There's a bathroom on the right... in Shanghai.

Ok, I haven't written for 2 months, since I've been back in the US. I want to keep this blog mainly about my time in China, so I'm going to add memories now & then. It'll be nice for myself (because really I'm the most important person here and not many of you really care about my time in China very much), but if someone out there finds it pleasant or amusing or interesting, well, that'll be a nice bonus and I'll feel good.

So here we start anew... not with my present daily life (much), but with memories and/or comparisons, thoughts about China, etc.....

I'm currently listening to a song called "Xiao Wei" which you too can listen to, see the video of, read the lyrics of (in hanzi, Pinyin, or rollover English) here...
http://www.chinese-tools.com/songs/song/85/xiaowei.html
...and everything got all misty and wiggly and black & white, and I heard that harp sound effect of when a tv sitcom person goes back in time in their mind....

I was in the back seat of Grandpa's SUV. Not my Grandpa, the Grandpa of the two Chinese kids I tutored. He'd drive one of them to and from school while their driver drove the other. I had to go along on all those 2-hour long rides at 7am and 2pm making sure the kids studied and didn't fall asleep or goof around in the car. Yeah, that part of the job stunk. But the hour without the kids, that was ok because I could look out the window and daydream... or listen to whatever music the driver was listening to, or try to talk to them a little. Grandpa had a CD of some soft rock, and Xiao Wei was a song that stood out in my mind. It's short and catchy, heard in supermarkets; everyone knows it. It was the first Chinese song I really "heard".


In fact, I was walking to a store one lovely evening and 3 guys sitting on a little bridge sang the last line of it to me as I walked by. It's a Chinese way of flirting or goofing with somebody, to sing them a line of a song. I looked back and smiled in a way that said "You naughty boys! But it's ok, I liked it." I didn't know what the line even meant at the time but I had a vague notion, and I knew it was a love song. It meant he's going to pick a star from the sky with his very own hand and give it to me. The part I mostly heard them say was the last part, "give it to you with my very own hand", so they could've meant anything really, but they looked innocent enough and as if they'd mustered quite a bit of courage to sing that line to a "foreign girl" like that. All 3 of them sang it together. It was cute.


But that wasn't my memory. I meant my memory to be this...
... riding in the SUV with Grandpa, hearing that song for the umpteenth time (wish I had that whole CD now), realizing it was a song about a guy loving something a lot, but being too dumb to realize it was a woman he was talking about. Sounds REALLY DUMB now. But after realizing the "love" part, I pondered, prepared my sentence, and dared to speak out loud to Grandpa in Chinese, "Wow, I think he must really love Shanghai a lot." Grandpa busted out laughing and told me he wasn't saying Shanghai, he was saying "xiao nu'hai"("girl"), which to my untrained ears (and in a song) sounded very similar. You see, (my defence coming)... our brains, when faced with uknown sounds or images, try to match it to the closest thing we know, and so I thought he said Shanghai and was singing about his love for the city. Yeah. But I laughed with Grandpa when I realized how dumb I just was.


Sort of like singing, "Theeeer'es a bathroom on the right..." because you never heard the phrase "there's a bad moon on the rise", so your 14 year old brain didn't even think of it. What. Tell me you didn't mess up that CCR lyric somehow.

Here's the gist of the lyrics to "Xiao Wei" in English:

There was a beautiful girl (not a city) whose name was Xiao Wei.
She had a pair of warm gentle eyes
She quietly stole my heart
Xiao Wei, can you realize how much I love you...
I want to take you up into the sky
See all those beautiful stars...
I'll pick one down to give you with my very own hands.

That's my own loose translation, not perfect.

I have some pictures from inside that SUV, of the scenery, the kids, etc, but I can't find that ONE out of my 5 USB thingies right now. It figures I can't find that one.