The Shaolin Temple just closed out its 2018 Shaolin Martial Arts General Assembly, and well damn, African nations came through.
Twenty-two trainees from seven African countries — Cameroon, Chad, Niger, Burundi, Mali, Djibouti, and the Central African Republic — spent three months at the temple as participants in the Ministry of Culture’s sixth African student exchange program. The class studied empty-handed Shaolin kung fu, plus sword and staff techniques. At the end of the training period students performed what they’d learned for the temple’s abbot, and received certificates of completion.
Full disclosure, this writer happened to be at the temple while the African exchange unit was there training, and can confirm, they were doing some serious stuff. Tourists from across China watched with confusion and pleasant surprise .
“We came empty-handed but finished full of enthusiasm,” one participant said. “We’re really excited to be ambassadors of Chinese culture, and to share what we learned at the temple with people back home.”
The abbot Shi Yongxin, international media’s notorious “CEO monk”, had a more put-together statement to make:
The Shaolin Temple is committed to supporting China-Africa ties, cultivating the friendship between Chinese and African people, and pushing forward on cultural exchange and cooperation between China and Africa.
Outside of the African class, other foreigners and kung fu fans made the trip out for the occasion. People’s Daily was quick to seize a photo op on Twitter:
Yoga lovers practice yoga and Shaolin students perform martial arts along a cliff walkway on Songshan Mountain during the 2018 Shaolin Martial Arts General Assembly in Dengfeng city, Central China’s #Henan province, on August 25 pic.twitter.com/4twTRu4q5V
As time marches on, and the world around us changes, we can all take comfort knowing that foreigners will continue to flock to the Shaolin Temple with shocking consistency.
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Zhibo is a weekly column in which Beijing-based American Taylor Hartwell documents his journey down the rabbit hole of Chinese livestreaming app YingKe (Inke). If this is your first contact with the livestreaming (直播; “zhibo”) phenomenon in China, start here with Taylor’s introductory guide.
Chinglish of the Week because I very good 色, so often girl 骗
This is some multi-layered Chinglish right here.
The message that our friend is trying to get across is that his… lasciviousness often leads to his being tricked or deceived by women. Let’s leave aside truthfulness and/or judgements of character and simply look at how this beautiful Chinglish sentence came to be.
The first thing to understand is that in Chinese, the word 好 (hao) means “good,” but can also be used as a modifier to mean very or quite. So I could say that I’m “好饿” (very hungry), “好热” (very hot), “好疼” (in lots of pain), “好厉害” (very lihai) (link that word lihai to the lihai column), etc. Rather than choosing from a whole host of positive and negative words to describe things, Chinese tends to lean more towards simply putting more 很’s and 非常’s (very and extremely) in front of 好 (good) or 不好 (not-good).
Here, have a completely unrelated image.
So when this fella says that he is “good色,” he means that he is very “色”. 色 (pronounced somewhere between “seh and suh” most literally means “color.”
红色 (hongse = red)
蓝色 (lanse = blue)
绿色 (luse = green)
…and so on.
As you scroll through the dictionary entry for 色, however, you’ll also see look/expression, appearance, quality, and finally, sex/desire for beauty. When you put a 好 (good or very) in front of it, you get “very desirous of beauty or sex.” Or more simply: horny.
The word 骗 (pian, pronounced like p-yen, all one syllable) means to trick or hoodwink. This is much more straightforward than 色, but I am simply fascinated by the fact that it is also the verb meaning “to get on something by swinging your leg over it,” like a horse. As we’ve discussed before, horses seem to have an incredibly unfair level of connection to derogatory statements – but that’s a problem for another day.
Surprisingly Hard-to-Answer Question of the Week What time is it in America?
As I’ve mentioned before, China is all on one time zone – good enough for Beijing, good enough for you. So when someone from China asks what time it is “in America,” that’s a perfectly reasonable question from their perspective, despite it not making any sense if you just think a lil’ bit about the curvature of the earth.
I don’t get the sense that the one-big-time-zone thing is exactly a hotly-debated topic (in places where it really makes life inconvenient, they just live by their own clocks), so I haven’t had many serious discussions about it with Chinese friends. But on occasion, I’ll hear the argument that, since time is something we just made up, it doesn’t matter whether all of China is on one time zone.
Maybe. But since time is just our way of describing very obvious phases of the day we all recognized and lived by long before clocks ever existed, when you tell a whole segment of your population that it’s already 10am when the sun is rising, I’d argue that you’re the one violating the good rules of common sense.
Truly Strange Question of the Week 如果在沙漠，有两杯水，一杯血，一杯尿，你选择喝哪杯
Translation: If you were in the desert and had two cups – a cup of blood and a cup of urine, which would you choose to drink?
…say what now?
I find that interacting with strangers on the internet is a great way to inject a little novelty into your day. For example, I can say with confidence that I had never before this week Googled the phrase “can you drink blood.”
Pictured: “Work”.
What surprised me about the blood-drinking question wasn’t the actual scientific answer – it probably won’t kill you immediately, but still don’t drink it, you f@#king moron – but rather the sheer number of queries out there indicating that there are a whole lot of people with a more-than-academic interest in picking up a copy of the Renfield cookbook.
Seriously people?
I was vaguely aware of there being a sort of Goth subculture of people who call themselves vampires – mostly because it’s a classic straw man for anyone who wants to pretend gender identity problems don’t exist, but that’s a whole other thing.
Still pictured: “Work”, but with bigger air quotes.
Bottom line: sign me up for a cup of urine, thank you very much.
You wake up, hungover, thirty minutes late to work. Your phone’s at 5% battery, so you plug it into your shared power bank. In your death-like state, you don’t have the energy to make your usual shared bicycle commute to your shared office — you decide to call a shared car. But the newest incarnation of sharing is coming to ease your throbbing, dehydrated bones: in-ride shared massage pads, now available for less than ten cents a minute.
Ingenious. This state-of-the-art addition to the now wildly colorful shared economy comes from massage and health product manufacturer 9 O’Clock Break. Once you’re in the car, the massage pad will address you verbally, announcing an incoming one-minute free trial massage. It features inflating airbags, a charging port for your phone, and massage rollers for neck, back, waist, and buttocks. After your minute is over, you have the option to scan a QR code for further kneading. And at the price of 3 RMB (about 50 cents) for five minutes, you just might choose to make that purchase.
A pilot batch of eighty massage pads has been rolled out for testing in shared cars throughout the northern city of Shijiazhuang. 9 O’Clock Break intends to eventually blanket the city’s cars in their unique mobile massage units, and man, we are definitely rooting for them.
Our Photo of the Day series this week features drone photography from Angus Burgerman.
Shanghai lane houses take “love thy neighbor” to a whole new level. Narrow lanes and small, tightly-packaged rooms create a close-knit community where you can borrow a cup of sugar by simply reaching out the kitchen window.
Originally from Australia, Shanghai-based Angus (@angusburgerman) describes himself as “chasing the China Dream while exploring China from another angle – through road trips and drone flights”.
Imagine not being allowed to take a shower, leave your house, or even open a window for an entire month. Sound horrible? Well, it is an experience millions of Chinese women have been through immediately after giving birth.
It’s called “sitting the month” (坐月子 zuo yuezi in Chinese) and, so traditional Chinese medicine would claim, it is an essential part of the childbearing process. It’s certainly a far cry from the approach of most Western women, many of whom take the first opportunity they get to take their new baby for a walk in the park — and not to mention to take a shower.
On this podcast, Jingjing and Yajun sit down with new mother Kaijing Xiao (pictured right) to hear about her “hybrid” experience, combining elements of traditional Chinese post-natal practices with a more modern approach.
Our Photo of the Day series this week features drone photography from Angus Burgerman.
FitFam, one of the many burgeoning health and fitness communities in Shanghai takes advantage of the inconspicuous sports fields scattered across the city, which can often only be found with a bird’s eye view.
Originally from Australia, Shanghai-based Angus (@angusburgerman) describes himself as “chasing the China Dream while exploring China from another angle – through road trips and drone flights”.
