User Comments - RJ

Posted on: Your First Mooncake

Well you could send them to

Praxis Language,

Suite A301, 2452 Wanhangdu Road,

Shanghai, China

treats are more appreciated at work.

Posted on: Your First Mooncake

No doubt its a loophole not easily closed either. Not without getting rid of the unpopular but Sacrosanct threading mechanism. But if you dont join, however would you get your hands on the great lesson materials? :-)

Posted on: Giving Instructions to the Ayi

ok chanelle, your words:

Practical Ayi tip: never plan ahead and tell them you are "leaving".

Now thats the story I want to hear. :-)

Posted on: Giving Instructions to the Ayi

money doesnt buy happiness? Now thats depressing. You might be right but if I cant have happiness, the absence of any discomfort or inconvenience is the next best thing, and money handles that just fine. Are you sure money doesnt buy happiness? Maybe some people that have money are just too stupid to know where to buy the stuff. :-)

Posted on: Various Speech Acts and 向 (xiang)

All good stuff. The "Qing Wen" Well never runs dry.

Posted on: Your First Mooncake

Jen

I was being a bit tongue in cheek while playing food critic with moon cakes. Truth be told, I have found one or two that I liked. Well, one anyway. I still prefer 油条 (you2 tiao2) with my coffee, (most Chinese find that strange) but now I know where to send my surplus moon cakes. (I hope you will give pizza a second chance.)

Posted on: Your First Mooncake

Well, "Mooncakes", what can I say. I love cake so this seemed to me like a Chinese tradition made just for me, until I realized:

1. Moon "cakes" weigh 10 times as much as any "cake" has a right to.There must be a law somewhere?

2. Mooncakes are, at their freshest, harder by orders of magnitude, than the stalest of western cake goodies.

3. Masquerading as a "desert", Mooncakes are filled with vegetables, beans, or other mystery fillings that are usually anathema to a pastry chef.

4. Cake is supposed to go well with coffee - these do not.

But anyway, if you can find one of these little tattooed hockey pucks with a filling that suits you, you may actually be able to eat it, but mostly it seems they are designed only to fullfill a yearly ritual role as items to be gifted and, (thank God) re-gifted.  But other than that, sure, I like em too. If you get stuck with one, they make great paper weights. Anybody have a recipe? :-)

Posted on: Giving Instructions to the Ayi

bodawei

yea I get so tired of people telling me how something is in China, and they know because they asked a Chinese person. One. hehe. They just dont get it. There are a billion stories in China, all of them right, all of them different. You are right also about the narrowness of experience. It is remarkable how hard it is to find info on things like social security or retirement. Welfare, unemployment, medical benefits. The list goes on. Anyway how was the movie? A big hit in China?

Posted on: Giving Instructions to the Ayi

bodawei,

I was going to suggest, after your earlier vent, that the best thing you could do would be to hire an ayi, treat her right, and pay her well, but I thought you might hand me my head. They will work for somebody else if not you, since they need that job, and as you point out, boycotting would make little sense. I tend to feel as you do and I am always champion of the underdog, but in China I find this sometimes just makes them nervous. You can even get a worker in trouble by being nice to them on the job. They care little about what you think, they need to survive. A co-worker of mine saw it differently, he said to me, "isnt it something how in China everyone just seems to accept their lot, no grumbling". I know its a cycle but they are as locked into it as those above them on the social ladder. In China its much harder for me to really understand what somebody may be feeling so I am careful making judgments or drawing conclusions. I am eager to learn however and that makes comments from folks like you and Tal, who live there, quite interesting.

Posted on: Giving Instructions to the Ayi

yes, Ive noticed that "matter-of-factness" in China. Just wasn't sure how I felt about it.