City of Life and Death

iliyi说他不想看这部电影，因为不想自己反日情绪失控，于是我便有点犹豫了。我有学过历史，我有认真地参观过南京大屠杀纪念馆，尽管我没有经历其中， 那些画面和片段却是会永远刻入脑中。所以，看《南京！南京！》就是看一部已经知道结果的小说，虽然选取了不同人物去刻画，我们都知道他们最终的结果。画面 没有想象中震撼，情感也没有意料中激动，只是那几个与被历史大车轮碾碎的人物却让我看到有种新的希望。
姜老师死了，却换来两个生命的自由

Here Comes India, again!

Have been back from this "filthily annoying yet ridiculously incredible" country for almost 3 months, but I am just like many of the people who suffered from intensive nostalgia, this time it's India-wise. Randomly viewing FB and found an interesting note from Maria, so I have decided to posted it here. It's still unknown why people can be so annoyed in India yet they still love it, but it is sure that whoever survive in that country can easily survive in 90% of other countries, yay!!

Here comes the note:

When I came to India, I never thought I would:

1. Lose two debit cards in less than six months and have to make friends with Western Union
2. Realise that ‘What’s up?’ is one of the most nonsensical ways of greeting anyone ever
3. Develop an intense dislike for the word ‘random’
4. Not iron any of my clothes even once
5. Wee in the desert or in fact…
6. Go for a one or a two anywhere that didn’t classify as a ‘Western style’ toilet and definitely that didn’t involve toilet paper
7. Become even more addicted to tea than I was in England
8. Up my sugar intake per cup from 1.5 to 3.5 teaspoons (uh oh...)
9. Not learn to cook anything Indian (unless ginger tea counts)
10. Suffer for non-too-extensive but testing periods without running water, light, gas and a working fridge (luckily not all at once)
11. Only blow-dry and straighten my hair once in five months
12. Break my camera and be able to blame it on a camel
13. Have to melt buckets and risk mild electrocution just to heat water for a bath
14. Have to shower in the company of cockroaches (hardly 'Joe's Apartment')
15. Miss plastic bags so much (they are banned in Chandigarh) – the thrill I get when I see one now may cause problems when I get back home…
16. Actually feel happy when it starts to rain
17. Have to live in a house where things ‘go bump in the night’
18. Come to know a club with a cheesy name like ‘Score’ – makes for lots of one-liners (Are you going to score tonight etc…)
19. Be preached at to convert to Christianity by an Indian whilst traveling in a rickshaw (or indeed at all!)
20. Find out that it’s possible to have fantastic arguments with rickshaw drivers, even when they don’t speak English and my Hindi is pitiful – largely with the help of mime and dramatic tones of voice – and WIN
21. Live in a house that had a genuine cat burglar

But I’m so glad that I did:


1. Name and love a stray dog that now lives on our doorstep (I’d bring her home but Dad told me if I did he’d call me ‘Rabies Girl’)
2. Manage to have a full leg wax for only 120 rupees (less than two pounds!)
3. Find the best cakes and pancakes and tasty stuff in a café run by an Indian who studied European pastry-making methods in Australia and consequently…
4. Discover Nik’s ‘Special Power Breakfast’
5. Ride a camel
6. Start a personal project I’ve been wanting to do for a long time
7. Actually realize I could interact with and actually be loved by small children (small children were previously a phobia – I could often be heard saying, ‘I’d rather have a puppy any day’)
8. Meet more than one person who is similar to and understands me, regardless of age and the British/Indian difference
9. Realize that being British and especially having a British accent may not actually be that bad :D
10. Eat lots of chicken but also realize that vegetables can be quite tasty (and this from the girl who once said a meal could not be complete unless it contained meat!)
11. Manage (thanks Facebook!) to keep in regular enough contact with my best friend, who despite the distance, was still able to make me laugh and feel loved and comfort me on a bad day
12. Find out that I’m a lot tougher than I thought I was
13. Go to the cinema for about one twelfth of the price of the cinema in England
14. Finally throw my Converse away and get new ones! I think everyone I know in England will cheer if they’d seen the state they were in even before I left…
15. Realize what I want and what makes me happy
16. Have a dream and make it come true and…
17. Celebrate the New Year on a rooftop in Jodhpur realizing just this – that I was in my dream… and knowing now that maybe my other dreams are not as out of reach as I think…

In the Exhibition

左一女于背景男有那么一点相像

好学

很喜欢这些被小鸟围困的十二生肖

最后让自己小出个镜

Grass Mud Horse

Take a glance of the very popular animal in China nowadays, Grass Mud Horse
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Meet the Grass Mud Horse (草泥马), a rare animal that has become phenomenally popular in the past month.

The animal, whose name sounds like a common curse (操你妈), is the most famous of the Ten Legendary Beasts of Baidu, non-existent animals that were inserted into Baidu's user-editable encyclopedia. Although the majority are juvenile puns for curse words or genitalia, the collective editing process did manage to come up with a few clever descriptions.

Here are the rest:

• The Dafei Chicken (达菲鸡): A strange bird that likes exercise. (打飞机, slang for "masturbate")
• The Chrysanthemum Silkworm (菊花蚕): A silkwork that feeds on chrysanthemum flowers instead of mulberry leaves. (菊花残, an insult that means something like "bugger")
• The Midge Butterfly (雅蠛蝶): An exceedingly rare creature only found on the Tibetan plateau. (From やめて, Japanese for "stop it"; via imported porn)
• The Weishen Whale (尾申鲸): During his maritime adventures, Zheng He discovered this creature was hunted as the raw materials for women's underpants. (卫生巾, "sanitary napkin")
• The Jiba Cat (吉跋猫): A creature that lives in a dark, damp environment and competes for food with the White Tiger. According to historical records, the Jiba Cat flourished during the reign of the Zhengde Emperor. (鸡巴毛, slang for "pubic hair")
• The Qianlie Crab (潜烈蟹): A legendary crab that once stopped up the Grand Canal. (From 前列腺, "prostate")
• The Crying Paddy Goose (吟稻雁): In the Kangxi era, a large goose dove into a certain field, damaging it and causing the local farmers to come down with a strange sickness. (From 阴道炎, "vaginitis")
• The Franco-Croatian Squid (法克鱿, scientific name "Vai-te Foder"): A fierce species of squid originally inhabiting Europe and the Americas. (From the English-language curse "Fuck you")
• The Puremen (鹑鸽): A rare bird found only in Sichuan and Hunan; formerly found in the area that is now the Republic of Yemen. (From 春哥, a nickname used for Super Girl winner Li Yuchun among fans who claim, whether sincerely or ironically, that she's a man. Their catchphrase is 春哥纯爷们, "Brother Chun is all man", which is where Yemen comes in)

And finally, in a nod to the editors of the encyclopedia, there's the Stork-Cat Ape (鹳狸猿) that inhabits Baidu County in Lanzhou. This entry pokes fun at Baidu administrators (管理员) who continually spar with the online pranksters and who ultimately deleted all of these entries.

Although the Ten Legendary Beasts have been wiped from Baidu, the Grass Mud Horse lives on in Photoshopped images (the cute cousin to the Alpaca turned up at the CCTV fire) and videos.

Here's the "Song of the Grass Mud Horse," a spot-on parody of a contemporary children's songs:

For lyrics and analysis, see China Digital Times.

Another clever parody uses the familiar format of Animal World (动物世界), a popular CCTV program, to introduce the Grass Dirt Horse and its habitat.

But fun with Baidupedia is not entirely about dirty words. For a different level of satire, check out the now-deleted entry for revolutionary hero Wei Guangzheng (伟光正, taken from 伟大, 光荣, 正确, "great, glorious, correct"):

Wei Guangzheng

Comrade Wei Guangzheng is a superior product of natural selection. In the course of competition for survival, because of certain unmatched qualities of his genetic makeup, he has a great ability to survive and reproduce, and hence Wei Guangzheng represents the most advanced state of species evolution.

Here is the evolution of Wei Guangzheng's thinking: Since the day of his birth, comrade Wei Guangzheng established a guiding ideology for the people's benefit, and in the course of connecting it with the real circumstances of his beloved Sun Kingdom, a process of repeated comparisons that involved the twists and turns of campaigns of encirclement and suppression, his ideology finally realized a historic leap forward and generated two major theoretic achievements. The first great theoretic leap was the idea of leading a handful of people to take up arms to cause trouble, rebellion, and revolution in order to build a brave new world, and to successfully seize power. This was the "spear ideology." The second great theoretic leap was a theory, with Sun Kingdom characteristics, in which Wei Guangzheng was unswervingly upheld as leader and the people were forever prevented from standing up. This was the "shield theory." Under the guidance of these two great theoretic achievements, comrade Wei Guangzheng won victory after victory. Practice has proven, "Without Wei Guangzheng, there would be no Sun Kingdom." Following the road of comrade Wei Guangzheng was the choice of the people of the Sun Kingdom and an inevitable trend of historical development.

Comrade Wei Guangzheng endured a bitter struggle for survival. In his struggles with natural conditions, he climbed mountains and trudged through plains, expressing with an iron will a legendary story of pathos that continues to impress his posterity. In struggles with heterogeneous individuals, he engaged in a long-term fight with the reactionary government of the time and was ultimately triumphant. In his struggles with individuals in his own group, he cast out the cow devils and snake spirits that organized internal reactionary activity, and dealt them harsh punishment. This is the reason why comrade Wei Guangzheng could continue to survive: he fit perfectly with the three main factors of natural selection.

In the harmonious environment that comrade Wei Guangzheng himself constructed, mates were plentiful and there were no natural enemies, so Wei Guangzhengs could multiply quickly. Their numbers swiftly increased. Today, Wei Guangzhengs inherit the advantages of their Wei Guangzheng ancestors, and also attempt various innovations. For example, many Wei Guangzhengs use their unmatched power to amass money, setting records that are continually broken. Of course, evolutionary principles mean that there is also mutation, as when, following his leadership of a handful of people to take up arms to cause trouble, rebellion, and revolution and to seize power, Wei Guangzheng began to detest "a handful of people"....

The reason for this mutation may be due to errors in genetic transmission during the period of the second leap of Wei Guangzheng Thought. It is said that mutation frequently causes cells to function improperly or even die, or could lead to cancer. Yet at the same time, mutation is a motivating factor for the evolution of species: sudden changes that are less than ideal will be naturally discarded, while beneficial changes will accumulate. In this way, we see that mutations directly affect the evolutionary direction of Wei Guangzheng.

Update: Our friends from the World of Warcraft boards on Baidu's BBS have stopped by for a visit (草泥马被国外知名媒体报道 WOW吧名扬海外了).

Links and Sources

• Tianya repost (Chinese): The world's four greatest mythological creatures
• Leitie (Chinese): Ten greatest mythological creatures on Baidu Baike
• Wei Guangzheng entry via Big Window
• Caonima image via Can't leave you
• China Digital Times: Song of the Grass Dirt Horse

Xichong, Shenzhen

深圳西冲 Shenzhen

see the little red knot on her head, a sign of CNY

a touch of peace underneath my running vein

silly thing

real bubble fish

I dance like a ballet dancer (uhhhh)

From Diwali to CNY

CNY can stand for Chinese Yuan (the money) or Chinese New Year, this year, it stands for Chinese Niu Year (Niu=Cow in Chinese).

I am so happy to be home for the new year since it really is the biggest festival here, try to imagine, the train station of Guangzhou delivers 800,000 passengers a day a week before the big day, which means we evacuate a whole Chandigarh in one day, so you guess how big the festival is. It is an event for which people would pay double the price just to get a single ticket home, even when he needs to stand on the train for some 20 hours.

Holi is big, Diwali is bigger, but I can say Chinese New Year is even more, in terms of size. Even though, I always let go of my mind back to those days when we play holi in Vikram's big house and try to duck down from the eggs on the street, also those days when we had a big dinner in Jodhpur under the fort, sipping beer and enjoying the Rajasthani dance. Comparatively, India is far more disorganized than home, but the magic is no matter where you are now, you will still miss those days when you stay in a crappy hotel, pinch your nose when you walk pass a big pile of shit and garbage or running away from a river of auto-rickshaw, sometimes I think, it's amazing because of the tradition and the consistence of keeping it.

So Chak De, Bharat!!!

A Bike Trip

sorry guys I was not able to update here since there seemed to be some problem connecting Blogger in China, but anyways now it works well.

Right now I am on a bike trip from Guilin to Guangzhou. The first 2 days were really tiring because I was really new in cycling and chose the wrong tires, sigh. 2 days ago I changed some parts of the bike and found it saved me 20% of my energy and, makes me feel I am actually not that shitty in cycling, haha. Exciting!

At this moment I am sitting in my college roommate's house in Wuzhou, the border line of Guangxi and Guangdong Province. Wuzhou is really beautiful, locating at the junction of 3 rivers and on a mountain range. Tmw I will be cycling 120km till Deqing City in Guangdong, hopefully I will be home by the day after tomorrow.