Shanghai Bob

On the morning of Halloween, we went to the huge Paragon Mall to get a camera for Andrew.  It was a super deal compared to China or the UK — the same camera I bought but about $250 cheaper, with the chance to get your face painted Halloween-style for free.

We are still at the tail end of the rainy season, which resembles Florida’s more than Tokyo’s:  20 minutes of rain every afternoon rather than days at a time.  The problem in Bangkok is drainage.  I once went three stops on the sky train and alighted to see that it had started to rain while I was underway.  Before I got back down to street level, the sudden shower had stopped, and I was congratulating myself on my perfect timing when a car drove through a standing puddle and soaked me.

We had a solid hour’s worth of rain during dinner at Ruen Mallika (in a fantastic, leaky, teak house), and when we took the taxi to Soi Cowboy for a beer afterward, the taxi was throwing a bow wave.  (The pictures are on Andrew’s new camera.)  When we got to Soi Cowboy, the entire street was flooded, and all the patrons who were already there when the rain started were essentially stranded.

We didn’t feel like wading (literally) through the water, so we went to Nana instead.

There’s more to Bangkok than street food, Thai massage, go-go girls and ladyboys, and now that my friend Andrew is here for a long weekend, maybe we’ll see some of it.

Sausages and chicken wings

The last time I gave money to a beggar, he and two of his friends followed me secretly until I was passing through a park and then the three of them mugged me.

I only had $40 in reais in my pocket, but they took my pen, compass, and watch, and I had to fight over the key to my hotel safe, which they eventually threw on the sidewalk.  This was in Rio.

The funny part was that in my next Portuguese class, we got to Chapter 5, “How to Report an Assault to the Police.”  I had fresh details to practice with, and learned that all of my instructors had been mugged multiple times, sometimes at gunpoint, which I guess explains why it’s a chapter in the textbook.

There are a lot of beggars on Sukhumvit Road, but they are generally not just poor.  Most are amputees or have otherwise deformed or diseased limbs (and sometimes faces).  Giving these people money is easier than deciding what to label it in the expense diary I am keeping for this trip.  “Beggar” seems too cold, and “charity” seems too grand.

On my flight home to Tokyo from my last trip to Bangkok, Thai Airways invited monks to board first before making the usual announcement about “guests traveling with small children and people needing extra time.”

When I got to the counter I asked why and they told me that monks are not allowed to touch women, and letting them board first helps keep them from getting accidentally jostled.  Apparently it works the same on the metro:

I wonder if monks are allowed to touch ladyboys.

While walking down Sukhumvit Road, I’ve been approached on two occasions by a man wearing saffron monk robes.  He was very aggressive in asking for money, and singled me out of a host of Thai people walking down the same street.  I didn’t give him any money for several small reasons:  He was wearing street shoes, not sandals; he singled me (the foreigner) out, which I didn’t want to encourage; he was out begging in the early evening and I had read that monks were meant to live on alms they collected each day before noon.

I understand that all Thai men are monks at some stage in their lives, even if it’s only for one day.  It seems to me that the point of living from alms is to learn humility and self-denial, and to understand your interdependence with other members of your community.  You can’t learn these things by begging from tourists (presumably because they have more money) rather than your co-religionists.

On the other hand, I read this excerpt from the Diamond Sutra quoted in Paul Theroux’s Ghost Train To The Eastern Star yesterday:

Buddha teaches that the mind of a Bodhisattva should not accept the appearances of things as a basis when exercising charity.

What is this an ad for?

It looks like it could be an ad for British cuisine, which reminded me of that Goodness Gracious Me skit where they go for “an English” and daringly order “the blandest thing on the menu.”

It’s an ad for English lessons.

I think you can learn a lot about what people actually do in a country by looking at what is prohibited in its public spaces.   Here’s the list of prohibitions from Bangkok’s relatively new metro:

I broke one of the rules by taking this photo (second from right on the bottom).  The prohibition next to that (on the left) is specific to Thailand.  The next along on the left was hard to interpret, but I found another prohibition list with English glosses — it means “No sitting on the floor while holding oversized balloons.”

The ones from China show that spitting and explosives on the train are problems, and the ones from India discourage public urination.  In the US you see a lot of No shirt, no shoes, no service; We reserve the right to refuse service; and No firearms.  This last is probably because they are afraid of what you’ll do if they don’t serve you.

My taxi driver yesterday was wearing an amulet that looked like a Matrix-style jack at the base of his neck, and his dashboard held a miniature shrine. Buddhism in Thailand extends to T-shirt philosophy like “Don’t fight your destiny” (which I actually saw on a T-shirt.)

The pre-Socratic philosophers used a cart metaphor to describe our relationship to fate or destiny: We are a puppy tied to a cart — wherever the cart goes, we will go too, but we have enough freedom to decide whether to be dragged by our chain or to trot happily beside the wheels.

It’s not all genial fatalism here, though. There are Lamborghinis for sale at the mall:

Is this your destiny?

In the Pudong arrival and departure terminals you are given the opportunity to rate your border guard while a flute instrumental version of George Michael’s “Last Christmas” plays in the background. You can choose among two degrees of smiley faces, two degrees of grumpy faces, and one neutral face. The instructions ask you to rate the guard according to the amount of time you had to wait in line.

I flew to Bangkok today for a three-week stay.

One of the challenges in learning Chinese is remembering the tone for each word, but I’ve come up with a fool-proof method to learn tones in just a few seconds per word.

Use visual memory

Since the tone numbers (and even the tone symbols) are more or less arbitrary, you can substitute something more memorable for them. I assigned the following objects to visually represent the five tone contours in Mandarin Chinese (four tones plus “unmarked” tone):

• Tower
• Jet
• Swing
• Waterfall
• Pavement

The tower and pavement images are motionless because the tone contours they represent don’t change. The others incorporate motion (imagine the jet taking off, the swing falling then rising from left to right, water plummeting down the waterfall).

I also assigned colors to each object to give my memory another feature by which to “index” the tones and to let me use highlighter pens to flag ones I want to remember. Since any color association would also be arbitrary, I assigned the primary colors in ROYGBIV order (with one exception) to yield the following:

• Red Tower
• Yellow Jet
• Green Swing (like Tarzan’s)
• Blue Waterfall
• Grey Pavement

Pavement is the exception (grey instead of indigo), but it’s appropriate both because this symbol is supposed to represent no tone and grey is kind of a non-color, and because pavement is generally grey.

To remember a word’s tone, mentally picture the word with the appropriate object (or combination of objects if it’s a multi-syllable word). You can try it yourself: “Horse” in Chinese is mă, and it’s the third tone. To remember the tone, create a mental “story” associating a horse with a swing and/or the color green. The crazier, sillier, more action-packed, or violent the image, the easier it is to remember, so don’t just imagine a horse in a green swing (though that is probably silly enough). Instead, put the horse in a latex suit, and put the swing in a circus, S&M dungeon, or superhero training camp.

Update: MDBG, an online Chinese dictionary, has introduced the same color scheme I suggested above (except that it continues on to indigo for the the 5th tone/no tone instead of using grey).

This idea owes a lot to Harry Lorraine and to James Heisig.

Here are some other strategies for reinforcing your tone knowledge:

1. Draw the tone in the air. Use your finger to indicate the tone while you are saying it.  You will look like you are conducting an imaginary orchestra, but adding a physical element to your tone production makes the tones easier to recall.  Many of the teachers here in Shanghai bob their head to indicate the tone instead of using their hands.
2. Create tone families. I remember the tones for cow-milk (牛奶) and milk-cow (奶牛) by remembering that the French keep dairy cows for cheese even though they don’t drink much milk. I know that France is Fǎguó (3-2), so this pairing helps me remember that milk-cow is the same sequence.
3. Add emotional color. LaoWaiChinese.com suggests giving each tone a personality. For example, he thinks of the fifth tone as “secretive, deceptive”.