User Comments - zhenlijiang

Posted on: Pregnancy Series 4: Fetal Attraction

thanks for that pete.  sometimes it's hard to tell, i think partly because there's still a lot about the thinking and values behind all the vocab, and therefore the scope of terms like 有文化, that eludes me.

Posted on: Pregnancy Series 4: Fetal Attraction

这个话题真有趣。 reminds me of Bridget Jones' friend trying to take more folic acid than anybody else.

in the dialogue, when the 胎教-unsavvy woman says

C:  你的宝宝真有文化。回头我再去你家找你取经。

could i assume here that she's not at all interested in the advantages of her friend B's approach and is just humoring her (giving her mianzi), and doesn't really intend to go?  is she being a little ironic for good measure, knowing that her zealous friend will not notice or mind?  what i often find i can't get in Chinese lessons from Chinese teachers is clarification on questions like this re tone/intent.  thanks in advance for your help!

i don't have many thoughts on prenatal ed, though i am deathly afraid of fanaticism in any form.  i look forward to after the baby is born, then when it's around five years old.  one of my favorite things to do is go and tell a child like that (whom i've known since they were "准") just how much 爸爸妈妈 and everybody had looked forward to meeting them and seeing what they looked like and hearing their voice and holding them!  and watch as they flush and wriggle and shine even brighter, tickled at that information. i love that.  but my friends are pretty much done with giving birth and i'm running out of kids to do that with.

another great thing for parents to do, when the tots can form their own sentences and tell you things, is to ask them to tell how it felt to be in mama's womb and how the journey was (first to her womb, and from there outside).  apparently we all remembered this up to a certain age, some kids retain as far as five years, but better to ask eariler.  has anyone here done that?  it's like the stories of the babies in the Mary Poppins books--love those too.

Posted on: Lao Wang's Office 9: Wang Plans Revenge

bababardwan, coming to CPod i never expected to learn so many Australian English terms.  funny how sometimes my (concise) oxford dictionary won't list something but my English-Japanese dictionary will.

Posted on: Dog Meat and Animal Rights

hi leimengde    "when in Rome ..." is 入乡随俗.

Posted on: Dog Meat and Animal Rights

jenny, your reference to dog du jour sounds just too familiar it makes me worry. i just hope the fashionable people of China stay far away from the path pet acquisition has taken in Japan.

i knew someone would have put up footage of this pet shop in Roppongi on youtube; it's not regular for a number of reasons. i.e., open very late at night. you can hear the innocent (British tourist, i guess) guy saying how strange this is. but--anybody who knows anything about the Roppongi district in Tokyo guess why (what for)? 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bhZ56fjMNw

on second thought the footage doesn't show the shop to be as sick-looking as it actually is.  i probably should have searched for a shot of the too-bright display windows seen on the too-bright street, that late at night, in that district. you'd get a better picture.

see the 189,000 (about 13000 in RMB now) price tag on the pomeranian pup.

not surprisingly, when you start treating puppies and kittens like expensive toys or accessories to be developed as commodities for a market notoriously trend-driven, all kinds of ethical problems, and miserable creatures, are born. 

if you want to talk about animal rights, this is much sicker and reprehensible than some time-honored eating of dog can ever be (even if i myself don't want to eat it because i don't find it appetizing, like i don't find boar or bear appetizing).  i know we do have many animal lovers in Japan too (found also in this discussion). but the very sad shameful truth is that we're in the dark ages when it comes to having respect for animals, and i pray this doesn't become prevalent anywhere else.

Posted on: Dog Meat and Animal Rights

hey changye, that's davidkaneda!

Posted on: About Face! A Multi-faceted Look at 面子

hi changye

"世間体"--yes, appearances--could be one of the terms i meant when i said we have words other than メンツ to refer to these concerns in our society but these, like you say, just don't carry the kind of  consequences that mianzi does in Chinese society.  by failing to care enough to meet 世間体 norms you risk being ostracized in Japanese society yeah because in general we are deathly afraid of standing out (not me though) in the group. very Japanese.

but that's something you do to your own appearance or reputation; no third party can do harm to your 世間体.  whereas they can 顔に泥を塗るput mud on your face, another thing i was thinking that we have in Japan.  but that's still not as  socially serious as violating the code of mianzi in China is it?

and it seems to me that there are so many more opportunities for even well-meaning foreigners who aren't clued in, to get in trouble with this.  like trying to be helpful and (in a friendly way) calling attention to someone's error in front of a group.  or unwittingly putting someone in a situation where they are not familiar w/the protocol.  a Chinese teacher here warns that (and i realize this is changing fast, but very generally) if we take business guests from China to dinner we should avoid western restaurants, because our guests may be unaccustomed to and made uncomfortable by the silverware and the table etiquette.  and that would not constitute a nice welcome even if it's at the best French restaurant in Tokyo, say, and we think the food is wonderful.

but the above are not hard for non-Chinese to understand.  what makes mianzi such a mystery (a wonder, even!) to me is the extreme, dark manifestation of it.  i guess i have to refrain here from describing the instance that really forced me  to think hard about this, as it has to do with a foreign ministry spokesman's comment on something to do with Japan ... but  because of that, i say mianzi is not something that "exists in all cultures".  that is not mianzi.

Posted on: About Face! A Multi-faceted Look at 面子

in the post above

acknowledging that something exists in another society that doesn't in your own isn't antagonistic in itself

i meant judgmental, or intolerant, or critical--couldn't think of the words!

Posted on: About Face! A Multi-faceted Look at 面子

i agree with bodawei.  to me this notion of 面子 is very Chinese, and i'm from the far eastern land of businesspeople and politicians who once upon a time used to exasperate westerners by always giving "saving someone's face" as the reason for decisions they couldn't comprehend.  at the time face was ridiculed as this "Japanese thing" that only served to obstruct good decision-making.  so, it is nice to see that two decades on westerners are so much more willing to try to empathize with the different kinds of thinking they will encounter in Asia (said w/just a touch of irony ...).

we've imported the word 面子 (メンツ pr. like menzi) into our language.  but almost as soon as i began studying Chinese and started knowing more about the society and culture, i could see that this Chinese 面子 is much more serious than メンツ (we do have other words for the more socially serious aspects of "face", but even then, the Chinese 面子 is different, much graver).  because "face" does not adequately stand for 面子 which is not the same thing as respect (though there is overlap of course), it deserves a lesson on its own.  even though one QW is too brief to describe all the manifestations of or thinking behind it.

acknowledging that something exists in another society that doesn't in your own isn't antagonistic in itself, even if in many ways you find the other impossibly mysterious and hard to understand at first.  the example of flaunting wealth and "superfluous" spending is only one aspect of 面子. anyway, the novelty of acquisition and material wealth will wear out in due course--as in any country (maybe not for all people).

in this case i do think we should acknowledge the difference, and acknowledge that not all people in the world think like westerners.  otherwise we keep ourselves from understanding better this very interesting thing called 面子.

Posted on: Remembering that Day on the Creek -- 如梦令: 常记溪亭日暮

大家好，

i posted links to a chain poem--a Japanese project with some international contributions--i just found two days ago, with translations in 17 languages.  if i had known a couple of months sooner, some of us might have submitted works ...  真倒霉。

some of the poems are quite nice.  hope you enjoy.