must be some Chinese software that performs a similar task but in another fashion. I will have to get hold of some Chinese translation websites and/or software.

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