Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

Princess and Mrs. Beijing Sounds sent text as soon as the wheels touched ground at PEK last night. By 10:30, they’d entered the Beijing Sounds studios in Shàngdì (上地 in northwest Beijing) and managed to include your editor (who they’d left holed up in Minnesota) in most of the evening rituals: the book-reading, the talk about instant noodles for dinner — pretty much like home.

No, separation isn’t what it used to be. How quick you forget the days of shouted greetings over dollar-a-minute phone calls. You can hardly even recall anymore what it’s like to wait for mail.

All the same, today you still have to disconnect, eventually . And then you listen to the refrigerator hum, uninterrupted. You start feeling sorry for yourself and dig up whatever annoying sound clip you can find.

一个老头上厕所
yīgè lǎotóur shàng cèsuǒ
An old man goes to the bathroom

一摸兜儿，没带纸
yī mō dōur, méi dài zhǐ
feels his pocket — didn’t bring paper

擦完屁股一手屎
cāwán pìgu yī shǒu shǐ
after wiping his bottom, one hand of poop*

“Yeah,” you think, “that’s me — the hand of poop.”

C’mon! Pull out of it already. Get yourself together. What do you need? A beer? No, some bon-bons then, maybe? Still not right? Well what, then?! Oh sure, of course — I mean, who wouldn’t need to prop themselves up by scouring every last corner of the internet for some sign that you’re cool? Sure, here you go, critical acclaim: your very own refrigerator, fully decorated.

–

* Maybe someone can do better with that translation? Inelegant, to say the least.

[Update 8/1/08: Yes, indeed there was a better translation -- yet another sound clip I found in which PBS (princess beijing sounds, age 5 at the time) translates the work herself. The existence of the recording only further documents my continued and inexplicable fascination with child culture, especially of the potty-humor variety.

]

Olympic sloganeering & ingenuousness, Mandarin acquisition & n-closing, the Catch-22 of tones

If you’re a return reader to this blog of questionable taste, obscure subject matter and infrequent update, you probably have an appetite for a good cynical rant. Not that you’d be able to feed the habit on this url, mind you: as a recovering cynic, the editor-in-chief takes pride in methodically expurgating sarcastic ledes that might degenerate into farting about the ignorance or folly or Pollyannish behavior of some group or another. But old habits have a way of sneaking in through the side remark, the choice bit of lexicon, the polysemous blog title — the territorial pissings of a cynical alter ego that subvert the editor’s best intentions and signal to the ranks that Optimism shall not yet overcome. Read the rest of this entry »