Blog: A Cool, Refreshing Glass of Fetal Treasure.

All things considered, quarantine is going pretty well.

Now in my 7th day (or 6th, if Monday, the day I arrived is not counted), I haven’t felt the walls closing in, or the desire to squeeze through the window to freedom. Mostly, that’s because doing so would be followed by a four storey drop, and also because the window is on a horizontal hinge, and so doesn’t even open up far enough for Michael Jackson to dangle Blanket (shortly after renamed Prince Michael Jackson II and now Bigi), successfully. 

I find I have plenty to do. I have to report my temperature to reception and the office twice a day, at 9am and 4pm. I order my meals through the restaurant associated with the hotel, and they are deposited on a chair outside my door. Then, between online Chinese lessons, browsing the Internet (welcome back, Reddit), reading (thank God I swallowed my misgivings (and my scruples) and bought a Kindle), and a bit of yoga, the days have flown by. It also helps that on Friday, I started working, with my first job writing a summary of the online forum on Covid-19 CGTN hosted on Friday night.

Outside, the weather has been consistently beautiful, bright blue skies and crisp air, and while that has led to occasional pangs, especially after watching a BBC clip about life slowly getting back to normal elsewhere in Beijing, it’s definitely better than grey and rainy. As much as lovelovelove a blustery day, I’m not sure it would improve the view from my window, which is industrial, but perhaps not chic.

The Eternal Sunshine of the Quarantined Mind. Or, Look At That Beautiful Beijing Blue!

So I’ve managed to stay chipper. A colleague downstairs hasn’t fared as well. A smoker, he lost his lighter on the plane and today, he confessed that he had tried to make a ‘prison lighter’ using a battery and a piece of metal (I didn’t asked how he learned about that. Or where.) and was even trying to refract sunlight through a water bottle.

But I’m obnoxiously fine. Not even Damien, aka The Demon Child, and his shrieking mother in Room 436 across the hall, who punctuate the day with regular bouts of crying and shouting, or the occasional odour of cigarette smoke wafting through the vent in the bathroom, have managed to dampen my spirits. While this level of neighbourly noise would normally make my blood boil - yes, The Greens Dubai, I’m looking at you - I am currently in a sufficiently Zen place to empathise, and also to appreciate that being locked in a room for 14 days alone is infinitely preferable to being locked in a room for 14 days with someone else. Particularly when that someone else is too young to understand why he can’t go outside. Rosemary, you have my sympathies.

The interwebs also keep one in ‘contact’. The wonders of Skype, and a card linked to a bank account outside Lebanon, thus freely giving me access to all online services (Beirut, I still love you), mean that I’ve been able to keep in touch with my Dad more easily, which is good, as he’s currently back in hospital again. My future colleagues at CGTN – I say future, because we’ve not yet met IRL – are solicitous and regularly ask me if everything is going well. The food is delicious (hello, Scrambled Eggs with Fungus) and although the Internet slows to a crawl at time (it’s the hotel, not China), I haven’t had too many problems using a VPN. This is helpful as a number of the sites I’m visit to catch up with friends – FB, Google, Gmail, Whatsapp, Instagram – are currently blocked. Though I miss Google and Whatsapp (well, when I’m not VPNing), when it comes to FB and Instagram, inaccessibility might be a good thing.

The app everyone uses here is WeChat. It seems to combine aspects of all the above, and more. I’ve not yet fully explored its possibilities, but it combines instant messaging with news and articles and you can post photos and stories. It also functions as a payment platform, so you can order food, pay bills, rent, buy sofas, you know, useful things like that, and includes a nifty translation subroutine, so you can easily translate messages sent to you in Mandarin.

I also use Google Translate, mostly for the camera function, which WeChat does not seem to have yet. I downloaded the Mandarin file before I left, so it works offline and for the most part, it functions perfectly, though I’ve noticed that when it comes to translations through the camera, it is less reliable, especially when it comes to names and places. The Chinese characters on my bottled water, for example, which is labelled C’estbon (one word, no spaces) in English, translate through the camera function as ‘Fetal Treasure’ on Google. Hence today’s title.

Aimed at the menu I order my lunches and dinners from, it produces the kind of clangers you used to see on websites devoted to mocking translations around the world. While that mockery was mostly devoted to translations into English - you know in that irritating Anglo ‘foreigners, eyeroll’ kind of way - cultural crossed-wires cut both ways. I still remember VWs embarrassing climb-down after they released the Nova in Latin America, and had to be told that this probably wasn’t the best name for a car.

Think about it.

So, Chinese produces even greater opportunity for such mix-ups, as most characters have multiple and sometimes multiple, multiple meanings. This means each can be read (and sometimes also pronounced) in a number of different ways, which must make it a lot of fun to play on words, here. Specific meaning is determined by context. And Google Translate, running on an algorithm, isn’t quite there when it comes to context. Thus, it can’t work out that ‘Wooden Erythers’ are unlikely to feature on a restaurant menu and nor would Dried Partial Beans, Sriffy the Potato, Sack Sauce (I suspect that one’s just missing an ‘of’), Tools Stew, or Fragrance with Fish, though admittedly, that does sound delightful.

Of course (he says, with no trace of hyperbole), I should soon be able to read those menus for myself, for you see, my dear 朋友, I plan to become as fluent as possible, in the shortest time possible. And yes, you may remind me of that promise in a year’s time. By which time I hope to be able to blithely reply 但是我当然会说普通话 !  农民, 你不能吗 ？