May 5, 2013

I never put a cap on Paul's MUN trip.  From what I can gather, he and the team did well, and with the real UN, there are no winners or losers, just a lot of meaningless chatter.  He did win an award as Most Improved Delegate, which he didn't seem overly pumped about.  His teacher said he should be, but Most Improved implies that one didn't suck nearly as bad at the end as he did at the beginning.  The experience is great for any kid as you need to study issues and prepare a stand on them, then debate them on the fly in front of your peers and adult observers.  He worked hard getting ready for it and am happy to report that he is still interested it pursuing it next year as he is applying for a Chair position at a Shanghai conference in November. 

In the "What goes on in people's minds" file this week are the reverse walkers.  On occasion, I will head over to the local sports complex to exercise with a few laps around the track.  Bad knees prevent running, but it gets some cardio work in, and when it is stinky humid/hot (most of the time)  you can work up a better than decent sweat.  There are usually quite a few other people out there going in a typical counter clockwise direction, but about a 1/4 of the times I go, there is some oddball that is walking or running in the opposite direction.  In all of those cases, they seem fixated on staring at everyone and it feels like an invasion of privacy and almost an attack.  They are always Chinese, so it can't be a confusion coming from a country where they drive on the opposite side of the street or, like in Australia and the UK, where the horses race in a clockwise fashion.  Seems like a simple cry for attention to me but wish they'd knock it off.

Something the kids and I goof on all the time is how some (a lot) of Chinese girls will do baby talk.  The word for thank you is Xie Xie (pronounced shay shay), and the frequency with which we encounter young female sales people that will say it like they are 5 years old is alarmingly high.  Whenever I hear the female baby talk in the States, years of listening to Loveline has taught me that it is usually due to arrested development caused by abuse as a young child where their speech patterns get locked into the age that they were molested.  I pray that is not the case here as it is way more common.  Betty pointed out that it is only the young unmarried girls that use the baby Xie Xie's and they jettison the infant speech when they get married.  Must be a shock to the groom on wedding night after they consummate the marriage and he hears his bride give him a husky Xie Xie.  To complete the cycle of life, there is another instant where women turn the corner into old lady mode, and I'm talking Chinese old lady mode here  First of all, much like the baby talkers turn into "normal" women the day they get married, it feels like the normal women turn into cranky old Chinese shrew overnight.  Much like there is no transitional fossil evidence that proves birds evolved from dinosaurs.  First of all, they cease to use Xie Xie at all and just barrel through life like a bull.  And watch your kneecaps if you are in a line or pushing your cart at the supermarket for the old bats as they will not think twice about taking you down.  The cultural sociologist in me thinks they turn the day their sons get married and the daughter in law moves into the house, and they go from being devoted to their little prince, to taskmaster over the woman who is obviously not as good of taking care of their little baby as they are.  This would also explain what happens to the baby talk Xie Xie'ers as their previously happy care free life just turned into a prison sentence with the mean old mother/warden crushing their spirit.