Huolong

I've known Mostafa Elmasry for around 6 years. We used to chat over Yahoo messenger when I worked in Harbin, Heilongjiang province.

I wanted to say sorry to him about me not contacting him just because I've been quite busy with life since I came to Beijing. But, being busy is always an excuse. Everybody is busy, or at least busy with doing nothing!

Things seem okay over here. Though my wife and I live in different cities: she is now in Guiyang, Guizhou province for graduate studies in medicine and I work freelance as translator in Beijing, we never feel we are not together. Good communication between us is a two-way street that keeps us connected. I've come to know that good communication is part of the recipe for keeping a happy marriage.

* Like in any country, you need to have enough literary, historical, artistic and philosophical knowledge to appreciate the culture that nurtures you and the people admired in your society. I want to appreciate the cultures of the English-speaking world and their roots and origins. And I want to be admired. One old friend of mine, who used to be my colleague back in Harbin where we both worked for his brother's company, teased me: "You continue learning and studying English? You want to teach Englishmen English?". I wish I could. But, not to be mistaken. Such deeds have been accomplished by others whose native tongues are not English at all and whose books on the English language have become authoritative ones in the English-speech world. I can set my goals as ambitious as theirs. After all, as I said, or rather I quoted another person as saying, "Nothing happens unless first a dream." Who can be sure you, Chang Guohua, are not to become Guohua the Great for Something?...

* Let me now preach a little about the European culture to those with little knowledge of it. Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian elements characterize the culture, just as Confucius and Buddhism have deeply influenced the Chinese culture, though maybe to a lesser extent.

* I now know that, after reading, the term "Bible" means different things to different people. For Judaism, it is the Old Testament as known to Christians. Judaism only accepts the Old Testament as the true Bible and rejects Jesus Christ as the Son of God. But, for different denominations of Christians, it is a collection of different books or different versions or translations of them divided into the Old and New Testaments. (20050920)

* "You know what you're doing?" I have found myself facing a totally different world of cultures, histories and arts. There is too long a list of strange people, events, places, wars, styles of buildings and culture-charged passages I want to understand, appreciate and remember. I've decided that I must be a man knowing almost every facet of the cultures behind the English language. Without this knowledge, no major process can be made in my preparing to become a competent interpreter. When I opened the book that introduces me into the wonderful world of European culture, I might be as happy, pleasantly surprised as a famous man when he for the first time came across the ancient Greek mythology.

* Renaissance is a "rebirth of classical learning and knowldge through the rediscovery of ancient texts and also a rebirth of European culture in general". ( Wikipedia.org) The term Renaissance (文艺复兴) seems to me a happy, historical period in the West during which a large number of artists (Leonardo da Vinci, etc.), buildings of different styles (Gothic, etc.), paintings, sculptures, music and others combined to create a great age that built up a great force leading to the Industrial Revolution. In my mind's eye, the Renaissance was the turning point when the West started to overtake China. I was very sad to find in my reading no Chinese thinkers, philosophers, scientists or artisans that were matches on their Western counterparts when the West was doing their "Renaissance". Renaissance refers to the period between 15th and the mid 17th century in Europe and roughly corresponds to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and early Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) in China. The Chinese people were busy trying to fossilate their long-accustomed feudalism glory and refused to be jolted by a rude awakening from their pipe dream of prosperity and fool's paradise-like pride. China was actually rotting inside with its outside appearance buoyed up only by its accumulation of the past, including tradition, wealth, knowledge, ideology, and burden of thousands of years, instead of innovations, inventions, and discoveries that might grow out of the past.

Now, I'd like to give you some more information you might need to make you updated on the idea of Renaissance. This term is now often replaced by "Early Modern". Renaisssance, like the Bible, means different cultural movements that started "at different places at different times". In addition, the period did not seem so happy to all the contemporary people, especially the poor, who even felt their Renaissance life worsened, compared to the dark days of the Middle Ages. ( Wikipedia.org) (20050925)

* I believe I have chosen the right way to grow to be an interpreter or a simultaneous interpreter. First, establish a strong foundation on which I can build an empire of whatsoever knowledge and skills I need. Second, build this empire with whatsoever I can find and need.

* Here is what I want to tell myself: Set a goal and work towards it, and you will achieve it. Set another and approach it in the same way, and you will achieve it, too. WORK, DO NOT WAIT FOR TIME. (20051112)

*Good homework is what I need now. I know this might sound a little strange or disappointing after having spent so much time working and studying for a goal I've always failed to define. Yes, this is in fact what I've always wanted to do---good homework that is purely a phase I must go through before anything else. Two or three years are not long. Just look back at how many years I've been in Harbin (2 years and 9 months) and in Beijing (3 years and 7 months). And consider all my failed New Year resolutions or attempts to finish the Collins, a wonderful source of information on the English language.

I also bought dozens of Chinese classics, all in paperback. These perfumed books are churned out by a Jilin province-based publisher and feature, unfortunately, proofreading and editing under par. I've always understood the importance of a good publisher in producing quality books. This is easy to figure out: Sony's cameras are better than Aigo's, and they are all cameras though under different names. Nonetheless, I'm reading one of them, a collection of Bai Juyi's poetry, and have finished a collection of Su Dongpo's works. The books still have their own values and serve as a source of literary information.

I placed an order of another Longman dictionary to Joyo.com. The book offers a great source of information that is encyclopedic up to a point, which is different from the Collins. And I want to finish it, too. (20060617)

*I know what my problem is. I don't have the means by which to communicate in the language with native speakers: I don't know what to say when I'm supposed to say something. For example, I don't know how to decline an invitation to lunch at lunchtime, and have no small talk and always get right down to business in phone conversations. I even deliberately avoid conversations with a British man also working for the newspaper. My philosophy here seems to be a pursuit of perfectionism: if I don't know how I can sound sociable in these situations where pleseantries are exchanged, I don't even bother about them.

It is a painful realization that I have inadequate communications skills when I speak English. In the Chinese context I'd be even thought of as talking too much sometimes.

Reading can help me again. Now I'm planning to read a dictionary of spoken English. That might be a good start.

*This is my book report for reading Global Competitiveness-Getting the U.S. back on Track.

*This is a book written by some worrying people in the late 1980s about the seemingly likely decline of the United States. They were afraid that the U.S. was losing its competitive edge out to its international competitors, such as Japan and Germany. (Of course, no China-relating issues were mentioned in the first chapter depicting those days when Japan was the star performer, except the fact that China was one of the biggest exporters of immigrants to the U.S.) In the first chapter, author Richard D. Lamm insisted that everything in the U.S. ranging from its legal system to its political system, tax system, and even Americans' "hubris" be changed to regain the U.S. dominance over its competitors. The United States needs a "generation" to conduct institutional before it can lead in the pack again, he declared.

Well, it sounds quite strange to me. What I knew was that in the 1990s the United States led a revolution called Information Technology that saw a nearly decade of strong economic growth in the U.S. It did not, as Lamm believed, take a whole generation for the country to lead the world again.

The book was published in 1988 and probably had been in the making during the 1980s. Things happened beyond his wildest dreams almost in the wake of the book's publication. In the 1990s, things tipped in favor of the U.S. productivity and economy though its institutions or problems remained there, which he clamored to change or correct.

What on earth happened after the publication of Global Competitiveness-Getting the U.S. back on Track? The awfully sounding predictions, having a doomsday-of-the-U.S. air to them, made in the book proved upside down. I will read other books to find it out. But, as the first step, let me see what about the U.S. made Lamms squirm so uneasily in their chairs in the whole 1980s.

(Considering the upside down predictions, I have one more point to add, that is, predictions are no more than predictions. They just charter future changes based on current changes. They are all about changes. So, if predictions go awry, I'm amused, instead of amazed. They also remind me of the recent "Peaceful Rise of China". Will it last? Is it something we can take for granted? What can hinder it, stop it, or even reverse it?)