Xin Nian Kuai Le!

Happy New Year!

Xin Nian Kuai Le!

Gongxi Facai!

The Kaulins Family: Jenny, Tony, and Andis will be in Beixing (part of Taixing which is near Jiangyin), Jiangsu for the Spring Festival aka Chinese New Year Holiday. So, I won't be able to make any blog entries for five days. You can expect lots of photo and video and complaints when I return.

The school was slow today. I had one person show up for my movie class which means I can show the same movie in the next class and save myself the bother of preparation. For some reason, I thought the big CNY suppers would be Saturday night but talking to the students I realized I was mistaken. The Chinese will gorge themselves Sunday night which means I am not off the hook when I go to Beixing tomorrow.

John Derbyshire, conservative and something of a Sinologist (he is married to a Chinese woman) says that the symbolic animal of the Chinese New Year will be the Bull. I had been wondering if it in fact it would be the year of the Ox or the Cow. Now, I have three choices. If it is the year of the Cow, I would be making the lame joke, all year, about how it would the year of the fat chick. If the next year is the year of the Ox, I would be talking about climate change oxen getting their Al Gored. And if next year is to be the year of the Bull, well, you can just guess what joke I would make. The way things are shaping up these days in the world of politics and economics, I would assume the Bull will be the appropriate animal for many reasons.

The sad part for me about having to go to Beixing is that this blog is threatening to have record monthly numbers for visits and page views this month and so the lost of five days of blogging may cost me the record. I hope you rare readers can comb the AKIC archives to help me achieve new monthly highs.

I had a student from my school sit beside me on the bus ride home this evening and tell me some things about Chinese dialects that I hadn't given much thought to before. The student told me that his parents want him to marry a Wuxi girl because they can't speak Mandarin. His parents can only speak the local dialect which means that the only people who can understand them are in Suzhou and Shanghai. I asked the student how this could be. He told me his parents were workers who hadn't progressed beyond middle school in their education days. While his parents can understand Mandarin (how could they watch t.v. if they didn't?), they can't speak it very well and their accents also make any attempts at Mandarin speaking difficult. I could only think to myself how limited his parents' horizons must be. I can converse with people from America, Australia, and England, all countries being very far-flung from each other while his parents are restricted to a small portion of one province in China.