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Cantonese Tuesdays: Nine Tones of Hell

 

Ed: Our August season of Cantonese posts, from the lovely Rosalyn S, will be your open sesame to that mysterious and impregnable “other Chinese” (the “funnier sounding” one, according to Russell Peters). We begin with the tricky question of just how many tones it has anyway …



There’s a running joke among Cantonese speakers. If we can’t decide how many tones we use, what hope is there for outsiders?

There are six main tones, from high to low to those that wiggle in between.

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Summer Shorts: Train Station

Tickets please – flash fiction by Anthony Tao

 

It’s too humid to be raining. The water caught in the sky doesn’t fall so much as appear on our skin, so that it feels like we wear another person’s sweat. We turn into a narrow entryway, the thick orange characters transomed atop informing us that the station is ahead, past jewelry shops, milk tea stands, and a side entrance to Kentucky Fried Chicken. The air here is different, hefty and choked with presence, as if, according to some law of physics and society, it pushes back against our breath.

Travelers sleep on the grubby linoleum in the lobby. One man lies with his head pillowed by his single-zippered rucksack. A crowd has begun to pool around the only two functioning gates.

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Identity Papers

On being Chinese, but not – by James Hsu

 

When I was growing up in Canada, my mom used to tell me a story about how our Taiwanese relatives got cheated when they visited mainland China. The story meant only one thing – that all mainland Chinese were thieves and could not be trusted.

It must have been the early nineties, because the tale has been repeated endlessly for at least two decades. My mom wasn’t there, but she heard it from her sisters. As the story goes, my aunts visited China for a tour in the summer. They were looking for a place to exchange their Taiwanese dollars for Chinese yuan.

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Chinese Myth Tuesdays: Chinese Valentine's

Edited and with additions from Fuck Yeah Chinese Myths!

 

Chinese Valentine’s Day (七夕节, qīxījié) falls on the seventh day of the seventh month in the old Chinese lunar calendar, and has been celebrated since the Han dynasty. This year it was on Saturday 2nd August, so date night. Here’s the really awesome story behind it.

Once, there was a cowherd, Niulang (牛郎 Niúláng) who married a beautiful fairy girl, Zhinü (织女 Zhīnǚ, literally “weaver girl”). Zhinü was the seventh daughter of the Goddess of Heaven, but she got bored, came down to earth and fell in love with Niulang. In another version, Niulang’s cow talked to him one day, and told him to go to the lake where fairies were bathing, and take the red set of clothes as it belongs to the prettiest one.

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Summer Shorts: Going Home

A Uighur returns – flash fiction by Robert Powers

 

My job for the winter is finished. I am finished here. I am outside a train station in Beijing. It is midnight. The sky is a shroud, the same shroud. There is a board with red lights, and we are looking. A mass looking. People amassed looking the same. All doing the same thing. Everyone impatient, tired, hungry, lonely. People, I think, are the same. But they look at me in the same way: You are an alien. You are not the same. You are not from here. You do not look like me. You do not think like I think. It is always the same. I am going home. Home to the West, leaving from the East to the West, past the desert, to the border, to the rest of Asia.

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