World of Deadcraft

Many cultures have something going on in the Spring. Last weekend was Easter, when Jesus rose from his tomb and trans-substantiated into a chocolate-egg-laying rabbit. It was also Passover, the Anti-Yeast Festival of the Jewish tradition. Of course let's not forget Nowruz, aka Zoroastrian Spring Break; and of course Egyptian Fun Day Sham el-Nessim.

Meanwhile, in China, they had the Tomb-Sweeping Festival, (清明节 qing1 ming2 jie2). This is the holiday on which you are supposed to go to the tomb or grave of your ancestors and clean it off, pull out the weeds around it, place flowers, burn incense and spirit money (legal tender in the underworld), and generally pay your respects to the departed. It takes place 15 days after the vernal equinox (chun1 fen1 春分). It is an ancient traditional holiday, but it only became a recognized national holiday in 2008.

Of course real graves and tombs are expensive, and who has time to go to the cemetery anyway? Enter the e-Tomb.

A website has sprung up, 1000soul.com, where users can create accounts and set up virtual tombs in virtual graveyards all over virtual China. Then they can go and virtually do stuff at the grave, like pray, offer incense or place gifts. At the bottom of the home page is a counter. It says (as of this week):

Birth count (chu1 sheng1 tong3 ji4 出生统计): 107395824161

Death count (si3 wang2 tong3 ji4 死亡统计): 100552766469　

Dearly departed in residence: (gu4 ren2 jin4 zhu4 故人进驻): 19285

So there is lots of room for expansion!

On the site, you can click on a map of China (there is also an overseas section) to select the region where you want the tomb to be. Then a virtual graveyard complex pops up (shown in the picture above) and you can scroll around and select which part of the 'Net necropolis you want to set up the tomb in. Once you click in, you can see a bunch of graves that already have monuments in them, and other vacant spots. You can choose one of the vacant spots for your online ossuary, or you can visit a grave that has already been set up.

The layout looks like a game map, which adds to the overall strangeness. Then, once you are zoomed into a specific grave it looks even more like a game (second picture (names removed to protect the cyberdead)). There are multiple icons all over the screen, but instead of spells and weapons like in World of Warcraft, you can select different flower arrangements, incense, food offerings or other objects to place at the grave site. Some of these are free, and other gifts and offerings can be unlocked by paying real money for them.

At graveside, there is also a Facebook-like news feed with recent activity for that particular pixellated polyandrium. (Sorry.) Just for fun, I tried clicking on the button labeled "Quick Grave Set-up," (kuai4 su4 jian4 mu4 快速建墓) but it asked me to register or log in first.

Is it modern apathy at its worst? Or is this in-silico interment a clever invention to suit the globalized world? You be the judge.

Year of Le Tigre

It's that time of year again, when another zany animal from the Chinese zodiac lopes into the scene. This time, it's the Year of the Tiger (hu3 nian2 虎年)! Rawwr!

Minor Digression: Tiger Woods' parents should have seen this coming. Tiger recently issued an emotional apology to all of his fans and sponsors and lady friends. If he had only paid attention to a few simple and obvious details, he probably could have avoided all of this trouble. You see, 2010 is the Year of the Tiger, but not just any tiger - the Metal Tiger. The Wood Tiger's year will not roll around until 2035, which is when Tiger Woods will really shine, probably on the Seniors Tour. See, Tiger was born in 1975, part of which was a Wood Tiger year. But our Tiges was born in December, a full 10 months after the year switched from tiger to rabbit. Although the phase of that rabbit year was still wood.

Major Digression: Wooden rabbit. 1975. Can anybody see the connection here? Okay, I admit. I had to Google what year "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" came out, but yes it was 1975, and the film features a wooden rabbit (No, not the killer rabbit of Caerbannog. What is wrong with you nerds?) that is created as a Trojan horse to sneak into the French Person's castle. Were the Monty Python crew taking a pot shot at traditional Chinese astrology? We don't know for sure. But the connection is intriguing.

Post Regression: Is anyone confused yet? Okay, so most people know about the Chinese animal years, Pig, Chicken, Rat, Ox, Sloth, Fruit Bat, etc. But the animals are merely the tip of the astrological iceberg. In addition to the 12-year animal merry-go-round, there is also a 60-year cycle in Chinese astrology, which is made up of 60 different combinations of the 10 Heavenly Stems (天干 tian1 gan1) and the 12 Earthly Branches (地支, di4 zhi1). These were created several thousand years ago as ways of simply keeping track of time, and as a way of fortune telling.

Each Earthly Branch corresponds to one of the animals (which have characteristics used in fortune telling), and the Heavenly Stems are associated with the negative and positive (yin and yang) aspects of each of the 5 Elements or Phases (wu3 xing2 五行): Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water. So once you have gone through each permutation, a 60-year, or sexagenary, cycle is complete.

The more I read about this the more confusing it gets, so I will try to keep it simple for my own sake. This year in the cycle is the 庚寅年 (geng1 yin2 nian2), which is the 7th Heavenly Stem, 3rd Earthly Branch. It is the 27th year of the current 60-year cycle, and the 庚 represents Yang (positive) and metal, while the 寅 represents the Tiger and all of its characteristics.

According to the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, Tigers are suspicious, short-tempered, sensitive, have trouble with authority, indecisive, and unlike wooden rabbits, are generally bad at golf.

Tiger-related Note: I just read on the Language Log website that a popular saying this year for Valentine's Day (mostly in advertisements) was "I 老虎 you," where 老虎 (lao3 hu3), which means "tiger," sounds like a terribly pronounced version of the English word "love." And since Valentine's Day was the first day of the new year it was especially clever.

Temple of Womb

Recently a translation job took me from the banal world of college diplomas, deep into the uncharted and lawless hills of northeastern China.

The document was hand-scrawled on official government stationary from an area of Yi County (义县 yi4 xian4) in Liaoning Province (辽宁省 liao2 ning2 sheng3). Since it was written by hand, this thing was a little hard to decipher. There was a clue on the paper, though, where it said the name of the town, printed at the top of the page: Dizang Temple Manchu Village (地藏寺满族乡di4 zang4 si4 man3 zu2 xiang1). First I looked up Dizang Temple.

Turns out it is a Buddhist temple, and Dizang can also be translated as Ksitigarbha, a Sanskrit name. He is a bodhisattva (an enlightened person who tries to help others), and 地藏 (Dizang) is actually a translation of Ksitigarbha, which means Earth Store or Earth Treasure or Earth Womb (hence the witty titular pun of this post. Actually there is an even subtler connection there, to be described below!).

According to the Internet, the Dizang Temple in this village was founded by Manchurian chieftain Nurhachi (努尔哈赤 nu4 er3 ha1 chi4) in the 16th-17th century. He was famous for creating the written form of the Manchu script, and as the father of the Qing Dynasty.

Also, he is the same Nurhachi whose ashes appear in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, when Indy trades them for a large diamond in Shanghai!

As Hannibal used to say on the A-Team, I love it when a blog comes together.

Whither google.cn?

As you may have heard, in the last few days, Google has been having some domestic issues with Big Mama China. Google suggests that it was infiltrated by Chinese government hackers in an attempt to discover email addresses of Chinese human rights advocates. They said the attack also resulted in some unspecified "intellectual property" being stolen.

The result is that the company may be closing down their Chinese version of Google, which is google.cn, unless China allows them to put up uncensored search results. I can't see how that would happen.

Anyway, it would really suck for me because I use Chinese Google all the time for translation work. So in premature memoriam of google.cn, I now offer a little bit of Chinese googling trivia.

• Mystery! Today's (Jan. 14, 2010) Google doodle (where they change the logo into a picture) on google.cn is the Four Great Inventions (四大发明, si4 da4 fa1 ming2). Usually there is some holiday or birthday or something to warrant a doodle. But why is this here? The Four Great Inventions (in the Chinese context) are Paper (造纸术 zao4 zhi3 shu4), the Compass (指南针 zhi3 nan2 zhen4), Gunpowder (火药 huo3 yao4), and Movable Type Printing (活字印刷术, huo3 zi4 yin1 shua1 shu4). Yes, Gutenberg, the Chinese did that first, too. So the question is: Why? Theories as to what they are trying to say:

1) The Internet (or Google) is a great invention, too, so don't make us leave you, China.
2) The letters of the logo that are altered are "Go" and "le." This could be a very strange Chinglishy way of saying "we are going," ie, "go 了" (了 (le) is just a modifier of the verb). Or, it could be a phonetic way of saying "Enough!" (够了, gou4 le).
3) It is a way of saying "We love China! It is soo smart!" in a last ditch effort to bribe the Central Government with Google doodles.

• Google in Chinese is 谷歌 (gu3 ge1), which means "Valley Song." But mostly it is just phoeneticization of "Google."
  
• Censorship? I wanted to test how censored the Chinese Google is. So I plugged in the phrase 六四事件 (liu4 si4 shi4 jian4) into both the mainland and the Taiwanese version of Google. 六四事件 is literally the "6-4 Incident," or June 4 Incident, meaning the Tian'anmen Square massacre on June 4, 1989. The mainland version actually came back with about 3 million results. But the top hit is an interview with Premier Zhu Rongji, who says that "I think that China now has enough democracy, so something like (the June 4 Incident) could not happen again."
  
  A Taiwan Google (google.com.tw) search of the same term, on the other hand, produces more than 11 million results. The top one? The Chinese Wikipedia entry for the Tian'anmen Incident. Talk about freedom of speech. Plus it shows YouTube videos and all kinds of stuff about the massacre. So yes, the mainland version is definitely censored. To be fair, the google.cn version of the results page does say at the bottom: "Due to local government laws and regulations, some search results are not displayed."

Chinese diploma, see?

I was just working on a translation of a college transcript, and learned two interesting things that I thought I would share with the universe.

Not all diplomas are created equal
I have found that there are three different types of certificate issued by Chinese universities.

1) Diploma - 毕业证书 (bi4 ye4 zheng4 shu1) - GOOD. This is for students who have completed and passed all of their classes. The best type of certificate to have, it is accompanied by an academic degree certificate, BS, BA, MA, etc.

2) Certificate of Completion of Studies - 结业证书 (jie2 ye4 zheng4 shu1) MEH. This means that the student has completed all of their classes, but has not passed all of the classes, or at least they didn't pass their graduation test. I am not completely sure, but it means the student did not pass something and therefore does not qualify for graduation, but they did complete everything. Not a good thing to have, altho probably better than nothing.

3) Certificate of Study - 肄业证书 (yi4 ye4 zheng4 shu1) - BAD. This is apparently the worst type of certificate to have. I've only ever seen one out of the hundreds of academic documents I have translated. According to the Internet, it is worse than not having anything at all. Basically this says that yes, this person did study at this school, but they did not finish school. Here is what happens when you present this piece of crap at a job interview:
"But, Mr. Interviewer for a Good Job, I didn't finish because I ---"
"Zup! Zip! I don't want to hear it. Thanks for coming in today. Bye."
"But I -"
"Zup." [pinches lips shut as a subtle message]

Progress in the classroom!
OK, that is a very subjective statement, but I am basing it on a transcript from 2008, which had some classes I have not really seen before. Oh, there was the usual 马克思主义基本原理 (ma3 ke4 si1 zhu3 yi4 ji1 ben3 yuan2 li3), Basic Principles of Marxism, but then right under that was
儒道佛文化及其精神 (ru2 dao4 fo2 wen2 hua4 ji2 qi2 jing1 shen2), which is Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist Culture and Spirit. In the transcripts I usually translate, which are usually from the 1990s or before, I have never seen that class listed. The fact that it is taught now is kind of cool. I mean you still have all of the Communist BS, but at least they are branching out. And then I was really surprised to see this class: 动物福利 (dong4 wu4 fu2 li4), Animal Welfare! I have absolutely never heard of that being taught in China. So that, too was encouraging. Well done, Chinese educational system.

Home improvement 101 and NaNoWriMo

I have decided to undertake the National Novel Writing Month challenge. The challenge is to write a 50,000 word novel within the month of November. And since it usually takes me several months to write a 16K- word short story, it is a real challenge.

But I have been keeping on track so far, and hopefully I will be a winner! Which in this case means that you complete the challenge. Here is a brief synopsis of the novel so far:

Thirteen-year-old Waverly Yancy finds an ancient amulet in his freezer. Somehow it seems connected to unexplained incidents in his own life. And when his parents find out the source of their African heritage, Waverly goes along for the ride of his life.

The working title is "The Sky Stones of Tombouktou." Essentially it is the black Harry Potter. Hear that, agents who are googling around, looking for the next great novel? "The Black Harry Potter." Heeeere, Google spiders. You might think: Dude, how can you write convincingly about a 13-year old African American kid? Well, you will just have to wait and see! It's gonna be awesome.

In other news, I fixed not one but 2 household items over the weekend. The first was the sink disposal. It was jammed and I was basically waiting for whatever crap was in there jamming it to
rot away and the problem would take care of itself. However, this was not happening. So I looked on the International Network of Computers (they have that now) and figured out that you don't have to take the thing apart in order to fix it.

All you have to do is cut off the power to it, get underneath with a 1/4" allen wrench and insert it into the access hole in the bottom of the unit. You then turn the blades manually with the wrench, and it works the blockage loose. Then you can grab whatever it was (spoon, bag, etc) with tongs and it is fixed! In my case it was just gunked up so after spinning it a few times it started moving freely again. Then Michala poured some dish soap in the drain and it was good as new. Amazing.

I also fixed the water dispenser that comes out of the fridge. I learned via the International Network that the tank for the water that comes out of the fridge door is in the back of the crisper drawer. Who knew? I had noticed a day or so earlier that a pepper in the crisper drawer had some ice on it. Hmmm. Maybe the tank was frozen? So I took out the drawer and found the tank. There was a tube coming out of it and when I fiddled with the tube some ice seemed to crunch and loosen up. I tried the dispenser again and -- holy home improvement Batman -- it worked!

Amazing Lesson: If something does not work in your house, go to the Internet and then fiddle with said broken item. With enough fiddling, you can fix anything!

Random Chinese factoid to keep blog relevant: 冰箱 (bing1 xiang1) means "refrigerator" in Chinese. Literally it means "ice box." Very to-the-point, if a bit old school. But some Chinese words are just old school, and the word for a thing does not necessarily change along with the technology of the age. For example, the word for "rocket" is 火箭 (huo3jian4), which is literally "fire arrow." And the word for spear and gun are the same exact word, 枪 (qiang1). Oh, and "black Harry Potter" in Chinese is 黑 哈利・波特 (hei1 Ha1 li4 Bo1 te4).

Nonsense and the curse of the lazy blogger!

In the interest of posting a post in September, I present with no introduction the cover of a nonexistent graphic novel: "Curse of the Dagger!" This was an idea I had and messed around with for a while. Finally I inked it and scanned it into Photoshop for the colors. Fun!

A young pharaoh finds a mysterious dagger stuck in a strange looking skull in the desert. As he pulls the dagger from the bizarre, deformed skull, a brilliant red light flashes across the landscape.

Little does the young king know, he has released an ancient curse that will ravage the kingdom and threaten to destroy the very fabric of reality!

Anyway...
OK, I thought of a translational subject:

The Chinese phrase: 胡说八道 (hú shuō bā dào) means "nonsense." It is what Rep. Joe Wilson would have yelled at Pres. Obama during his health care speech if he spoke Chinese. Literally it means: "Outrageous speech in eight ways." What is the origin of this strange saying? Let me regale you with the tale...
A young pharaoh finds a mysterious dagger stuck in a strange looking skull - No, no that's not it. Here is the story that makes most sense to me (from Baidu).

In ancient times, Chinese people referred to the minority populations to the north and west as the "Hu." The who? Yes. The Hu. So the unintelligible language of these groups was lumped under the phrase, "hu shuo" 胡说 (Hu speak).

The 八道 (bā dào) part of this expression comes from the "Noble Eightfold Path" 八正道 (ba1 zheng4 dao4) of Buddhism. So in other words, the phrase means "an ignorant barbarian trying to talk about the Noble Eightfold Path to enlightenment."

See, now isn't that much more interesting than a moronic outburst of "you lie!" ?