I was quite surprised to get this leaflet through the mail earlier today. At first thought it was an advert for a vegetarian restaurants, but looks like it’s just aimed at promoting vegetarianism/veganism in Taiwan:
“After animals die, their flesh contains germs which are the leading cause of tumors and cancer in the human body. So eating a vegetarian diet and exercising to expel these toxins is really of the utmost importance.”
Interesting to find out who is behind this propaganda effort, as there are no clues on the leaflet itself.
This post is not an endorsement of the message of the leaflet or the pseudo-scientific claims therein, purely posted for curiosity (which killed the cat and subsequently led to toxins infecting said cat’s flesh…).
I spotted this intriguing-looking character on a signboard on a road I have walked down a million times before. It looks like a cross between 「優」(yōu/excellent) and 「收」(shōu/to receive):
Google tells me the name of the company–which sells office supplies and prints name cards–is 「猷美」(yóuměi), so the other two characters on the sign seem decorative. If anyone has solved this mystery before or has any suggestions, let me know.
I tried the variant dictionary already and there does seem to be a wide variety of different forms of 「優」, none I saw though replaced the 「心」and 「夂」 with a 「收」though:
Update: Thanks to jdmartinsen for resolving the mystery, stating that the 「丩」 is likely a stylized 「忄」:
劉炳森寫的優
The 「優」 in the sign seems to resemble the style of calligrapher Liu Bingsen, as shown in this calligraphic database.
You can see that the 「有」 also employs a variant form, with 「𠂇」 written 「㐅」, similar but not identical to one of the variants listed below:
Another sign in a shop two streets away had this (rather more common) variant of 「價」(jià/price):
This simplified version of 「價」 is also the Japanese kanji version of the character, 「価」(か/ka). Cool to see the use of variants in action and perhaps Japanese usage influencing choice of shorthand in Chinese.
In endless time and space Each person Is just a speck of dust But a speck of dust
I’m a piece of lint Light as a spore Swept by fate Swept by the wind On to your clothes
(An extract)
Shaky hands, sorry!
Hsu Hui-chih (許悔之) is a poet and calligrapher born in 1966 in Taoyuan in Taiwan. He graduated from National Taipei Institute of Technology (now National Taipei University of Technology) in chemical engineering and has worked as the editor of the supplements of the Liberty Times and China Evening News and the chief editor of literary monthly magazine Unitas.
As you might be able to tell, I was feeling kind of sheepish when I took the photo, hence the blurriness, so had to Google parts of the poem to make it out. That’s when I discovered that the poem has a final verse that wasn’t included in the MRT version as below:
微塵眾啊 微塵眾 如此眾中 遇到你
In a cloud of dust Amid the dust In this swirling mass I came upon you
I liked how the poet was able to convey that sense of wonder at finding a kindred spirit at a certain point in the infinity of time and space. There’s also a recognition of the relative insignificance of humanity in terms of the universe, similar to Carl Sagan’s reflections on planet earth being portrayed as a pale blue dot in the Voyager 1’s pictures of the solar system:
Mountains May Depart (《山河故人》 Jia Zhang-ke, 2015) depicts the breakdown of small town culture and a family unit in China, the price paid for the pursuit of the Chinese Dream and ‘going West’.
The film opens with a surreal scene of a group of people dancing to the Pet Shop Boys’ cover of ‘Go West’ by the Village People. Although this appears jarring at first glance, the symbolism of the song when sung from a Chinese perspective, ties in with the stated ambition of one of the protagonists, Zhang Jinsheng, to bring the object of his affection, Shen Tao, to the US. In the small town of Fenyang in Shanxi Zhang has a violent falling out with his friend Liangzi over the pursuit of the female lead, Shen Tao. There are then successive jumps through time, from 1996 to 2014 and finally to 2025.
We follow Zhang Jinsheng as he wins Tao’s affections (attempting to bomb Liangzi in the process), they get married and have a baby together, while the spurned Liangzi travels to another province to work in mining. As we jump again, we learn that the marriage has failed and Zhang has taken their son to live in Shanghai, while Shen Tao remains in her hometown. She has limited contact with her son, Dollar, and they have several tense and awkward exchanges when he returns from Shanghai for her father’s funeral.
With the next jump in time, Liangzi returns home after being diagnosed with lung cancer and meets again with Tao in Fenyang where she offers to pay for his treatment. An increasingly unhinged Zhang Jinsheng has taken Dollar to live in Australia, where he has all but forgotten his mother. Zhang himself hangs around with other people from his province, unable to return due to ongoing corruption purges back home and largely unable to communicate with his son, having to resort to Google Translate to hold a conversation. Dollar subsequently develops a romantic attraction to his Chinese teacher, an older woman from Hong Kong (and mother substitute), and announces that he is leaving his father. The film ends with another rendition of ‘Go West’, this time with Tao dancing alone.
As Michelle Huang’s (黃宗儀) points out in her book ‘New Feelings Between China and Hong Kong: The Politics of Emotion in Dreams of Development’ (《中港新感覺：發展夢裡的情感政治》), the culprit in the eventual misery of each of the characters in the film seems to be globalism and new iterations of the “Chinese Dream” that spur people on towards an illusory upward mobility. Contrary to popular representations of the nouveau riche in China as an aspirational identity, Huang suggests the film’s subversion of the conventional perception of the nouveau riche (「新富」) stating:
In Mountains May Depart, the nouveau riche aren’t purely represented as smug members of the developed world, or as those who have forgotten their roots, on the contrary, impoverished people and the nouveau riche become the ‘kitchen waste of history’, with societal development they lose their desires and sense of orientation.
Zhang JinSheng ticks all the boxes of the Chinese success story on the surface, but in reality, he is unmoored in Australia (which although in the cultural west, is ironically east of China), hanging around with a group of fellow exiles from his home province and isolated from his son. Huang talks about how Zhang Jinsheng is never really able to make the conversion from small town mindset to global or international point of view and part of this is represented linguistically. Part of this small-town mentality, is Zhang’s (rather clumsy and over the top at times) hypermasculinity, whether it is his incel-like plot to blow up his friend and rival for the affections of Shen Tao, or the collection of guns he keeps in Australia. This association of small town mindset with traditional gender roles also applies to Dollar, who Shen Tao scolds for the effeminacy she perceives as Shanghai (metropolitan/cosmopolitan) affectations, which she contrasts with the 「爽快」 (lit. frank and straightforward; read masculinity) values of small towns. She angrily removes his cravat and tells him his use of the Chinese equivalent to “Mummy” (媽米) instead of “Ma/Mum” (媽) isn’t manly enough:
-Dollar, why aren’t you speaking to your mother? Call me ma! -Mummy -Mummy? Who taught you to say that? You should be more straightforward, and call me ma. -Ma -Are you a boy or a girl? Who put this thing on you?
The distance between mother and son is also emphasized through the latter’s use of Shanghainese on the phone to the woman we suppose is his step-mother and his inability to speak the local dialect. Huang states that Dollar’s ultimate unhappiness also subverts the conventional portrayals of the 「富二代」 (second-generation wealthy) in China:
Conventionally portrayed as the final victors in the social transition spurred by China’s rise and globalization, the second-generation of wealth in the film is portrayed as rootless. Dollar feels constricted and exasperated by post-socialist development.
Huang points to Tao as the embodiment of the small town culture that we see eroded throughout the course of the film, represented in the decline of Chinese New Year traditions (and Tao’s role in them at the start vs. when Liangzi returns from the other province):
In Mountains May Depart, Jia Zhang-ke uses the character of Shen Tao to embody nativist affection and values, to reflect the small hometown of his memory (or more accurately his imagination).
This evoked for me Shen Cong-wen’s portrayal of the border regions of China, chronicling an era on the brink of its own demise.
Some parts later in the film, particularly those parts filmed in Australia felt a little more melodramatic and corny compared to the rest of the film, but overall the film was well-paced and moving.
I’ve been hearing the phrase 「是在哈囉」 for a while now. The most recent case of which was a while back when a Taiwanese friend responded to a former member of the diplomatic service who wrote tell-all posts on his Facebook lodging his complaints about his former colleagues.
According to this handy slang guide from Business Next, the phrase takes its origin from when Americans say “Hello~~~?” (wavy intonation) to mean “What the f*ck is going on with you?”. Originally I’d thought the phrase meant attracting attention just for the sake of courting controversy, but according to the Business Next interpretation, it’s basically “up to f*ckery” or “behaving or acting bizarrely”.
中天 (whoops) posted this video suggesting that lots of people don’t really know what it means but get the general gist:
As with much slang, different people use it in different ways and it evolves over time (see the varying interpretations of 「三八」 to start your journey down the rabbit hole), so I thought I’d pick a few random examples of its use from across the internet so that you can troll strangers without nagging doubts about the appropriateness of your cutting remark on their new Instagram pics.
Even Minister of Foreign Affairs Joseph Wu has apparently employed the phrase when questioning the actions of the WHO:
Do these people live in a parallel universe? What the hell is going on?
A Taiwanese soap star Brent Hsu also made the Taiwanese version of the phrase popular in the Taiwanese drama Proud of You (《天之驕女》):
In the phrase 「洗嘞哈囉」, the character 「洗」 is used to represent the pronounciation of the character 「是」 sī in Taiwanese, and the character 「嘞」”lei” in Mandarin and “leh” in Taiwanese represents the Taiwanese character for 「在」 (to be doing s.t.). Then the 「哈囉」 is just a representation of the borrowing of the word Hello from English.
As you can see many of these posts are from last year or the year before, so expect saturation with this phrase at some point and a few rolled eyes if you use it at this point.
Another way to say “What the f*ck!?” in Taiwan is to use the phrase 「花若發」 (huā ruò fā) which is an approximation of the sound of the English phrase (What the f*ck) using Chinese characters (and Mandarin pronounciation).
You can get some fancy MRT-themed masks today if you register with the new MRT app (Android: 捷運Go or Apple: 捷運Go), although beware, you might have to suffer through several crashes:
Once you’ve signed up for the app, (you’ll need to verify your phone number, head to 「好康活動」 on the orange nav bar and click on 「捷然不同的通勤時尚」 and then register for the promotional event by pressing 「拿口罩」 on the bottom of the screen. You’ll then be prompted to pick a station to pick your masks up at on March 28 (from 10am – 6pm). Then hit 「領券」 pick up my voucher. You’ll be able to go to the MRT counter to exchange them on March 28, but brace yourself for queues judging by how much the app has been crashing.
Just a quick note for pun-lovers. The name of the promotion 「捷然不同」 is a pun on the phrase 「截然不同」 (jiéránbùtóng / entirely different), substituting the first character for the 「捷」(jié / rapid) in 「捷運」(jiéyùn / MRT).
I’m not sure quite what was going on with this angry red spoldge of red spray paint on the 「拍謝」 on the construction site sign below:
「拍謝」 is the informal way to write the Taiwanese term 「歹勢」 or “phái-sè”, which is the Taiwanese equivalent of the Mandarin term 「不好意思」 (sorry).
I’m curious about the motivations of the vandalizer. Are they against the use of Taiwanese on a formal sign? Are they against the borrowing of Mandarin sounds to represent Taiwanese, rather than the 「歹勢」 that is used more commonly? Or are they against the use of Chinese characters to represent Taiwanese at all? Or was it just a random stain that got on the sign somehow?
Given the history of its suppression, language tends to be a sensitive issue in Taiwan. Writer Huang Chun-ming (黃春明) even took off his shirt during a lecture back in 2011 due to a disagreement with Associate Professor Wi-vun Chiung (蔣為文) in the audience over the necessity for Taiwanese-language instruction for primary schools and Huang’s unwillingness to adopt Latin script to represent the Taiwanese language (as implied by the sign below).
Taiwanese writers don’t use Taiwanese language, but use Chinese language to create, oh the shame!
Ironically you’ll see Professor Chiung uses the Simplified version of the character 「國」 in his sign. Linguistic hardliners are not really my cup of tea, and I much prefer the hodge-podge of English, Mandarin and Taiwanese that the construction site sign portrays.
If you work in an Asian office, a biandang/lunchbox/bento warmer is a standard bit of kit. Lots of people have metallic lunchboxes which you can put inside to keep them warm until lunchtime.
There has been an escalating passive-aggressive argument lately in my office, as someone has been turning off the warmer as soon as they take their own lunch, leaving the remaining coworkers with lukewarm lunches, which is the eighth of the seven deadly sins (James 2:15-17).
I’m a microwave kind of guy, so haven’t been involved in the tussle, but the note was posted back in January without the highlighted text or scrawl down the side:
敬請最後一位使用者關掉即可，感謝！（想吃熱便當 heart emoji) 以上 2021.01.21 Please only turn off the machine if you are the final person to use it! (I want a hot lunch) Yours Jan 21, 2021
Since then, while innocently waiting for the microwave to finish, I’ve noticed the door ajar and the machine off a few times with quickly cooling biandangs still inside.
This led to the escalation down the side and the addition of dots and highlighted text:
*不要再關啦！2021.2.8 Stop turning it off! Feb. 8, 2021
I’m sure the culprit is someone with good intentions but over-wrought anxiety about the biandang warmer never being turned off and consuming the whole building in flames, however, it does seem like a bit of a dick move to continue to turn it off.
I’m always interested to see how variants of standard Chinese characters are still used in everyday life, whether it’s handwriting, signs or an author making a stylistic choice.
I spotted this beauty at a petrol station in Taitung. You can understand the reason for the simplification of the top of the character given the chunky font required by this kind of paint:
This character is 「嚴」(yán/strictly), but the top has been simplified along the same lines as the simplified version of the character 「严」. It retains the 「敢」 of the traditional character though:
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