in san fran for a day or so

Hi, here's a picture- and content-filled post for me to read later when I check this blog. Please post a comment if you read this, just so I know someone does.

My packed stuff:

1) My gym bag, containing Thai shorts and my gloves.

2) Gifts for my family members. My sister remembered the day before I left that it's a custom to bring gifts for one's family when visiting; we had to scramble that night and the next morning to find gifts. It's quite strange - I'm bringing nuts and jam and chocolate, etc., for the parents, and the eldest kid gets a shirt while the younger brother gets his own boxing gloves (!) which you can see in the picture... somehow the presents don't seem appropriate given the context of family heirarchy.

3) My laptop hidden in there somewhere.

4) My saxophone.

5) My backpack, stupidly not containing a Chinese dictionary.

6) All my clothes. No formal wear .. we'll see how that goes.

Me outside my house. Not much to say. Aviators were necessary. You can see my dad and one of my sisters in this photo.

I sat next to a father & daughter on the plane, and noticed the girl was wearing a Yale cap! Turns out her mom was a Yale undergrad (didn't catch which college, sorry). They were in fact just returning from a Yale tour to their home in Palo Alto. Peter is a patent lawyer and Ellie is really good at making hard Hangman words (Snyder's of Hanover? jeez). They are surnamed Chen leading me to believe that our tickets were assigned alphabetically... did everyone else know this already?

Here I am having arrived in SF to visit my grandma, great-aunt, and two pairs of aunts and uncles. The picture here gives you an idea of how I physically relate to everyone in my family. This is Ebuh, my great-aunt. She's actually in phenomenal physical shape for her age.

This is my aunt, who I'm staying with for a couple days. She's my dad's sister. She and her brother speak the best English out of everyone, which is nice but also leads them to speak more (or too) complicated Chinese sentences to me because they can explain them when I'm confused.

I'm trying to figure out how to use Blogger, but IE on my aunt's computer is all in Chinese so I'm not sure of what to do. Also, the Chinese input system here is Zhuyin Fuhao, which is the Chinese phonetic alphabet "bpmf" which I don't know. Anyway, we visited Lombard St.

We went to Fisherman's Wharf but I didn't take any pictures. Sourdough + clam chowder is great. Then we went to the Golden Gate Bridge (why is the Northeast not perpetually beautiful like this?)

Here's everyone.
Left to right: Me, Buo Mu (aunt), Buo Buo (uncle), Ama (grandma), Ebu (great aunt), Gu Gu (aunt), Gu Zhang (uncle). Names are in my wierd pidgin Taiwanese/Chinese hybrid romanization.

Something interesting I've noticed about speaking Chinese with my family members is that I'm having a hard time audibly hearing them when they speak. For years and years whenever my family members spoke Chinese I would just tune it out as background noise because I knew they weren't talking to me; now I have to really concentrate to even hear them at all.

Then comes the issue of the accent. My family doesn't just have a Taiwanese/Southern Chinese accent; they have a wierd pronounciation system that's practically Taiwanese. Taiwanese is this crazy language that sounds like Chinese spoken in an echo chamber. There's a lot more emphasis in the "g" and "d" sounds and most of the phonemes are produced with the back of the throat, rather than with tongue articulation. As I've learned from overhearing my dad on the phone, it's possible to conduct an entire conversation in Taiwanese using three simple words: "Annae Huh," "Hiduuuh," and "Eebuudaaaah!"

Anyway, when they're speaking Chinese to me (when someone's speaking Taiwanese at me, my aunt will erupt with "JIANG GUOYULEAA!!" where the "leaa" is just the word's transformation into an imperative-sounding yell) the phonemes are all wierd. A lot of "g"s are left off the ends of words, and as I noted before, sh/s, ch/c, zh/z, b/h/f, l/n are all fair game in the same words.

I'm having a lot of trouble speaking not necessarily because my Chinese sucks (it certainly does right now because I neglected it for a while) but because I'm trying to figure out whether I should talk with my heavy Beijing accent or try to emulate a heavy Taiwanese one. I know I'm eventually going to adopt the Taiwanese accent, but I always get mixed up. For example, "yelu daxue de laosi... lao.. shi... dou shuo.. suo... shuo..." etc and I sound like an idiot. I'm already learning words by hearing them, so even though I can repeat back, god only knows how they're actually spelled.

Anyway, I leave tomorrow afternoon for Taiwan. I actually still have yet to fill my prescriptions from the Travel Clinic, and I went today and they couldn't fill it cause they didn't have the name of the doctor. So I'm going to call the Travel Clinic at 8AM EST, which is 5AM here (about 2 hours from now) and see if I can get it worked out fast enough so I can get the medicine prior to leaving.

Oh, for a while the plan was for me to get off the plane in Taiwan and find my own way to the bus station, buy a ticket to Taichung (~2 hrs away), and find my uncle's house by myself. I was all set to do this ("Wo xian mai piao haishi zai che shang mai piao?") but then my aunt was able to pick me up so that exciting-as-hell plan fell through. I really wanted to go solo and even told my dad to tell my aunt not to pick me up, but it turned out being a question of the men wanting me to ziji qu and the women wanting me to yiqi qu. So we reached a compromise: my aunt's going to be there but I'll be in charge of finding our way home; she'll help out if she needs but will otherwise let myself make a fool of myself ("meipiaomaipiao!" "what?").

I've been writing down vocab and sayings that I'm hearing, and one funny one is: 雞同鴨講 ji1 tong2 ya1 jiang3 which means "Chicken and duck conversing." This came up when I was talking to my (in-Taiwan) aunt over Skype and she was talking about how I should let them know if there's something I can't eat; I told my other aunt (who was sitting next to me) "She wants me to not be polite when I meet them???"

Oh, one more thing: "Taiwan" is hard as hell to write. Ready? 台灣 !