Engrish in Hong Kong

I really should care my camera around with me more often -- but as I didn't, you'll just have to take my word for it. Engrish, as you may know, is

a variation of English that is often found in Asian countries. While the term may refer to spoken English, it is more often used to describe written English, for which problems are easier to identify and record. Engrish has been found on anything from badly translated signs, menus, and instruction manuals to bizarrely worded advertisements to strange t-shirt slogans.

As I was heading down the Hong Kong subway system today (which, for the record, rocks), I saw a guy in a T-Shirt that said something along the lines of "Welll, how you doing? Circle." And then was followed by a string of random letters: Nxgre tegad edfts, etc. Granted, it's not as bad somethings in Japan, but this Hong Kong. And in Hong Kong, you really don't have an excuse. Sure, you've been part of China for nine years, but you were a British colony for 99 years! Every other sign here is written in English here -- some with worse spelling than others (there are a ridiculous number of "Wellcome" signs), and in a land of Asian parents, almost every school child is learning English right now.

Which begs the question: why the heck can't y'all spell?

[tag]Hong Kong[/tag] [tag]Engrish[/tag]

In Hong Kong!

Since my mother works for United Airlines, we often fly on "Employee Standby," which basically means that whenever a plane isn't full, we get to grab whatever extra seats there are. Sometimes, that means a seat in First Class. Or sometimes, like last week, it means no seats at all.

No wonder United employees are disgruntled. And here all along we thought it was the unions.

Long story short, it took three days for me to get to Hong Kong, but I'm here now (been here for two days actually, but I didn't get around to posting). I'll be heading to the mainland tomorrow to visit my grandpa's grave, return to Hong Kong for a day to get some last minute shopping done, and then it's off to Beijing for a summer of not speaking English.

[tag]Hong Kong[/tag]

Taiwanese Independence

This is in response to the following essembly resolve: "We should support a democratic Taiwan's independence against a totalitarian China." I respect what's Taiwan managed to accomplish through democracy, legislative scuffles aside, and recognize that Taiwan is, de facto, independent (given that Taiwan once claimed to speak for the mainland, you could say that the mainland is independent), but I have to disagree that the US should support a formal independence movement.

I mean, why should we? In practice, the mainland does not interfere in Taiwanese domestic politics. Meanwhile, business is good. There's an occasional crisis over the strait, but by and large, things are fairly peaceful. There are, of course, problems that result from the mainland trying to speak for Taiwan -- e.g. difficulties in getting WHO assistance during the SARS crisis, no UN seat, etc. It seems possible, however, that these issues could be resolved without formally recognizing Taiwanese independence. In fact, we'd probably have better luck winning greater de facto independence if we could assure the mainland that none of these would lead to formal independence.

On the other hand, formal recognition leads to problems for everyone. I can think of three.

More on the flip.

Read more »

My own domain name

This site is now accessible via andrewfong.com. I'm using my own name as the URL rather than something like spooky-squirrels.com so I can change the name of this blog as I want to without having to update the URL.

[tag]Blog Updates[/tag] [tag]Data Independence[/tag]

Summer Plans

FYI: I will be taking off for Hong Kong tomorrow. Around June 15th or so, I will be traveling to Beijing. I'll be there for nine weeks or so for the Harvard Beijing Academy. After that, I'll be spending a few days in Singapore for the HPAIR conference. I should be back in California on August 22nd or 23rd, from where I'll probably banish off to New York to help my cousin move into NYU, and then I'm back home for another week or so before heading back to Harvard.

This info will likely be changing a bit, so feel free to check out my Google Calendar. An XML feed can be found here and an iCal version can be found here.

[tag]Blog Updates[/tag] [tag]Google[/tag] [tag]Harvard Beijing Academy[/tag] [tag]Harvard Project for Asian and International Relations[/tag]

Crossposting at CampusTap

For those of you at Harvard, most of the material on this page will also be cross-posted at fongandrew.campustap.com. The reason for having two copies of the same page is to reach out to different communities. CampusTap is a collection of blogs by Harvard students -- so, being a Harvard student, I'm creating a copy there in order to play nice with that little project.

On the other hand, I'm maintaing this page on blogspot in order to draw traffic from the non-Harvard community and half-heartedly resist the isolation that being in the Harvard bubble entails. A little bit of AdSense revenue and the possibility of further Google integration doesn't hurt either.

The biggest disadvantage of having two copies of the same site (besides the extra workload) is that commenters on the different sites won't see each other -- but honestly, that's not a huge deal.

Long story short, browse whichever version you prefer. The posts are more or less the same.

[tag]CampusTap[/tag] [tag]Blogger[/tag] [tag]Google[/tag] [tag]Harvard[/tag]

Profound First Post Title Goes Here

The point of this blog is simply to aggregate a bunch of the stuff I write online (i.e. Dem Apples, Essembly, Campus Progress, Daily Kos, TPMCafe, etc.) in one easily accessible page. And then some. Most likely on how the constant gaze of the campus squirrels is a metaphor for blog reading. I was going to use my Xanga for this purpose, but just saying that word "Xanga" conjures up images of high school angst. So the Xanga is dead. Maybe. Probably.

I'm not going to cross-post existing material onto this page, mostly because I'm lazy, so if you have some burning desire to see existing material, log onto those sites and search for stuff. The links above go straight to my diary/profile/etc. If for some reason, stuff doesn't show up, Google it.

Anyhow, this is a pretty boring first post. I understand that they're supposed to be bold and profound or something, but generally, if I say anything profound, it's the 5th, 6th, or 27th thing in that I say. I mean, my first words were probably babyspeak for "My butt is itchy; please change my diapers."

NB: My username for some of those sites was ACDC. This is before I realized that AC/DC was the name of a rock band from Australia. And no, I don't like their music. So I suppose I won't be using that username again.

[tag]Blog Updates[/tag]