The Chinese speaking English

In a cafe in Vermont, an eastern suburb of Melbourne, two Aussie guys are having a conversation. They are having their Saturday afternoon caffeine shot in a local bakery cum cafe.

"When you ask them a question, they simply stare you in the eye - stupidly" one guy refers to his experience with Chinese migrants in Australia.

"You know, they cannot even speak English, they must be stupid or something. I cannot understand why they even bother to come here" his friend replies.

In another part of town a shop assistant in a Louis Vuitton store approaches a customer.

"Good afternoon - how are you?" a well-trained shop assistant would ask an open question and always start a dialogue with a greeting.

Ignoring the Australian shop assistant, the Chinese lady and her friend continues looking at a handbag. Instinctively knowing when to keep his distance, the shop assistant politely retreats keeping vigilant on the Chinese customer from afar.

He has started a course in basic conversational Chinese and after a few months is able to decipher basic words. Tuning into the conversation the shop assistant hears these words in Chinese and manage to interpret the conversation literally.

"xi huan ma?" do you like it? questions her friend. (do you like it?)

"ma ma hu hu" horse horse tiger tiger - she replies. (its ok)

"Ma shang mai la" on top of horse buy la! - getting impatient (buy it quickly)

"Wo la du zi" I am pulling belly (I am getting a tummy ache)

"Huang se hen pei ni" yellow suits you - compliments her friend (yellow suits you)

Knowing that majority of their customers are from mainland China, Louis Vuitton insist that their full time staff attends a basic Chinese conversational course. The shop assistant by now is into his 6th week of his course and he realises his level of his Chinese is not quite up to scratch but he is sure his literal translation is not wrong. However, the conversation he heard is not making sense to him, especially the part about being on top of a horse, tigers and something about pulling belly. 

But queuing in on the comment about the yellow colour he zooms into the pair and compliments the yellow handbag the Chinese lady is looking at.

"zhe ge hen piao liang. hen pei ni" this is very beautiful and it suits you. The shop assistant dredging up enough Chinese to compliment the lady's selection.

A good shop assistant would comment on the product and subtly compliments a customer's choice.

Much to the surprise of the shop assistant the lady replies "Yes, I like....."

"Try it" queuing into the Chinese customer's choice. He takes the LV bag off the shelf and straps it around the arms of the customer. He stands back and admires the A$5,000 handbag on the customer.

Then without warning the question came out of the customer's mouth:

"This make out of beef or pork?" pointing to the handbag.

Without flinching nor letting out his explosive urge to laugh the shop assistant replies:

"Its made of pork. Pork is pre-dried and re-oiled before making bag!"  The handbag is made from pigskin specially from Papua New Guinea

"Re-oiled? Waaaa!" a final smile from the Chinese customer.

"OK I buy. Also the little pig?" pointing to a purse - with a A$2,500 price tag.

With a smile on his face, the shop assistant hands the customer a receipt for $7,500, wrapping the two items with utmost care and with both hands hands the two items to the Chinese customer.

Without a word or smile, the customer walks out of the shop.

By this time the two Aussie blokes in Vermont are finishing their two cafe lattes. After paying A$7 they both walk out of the cafe accidentally brushing a Chinese student.

"Bloody stupid Chinese" staring at the young student who is tucking hungrily into a bag of chips.

Even Louis Vuitton is realising the world is changing - I hope these two blokes wake up one day.

Fermented grapes.

$233,000 for a bottle of wine: it has something to to do with Descartes.

Penfolds

The world’s most expensive wine sold out of a winery, was the Penfolds “2004 Block 42 Kalimna”. It was sold for A$168,000. The company produced only 12 of these wines and one of their very first customer was a Chinese restaurateur in Hong Kong - Mr Wong Wing Chee.

The world's most expensive bottle of wine ever sold at an auction was Châteaux Lafite-Rothschild bought by another Hong Kong Chinese for $232,692. Chateaux Latfite Rothschild has sold a few thousand bottles into China to-date.

Chateaux Lafite-Rothschild

There are no records of wine collections sold privately. I am sure somewhere a Chinese might have paid more than the prices fetched by auctioneers or wineries.

But what do they taste like?

Penfold’s chief wine maker: “There is something magical about this wine, it has an ethereal dimension and a saturated blackness on the palate and it’s extraordinarily perfumed with layer upon layer of flavor.”

I struggle with understanding what saturated blackness tastes like especially when it comes in various layers. Imagine trying to translate this into the Chinese language. Perhaps the wine maker is just trying to tell us what he thinks it tastes like.

Numerous research have proven that there is little if not no correlation between taste and price. http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/handle/37328.

The experience (taste) of wine is merely an interpretation of our senses by our brain. This interpretation is at best highly subjective. If we think or told that the wine is good – it must taste good. The problem here is neither with the wine, nor the marketing machinery but with our expectation that our tongue and sense of smell can be used to define objective pleasure. We expect that taste can be quantified on a 100 point scale.

We've somehow manage to turn the most romantic of drinks into a commodity worthy of Consumer Reports and price levels.

In other words, we have been fooled or our tongues have been fooled by our brains. "I think therefore I am" - Rene' Descartes. Perhaps Descartes himself may have even helped the French wine industry by convincing the world to think that French wines are the best wines.

So for the rest of us normal folks, who may not have a spare few hundred thousand dollars to spend on Penfolds Block 42 or Châteaux Lafite-Rothschild, I am sure we can imagine the taste to be layer upon layer of flavorsome black fermented grapes.

Why we do what we do?

At a Chinese lunch many years ago in Malaysia, the host honored me with an expensive bottle of red wine. To make the occasion even more special he asked the waiter for an ice bucket. I remember feeling a little odd and almost wasteful drinking chilled expensive red and eating spicy Sichuan cuisine.

Fast forward 15 years, sipping Sangria on my patio on a hot Australian summer got me thinking about the lunch in Malaysia. I start to wonder if it is really that odd?

I ask: "why is it that we do what we do?"

Just last week, I ordered eye fillet steak in a lovely restaurant owned by the French chef whose name I would not attempt to pronounce. The chef’s cooking genre is heavily influenced by his apprenticeship in Indonesia and he is now renowned for spice-flavoured steak.

I ordered a Sauvignon Blanc to go with my medium steak.

I caught the guy at the table next to me silently mouthing “red meat and white wine – huh?” to his girlfriend seated across his table. He was obviously trying to impress his date she had gone out with a man-about town, who would never be caught dead with white wine and red meat.

I cut a small piece of my steak with a sharp knife. A small piece of steak has a tenderer to-mouth experience than chewing a larger chunk. A sharp knife slices easily through the meat presented on the plate giving the diner the feel and expectation of a tender meat.

Pairing wine with food has only one objective and that is to enhance the experience of both food and wine either by complimenting OR contrasting with the food.

I chose to contrast my dining experience that night.

I wanted the crisp, acidic nature of the Sauvignon Blanc to cut through the spiced-up eye fillet leaving a refreshing sensation for the palate. In this way, every mouthful of this steak will be an ever new experience.

I savoured my spiced-up steak with the occasional sip of the fruity Sauvignon Blanc – I was in heaven.

I hope the guy at the next table enjoyed his Bueuf Burguignon (beef burgundy with bay leaves). I did not think his girlfriend was too impressed with his slurp, But he had red wine though – that must score some points with his girlfriend.

So why do we do what we do? I am sure I did what I did because I do think about what I do. I am not sure about the guy in the next table though..... CHEERS or YAMSING or KANPEI!

To sit or to squat - that is the question

To sit or to squat?

The "sit toilet bowl" was invented during the industrial revolution in Europe to solve their worsening sewerage problems brought about by its growing population. The device in effect made the process of doing the number 2 (Big one) private and out of sight. In conjunction with the 'flushing" system, it very quickly replaced the universal squat method naturally used by every human being in the world before the mid 19th century.

It has taken almost 200 years before this invention reached Shenzhen International Airport in China. In the toilet at this Airport, amongst all the squat cubicles there is one such "sit" toilet, and that cubicle is clearly marked "for weak only". 

Given that the Chinese has mastered the art of introducing / imitating the developed world's products, why has it taken so long before this "sit" toilet made its way to Shenzhen?

Perhaps they know something the "sit toilet" world never knew.

According to a report by Science News Online (Feb 2003), fecal stagnation is the leading contributor to colon cancer, the major killer disease in the west. The report went on to say that the sitting posture whilst in the toilet constricts the colon, preventing a complete discharge of waste from the body causing inflammation of the bowels. 

However, colon cancer is rare in the developing world and the report further suggests that the reason might be related to the squatting position as it is nature's way of fecal discharge, naturally used by majority of the non-western world.

So next time we see those "starting blocks" flanking the "hole in the ground" in Shenzhen International Airport, or anywhere else in our travels in China, you now know why it has taken so long to have sit toilets in the country. Perhaps instead of seeing it as a yet-to-be developed part of the nation, see it as a product of the nation's wisdom from its 5,000 years of culture.

Perhaps now after almost 200 years there is a reverse osmosis when it comes to westernisation of China.   It has taken a smart graduate from London's Royal College of Art to realise why the western sit toilet has so much resistance in China. The Chinese instinctively know that humans are not anatomically meant to sit when eliminating. This graduate re-invented the Squat/Sit toilet. He called it the Penseur, a sit toilet that positions the user in a 'squat' position. 

Its about time sit toilets are re-assessed. In today's Apple'lised society, 200 years is indeed a long time to keep using the same product.