At our Halloween Party last night, since most of our friends seem also to have daughters, the younger set’s costume stats read this way: Eight Disney Princesses (girls ages 3-6) and one Little Lamb (a four-month old boy).

Running through the post-Halloween list of China Blog entries this morning, though, the name “jellicle cat” caught my eye from the “Eye of Modok” feed and I just had to click on through.

Very cool: There are Modok’s daughters, ages six and nine, one done up as a Jellicle Cat from ALW’s “CATS” and the other in a disturbingly authentic-looking (meaning “Good job!”) “Corpse Bride” get-up. Great make-up work by Modok’s wife, Salomae. Seriously. I had to click through to their family photo gallery just for visual confirmation that there really is a cute and happy little girl in there behind the fangs and blood and dark sunken eyes. (There is).

I don’t want to steal that thunder, so go to the entry Happy Halloween 2006! yourself for the photos.

This gives me hope that next year one or both of my daughters will want to dress up as someone besides Cinderella. Or Belle. Or Sleeping Beauty. Or Ariel. Or Snow White.

At the very least, I think I’ll start to keep an eye out for Mulan costumes, but I’m really wondering how a pair of little matching Red Guard uniforms would go over….

If that sounds “really old” to you, then I laugh in your general direction, because it’s not old–just ask my elders Mick Jagger, Brad Pitt, and Weird Al Yankovic–and because you’ll be here far sooner than you can possibly imagine.

But if turning 40 is something you too have been saddled with already, or will be soon, but neither wanted nor somehow even expected it, like a bout of mononucleosis on your honeymoon or a painfully ingrown toenail just before the big game, then this post is for you.

Turning 40 has brought with it some of those strange effects I’d heard about: Eyeing the Volvo in the garage and thinking, “You know, a Harley would fit there just as well. Maybe better.”; meeting other parents at the PTA meetings and thinking, “That nice lady in charge of the bake sale, Billy’s Mommy, I’ll bet she was quite the hellraiser back at the U.”; realizing that a number of the washed up “has been” Playboy Playmates are younger than oneself (which is even more shocking than years ago realizing some of the new ones were); and so on.

But anyway…a blog post written recently by a “young whippersnapper” living in China has just set the world right for me.

I keep a few “China Blog” aggregator feeds in my RSS reader, checking out all the entries by some authors and other posts here and there if the titles and first paragraphs draw me in. Lots of these blogs are written by twenty-something and early thirty-something chaps living it up in China, and sometimes I enjoy their thrills vicariously, occasionally harking back to my own “Good Old Days” in the P.R.C. with a tinge of envy. “Oh, to be 27, single, young, wild and free on the other side of the planet again…when everything in the world was perfect.”

Right.

But this latest post from China Blogger Meursault, a 25-year old professional translator from Britain with a BA in Chinese, now living in China, has flushed all the cells of mid-life crisis out of my system before they’ve had a chance to take root, reminding me of everything I do not miss about life at that age, with his post called “Yellow Wings Vs My girlfriend’s flatmate,” which would be better titled, as 花崗齋之愚公 suggests, “The Roommate from Hell.”

Do read it yourself, but here are a few choice kernels regarding his Greek girlfriend’s Chinese flatmate who’s gone with the English name “Nile”:

• Blasts her music too loud while others are still sleeping
• Hands Meursault a note calling him “Guest in our house” and asking him not to use her favorite cup (Hands him a note!?!?!)
• Just barges without knocking in while Meursault and his girlfriend are, mmm, well, you know
• Criticizes his “Western” food…but then claims “Chinese bread is better” when he catches her eating some
• Nearly refuses to believe he can actually read the Chinese in a magazine that he is, uh, actually reading out loud to her

There’s more; you need to read the whole post.

But while this post reminds me of some of the particularly odd “undesirable social traits” that some Chinese people exhibit (every culture has some), even more it reveals to me why being a 40-year old Married with Children-White and Nerdy Guy in the ‘Burbs in many ways trumps (though I enjoyed it too) being an Adventure-Seeking Globe-Trotting Single Young Buck.

And that is, speaking in terms of my own experience: Young, single, twenty-something years old, ambitious, underpaid, probably just meager social connections at best in a place far from home: You are at the mercy of a random (sometimes nearly chaotic) social fabric, where even your very nice girlfriend can have a roommate who is as annoying as a festering boil on one’s bum. And that can color your entire world puke green.

But good luck to you, Meursault. I’m sure you’ll figure out a solution you can look back proudly on soon, though I suggest it needs to be one that involves this “Nile” person not being in the picture, whether that means you and the girlfriend only hang out at your pad, she kicks Nile to the curb, or she moves to a different flat altogether. Your 20’s are far too short to have many days colored puke green by the likes of Nile.

Which, uh, is of course a parody of:

First there’s the risable “Sex and Shanghai” blog itself (foreigner writes about alleged sexual trysts with ex-students).

Then the indignant Chinese backlash (Chinese professor’s call to unmask and expel the author ‘Chinabounder’).

Then the ‘Sex and Shanghai’ blog goes limp, taken offline “except by invitation only.”

Yesterday I suggested my skepticism over Chinabounder being who he claimed, and necessarily doing what he claimed, or even being where he claimed (back home in Denver, I suggested, which a commentor further speculated to “pimple-faced geek in Denver”.)

And now, reported via Danwei.org, an AP story headlined “Chinese Internet users hunt author of racy blog, but alleged authors claim a hoax” takes this a step further:

…a person responding to an e-mail to a contact address on the site said the authors were a group of performance artists who had fabricated its content as an investigation into online vigilante behavior.

“We did not anticipate quite the level of anger this would raise,” said the message, which said the authors behind the cyber name “Chinabounder” included a British man, an Australian woman, two Chinese men and a Japanese woman.

Already being skeptical of whomever is behind ‘Sex and Shanghai’, I don’t know if I buy that this was started as “an investigation into online vigilante behavior.”

If it is a serious investigation, and not a mere attempt at juvenile provocation–like reports of a young foreigner scattering change at a Beijing bus stop hoping to get Chinese people to chase the coins like hungry beggars–then there had better be a formal publication of findings in the pipeline.

Otherwise, here are a few observations and predictions:

First, Chinabounder, or someone claiming to be Chinabounder, has posted comments on at least one other blog. I noticed them on this post at John Pasden’s Sinosplice from back in May. If Chinabounder has commented elsewhere, then John and the owners of those other blogs could compare notes and report back to us whether Chinabounder’s posting IP is in Shanghai or not. (Or in Denver, perhaps.)

Second, Chinabounder is obviously in touch with the China Blog-osphere. He (or they) were reading Pasden’s Sinosplice Life blog at least as far back as May, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Chinabounder (or at least one of the “performance artists”) has posted there before under a different name.

Third–this enters further into the realm of pure speculation–I have noticed echoes of Chinabounder’s criticisms of China on other blogs under different user names. Chinabounder’s blog is offline now and I can’t find the exact reference, but one day I read a Chinabounder gripe about China that used many of the exact same phrases used by someone who comments regularly at Richard TPD’s blog. I’m not going to say who that poster is, and though it’s possible, I don’t mean to imply that they’re necessarily the same person, only that this “performance artist” group has perhaps sometimes “borrowed” from commentators elsewhere to create the fictional Chinabounder’s rants.

But my overall hunch at this point: Someone knows. Someone in the China Blog-osphere not currently known to be associated with this whole ‘Sex and Shanghai’ thing knows. I am by no means suggesting it’s John Pasden or Richard TPD just because I’ve mentioned their blogs in this post, but Someone Established in This China-Blogosphere Knows. Maybe it’s a friend, maybe it’s a blog author we know by a different name, maybe it’s someone who overheard something at the Shanghaiist 80’s Happy Hour. Who knows. Could be anyone.

But someone knows and isn’t telling.

And with a virtual lynch mob at the IP gate, that is perhaps not a bad thing.

Because if there’s anything Chinese hate worse than reading about some of their “wayward girls” doing the nasty with “ugly foreigners,” it’s being baited by foreigners who are trying to elicit their “arrogant” and vitriolic responses in order to ridicule them.

Related: ‘Sex and Shanghai’ Backlash in Machine Translation

1. There’s a blog kept by a fellow allegedly from England who graphically chronicles his alleged sexual conquests of Chinese women in Shanghai, many of them his former students.

2. Blogs hosted on Google’s blogspot (as ‘Sex and Shanghai’ is) were until recently inaccessible in China.

3. Once ‘Sex and Shanghai’ became accessible in China, some Chinese people discovered it.

4. One of these people, Zhang Jiehai, a professor of psychology at the Department of Sociology in the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, is calling for an all-out witchhunt to unmask and expel the semi-anonymous writer of ‘Sex and Shanghai’.

5. Roland Soong, a dual Hong Kong/USA citizen who often provides English translations of current Chinese articles, news stories and blog/forum entries, has translated Zhang Jiehai’s diatribe.

6. Lots of Chinese (mostly the young male variety, I guess) began leaving blog comments that threaten the ‘Sex in Shanghai’ blogger’s person, relatives, and so on.

7. The ‘Sex and Shanghai’ blog is now closed except by invitation only, at least for the time being.

There are a few different spins on this story going on…but I’m not 100% sure why. Until there’s a video-taped ass-kicking, hidden Web cam rendezvous, police raid, attack on an embassy, exclusive interview with one of the blogger’s conquests or something along those lines, it’s all just mild titillation. (Think National Enquirer.)

Why would I say that?

Because it’s nothing new, that’s why.

It’s just that this version of this story is being blogcasted and people can play along at home.

(And if anyone thinks that it’s all significant because “It’s the first time anything of this nature has ever played out via the Internet and blogs!”…then my-oh-my, you really do need to get out more.)

So…slightly more interesting to me today (though I’ll try to blend these two stories)….

Angle #2 Background

I recently decided to try out Google’s Chinese-to-English machine translation tool, and to see how it compares to what Altavista’s Babelfish online machine translation tool spits out.

And just for kicks, I decided to use Zhang Jiehai’s essay for the comparison.

Here, side by side for your convenience, are the first six paragraphs of (1) Zhang Jiehai’s “rout the garbage foreigner” essay, (2) Roland Soong’s translation of the same, (3) the Google Translator tool’s take on it, and–in last place, as you’ll see–(4) the Altavista “Babelfish” translator’s feeble spit-out. (And don’t miss my closing comments and external links down below.)

My own conclusions:

1. Zhang Jiehai’s diatribe is absurd, and pardon me for stooping this low, but if he were gettin’ any himself, he wouldn’t care one iota about the ‘Sex and Shanghai’ author’s escapades.
2. I find the overtly sexual content in the ‘Sex and Shanghai’ blog to be pretty boring, really.
3. I’ve had doubts all along–still do–whether the tales in the blog are entirely true, and even if there’s truth involved, whether they’re current. Maybe the author was in Shanghai, did have some similar experiences, but is now fictionalizing them (and his own persona) back home, say, in Denver. Admit it, it’s possible….
4. After running several comparison tests of various Chinese sources–this one shows it enjoying only a slight advantage–it’s clear that Google’s machine translation ability has far outpaced Altavista’s.
5. Lots of the Chinglish diatribes by angry young Chinese commenters on the ‘Sex and Shanghai’ blog read like they were translated using Altavista’s Babelfish tool.
6. The following are phrases from the machine translation versions that I want on t-shirts:
• Certainly must discover this trash, expels him China! ! !
• “my dear graceful, you have an excellent, pretty good…refined lower abdomen.”
• Susan I sent her a letter of good can achieve flirt, and through the Boke Schwartz to her task.”

And my favorite:

• I have only one thought : can forbearance, everyone can forbearance?

OK, click away:

• The ‘Sex and Shanghai‘ blog (under wraps as I post this)
• Zhang Jiehai’s call to Expel the Foreign Garbage
• Roland Soong’s translation of Zhang Jiehai’s Essay
• The Google Translator tool
• The Altavista Babelfish tool

Update: Get it while you can: ‘Sex and Shanghai’ via the Google Cache

Related: Sex and Shanghai’s “Chinabounder”: Pimple-Faced Geek in Denver, or Traitor in Our Midst?

This has nothing to do with the regular theme of this blog, but I think it’s a pretty neat tidbit and I don’t have any other blog to put it in.

I live near Seattle now, but I’m originally from (a farm near) a small town in the U.S. Heartland, Union City, Ohio.

Union City is actually two very small towns–Union City, Ohio and Union City, Indiana–with the OH/IN state line running through the middle of town. The combined population of these two Union Cities is just over 5,000, and according to the latest Census statistics, about 20% of the local population lives under the poverty line. Technically speaking, both towns should be in Ohio, but a surveying error in the 19th century split the town between the two states. When this mistake was discovered in the late 1970’s–during a follow-up survey to decide which side of town had jurisdiction over a prosecuting a fight that had spilled out from a bar onto the State Line street–everyone decided it would have been too much of a hassle to amend the results of the error, so the division was left to stand as is.

There have been a few claims to fame coming from Union City over the years.

Ohio’s 1993 high school “Mr. Football” Curtis Enis, later a Penn State standout and Chicago Bears short-timer, is from Union City, Ohio. I remember him as a little squirt who liked to sit behind our bench at varsity basketball games, but a 2005 Chicago Tribune article reported Enis as “currently working the night shift at an Ohio garage door factory” (source).

And oddly, so many “Curtis Enis” stories online list “Kilven” as one of his brothers, but I knew Kilven, whose last name is (was?) “Williams,” to be his cousin. And Annie Enis, who was in my class, I thought was Curtis’s sister, but she gets no mention in any of these stories, nor do any of the three or four other older sisters. Confusing. But Lincoln, Curtis’s dad–who burst into the locker room after a disappointing away game my senior year and yelled at Coach Courtney, “You’re a G*d D**n C**k S****r”–uh, yeah…I remember Lincoln.

Update 1: I ran Curtis’ name through Google, and even though a friend back home tells me the sign is still up at the outskirts of Union City that says, “Hometown of Ohio’s 1993 Mr. Football Curtis Enis,” Curtis unfortunately doesn’t fare too well in sports fans’ memories even now. Some say he’ll always be remembered most for promising hellfire and brimstone to friends and family a few weeks after his “conversion” and a couple hours after marrying his pregnant ex-strippper girlfriend. And just a few weeks ago, at a proudly rabid Chicago White Sox online forum, one person asks, “It seems like a lot of guys get a jersey with a younger guy/ rookies name on it to be ahead of the curve. Just wondering who turned out to be the biggest bust after you bought a jersey with there name all over it?” On page four of this still-running discussion, someone else answers, “a friend of mine had a curtis enis jersey…”. The next respondent says, “winner, no one need read anymore.”

Ouch.

Anyway, there are a few other names coming out of Union City you might actually recognize: (auto-play audio alert) Rick Derringer (you know his classic rock song “Rock and Roll Hootchie Koo” if nothing else); “The McCoys” (the first band Rick made it big with); and their biggest hit, the unofficial state song of Ohio, “Hang On Sloopy.”

I occasionally run “Union City” and the name of my high school through Google to see what turns up, and when I did that last night, I found this:

Another Union City native, Brian Bousman, is working on a documentary of the story and history of this song, “Hang On Sloopy,” which on October 2nd, 1965, replaced The Beatles’ “Yesterday” at the top of the Billboard magazine’s Top 100. Brian has posted an excerpt (narrated by Chris Hawkey; see below) online at YouTube.

(I recognize the name ‘Brian Bousman–maybe he was my childhood Sunday School teacher’s son? Update 2: I got in touch with Brian, and yes, his dad Keith was my Sunday School teacher when I was 11 or 12…and Brian was 2 or 3.)

The documentary is looking quite good; lend it your eyes and ears:

(And–though he’s not about to quit his day job–Rick has started a new side gig as a Florida real estate agent.)

Back to Chris Hawkey.

Chris’s older brother Mike was (along with Curtis’s sister Annie and 64 other goods folks) one of my Class of 1984 classmates.

I remember Chris more like this:

But Chris is now a Radio Personality and Singer in Minnesota who sometimes rubs elbows (and hips?–look for his left hand below) with the bold and the beautiful. Here he is at a fundraiser earlier this year with Desperate Housewife Teri Hatcher:

And here’s another video clip via YouTube with Chris singing a tune from his latest album and talking about his latest charitable venture (and Chris, what’s up with saying you’re from Indiana?):

Nice!

Union City. Not a bad place to be from, really.

But of course the greatest pure musical talent born and raised in the Union City/Darke County corner of Ohio is–I exaggerate not–my cousin D.A..

The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics is scheduled for August 8th, 2008.

42 years apart, I’ve just realized. 42. To the day.

Hmm, I’m going to keep thinking about this one for awhile before drawing any hard and fast conclusions.

42, of course, is the number posited in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy “from which all meaning (the meaning of life, the universe, and everything) could be derived.” (SearchSMB.com).

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I’m able to see that these Spam comments are posted from China, but I never gave them much thought.

At least I didn’t until I recently ran across the story “MODERN CHINESE SECRET: Thousands employed in search for, sale of video-game shortcuts.”

Here’s the short version:

Parked in front of computer screens, the players move through virtual dungeons to slay ogres and gather gold in online games. But this isn’t mere idleness. Many of these gamers are working. A vast shadow industry has mushroomed in rural China. Savvy entrepreneurs harness teams to play popular online games, gathering magic spells, battle hammers, armor and other virtual assets. They then provide the assets to brokers, who sell them to rich players in the United States and Europe who want shortcuts to gaming success.

At any given time, as many as half a million Chinese gamers toil in Internet cafes and makeshift computer labs, sometimes sleeping on cots in nearby dormitories in shifts.

And here I just pictured some bored but industrious high school or college students behind my Comment Spam. Nope. It’s part of a booming underground industry.

Yeah, “Wow,” indeed. I’m almost flattered that they feel my sites worth Spamming, even though I haven’t played a video game since “Quake I” way back when.

And from the pictures, it looks like their working conditions are better than those found in some iPod manufacturing plants in China.

UPDATE: And further fueling my suspicion that all of the MSM’s “feature” headlines are pulled from six-month old YouTube videos, here’s a digital tour and documentary in progress of some Chinese Gold Farms in China, called “Chinese Farmers in the Gamedom: A Work in Progress” by Jin Ge aka Jingle:

Update: A New York Times video article about the same topic.

The first time I was aware of any Internet usage in China was in early 1996, when Xiamen University, where I was taking some advanced Chinese language courses during a holiday break from my teaching job in Korea, was considered pretty advanced to have one e-mail address for the faculty of each department to share.

A combination of availability and restrictions, however, seemed to prevent much access to the World Wide Web beyond that.

Fast-forward to 2000, when my wife’s family home here in Anhai, Fujian Province, was pretty much cutting edge by having a dial-up Internet access account. I took advantage of that to convince my employer at the time to let me take a “working vacation” and telecommute from China for a brief period.

I don’t work for the same company now, so I don’t mind telling you that it was a dismal failure. The connection was supposed to be 33.6K, but I think it functioned more like 3.6K, if you can imagine that. I once timed it to see how long it took my employer’s company home page to load.

At home near Seattle on DSL, it was an instant load.

On 56K dialup in the United States, it was somewhere between five and ten seconds.

From my outpost in China: 4 minutes and 24 seconds.

But not long after that, the “lightning speed/bursting at the seams” phenomenon I mentioned took off.

Using my wife’s family as an example, a “3.6K” connection was followed just two years later by readily available ADSL for homes, and my Wife’s Younger Brother, by being familiar with the Net and having a degree in electrical engineering, found himself serving as the chief IT person in his place of employment (even though his job title isn’t IT-related, as I’ve mentioned earlier).

Then my Wife’s Younger Sister and her Husband opened their Internet cafe for a time. And several members of the extended family–siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews–are operating pretty successful small business operations through China’s answer to eBay, called TaoBao. (As a side note, you might like to check this Google News link for insight into a competitive tiff actually going on between eBay and TaoBao).

On one hand, most of the Internet in China news you read about in the mainstream press these days focuses on the negatives: censorship (the so-called “Great (Fire)Wall of China”), restrictions, and the like. But the other side of that story–the much bigger side, I don’t mind saying, thankyouverymuch–is how quickly broadband access poured into the more developed regions of China.

And the increasing rates for Internet usage are pretty dramatic as well.

For comparison, the United States has about 135 million Internet users, which accounts for around 67% of the country’s population. In mid-2000, there were estimated to be only about 24 million Internet users in China. The most recent estimates put that number at over 100 million. And that’s only about seven percent of China’s entire population. (Just wait until that percentage grows!)

There was a statistic floating around a couple years ago that by 2007, the most common language on the Internet would be Chinese. That claim, however, has since been refuted.

Based on what I’ve seen, I too think it won’t happen until later. Like, say, in 2008.

Now, one gets used to seeing these sorts of cards all over London, and in certain parts of Hong Kong, but this was the first time I’ve seen one in mainland China. In the P.R.C., working girl “hired companionship” is typically more visible as red-light “beauty shops” and such.

Anyway, here’s the card, front and back, advertising sexy models, college students, and housewives as specialties, though I’ve blurred out the cell phone contact number. Don’t want anyone to think I’m an affiliate or anything.

And isn’t it, I don’t know, weird that the gal in the second picture is wearing a Minnie & Mickey Mouse necklace?

This has nothing to do with this visit to China, but we (“white guy, asian girl” after ten years of marriage and two kids, by which time ethnicity and race and all that have long since become secondary or even tertiary to things like whether someone squeezes the toothpaste from the bottom or middle of the tube) found it hilarious. Maybe you will too:

Watch the hilarious “Yellow Fever,” by Wong Fu Productions, which asks the question, “Why are there so few Asian Men with White Women?” And so on:

Nicely done, folks, nicely done–and we’ll be sure to send the link to our “Indian guy/Chinese girl” friends (with two kids of their own).