To wear a robe, to write a blog

When I was working as an instructor on a Prometheus camp at summer 1996, we had a nice guy from the Hare Krishna temple visiting our camps world-view panel. He was wearing the typical orange robe of the movement and afterwards, when we were drinking tea together, I asked him if his church requires him to wear such clothes. He answered: "Oh no, I could wear any clothes. But I like to wear these clothes to remind me of my identity, to strengthen my resolve, to make me feel more what I am on all levels of my mind." I was impressed with that, the idea to wear some clothes to reflect on, focus and strengthen your self-identity instead of trying to give some impression to the external world.

In the year 2000 I did a big and scary career move from university research work as a software developer in the private industry. I then decided, along the lines of the robed Hare Krishna, to wear a tie for one year in the work. I decided to associate the wearing of a tie to the idea of being a good employee and polite and social coworker, having pride in my programming skills and will to develop my skills even further. I wore a tie to remind myself what I am and what I want to be, to reflect and build my self-identity. I cannot of course know how things would have developed without the tie, but my life has been good and my career has been successful and enjoyable.

Writing a diary, or its modern version blog, probably serves similar purposes. The main reason I am writing a blog is to reflect and focus on my thoughts, emotions and identity regarding my life and relationship to Jinlin, to think what I am, what I want to be and to nudge myself towards the target.

Brain is a peculiar thing: sometimes new insights can be gained by simply writing words out. Insights that could not be gained by just silent thinking inside the head. Even though the process of writing does not add any new external information to the process. This seems paradoxical, but can be understood in terms of brain - and personality - not being one single thing but comprising of multiple parts that communicate with each other in limited ways. People who have written diaries through the times know that main point of diary is not to communicate to the external world but to reflect on oneself, to seek and strengthen ones identity, ask questions and gain knowledge that thinking alone does not produce.

When I returned from my trip to China with Jinlin in the end of July my head was full of thoughts of language and culture, emotions and memories, growth and learning, questions about present and future. Partly so because our limited language skills did not allow very deep spoken discussion to happen on the spot. Some of our simple discussions that started to drift towards more complex topics ended in agreement to continue the discussion with emails after the trip. So I wrote notes that after the trip I have expanded to longer texts and other ideas, some resulting in emails but other more fit to diary-like form. So, although I am a nerd and have always thought that any blog I would start would be on topics of cosmology or functional programming, I found myself feeling more and more like starting to write on these "soft" topics.

Connection and community

While writing a private diary is valuable in itself for the reasons discussed above, a blog naturally adds potential for more value to self and others via expanded audience. Perhaps my humble utterances give some moments of fun or insight to somebody. Of course there is the special somebody, Jinlin herself, who is also reading the blog. With the blog I am hoping to add also another channel for us to communicate and learn about each other. I might write in ways and topics that might not so naturally come about in emails or chats otherwise but are nevertheless important to be aware of. I am happy her reaction has been very positive: 很开心你的文章，我在欣赏 ("I am very happy about your writings, I appreciate") and later 我看见你的文章，非常感谢你美妙的语言.我非常开心你的记录 (I saw your article, Thank you very much your wonderful language. I am very happy you make records.)

During my short blogging career I have received suggestions to other blogs that similarly tell stories of joy and challenges from inter-cultural relationships:

• http://diaspora.chinasmack.com/
• http://shanghaishiok.com/
• http://talesfromhebei.wordpress.com/
• http://lifebehindthewall.wordpress.com/
• http://www.rantapallo.fi/myexploration/  (in Finnish)  

By the way, these are all blogs written by females - it seems to be much less common for men in such intercultural relationships to start blogging (or perhaps they blog only about cosmology, functional programming and sports ;-)    So perhaps I can add some male perspective to the interesting discussions about cultural habits, language challenges, emotional issues and life lessons or international couples. Furthermore most bloggers seem to have the western person from USA, Canada or similar large English-speaking country whereas I come from the weird small North-European country of Finland with our peculiar own language. And it's good place to come to: Finland is the best country in the world ;-)

Topics, topics, topics...

I have quickly realized that the process of reflection that writing brings serves to bring also more ideas to write about. This is yet added by the immense input from reading other intercultural blogs and forums. My current condensed list has, among others, following topics listed:

• Topics from travel in China
• Shows of dance and singing
• Animals
• Nature
• Chinese children
• Chinese traditional medicine
• Jinlin (and me)
• Her beauty
• Her sweet character
• Her hobbies (and our shared hobbies)
• Her likes and dislikes (and our)
• Her career, studies and ambitions (and my)
• Our shared interests and compatibility
• Cultural differences and compromises
• Jinlin with my children
• "Beauty and the beast"
• Practices, joys and sorrows of remote relationship
• Ways of communication
• Snippets of nice and interesting words
• Learning language and misunderstandings
• Gifts, photos and singing
• How does love feel?
• Sorrow and missing due to the distance.
• East-west relationships in general
• Why start dating Asian women / western man.
• Good and bad Chinese dating sites.
• Positive and negative stereotypes of East-west relationships and people.
• The past and future
• Our childhood(s)
• Our past relationships and growing as persons
• How our relationship started and developed
• Our evolving plans for a future together

Anything that you, my dear reader, find especially interesting? Let me know and I'll adjust my priority :-)

So Good, So Messy

The name of the game in Chinese dining is variety. Whereas in a Chinese restaurant in Finland it is customary to have one fixed portion of particular food for each individual, in China it is more common to have many small portions of different foods that all share. This worked quite well even with just Jinlin and myself but the approach really blossoms with a larger groups like the one we had on our guided tour part of the trip.

I explore some of the variety and culture of the food on our trip with photos below. You can see the full selection of my photos from China in my Google Plus public albums.

Variety in a Zhengzhou restaurant

At a fine restaurant at riverside in Lijiang old town

Restaurant in a small village near Lijiang. We had one of our tour group lunches here

Typical rotating-disk tables with multiple dishes to share from our group meals.

Even quite small children were participating in the dining in same way as adults

 The dishes on the group meals were mostly vegetable based with a minor number of dishes containing meat, fish or tofu. It seemed that fish (鱼, Yú) in particular was considered delicacy, the beautifully cooked "crown" of the table. The fish was boiled, fried or barbecued as a whole and usually served to the table bit later than other dishes, prepared as a whole.

 Lots of fresh chili in a meat dish in Xishuanbanna

Barbequed chicken

Getting the table dirty

The pictures above are from the clean and beautiful beginnings of a dinner. Not so towards the end. Eating in a restaurant, especially with a group, was a more messy activity than I had anticipated and definitely much more messy than the act of eating in Chinese restaurant in Finland.

Getting plenty of food landing on the table in a group of experienced and considerate adults arises partly from practical reasons. Sharing many dishes means that small bowls are passed around from hand to hand multiple times with the ensuing mishaps. Picking stuff from distant bowls with chopsticks seems to be occasionally error-prone even to the experts.


Part of the messiness results from the way meat is often prepared in these dishes. It is rare to have just the meat: bones, tendon, thick fat and other inedible parts are usually attached to the meat even when it has been chopped to relatively small parts. This is of course even more so with the whole-cooked fish. This excess of inedible parts can be contrasted with western restaurants where dishes usually contain clean meat other animal stuff removed. Even when some bones remain with the meat in the west, restaurant dishes usually come in rather big plates with plenty of space in the edges to place the inedible bits and pieces. The small personal bowls in China, usually already filled with rice, are not suitable for gathering the waste. So people, in relaxed and intentional way, dropped the pieces of bone, tendon and fat on the table.

I have been so conditioned through my life to keep the table clean that I was desperately trying to invent some places like empty dishes to place waste in a "polite" (in my narrow view) manner. But Jinlin was assuring me that the table gets dirty anyway so no harm is done by adding some more. So I tried to feel cool about it.

One should also notice that the tradition of ordering slightly excessive amounts of food and then leaving significant amount uneaten was alive and well, at least in the parts of China we visited. While I can understand that the food left uneaten is a polite indication that everyone got enough to eat, I could not completely dismiss the thought that in the 1.3 billion person China huge resources are used to manufacture food without everyone getting enough. In that situation wasting 10-20% on the tables of restaurants feels bit morally bad. So, on more than one occasion I found myself trying to stuff down bit more of the excess when others were seemingly already ready to leave :-) Luckily the food is so healthy that even with frequent tasty meals and really filling up my stomach, I lost some weight on the trip ;-)

Hot and spicy

The first Chinese restaurant in Helsinki (and whole of Finland), restaurant "China", opened its doors 1973, same year I was born. Now Chinese restaurants are commonplace in Finland, even in small towns you can find one, and I eat in them quite regularly. Still, it is different to eat in Chinese restaurants deep in China, away from the biggest Cities with greatest western influence. It is different to eat with only Chinese people eating with you. And most important of all, it is different when you have a lovely expert Chinese "guide" arranging the details of the meal ;-) The food is different, the environment is different, the atmosphere is different, the customs are different. 

The food and food-related culture on our two weeks of travel with Jinlin in June were very diverse and interesting to me although we were travelling only in Henan and Yunnan. Eating together in restaurants, on the street, us two only or in a bigger group, morning, day and evening, turned out to be very happy and important part of the trip. Food allows simple ways of being together and have enjoyable cultural experiences without need for extensive language skills. 

And when it comes to the meagre Chinese skills that I do have from listening 200+ hours of  ChinesePod episodes, they are somewhat focused on everyday language of shopping and eating. So I can say and understand sentences like 我喜欢中国菜 (Wǒ xǐhuan zhōngguó cài - I like Chinese food), 好吃吗？(Hào chī ma? - Does it taste good?), 非常好吃! (Fēicháng hào chī - Tastes very good!), 我想吃鸡肉 (Wǒ xiǎng chī jīròu - I want to eat chicken) and 我可以用筷子 (Wǒ kěyǐ yòng kuàizi - I can use chopsticks), 请问.我可以有菜单吗？(Qǐngwèn. Wǒ kěyǐ yǒu càidān ma? - Excuse me, can I have the menu?)

Hot Pot

In Zhengzhou we visited two different Hot pot (火锅, huǒ guō) restaurants. On Hot pot a boiling kettle in the center of the table is divided to two compartments, other with mild spices likes herbs and mushrooms and other with strong chilis and peppercorns. Various sliced meats, vegetables and noodles are ordered from a long list, thrown to the the boiling soups for some minutes, fished up with chopsticks, rolled in various sauces and eaten. Super tasty! Though be careful with the chilis! The dish has obvious similarity to Swiss fondue and hence sometimes the name Chinese fondue is used for hot pot. Hot pot restaurants are found in wide areas of China from Beijing to Hong Kong, though the varieties of ingredients and sauces vary locally.

When discussing hot and spicy food, it is convenient that Chinese language has separate word for "hot" as in high temperature (热, Rè) and "hot" as in spicy (辣, Là). Although Hotpot is both Rè and Là you might notice that the disk name (huǒ guō) does not contain these words. This is because the literal translation for huǒ guō is "fire pot".

The first of our Hot pot restaurants was also the very first place where Jinlin took me to eat on Monday 16th June 2012 after we had met at the airport for the first time and arrived to the city. So it carries special significance of our first meal together. Jinlin sure ordered plenty of meat and other stuff to eat, I thought we could have easily served four person with all of that! :-)

In the "Happy Hot Pot" restaurant atmosphere was more casual and "fast food" style, but food equally tasty:

I'm planning later to write more food-related posts about topics like breakfast on the street, messy eating in groups, fresh fruit in the jungle and the endless variety of dumplings :-)

Why marry at all?

In response to my previous post on marriage, a friend rised the question "why marry at all?". It is very good question and I do not have any simple answer so I decided make a separate post about it.

First, we should separate practical reasons for marriage from others. It is confusing that marriage combines a slate of practical (including financial) reasons together with emotional and moral issues. In the case of Jinlin and myself, marriage will allow her to get permanent residence permit to Finland. In my previous marriage I had children with my wife and the status of marriage makes the bureaucracy related to children simpler. In many countries the state encourages long-term couples to marry through financial benefits.

I am not huge fan of such state-regulated rules based on marriage. In my ideal world states would not keep track of the status of marriage of its citizens. Marriage would not even be a legal entity in state jurisdiction at all. We would not need to debate whether gay couples, or triples of three persons should be allowed to get married because no-one would get married in the legal sense, legal marriage would not exist. No financial benefits would depend on the arbitrary switch between "married" and "non-married", status of children would depend only on who is their mother and father and Jinlin could move permanently to Finland based on similar letter of invitation that is now needed to get her a visiting Visa.

Even while marriage remains a legal institution I would change the law so that property of the couple would not be re-divided in divorce. This can be done with a prenuptial agreement already within the present law but I think it should be the default case since the present law is unequal and can lead to bitter divorce-battles in law. The possibility that a poor woman can marry a rich man and then walk away after short time with half of his possessions can actually hurt the level of commitment and love in a marriage.

Love and commitment without marriage?

For couples where practical (or religious) reasons for marriage are not an issue, I indeed think it is completely okay and equally good to remain unmarried indefinitely. I feel it is and should be completely okay to never get married. In this light my list of men that have not experienced divorce failed to include and important case. There are men, who have courage for love, relationship and commitment, experiencing long relationships with much good in addition to the trouble. But these long committed relationships do not simply involve marriage. Such men do not have divorces, they have simply endings of relationships.

I think I missed this case because it is rare: there are not many men who are born, live a long life with one or more long, full, committed relationships - with or without children - and die at old age. Indeed the friend who raised the question "why marry at all?" has been himself marrying and divorcing as well. This is because there are other non-practical reasons for marriage related to emotions, responsibility and public display of commitment. Regarding these "soft" emotional reasons for marriages, there seems to be a significant difference between the genders. Following reflection by a woman in an internet discussion quite well captures this irrational unexplainable desire for marriage:

I have no idea really why people marry. I really enjoyed my years as a single. I dated and I could do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. But I met someone and fell in love and we built a house and live together. We have everything we need, a nice home, love and commitment. Nothing will change when we marry, but I just have this huge, overwhelming desire to be married to this man. I know things will stay the same. I know we have no real need to get married. People living together is quite acceptable these days, and we are not planning on children or anything......but I cant deny my feelings. I want to be married to this man. It is like a mark of his respect to me. He adores me and respects me and will prove it to me and both of our families, by officially making his vows to me, and me to him.

Such desire most likely has large cultural aspect, but there might be some hard-wiring in the brain for that as well. It just reminds me of the stories of many parents about their girls start very naturally and at very young age play princess role-play. The fact that women are probably more deeply interested in getting married is contrasted by the cultural expectation that men are expected to ask their ladies to marry them. This reminds me of old quote: "Men choose the women that choose the men."

So is there more commitment in a long deep relationship with marriage than without? If other partner wants marriage - implicitly or explicitly, rationally or irrationally - but there is no marriage because the other one does not want (again, for any reason), then I would say that the level of commitment is not maximal. The additional trouble and bureaucracy of divorcing marriage and the slight residual shame associated with divorce can be reasonable reasons to not get married but I think that fully committed person does not use them as reasons but proceeds with requested marriage despite of these and other reasons.

But if both partners have absolutely no desire for marriage and are unconditionally happy about long and deep relationship with or without children but without marriage, then I see no reason for the commitment being as high as possible. In some ways, perhaps, such couples can have even stronger determination about their relationship by choosing to be explicitly independent from the pressures of society and traditional roles? I don't know, but I extend my sincere congratulations to such lovers.

A time to marry and a time to divorce

When Jinlin moves to Finland to live together with me, we are planning to get married.

I have been married before and I have divorced. I have two nice boys, now 12 and 9 years, from my marriage. I do know that this is okay. I know divorce is not s stigma like it was in the past. I know that ending a long relationship - with or without kids - can be more difficult or less difficult but the difficulty or ethics of the end does really depend on whether there is marriage or not. I know no gods are judging our dealings in life with holy laws. I think and feel that I have made right decisions in the past both when entering and when leaving my marriage. I do not regret anything and I can look at all my old wedding pictures and feel it was happy and good party.

But still sometimes, thought quite rarely, small nagging feelings touch the edge of my conscious though: Is divorce still a mark of failure? Does it give impression that I am difficult person or bad husband? Have I had enough love and compassion in my heart? Has my credibility taken a hit? Have I lived my life in good ways?

Then I think: what kind of different paths do people take though life? What kind of paths involve divorce and what kinds of paths do not include it?

There are men who are too afraid of relationships to ever start one. If I would have been such man, I might have no divorces. I might be available for a marriage now, but I would definitely be less competent and valuable as a husband than I am now. Long time ago I used to be too such a man, but I grew in courage.

There are men who fear commitment, who prefer dozens of short shallow relationships with half-hearted commitment, always running away on the suggestion of getting more serious, especially marriage or babies. If I would have been such man, I might have no divorce, but as a potential husband I would still be less valuable than I am now. But I value deep long relationships with no-limits commitment even when no-one can 100% guarantee happiness and success of the marriage or in the long run.

There are men who are weak and scared of divorce. They might hang in a marriage even if they are suffering in it, it brings happiness to no-one and all reasonable methods of reconciliation have been exhausted. If I would be such man, I might have no divorces. Long time ago I used to be such a man, but I grew in strength and I learned that one will survive many things in life.

There are men who decide that children should have always two parents that stay together in the same house, whatever the cost, whatever quarrel and disputes and lack of love these children need to witness. But I understand that children are flexible about practical arrangements, that sometimes for children divorce is better and I have seen my boys well adjusted and happy to their life of two homes.

There are men, fortunately rare, who are extremely afraid of shame of divorce and resort to rather killing their whole family and themselves when impossible-to-solve problems raise in marriage. Such men might escape divorce but at a horrible unthinkable cost. Tiina Raevaara writes in her excellent article about such extreme cases in Finland and how we should work to remove any remaining factors in our society that can induce shame about divorce.

And of course there are men who are lucky to experience a marriage where love and understanding continues to flourish, problems remain reasonable in size and solvable in nature, until death do them apart. I offer my sincere congratulations to such men and their wives! Such men are not any more available for marriage.

But I have not been myself like any of these men. I have had courage for love, relationship and commitment, experiencing long relationships with much good in addition to the trouble. I have worked to save my marriage as well as my other long relationships and resolve problems and show love. Yet I have also had the strength to accept divorce when efforts failed for too long time and divorce seemed and felt the right thing to do. And I am at ease with this, almost completely.

I am not religious, but sometimes it's nice to cherry-pick wisdom from holy books:

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot, 
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

It is one of lives more difficult questions how much patience one should have, how long to try, when to give up. If your business running a loss, how long should you keep pouring more investment? If the loss goes on and on, when to give up, let the business go bankrupt and try something else? Recovery might be just around the corner or it might never come. Same problem arises in all things in life where you engage, invest your time, money, will and energy - including relationships. One cannot give advice, one cannot know "right" answer in any particular situation, one has to do difficult balancing act.

I don't think I have been bad husband in my past marriage, but I think I can be even better one in the future for Jinlin. 

Who is Luobote?

Last time I wrote about confusion caused by Chinese names to western person. However, I can assure that there is no difficulty to "return the favour" by raising confusion with western names in China. I could create much amusement in West-China countryside by pronouncing my full name "Robert Johannes Brotherus" and showing it in written form to my fellow travellers. 很长! (Hěn zhǎng, "So long!") was the common opinion.

Of course Chinese characters are both characters and words at the same time, so there are exactly three words in both my name and a typical Chinese name. But just in terms of sheer length taken by these words there is no denying that Chinese names - like Chinese writing in general - are very compact compared to western names. In our boarding passes from an internal flight in China you can see my name overflowing the intended space whereas Jinlins name (陈妍洁) is fully printed in quarter of the space available:

When we were ordering tickets for our group travel in a small local travel agency in Kunmin, the employees were inspecting my passport for long time and discussing with Jinlin how to interpret the different incomprehensible fields in it. 

I was trying to participate in the discussion with my clumsy Chinese by repeating "Wǒ de míngzì shì Robert Johannes Brotherus" (my name is Robert Johannes Brotherus) and "Wǒ de Xìng shì Brotherus" (my surname is Brotherus). My explanations were not hugely successful, I should prehaps said "Wǒ de míngzì shì Brotherus Robert Johannes" to fit the Chinese way.

Western names, Chinese way

When Chinese names are written in English, they are written as English characters that together resemble the sounds of pronouncing the name. So for example 陈妍洁 is written as "Chen Yanjie" because this resembles the spoken sounds of 陈妍洁. Going the other way round is more tricky. Taking some random English or Finnish name - without any particular meaning - and writing it using only Chinese characters is called transliterating. The problem is that Chinese characters primarily code meaning whereas names like "Robert" do not have any intrinsic meaning. It is possible to find Chinese characters whose sounds approximately match the sounds in the foreign word. But there are many slightly imperfect matches using different Chinese characters. For example "Robert" could in principle be written in dozens of different forms, such as: 

囖比尔特    (Lo bǐ'ěr tè)
如波尔塔  (Rú bō ěr tǎ)

如喔波尔塔  (Rú ō bō ěr tǎ)

日噢贝尔托  (Rì ō bèi'ěr tuō)

Which of these and other possible approximations should be the "correct" transliteration of the name? In China the problem has been solved by simply officially deciding for each foreign name a standard set of similarly sounding Chinese characters. There is complete science trying to determine optimal transliteration of names, as exemplified by research paper "English-Chinese Name Transliteration with Bi-Directional Syllable-Based Maximum Matching". Standard transliterations exist in dictionaries for example for names of major places like Finland (芬兰,  Fēnlán) and Helsinki (赫尔辛基, Hè'ěrxīnjī). For many smaller ones like "Kainuu" standard forms do not exist, so they must be left in English form or transliterated ad hoc with just any characters. 

For person names, standard transliterations have been developed for all common names. Hence "Robert" is not any of the forms above but:

You can listen how this sounds with Google Translate. Of course all Chinese characters also have some meaning. Some of the many meanings of these characters are:

罗 (Luō):  talkative, silk, catch birds with a net

伯 (Bó):   senior, paternal elder uncle

特 (Tè):   special, exceptional

So in China I am "Luobote": the exceptional talkative senior guy. Well, I have no problem with that description :D

My last name "Brotherus" is rare enough to not have any standard transliteration so "Robert Brotherus" translates simply to "罗伯特 Brotherus". And "Brotherus" unfortunately contains the strong Finnish "r" sound that requires slow up-down vibration of the tongue in mouth (Google translate can speak surprisingly very well the correct form). This proved to be nearly impossible for  Chinese people to pronounce and after two weeks of futile attempts by Jinlin I said she can just say "L" instead and we worry about the "r" later :-)

Going all the way: Getting a Chinese name

Just like Chinese people studying English often choose an English name for themselves, it is sometimes recommended that western people studing Chinese pick a proper three-character Chinese name for themselves. This is less common but still an interesting possibility.

There is a nice website that creates such a Chinese name for you based on your English name, and "desired essence of the name". Latter helps to pick characters of specific positive meaning from the multiple similar sounding ones. I tried the app and got a Chinese name 白 锐彬 (Bái Ruì Bin). You can see that there is some correlation with the sounds of my English name. The meanings are about positive characteristics of the mind: 白 (white, pure, bright), 锐 (sharp, keen) and 彬 (refined). Possibilities to praise yourself and your babies are endless ;-)

No, it's not her first name

In Chinese 名字 (Míngzì) means "name".  The name of my Chinese girlfriend is 陈妍洁. The three Chinese characters in the name are 陈 (Chén), 妍(yán) and  洁(jié). You can hear how the name is pronounced by clicking this link to Google Translate and clicking then "listen"-button on the left pane. 陈 (Chén) forms the first short part of the name and 妍洁 (yánjié) forms second longer part. A natural conclusion for a western person is that 陈 (Chén) is her first (given) name and 妍洁 (yánjié) is her family name. This conclusion is unfortunately wrong, and I am embarrassed to admit I made this mistaken assumption for the first two months of our remote relationship.  陈 (Chén) is actually the family name (姓, Xìng), one of the 20 most common family names in mainland China. It just happens that in China family name is always written first in the name.

In addition to the confusing order it is further confusing to a western person that Chinese family names are so short. In English language, given names are on average slightly shorter than family names. But in China family names (姓, Xìng) always consist of only single character (like 陈) and given names almost always have exactly two characters (there are some exceptions with a given name having only single character). So a complete name (名字, Míngzì) in China are three characters long in 95% of cases and two characters long in the remaining 5% of cases. This is convenient for example when designing forms: form never needs to include space for more than three characters in the name field. This means also that the full name is always quick to pronounce.

It seems extremely rare to hear or use only the given name of a person. There is not even a clear translation for the phrase "given name" since 名字 (Míngzì) is take to refer to the whole name. If you translate "what is your first name?" to Chinese and back to English with Google translate, the result is "what is your name?". I have never heard my girlfriend in any circumstance say or write only 妍洁 (yánjié) but she did occasionally sign her letters as 陈 (Chén). It did not help to resolve this question that in messaging programs and social networking sites she uses nicknames like "olwen" and "fiona" and some of her friends call her with nickname 妹妹 (Mèimei, little sister)

During the first two months when I thought her given name is 陈 (Chén), I happily told my friends and relatives in Finland that the name of my new girlfriend is "Chen". Of course that was not strictly incorrect, especially when family names are very often used in China, but it was misleading since when western people ask "what is the name of your girlfriend?" and the answer is single syllable, they implicitly assume that the answer means the given name.

So when I realized I has used her family as the given name I was in bit of a problem. First, I was already used to discuss my girlfriend as "Chen" with many of my friends and it was awkward starting to try to switch to something else. But even bigger problem was that I was not sure what I should switch to. I was thinking to switch to "Yanjie" but I was hesitant because I had never seen her use that. In one slightly frustrated chat session I tried to ask her about her names and what she would like to be called but the answer was always: 我的名字是陈妍洁，陈是我的姓氏 (Wo de míngzì shì chényánjié, chén shì wo de xìngshì) which means "My name is Chen Yanjie. Chen is my surname". In the communication between ourselves the problem was not apparent because we mostly call each other 亲爱的 (Qin'ài de, beloved) or 宠儿 (Chong'ér, darling). But I had to find out what to call her to my friends.

After few days of awkward confusion I found my rescue. I remembered her telling in one of the first emails that she also has a nickname that at least her mother calls her. This nickname is 金琳 (Jin lín). So I managed to ask her if I can call her "Jinlin" (pronounced like English "Tsinlin") and got favorable reply. Since then I have been slowly trying to introduce this new name to my friends in Finland.

In addition of sounding nice, these characters have nice meanings. Character 金 (Jin) means "gold" and character 琳 (lín) means "gem" or "beautiful jade". This cutely reminds me of the Finnish habit of calling beloved one "kulta" which also means gold.

I have been mostly successful in introducing the nickname Jinlin to my friends, though my boys Arttu and Ilkka still happily talk of "Chen". Even this name the have apparently heard in a slightly different form: in a recent SMS Ilkka - who has especially enjoying some video chats with Jinlin - asked "Milloin Zen muuttaa meidän luo Suomeen?". This means "When is Zen going to move to live with us in Finland?" :-) Well, with my own confusion over the various names during our relationship, I cannot blame them at all for such minor spelling mistake :-)

Inventing English names

Given the differences in the structure, usage and culture of names between China and the English-speaking world, it is no wonder that many Chinese people choose a new English first names for themselves when they start to study English. In the internet one can find many Chinese Jasmines, Angels, Marys, Jennys, Amandas, and Lilys around. When they write their full name in English discussion they write it in the English order of
English first name first and the Chinese family name last. I was for example delighted to find out that in the forthcoming local elections in Finland, there is a candidate of Chinese origin whose name is "Jenni Chen" - clearly sharing family name with my darling and serving as example of successful immigration. Perhaps some day Jinlin decides to choose an English (of Finnish?) name and then we can start another round of educating our friends of a name change :-) Why not, after all names are just words - it's people we have fun with and love and care for in the end.

Holding hands - what an awkward thing to do!

We saw each each other with Jinlin first time, live, face to face, on 16th July 2012 at 1 pm at Zhengzhou airport in Henan prefecture of China. I tried to stay relaxed when the moment was approaching and reminded myself that it's just one moment along a long path and it will be okay if the interaction is clumsy. Still it is obvious that a mind-boggling expectation and brain-exploding thrill of this first meeting had been building up in the preceding months of writing, video chatting, exchange of pictures, sending presents and dreaming at night and day. I was already very excited when there was only one week to the travel and she was as well in her writing:

See you, I was so excited, and nearly 10 days we will see, this is a long wait, blossom time! Good! I want to you!

I was even more thrilled when there was only one day and I was packing my bags. Even more so when I was stepping to the plane... Stepping to the flight to Henan in Beijing... Waiting for my bags to arrive to the conveyor belt in Zhengzhou airport... Walking through the doors...

It is a rare and precious moment, even weird and somehow surreal, dreamlike, to have your love from so many letters and pictures, so many hours on computer screen and dreams to be standing in front of you in flesh and blood. A kind of moment that not all people ever experience. Brain has different parts for different kinds of interaction and it takes some processing to realize on deep levels of the mind that the person you are seeing here and now is the same person you have been writing and talking and loving for a long time.

Culture of modesty

For many times I had been imagining in my minds eye our first meeting, the lovely hugging, the passionate kissing, the looking at each others eyes and smiling. In our writing we had been talking of all this. But still there was a surprise to come.

We met and she did not want to kiss. She did not want to hug. She did not even want to hold my hand. I was surprised and a hint of sadness was mixing to my explosion of joy of being with her - what was wrong?

Only on the bus trip to the town we managed to get some light of understanding to the matter with our limited language skills. It turns out that in the traditional Chinese culture it is not okay for lovers to hold hands, hug, kiss or show other signs of affection in the public. That is simply not considered proper or appropriate. It is difficult for me to imagine what kind of negative emotions such habits invoke in people of traditional Chinese upbringing, but I would imagine it would be similar kind of disapproval that a completely naked couple on the street would receive in the western world.

It is peculiar that despite of our 300+ pages of discussion in the preceding months, such obvious and important cultural difference had gone completely unnoticed. Perhaps these kind of habits - or lack of them - is taken to be so obvious in any culture that it does not even cross ones mind that in a different culture it can be different.

Of course, it's not quite so black and white. The influence of western culture, though Hollywood movies, western people living in China and the internet, is leading to public signs of affection becoming slowly more acceptable in China. My company has a branch office in Shanghai and my colleagues visiting that bustling metropolis tell me that holding hands on the street is commonplace there. So the influence is creeping in, starting from the largest cities and flowing inland. But in Henan, in Zhengzhou, it is indeed rare. When we were walking in the streets, the people holding hands were almost always parents holding hands of their children. (With that in mind, I fully understand that Jinlin does not want to give the impression me being her father ;-) ) But even in Zhengzhou I saw some rare cases, less than one percent of all couples, holding hands in some way. Although these young pioneers of public affection were usually not holding hands with their fingers touching but rather the woman holding on with her hand to the arm of the man.

Even more subtle things like admiring the beauty of your loved one seems to connect to some awkward feelings in the traditional China. Of course even in the western world it is considered rude to stare long time at strangers, but for lovers the prolonged gazing to each other is the Hollywood norm. Not necessarily so in China. If I was looking at Jinlin for a long time, she might ask "What?" as if there was some problem or weird thing I was staring at. Although she continued to feel awkward about it, she quite soon understood that my occasional staring was completely benign and she even developed humorous way of staring back at me and pointing her finger at me in funny exaggerated ways :-)

We did "practice" occasionally holding hands in the street and in privacy the closeness we had was just like we had been talking and dreaming in the preceding months. It will be interesting to see how she will adjust to the more publicly open culture on her forthcoming stay in Finland. Will the influence of the external culture take precedence over childhood upbringing or other way round? How quick are such changes in feelings of proper and improper behavior? I am happy she does have strong will to understand and adjust, expressed in a lovely email after our trip:

"I can also understand the cultural differences, so I didn't in the street hug and kiss you, I'm sorry, because I never did, our culture is not the same, but I will learn your culture, I will at any time, any place, as long as I see you. I'll kiss you. Because of you and me together to understand the love of."

With such love, holding hands in public places does not seem so critical requirement after all :-)

How to write 300 pages without knowing the language

Before I travelled to China, Yinlin and I had already written each other numerous emails and chat messages, amounting to over 300 pages of text. That's over page per day on average, a book of writing in nine months. We discussed our histories, our hobbies and interests, our daily events and our moods, our happiness and sadness, our world views and beliefs, our works and studies, our books and magazines, our lunches and dinners... and our love. I might we have discussed topics wider and deeper than many local couples discuss during their first year.

There are advantages in getting to know each other well through writing before starting to live together. My experience is that when people are together and talking in their daily lives, they tend to talk about particular set of topics.When the same people are writing in chat, the different mode of communication tends to lead discussions to somewhat different topics. And finally writing long letters can bring up even more different topics. But with the lack of strong common language in the beginning - and still to some degree at the moment - such discussion would have been impossible without various great internet tools.

Software, Chinese way

In China, things are done in different way. This includes computer programs. For many common software packages used in the west, there is a similar but different Chinese software. Take for example the big and beautiful Google search engine. Google become politically incorrect in the eyes of the Chinese communist government by allowing all kinds of information on Tibet, Taiwan, democracy protesters and other hot issues to be found. So Chinese government blocked access to Google and all Google services (like Youtube) in China. Instead, China has local alternative called Baidu that looks and feels exactly like Google:

Baidu is produced by a Chinese company, served by servers located in China and therefore implicitly in control by the government. You cannot find any information critical of the Chinese government by searching Baidu.

I have been using Skype as my chat application of choice, but it is rarely used in China. Instead, Chinese people use QQ messenger. Never heard of that? Neither had I before getting to contact with Jinlin, but by it's user base of 800 million people, it's the most used messaging software on the planet. It's like Skype in its  video and audio support. But it has also some cool extra features, like access to machine translation services. With QQ messenger Jinlin and my can have the communication in English which she can translate in real time in China. Or we can have the communication in Chinese and I can do the translations at my end with click of a button (Jinlin has nickname "fiona" in QQ):

Although I had decided to concentrate my Chinese learning efforts to speaking and we also practice that in our sessions, translating the text also contributes a bit to the language learning. Seeing so many examples of sentences in both languages makes brain start to identify simple cases at some point without translation.

Of course machine translation is never very accurate, so it is good idea to write small sentences and sometimes write the same idea in two or more different ways. Even then, occasional translations mistakes and corresponding misunderstandings cannot be avoided. But with a good attitude and sense of humour, we have managed to mostly laugh at them. When it comes to writing really important sentences or complex subtle text like poems, its best to use the king of translation software, Google translate. Google translate allows the result of the translation to be inspected before sending it to your friend. What's even better is to use "checking by round trip": copy the translated text to another translation window with translation to opposite direction. The result should something that is close enough in meaning the the original text. With this arrangement, it is quick to edit your original text until you get a version that makes the round trip without changing its meaning too much:

Google translate is extremely valuable learning tool as well, because it can show the pinyin phonetic form of the text and even speak the words out. For example "my girlfriend" translates to 我的女朋友 which in phonetic pinyin is "Wǒ de nǚ péngyǒu" (the accents on top of characters mark the tones or pitches).

For our longer emails, we used for the first months a web-based mail from the makers of QQ messenger: mail.qq.com. It has good support for attachments and the emails do not go through the censorship firewalls of the government:

QQ mail does not have automatic translation but with emails there is less of a hurry for real time translation, so Google translate (or Baidu translate in China) can be used nicely.

The Great Firewall of China

How about Facebook, the bread and butter of connected internet citizens of today? It's also blocked by the Chinese government with their "great firewall" on incoming cables. And the Chinese alternative? QQ web spaces. Customizable status update environment for you and your friends, complete with picture collections, links to videos and zillion funny flash games with furry animals:

So nowadays when I post a set of new pictures to Facebook for my friends to see, I also post them to my QQ space for Jinlin to see.

I have only recently discovered that there are proxy services like http://www.facebookinchinaproxy.com/ that allow access to Facebook and some other blocked services from China. Perhaps soon we can get me and Jinlin to be friends in Facebook as well. Of course Chinese government is actively fighting to block such procies as well. So you must do the search for proxies outside China because searches of services that circumvent blocks are blocked :-) It's a funny game of cat and mouse and it will be interesting so see if in the long run the government will loose the game. Wikipedia has good article on the extent of Chinese government internet censorship. This of course means that Wikipedia itself is blocked by the Chinese government ;-)

Mothers and cursing horses

Very soon after starting to write with Jinlin I realized that learning some Chinese would be a very good idea. Chinese education system is not very strong in teaching foreign languages and her English skills were accordingly low - although still infinitely better than my non-existent in Chinese. So initially we mostly used various translation programs for our emails, instant messages and video chat. The translation programs work surprisingly well and when combined with video chat allow even nice combination with body language.

Although it might seem that for the subtle language of love one needs a good mutual language, I have found it otherwise. Clumsy language and translation errors do surprisingly little to the feeling that sweet words convey and sometimes simple and clumsy language can be outright cute. Or what would you say of this text in Jinlins second email to me on October 8, 2011: "You have not lost, because I feel good to you. I was feeling. Do you understand? I am very glad to know you. Waiting for you my number. I with you. I look to you." Personally I find such words heart-melting, which is of course exactly what happened ;-)

Some of my friends were naturally afterward curious why did I not filter from the multitude of Chinese woman in the Internet only those that had reasonable English skills to start with. The short answer is that I did, but Jinlin did not: she was the one initially contacting me. And before long I realized she had the character, the cuteness, the humor, the courage, the interests, the depth and the love that kept me chatting on and on. At that point the optimism and excitement of getting to a relationship made the language problem seem like a minor issue easily solvable. And partly such optimism is warranted: the same love that gives rise to the optimism provides energy and determinism to help it happen.

Despite initial success with the translation tools, I continued to be aware that translation would not be easily usable in our forthcoming real meetings. So the language-learning goal remained urgent. We soon determined that from our first contact in October 2011 we would have to wait nine months before getting first close together in July 2012. This constraint was determined by the very important university entrance exam Jinlin would have in June 2012 and the very intensive period of study preceding the exam. While nine months is admittedly a long time to wait, it was crucial for development of the rudimentary language skills that we so badly needed when finally traveling, eating, shopping and loving in China in June 2012.

Jinlin started with some level of English against my total lack of Chinese. Also her younger age provides some advantage in learning new languages and she had strong will to learn both English and my native language Finnish. Still I knew that she wouldn't be able in practice to put as much effort to language learning as she wanted because of the great demands of the forthcoming exam. So that added to the importance of me learning Chinese. But I did not only need to learn Chinese, I wanted as well. You know, the kind of primitive will to be active in a relationship, to show care, to do the right thing, to engage in activities that remind of the loved one when the distance is long.

And frankly, I did find it funny to try "something completely different" as Monty Python would say. I have never been particularly language-oriented person, I rather prefer math, programming and hard sciences. I did do my high school in the U.K. and got good English skills as a side effect, but learning a language was never the focus or the main point. I happened to learn English well and I though I am never going to learn another language again.

But now I have indeed learned some Chinese. As with many activities in life, it was good that I did not know in the beginning what a gigantic task it would be to become fluent in Chinese. If I would have known, I might have given up the effort before even starting it. But I had much optimism and now I am so far that I do not want to give up learning more even though I realize the magnitude of the task.

So, what about the mothers and horses?

Chinese is hard to learn. Yes, the characters are difficult. But even if you forget about the characters and focus fully in speaking, Chinese is still hard. To be fair, I'll specify: learning speaking Chinese is hard for a 38-year old male like myself not especially skilled in languages and having most recent experience of language learning some 20 years ago. Even before discovering Chinese is hard I had already decided that for writing the characters, translation programs would be fine for me forever. What I really needed is to be able to speak with my girlfriend, and preferably on a higher level than "-sex? -okay" (There are unbelievable cases of some Eastern-Finland quiet men importing wives from Philippines in the 1980's and actually desiring not to learn any common language with them "to keep the nagging at minimum!")

The main reason spoken mandarin Chinese is difficult is that it is very compact in terms of sounds: it lacks the  characteristic redundancy of languages like English and Finnish. By redundancy I mean that most words in the dictionary are two or more syllables long and most words have a single meaning. This means that making a slight error in pronouncing a word usually leads to listener guessing the correct word or the word becoming meaningless gibberish. The gist of Chinese is this: there is no meaningless gibberish. Most Chinese words are just a single syllable long and almost all syllables have multiple completely different meanings. And the meanings depend on the tone (pitch) of the voice, there being five different tones.

Let's take the syllable "Ma" as example. It has variations "Ma" (neutral tone), "Mā" (high tone), "Má" (rising tone), "Mà" (lowering tone) and "Mǎ" (low tone). The high tone Mā means mother. The low tone "Mǎ" can mean horse or ant or code - guess from the context. The lowering "Mà" means curse. The rising "Má" means hemp. The neutral "Ma" means toad or water well or morphine. This is typical example, not a rare case. For a more extreme example, take the syllable / word "Shi" for which dictionary lists over 50 completely different meanings depending on the tone and context. So, the title of this blog post can be spoken as "Mā hé mà mǎ". With Chinese characters this is written as 妈和骂马, so there is less possibility for confusion. But that does not help when learning to speak or understand spoken mandarin. Not that I would have easy time learning those characters either.

So even with perfect pronouncing a syllable has usually many possible interpretations and the correct one should be determined from context. And when you are beginner and have slight errors in pronouncing, all hell breaks loose. Especially when beginner speaks very simple sentences or single words with little context to help determining meaning. Most of the time Chinese people will not hear you speaking gibberish but they will hear you speaking sounds that mean something completely different from your intention. And this is not theoretical, it happens. In real life, with me and Jinlin, it happens often when I open my mouth. I try to hold on to the principle that best way to learn speaking language is just to keep speaking and practicing it in real situations even when your skills are low. But this feature of the Chinese language - the fact that you can be talking of cursing horses when you want to talk of your girlfriends mother - has really been challenging my principles here.

To have some balance, I must add that we have found something in the Finnish language that is virtually impossible for Chinese people to learn to say. This is the strong Finnish "R"-sound that is characterized by tongue vibrating at low frequency in the mouth. There is nothing like that in Chinese nor in English and two weeks of attempts by Jinlin saw now audible progress towards the correct sound. So in the end I said to her she can just say "L" or the English soft "R" (with no tongue vibrations) instead. Luckily, because of the redundancy of words and syllables, in most cases that will still result in comprehensible sentences. :-)