Passersby in the night

urbandweller

November 19, 2008, 08:19 PM

ummmm what? am i the only one confused by this post?

Jess_Andersen

November 29, 2008, 03:23 PM

你怎么这样糊涂？

 

make my hair stand on end!!!

henning

November 19, 2008, 08:47 PM

ok, no hanzi post from the iPhone. Blame that lame xixuegui.

haikeyi

November 19, 2008, 09:18 PM

Can you give me a translation ot this message?

Wo zhi shi ni shou ming zhong de yi ge guoke.

[Sorry, I can only make a literal translation: I only am you life kind of a passer-bye]

I'm still experimenting with this website. Don't blame the iPhone. I am a newbie so I ignore hanzi. Thanks, Joe

pearltowerpete

November 20, 2008, 01:16 AM

Hi urbandweller

I don't get it either. I'm as confused as a baby in a topless bar.

henning

November 19, 2008, 08:45 PM

udw, thanks for guiding me here. %u4E0D%u8FC7%u5438%u8840%u9B3C%u5F97%u591A%u7528%u6C49%u5B57.

haikeyi

November 20, 2008, 12:58 PM

Here is the original:

Sissi: 我只是你生命中的一个过客

Wo zhi shi ni shengming zhong de yi ge guoke.
[I only am you life middle of a passer-by]

I am only a passenger in the middle of your life

mid-life crisis? You might be right, billm :-)

I think I hurt her feelings, again. She's just a little girl in a big, big world. Sissi is 25, lives with her mother and father and big sister (30) surrounded by family, aunts, uncles, cousins... I think she'll come around, but it looks like I'll have to wait another 3 months before she speaks to me again. In the meantime... there are other fish in the sea.

Joe

haikeyi

November 29, 2008, 02:27 PM

I'm like a Bird

My phone is out of memory. I have too many friends, tai duo pongyou? I add another name and my phone complains, "SIM card memory full. Save to another memory?" There is room on the SIM card for about 100 names. I must do some housekeeping. The SIM card also holds my Sent folder which is too small to be useful. It only holds 25 messages... I say, "Yes" and my phone says, "Saved." I have no idea where it is putting them all, but I have a suggestion: let's put the sent messages in that auxiliary memory, the Ausweichparkplatz, overflow parking. I will lose them when I put the SIM card in another phone, but so what? This is not my immediate problem.

Introducing...

the sweet-dreams =
the dreams-come-true = {jenny, connie, jiaojie, emma, vera}

the laowai = {ken, john, amber...}. The outsiders, the "Magnificent Seven," {Yul Brenner, Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn (The Man from Uncle) and Horst Buchholtz. Amber is playing the role of a Angie Dickenson}

the four-seasons = jie = tian = {chuntian, xiatian, qiutian, dongtian}.

I know a Xiatian, a Qiutian, a Dongtian, but no Chuntian. I know Vera. Her name could be Primavera, another Spanish name. Her Chinese name is Hu Fei Fei. Or is she Vera Cruz, the True Cross, Zhende ?Shenme?, the one the crusaders found in Jerusalem... I know a Snow Flower; wo renshi yi ge Xue Hua, yi ge Snow White [Bai Xue qv]. Snow Flake? How about Sweet Pea? Rosebud? Wo hen xihuan he {Lv, Hong = Bei} cha. The girl at McDonalds is Huang Yu, Yellow Leaf. I know a Xiao Xuang, Little Yellow, Carol's best friend. My mother-in-law's name is Hong Yu, I call her Red Fish, but that can't be right. Just kidding, I never married her daughter. Japan is the Land of the Rising Sun. There is a house in New Orleans called The House of the Rising Sun. I know a Summer Rain, yi ge Xiatian Yu ma? 'Shenme' selects one season from the enumeration. Zhe shi 'shenme' jijie? 'Shenme' shi ni zui xihuan de jijie? What is your favorite season? Ni zui xihuan de yanse shi 'shenme?' Your favorite color is what?. Let's match up the seasons and the colors. I should know how to do this, but I don't. [I know, Ma! "It's all my fault."]

The primary colors = yanse = se = {{heise, baise}, {hongse, lvse, lanse}, huangse=yellow}. Black & White. Red, Green, Blue. We now know 'lanse' is an adjectival verb and 'lanse de' is an adjective, 'lanse de {toufa, tian}'. Lantian, Lvcha, Hong xiezi? Tian lanse ma? Is the sky blue? Don't it make my brown eyes blue? Is lanse an adjectival verb, like piaoliang, shanliang? Ta piaoliang ma? Is she pretty? Ta you heise de toufa ma? Does she have black hair? Ta de toufa heise? Hey, What is the past tense of 'you?' "? ? ? ? Jenny had blue hair." So many questions! I have a hunch tenses are defined using adverbs, like 'Jenny yi ci you heise de toufa.' What would those adverbs be? "Once, back then Jenny had blue hair. Jenny will have blue hair again."

Spring is blue. Chuntian lanse. Chuntian shi lanse de?
Blue, blue, my love is blue? Lanse, lanse... wo de ai lanse? Wo de ai shi lanse de?
Summer is red. Xiatian hongse.
The sun is red...
Fall is yellow. Qiutian huangse.
Winter is white. Dongtian baise.

What season is it?

The Chinese say "dongtian" but winter doesn't start until the solstice, Dec 21. When is the feast of the winter solstice? We have three of them, the solstice was celebrated by druid priests on the 21 of December, the precise day the sun reaches its {opposite:zenith} but they didn't have a calendar. The Germans and the Irish celebrated the solstice on Christmas day, Dec. 25, which became the Christian new year, the birth of Christ. The solstice is the day the sun stands still, stops falling, begins to rise again, a good omen because now the days will be getting longer. The Roman new year fell on the 1st of January. Janus was the two faced gate keeper, one face looking forward, the other back. But January was in March, the first month of the Roman calendae. It fell on the vernal equinox. The Roman year began in the Spring, but later than the Chinese Spring festival which begins in the winter.

the days = tian = {qiantian, zuotian, jintian, mingtian, houtian}

the days-of-the-week = {xingqiyi, xingqi'er, xingqisan, xingqisi, xingqiwu, xingqiliu, xingqiqi?} The seventh day always confuses me.

Jintian xingqiji? Jintian xingqi'er. Today is xing-7-2

'qi' is the number 7, so 'xingqi' must be 7 'days', a settimane. Heptimoni is Greek for 7 days, a week. 'ji' is a question word which selects one day from the days-of-the-week enumeration, like in French, "Quel jou sommes nous?" "Nous sommes mardi." Which day is today.... This ontology needs to be completed by an expert, a teacher.

parts-of-the-day = {zaoshang, shangwu, wanshang}

The cartesian produce of days and parts-of-the-days = {qiantian zaoshang, qiantian shangwu, qiantian wanshang...}

The reason I don't like the tones is because they have no names, just 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th tone. Long before the Internet, way back in the 70's, IBM had SNA (=Systems Network Architecture), I can still remember reading the documentation, "In SNA there are 5 types of messages, Type I, Type II, Type III, Type IV and Type VI. Notice, there is no Type V message type." haha... My phone beeps.

Sissi(14:54): I am leaving yiwu

What!?

Joe: Where are you going?

Sissi: Guangzhou

Joe: Did you get a new job?

Sissi: No

Joe: Do you have family in Guangzhou?

Sissi: No. I can not stay in a place too long. I have to go out to breath some fresh air.

Joe: Me too :-)

Joe: When will you leave?

Sissi: I am on the train

What?! I want to cry.

Joe: You are beautiful, Sissi. That's for sure.

Joe: You'll never, ever fade.

Joe: You are like a bird flying away.
http://web.tiscali.it/cataldomusto/file/Nelly%20Furtado%20-%20I%27m%20Like%20A%20Bird.mp3

Joe: You will come back some day.

Sissi: Of course! I am a kite with a string!

Joe: I will miss you very much.

Joe: I am missing you already. :-)

Of course, I am not smiling. I am crying. I think of myself, my life, my past... My mother used to say it was all my fault. She said, "Joey, you are too sensitive." That made me cry more. One day when I was 9 years old my best friend died, my turtle. My turtle lived in a glass bowl on the kitchen table. I used to spend hours with my turtle, watching him swim and eat. I fed him dried insects from a cardboard insect shaker I got at the pet store. Then he would stretch out in the sunlight which streamed in through the kitchen window on a flat stone I found for him in the yard. He was beautiful, that's for sure. He had a long green neck which he liked to stretch out of his shell. His green neck had bright yellow stripes. He was tiny, no bigger than a quarter and had a sharp, hooked nose like a beak. Then one day my turtle died. I found him floating in the water in his bowl. My mother said to me, "Joey, if you don't stop crying right now I will never buy you another turtle." We buried the turtle in the backyard next to our neighbor's house, right on the spot where I found my turtle's flat stone bed. My mother kept her promise. I never got another turtle. She said, "I told you so." I have been crying ever since.

My mother was a pruduct of the depression. She used to tell us she walked to school in her bare feet, in the snow... She was born in 1933 into a working class family in Detroit, Michigan. My mother's father was an electrician for the Ford Motor Company, a veteren of the first world war - WWI, a strict German protestant and an alcoholic. He got drunk every payday which in those days was every Friday. He used to say "Ihe first $5 are for me!" so he came home drunk every Friday. He abused his wife who was Polish catholic and terrorized his children. My mother was the 8th of 11 kids, a happy girl until her father drove the happiness out of her life. She told me once she liked to collect the photoplay pictures of the movie stars when she was a young girl, Tyrone Power, Lana Turner... She took great pleasure in collecting her photo album. Then one Friday her father came home drunk and angry, looking for a fight. He find's the little girl's Photoplay album which she kept locked in her dresser drawer. This makes him even angrier. He tears the thing to shreds. He says, "If I am not happy no one will be happy!" I never liked him. He scared me. I'm glad he is dead.

I was born in 1955. My father got back from Korea in 1952 and went looking for a bride. Unfortunateky he never told us their story, how they met, how they fell in love. They seemed to have nothing in common: he was very sentimental, she was very strict. There are a couple black and white photos of them on their honeymoon to NYC in 1954 taken at Jack Dempsey's restaurant. They looked young and happy, dressed up in adult clothes that made them look like ageless 30-somethings, my mother in a sharp new hair-do she probably got on Madison Ave. wearing one of those ugly little box hats. My father was dressed in a suit and tie. He used to say, "Son, the clothes make the man!" I am the oldest of seven children. I had a happy childhood. My parents did the best they could. We weren't poor, but we weren't rich either... I have never gotten married. Neither have my younger brothers and sisters. Well, Tony and Georgie got married and Ruthie too. Of the 7 kids my parents had only 6 grand children. Margaret is the youngest, the one that sounds like paganfarmer. She just had a baby with William, a handsome beach bum in Costa Rica, dark skin, light brown dreadlocks. He sleeps with all the American girls who come down on vacation, including my sister. She named the little boy Wodin, Wutan... Odin after the German god, but I keep forgetting his name, so I call him "Cortez" after the Conquistador, the conqueror of Mexico.

My father died in 1989, my mother in 2005. He was 59. She was 72.

So why am I crying over Sissi? I am lonely. She'll probably be back in a week. She has no family down there and I know she has no money... I'm crying because I think she is unhappy and she doesn't know what to do. She is young and her life is just beginning. She'll be a woman soon. It would take 100 Sissi's to make one Mexican woman, but she is all I've got.

Joe

PS

The truth is I have at least 5 children with 3 women. I was married once to a young Catholic girl in Ohio who never finished anything she started and complained about everything. So my parents had at least 11 grand-children, but they didn't know half of them. I never told them. I don't count anymore.

troggs-wild-thing
http://cdn1-89.projectplaylist.com/e1/static10/349/1030897.mp3

haikeyi

November 29, 2008, 02:32 PM

Welcome Home Sissi

My phone beeps.

Sissi(08:45): I will be back in the afternoon.

Joe: Hi Sissi. Today is sunny but cold.

Sissi: I will wear more. Thanks.

I stay in bed until noon, then go to McDonald's for coffee. I hold a English corner downstairs with the McDonalds-girls = {Xiao li li, Huang Mei (Pretty Yellow), Huang Ye (Yellow Leaf), "Ssssh" Ting, Yu Mu Dan, Xiao Bai (Little White), Tian Yue Yi, ....}. Girls, girls, girls! Boys need not apply! I teach them English and they teach me Chinese. Sometimes they give me free coffee. Today we covered many topics...

colors = yanse = se = {heise, baise, {hongse, fenhongse}, lanse, lvse, huangse...}

You duo shao yanse? You hen duo. [Dongtian helped with these, but I think they are wrong]
Ni zui xhiuan de yanse shi shenme? heise, baise, lanse, mvse, hongse... [The girls do not seem to understand my Chinese]
Tweety de yanse shi huangse de. Tweety is yellow.
Tweety de yanse huang bu huang? Huang! This seems to indicate 'huangse' is a adjectival verb. It is being used as a predicate with out 'shi'
Tweety shi shei?
Tweety shi Huang Xiao Ya.

Sometimes the color is fused to the noun: {lantian, {hongcha, lvcha, lvshui, heifa=heise-de-toufa}, baiyun, baixue...}

seasons = jijie = {dongtian, chuntian, xiatian, qiutian}

You duo shao jijie? Si.
Ni zui xihuan de jijie shi shenme? dongtian, chuntian, xiatian, qiutian.
{Xianzai, Zhe} shi shenme jijie? Dongtian.

months = yue = {yiyue, eryue, sanyue, siyue, wuyue, liuyue, qiyue, bayue, jiuyue, shiyue, shiyiyue, shieryue}
Duo shao yue you? shi'er.
Ni zui xihuan de yue shi shenme? Liuyue, June.

Class was exhausting, standing there in the overheated atrium below the dining room for two hours. After two hours we say goodbye. The girls go back to work and and I go upstairs for my coffee. It is now 1700 hours. I see Kenny is already here. She sneers at me, pretends not to see me, ignores me.

I ask her, "Are you mad at me?"

She says, "Yes."

Why?

I'll tell you.

Kenny is a prostiture and a liar(= a "whore"), a 22-year-old, self-described "good-girl" from Anui province who claims she has never "f*cky" [sic=her words, not mine] before.

"I do not do that," she says.

I met her the day before yesterday at the same McDonald's, the one on the Chouzhou beilu, another "midnight" McDonald's (the other one is further away, in the Chengzhong lu). It was 5 in the morning. The only girls walking the street at that hour are the "street-walkers," the "working girls" i.e. the prostitutes i.e. the liars. They have turned McDonald's into a whore house.

Kenny adds, "My father will not let me have a boyfriend...."

Kenny asks for money under false pretexts.

I was all alone having a midnight snack when this young Chinese girl comes in. She says her name is "Kenny." She is young and pretty, not beautiful, a bit like Shelia, fat but very healthy, strong; Kenny clearly is not starving. I like fat girls. O like skiny girls. I like all kinds of girls. The restaurant is empty. I am standing at a counter eating a double cheesburger. Kenny looks at me with friendly eyes. I know she is a whore. She insists I sit down at a table with her.

I smile and say, "Ok."

Her first story is about her boss - a Pakistani who she says, wanted her to have sex with his friend.

"I do not do that," she says and adds "I am a good girl.... So he fired me."

'Martyred you' I thought.

Her second story is about getting robbed. She says somebody pilfered her purse, picked her pocket somehow, "touched her" she said and pointed to her purse. Hard to imagine how someone could do that. He could have been a Chinese Houdini. She says she has no money, but she has ordered a cup of corn and an order of fries, and a banana pie and a Coca Cola.

Kenny continues to tell me she was taking the noon train back to her home, some small farming village in Anhui province. She looks like a farm girl from Anhui. Yiwu is full of them, all young and ripe and uneducated, selfish and rude, corrupted by the poverty of the region, not very pretty, but very strong looking like the oxen which plow the fields. Kenny's English is pretty good, so is Shelia's and Sydney's too. Sydney Zhang Mei is a Chinese English teacher. It is 5 o'clock in the morning and Kenny says she will spend the night here in the all-night McDonald's.

"Good idea," I say.

We talk some more. She repeats her lies 20 times. I don't care because she means nothing to me. Her phone rings. It is her friend, she says. I understand Kenny's Chinese, "I am sitting in McDonald's with a rich laowai. He's American..." Kenny announces her friend will be right over. I am not too happy about that. I don't want to be sitting with two whores, one is boring enough, two is boring to death. Kenny's friend is called "Mickey." I think Mickey Mantle, two boys names. Mickey is full of shit too, brown hair, brown eyes. She says she is 28, divorced with a 6 year old daughter, then she says she has no where to sleep either. Both girls are homeless, duh? Mickey wants me to "pay" them a hotel room.

I say, "Mickey, now why would I do that?"

No reply.

Finally I say to Kenney. "If you want you can spend the night with me in my apartment."

"How many beds do you have?"

"One."

Kenny protests. She says, "I am a good girl..."

I say, "I won't touch you. You can sleep on my bed with me a couple hours then go to the train station..."

No, that's not good enough. Mickey wants to come too.

I say, "But my bed is not big enough for three people."

Mickey says again, "Can you pay us a hotel room?" She must be deaf or just determined.

I say, "No, that wouldn't be economical. It is 5 o'clock in the morning and you'll have to check out by noon. Just camp out here. They won't mind."

Both girls know I am saying, "Thanks, but no thanks," but both have one-track minds. Finally I say, "Good night. And good luck." They frown.

Kenny is mad at me because I didn't give her any money.

My phone beeps.

Haha: Hello . Joe . This is Lulu.

Joe: Hi lulu, Honolulu, Hoola-hoop :-)

Haha: yeah . How are you ? Are you still stay in Yiwu?

Joe: You have the most beautiful hair, lulu. [You have the most beautiful breasts I have ever seen/touched/tasted, lulu]

Haha: thank you . You said you have a bad memory ! so you know i am so happy.

Not true, I never said I have a bad memory. I was ignoring your messages, pretending I didn't know you because you changed your number when you moved to Hangzhou. Temporary insanity, amnesia... I temporarily saved your name as 'Haha,' because you think everthing is funny, including me. When I am with you I feel like a fool.

Joe: It is cold in Yiwu today.

Haha: Hangzhou is cold too . I need to put on my heavy cloth.

Joe: Studying hard?

Haha: Not busy . Always free .

Joe: Hardly studying. :-)

Haha: That's true. I only have two subjects to study. How about you chinese [sic]

Joe: Chinese girls are pretty dressed in black.

Haha: I like black and White Best . What colour do you like best ?

Joe: I like black too.

Haha: Have you been traveled to other cities?

Joe: My friends call me "Joe." Strangers call me "laowai."

Haha: Laowai do you like the nickname

Joe: Tamen shuo, "Ta zhe me gao! Ta shi laowai..." :-)

Haha: you are much taller than chinese people .

Joe: Wo xiang ni, lu lu.

Haha: I miss you too . So i send you message . You made a great process [sic] in learning chinese

Joe: Wo xiang ni yinwei ni piaoliang.

Haha: How many teeth in your mouth ?

Huh? I don't get it. Some kind of China wisdom translated directly into English? Lulu is beginning to bore me. I want to go to sleep. Is she saying I am an old man? I am missing teeth? Are my teeth falling out? Telling a lie? This is not the answer I am looking form, not the answer which will keep me awake. Lulu is just like Annie, both have sharp wits, sharpened tongues. Both use it like a weapon, to beat a horse to death, destroy enthusiasm, like a nurse on the surgical ward trying to insert a catheter in an old codger's hard dick. They use expressions they do not understand, because everything is a joke to them, nothing is serious. That's how they compete, true omegas they always say "No." They are omegas disguised as alphas. Ivan, Annie's cousin, on the other hand is as sweet as peach pie, authentic, shy but generous, just afraid to express herself. We had a great date yesterday. Her English is getting better and I am funny in Chinese. None of the girls have been kissed yet.

Joe: ... but you are very selfish.

Haha: <message deleted>

Joe: You only think of yourself

Haha: <message deleted>

Joe: Goodbye

Haha: <message deleted>

Kenny and Alisa have been playing Chinese fire drill all afternoon, first sitting next to me, then changing seats to the other end of the restaurant, then back again. Now Kenny is angry with me because my phone has been beeping all afternoon. I must be popular. She treats every girl as competition. She has been joined by Alisa, another friend. Alisa gave me a business which belongs to an Export company, but she looks and acts like a whore. These girls ruin the whole game, such poor liars. They are the reason why good girls look away: they don't want to be thought of as whores. I get up and go. Kenny is now sitting at a table with the kids. A hostess, Huang Ye, Yellow Leaf is acting as the MC of a birthday party. Kenny is one of the kids, a grotesquely painted prostitute sitting with the kids, smiling like Bozo the clown, Ronald McDonald. She reminds me of John Wayne Gacy. I'm concerned about the kid's safety. She might eat them, like the wicked witch. Does Yellow Leaf know the girl sitting next to those innocent chidren offered me sex for money just two days ago? She has come to McDonald's fishing for a rich, juicy laowai c*ck to s*ck. She thinks she has a right to be there.

Back home at the Yihe hotel I compose another message.

Joe: Welcome home, Sissi. We missed you. The City was not the same without you :-)

Sissi: Thanks for saying so warmly.

haikeyi

November 29, 2008, 02:36 PM

The Wolf is coming! The Wolf is coming!

Joe: Wo feichang feichang wuliao.

Joe: Wo wuliao si le.

Joe: Wu bu wuliao?

Joe: Wo xihuan kai wanxiao.

Joe: Lang lai le! Lang lai le! :-)

Sissi: Na zen me ban ya?

I propose, "What do you want me to do?" but my new teacher, Lv Zhi Ping doesn't seem to agree.  She does not know what this means, or she can't tell me, so I ask her for the answer instead, which neither of us understands.

Joe: LANG LAI LE!!! LANG LAI LE!!!!

Sissi: dou ni wahr

Ping doesn't know what this means either. I suspect she is having trouble reading the pinyin. What am I paying her for?

Joe: Bie dan xing ma? [Don't worry?]

Sissi: the same with kai wan xiao "dou sb wanr"

Ping doesn't know what this means either. I look in the dictionary, find the hanzi and show it to her. 逗 'dou' 1) vb to tease, 2) adj funny. Not the adverb 'dou' 都. 'wanr' 玩儿 is a verb meaning 'to play.' Ping doesn't know this word either, but a light goes on when I say 'wan.' Still, we don't know what this sentence is doing. 'sb' is an abbreviation for 'somebody.' [How do you say 'somebody' in Chinese, 'yi ge ren?' So many questions, so few answers.] What is the subject of this sentence? "Tease somebody play?" I don't get it. "Play somebody a joke?"

I fire Ping and go for a walk. A have a cold. My nose is running. I would like hot water, or a green tea, but I'm not willing to pay the hotel 20 rmb for nothing. I send another message.

Joe: Where can I get a green tea for free?

Sissi: I do not know.

Joe: For 5 yuan?

Sissi: No

Nobody knows anything, so I answer my own question.

Joe: I can get a weak coffee at Kfc for 5.5 Y.

No reply.

My phone beeps.

Sissi: Do you like donut?

Joe: I love donut [sic] :-)

No reply.

My phone beeps.

Sissi: Next time I wil [sic] take you there.

I must smile. This is a typical Chinese non-reply. I want to reply, but I am worried I may appear too enthusiastic. Chinese girls do not like enthousiasm.

Joe: Thanks, Sissi.

My phone beeps. I think it might be Sissi cancelling our date. Chinese girls do not keep promises.

Sissi: When do you eat donut? Morning? afternoon?

Careful, Joe. Don't say too much. You may scare her away.

Joe: We can eat donuts any time of the day :-)

Too enthusiastic?

My phone beeps.

Sissi: Ok i see. How about meet at yimei 3 oclock if it is sunny tomorrow?

Joe: Ok, see you tomorrow!

Tell me, Poddies. How do the Chinese manage to make so many babies?

Joe

mayor_bombolini

November 20, 2008, 01:43 AM

ptp: "baby in a topless bar"..哈哈哈！

Here's a wild stab:

我只是你寿命中的一个过客。

I'm only a passerby in your life.

I'm shaky on the shou ming zhong...but the message is clear...this is just a short-term relationship...maybe a one night stand.

Haikeyi:

Very entertaining。 Keep up us informed on how your mid-life crisis progresses.