Please Don't Kiss Me

Well that's finally the end of the Korea posting but I still have a lot more catching up to do. There's been my time at home, my trip to New Orleans, and my trip to Beijing and Chengdu, and my most recent trip to Qingdao, plus of course starting the new semester. But first I had a number of topics left over from the end of last semester that I wanted to get to so the next couple of posts will be from that before any of the stuff about going home. The picture on the left is some calligraphy drawn by one of my tutors. On the last day of tutoring with Winter and Olivia, two of my former students they got me a really nice calligraphy set and showed me a little how to use it. I was thankfully aware that they would probably get me a present, despite the fact that they were tutoring me for free, so I got them some DVDs and some tea. Chinese calligraphy is actually much more complicated then I thought it would be. Besides the obvious difficulty of making all the strokes in exactly the right way, I couldn't even write the character for 1 which is simply one horizontal line correctly, there are actually as many as six different ways to write each character. There are faster and slower methods which actually make the characters look completely different and require a totally different technique.

Besides all that sometimes for calligraphy people use the traditional characters, which are very different from the modern ones, and there are of course many different ways to write each one of those. This isn't something that only a few people do either all the students learn when they are young to do some calligraphy and if you asked any class who is best and second best at it they would probably be able to name the person with little difficulty. Me and Ken were in a debate with another westerner recently about if the characters were beautiful and important or just archaic. Actually learning about all the types of calligraphy lowered my opinion of learning characters since I just feel that the amount of time and effort that the younger Chinese students have to put into learning all these different characters would be better spent on something else. The more time and effort you put into language the less time and effort are left for math or science. It was though really nice of my tutors to show me all of this and they wrote me a traditional Chinese saying along the lines of "wherever you go you'll have friends here," though the actual direct translation doesn't make much sense. I also asked them to try to write something for my blog, an attempt at translating the name into Chinese. The best they came up with was the phrase, "please don't kiss me" which is something that people put on the back of cars and means essentially don't bump me with your car. It certainly makes for an interesting translation of my blog.