Author: Chris Barrus

Orange County, China

File this in the “just when you think things couldn’t get more surreal” folder.

ORANGE COUNTY, China — An hour’s drive north of Beijing, on an icy country road lined by fields and populated by trucks and sheep, the landscape is a far cry from palm-ringed golf courses and “Surfin’ USA.”

But wait. There is Sun City, a half-built gated community with echoes of the desert. Then the tidy homes of Orange County come into view. Finally, you drive through a stone portal, past advertisements showing men fly-fishing in cowboy hats, pulling up before the impressive mansions of Watermark-Longbeach, the epicenter of faux L.A. in China.

“I liked it immediately – it is just like a house in California,” exulted Nasha Wei, a former army doctor turned businesswoman, sitting on a white suede banquette in the four-bedroom home in Orange County (China) she moved into this year.

Bits of American geography are popping up all over Beijing, the latest fashion in real estate marketing and sales. Soho, Central Park, Palm Springs and Manhattan Gardens are among recent developments.

In many instances, the name is just an American location tacked on to typical upmarket Chinese apartments. But at Orange County and Longbeach, developers have promised clients the real deal – so long as they can afford the minimum half million-dollar price tag.

Houses are replicas of Southern California homes, designed by Southern California architects, with model homes decorated by Los Angeles interior designers. The basement pool tables are American. The appliances are imported. The tiles, wood siding and wall sconces are from the United States, too.

Cantonese idioms and expressions

A friend over at the UCI Library emails me with some great excerpts from a book of Chinese idioms:

UCI got another book about Chinese idioms today, and it’s a lot of fun. Since I already told you about “eating dates whole” and “one day of sun and ten days of rain”, I figured you might find some of these interesting/amusing, too. (I’m particularly fond of the first one, since it explains Hong Kong cinema and vice versa …)

— “to start a movie” —
(to cause a fight among rival gangs)
“Hey! Let’s go start a movie with the Tseng triad!”

— “to drop an orange then pick up a tangarine” —
(to recover some of your losses)
“After the stock market crashed, I lost a lot of oranges, but I found some tangerines, too”

— “to throw down the cooking pot” —
(to divorce)
“Things haven’t been the same since mom and dad threw down the cooking pot.”

— “the roof only leaks on a rainy night” —
(troubles have a way of compounding and overlapping)
“I should have known that this store would be closed when I am in desperate need of some asprin — after all, the roof only leaks on a rainy night”

— “to be slapped by a ghost” —
(when a person bluntly reveals the truth about a situation)
“He finally told me about the affair he’d been having. He must have been slapped by a ghost.”

— “big food” —
(to take more than your share of the entree, and less than your share of the rice that’s meant to accompany it — to be greedy)
“Watch out for him. He’s big food — he’ll take all your money and leave
you with none”

Columbia

sts1Brian Webb’s Thursday email alert for viewing Columbia’s re-entry is still in my inbox. I set the alarm early and poked my head outside to see what the weather was like, but it was pretty well socked over at the coast and didn’t feel like driving far north to see it. So I went back to sleep.

Other blogs have been much more eloquent about today’s events, so I’ll go with this picture instead – the very first shuttle landing (STS-1) out at Edwards in 1981. I was fifteen years old and didn’t know the ways of telephoto lenses so it’s a tiny photo, but I was there. This is how I’ll remember Columbia.