We were walking back from lunch. He noticed some greenbacks on the ground and asked, "whose money?" He said to the man close by, "Is this your money"? The man looked down, paused a second, and picked them up. As they were going innocently from his fingers to his pocket, I noticed they were two fives and two ones and suddenly realized: they were my money! I just got them from the food cart vendor. They just slipped out of my pocket.
Well, they are no longer mine. If I told the man they were mine and demanded them back, it would be like slapping him in the face. How could I allow anybody lose face like that?
29 comments:
NO. You could not. Just make sure you don't drop your money again...
you are way too nice... hoho. but again, you always are.
thanks for your 'good luck' and kind words! you too! cheerio and best!
oh, btw, you can cross out my sina link. :P sina and blogspot copies are pretty much the same. hehe. thx and stay dry. (ny is pouring...)
you seem not so Chinese when it comes to the matter of money.good. :)
I don't quite understand what "jason" said... Could you help him clarify? BTW, I am Chinese, very very Chinese.
From the cat to the money, the bizarre of the everyday recurs. I like your attempt at catching it.
Sorry, but who's this Jason? What's the "Chinese" way to see or deal with money? If i follow his logic, the man that took Coffee-or-tea's money seems a typical "American"?
--xiwen
It's a situation when there is no time to reflect on, both for you and for the guy. I guess you both respond by instincts:-) Not sure whether this cases shows the link between 'losing face' and the Chinese, or women, or Chinese female PhDs. It might just because liansu jj is too nice.
No no no no no... Xiwen is sort of right. You see, Liansu is a filthy savage from god knows where; she is frightened and mezmerized by shiny objects, which we, the white folk, use to distract her and steal her money (and land and cheap labor).
Xiwen is now going to kill me for associating her with my blather.
Nicholas-- hahahahaha... i'd rather see you live forever giving funny blather like this! ~xiwen
Wow, it seems there has been quite a flurry here since my last visit. 这是咱家挖坑最成功的一次。 Thanks, dears. :)
I guess Jason was referring to the widespread moral degeneration and the grab for money that my friends complaint about upon my last trip home. Correct me if I am wrong.
After that bizarre happening, I was wondering whether I was simply "harmless and useless," or whether I have pushed him closer to prison by keeping him from losing face....blah blah
News update: On April 25, 2007, our Hygienic Barbarian looted all the mussels that the locals had painstakingly hidden in the sand and mud of a small beach in Gamagori, Japan.
oh, Chatty Cathy and Hygienic Barbarian, I still owe you a lengthy post on Brecht, Laozi and Sophocles.
I'm perfectly willing to take a raincheck on that B-L-S entry - my eyes are bleeding from my notes on "Schriften zum Theater".
My conclusion about your money-adventure is: YOU should have grabbed the bills and not asked the nice polite question. Can you imagine standing around on the street and having some small mysterious person pop up out of nowhere and say "Excuse me, is this your money?" What would you do - Chinese, American, or what-some-have-you?
hey meng! hope you are doing well
rob
It's really a waste of your talent not to be a creative writer!
Are you coming back this summer? I hope we can have another happy talk in Shanghai. I am overwhelmed with the endless job and even postpone my plan to join you guys in the states. But I haven't given up. I'm getting more and more disappointed with the "academic" environment around me.
Take care!
hey dear friends,
apologies for my long dormancy. i am fine, but like mike, my eyes have been bleeding from the endless reading and long-awaited writing of a chapter. yeah, i know, few of us could escape from such a pathetic fate.:)
pengpeng, great to hear from you and know you are still planning to join us:) the bad news is that i am not coming back this summer, as a punishment for my procrastination. it is unfair to punish my family and my friends because of my own fault.:( you take care too and hope to see you again soon.
You can be proud of the distinction you have earned by being the latest blog to which I now (after some sweating and struggling) subscribe to on my Google homepage as an RSS feed. I bet you didn't even know you *had* an RSS feed. Well, now your brilliance is feeding my fat Western face. RSS-wise.
i feel like we belong to this cult called "ph.d. candidates" whose basic rules include punishing, suffering, getting bored, etc. i am at D.C., finding myself carrying the archival material with me, some political psychology articles, and Kristeva--instead of my swimming suits, on a "vacation."
mike, i feel so proud. i am always proud when your majesty confer upon me any distinction:) well, i was aware of the rrs feed, but it's also true that it is the same as i did not know about its existence at all.
beauty, i do suspect that the whole purpose of a phd training is to turn a healthy and happy being into a miserable workaholic, but still, try give yourself a break. i repeat this to myself everyday. take care.
Y'all seem to be a bunch of eager beavers with the comments, if only some of actually wrote something on which one might comment. *cough cough*
Though, I suppose that's academics can really do... comment.
Nicholas, all I could possibly blog about right now - that wouldn't make my personal life any more interesting than it already is, I might add - would be about all the splendid Brechtian themes that keep cropping up in my current reading of Benjamin, and my realization that my topics paper was an effort to rewrite Walt's "Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproduction" in English so German that it actually beats out W.B.'s for opacity. (Speaking of opaque English, yours is once again happily skidding around the edge of the toilet like a wild loose turd. You'd better be glad you're coming back here soon; you could use some grammatical hazing.)
Anyway, if you really want to hear about the gooey, murky, Marxist thoughts running through my head right now in the forum of my blog, give me the go-ahead. Aside from that, I can only repeat in so many different ways that I'm basically sad, lonely, and anxious.
"The highest goodness is water..." Remember this from Lao-zi? Water therefore you unconsciously created this space for "comments" and you are supposed to console everyone.
hahaha.. nicholas, you are so good at pointing out the germ of a situation. it seems your staying in japan is turning you into a zen poet, if not a master.
so, go ahead, mike. i think i have much to learn from you about those two brilliant germans.
and you are not alone, mike and beauty. for two weeks in a row, i have been woken up at 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6, or anywhere in between those hours by the specter of my dissertation and had to read for an hour in order to feel justified to go back to sleep again. ok, i will put a new entry up here soon so we could start another line of commenting.
Well, see, my technique for dealing with that is simple: just STAY AWAKE until 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6, drink a bottle of vermouth and smoke a pack of cigarettes, and then sleep till 1 or 2 pm. I'm lucky to feel anything, let alone stress.
Well, then, now you two know what it's like for me day in and day out. Project that back about 15 years and you pretty much have my life.
As for the grammar, jesus christ that was awful; it's barely comprehensible even to me. This is why I generally write things out by hand: it slows my brain down a bit and forces me to consider precisely what it is I'm putting on paper.
And of all the Buddy-ism's I always found Zen to be the most ridiculous. Which is one way of saying it'd be perfect for me.
I must say that in this space I feel I'm back in a 600 level English literary criticism seminar, reading and making commments on ten people's published comments on something that half of the class has not read yet. ... Water, when we talked on the phone today, I actually forgot what your blog piece was about. :(
You're quite right Beauty - I don't have the slightest memory what the original entry was about. And I'm here commenting on it again.
(shrug) Michael, what can I say?
(scream) Water, start a new line!
I believe the post was about how the savage thought it more important to save face than get her money back.
Was that the moral? Give in to social inertia?
ok beauty, you may move now onto next line.
nicholas you are right. social inertia is the moral.
mike please don't kill yourself. nicholas glad you are still alive.
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