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Archive for the ‘personal-life’ Category.
Chinese New Year Wishes
February 14 is the first day of the new Chinese year, so this Saturday all Chinese (and also many non-Chinese) in the world will get together with their families to celebrate Chinese New Year (aka Spring Festival, 春节).
In this post, I’ve gathered some traditional (and untraditional) spring festival wishes. By clicking on the links, you can easily send the wish to your beloved ones, parents, children, friends, collegues or actually anybody.
万事如意 all best wishes
心想事成 may your wishes come true
幸福安康 happiness and good health
平安快乐 safety and happiness
一帆风顺 single sail, gentle wind
恭喜发财 prosperious new year
笑口常开 life full of happiness and smiles
工作顺利 job to go smoothly
事业有成 success in all projects
无条件爱 unconditional love
自由 freedom
儿童 children
尊重 respect
理解 understanding
友谊 friendship
欣赏 appreciation
Or, you can see them all. This gallery is powered by silverhd.net, a new beta created by my collegues. The wishes are best viewed with Microsoft Silverlight. I thank 于海婷 for the wishes and translating.
Geopolitics
Some time ago, I’ve added “When China Rules the World” by Martin Jacques into my Amazon wishlist. I was attracted by the provocative title and believed it should be a small book containing sarcastic passages about prejudices about both world and the chinese culture, witty anecdotes and such. Something like “User’s Guide to <put your country name>”.
Culture variability
The more I learn about different cultures, the more I find cases when same thing has different meaning in different cultures.
The most well-known example is, probably, the white color, in european tradition meaning purity and innosence, but in Japan related to death.
My favorite is what you should do with birthday presents. One line of thought teaches to unpack them right away. By doing it, you allow the presenter to see how delighted you are because of the gift. Besides, if you don’t look at the present, the presenter may think you’re not interested in it, and therefore in him.
Another tradition believes it is better to unpack the present later and alone. If the present is too cheap, the presenter may be publicly ashamed of it. And by ignoring the present you are sending the message that the presenter is more imporant for you than the present.
Go figure what is better.
Today I’ve learned another example. The moon is something cold and evil (the opposite of the sun) in Europe. But in China, it seems to mean something pure and constant, like in the song 月亮代表我的心 (my love is like a moon).
And this made me thinking about invariants in the world cultures. I believe, the vision of friendship and love being the most important immaterial values is the same across most cultures (unfortunately, I cannot say “all” cultures, because I know one where it is not so). What else is invariant? Is “treat others like you want you’ll be treated” it?..
Developing country rant
Today’s rant is motivated by the announcement that Google is going to stop censoring in China. This is exactly the kind of things happening in the so-called developing countries, and it is a part of the reason of me leaving Russia.
The life in a developing country is… pretty much possible. A development country is not such a deadly place like Iraq, Nord Korea or Ruanda, mind you. In fact, it is even possible to live the western life quality.
2009 Summary
In 2009, life gave me mostly lemons. But:
So I have made plenty of lemonade out of them. Hope you’ve enjoyed it, but for me, it was actually too much soda.
I’d like to switch to the healthy Jasmine tee this year.
Chinese Characters for Image Frame
I’ve got an electronic image frame on this Xmas.
What photos should I put on it? It looks like this typical frame people usually have on their tables in the office. But I have neither children nor wife, and I see my parents almost every day in person anyway. For some reason, I don’t have a lot of photos of my friends, nor I have my own pictures I’d like to see constantly rotating on my table.
Presenting Luck
I don’t like to receive good wishes, and I wish them myself only when no other present is possible or appropriate. It is because I feel how empty the wishes are. Can a good wish change the reality?
What I need is a way to present luck in a more realistic, material way.
Money don’t buy you luck, as we all know. And a long-awaited present can only make you happy for some time, but not bring the other things we normally wish (health, love, good job, etc). So it must be something different.
I was looking to amulets, but they always seeming to be a big scam. Today I’ve realized why. If they worked, they would break the conservation law. Just like in physics, energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but only changed from one form into another — similarly, I believe, luck cannot be created or destroyed, it just goes from one person to another.
So what I need is a way to give away little controlled pieces of my own luck. You know, 24 hours of “looking competent and professional”, a six-smiles-pack, or a three months subscription to “warm feet and hands”. And I’d put some really-good-mornings, heartthrobs, and look-mom-I’m-on-TVs onto my wish-list 
Simple Girl from USSR
Once upon a time, in a small Russian village with a Tatar name, a baby-girl Natasha was born to a family of farmers. For her parents, Maria and Pyotr, she was the fourth child, and not the last one. They were quite prosperous; they had a good house, and their land was so large and the livestock so numerous that they had to hire several other villagers on full-time.
These were the late 1920-ies, the time of NEP in then young USSR, the New Economic Policy — that strange mixture of economic freedom and communism that also the modern China exhibits.
When Natasha turned eight, communists decided to end NEP in that village. One day, armed people came to their house and declared all their property nationalized, and themselves exiled to Siberia. They weren’t given any time to prepare to the exile, and they were only allowed to take so much each person could bear.
Millions if not ten millions of other prosperous farmers everywhere in USSR were affected by this nationalization. Typically, they were gathered together (concentrated) in concentration camps, and then pushed into railroad waggons not intended to transport people, to be transported without food and water for days and weeks. Nazis repeated that communist trick with Jews twenty years later. What they couldn’t repeat is what happened, when the minority of the railroad transport survivors actually arrived to Siberia.
Heart, ripped
Do you know this feeling, when a tooth aches for a such long time that you want to rip it out of your mouth? Because you’re already OK with living without a tooth instead of enduring the pain…
I have this very feeling in the last time, and it is not a tooth but my heart I want to rip out of my chest. And this reminds me of two stories I’ve read as a child.
