Postcards from China

Angle #1 Background

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?

A couple updates added below on August 18.

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 Cultural Revolution officially began on August 8th, 1966.

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).