Chinathread: Look at this pig'zhuge balls!

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Kharnifex: Sep 11, 2001; The Banter is better in AusGBS

Some betoota parody magic

# ? Apr 30, 2020 03:46

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# ? Jun 7, 2024 09:07

hakimashou: Jul 15, 2002; Upset Trowel

Is that the dude where the chinese liars had a tantrum because the Australian swimmer called out their cheating olympic athlete and then the cheater got some massive ban from the olympics and the australian guy was vindicated?

# ? Apr 30, 2020 03:52

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

I wonder if these conversations ever take place the other way. I've run into plenty of immigrants to the US who either don't speak English at all or never get past super basics, including parents of friends. It doesn't bother me any, though there are a lot of those SPEAK ENGLISH OR GO HOME idiots.

# ? Apr 30, 2020 03:52

Blistex: Oct 30, 2003; Macho Business
Donkey Wrestler

Kharnifex posted:

Some betoota parody magic

I don't know if he's a horrible chud or not, but (if not) my hat's off to him.

# ? Apr 30, 2020 04:09

Mr. Smile Face Hat: Sep 15, 2003; Praise be to China's Covid-Zero Policy

strange feelings re Daisy posted:

I don't think it's an overstatement at all. For a vacation it would make sense to just muddle through, sure. Someone with easy access to education living in China for years is a completely different story. I met many expats who only hung out with other English speaking expats and relied on bi-lingual helpers for everything. I think it was rude but moreover it was completely pathetic. They experienced virtually nothing of China, couldn't even really take care of themselves without help, and just hid in their little bubbles. It was also my experience that these types usually had a condescending, imperious attitude towards the locals. Many people in China already speak 3 or 4 dialects and Mandarin is the lingua franca there.

Not sure what the point you're trying to make with the dialects is but sure.

Grand Fromage posted:

I wonder if these conversations ever take place the other way. I've run into plenty of immigrants to the US who either don't speak English at all or never get past super basics, including parents of friends. It doesn't bother me any, though there are a lot of those SPEAK ENGLISH OR GO HOME idiots.

I've been in such a situation many years ago in a Manhattan shop when a friend and I spoke our language to each other. "Be polite! Speak English" the owner of the store, which sold post cards, suitcases and assorted tech items said. We left. I think some people can't deal with that and think anyone who speaks a different language is talking about them or something.

# ? Apr 30, 2020 04:16

I would blow Dane Cook: Dec 26, 2008

Bold the whole thing, etc

quote:

Mack poked the dragon and parents paid price

Gangs outside the home, constant threats, their business hacked... four years after swimmer Mack Horton outed a Chinese rival as a drug cheat, his family still pays the price.

By LUKE SLATTERY

On a mild October day last year Cheryl Horton was cleaning the backyard pool at the family home � a chore she rigorously avoids until it can be ignored no longer � when the vacuum head made a curious grinding sound. She raised the appliance, felt beneath it, and winced with pain. Blood coursed down her hand, dripping into the pale water. She called to her husband, Andrew, and together they discovered a �bucketload� of broken glass on the floor of the pool. She holds one of these centimetre-thick glass chunks, �glinting like a rough-cut diamond, as she speaks. �We keep it on the desk in the study,� she says, �as a reminder of how bad things got.�

The couple knew immediately where the �broken glass had come from, and why it was there. Just three months earlier their son, �Olympic 400m freestyle gold medallist Mack Horton, had refused to join Chinese swimmer Sun Yang, a three-time Olympic gold medallist and 11-time world champion, on the medal podium at the World Championships in the South Korean city of Gwangju. Horton had just won silver in the 400m freestyle; Sun Yang gold. Mack Horton�s mute �protest � standing up for clean sport by refusing to stand beside Sun � unleashed a wave of hostility more disturbing than anything the family had ever experienced. And since their son famously labelled Sun a drug cheat at the 2016 Rio Olympics, they�ve experienced a lot. �We�ve had so many death threats that we�ve stopped taking them seriously,� says Andrew with a grim chuckle.

At the Rio Olympics, before competition had even begun, Horton says Sun tried to provoke him in a warm-up pool by splashing water and hurling abuse as they both paused at the ends of their lanes. Asked by a reporter afterwards about the contretemps, Mack coolly replied that Sun had �splashed me to say hello, and I didn�t respond because I don�t have time for drug cheats�.

�That was the moment our lives changed,� says Andrew. �That�s when it all started.�

Mack�s remark in Rio, a reference to a three-month suspension his Chinese rival had served in 2014 for taking a banned stimulant, detonated across all forms of media � print, television and internet � with the force of a depth charge. Within 45 minutes, some 680,000 slurs, insults and death threats had assailed Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the Chinese social media �platform Weibo. His Wikipedia entry was later trolled. Mack was dog poo poo, a racist, destined for the Paralympics, and perhaps a nuclear bomb strike. He must apologise. Or else.

A week later, with Mack and his parents still in Rio, there was a break-in at the family home in the blue-chip Melbourne suburb of Glen Iris. Andrew�s business � he runs an educational �technology company � also began to experience relentless cyber attacks that could only be mitigated, he says, by denying access from China.

After Mack�s theatrical and somewhat passive-aggressive follow-up protest in South Korea last year, �the hate�, as the family calls it, rose to another level of intensity. Dog turds were hurled at the family home; their trees and plants were poisoned. A passing parade of youths gathered at the back fence to chant slogans while banging pots and pans in the dead of night, or stood in the driveway hurling abuse. Someone who spoke broken English took to phoning Andrew every second day to detail what he would like to do to his daughter (he has no daughter). And there was the broken glass in the family pool.

�The biggest change was the intensity,� says Andrew. �It was unrelenting. Every day and night in the second half of 2019, peaking in September, easing off in February this year.� It relented in the same month that Sun received an eight-year �suspension for destroying a blood �sample in an out-of-competition doping test.

Horton, who has regular and ongoing �security briefings about threats to his family, has been informed that his assailants call themselves ��Confucianists�. The 5th century BC �Chinese �philosopher has been revived in recent years as a national icon by a Chinese Communist Party seeking ethical moorings outside its founding credo of Maoism, and his name has become a codeword for Chinese nationalism. Sun himself seemed to invite a nationalist interpretation of Horton�s comments in Rio, saying: �Disrespecting me was OK, but �disrespecting China was unfortunate.�

Andrew harbours no ill-will towards Sun�s �supporters, believing on the advice of �security officials that they are acting under instructions from the Chinese Communist Party, either directly or indirectly, and �have little choice�. He is concerned, in fact, that some of them will be �beaten up, or worse, if they don�t comply�. He declines, on security grounds, to specify the assistance given to his family by police and security agencies; he�ll only say that he is �very grateful�. The fenced-in suburban family home is by social convention a kingdom, but for the Hortons it is a kingdom under siege.

The family�s challenges are part of a broader pattern of harassment and intimidation of the Chinese Communist Party�s critics and dissenters. Says a national security analyst who keeps a close eye on the case, and spoke on condition of �anonymity: �The Hortons� story is very disturbing... It says something about the reach of foreign �powers within Australia.� Clive Hamilton, professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University, tells me: �Australians should know that China�s secretive Ministry of State Security has been carrying out a campaign of intimidation in this country against critics of the regime. It�s illegal and nasty.� Hamilton, co-author of the upcoming Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World, says ASIO is trying to monitor activities of this kind. �I hope we see some arrests and prosecutions soon. When that happens, we can expect the usual hysterical �denials and calculated outrage from the Chinese embassy, state newspapers and the Party-affiliated Chinese-language media in Australia.�

It�s understood that no arrests have been made in the Horton case, which has been kept from the public gaze. The Hortons report a �constantly revolving cast of characters� at their fence and in their driveway. If any were apprehended by police they would be questioned, cautioned, released, and another would take their place. �This is not an amateur operation,� remarks a security insider.

Politically motivated attacks on non-Chinese Australians are rare, but not unknown. In July last year a University of Queensland student, Drew Pavlou, a vocal critic of the university�s ties with Chinese organisations, says he was assaulted while leading a pro-Hong Kong rally on campus. �In the aftermath I saw my social media flooded by �hundreds of abusive �messages from supporters of the Chinese government,� says Pavlou, who is Greek-Australian. �There were dozens of threats in Mandarin and English. They threatened to kill me and my family, to rape my mother. It�s a terror �tactic to silence critics of the Chinese government.�� Another position on the spectrum of debate about Chinese influence in Western society is occupied by John Keane, professor of politics at the University of Sydney, who warns about the �prejudice known as Orientalism� and points to �the treatment of Sun Yang by Australian xenophobes�.

Sun rose to fame in China when he became the first Chinese man to win an Olympic gold medal in swimming in 2012 (he won two: the 400m and 1500m). So when Horton defeated the Chinese superstar in the 400m in Rio, on the evening of August 6, 2016, it was bound to ramp up tensions.

Almost immediately Swimming Australia, the sport�s governing body, received letters from its Chinese equivalent threatening reprisals over Horton�s �drug cheat� claims. Shortly after the expiry of the deadline these letters had set for an apology, Swimming Australia�s website was hacked and crashed. Around this time, the Australian Census website went down after it was hit by �concerted cyber attacks launched from overseas, in a major embarrassment for the Turnbull �government and the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Some tech commentators have speculated that these attacks were part of the blowback from Rio.

But there was one lighter moment to the post-Rio backlash. Horton�s coach, Craig Jackson, took six months off to travel around South America and in the jungles of Colombia he met a group of British students who told of a friend in the UK by the name of Matt Horton. �His Instagram account had been bombarded with insults by Sun�s �supporters,� Jackson says. �He even wrote to Mack to ask him to please apologise.�

The Hortons are happy to tell the story of their �grand adventure�, as they like to call it � and in the telling, to put it behind them. I catch up for a video call with Andrew, 53, and Cheryl, 52, a month after the announcement of Sun Yang�s eight-year ban � a punishment that will likely end his career, barring a successful appeal. It�s late March, and the 2020 Tokyo Olympics have just been postponed. Mack, a 24-year-old La Trobe University business management �student when he is not chewing up laps in the pool, marked the suspension of training with his first drink in a long time � a negroni � and a handful of almond croissants. But now he has been advised to �shut down� any media engagements amid security concerns: his mother had spied a �serious� drone above the house. Things that had once seemed extraordinary � death threats, abuse, home invasions � are now the wallpaper of their domestic lives. Andrew insists that his son�s protest in South Korea last year was as unrehearsed as his �drug cheat�� remark in Rio. �It�s not about the result and it�s not about China and it�s not about Sun Yang,� he says. �For Mack, it�s all about clean sport.�

Andrew and Cheryl were in the stands at Rio watching the races when they felt the first ripples of all this. �I saw John Bertrand [president of Swimming Australia] and Mark Anderson [CEO] running towards us with a bunch of support staff,� Andrew recalls. �John asked if I�d had a conversation with Mack about what he was going to say about Sun Yang and I said, �No. I don�t know what you�re talking about. I�ve no idea what he�s going to say�. At that point John told me [that Mack had made the drug cheat claim] and I went, �Oh� ok-ay�.�

Immediately, and without his knowledge, a Brazilian special forces commando was assigned to shadow the swimmer. His parents, too, had �protection; wherever they went they noticed the same two �friendly� young men nearby. �It was only when we were leaving the hotel and saw them putting machine guns into the boot that the penny dropped,� says Cheryl.

Since the Rio games there have been suggestions that Mack�s outing of Sun, made between the heats and the final, was merely astute pre-event gamesmanship: in the 400m freestyle final Sun was more than one and a half seconds off his �winning London Olympics time, and immediately after the race was filmed in tears. Others speculate that it was a way for Mack, at his first Olympics, to spur himself on. He told reporters after the event: �The last 50 metres I was thinking about what I said and what would happen if he gets me here.� Craig Jackson tells me there was �no preconceived plan to say any of that, but after he made the �comments he had to live up to his words. Mack certainly enjoys the big stage, and there is no stage bigger than the Olympics.�

The heats for Mack�s other big event, the 1500m freestyle, were held the following week. The night before, during an interview for Australian tele�vision, Andrew noticed his phone light up with text messages. Two suspicious vans had been �spotted outside the family�s home, where their other son Chad was preparing for his Year 12 exams. Andrew shows me one of the texts from a concerned neighbour, which reads: �The garage door was open and so was the house and Mila [the �family dog] is missing. The alarm is going off now I am waiting for the police to arrive.�

Cheryl cuts a sharp look at her �husband as he tells me this. �This is news to me as well,� she says. �Well I�m letting you know,� Andrew continues. �At around that time the school contacted us by SMS to say they were getting threats concerning Chad. He was actually doing a practice exam so he was escorted out of the school and spent the rest of the Olympics at his mate�s house.� Nothing was stolen from the home, and the dog eventually returned. �By the time the police arrived they�d hightailed it.�

Mark Anderson, former CEO of Swimming Australia, vividly recalls meeting the Hortons in a stairwell of the stadium at Rio soon after their son�s victory in the 400m freestyle. �They were trying to celebrate what was the biggest moment in Mack�s career,� he says. �I was hearing of the break-in at home where the son was still �living. They were concerned about Mack in the intense environment in Rio and their son a world away at home. They were justifiably concerned about the safety of both children. The celebration was tinged with concern � it was etched on their faces. But it says something about them that they were able to conduct themselves with dignity throughout.�

The following year Mack Horton told reporters that the ferocity of the blowback � the threats and harassment aimed at him and his family � had changed nothing. �I think I would do the same thing even if I knew the outcome.� And so, two years later, he did. Andrew and Cheryl were back in the stands to cheer on their son at the World Championships in South Korea. They didn�t know he was considering another protest. �But in hindsight we knew something was going to happen,� Cheryl admits. �There was an expectation � you could feel it in the air. Either Mack was going to protest, or someone else would.�

Her son�s actions are immortalised in the �iconography of competitive sport. In footage of the event, silver medallist Mack, lantern-jawed and bespectacled like a blond Clark Kent, congratulates Italian bronze medallist Gabriele Detti with a handshake but ignores his gold medallist Chinese rival. When it dawns on Sun that Horton won�t stand next to him on the podium his expression stiffens, and he offers a strained smile. None of the three medal winners in this awkward tableau seems to be playing the standard part: Horton, the steely protester, is resolute yet anxious, uncertain. Nor is there much joy in the smiles Sun and Detti are able to muster. When the trio walks off the stage Sun waves to the crowd, but his smile has once again curdled; Horton brings up the rear with long strides, arms clasped behind his back.

Fresh in the mind of Horton and every �swimmer at those championships was a recent report in the UK Sunday Times detailing how three anti-doping testers had arrived at Sun�s home in September 2018 to administer out-of-competition blood and urine tests. Blood was taken at a nearby clubhouse. In the early morning, after a clash between Sun and the �officials about their accreditation, qualifications and behaviour � �followed by a lengthy standoff � blood samples were allegedly destroyed by Sun�s entourage on the instructions of Sun�s mother Ming Yang. In January 2019 � three weeks before publication of the damning Sunday Times investigation � the sport�s global governing body, FINA, had cleared Sun of wrongdoing on a technicality. So when Mack Horton refused to mount the �winners� podium his protest was as much against FINA�s inaction as it was against Sun.

As the medal ceremony was playing out he heard roars of approval from his fellow athletes. But his parents, who were sitting in a spectator stand opposite, heard only the boos and jeers from Sun Yang�s supporters. �It ramped up after that,� recalls Andrew. Next day a security official told him that in 24 hours �Australian consular officials in China had received more than nine million messages and not one of them was pleasant�. The day after, his company was again targeted.

The following day father and son spoke. It was a testy conversation. �In the athlete�s village they have very little idea of what�s happening outside,� says Andrew. �Athletes turn off their social media and disconnect. I explained to Mack that while I fully support his stance, he just needs to be mindful that these things have flow-on implications. It�s the only time we�ve had a serious disagreement.�

�But if nobody stands up, nothing changes,� says Cheryl. �I get that,� replies Andrew, turning to address his wife directly. �But he just hadn�t �considered the full implications.�

Mack�s silent snub again made global news. It also set off a chain reaction. A few days later �British swimmer Duncan Scott, who was placed joint third in the 200m freestyle, also refused to join Sun for pictures on the winner�s podium or to shake his hand. Sun confronted Scott and called him a �loser�. Scott and Mack received official warnings from FINA, and both were overwhelmed by death threats from Sun�s fans on social media.

Craig Jackson, Mack�s coach, wasn�t in South Korea that night. He recalls a conversation with Mack a week before the championships that �suggested his charge was stewing over the issue of clean sport, and might have been pondering a protest. �I don�t recall the exact words,� Jackson says. �But he didn�t rule it out... We�d spoken a lot about clean sport, and I knew his position. He�s true to his values.� He watched Mack�s protest at the medal presentation from his lounge. �To be honest I agree 100 per cent with the statement he�s making but as a coach I�m sitting there going, �You know, I�d prefer you didn�t do that.��

Mack was well aware of the burden borne by his family after the comment about Sun in Rio. Why then, having poked the dragon and felt the heat, go for Sun again in South Korea? �It says something about his laser-like focus on swimming as well as he can and as fast as he can, and his feelings about fairness in his sport,� Andrew reflects. �And I think he is insulated from a lot of things. One day he�ll have a family of his own and he�ll look back with a better appreciation of how much background support he had.� Mack later spelt out what the protest was, and wasn�t, about : �This isn�t a China-Australia thing. This isn�t a China versus the world thing. This is a principle in the way the sport is governed and controlled.�

In February this year FINA�s decision to clear Sun was overturned on an appeal from the World Anti-Doping Authority to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), which slapped Sun with an �eight-year suspension. The unanimous verdict was a blow to FINA�s prestige and authority, and to Sun and his family�s fortunes. And it was a stunning vindication of Mack Horton�s stance.

Andrew Horton is inclined to view Sun � an only child with boyish movie-star looks who is unafraid to show his emotions in victory or in loss � as the �victim� of an enormously powerful �system with a vast global reach. He points to a recent post from Ming Yang, made after her son�s eight-year ban, in which she alleges an official cover-up over his 2014 doping penalty and rages against his legal team at the CAS hearing. Chinese authorities had initially kept Sun�s three-month suspension in 2014 under wraps, revealing it to the public after he had competed in the Asian Games of September that year. In her since deleted post, Ming Yang alleges that the Chinese Swimming Association manipulated the timing of the news so that his results at the Asian Games � three gold and one silver � would remain intact.

In her post Ming Yang gives a touching insight into the family life of a Chinese swimming star: �I couldn�t sleep at night, powerless and helpless. My son struggled in the swimming pool for more than 20 years, and was strangled by power and lies.�

Even at the age of 10, before swimming had taken hold of his life, Mack Horton was unusually attuned to the spirit of fair play. �This is a kid who as a young basketball player used to throw the ball to players on the other team who he thought �weren�t getting a fair go,� recalls his father. �Needless to say, he didn�t get very far with basketball.�

In another life Mack�s sensitivity to injustice might have propelled him into an altruistic profession, but his mother�s feeling for water had a large bearing on his passion for the pool. When Cheryl first started dating the man she would marry � both hail from Perth � a big moment in their courtship was her discovery of his family�s pool. �I could never get her out of the water,� Andrew recalls. �Cheryl and the boys just love the water: the feeling of it flowing over their bodies. It�s in their DNA. It�s like a drug.�

Asked if she recalls how she passed on this �passion to her youngest son, Cheryl makes a dunking motion. �He was a reluctant swimmer,� she laughs. �Scared of the water. But once he put his head under he loved it. He couldn�t stop.�

By 2008, 12-year-old Mack was showing great promise � he had the hunger and what his father describes as the �natural metrics of a world-class swimmer�. Even then, though, Andrew wasn�t sure if Mack knew what he was letting himself in for: the pain as well as, just perhaps, the fame. �Do you really want this?� he asked his son one day. Mack turned towards him with a �deadset straight in the eyes� gaze. �But Dad, you don�t seem to understand,� he said. �When I swim I feel like I�m flying. And the faster I swim the �better it feels.� Andrew felt his chest tighten, as if he had seen his future. He called Cheryl to say, �We�re going to have to get used to this. It�s not going to go away. It�s going to need the support of the whole family.�

�I knew it would have a huge impact,� he tells me. �Swimming can be brutal on families.� And yet Mack �loved the toughness�, Andrew says. �The pain was nothing to him.� He wanted it so badly that some time in his 13th year he pasted the world record time for the 1500m freestyle on his ceiling. The Hortons like to think of themselves as an �ordinary� family; in their pursuit of normality they�ve banished swimming trophies and photos � even swimming as a conversation topic � from the family home. But they�ve kept the old 1500m record on the ceiling of Mack�s room. �We kept telling him as he was growing up that he was an ordinary person who did some extraordinary things,� says Andrew. The desire to ground the child who was flying in the pool is one reason Andrew and Cheryl felt no shame forcing their myopic son onto the tennis court from time to time. �It was a way of bringing home to him that he was just a mug like the rest of us.�

The way Andrew tells it, Mack�s alma mater, Caulfield Grammar, approached him in January last year for guidance with its new $25 million aquatic centre. Both father and son were chuffed by the idea. Andrew was on good terms with the school and he, together with Craig Jackson, who was asked for his expertise in high performance swimming programs, offered their help. �For most of the year we were talking with the school once or twice a week,� he recalls. �Mack and I also were participating in school events.�

But around October � three months after Mack�s protest in Gwangju and coincidentally the same month Cheryl found a bucketload of glass in the family pool � Andrew and Craig felt the school had cooled towards them. Calls that were once answered promptly were now ignored. Around this time, Andrew believes, the school�s contract with its Nanjing campus in China, which hosts Caulfield Grammar�s Year 9 students each year for a five-week program, came up for renegotiation. The school�s Wikipedia entry makes no mention of Mack Horton in its entry on sporting alumni. Instead it notes the achievements of Chris Judd and John Schultz � Brownlow Medallists � and John Landy, who held the men�s mile record in the 1950s.

In February this year, after media reports alleged that Caulfield Grammar had scrapped plans to name its aquatic centre after Mack �Horton, principal Ashleigh Martin moved to �defuse the issue, labelling the reports incorrect. �The school has not started a process for naming the facility after any individual, or decided at this time if it will be named after any individual,� the �statement read. �Caulfield Grammar School and its community have great pride, respect and �admiration for Mack Horton, as both an Olympic swimmer and as a Caulfield Grammarian.�

While Andrew points out that �swimming fast doesn�t entitle you to have a building named after you�, he has at least one powerful ally in Gina Rinehart, Swimming Australia�s patron. �Like many Australians I was very surprised in relation to Caulfield Grammar, as any school should be thrilled to bits to be able to have Mack as alumni,� she tells me by email. �I did ask his �parents if they would like me to write to the school to mention this on Mack�s behalf, but they did not wish this, saying Mack�s focus is on training.�

Things have changed dramaticall y for the �Hortons since Sun Yang was given the �eight-year ban. The �hate� has lost much of its heat. Sun, �disgraced, has been derided online by many of his former fans; Mack, once widely vilified, has been publicly vindicated. Andrew, who claims to have much sympathy for Sun and his parents, shares, at the very least, something of their pain as families dedicated to their athletically elite offspring.

Mack Horton was prepared to make a stand for clean sport. But there is a pyrrhic quality to his moral victory, for it has taken a heavy toll on �family, friends, neighbours and a largely invisible web of support. �It�s been a grand adventure,� reflects Andrew. �But it�s certainly not what we anticipated when we chose to encourage our children in sport.�

# ? Apr 30, 2020 04:42

Baronjutter: Dec 31, 2007; "Tiny Trains"

Arven posted:

So I've been reading through the Three Body Problem trilogy, and I just had to ask this thread... is it me, or is Chinese thinking practically alien? I've lurked this thread off and on through its many iterations and I think I understand no why and face culture and all that, but goddamn something struck a cord in me with these books. It's possible it's just the author, but I feel like it isn't because what I've read previously here?

And yeah, part of it I'm sure is eastern and western thought, but I've read some translated Japanese stuff (not just manga), and seen tons of Korean and Indian movies, and I've never felt that way about other Asian cultures. Again, maybe it's just the author, but so many mental leaps are made and solutions to situations put forth as common sense that make me do a mental double take that I legit feel like an alien watching humanity from afar wrote these books.

And please let me be clear, I am in no way attributing this to biotruths or race or anything and I know it's purely cultural- but drat that culture seems to be different than any other I've encountered before.

I'd love to know some examples of this from the book. I've also experienced this a little with media and just ESL-student interactions. Like sure there's going to be some cultural differences around the world, but it doesn't matter if someone's from Chile or Nigeria or Vietnam there was always enough of a sort of universal shared human experience and thought-process that could eventually form friendships and a common ground everyone could relate to, everyone could eventually get on the same page to tackle group projects and creative writing and interpreting poetry and movies and so on. But the mainland chinese students, specially the boys, there was always way more trouble. And we'd rarely get through to them, they'd usually just go into a sulk mode and put in minimal effort and hide in their dorm rooms. The Saudi, Nigerian, and HK kid would all understand the underlying message of a film but the mainland chinese guy would have some absolutely bizarre take on it, totally missing the obvious themes of the movie and then getting very upset that everyone else thought differently and then further withdraw from the other students. It was always very difficult and we never quite figured out the right strategy.

# ? Apr 30, 2020 04:42

BrainDance: May 8, 2007; Disco all night long!

I get that it can be hard, I think there are situations where not learning the language makes sense, like people just doing a year in another country or even people who live somewhere that speaks a language you can't just naturally pick up, and are way out in the middle of nowhere.

I'm the kind of person that really struggles to learn a language on my own but I pick it up really well if I'm in an actual class. So, I've been lucky to have that, live in a big city, or with Chinese I took uni classes before coming here which gave me a pretty good base to work with. Not everyone has the chance or the money for that.

Or if you just sit at home/hang out with expats all the time because that's what you like, whatever. Who are any of us to tell people what to do with their lives. As long as they aren't speaking poo poo or bugging other people who cares.

Though, last job I worked with this guy, he had something weird going on in his head I'm sure. But he would just speak English, all the time, to everyone. Go to some small store run by a 60 year old guy and he full blast starts shouting English at them until he gets what he wants. He was the 'Chinese people are loving animals' type, so gently caress him.

You're dumb as poo poo if you don't pick up hangul in Korea though. Figured that poo poo out on my own just riding the train and looking at multi-lingual signs.

I'm more kinda blown away by these 'I had no Korean/Chinese friends' posts. You guys do you but that seems boring as gently caress.

# ? Apr 30, 2020 04:50

hakimashou: Jul 15, 2002; Upset Trowel

I knew like 10 words of chinese when i went to china, but I had done a couple years of Japanese in college and had a deep abiding love for the calligraphy, much more so than for anything specifically Japanese, so while I could eventually get by in Chinese I was always more literate than fluent. Tons of poo poo I knew/know the character for but couldn't remember how to say.

# ? Apr 30, 2020 04:55

Vesi: Jan 12, 2005; pikachu looking at?

in any other place on earth I'd argue knowing the language will be better but (mainland) China is an exception, the more people understand the quicker they burn out

# ? Apr 30, 2020 05:04

Qtotonibudinibudet: Nov 7, 2011; Omich poluyobok, skazhi ty narkoman? ya prosto tozhe gde to tam zhivu, mogli by vmeste uyobyvat' narkotiki

Magna Kaser posted:

Cuz most non Chinese speakers can�t pronounce a lot of Chinese sounds, never mind tones. There�s also a ton of discrimination outside of China itself and if you cv says �Rachel� you�ll get a lot more follow ups than if you name is Shan Shan.

It's quite annoying that most English transliterations of Chinese don't use pinyin tone marks, given how fundamental it is to the language and how honestly quite quite simple the Mandarin tone system is. The marks look like the tone curve they represent and there's all of four of them, it's not that hard. Can I pronounce or hear them reliably and quickly? No, but having the tone marks is a hell of a lot more information about the sound than completely omitting them. It's not like it's impossible to understand the underlying vowel sound when tone marks are present even if you don't know what they mean. We don't strip all the diacritics from Spanish or French or Vietnamese; I see no reason why we strip them from pinyin.

Mandarin consonants are, however, a crapshoot, and pinyin is often quite misleading there if you understand it as "sounds like the English equivalent consonant" rather than "a somewhat arbitrary Latin character choice to represent a consonant that doesn't exist in English, but soooooorta sounds like that letter does in English". It's probably about as good as we're going to get though, and is no more off the mark than, say, English speakers trying to pronounce Dutch names.

# ? Apr 30, 2020 05:09

Cheesemaster200: Feb 11, 2004; Guard of the Citadel

hakimashou posted:

I knew like 10 words of chinese when i went to china, but I had done a couple years of Japanese in college and had a deep abiding love for the calligraphy, much more so than for anything specifically Japanese, so while I could eventually get by in Chinese I was always more literate than fluent. Tons of poo poo I knew/know the character for but couldn't remember how to say.

China is one of those countries where not knowing the local language can really leave you completely lost. You can get around with english in Shanghai or Beijing, but even there it can get dicey outside the tourist areas.

The other big country like that is Russia and its cyrillic sphere of influence.

# ? Apr 30, 2020 05:35

Ailumao: Nov 4, 2004

CMYK BLYAT! posted:

It's quite annoying that most English transliterations of Chinese don't use pinyin tone marks, given how fundamental it is to the language and how honestly quite quite simple the Mandarin tone system is. The marks look like the tone curve they represent and there's all of four of them, it's not that hard. Can I pronounce or hear them reliably and quickly? No, but having the tone marks is a hell of a lot more information about the sound than completely omitting them. It's not like it's impossible to understand the underlying vowel sound when tone marks are present even if you don't know what they mean. We don't strip all the diacritics from Spanish or French or Vietnamese; I see no reason why we strip them from pinyin.

Mandarin consonants are, however, a crapshoot, and pinyin is often quite misleading there if you understand it as "sounds like the English equivalent consonant" rather than "a somewhat arbitrary Latin character choice to represent a consonant that doesn't exist in English, but soooooorta sounds like that letter does in English". It's probably about as good as we're going to get though, and is no more off the mark than, say, English speakers trying to pronounce Dutch names.

You're misinterpreting what pinyin is. It's a pronunciation tool for Mandarin and was never intended to be 1:1 with English phonology. This has been explicitly stated by one of the lead architects (and vocal CCP critic for most of the 100+ years of his life) of Pinyin. They set out to make a pronunciation tool and not a way to transliterate it, which it was retrofitted into being sometime later. When developing Hanyu Pinyin, they considered making a new set of glyphs, using Cyrillic and resurrecting old sets (like the one that would become Bopomofo), etc.. and landed on Latin characters.

It's only misleading because you're assuming it should be using English phonology and not looking at it as its own set of sounds. I hear this complaint a lot from English speakers but I've never heard anyone complain that German or French or Italian have different pronunciations for the same letters.

For this purpose, it's great, and big step up from what they used to use which was some wild system of assigning arbitrary sounds and tones to certain characters.

The lack of tone markers is annoying, but common because for most purposes of transliteration Chinese people know what the word is and don't need them and it's annoying to add. Any time they Hu Jintao or Xi'an or Guangzhou, they know the tones they are supposed to be and it's extra work for everyone to add then for no real benefit as hardly who needs pinyin would know what those mean. It's not the same as accent marks in other languages because very few actual speakers of the language use Pinyin to communicate longform or officially.

Almost every kids' book with ruby script would have them because the intent of that is to teach how to read characters. This is a totally different use-case compared to just using "Deng Xiaoping" as a standardized way to write 邓小平。

Bopomofo while sometimes is missing tone marks usually has them cuz it's exclusive use is similar to my above example. It's just as useless as full-on characters to 99.9% of people. The cool thing about Taiwan is they still use 32 different romanization systems so you really have no idea how to pronounce anything unless you know the Chinese or what exact system you're looking at.

tl;dr, pinyin wasn't made to replace characters and used on it's own, and wasn't specifically made for speakers of any language other than Chinese itself. It's a very good system for what it is and the lack of tone marks when localizing place or people's names is understandable laziness as most people who don't know the tones already wouldn't know what they mean anyway.

# ? Apr 30, 2020 05:47

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

Pinyin is good because it's consistent. You don't get the problem of just random rear end spelling in China that you do in Korea, despite the fact Korea has a standardized system for spelling in Roman script everyone just loving ignores it and mashes their keyboards like idiots. I do agree about using the tone markers though, I would have had an easier time. Fortunately it turned out that at least in Sichuan, you can just straight up ignore tones and everyone still understood what I was saying. Idk if that's true everywhere but Sichuanese tones are so weird anyway it works.

# ? Apr 30, 2020 05:53

strange feelings re Daisy: Aug 2, 2000

Grand Fromage posted:

I wonder if these conversations ever take place the other way. I've run into plenty of immigrants to the US who either don't speak English at all or never get past super basics, including parents of friends. It doesn't bother me any, though there are a lot of those SPEAK ENGLISH OR GO HOME idiots.

Those conversations definitely do take place the other way sometimes. The Chinese-American immigrants I know consider it extremely foolish to live in America and not learn English. It's basically seen as career suicide and condemning yourself to menial labor. That's just the majority of people I know, including my own family, obviously not everyone feels the same and it's not 100% true.

BrainDance posted:

Or if you just sit at home/hang out with expats all the time because that's what you like, whatever. Who are any of us to tell people what to do with their lives. As long as they aren't speaking poo poo or bugging other people who cares.

I guess you're right that's it not rational for me to be annoyed since they aren't really hurting anyone but it bugs me for some reason. I think of all the cool people I met and adventures I had in China and some of the expats just seem to be wasting a big opportunity moving across the world to isolate themselves.

# ? Apr 30, 2020 05:58

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

strange feelings re Daisy posted:

Those conversations definitely do take place the other way sometimes. The Chinese-American immigrants I know consider it extremely foolish to live in America and not learn English. It's basically seen as career suicide and condemning yourself to menial labor. That's just the majority of people I know, including my own family, obviously not everyone feels the same and it's not 100% true.

Interesting. Can you post any stories or conversations you've had about the Chinese expat experience? Obviously most of what we read is English speakers moving elsewhere, I'm always curious about what sorts of expat bitching there is for people moving to Anglophone countries.

# ? Apr 30, 2020 06:00

BrigadierSensible: Feb 16, 2012; I've got a pocket full of cheese🧀, and a garden full of trees🌴.

strange feelings re Daisy posted:

I guess you're right that's it not rational for me to be annoyed since they aren't really hurting anyone but it bugs me for some reason. I think of all the cool people I met and adventures I had in China and some of the expats just seem to be wasting a big opportunity moving across the world to isolate themselves.

This is/was one of my biggest gripes with "those" kind of expats.

Why take a job half way around the world if you don't want to at least engage with the culture/people? And a lot of the time they actually have to try to avoid stuff. i.e. the guy I knew who spent 5 years teaching elementary kids in Korea yet didn't know who/what Pororo was. I suppose the Chinese equivalent would have been not knowing about the Monkey King. People like him, (and in my time as an expat I have met plenty of them), seem to spend their time drinking at the same bar with the same people whinging about the same things.

On this phenomenon. It always baffled me the people who had spent multiple years 'in country' but hated it. One of the benefits of being an ESL Teacher is the ability to gently caress off home after your contract is finished. If you hate it here so much, why did you re-sign for another year?

# ? Apr 30, 2020 06:16

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

BrigadierSensible posted:

On this phenomenon. It always baffled me the people who had spent multiple years 'in country' but hated it. One of the benefits of being an ESL Teacher is the ability to gently caress off home after your contract is finished. If you hate it here so much, why did you re-sign for another year?

You're presuming options on the other person's part that they may not have. I stayed in China longer than I wanted to because my job was secure and paid enough to live, and I had nowhere else to go. I was looking for something new, but finding a job that pays enough to live on in the country you're in + enough extra to pay massive debt back in the US is not easy. And going "home" meant no friends, no job, no healthcare, and nowhere to live, so it was not an option until it was forced on me by family poo poo.

E: Also, leaving would've meant going to some ESL mill instead of the good job I had. Living in China sucked but my job was largely decent and had a potential future, unlike doing the grind at a hagwon or some bullshit. Basically I'm saying there are a lot of things in other people's lives you may not be aware of. There's also the fact that everywhere sucks in its own way, and the specific combination of suck in one place may be better than others, so you live with it but that doesn't mean you have to pretend it's all roses and sunshine.

There are also people who just suck, but honestly I didn't encounter all that many in either Korea or China. Korea had a few spectacular burnouts though, that was always fun.

Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 06:29 on Apr 30, 2020

# ? Apr 30, 2020 06:23

WarpedNaba: Feb 8, 2012; Being social makes me swell!

Grand Fromage posted:

Interesting. Can you post any stories or conversations you've had about the Chinese expat experience? Obviously most of what we read is English speakers moving elsewhere, I'm always curious about what sorts of expat bitching there is for people moving to Anglophone countries.

Wasn't that /r/sino? Or are we talking legitimate bitching?

# ? Apr 30, 2020 06:24

BrainDance: May 8, 2007; Disco all night long!

Maybe it kind of depends on how far we're stretching the definition of expat here. A friend of mine hasn't really put much effort into learning Chinese, she doesn't care. She doesn't even like it all that much (she's black and has a very different experience than most of us. I went to Luoyang with her to see those big rear end Buddhas, the Buddhas were great but the way everyone acted around her, way different than how I'm treated and super lovely, gawking like they're at the zoo).

She's from a pretty poor country, her husband is from Zimbabwe and you can imagine how that goes. She's here to send her kids to college, and she puts up with a ridiculous amount of poo poo to do that. If I was her, gently caress learning Chinese.

But SA is mostly white, mostly from western developed countries, so yeah we're probably talking about a very specific kind of expat, but really there are a lot of not Chinese English speakers who come here for all kinds of reasons other than getting pictures eating bugs for their blog.

# ? Apr 30, 2020 06:27

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

BrainDance posted:

Maybe it kind of depends on how far we're stretching the definition of expat here.

There doesn't seem to be a consistent one. For me, expat = living in another country but not intending it to be permanent. Immigrant is when you are intending to stay in the new country permanently. I hope to eventually graduate from expat to immigrant somewhere.

# ? Apr 30, 2020 06:33

BrigadierSensible: Feb 16, 2012; I've got a pocket full of cheese🧀, and a garden full of trees🌴.

BrainDance posted:

Maybe it kind of depends on how far we're stretching the definition of expat here.

Yeah. I guess I am hugely guilty of using expat to describe only the wastrel ESL teachers I have met, most of which were white priviledged Americans/Canadians. (It always surprises me how few other Aussies or Kiwis I have met).
And yeah, sometimes grinding away at a ashitty job in a lovely country you hate is better than what is 'at home'.
Also, I am not talking about all the cool, fun, interested people who engaged with local culture etc. Coz there are plenty of those as well.

I was just whinging, and making generalizations based on a few arseholes I have met. Sorry.

# ? Apr 30, 2020 06:41

BrainDance: May 8, 2007; Disco all night long!

Well you're not wrong either, it's not like those lovely people don't exist. I'm not trying to say you're wrong, just that, like everything it's a complicated thing. I think, anyway.

# ? Apr 30, 2020 06:54

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

Is cool, just offering the other perspective. I had my issues with Korea but I never hated it. China was fine for two years and then by the end of my third I loathed being there, but I was stuck so I had to deal. If things had gone differently I might still be stuck there. Which at this point doesn't sound so bad, my time back in the US is even worse than China.

# ? Apr 30, 2020 06:59

Kharnifex: Sep 11, 2001; The Banter is better in AusGBS

Korea is the Australia of Asia.

# ? Apr 30, 2020 07:04

hakimashou: Jul 15, 2002; Upset Trowel

Pinyin is actually really good.

There are a handful of consonants and diphthongs you have to just learn but... you learn them by speaking chinese and listening to people speak it. Its very regular and intuitive like someone said above with the diacritics giving you a pretty accurate visual sense of the tones they mark.

"x" is the sound in "xie xie" and "c" is the sound in "baicai" or cao ni ma, "q" is the sound in "qing" etc, "s" is from "yi er san si" and of course, the y is silent, and there you go. "ua" from "yuan" and iu from "jiu." cant think of the rest off the top of my head but bang, now you know pinyin.

What's the alternative? That wade-giles substitution cipher poo poo?

hakimashou fucked around with this message at 07:18 on Apr 30, 2020

# ? Apr 30, 2020 07:08

ninjoatse.cx: Apr 9, 2005; Fun Shoe

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

Bold the whole thing, etc

Honestly, ignoring them and not actively trying to find them just emboldens people. I mean, at least not actively looking for them is implied in the article.

# ? Apr 30, 2020 07:17

GotLag: Jul 17, 2005; 食べちゃダメだよ

Kharnifex posted:

Korea is the Australia of Asia.

It's not that bad, surely

Blistex posted:

I don't know if he's a horrible chud or not, but (if not) my hat's off to him.

He's a chud and The Betoota Advocate is a parody outlet, in the same vein as The Onion

# ? Apr 30, 2020 07:20

Shadow0: Jun 16, 2008; If to live in this style is to be eccentric, it must be confessed that there is something good in eccentricity.; Grimey Drawer

Pompous Rhombus posted:

As someone who loves languages and currently teaches one (not English!), I actually pretty much agree with this take.

Learning a language is probably one of the worst tradeoffs in terms of time invested:financial reward. In the time it takes you to learn most Asian language to fluency, you could probably learn to code, or do an MBA (or both, lol). But with that said, a lot of the payoffs are intangible or things you can't put a value on, like experiences, relationships, etc.

Don't get me wrong I love Thailand and Thai people/culture, but unless you're married to someone, are a language nerd, or have a deep interest in like, Thai history or art or something, trying to learn Thai to fluency is one of the biggest wastes of time I can think of. But even if you're just trying for conversational Thai, definitely learn the alphabet.

Yeah, like I said, I'm mostly invested in it because of my partner, but also I do just genuinely enjoy languages.

The "worst" "investment" is definitely Ainu, but I want to learn that too one day.

BrainDance posted:

we're probably talking about a very specific kind of expat

That's the argument being made. If you're just visiting, just learn hello and thank you if you want. If you're moving there, learn something! You've moved to a new country for a reason, what was the reason? Get out, travel, learn some stuff. Do stuff!

If you've been living there for 10 years, and will continue living there for the foreseeable future - you've definitely got the time and reason to learn the language.

On the other hand, you've already made it this far, so I guess you've got everything worked out. At the end of the day, you should do you. But you're just making your life harder than it needs to be and you're putting yourself in a situation where you need to rely on other people a lot. You're also just setting yourself up for situations where no one is going to be able to communicate and it's going to be frustrating for everyone.

It's silly to be mad at those people, but like, you're mostly just hurting yourself a lot by not doing it.

It's good we live in a time of Google Translate.

Edit: The real issue though is that you have all these passionless people teaching English. People with no love for English or language or teaching or real anything. Like if your math teacher doesn't like math, how are you supposed to get excited about it yourself?

Grand Fromage posted:

I loathed being there

I think learning the language helps a lot. You'll be able to do more things and interact with more people. You'll run into fewer obstacles and have greater independence.

Arven posted:

So I've been reading through the Three Body Problem trilogy, and I just had to ask this thread... is it me, or is Chinese thinking practically alien?

This happened to me when watching Rashomon, with the scene with the bandit and the woman. It's kind of amazing (or in that case: unfortunate) the way people's thinking can work so differently than your own.

Related: I often wonder what farmer Koreans think having dogs tied up on short, short leashes to tiny, tiny dog houses all day. I saw someone taking one for a walk; I hope they all get some play time, but it's all so sad.

BrainDance posted:

I'm more kinda blown away by these 'I had no Korean/Chinese friends' posts. You guys do you but that seems boring as gently caress.

Strong e/n territory here, but:
Edit: Eh, I don't really want to post all that. Suffice to say, I tried. And I've got some old friends and some elderly friends, just not too many new my-age friends. It's easier to make friends in a big city, which is not where I live.

Shadow0 fucked around with this message at 07:46 on Apr 30, 2020

# ? Apr 30, 2020 07:27

strange feelings re Daisy: Aug 2, 2000

Grand Fromage posted:

Interesting. Can you post any stories or conversations you've had about the Chinese expat experience? Obviously most of what we read is English speakers moving elsewhere, I'm always curious about what sorts of expat bitching there is for people moving to Anglophone countries.

Some of the poo poo Chinese immigrants say about people of other ethnicities, including other Asians, would make a white racist blush. Many of the older Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese all hate each other and they all band together like a racist Voltron to be lovely towards Filipinos together. Can't say they're overly nice to Mexicans or black people either. Some of them are used to being in an ethnically homogeneous society where they are the default "normal" and don't deal well with the racially diverse aspect of America. This is mostly older people I'm talking about. Young ones may identify as Asian-American and see a shared sympathy with people of color.

Those that raise kids here or even just send them to college here don't understand that young people here are much more independent and want to do their own thing. When their kids move away permanently altogether instead of coming home sometimes they freak out and guilt trip them very badly for years. Also related to parenting, there is a lot of truth to the stereotype about pressuring kids to succeed and be prestigious on the parent's terms. Chinese parents can be really specific about what they consider an acceptable area of study or career for their children and don't understand why colleges have so many "pointless" degrees. They would get along well with American conservatives that complain about degrees in "underwater basket weaving".

This new wave of professionals and student expats/immigrants are different from the impoverished people and refugees of earlier waves. They are often extremely nationalistic about China. Sometimes they have their own reservations about life there but when foreigners criticize China over just about any news item you can imagine they get insanely defensive. Don't antagonize them because they will just double down. Freak them out with reverse psychology. Tell them how perfect Chinese healthcare is and how there's no corruption or poverty and you want to move there to study Xi Jinping Thought and China's 10,000 years of history.

Some of the expats I know who came here for business opportunities and possible permanent residency have seen how America handled the COVID crisis and are now like "Holy poo poo this country is more dysfunctional than I thought. Maybe I should just go back now?" Some of them won't have a choice anyway because they are underwater and they aren't getting SBA loans.

Many of the expats don't care for American cuisine all that much and prefer to keep eating Chinese food. I thought this was interesting since KFC is a big hit in China but I guess for everyday eating many of them prefer what they grew up with. This contrasts notably to many Westerners I know that fall in love with East Asian food on trips overseas and prefer it to American staples.

On the more trivial side, I've spoken to Chinese expats who don't understand why white people are so obsessed with wine.

strange feelings re Daisy fucked around with this message at 07:59 on Apr 30, 2020

# ? Apr 30, 2020 07:50

Atlas Hugged: Mar 12, 2007; Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all

Alternatively to the guest angle, I'm only in whatever country I'm in because they have work they need done or want me to do that for whatever reason they've decided a local can't. The government has agreed with this and provides me a path to legally be in the country and work. At no point along the way are there any requirements for me to have any knowledge at all of the language.

This is different than an education visa (to learn the language) where they might actually check your progress in the language and your attendance record to make sure you're not just using the visa to bum around (this was a huge issue in Thailand very recently).

It's not quite the same as someone showing up in a country that was getting along fine and then demanding to be a part of that society and putting no effort into learning things that make being a part of that society possible.

Again, I think learning something is better than learning nothing because it dramatically improves quality of life, but I don't even see it as rude. It just is.

Also, it's kind of silly to think if you can't speak the language that you're going to be shopping by feel. Packages have labels on them, usually bilingual. It's not like you can't tell if something is a pack of chicken wings or a stick of butter. Checkouts almost always have displays with the total and change and I've been probably to a handful of places total in all of Taiwan, Korea, Japan (admittedly I was only in tourist areas), and Thailand that displayed prices in the local language and not in Arabic numerals. They're basically universal.

It is very, very easy to get by without speaking a word of the local language and not interacting with staff beyond handing an item over and reading the display. I'm not advocating living like that, but if you're a specialist in something and get hired from abroad and are paid better as an expat than you would back home, I don't really condemn them for just living their life and not bothering with the local language, even if they live there forever. It's their life, not mine.

# ? Apr 30, 2020 07:54

Ethics_Gradient: May 5, 2015; Common misconception that; that fun is relaxing. If it is, you're not doing it right.

strange feelings re Daisy posted:

On the more trivial side, I've spoken to Chinese expats who don't understand why white people are so obsessed with wine.

White person here, I don't get this either.

# ? Apr 30, 2020 08:15

LimburgLimbo: Feb 10, 2008

BrigadierSensible posted:

Yeah. I guess I am hugely guilty of using expat to describe only the wastrel ESL teachers I have met, most of which were white priviledged Americans/Canadians. (It always surprises me how few other Aussies or Kiwis I have met).
And yeah, sometimes grinding away at a ashitty job in a lovely country you hate is better than what is 'at home'.
Also, I am not talking about all the cool, fun, interested people who engaged with local culture etc. Coz there are plenty of those as well.

I was just whinging, and making generalizations based on a few arseholes I have met. Sorry.

It's funny because in places like Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, etc. "expat" is/was in my experience more often used to denote people on "expat packages" aka by and large very very well off, though perhaps wastrels of their own sort. I think it's also complicated by the vast majority of the western community in Asian countries definitely not being "immigrants" in the sense that relatively few of them have interest in taking citizenship, as opposed to people from poorer countries who can and will jump at the chance to apply for Japanese, Singaporean, etc. citizenship given the chance.

This tends to complicate things by the fact that generalizing Westerners = Expat, Southeast Asian, South Asian etc. = Immigrant is actually technically speaking *usually* correct as per the definition of expat = temporary but medium to long term, immigrant = intention to be permanent. But the problem there is that in certain places expat also tends to mean "wealthy" (as I noted above), and "immigrant" in vernacular English unfortunately tends to have negative implications of poverty/illegitimacy, thus why some people object to how the terminology is used.

strange feelings re Daisy posted:

Some of the expats I know who came here for business opportunities and possible permanent residency have seen how America handled the COVID crisis and are now like "Holy poo poo this country is more dysfunctional than I thought. Maybe I should just go back now?"

On the more trivial side, I've spoken to Chinese expats who don't understand why white people are so obsessed with wine.

Sounds right to me

# ? Apr 30, 2020 08:15

Shadow0: Jun 16, 2008; If to live in this style is to be eccentric, it must be confessed that there is something good in eccentricity.; Grimey Drawer

Atlas Hugged posted:

Packages have labels on them, usually bilingual. It's not like you can't tell if something is a pack of chicken wings or a stick of butter.

When I first moved to Japan, I didn't really know how to cook. On my first trip to the grocery store, I looked at the various beef-like things there and bought one at random (maybe it was the cheapest one). I'm pretty sure it was cow stomach. I ended up cooking the chewiest, blandest thing I've ever eaten in my life, haha.

# ? Apr 30, 2020 08:21

Ailumao: Nov 4, 2004

food labels in china usually are only in chinese. a coworker of mine with a very huge peanut and sesame allergy learned the characters and words for those fast.

# ? Apr 30, 2020 08:32

GoutPatrol: Oct 17, 2009; *Stupid Babby*

LimburgLimbo posted:

It's funny because in places like Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, etc. "expat" is/was in my experience more often used to denote people on "expat packages" aka by and large very very well off, though perhaps wastrels of their own sort. I think it's also complicated by the vast majority of the western community in Asian countries definitely not being "immigrants" in the sense that relatively few of them have interest in taking citizenship, as opposed to people from poorer countries who can and will jump at the chance to apply for Japanese, Singaporean, etc. citizenship given the chance.

I would be interested in citizenship except it would involve renouncing all previous citizenship, something that you wouldn't have to do moving to most (all?) western countries. Supposedly in the fall my permanent residency number in Taiwan will be the same style as a citizen ID number, which would get me over the hump from being able to order things online or randomly sign up to park in certain parking lots.

# ? Apr 30, 2020 08:38

Atlas Hugged: Mar 12, 2007; Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all

Shadow0 posted:

When I first moved to Japan, I didn't really know how to cook. On my first trip to the grocery store, I looked at the various beef-like things there and bought one at random (maybe it was the cheapest one). I'm pretty sure it was cow stomach. I ended up cooking the chewiest, blandest thing I've ever eaten in my life, haha.

The big mistake I made once was getting ground pork instead of ground beef, but that's really not that big of a deal for what I was cooking.

I'm not sure how you look at stomach in any condition and think it's beef though.

Magna Kaser posted:

food labels in china usually are only in chinese. a coworker of mine with a very huge peanut and sesame allergy learned the characters and words for those fast.

Well I can't speak to China as I've never been. When shopping, if the label was strictly in one language that I couldn't understand, I tended to avoid it unless someone I trusted told me what it was first or the picture was obvious. If I had a food allergy, I'd do that triply so.

If I were in China, I'm not sure I'd even trust the labels though. Probably just safer to buy raw ingredients and cook for yourself.

As I said though, learning the language is definitely possible. But like in Thailand, with online shopping and specialty grocery stores, literally everything is in English and you never have to interact with anyone but the guy dropping off your order.

# ? Apr 30, 2020 08:38

WarpedNaba: Feb 8, 2012; Being social makes me swell!

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# ? Apr 30, 2020 08:38

BrainDance: May 8, 2007; Disco all night long!

Magna Kaser posted:

food labels in china usually are only in chinese. a coworker of mine with a very huge peanut and sesame allergy learned the characters and words for those fast.

How do you even live in China with a peanut allergy? What does that leave you with, raw vegetables and fruit you pray hasn't been around boxes of peanuts?

# ? Apr 30, 2020 08:54

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# ? Jun 7, 2024 09:07

Ailumao: Nov 4, 2004

BrainDance posted:

How do you even live in China with a peanut allergy? What does that leave you with, raw vegetables and fruit you pray hasn't been around boxes of peanuts?

idk he was fine for several years. I also asked him this and he'd say the only 2 times he had to whip out his epipen in China were at foriegner-focused, higher-end places in Shanghai (a steakhouse and a thai place. thai food sounds like a deathwish for him but whatev).

Sesame is way more common esp. since so many things are seasoned with sesame oil. From him I found out most people with peanut allergies don't have an issue with peanut oil cuz it's refined so much, but sesame oil is a much more unrefined oil and gives problems for people with sesame allergies.

He also wasn't one of those people who like sniffed a peanut or if there was one nearby he had issues, but it was bad enough no one could order peanuts at our table if we ate together.

# ? Apr 30, 2020 09:21

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