Navneet：中国人说“喜欢”不说“爱”（3）

My passion for writing is one of the most useless and distressing hobbies/habits a husband should/could have, according to my wife but I am not a writer out of my own volition but because I was destined to be one. Writers have some aura around them they say, but I don’t think I can nurture such thoughts. In all probability, he spoke well of us because, Unicorn and Sunny expressed their desire to call on us the coming weekend. When Unicorn called to say that they had arrived but they couldn’t locate my apartment, I was a little surprised. Although I don’t know anyone in the locality where I live but I am sure everyone in our locality knows where I live. They could have asked any Chinese for knowing where we live, even we have to ask them to tell to the people when they call on phone to know where we live. The name of our colony is “Gang Cheng Hua Yuan” but it is not spoken as you will make out from the way it is spelled. As such English pronunciation can be very different from what the spellings suggest but when Chinese is written in English, you are completely flummoxed. Chinese don't understand our English...Nor do we understand theirs :)) Sample this

用我妻子的话来说，我对写作的激情是一位丈夫最无用和最痛苦的一个爱好。然而，我不是一位立志的作家，而是命中注定的。

很可能，他说的是我们的好话，因为Unicorn和Sunny表达了周末来看我们的愿望。Unicorn打电话过来说已经到了，但是找不到我住的公寓。我有点吃惊。虽然小区里一个人我都不认识，但是我肯定每个人都知道我住在哪里。他完全可以随便问一个人的，而这还是我在电话中提醒他去打听的。我们住的小区是“港城花园”。英语发音与拼音听起来有很大不同，而碰到中式英语，你就会完全困惑了。中国人听不懂我们的英语，我们也听不懂他们的英语 :))

比如：

and this

还有这个

We speak this name ( of our colony) with all possible tonal inflexons and nuances we can think of, to the tax drivers every time we hire one but so far ( in four months of our stay and after perhaps speaking to some 30-40 tax drivers) not even once have we seen the glimmer of acknowledgement in their eyes. I had not spoken the name of our colony to Uni and Sunny, but had sent a picture of the name of my colony written in Chinese, they couldn’t have mistaken it.

我们绞尽脑汁、想尽一切办法向出租车司机说我们住小区的名字，但是在我们所呆的4个月里，问了大约三四十位出租车司机，居然没有一位司机的眼神里流露出听懂的意思。我并没有把小区告诉Uni和Sunny，而是发了一张图片过去，上面写上了中文，他们不可能会搞错的啊。

And around our colony

我们小区周围

I have come to know but have ever failed to understand that why Chinese names of the places and people are so similar sounding when Chinese has thousands of characters for forming words. Is there any dearth of combinations the human larynx can produce? Hubei, Heibi, Yunnan, Hunan, Zhenjiagang, Zhenjiang, Zhejiang.. Hu, Wu Fu, Xu..what is this all Haahaha ( no malice intended)? My brother in law who came to visit us in Shanghai some three years ago commented that the English people couldn’t find much use of the alphabets Z, X and Q and the Chinese find them the most useful ones.

中国地名和中国人的名字听起来很相似，这是我无法理解的，中国人不是有几千个汉字吗。难道不够组合吗？

湖北、Heibi、云南、湖南、Zhenjiagang、镇江、浙江.... Hu, Wu Fu, Xu..这都是什么（无恶意的）？

三年前，我姐夫来上海看我们，他说英国人没有为Z、X和Q找到多大用处，而中国人发现这些字母非常有用。

Unicorn certainly wasn’t there anywhere far as my eyes could see though he said, he was there. He told me to make him speak to a Chinese person, a time tested method that has always helped me out of difficult situations. I wonder what the foreigners who came to China before the advent of mobile phones would do to tell to the people or know where they were. Through the animated conversion, the part of which I was witness to, I gathered that they had landed at some other similar sounding apartment complex, but surprisingly not at a different similar sounding town.

不知道Unicorn在哪里，虽然他说我在这我在这，但是我没看到。他叫我让一位中国人接电话，这是我陷入困境时百试不爽的办法。不知道手机还未普及时，外国人来到中国是如何报告自己身在何处的。我发现他去了一个发音类似的小区了

The person from the set of people who were talking when I asked for help, told me through gestures that I should wait in the biting cold of February morning for them to appear on the scene as they were walking down from some colony with a similar name, half a mile away. And they came walking in staid steps, brisk and assured. One was shorter, high cheek boned and the other was slim, tall and boyish. The shorter one was Unicorn. I was meeting them for the first time.

帮忙接电话的人通过手势告诉我，在这个寒冷的2月份早上，我应该呆在原地等待他们的出现，他们正从半英里外一个名字类似的小区走过来。一个矮一些，另一个高高瘦瘦的，带着一些孩子气。较矮的是Unicorn。我第一次与他们见面。

The small party of men of my colony that had gathered to help me, dispersed as we started moving towards our apartment after exchanging greetings. What surprised me then and often has in China was that no thanks or courtesies were exchanged between the people who helped me and my guests who were helped by them. Chinese really don’t go overboard in expressing courtesies like the westerners who can go to the extent of making you feel sick of obvious lack of genuineness but keep saying “Thanks and Sorrys Ad Nauseam. Total absence of it reeks of indifference and is definitely as unpleasant.

经常令我吃惊的是，中国人交流之间很少用谢谢等礼貌用语。中国人的礼节表达不会像西方人那样太频繁，西方人一直说“谢谢啊，抱歉啊之类的”，多到让人觉得缺乏真诚。而完全不说又散发着冷漠，肯定会让人不愉快。