799 Words

This'n here is my b log archive. iffin youins fancy readin' muh knew scribblins ya ken fend 'er yonder:

YONDER BLOG

Have you ever played the game Mad Gab? If you have skip the rest of this paragraph: the “it” person reads a short phrase off of a card aloud to his team. To him the words look like complete gibberish. The card might read “yewl bees or re,” which makes no sense, but to his team hopefully it actually sounds like (or approaches sounding like) “you‘ll be sorry.” The team tries to guess as many phrases a they can before time runs out.

They’re playing Mad Gab in China without knowing it. The Chinese character system is so complex that, in order to give foreigners an outside chance at literacy, there’s a hybrid (written) Chinese language that uses the English alphabet (It’s a phonetic rendering of Chinese sounds with accent marks denoting the proper tones). For an American the system makes reading possible. But for Chinese, this “pinion” language amounts to a game of Mad Gab in which they not only have to be the reader, but also the guesser (they must say the sound indicated by the pinion letters, and then ask themselves…the word that I just said, what did it sound like?) if they hope to derive meaning.
One of the coolest things about Chinese characters is their basis in practical reality. They‘re like hieroglyphics (perhaps they are hieroglyphics) -sketches of real things put together to tell a story. For example, when I’m in the valley of decision (trying to figure out which bathroom is for dudes) I need to look for a drawing of a field that includes the pen-stroke for strong. “Field Strong,” that’s “man.” The symbol for woman is harder to read, I think it’s “nag strong.”
There’s a lot of history in the characters too, some of which will really make your socks go up and down if you’re a fan of the books of Moses: the symbol for “covet” is a woman between two trees, the symbol for “boat” indicates a vessel and eight people. All this in atheist China, crazy huh?
Today we arrived in Beijing and introduced ourselves to the city’s infamous public transit system. Since arriving in Asia it’s been my dream to see the Packers in action (actually I did catch a few minutes of a Greenbay game on TV in Bangkok’s U.S. embassy waiting room, but that’s not the kind of Packers I’m referring to). The Packers are the people who are employed by the subway system to physically compress crowds in order to fit them onto trains. Today I not only got to see them working, I got packed!! I was the last person on one of the cars and that little packer pushed her hardest (yeah it was a girl, and she really had to lean into me) to make my shape fit the shape of the empty space remaining on the car.
Funny situations arise when people are in such close proximity. Breath is particularly noticeable when you end up in the front-to-front position (a position Americans customarily reserve for making out). It’s hard to figure out which air is yours to breath and which is theirs. Where should you look? What if they’re breath isn’t so bad and you wind up being attracted to them? Should you tell them or just try to remain aloof, all the while enjoying their closeness?
One guy sneezed all over his three friends. They would have liked to reach up and wipe millions of tiny snot rockets off of their necks and faces, and to beat their friend in atonement for his iniquity, but their arms were irremovably pinned to their sides by their neighbors in the train (I was one of those neighbors and narrowly avoided the blast zone). If the first guys arms hadn’t been pinned perhaps the whole ordeal could have been avoided by a well-placed hand over his sneezer.
Getting off the subway is the process of birth: Proper pushing, squeezing, and breathing must all be used to make it from the middle of the subway car to the door. Fortunately the “one child” law in China left a lot of midwives looking for work. Many of them now earn their living holding clinics on rhythmic breathing and other birth-related skills that equip people for success in moving small masses of human flesh through narrow openings in larger masses of human flesh. And what a worthy work, what is life but such movement?
Speaking of movement I’m glad I won‘t have to move far for the next few days. We’re taking a train to Mongolia, but there’s no train until this weekend, so we wait. For a person who does a lot of “passing by” it’s wonderful to stop for a bit, find a place to sit, and let the rest of the world do the passing.