My friend couldn’t contain his giggles as he sat down to have dinner with me in a Hong Kong restaurant. “I just bought the funniest of books,” he declared and proceeded to pull it out of his bag. The book is called “More Chinglish: Speaking in Tongues” and is a collection of poor English translations of Chinese words and sentences. Even though my friend was born and raised in Hong Kong and therefore must have seen countless such examples, he couldn’t help guffawing over the gems in the book he had just acquired. Here is a particularly funny one:

(You must know that traditionally Chinese was and still is, as in this example, written right to left.)
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So is this going to be a serious or a light-hearted blog?  Some times definitely light-hearted.  See this lovely video about a sporting dog,  courtesy Liu Hong, a dear friend who, on the other hand, endured a stretch of life that’s anything but light-hearted.  More about Hong Hong (as she calls her herself) some other time.  Hong Hong lives in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province.

***************** For the curious…

Where is Taiyuan? About 6 hours drive South-West of Beijing.  Taiyuan (pop. 3m) is the capital of Shanxi Province (pop 34m).  Fyi, Shanxi is about the size of Illinois or twice the size of Austria, the land of my birth.)