Blogs have become wildly popular in China, and one of the more interesting is written by a woman who is married to a Chinese American guy—a physician– and lives in the United States. The blog is called “The Shadow in the Water,” and it’s popular because it basically compares and contrasts middle class life in the United States and China (the blog’s author, who does not give out her name, says she has three kids “and one cat.”) A lot of Chinese are intensely curious about life in the US and how it differs from what they are used to in China.
It’s a pretty wide ranging subject and the author often has fun with it, as do some of her readers. She recently wrote, to take one example, about how hard it is to bring gifts back for relatives in China—which she, like every Chinese, is obliged to do whenever she returns for a visit—because everything is so damned expensive in the US compared to China. But she noted that a Chinese friend recently asked the blogger’s husband, the doctor, to prescribe Viagra for him. How may did he want, her husband asked the friend. (He’s usually prescribes only ten at a time.) “How about 5000?” the guy said. He apparently was going to hand them out to all his friends back home, a great souvenir from America if ever there was one.
Another time recently she wrote about the Chinese obsession with having male children, and laid out a complicated formula she’d heard about for how to practically guarantee that when a woman gets pregnant she has a boy. You start with the number 49, then assign a number to the month in which the woman becomes pregnant, using the lunar calendar ( ie October is nine, November is ten, etc) and add it to 49. Then you subtract the age of the mother. Then you add 19. (Why 49? Why 19? No idea.) If the result is an odd number, the child will be a boy; if an even number, it’s a girl. The accuracy of this formula, according to the blogger, is 80 per cent.
One of her reader’s complained that this was just way too complicated to deal with, plus she had heard that Japanese doctors had figured out a way to guarantee the sex of a child.
Nothing gets the Chinese blogosphere going quite like an even vaguely favorable reference to anything Japanese. So a reader responded: oh, really? If it’s true the Japanese have figured this all out, why can’t Japan’s Crown Prince have a boy? Which, I have to say, was a pretty good point. (Japan is in the midst of a debate as to whether one of the Crown Prince’s daughters should eventually be able to ascend to the Chrysanthemum throne, given the current lack of male alternatives in that generation. )
Anyway, if you can read Chinese and want to check out the site, it’s available through the Sina.com web site:
blog.Sina.com.cn/m/shuiyinger
Oh, and one last thing: the blogger’s family recently bought a new house in the US—she doesn’t say where, exactly, they live– and she was busy organizing the move, so she didn’t post for several days. This prompted a complaint from a reader. Why haven’t you been blogging lately?
And the woman replied (I’m paraphrasing slightly): y’ know, blogging is sort of like sneezing. If you sneeze ever day, you’re probably not feeling very well; in fact, you’re probably sick…
Which, in any culture or language, pretty much says it all, don’t you think?