The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by vfc:

Chris,

What you wrote is "I can't Chinese [written], please speak English [written]. You left out the verb (jiang=speak] The ending "wen" usually refers to the wriiten language.

It would be better to say "Wo bu hui jiang Putonghua" or "Wo bu hui jiang Hanyu" - jiang meaning speak and "Putonghua" meaning The Common Language (Mandarin] and "Hanyu" meaning "the language of the Han people". But, people WOULD understand your meaning, which is the main point :)

Ooops, now just discussed the issue w/ some friends. One said he had heard Taiwanese people use the term "Zhongwen" for the spoken language and that it can mean any Chinese dialect and covers both written and spoken. Another friend dosagreed (it was a group conversation), and said she thought it would be odd to hear Chinese people call it Zhongwen, and that in her mind it refers to written only.

Just to add to the confusion, here in HK people use the Cantonese term "Zhongmen" to refer to Cantonese and "Putonghua" to refer to Mandarin and so you'll have people saying things that translate like "I can't speak Mandarin, I speak Chinese".

Also good that you distinguished between "hui" (have the ability to, know how to") and "neng" (to be able to do something or not do even if you DO know how to do).

This site Learning Chinese online might be helpful to you and anyone else who thinks about studying Chinese.

Yoon Ha, good point. I think Primo Levi wrote in The Reawakening that the first phrase one usually learns in a foreign language is how to say "I don't know how to speak x".

The Midlevels escalator is rather futuristic, if a bit old - kind of like the moving sidewalks in the Jetson's cartoon.
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Having very tall apartment towers in the midst of greenery is also very typical of Hong Kong.

When I first moved here (over 12 years ago) when I would go downtown, I thought "This is what visually inspired the set of "Blade Runner", especially at night, in the rain.

I think that some of the the things listed in the article are by no means universal, although the electronic film theater booking has been operating in HK since the early 1990's.

There are parts of China still so poor that villagers live by selling their blood and there is massive HIV infection
http://www.chinaembassycanada.org/eng/xwdt/t141603.htm

There are many places in China where people are still extremely poor - very little food, problems w/ adequate clean water, no electricity for lights. School fees can cause problems for families, inequality is growing.

Diseases like schistosomiasis have come back in places like Jiangxi and Sichuan
http://ehs.sph.berkeley.edu/china/

Of course, in the big cities on the Coast (Shanghai, Guangzhou) or in Beijing, the things the article's author writes are true - enormous use of public transportation, stored value cards for paying for the bus or MTR (in HK they are called "Octopus" and you can use them for buses, minibuses, ferries, trains, in convenience stores like 7-11, and in some university libraries to operate the photocopy machines).

Throughout China, the levels of inequality are growing, and there are lots of problems for workers trying to establish independent trade unions. Visit http://www.china-labour.org.hk/iso/ to learn more.

I recently attended a conference on Chinese women and the internet, and one of the participants had had trouble w/ her job (threatened firing) because she ran a BBS that discussed sex in an open way.

In the newspaper yesterday I read a report that a man who was imprisoned for LIFE for throwing red paint on the portrait of Mao Zedong in Tian An Men was tortured in prison and has now lost his mind
http://www.rfa.org/english/news/2004/11/19/China_dissident/

Pollution - massive pollution is a problem in China almost everywhere, plus drought.

Don't get me wrong. I love living in Hong Kong and in many ways things *are* better in China than thay were in the past, especially for educated people who live in big cities. I think in the mid 1990's, 1/3 of Shanghai residents still had to use chamberpots (or maybe more). Now it's more universal.

Public toilets (at least we do have them) in China are often really gross - this one isn't too bad compared to some I've used.
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/40533000/jpg/_40533567_afp_beijing203.jpg
And there too, things have gotten better over the years.

When I stayed at a friend's in Harbin, there was a toilet in the flat, but to shower I had to go to a public bath-house.

So - 21st century in electronic consumer goods, early 20th century in plumbing.

In fact, the 4th World Toilet Summit met recently in Beijing
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041117/ap_on_fe_st/china_toilet_summit&e=1

Lydia wrote:
"I don't know of any stories of mass rape by the Allied forces in WWII. I don't know if that's because we didn't think of things like that back then, or if the local girls welcomed the liberating soldiers with more than open arms, or some other factor."

I remember first reading about it in "Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape" by Susan Brownmiller, that there was an enormous number of rapes of German women by Soviet soldiers (Allies)

Here is a link on it
"Based on contemporary hospital reports and on surging abortion rates in the following months, it is estimated that up to two million German women were raped during the last six months of World War Two, around 100,000 of them in Berlin."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/wwtwo/berlin_05.shtml

Of course, it's not unique... Rape of Nanjing, mass rapes in the Pakistan-Bangladesj war, Bosnia, etc.

"He was possessed of a very large fortune, and could have done whatever he wanted. What he chose to do was dissect barnacles under the microscope, day in day out for eight years. This is not a choice that many of us would have made in the circumstances. We, but not he, are fritterers."

I found this quote off of aldaily, from a review of "Darwin and the Barnacle".

It seemed apropos [sp?] to the discussion.

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