Comix

Asians love comics, cartoons and animation of any type.  I noticed over the last couple of years that people spell comics as comix, so at some point, the English language changed on me and I wasn’t consulted.  I have begun looking for a literary agent for a book I wrote, and the agencies list their specialties and genres. Comix are a favorite of agents.  I also notice that a small industry has been created to support “make your own” comics.  Who would have guessed?  As a child I didn’t care for cartoons and read only one or two comic strips.  As an adult, I read Dilbert and watch the Simpsons.  That is the extent of my love for comics and cartoons. Enough about the name change and what I don’t like, and back to Asians love comics, cartoons and animation.

I have always been accustom to small children having cartoon characters on their clothing, toys, back pack, etc. This seems normal to me.  Seeing adults in Asia passionate about cartoons and comics does not seem normal to me.  I guess it is just a cultural difference. A man wearing a Hello Kitty hat looks ridiculous.

Cartoons and animations are used frequently in everyday media.  Advertisements often include cartoon characters.  Business websites love cartoon characters.  Please note a screen print taken from the Fubon Financial Holdings company website.  This is a well-respected financial services company.  To me nothing looks more unprofessional than a business website full of cartoons.  However, I am willing to accept I might be wrong and need to look at it differently. If my U.S. bank website used duck and pig icons to help me transfer money, and maybe threw in a horse laugh sound when I pressed confirm, I might look forward to banking more often.

The Japanese are notorious comic readers and lovers of everything cartoon.  Japanese men read comic book pornography (so I am told) and visit virtual brothels, which feature cartoon women that remove their clothing at your request.  I read this in the Wall Street Journal-really!  I took the picture below in a Japanese book store that featured comic books.  These are not the U.S. style 20 page comic books full of color, but hard bound thick comic books. The store was filled with only men, so I can imagine what was printed.  When I took the flash picture, I received looks as if I caught them doing something wrong.  Nobody ran for the exits, but rather moved on to the next book.

As I try to accept Asian culture and look at things through the eyes of change, I have altered my view on many things.  I have become a huge fan of public transportation, stinky tofu and the musical garbage trucks.  I have not been able to gain an appreciation of comics and cartoons.

Mandarin

I have been working hard and keeping myself busy by taking Mandarin lessons at the local university.  The course is described by the university as intensive and is typically taken by someone that intends to earn a degree at a Chinese language university.  A student would study the intense Mandarin classes for one or two years, and then enroll in National Taiwan University’s chemical engineering program, as an example.  The students enrolled are driven and here for a purpose.  The class is three+ hours per day, five days per week.  Study is four or more hours each day outside of class and more on weekends.

There are 11 students in my class and all of them are from a different country and multi-lingual.  They are multi-lingual and not bi-lingual, except me. Most already speak four languages or more.  One student is in his 30s and the rest, other than me, are in their teens or early 20s.  The countries represented other than the U.S. include Israel, Russia, Spain, Guatemala, Germany, Belgium, Canada, Netherlands, Indonesia and Korea.  Everyone sounds different speaking Mandarin and each person has their own sounds that are problematic for their mouths to form.  The Indonesia guy struggles with a number of sounds, despite the similarities of his language and Mandarin.  For the first week, the teacher would continually scold him and say “No L, No L”. After hearing this for a number of days, I was about to defend him and tell the teacher he is not saying “L”, when I realized she was saying “No Air” meaning that he should say the word without having air leave his mouth.  The teacher’s English is poor, which creates some problems.   One day she kept trying to explain the “Freezes” that we are creating.  It made no sense and we had her write it down and discovered we were creating “Phrases”.

 The Chinese speak hundreds of different regional dialects.  The primary differences are the tones used, however a person speaking Cantonese cannot communicate with a person speaking Taiwanese.  Mandarin is the Beijing dialect and considered standard Chinese.  Mandarin is taught in all of China and Taiwan, and only the very old or very poor/uneducated do not understand Mandarin.  Despite the standardization, a number of regional differences exist.

Tonality is important in Mandarin.  There are five tones: voice drops from beginning to end, voice rises, voice remains constant, voice drops and then rises and the fifth tone is neutral, which is very short and no variation.  When you learn each character, the tone is critically important.  As an example, the word ma using a constant tone is mother.  Ma using a rising tone is hemp.  Ma using a falling and then rising tone is horse, and using a falling tone is a scolding word like no, and with the neutral tone, it is used as a question particle.  You don’t want to call your mother-in-law a horse, so it is important.  Many words have exactly the same tone and sound, yet have different meanings; they have different written characters though.  When words are used in succession, like most words are when you build sentences, the tone rules can change, especially for words that using the falling then rising tonality.  Mandarin is difficult.

Written Chinese is even more difficult than spoken Mandarin.  There are approximately 80,000 characters, however if you know 2,500 of the right ones, you cover about 98% of the language needs.   Unlike students in western education systems, the Chinese will continue learning how to write through high school and leave for the university with the ability to correctly write over 10,000 characters.  In the west, we typically know our alphabet and diacritics for certain vowels by the time we are seven years old.  The stroke order for making a character is highly important to the Chinese.  I still don’t fully understand why, but it is not a logic based rule.  It is just a rule that you create the character in the correct order of strokes and marks.  After the war, Mao Zedong was faced with educating a large peasant population.  He ordered that written Chinese be simplified.  Simplified Chinese is taught in China with almost 3,000 characters modified from the traditional version.  Traditional Chinese is taught in Taiwan and that is what I am learning, and is more difficult.  Some characters have more than 25 individual strokes. 

There are several methods to teach Mandarin with Latin language derivatives, including Pin-Yin, the Taiwan Tongyong Romanization System, the Yale Romanization, etc.  We temporarily use Pin-Yin, but in the end, you need to learn the characters and abandon Pin-Yin.

Learning the language is hard-very hard.  For westerners, we have nothing familiar to hold on to.  There is no alphabet, the rules are totally different, and nothing makes sense.  I have never felt more vulnerable and inadequate in my life.  I took Spanish as a young child, German in high school and Japanese as an adult.  German and Spanish are incredibly simple compared to Chinese, though I can’t say I speak those languages very well either.  I tease my German classmate that Chinese has some similarities to German, though we don’t get to spit when we speak.  The 11 classmates get along very well.  For those that watch the tv show Community, I play the Chevy Chase character.

Every week we learn about 50 new words and we need to be able to correctly write at least 25 characters.  Everyone in the class except me, has either lived in Taiwan or China for some time and knew some Chinese or had previously taken Mandarin lessons.  I started the class with a previous knowledge of 10 words.  I have always been embarrassed that I speak only one language and it is never too late to change.  I can now recognize a number of Chinese characters as I travel throughout Taipei, and read some signs, or have a very basic conversation.  I am trying very hard to learn Mandarin, though it has been humbling every day.

Beat the Dog

We visited the southern Taiwan city of Kaohsiung for several days.  Traveling Taiwan via high speed train is easy and comfortable, so we decided to drive.  Taiwanese, for reasons I can’t understand, refuse to drive the speed limit.  They will block all lanes driving 15 kilometers per hour below the already conservative limit.  It is much worse than driving in Iowa.  The weather was slightly wet, but nice.  High temperatures were 80°F or 27°C.  The southern part of Taiwan sits below the Tropic of Cancer, so the climate is considered tropical.

Kaohsiung is the second largest city in Taiwan, but at only 3 million inhabitants, it is much smaller than Taipei.  It was interesting to see how wide the streets were, with no crowds anywhere.  The rapid transit system of the city is great, though simple and very few riders.  The stations have wonderful artwork-see the glass art at one station.  Apparently I have become accustom to congested Taipei, when I think that a city of 3 million people is like a small suburb.

The city has a large port and small outer islands.  We took a ferry to one of the islands for a seafood lunch, which I believe made me sick.  At one time, a significant rail system moved the freight to and from the port.  The rail is gone and trucks do the work.  The remaining warehouses that once stored sugar cane and pineapple are now homes to art studios.  The alleys have edgy street art.  The former rails are now gardens.  I watched steel coils being loaded on a ship bound for some metal stamping house. Within an hour, over 70 trucks unloaded their steel.  The port has artwork-see the shipping container sculpture.

The Dutch established the city in the 1600s but were expelled by the Ming dynasty in 1662. The original Chinese name for the city was translatable to “Beat the Dog”.   After the Japanese took over Taiwan in 1895, they renamed the city “High Hero” or Takao.  When Taiwan was awarded to China following the Japanese defeat in 1945, they renamed it Kao-hsiung, based on the romanization language translation of Takao.  

There are numerous shrines and temples in the city and parks.  At one shrine, we watched people pay 10 NTD to an automatic fortune teller machine.  The little robot delivers a fortune, which is very popular.  I’ve said it before, the Chinese are very superstitious.  After reading his fortune, one man began walking backwards.  I hope his fortune comes true.   Another temple is guarded by two animal heads.  You make a wish and walk into the dragonhead entrance and exit the tiger’s mouth.  I made a wish and walked through the heads, but my bad diarrhea didn’t stop, so I’m not a big believer of this temple and won’t return.

We had a nice time in Kaohsiung.  I enjoyed walking around the accessible port and watching the activities.  The art was free for viewing and everywhere.  If I were writing the travel guide for the city, I recommend you skip the dragon/tiger temple, but definitely spend some money on the automated fortune teller, and enjoy the nice tropical city of Beat the Dog.

7-Eleven

7-Eleven began in Texas in 1927.  Before the days of refrigeration, ice blocks were sold for iceboxes to keep perishables cold.  People kept fewer perishable foods and had to shop frequently.  The convenience store was born when the founder Jefferson Green began selling milk and eggs from his icehouse and then realized that staying open during the evening and Sundays, when grocery stores were closed, was a strategic advantage.  Southland Corp. eventually owned the convenience store chain and began the franchising.  In business school more than 30 years ago, we had a case study on Southland, and learned how they screwed up a good thing.  The lesson I learned from the case study is that business people are incredibly smart when they apply hindsight.

In the U.S. I barely paid attention to 7-Eleven.  I don’t smoke cigarettes, drink soda and have no desire to overpay for a gallon of milk or 6-pack of beer.  So I had little reason to go there, or know what a Big Gulp or Slurpee was.  Some 7-Eleven stores have gas pumps, but I would pay at the pump by credit card, eliminating the need for me to go inside and see what I had been missing.

When I moved to Taiwan, I discovered the importance of 7-Eleven to the well-being of Taiwanese society.  7-Eleven has 44,000 stores around the world, with a significant number of them located in Asia.  Japan has almost 14,000 stores and little Taiwan has almost 5,000.  I haven’t done the per capita density calculations, but I would bet Taiwan is densely packed with these stores.  And there is competition from the OK Mart, Family Mart, Mr. Brown Coffee and others.

Much of the population of Taiwan is packed into several large cities.  It is not uncommon in these cities to have two or three 7-Eleven stores on one city block.  Why?  Because 7-Eleven rules Taiwan.  At 7-Eleven you not only buy convenience foods, newspapers and coffee, but you use them to pay your traffic tickets, renew/refill many types of prepaid devices, mail letters, pay your bills, conduct minor banking, reserve taxis, ship and pickup packages, purchase concert tickets, pay school tuition and obtain stitches for minor cuts (6 stitch limit) and so much more.  There is almost nothing you can’t do at 7-Eleven, except buy betelnuts.

 7-Eleven already rules Taiwan, and much of Japan. I predict they will rule the world within the next half century.  I hope some business school reads this blog 50 years from now and realizes that I did not use hindsight to make this prediction.