Negative news about China circulates quickly and often and colours people’s perceptions of China and Chinese people, so when something great happens I want to share it.

Since Spring Festival is a Chinese family holiday, it’s not the ideal time to do much with your Chinese friends as most of them are busy. Because of that and the unbelievable amount of fireworks (and car alarms) that go on for several days, especially in Tianjin, many foreigners find ways to “escape” during Chinese New Year’s Eve. Our NGO and many others plan their annual conferences during this time. We know a Dutch family who’s gone to Thailand for Spring Festival this year, and they invited us to house-sit while they’re gone. They have an actual Western-style house (rare in China!) on the edge of the city where it’s quiet (even rarer!), and we were more than willing to take them up on their offer.

Four or five nights away with a toddler means we had to pack out a lot of stuff, and it being over Chinese New Year’s means we also had to pack out food (lots of stores will be closed), so we crammed a lot of stuff into a taxi, including a borrowed $600 camera (our old camera finally died, and we’d borrowed a friend’s extra camera while waiting for another friend to bring one we ordered to her American address while she was in the States seeing family). The driver had to pull out half our stuff and rearrange, so things were moved around and stuffed places.

When we arrived we unloaded everything into a pile, said thanks, and he drove off. Almost right away we realized the camera wasn’t there. I ran to the entrance of the housing complex hoping to catch him, but he was gone. We called our friend to tell her we’d lost her really expensive camera for no good reason, and that we’d replace it. We’re not usually so irresponsible, and we felt horrible about it; we were supposed to be kicking off the beginning of a relaxing, romantic vacation but it was like a cloud had dropped on us. Being out several hundred dollars didn’t add to the mood either.

Petty theft goes up before Spring Festival because people are spending lots of money and, so our local friends tell us, the legions of migrant workers who are preparing to make their torturous train ride home are more apt to make a little extra money by any means that presents itself. They also sometimes have to fight for their wages from bosses who try to cheat them; it’s not too uncommon to see the occasional protests by migrant workers outside a constructions site, for example, during the lead-up to Spring Festival. Anyway, this didn’t even really count as theft, and we had no illusions that we’d ever see that camera again.

The next day, just a few minutes ago, I heard a car pull up but assumed it was the neighbours (the house is actually a duplex). Lilia was upstairs not sleeping, and the doorbell rang. No way, I thought, and went to open the door. There was the driver(!), opening the trunk and explaining how he’d not seen it yesterday because it was stuffed in the back (taxi drivers usually have lots of their own stuff in the trunks). I thanked him profusely and gave him some money, and he said think of it as him 拜年-ing us. 拜年 means sending someone a New Year’s greeting or paying them a New Year’s visit, both of which are customary during Spring Festival. Chinese will send billions, literally, of New Year’s text messages as a means of 拜年-ing each other，and in the days following New Year’s Day they will go 拜年 relatives and friends by visiting their homes.

Anyway, we’re very thankful today for a kind-hearted, exceptionally honest Chinese taxi driver. Happy Chinese New Year to him, and everyone else, too!

Related Stuff:

• Dear Tianjin subway driver
• Hospitality… with Chinese characteristics
• Suspicion…
• Taking a “hard sleeper” train in China
• 春运
• I pity the fú​!
• 拜年

Pronounced: bài nián
Literally: 拜： worship, pay respects, salute, visit. 年： year.
Means: to make Chinese New Year’s visits to relatives and friends, or send Chinese New Year’s greetings.

Take a quick gander at a google image search for 拜年 to get a little taste of the idea.

We’re in a Chinese hospital for an ultrasound to confirm our first pregnancy. The examining room is a bit of gong show — there’s no privacy, and forget lining up; a group of women are elbowing each other for position, crowding the examining area, each trying to shove her paperwork in the doctor’s face ahead of the others while the doctor’s busy seeing Jessica. But we don’t care, it’s a spiritual moment for us: we’re going to hear our child’s heartbeat for the first time, see his or her first picture, get real live confirmation that there definitely is a baby growing inside Jessica and that we are indeed parents. Awestruck doesn’t even begin to capture our feelings. “I want to abort it,” a woman says bluntly in Chinese, in front of everyone, as she thrusts her paperwork at the doctor. That was our first personal encounter with abortion in China.

China’s Abortion Epidemic

That was two years ago. As our language ability develops and abortion becomes increasingly ubiquitous and brash in China, we’re running into it more often. If I take a taxi and the radio’s on, chances are I’ll hear a commercial about once every 30 minutes that always starts with the same unflinching dialogue:

“Oh no! I’m pregnant! What about my career? What will I do?”
“Don’t worry! It’s no problem. You can just go to blah-blah hospital and get a 3-MINUTE, PAINLESS abortion!”

Only once have I heard them use the euphemism of “woman’s surgery” for abortion; usually they’re just unapologetically explicit. Students have told me how they were “supposed to have a baby brother” but didn’t, and most of them assume we’re planning to have more than one child because we didn’t get a boy the first time. In a country with an on-going legacy of post-birth infanticide, killing babies before they’re born doesn’t carry near if any the stigma that it does in North America, as our taxi driver last week demonstrated by bringing it up in casual conversation:

Driver: “How many kids do you have?”
Me: “Just one, but we hope to have more later.”
Driver: “Yeah, then you can have a boy!”
Me: “We don’t really care if it’s a boy or a girl.”
Jessica: “Besides, you can’t really choose that anyway.”
Driver: “Sure you can! You just wait until the belly’s big enough” [he gestures] “and then you can see. If it’s a girl you can get rid of it, but if it’s a boy, ‘Oh! We want it!’” [thumbs up sign].

Sex-selective abortion may be small talk fodder for some in China, but pre-marital pregnancy is another story:

“The moral outrage over having a child before marriage in our society is much stronger than the shame associated with abortion,” said Zhou Anqin, the manager at the clinic in Xi’an, which performs about 60 abortions each month, mostly on students aged 24 or younger.
[...]
“Luckily, in Chinese culture people generally feel that before the actual birth, you don’t yet have an actual person, so we have cases of induced abortion at seven and eight months along,” Li said. “I think this is to China’s advantage from a population control point of view … China has absolutely no need for the so-called ‘right to life’ argument, no need to introduce ideas about abortion as murder and so on.” [Full article]

The Chinese abortion epidemic is even skewing gender ratios in North America. In my hometown of Surrey, B.C., Canada where our daughter was born, there were signs taped to the walls in the ultrasound clinics telling us that the techs and doctors would absolutely not tell us the gender of our baby. I later confirmed what the nurses in the NICU had told us: too many baby girls were being killed. Turns out that a school board administrator in the 1990′s noticed that the gender ratios in greater Vancouver elementary schools were skewed in areas with large East Asian and Indian communities (see Canada’s Missing Daughters and Ultrasound ads promote female abortion). (In Canada you can abort your child for any and no reason because a person’s legal status depends on her physical location relative to a few inches of birth canal (or, it used to); if she’s on the inside, then she has not yet magically transformed from a not-a-person into a baby. Arbitrarily disallowing minority women who have a gender preference to know the gender of their not-a-baby seems just a TAD hypocritical to me.)

I try not to share the nastiest parts of our China experience on the internet. It’s rude and misleading to show up in someone else’s country and make a big deal out of the absolute worst or exceptional and freakish experiences. All our societies have brutal, inhuman aspects to them, but China takes it to a whole nother more explicit level by foregoing the faux-moral fig leaves to which Western societies still hypocritically cling. In blunt, unapologetic ‘honesty’ China carries some things further toward their logical conclusions than North Americans are currently willing to go or admit to (in the West we’re still in denial about being unable to grow Judeo-Christian moral absolute apples — like the inherent value and dignity of people — from secular, relativistic trees).

I could share some things, with photos, that people do and accept/tolerate in China that are so mind-blowingly brutal and animalistic that they make ubiquitous abortion look minor by comparison, even to the hardest-core pro-lifers — but I wont. I will, however, translate something below, because abortion in China is invading everyone’s consciousness here with increasing regularity. And since it actually invaded our home this week, I’m blogging it as a significant aspect of our China experience that we can’t ignore.

Magical Abortions… at a discount!

If you buy a pregnancy test today in Tianjin, China (we’re not pregnant), it comes with one of these (below), because if you’re potentially pregnant in China the first thing you’re apparently supposed to do is consider killing your baby. And judging from the amount of advertising, pre-birth infanticide is not only much more convenient than traditional infanticide, it’s a cash cow:

This is an abortion discount card for a local hospital. Mouseover the Chinese text below to see the pronunciation. The front says:

“PAINLESS ABORTION Assistance Card” 无痛人流援助卡
“Assistance amount: $50 援助金额：326元
Tianjin City Family Planning [Government-]Appointed Hospital 天津市计划生育定点医院
Painless Abortion Assistance Hotline 无痛人流援助热线

And then it has the address, bus routes, and website. The back is worse:

The back compares three kinds of abortion: abortion via drugs 药物流产, ordinary abortion 普通人工流产, and (in the pink column) “Blah-blah Hospital’s Hysteroscopy Obtain Embryo Surgery” XX医院宫腔镜取胚术 (a Tianjin City Women’s Federation Designated Medical Treatment Aid Hospital 天津市妇联指定医疗救助医院). Here’s what the pink column says:

• Surgery eligibility 适应症 (“medical indication”):
  • “up to and including the 11th week.”
• Surgery time 手术时间:
  • “three minutes” 3分钟。
• Anesthetic 麻醉:
  • “short-term effect I.V. anesthetic” 短效静脉麻醉。
• Patient’s surgery experience 手术者感受:
  • “sweet dreams during the surgery, wake up promptly, cozy and cheerful after the surgery” 术中甜梦、术后即醒、舒适愉悦。
• Harmful side-effects 不良反应:
  • “very few complications, won’t affect subsequent pregnancies, can go to work the next day” 并发症极少、不影响再次怀孕、转天即可上班。

Under the chart it says you can get:

1. “a free ‘early avoidance early pregnancy detection’/ultrasound exam (valued at $20 USD)”
   免早早孕检测/免费B超检查（价值126元）。
2. “$30 USD off an abortion (Please present this card when visiting)”
   凭此卡可抵扣人流手术费200元（就诊时请出示此卡）。

Related blog posts:

• When the news is real life
• October’s propaganda: anti-”gendercide”

Related news links:

• Chinese Academy of Social Sciences publishes the latest and most negative data on sex-selective abortion in China
• China’s abortion numbers grow
• Largest Gender Gap Seen in China’s Youngest Generation
• The worldwide war on baby girls
• India’s unwanted girls
• Mothers in China — Sobs on the night breeze: The centre of global gendercide
• Rise in abortions in China, young women targeted
• Abortion adverts come to a college campus
• Canada’s Missing Daughters
• Ultrasound ads promote female abortion
• Asian ‘Gendercide’ Migrates to North America

Canada’s “fourth trimester abortion”:

• Fourth Trimester Abortion
• Infanticide conviction nets Alberta woman suspended sentence
• Thrown Over the Fence — Infanticide, Canadian Style

On the Kermit Gosnell scandal:

• It is All About Abortion
• Gosnell Headlines? Gone, Baby, Gone!

The character of overseas Chinese student communities has changed drastically, according to this translated report: “They neither have the ability nor the interests to express their views on Britain or the world. Meanwhile, the rise of China affects them in another way. They no longer view themselves as a progressive force which will improve China. Conversely, they strive to integrate themselves into the current Chinese order. The internal logic of the rise of China has also forced its way into their lives. Three decades of successful commercialism and consumerism is accompanied by political stagnation and incompetence, and a noisy and coarse culture.”

Fireworks stands are on the corner and street vendors are selling auspicious red bunny panties — it can only mean one thing: Chinese New Year is coming!

Wednesday is 小年 (“little year”), when you’re supposed to make offerings to the Kitchen God (灶王爷), especially sweet, sticky offerings, so that his mouth will be glued shut and he won’t be able to report any of your family’s bad doings to the Jade Emperor in Heaven (or so that he’ll only report sweet things, or as a bribe to butter him up and make him more predisposed to give a good report).

The Kitchen God watches over the family fortunes. He leaves for Heaven every year on the 23rd day of the 12th month in the Chinese lunar calendar to report on the family and returns a week later, at which time the family will welcome him back with a fresh picture on the wall.

You can read about the legend behind the Chinese New Year Kitchen God traditions here, here and here (three parts), and see more about the history of “Little New Year” and its traditions and rituals here.

P.S. – Photos of lucky red bunny panties are on the way. With the tiger panties from last year I’ll have the whole Chinese zodiac in underwear form by 2021!

Pronounced: sùzhì
Literally: quality
Means: This is the word I often hear used to describe what’s lacking in a person or in China’s general population, e.g. “Their 素质 is too low” or “In your country people have higher 素质”, often in reference to people’s ‘uncivilized’ behaviour like causing unnecessary traffic jams with their selfish driving habits. Makes me cringe a bit when I hear people use it; flatly ascribing more or less quality to people, as if they’re mere products on a store shelf, feels a little too close to ascribing value to be comfortable.

We recently hit the jackpot on Chinese translations of Dr. Seuss books. Bedtime stories are big in our house; we grew up with them as kids, we read aloud to each other as a couple before we had kids, and now our daughter has stories before every nap and bedtime, and often during playtime. Of course we want to take advantage of all the reading to improve her and our Chinese. It turns out there are at least three different Chinese publications of Dr. Seuss out there. Our reviews and all the links and search terms you’ll need are below.

How Can You Translate Dr. Seuss?

Since Dr. Seuss books were written as English-teaching tools, many of them are pretty pointless in Chinese, especially the ones aimed at the youngest readers that emphasize phonics over story, like Hop on Pop. Aside from providing useful Chinese vocab, the translations aren’t much use; it’s impossible for translate Dr. Seuss’ English-learning magic. However, we’ve found that the longer stories like The Cat in the Hat and The Sneetches are a lot of fun for for us and our daughter as Chinese language learning tools.

When it comes to language and culture acquisition, translated material can’t be as useful as stuff written in Chinese by Chinese for Chinese because a translated story is still culturally foreign in its content. But translations are still good stepping-stones on the language learning path, depending on your level. Also, when you no longer have the luxury of a pre-child, full-time language study lifestyle, you have to find creative and convenient ways to work Chinese into your daily routine (in addition to whatever part-time study you can squeeze in) or your language ability atrophies. So for us, 苏斯博士 is fun and useful for our little family’s Chinese learning.

We have books from two of the three different Chinese Dr. Seuss publications out there, and each seems to have a different purpose in mind. If you’re into bilingual bedtime stories you’ll want to know these significant differences so you can pick the ones that best fit your situation.

1. Chinese-only reading

These extra-large soft-cover bilingual Dr. Seuss books emphasize the Chinese translation. Published in 2010 (with more on the way) by 现代出版社 (Modern Press) in their 苏斯博士最经典童书 (Dr. Seuss’ Most Classic Children’s Books) series, they’re meant to be read aloud in Chinese. We have eight of these, all translated by 馨月, who’s obviously tried to capture the Dr. Seuss spirit by giving the Chinese as much as rhythm and rhyme as possible. The binding is the better-quality Chinese-style softcover foreigners in China will be familiar with — not bad but of course not as durable as the traditional hardcover Dr. Seuss books.

The large pages and prominent Chinese are great, but these aren’t convenient if you want to also read in English because they only provide the English text in the back of the book next to thumbnail versions of the illustrations. I’ve found the odd English typo.

We bought them on sale here and here at 45元/4 books.

Here’s a text sample from 戴高帽子的猫又来了 (The Cat in the Hat Comes Back):

你可知道我是哪儿把他找到？
他正在浴缸里大吃蛋糕！
没错儿，正在大吃大嚼！
他打开了热水龙头，
冷水也在哗哗地流。
我对那只猫说道：
“你这么做真是糟糕！”
那只猫哈哈大笑：
“我喜欢在浴缸里吃蛋糕，
你哪天也该试试看好不好。”

Do you know where I found him?
Do you know where he was?
He was eating a cake in the tub!
Yes he was!
The hot water was on
And the cold water, too.
And I said to the cat,
“What a bad thing to do!”

“But I like to eat cake
In the tub,” said the cat.
“You should try it some time.”
Laughed the cat as he sat.

2. Bilingual reading

These look and feel pretty much identical to original hardcover Dr. Seuss books you’re familiar with, aside from the addition of Chinese titles and text. They were published in 2006 by 中国对外翻译出版公司 in their 苏斯博士 双语经典 (Dr. Seuss Bilingual Classics) series, and use various translators. Each page has both the original English text and the Chinese translation; the English is sometimes slightly re-formatted to make room for the Chinese.

My biggest complaint is the formatting: with squintingly small Chinese text that’s not given a prominent position on the page, it looks to me like they’re aimed at Chinese parents who want to teach their kid English and just need the Chinese as a reference to help with comprehension. But I’d still definitely choose these over the original English-only Dr. Seuss books. They also have a colourful introduction to Dr. Seuss in the front and tips from a children’s education expert on how to use the stories in the back (both in Chinese only).

We found them on Taobao for 110元/10 books by searching for 苏斯博士 双语经典 全10本.

Here’s some sample text from 史尼奇 (The Sneetches):

忽然有这么一天，光肚史尼奇们正像往常一样在沙滩上呆着，无精打采地做着肚皮上冒出颗星的白日梦，一个陌生人驾驶着一辆奇怪的车呼啸而来。

Then ONE day, it seems…while the Plain-Belly Sneetches
Where moping and doping alone on the beaches,
Just sitting there wishing their bellies had stars…
A stranger zipped up in the strangest of cars!

3. ?

We don’t own any of this third kind; we’ve just seen them for sale online.

If you have links to any other great English kids books in Chinese (like 蚯蚓的日记/Diary of a Worm), or if you have particularly outstanding Chinese kids books to recommend, please share in the comments! Same good Chinese kids music!

And if you’ve ever wondered how to say “The Perilous Poozer of Pompelmoose Pass” in Chinese, click here.

Related posts about having a Foreign Baby in China:

• Diary of a Worm in Chinese! (an English / 汉字 / pīnyīn online read-along)
• A Foreign Baby in Tianjin Pt. 1 – is this our future?
• Foreign baby in China essentials: IMPORTED BABY FORMULA
• Foreign baby in China essentials: FACEBOOK SUBSTITUTE (or VPN) & SKYPE
• Foreign baby in China essentials: FRIENDLY STRANGER FINGER SHIELD

You can stop wondering what the story of Ruth would be like if performed as a Beijing Opera, because there’s pictures and video here: Whithersoever Thou Goest… Even to China:
The Story of Ruth Meets Beijing Opera

Henry A. Kissinger on Avoiding a U.S.-China cold war: “Americans frequently appeal to China to prove its sense of “international responsibility” by contributing to the solution of a particular problem. The proposition that China must prove its bona fides is grating to a country that regards itself as adjusting to membership in an international system designed in its absence on the basis of programs it did not participate in developing.

While America pursues pragmatic policies, China tends to view these policies as part of a general design. Indeed, it tends to find a rationale for essentially domestically driven initiatives in terms of an overall strategy to hold China down.”

I recently discovered Guanxi Master, a Chinese culture blog with plenty of interesting food for thought on a wide range of topics, like The Crisis of the Chinese Soul and Chinese Attitudes on Work. From From “Zhong” to “Hua” and Back:
“…it is not enough to be “a center”: China has an almost genetic disposition to set their sights on becoming “The Center”. Nothing else will do, for the goal is highly associated with the ultimate good and the ideals around which China is built. The manifest destiny of the Chinese is to become the “Middle Kingdom” yet again.

“… That a second generation Chinese in the West would still feel connected to the Mainland is hard for most Westerners to understand … The years that overseas Chinese have spent in Diaspora often make these ideas even more real to them than they are to the younger generation of Mainland Chinese themselves.”