The heart is the strongest muscle. So it’s fitting to have a day for love the day before China’s world sports party begins. Of course, the Chinese ancients held that the liver was the seat of emotion, but they never had to juxtapose romance and the Olympics.
You are not likely to hear one person bring up that today, the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, is Qixi, Chinese Valentine’s Day. Come next February 14th, though, Chinese store windows will be plastered with giant paper hearts, and lines of couples will stretch around the block at Pizza Huts across the nation.
So marketing means the end of tradition. It’s a shame, at least in this case. The legend behind Qixi makes a lot more sense than a saint linked to romantic love by virtue of having married a lot of people, much less a winged baby taking pot shots at people with a bow and arrow. More importantly, the story of Qixi shows that, no matter how diverse and creative we’d like to think the family of man, there’s only one love story, Tom Hanks’ and Meg Ryan’s not withstanding.
"Ba-ba-ba." Has a nice ring to it, don't you think? It ought to: ba in Mandarinmeans "to increase" or "get rich". So by ancient Chinese association, if ba also means "eight", why then the number eight is lucky, too. Three eights? Trifecta! Of course that's why Beijing will be holding its opening ceremony on the eighth of August (at 8:08, no less), but there's no reason you can't share in the good fortune. Buy some penny stocks. Go on a blind date. Better yet, get married. You'll be in the company of a record nine thousand other couples who plan to get hitched on the most auspicious day of the century.
As even the freshest Sinophile knows, however, there's a downside to this homophonic logic. Si means "death" and "four". It even means "is" if you're one of those lazy southwestern Chinese who feel Mandarin is already rich enough in different sounds to make touching the tongue to the roof of the mouth and saying "shi" unnecessary.
This is all fairly academic until it comes to the delicate matter of gift-giving in China. Gifts for the friends who squire you about and translate on demand during your Olympic visit are as appropriate as offers of cash are inappropriate. But by all means avoid giving the following:
Make no mistake - we at China Expat are 100 percent committed to a glorious, harmonious Beijing Olympics. We are also realists. Hence, we must consider the microscopic chance that, somewhere between the shooting preliminaries and the flyweight boxing finals, a few visitors may crave entertainments entirely unrelated to competitive sports. Glance around at the roasted fans watching the eighth scoreless inning of the Venezuela-Japan softball match. You'll notice that some of them are flushed and listless-looking, but not from Olympic fever.
In fact, we suspect that even the athletes could benefit from some contingency activities. So when the resounding "doink" of a swatted shuttlecock ceases to thrill, consider some of these alternative outings, completely free of Great Walls and other obligatory cultural wonders.
Lang Lang, the Shenyang born Chinese pianist many consider the best of his generation, ("Stunning" - New York Times) has released a new joint CD and DVD, "Dragon Songs" on the Deutsche Grammophon label, the most prestigious for international classical artists. Comprising many of China's most loved classics, the pianist also made a documentary of the recording, included in the package.
The Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang has been creating a stir internationally with his recent installations, most notably his "Exploding cars" sequences, which have been showing everywhere from the Guggenheim onwards over the last few weeks. Described as "an explosive moment expanded in time and space as if in a dream" Cai Guo-Qiang's work is dramatic, severe and frighteningly beautiful.
Obviously, these are banner days for China's sports scene. And whether or not it achieves its goal of highest gold medal count at the Beijing Games, China's Olympic team will certainly deliver many tearful, triumphant moments on top of the winners' podium. Here's the rub: there's not a patriotic Chinese alive who wouldn't trade it all, every medal, for one World Cup trophy.
No matter how many droopy-shorted youths pad around shopping malls in day-glo basketball sneakers, soccer is the People's game, for now and for the foreseeable future. No other sport is so closely identified with national pride, hence no other issue so deeply rankles the patriotic Chinese heart as keenly as the chronic incompetence of its national team.
Here's a brief timetable of international Chinese soccer history, intended not to rub salt in the wounds of football fans, but to apprise a China expat of why (s)he should treat the subject as delicately as other sensitive political matters.
No, no, the following has nothing to do with Beijing's eight-year case of Olympic fever. It's an up-to-date vision of the inspired delirium with which Chinese artists have been turning out the world's most important art, ever since a group of ragtag painters defied Zhongnanhai and set up their work outside the National Museum in 1979, proclaiming themselves the "Star Group".
The Chinese Contemporary Gallery, with locations in New York, London, and Beijing's 798 Art District, focuses on the strongest work created by China's avant garde post '89.
Their ‘Beijing Frenzy' August Group Show will run from August 2 - 27 [see below for details], providing an ideal escape for those who prefer oil and canvas to sweat and Astroturf. Here are the artists on view and some of their best pieces.
All Chinese Olympic athletes merit respect, whether they end up wearing gold or sucking wind. They are the hard as nails products of a system pioneered by daycare centers in Sparta, and perfected by the Kremlin’s sports gulags. Nary a one doesn’t have the eye of the proverbial tiger, earned from the age of six by leading lives resembling unending Rocky training montages.
"How come all those darn provinces sound the same, even the ones next to each other?"
- Soused Expat, Overheard in Watering Hole
Willful ignorance is much easier than learning, at least in the short term. If you've been in China a while, you probably know ‘Shanghai' means ‘on the sea', and ‘Beijing' means ‘North Capital'. And if you're one of those diligent souls who spent a year in intensive Mandarin study as soon as you unpacked your suitcase, then by all means back to your classic Confucian texts. The following is for the rest of us, who figure Hubei must be near Dongbei because, hey, ‘bei' means ‘north'.
Knowing your Hu's, He's, and Shan's constitutes a big step forward in "getting" China, as utterly impossible a goal as that is.
While you’re expected to root for your own country’s athletes at the Olympics, you’ll score valuable face points with your Chinese comrades by knowing a few of their favorites. No, not just Yao Ming. Here are five other Chinese Olympic hopefuls with huge expectations riding on their athletic shoulders.
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