Reuters Canada (and the fact that it’s Canada is important here) reported early Friday that “China’s Li” was “surprised to be picked by Milwaukee.” There are many many people with the name Li in China. The player who was drafted by the Milwaukee Bucks in Thursday night’s NBA draft is not one of them. His name is Yi, pronounced “t;Eeee.” Yi Jianlian, the 7-foot forward who has drawn comparisons to Kevin Garnett, was selected with the sixth overall pick in the draft, making him the fourth player from China to join the NBA. Reuters has since corrected the headline, but I have an image of the original story below. Why would Yi be surprised to be drafted by Milwaukee? Well, maybe because Milwaukee is like the lowest profile team in the league and people in China couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the Bucks. Yi told the media, “Myself, I’m not really familiar with the city but I’m happy to play with the team and I’m happy to play in the NBA. I didn’t see a lot of Milwaukee’s games in China and I’ve never been there, so it’s kind of a new city to me.” That’s a nice way of saying that Milwaukee is a dump and no one has ever heard of it in China. Reportedly, Yi really didn’t want to go to the Bucks.
So much so that when Yi came to the U.S. to train, he declined to work out for the team so they wouldn’t pick him. Whether he likes it or not, Yi is going to Milwaukee and undoubtedly, the Bucks will be China’s second favorite team. Whether Yi will be a favorite in Milwaukee is still a question mark. Many are saying that the power forward is a “workout wonder” and will be in way over his head once he gets some game action. The word around the Shanghai water cooler, well I should say, my Shanghai water cooler is that this guy’s not as good as everyone thinks he is. Chinese fans say this guy’s weak, kind of slow and plays no D. Comparisons to Yao Ming seem very premature. I’ve also heard from Chinese friends that there is no way this guy’s 19 years old. Thursday night, Yi became the first of the Chinese NBA players to actually show up to New York for the NBA draft.
•Reuters: CORRECTED: China’s Yi Surprised to Be Picked By Milwaukee
•China Daily: Yi: Stop Comparing Me With Yao
Update (6/29): This story took a strange strange turn Thursday evening when investigators in the Chris Benoit murder/suicide reported that his Wikipedia entry had been edited to include his wife’s death 14 hours before her body was discovered. At 12:01 a.m. Monday, an anonymous user added the following information to Benoit’s page: “Chris Benoit was replaced by Johnny Nitro for the ECW Championship match at Vengeance, as Benoit was not there due to personal issues, stemming from the death of his wife Nancy.” Eerily, Nancy’s body was not found until later that evening. An employee from Wikipedia told authorities that the entry was edited from an IP address in Stamford, Connecticut, where the WWE, Benoit’s employer, is based. Investigators are examining the possibility that Benoit called someone between killing his wife and killing himself to inform him or her that his wife was dead and he wouldn’t be making it in to work. Or perhaps, like any good open-sourcer, Benoit edited his own Wikipedia page on Monday morning. After all, his killing his wife and son seems like relevant information for any Wikipedia bio.
Yikes. You would think with over half a billion women in China, the biggest international star from the Mainland could have landed himself someone who, well, looks a little bit more like Bai Ling. I’m talking about Ye Li, the woman with the ball in her grasp, not the other specimen of beauty in this AFP file photo. Titan Sports Weekly, the Chinese newspaper, announced Monday that NBA center Yao Ming will marry Ye Li, his teenage sweetheart, in a Shanghai ceremony this August. The paper called the union a “match based on pure love.” The Houston Chronicle claimed that Ye made Yao the red wristbands he wears during every NBA game. The 7′6″ Yao met the 6′3″ Ye when he played for the Shanghai Sharks in 1999. The two have dated steadily though long distance since then despite a rumor earlier in the year that linked Yao to American actress Nia Long. And despite Chinese news reports, the Yao-Ye wedding will not be broadcast live on Chinese television. The big guy has not revealed any of his summer plans to the media other than expressing his desire to have a private ceremony at which the media will not be welcome.
Since staring this website I have attended every major Western concert that has come through Shanghai in an effort to give you readers an honest appraisal of this new trend of Western performances in China. Tonight, my streak of four shows (Stones, Clapton, Ziggy, Roots) will sadly come to an end. That’s because the professedly-Hispanic pop star Christina Aguilera is on the bill tonight at the Shanghai Grand Stage and I can’t be asked to pay 200RMB to watch her sing and dance. Instead, I might pay no money and just stare at this photograph all night. But that’s not to say that everyone is as indifferent about Tuesday’s concert as I am. There’s a certain group of people in Shanghai that is especially excited for the Christina Aguilera Back to Basics Tour. This group is called “girls.” In fact, the only people I know who are going are girls. Two female Shanghai residents I know almost cut their vacation plans short in Yunnan province for the Christina show before snapping out of it. And a manager of a prominent Shanghai English education company who has tickets for the show told Flumesday, “I have been walking around my office replying ‘What a girl wants’ to anyone who asks me a question.” Has Xtina cast a spell on the women of Shanghai? The four-time Grammy winner held a press conference in Shanghai Monday and said, “I’ve never been to China before, so it’s very exciting for me to be here…I love performing more than anything in the world. I have the best time being on the stage, feeling the passion of the audience and enjoying the music.” Photos from last week’s Tokyo show reveal that Christina has a baby bump and rumors are flying that the singer has a turkey in the oven. Though in Xtina-nese, one would say she has a “genie in the bottle.”
In March I wrote about the Supreme Court case involving Joseph Frederick, who as a high school student in 2002 unfurled a 14-foot banner at a school-sponsored parade for the Olympic torch relay that read “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.” The principal of the Juneau, Alaska school, Deborah Morse, suspended Frederick and the student responded by filing a federal civil rights suit. Five years later, after the case escalated to the U.S. Supreme Court, the highest court in the land ruled Monday against Frederick. In Chief Justice John Roberts’ decision he wrote, “The message on Frederick’s banner is cryptic. But Principal Morse thought the banner would be interpreted by those viewing it as promoting illegal drug use, and that interpretation is plainly a reasonable one.” Keep in mind that while the event involving the banner took place during school hours, neither Frederick or the parade were on school grounds. The ruling is devastating for student freedom of speech and gives legal precedent to punish students who don’t comply with a school’s educational mission. A school’s philosophy can be quite subjective and can be tailored in specific cases to suppress student speech and push a political or religious agenda. At a time when Americans are accused of being un-American for not believing in the Bush foreign policy and someone like Michael Moore is skewered in public and harassed by his own government simply for making a film, Monday’s decision is like that final kick in the 6-year beatdown of the First Amendment. The one where the guy leaves his victim writhing on the pavement and comes back for one last boot to the ribs. Like I wrote in March, Joseph Frederick, the student who put “bong hits” and “Jesus” on the same piece of cloth, is now 23, living in China, studying Mandarin and teaching English. His precise location is undisclosed and did not issue a comment on Monday’s ruling.
Could it really get any worse for America? First, they get a Chinese guy to build the next memorial in Washington D.C. Then, Major League Baseball teams begin signing players from China. Now it seems that the apple pie that’s baking in Grandma’s oven is probably made from Chinese apples. A shocking report by the AP Sunday reveals how China has decimated the American apple industry. While only 15 years ago, China grew fewer apples than America, now it grows 5 times as many. Apple pickers in China earn an average of $2 a day, $8-10 less than their American counterparts earn per hour, apple producers in America find it nearly impossible to remain competitive. A seventh-generation Pennsylvania apple grower told the AP, “We’re facing a threat that we’ve never faced before in terms of their ability to come in and essentially replace every apple that we produce in this country numerically and at a much lower cost.” U.S. apple growers are pressuring the government to implement new legislation that would benefit the American apple industry such as increased subsidies, mandatory country-of-origin stickers on all domestic and imported apples and stricter pest control standards that would limit the number of Chinese apples entering the U.S. market. With regard to the country-of-origin stickers that would encourage produce shoppers to buy American, it’s not like China’s apple exporters couldn’t find a way to stick “Made in U.S.A.” stickers on their apples and pay their way through inspection. And with regard to the health standards, I’ve bought apples in China that smelled pungently of shit. Seriously. I asked a Chinese friend about it and as he explained, often times, animal and sometimes human fecal matter is used as a fertilizer and even fruit or vegetables that grow on trees are susceptible to contact. Forget patriotic consumerism. If the American apple industry wants to survive, they should focus an ad campaign around Chinese apples that smell of shit. Because in a price war, even with the most American product, there is no way to beat China.
An interesting Tiananmen-related story broke over the weekend as the daughter of the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping told a Hong Kong radio station Sunday that the decision to roll tanks and order troops into Tiananmen Square during the infamous ‘89 democracy riots was not solely her father’s. Deng Lin, Deng’s eldest daughter told a state-run radio station, “It was the leadership that made a collective decision. You shouldn’t say that one person was responsible for it.” While 17 years after the event that remains China’s most taboo topic of conversation, it is still unclear who made the order to meet the student protest with such force. Although Deng was China’s “supreme” or “paramount” leader at the time of the “crackdown,” ultimately the decision to crush the riots rests with him. But in defining the legacy of Deng Xiaoping, many writers and now, his own daughter, have hinted the Deng was very disturbed by what happened at Tiananmen Square. A Deng biographer has claimed that a source close to the leader said that Deng had characterized the Tiananmen incident as a “botched military operation” and was appalled with his generals. Furthermore, sources say that Deng chose Jiang Zemin over Li Peng as his successor because Li had become notoriously linked with the Tiananmen incident. China’s Communist Party has yet to issue a detailed report of the event, and until it does, these questions regarding the Tiananmen incident will linger.
Actress Cameron Diaz made some Peruvian eyebrows raise and mouths drop when she showed up to the Inca city of Machu Picchu in Peru wearing an olive green Mao bag with the popular Mao slogan, “serve the people.” Now, while these Mao messenger bags are trendy fashion statements for expats in China and American and Euro hipsters alike, there are some places in the world where Mao paraphernalia just isn’t all that cool. For example, Peru, where in the 1980s and early 90s the Maoist Shining Path insurgency led a campaign of massacres, bombings and assassinations that led to the deaths of over 70,000 Peruvians. Oops. A prominent Peruvian human rights activist said of the fashion faux pas, “It alludes to a concept that did so much damage to Peru, that brought about so many victims. I don’t think she should have used that bag where the followers of that ideology did so much damage.” It seems that Diaz, who is of Cuban ancestry, did not do her homework before making the trip to Peru. Her Cuban-American father might be equally as offended if one of Cameron’s hipster boyfriends showed up to their home in a shirt emblazoned with Che Guevara, the revolutionary who led guerilla attacks in Cuba in the 50s. Some gossip writers have likened Cameron’s fashion crime to wearing a swastika bag at the Wailing Wall. Maybe fashionable travelers should think twice about where they wear their Mao bags.
I, like many bright-eyed foreigners who arrive in Shanghai, planned on spending my time here learning Mandarin Chinese. After all, there are more Mandarin speakers here than in any other city in the world. We either enroll in a Mandarin course or hire a tutor so we can communicate while we are here and broaden our job skills for after we move on. We’ve all heard a million times that Mandarin will be the most essential language of the 21st century. But what we all learn soon after we get here is that Shanghai has a language of its own. Anyone who’s been in a crowded Shanghai elevator pressed up against another person shouting “hao va” (alright?) repeatedly into a cell phone knows that on the streets, in the noodle shops and on these crowded elevators, most Chinese in Shanghai are not speaking the same language we read in our Mandarin books or hear on our Chinese podcasts. It’s a dialect unfamiliar to even the most dedicated Chinese learner. It’s a dialect spoken between locals. It’s Shanghainese. The Shanghai dialect is somewhat similar to Yiddish in that it is a language that is dying with every generation. Shanghainese can also be compared to the Barcelona dialect Catalan in that all of its speakers also speak Mandarin similar to how Catalonians all speak Spanish. But the comparison I like most is the Shanghai dialect and Ebonics, or as some linguists like to call, African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). While technically, Shanghainese and AAVE are derivatives of Mandarin and English respectively, most people who speak standard Chinese and English cannot understand what the hell the speakers of these dialects are saying. As many educators, psychologists and linguists in America have sought to legitimize AAVE as a dialect with linguistic patterns and rules, so too in Shanghai, there exists a movement to preserve and validate the local tongue. Since Mao’s revolution in 1949 and the subsequent wave of nationalism, regional dialects were banned from schools and literature in favor of the national dialect, Mandarin. The Shanghai Daily reported Friday that the first ever Shanghainese dictionary will be published in August. A former Shanghai University professor has compiled 15,000 words and phrases from the Shanghai dialect, or Shanghai hua, that will incorporate both Chinese characters and pinyin, the English transliteration of the sounds. For a language that is hundreds of years old and is spoken by 14 million people, it’s high time for a dictionary. Linguists plan to use the new dictionary as the basis for language input software that could be used for translation and online dictionaries. The Daily reports that an online version of the Shanghainese dictionary will be available by year’s end. Which means that in a few months time, when you find yourself in another crammed elevator with locals shouting into cell phones, if you are wondering what that non-Mandarin word you hear means, you can pick up your new Shanghainese dictionary and look it up. Hao va?