From Shanghai

Saw this sign/banner when I was in the Shanghai South Train Station. Thought it was a more felicitous form of Chinglish than one normally encounters, so I took a snap. 传播 is usually translated as spreading or broadcasting. 播下 is usually translated as to plant or sow. So I guess the common character is where you get the idea of creating a metaphor based on seeds.

It also reminds of how Chinese people always liken teachers…to gardeners (and it was Teachers’ Day on Sept 10). I guess they are doing their faire share of sprinkling.

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Let me say that I am big fan of the Harold and Kumar enterprise, if only b/c yes, it is nice having some non-white, and not especially handsome boys as the leads. The same dynamic and humor is there, John Cho being the uptight choad and Kumar getting all the gross-out jokes. I have to say that what sealed the deal for me was the one brief shot of Kumar masturbating where you see him come over his own face. God Bless America and our sense of humor.

The bit in the south with the KKK and the in-bred child (a cyclops) is a bit hackneyed, but yeah I still laughed. The homeland security chief grew on me. At first he seemed like your typical whiteboy homeland security prick, but they gave him good jokes to wrap it around, like when they bring in Harold and Kumar’s parents, and speak to the former in Korean. The translator squeals something remotely Korean and, when the parents reply in English, clearly audible to everyone–the translator turns to the homeland security guy and says “they’re using some strange dialect.” Later the homeland guy turns to the translator and says “are you sure you know how to translate?” The translator replies, “I have a Master’s in Romantic Korean literature” to which the homeland guy replies “that’s good enough for me.”

So you know there’s nothing new in there, just some good old-fashioned white, hetero, liberal humor. In fact it’s very “Stuff that white people like.” You get weed, hot chicks, whores, a strange relationship with homosexuality (eg the “cockmeat sandwich” torture at Guantanamo as well as the choice of casting openly gay Neil Patrick Harris as a (hetero) sex maniac who likes to “rock out with the cock out.” Sounds like we’ve got a repressed/closeted scriptwriter.

What else? Not much. Keep your expectations low. Laugh hard, laugh honestly. You will enjoy the movie.

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Summary: born in 1969, Tu Shaoquan doens’t have a lot of money and isn;’t good looking, but in the span of year managed to get three women to bear him three children. After investigation, it was discovered that Tu had a total of five “wives” and seven children.

Ms. He was one of his wives. Her parents divorced at an early age and needing some fatherly love, she fell in love with Tu. After they found that she was pregnant, he convinced her to keep the child. Five months into her pregnancy, she found out that he had other women. She was saddened but unwilling to give up her child, she went on and eventually gave birth to their child. Later on, she discovered that he’d been lying to her all along. He had told her that he was divorced and had one child.

Ms. He discovered that two of his other children were born on November 14, 2006 and December 24, 2006. Her child was born on December 12, 2007. In slightly over a year, Tu had fathered three children.

So here’s the breakdown: Tu had one child from his first marriage, then got divorced. Then he met and married a teacher named Li, and they had two kids. He’s living with her but they have problems. He had another woman named Tang, who bore him two children, but without being married they don’t have his hukou and he doesn’t have to pay childcare; with Liu he had one child, and she returned to her old home in Sichuan to have it, and with Ms. He he had one child.

After discovering that Tu’s whereabouts were unknown, Ms. He contacted Ms. Liu and went to the police station together to report a missing person. Tu’s wife Zhu showed them her marriage certificates and demanded a divorce. In June a court handed down a polygamy verdict and sentenced him to two years in prison.

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I thought this picture was somewhat amusing…don’t know if there was any PS in this but then again, having a huge belly that you can puff out more isn’t exactly a rarity among middle-aged men.

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