Mafan (麻烦)

Trips To Various Places
Much time has passed since my last post. I've finished my obligations for the Fall semester, and I am eagerly awaiting the results from my exams. Since my last post, I've gone to Xi'an (西安) and Guangzhou (广州). I think that I shall use my next post to talk about them. For now, check-out my photos.

Crimmus
After lectures ended on Monday 25 December 2006, a cadre of Canadian students (and one Brit) went to an establishment called 'Paul's Steak And Eggs' for Christmas lunch. The owner is reportedly from Edmonton, although I haven't had a chance to verify this rumour. For dinner, Cheryl organised an outing for approximately twenty of us, including Ali, to a Cantonese-style restaurant. Mmmmm ... gooooood. div align="justify">
Liz And Taka, And My Broken Anka
My good friends Liz and Taka came from Japan to visit Beijing (and me) on 28 December, and they returned to Japan on 31 December. I had planned to be a good host for them because, relatively speaking, Beijing's now my home turf. I met them at the airport, and we hopped onto airport transit to go to Beijing Station, near to which their hotel is located. (Aside: airport transit costs 16 kuai; take it if you need to go inside the city from the airport. One may expect to pay ~80 kuai if one takes a legitimate cab, or much more if one either takes a 'black' / illegal cab or goes with an unscrupulous driver of a legal cab. Cabs in Beijing are legal cabs if and only if the number on the licence plate begins with '京B'.)

Anyway, after more than an hour on the airport transit vehicle, we finally arrived at Beijing Station. I stepped from the bus onto ... an uneven part of the sidewalk. Before I describe the story more, I need to stress that I really should have looked exactly where I was to step because I'm in China and I'm unable to trust any sidewalk. Certainly, if one is concerned about stepping into someone else's spittle, then one needs to look at the ground while one walks; the same is doubly true when one alights from some sort of transit onto Beijing's characteristically unstable sidewalks.

In this case, the sidewalk itself was in good condition but it was poorly designed. A tree was growing out of the sidewalk in a square of dirt around which the sidewalk was built to accommodate the tree. When I alit from the bus, the edge of my left foot landed on the edge of the concrete ring around the dirt. My ankle then twisted. I learnt later that I broke the lower tip of my left fibula; I suspect that the tip of the fibula scored the aforementioned edge of concrete, and that's what caused the break. The break is not too serious; I've not worn any sort of cast at all.

I continued to hobble-along with Liz and Taka, blissfully unaware of the extent of the damage. I firstly accompanied them to their hotel, and then we took the subway to a place where we might eat Beijing Duck (北京烤鸭). At the entrance of the subway, I saw that one of Beijing's many street-side vendors was selling tensor bandages. How serendipitous! After we rode the subway to Wangfu Jing (王府井), we ate Beijing duck, after which I went homeward.

The next morning was a different story: when I awakened at 6:00, I was unable to stand on my foot. I sent a message to my good friend and classmate, Jeanette, to enlist her aid. I had many reasons for enlisting the aid of Jeanette, not the least of which is that I knew that she knows the location of the on-campus medical clinic. After lectures had finished for the day, Jeanette brought me food and she helped me with translation at both the on-campus clinic and at the hospital to which we eventually went. Jeanette truly is my shining star.

We encountered a few T.I.C. ('This Is China', for those of you joining us now) moments throughout the day, but I don't think that I shall describe them here. After that day, my ankle has improved. The sprain is not yet gone, but I expect it to be gone after another week.

On the Saturday, while I was walking on my way to meet Jeanette, Liz, and Taka for dinner, I encountered my good friend Genjirou. I invited him to join us for a good meal at a Dai (傣) Minority-nationality restaurant to which he introduced me. Genjirou's Chinese is really fluent, and his English is quite good, too. He ordered a number of tasty dishes on our behalf, and we all had a really good time.

Liz and Taka went to see a few sights while they were here; I regret not being able to act as some sort of tour guide. Even without my injury, I'd have some problems given my schedule of classes, which I shall describe in the last section of this posting.

Debi's Birthday

Debi Blizard,one of the other Canadians here at BLCU, celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday this week. Happy Birthday, Debi! We celebrated by going to a Buddhist Vegetarian restaurant. To date, it's the most expensive restaurant in Beijing at which I've eaten. We had vegetarian Beijing Duck! Yum yum!

'80s Hair
Beijing seems to be afflicted with some severe cases of '80s hair. If you see someone sporting an '80s 'do, please report it immediately Beijing's Centre for Disease Control.


Locked Doors And Stupid Service Persons
I had to knock on the door to enter my dorm building tonight. The on-duty fuwuyuan (服务员), who was in an adjoining room and not in the room in which she was supposed to stay, asked 'Why didn't you ring the door bell?'. My response to that was 'I pressed the button twice, and it didn't work.'. She then came to look at the button and said to me, as if she were talking to a stupid person, 'You see that light on the button? If it's a red light, the button works. It's not on right now.'. My response was 'That's why I knocked on the door.'. She then said 'You don't have to knock so loudly; all you have to do is rattle the door.' My response was 'I didn't know that at the time.'. This is not the first time I've encountered her stupidity. I have no qualms using the word 'stupid' because she's both unintelligent and mean-spirited. I'd be more charitable if she were actually nice. 'Fuwuyuan' may be translated as 'service person', but it's like I'm causing her trouble every time I ask her to do her job. This was very mafan, and that leads me directly into ...


Mafan
ma'fan (麻烦): (adj) troublesome, inconvenient; (v) trouble, bother, to put somebody to trouble. (Courtesy of Oxford Concise English-Chinese / Chinese-English Dictionary) Somehow, this dictionary entry doesn't do the word justice. It's really difficult to translate into English. Reportedly, an incredibly similar-sounding word exists in Arabic, and it is used by speakers of Hebrew in Israel to describe bothersome situations.

Why is it so difficult to translate? Any single word is insufficient to capture the essence of 'mafan', although I think that 'vexing' is a particularly good word for it. I hope to demonstrate the meaning of mafan by giving a few examples.

To help illustrate the meaning of 'mafan', I've included a letter which I sent to my academic advisor at University of Waterloo, Mavis.

--

Hello, Mavis.

I've finally sent the package. Every day here seems like an adventure; rather trying to do something, no matter how trivial, is an adventure. I was going to send the package yesterday but, when I arrived at the post office, I discovered that I'd forgotten the cheques at home. Today, I went to withdraw money from the post office's ATM but I had some issues: the machine didn't want to give me money from my MasterCard after it had started the transaction, and then it ate my Visa card during the transaction of my second attempt at actually obtaining money for postage. I had to waste another half-hour just having my card returned to me. I paid $25 Cdn for the postage, and it should arrive at St. Paul's late this week.

Yesterday, I had my forms with me and I decided to complete them in the building where I take my lectures because it is open on Saturdays and it has places where I may sit. I went to my classroom to spend ten minutes completing the forms. They must have seen me on the security camera when I entered the room because three minutes after I entered the room one of the cleaning persons kicked me out of the room (and then proceeded to lock it). I went downstairs to the main lobby and sat on the stairs there next to a security guard. He seemed to have no problem with me sitting on the stairs, but another member of the security staff must have complained because a boy (I have no better way to describe him), who I think was just an off-duty guard, told me that it wasn't all right to sit on the stairs. Argh!

These are not isolated incidents. Each thing in this country seems to be designed: a) to give someone a sense of superiority; and b) to inconvenience everyone to distract them from actually working efficiently. Even at the post office today, when I was trying to get an envelope for the package, the person who actually sells envelopes told me to buy an envelope at the place where I'd pay for postage. _That_ person sold me an envelope, but told me to go elsewhere to complete the envelope. I have no idea why she had me complete the address on the envelope because that envelope was immediately put inside _another_ envelope, upon which I had to rewrite the address!!!! WTF??? WHYYYYYYY????? Something which should have taken me ten minutes, _including_ standing in line, instead took me more than an hour. Soooooooooooooooooo stupid!

And this is just two days' worth of inconvenience. I expect more this evening.

I hope that things are going better for you. :)

Take care.

- S2

--

We all know the answer to the question 'WHYYYYYYY?????': T.I.C.. In fact, much as anything which happens to any person may be explained by 'it's his karma', any mafan which has no rational explanation may be explained by the magical 'T.I.C.'. The last few weeks have been quite mafan for me, although I don't need to appeal to T.I.C. to explain all of it. The first bit of mafan is that my BlackBerry device has finally bitten the dust. After dropping it several times, including at Huashan when I was in Xi'an and its environs, I seem to have cracked the board inside. I was able to recover some of the data but, currently, the data are sitting on my computer in an inaccessible form. That's mafan. It's self-induced mafan, but it's still mafan.

My next example illustrates that mafan which comes from external sources is not confined to the post office. When I went with Cheryl to return my broken humidifier to the local shopping centre, we had to speak to various fuwuyuan and security guards no fewer than ten times to successfully return my item and get a replacement. Firstly, we went to the store at which I purchased the device. The store is on the second floor of the building. We were told by the security guard at the store's entrance that we had to return to the first floor and find a particular booth. This was Encounter #1 / Person #1. We returned to the first floor to get a replacement. No dice; I had to get a form stating that I was returning this humidifier in exchange for another, and this was Encounter #2 / Person #2. After obtaining this receipt, we proudly marched to the second floor to enter the store through its main entrance. Uh-uh: the guard informed us that we had to enter the store via its exit and then proceed to the counter; I thought that that was a stupid idea because the counter where I'd purchased the device was right at the main entrance. That was Encounter #3 / Person #1. We then went to enter through the back of the store, and encountered another guard there, yielding Encounter #4 / Person #3. He told us what to do in a very thick Beijing accent, which sounds as if one's speaking with marbles in one's mouth. Cheryl and I parsed things differently, so we didn't know to where we had to take the humidifier. The guard repeated things, thus giving us Encounter #5 / Person #3. We walked against the flow of over-crowded and too-narrow payment aisles to the in-store counter at which I had paid for the machine. We spoke to one person at the desk, and we were told to speak to someone else, thus giving us Encounter #6 / Person #4. That person, in turn, referred us to someone else, who finally helped us. That gives us Encounters #7 and #8 / Persons #5 and #6.

Because the store had no more humidifiers in that model, I had to pay the difference between the two models. I thought that that wouldn't be a problem. then I wa informed that the easiest way to do it (for the employees, anyway) was for me to purchase the new one, and then return the first for a refund. sigh I purchased the new device, then we returned to the first floor with a receipt from the last fuwuyuan to help us. While walking out of the store, I had to get the guard with marbles to stamp my receipt, indicating that I'd purchased the thing (what-ever). Encounter #9 / Person #3. We returned to the counter for me to collect my refund. Encounter #10 / Person #1. The fuwuyuan from upstairs apparently didn't sign the receipt; Cheryl returned upstairs on my behalf to obtain the fuwuyuan's signature, and thus absorbed some encounters on my behalf. I think that all of you readers shall agree that that is mafan.

What's more mafan is the situation related to my last two weeks of lectures for the semester. I was fully prepared for lectures on Christmas Day. Even though I'm now a Buddhist, and not a Christian, I'm not really accustomed to going to lectures on Christmas Day (I've heard that it hurts only the first time). However, I was interested to see whether I'd feel any different about it, so I was actually looking forward to it. On 11 or 12 December, we (the foreign students) learnt that we would have classes for seven contiguous days, starting on Monday, 25 December 2006, taking us through 30 and 31 December 2006. My first thought was 'WTF? Liz and Taka are coming on that weekend!'. My next thought was 'We shall have seven contiguous days of classes, followed by three days of vacation, followed by our last two days of lectures.'. Wow, that's possibly the best way to screw-up any plan for studying, especially given that we weren't notified about it until the last minute. My teachers seemed genuinely surprised that this was to happen, so I have to wonder how many persons actually expected it. I have been informed by a friend of mine who is native to China that everyone was expecting this, and that I should just become accustomed to this. Accustomed to what? Last-minute mafan? That week, I experienced a bunch of other mafan as well, which served only to fan the flames of mafan.

My final example of mafan for this posting is that I now have to change lodgings. On Saturday, I saw Genjirou with his suitcase outside our dormitory building. He told me that we all have to leave because of renovations. I told him 'Really? Only two or three days ago I was offered a room on the second or third floor, should I want to move away from the relatively noisier first floor.'. Genjirou told me that they'd told him at 9:00 P.M. on the previous evening that he would have to relocate within a week to another residence. Did the housing office make that decision at 8:00 that evening, so they couldn't have told him that more than a week before he was required to have completely vacated the premises? I asked one of the fuwuyuan in my building about it, and I was told that he must move, but I'm not required to move. I didn't understand her explanation of that, but I thought no more of it. When I told this to Genjirou a bit later, he asked the fuwuyuan. She told him a slightly more complete story than I had previously understood: the students whose scholarships cover the full cost of the residence in our building have to move before others do for that they have first choice of where to go; the others, who have had to pay for their housing, either in full or in part, shall be forced to leave afterwards. I shudder to think of what might have happened had I left for parts unknown immediately after my last exam. Until I move, I shall have no idea whither I shall relocate.