User Comments - luobinzhenmei

Posted on: Matchmaking in the Park

Thanks for all the information and links about health care in China and health care for the elderly. I visited the Huangpu assisted living facility last month and found it to be a lot like the better ones in the US--lots of activities, happy alert elders, emphasis on quality food, and a really nice park across the street. The manager was very happy to talk about the facility. There is one in each district of Shanghai, the cost is 1650 RMB a month, and since the lowest pension is 2000 RMB a month, it isn't onerous. (In contrast, an assisted living facility in the US can easily run about $5500 a month and many elders in the US don't have pensions--(something that surprises Chinese, BTW).

The filial piety model IS undergoing change, but the Huangpu facility only housed 81 people which has got to be a very small percentage of the elders who actually live in the district. I've read that there are over 300,000 elders in Beijing trying to get into housing for the elderly, but only 40,000 spaces.

Pretzelllogic, I wasn't entirely joking.

Posted on: Matchmaking in the Park

I think one reason for the panic Chinese parents exhibit about their unmarried children is that they are required to retire (around 55 or 60) when their children might produce a grandchild that they can take care of. Chinese grandparents often take almost complete responsibility for raising the grandchild, especially if the birth parents travel in their jobs or study abroad. So to not have your one child marry (and have a child) is equivalent to being unemployed.

Imagine the pressure when you aren't having that offspring--you are denying your parents a job! 哎呀。 How can you be so selfish! :-)

Posted on: The Complexities of 'De'

Neilus,

As I understand it, "compliment" is something nice said about someone, while "complement" is something that completes, for example, some verbs require objects and those objects are the verb's complement.

Posted on: Addressing People Revisited

One Chinese friend of ours, someone we have known for years, tells her child to call us 阿姨  and  叔叔.  Another tells her slightly older child to call us 奶奶 and 爷爷.  We really are in the latter category but when we first heard it, we felt a little bad.

And we do occasionally address our friends as 同志们 with appropriate old fashioned gestures to make them laugh.

Way back, when everyone was either 老 or 小, we proposed that we call the rather stuffy head of a department  小 instead of 老, because he was, in fact, a slight bit younger than we were.  No, no, no, we couldn't do that, we were told, with lots of giggles at the thought.

Posted on: The Kindle

We got a Kindle especially to use when we travel in China.  However, as of last year, we had to load everything we wanted to read BEFORE arriving in China.  That said, we love it.  Just a thin little screen instead of lugging physical books, easy to read while eating without worrying about spills and splatters, easy to read in bed, convenient to carry to parks and read there.  We haven't tried loading Cpod stuff though, just books.  Have to try more stuff.

Posted on: Retired Life

We are "going on 70" but not quite there yet. Hanging out with college students keeps us wanting to learn things and we forget (until we look in the mirror) what ages we really are.

Posted on: Discussing Basketball Teams

Definitely impure. But isn't the concept of 排队ing is "impure" too?

:-)

And think of all those Chinese characters in Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and for all I know, Albanian.

Chinese are linguistic imperialists, just like the rest of us from big countries.

Posted on: One-Way Street Scuffle

We've been in Shanghai for about two weeks and we see on average an accident ever other day.  Mostly motorcycles and fenderbenders, not people.  But we've also noticed that really really old people completely ignore lights at big intersections, hobbling slowly across the streets as the cars and motorcycles and bicycles swerve around them.  It's amazing.  We can imagine them saying to concerned relatives "Don't expect me to get used to these new fangled red and green lights.  In my day, we didn't need them and at my age I'm not about to learn how to use them now."

Posted on: Walking the Bird

Great that the Qing Wen's about 成语 (at least three in this lesson）and uses of 起来 are worked into this lesson so smoothly.  You guys are terrific.

Posted on: Food Flavors, Shanghai Style

When David says the food is very good, the last line, it seems to have a "g" sound between the "tse" and the "a" as if it were "Lo'tse ga"  Daini didn't say it that way, so what' going on?  Do other people hear it?  Does David put random "ge" sounds?  Should we say it the way it sounds even if it's not in the transcription?