Think in English with Adah

The worst train that I had ever taken set off at about 3:00p.m. on February 20, 2010 at the very peak travel period of the so-called Spring Festival transport rush. It was the Saturday before the first work week when most people came back to work from Western and Middle-eastern China to Eastern China.  

Now let me list the dire conditions of this temporarily utilized train.  

First, the train was way overloaded. There were more than 90 passengers (not including small babies) who bought a standing ticket whereas the number of seats was only 120 in one compartment. There were people in every conceivable corner of the train! I even started thinking about renovating the train so they could hang people on the ceiling or walls!  

Second, hot water for drinking became unavailable just several hours after we boarded the train. There were mothers who needed hot water to prepare the formula for their babies to drink. Holding babies less than 1 year old on average in their arms and sitting on the floor of the over-crowded aisle, they looked helpless and the only solution was to use bottled mineral water to make some cold formula drink for their babies on a winter day.

Third, the train attendant of our compartment, a young lad with acnes on his face, never showed up again after some male passengers jumped together to make noises in order to get him opening the windows to let some air in when the train paused at a temporary stop for 2 hours. Because there were no air-conditioners, ventilation was really poor unless passengers kept opening the windows when the train stopped and shutting them down when it moved again. This repetitious practice could drive people crazy for the train paused ad hoc for more than a dozen times!

Next, all the lights went off at night so it was completely dark, which made it very easy for thieves to get their jobs done. Ironically, when all the passengers had decided to immerge themselves silently in this complete darkness, some loud disco music started to be broadcasted from midnight to about 2:00a.m. Was this an act of vandalism conducted by the young train attendant when he felt bored in his nice clean rest room?

An annoying food cart selling distasteful and roughly cooked meals kept going back and forth through the standing crowd even at 2:00am. Who would buy meals in early morning? Each time the cart passed, it stirred up a great turmoil among the standing passengers. Standing passengers needed to climb up the seats in order to spare some space for the food cart. Children cried and adults grumbled. This ridiculous schedule of the food cart had pushed most people to an edgy state. The cart may have been seized by the angry passengers and the service people may even have been beaten up by the resentful. My imagination dared not to go on.

Then some deliberate black humor happened in the compartment at around 3:00a.m. The train stopped at a station and some passengers squeezed themselves in this packed-out compartment. One of the 2 toilets of the compartment was occupied by 3 passengers who decided to stay there over night despite the unpleasant smell. These people knew it profoundly that the toilet was actually the least crowded place on that train. Usually, train attendants didn’t even bother to drive these people out because they would come into the washing room again anyway. A foreseeable but helpless consequence was that more than 200 people lined up to use 1 toilet. This toilet could be called the most used toilet in the world if there was such a record.

Finally, the train had been delayed for 4 hours. There was no formal apology notices except that an informal announcement was broadcasted when the train stopped for the first time for about 2 hours.

I do not like making complaints but all these tiny things added up and it came to a point that I couldn’t neglect the bad service I had received. If I just got off the train like the rest of the passengers, I may not even talk about my ordeal on this train with my friends. But what about the mothers and the babies who needed hot water for making drinks on the next similar train? Would they have to drink cold formula again? I just couldn’t forget the helpless and tired looks on those mothers’ faces. It was time to change, even a little. I suddenly remembered a hotline number for making complaints about the railway system.

I got this hotline number (010-5184 3418) based in Beijing in late January accidentally when I was surfing on the Internet. So I dialed this number with little hope for having the current situation changed at around 8:00a.m the next morning with many seemingly calm eyes staring at me. They were actively speculating the outcome of the call, probably negative from their passive point of view. They have got used to this unfair treatment during Spring Festival transport rush so my attempt to break this ridiculous loop seemed feeble and naive. But I still wanted to do this for them and for myself. In my call, I used a very clear structure and listed the above conditions in a priority order.

The outcome of this complaint was so surreal that I even doubted the realness of it. I never expected that the railway system reacted in 1.5 hours to my complaint in such a serious way, which was beyond my fondest hopes. The female chief conductor of the train called me and came to our compartment in order to understand the real situation. This middle-aged woman with black curly hair listened to my reasons for making the complaint with great patience. Her eyes had an earnest twinkle. It appeared that she cared about my words more than anyone else on the train.

After the chief conductor understood everything, she explained some reasons for the bad service that we got and apologized sincerely. She revealed that most train attendants are underpaid and the lad we had in this compartment was temporarily assigned so he didn’t really care about the passengers. The power supply was in extreme shortage at midnight. The electricity power wasn’t enough to keep up the lights,  let alone broadcast further announcements about the delay. The train attendants did boil hot water. But there were too many people sitting on the aisle so they were afraid to scald the passengers if they moved hot water jugs from one compartment to another.

All these explanations sounded really reasonable. But weren’t they excuses? Now take a look at this insanely overloaded compartment. Everyone was not treated as a real passenger or a service buyer. We were like goods being transported in a big metal boxcar moving on wheels! This even reminded me of the inhuman treatment that the Jews got in WWII. Why did the train system sell overly excessive standing tickets when they knew clearly that the train service couldn’t accommodate this huge amount of passengers? If they set a reasonable upper limit on the number of the standing tickets they could sell, there would be far less passengers on this train. And everybody would be having a pleasant journey and getting basic on-board service! Basic train service was all we asked for for Confucius’s sake! Of course there would be passengers who couldn’t buy the standing tickets of this train if the railway system cut down on the amount of the tickets.  Instead, they would rather travel by alternative transportation tools (such as long-distance buses) in order to take a comfortable and safe trip. 

This Chinese poor people’s typical ordeal on a train could have been avoided if the railway system reduced the number of the standing tickets. This would mean less income for the railway system but it would be a really simple solution to this long-term conundrum that poor people in China always get poor train service during Spring Festival transport rush every year. Getting more money or taking care of passengers, these choices unfortunately never comes to the railway leaders’ mind when they make decisions, because they simply do not consider the railway system as part of the service industry. Now why would they care about these people from the lowest social class of China? They don’t complain. They just get off the train and get on another packed bus like sardines. They have got used to this packedness. So why bother?

Now let’s get back to our story and see what happened on the train after the chief conductor gave her sincerely worded explanations. She came to the occupied toilet and drove the 3 guys who occupied the toilet for the entire night out. Several train attendants carried 2 bottles of hot boiled water to our compartment very soon after the chief conductor gave her orders. The chief conductor also proposed that she will take out some measures in order to punish the train attendant who was supposed to serve the passengers in our compartment but did actually nothing. She suggested that she will decrease the train attendant’s salary for this month and ask him to write an apology letter and send it to my by fax as evidence for the punishment. This was getting really interesting! Nobody had ever written an apology letter to me so far. I would certainly frame it and hang it on my wall!

But the story didn’t end here. Astonishingly, the leader of Nanchang Railway Station, where the train set off from, gave me another apology phone call. This leader should be much more superior to the chief conductor. He used such a serious and hearty tone that it sounded like he was reporting to me. What he said was really not expected. He told me his anger with the train attendant in our compartment and he would just fire him and ask him to make a verbal apology in front of all the passengers in my compartment!

However, I didn’t make the complaint call in hope of that the train attendant would lose his job because some parts of my complaint were not totally his fault. But the leader of the railway station made such an abrupt decision and I can sense that he wanted to impress me with his strong willingness to make the passengers happy. I guess my complaint had been reported to the national railway system so the leader of the railway station had been reprehended by his superior officers. I guess he needed to get this complaint handled fast so he wouldn’t lose his opportunities of getting a future promotion or something.

At last, 3 minutes after the train arrived in Guangzhou East Railway Station, this irresponsible train attendant came reluctantly. He pretended to be ignorant of the passengers’ complaints against him. But after the chief conductor scolded him, he realized that there was no way out so he apologized to all the passengers and bowed. The passengers, mostly migrant workers, got excited because they never expected this kind of treatment. However, this should be the way how things are run in a service industry even in our highly populated China.

After all this, the chief conductor and the other leads required me to make a return call to the railway hotline to basically eulogize their ways of dealing with the complaint. This step of making a follow-up call must be designed by the National Railway System as a way to urge the train leaders to take actions and to keep them under surveillance. Then all the leaders shook hands with me and thanked me for “helping them to improve their service quality” before I got off the train. This was certainly an once-in-a-life-time experience for me.

I knew from that day that a complaint call can make a difference in China but certainly my call had been escalated to a certain level of management so that it could have this kind of exaggerated impact on the train staff.

Nevertheless, one thing did change in my mind. I started to understand the difference between ignoring these things and noticing them and not letting them go, even though I didn’t feel hopeful at the beginning.

Now I hope that the railway system can learn something from the Chinese army in terms of their attitude of serving the people if such an analogy stands.

This is a statue made of GRP created by Xu Hongfei in an effort to praise the Chinese army’s selfless spirit of serving the people. These 4 soldiers fell asleep while leaning against a railing during their short break when they were assigned to accommodate the passengers who got stuck in the railway stations after severe snowstorms left the railway system paralyzed in South China in 2008.

Now when will they set such a statue for train attendants? Let’s hope for the best while we have to tolerate the worst.

(Thanks for reading this article. All the photos used in the article were found online because photos were forbidden to be taken on this train after the complaint was made. This is an original article written by Adah Huang. Please contact the author before you cite the article. My email adress is litahzy@163.com.)

1. Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

 - Mark Twain (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910) an American author and humorist

2. You have learned something.  That always feels at first as if you had lost something. 

  - Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) a British writer, The Father of Science Fiction. His works include The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, When the Sleeper Wakes, and The First Men in the Moon.

3. I am learning all the time.  The tombstone will be my diploma. 

- Eartha Kitt Kitt (January 17, 1927 – December 25, 2008) an American actress, singer, and cabaret star

This argument came across my mind during a random post-lunch chat with some colleagues this noon:

Eventually it is (pretty) women who get the fortune of the entire world.

Let me explain the steps that led to this conclusion:

Step 1: Most of the time women outlive men.

Reasons: women have a lot of biological and social advantages compared with men, e.g, women do not like to consume a lot of energy at 1 time; female bodies can reserve more energy than male bodies; women eat more vegetables and fruits than men who live on a monotonous diet of meats and starch; women pay more attention to their health conditions and they like to talk about them; women release stress and bad emotions easily by crying and confiding their worries to their friends, but men do not tend to do the same because it is against the social norms that men are “big men” who do not show any weaknesses to others…

Step 2: The above rule also applies to rich men.

Despite that rich men can enjoy extremely good health care and medical services, they die prior to their wives do due to that men’s  biological decline happens much earlier than it happens to their wives.

Step 3: What’s even worse, most rich men (old or young) like to marry pretty women that are (much) younger than them. And about 85% of the fortune of the world is owned by about 15% of the polulation, the wealthy men, according to the famous 15% rule.

This means the gap between the life span of the wealthy husbands and that of their younger wives would be bigger than the average gap between the average life span of less wealthy men and that of their wives.

Step 4: These younger wives of the dead rich men get most of the heritage left by their rich husbands. The wives of less rich men or average men also get the heritage from their less rich husbands across the globe.

Step 5: Eventually women (espeically attractive women) get most of the world’s fortune by means of marriage.

A furthur conclusion:

Men make money for women to spend. The world is seemingly controlled by men but eventually it is owned by women. Wahahaha!

Carl Gustav Jung - “The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.” 

Adah’s notes: We can accept others’ merits and faults (such as our friends, colleagues and family members) completely but accepting ourselves without question stops us from growing. From time to time we need to challenge our understanding of who we are by asking questions such as “Am I good enough? Can I refuse to accept my current weaknesses as part of me? If I can, what changes are needed to get a ‘better’ me?”

Questions lead to actions. If we don’t start questioning ourselves, how can we make correct changes to ourselves? Questioning about our shortcomings helps us to be more conscious about who we are right now and who we choose to become in the future. 

This may be very hard because we are “insiders” to ourselves. One Chinese saying goes “Those closely involved cannot see clearly but the onlookers are clear-headed.” We are too closely involved in our own merits and weaknesses to see them clearly. But others cannot help us because they don’t really care or dare. An objective perpespective is needed when we look at ourselves. It has to be cruel and we need to have the courage to put ourselves under a microscope invented by ourselves. 

An introduction to  Carl Gustav Jung:

“Carl Gustav Jung (German pronunciation: [ˈkarl ˈɡʊstaf ˈjʊŋ]; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, an influential thinker and the founder of Analytical psychology. Jung’s approach to psychology has been influential in the field of depth psychology and in countercultural movements across the globe. Jung is considered as the first modern psychologist to state that the human psyche is “by nature religious” and to explore it in depth.^[1] He emphasized understanding the psyche through exploring the worlds of dreams, art, mythology, religion and philosophy. Although he was a theoretical psychologist and practicing clinician, much of his life’s work was spent exploring other areas, including Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, sociology, as well as literature and the arts. His most notable ideas include the concept of psychological archetypes, the collective unconscious and synchronicity.

^{The above 2 paragraphs are from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung .}

This is the game we used in the discussion session this week.

One of the objects in the following sets of 4 is odd. Please choose the odd one and explain the reasons. Some sets allow more than 1 reasonable answer.

Example:

Cabbage fish tomato carrot

Answer: Fish is the odd one out because the others are all types of vegatables.

1. Duck turkey lamb chicken

2. Milk salt rice tomato

3. Banana mango pineapple raspberry

4. TV computer mobile fridge

5. Syrup sauce icecream chocolate

Make your own choices and write your own explanations.

This essay has been published on Issue No.7 of Huizhi - an Accenture Greater China Employee Newsletter. Copyright fully reserved.

WOMEN will spend more than 8 years averagely

 in shopping according to a recent study conducted by GE Money! One of the possible reasons that shopping is mostly done by women is NOT because women like to indulge themselves into making choices among colors, styles, sizes and smells, but that men in the house DO NOT shop!

Dealing with over 8 years of shopping experience (retail experience to be more exact) that should commence at an age of a girl,  most women are trying to develop great retail skills out of just grabbing their targets and going away. Women should treat these 8 years with real delicacy in the way of carrying on a second profession in their life. This can be an art for men to learn in years! Men are not likely to shop around to get the best price. They never comprehend why a on-sale message from your favorite mall would infuse you and you would be on your way to the mall in the next 15 minutes however exhausted you are. They seldom know where to get great deals of the last season or year at discount stores. They never understand why a great deal - buying a cup with 5 yuan off would throw women into ecstasy!

Women relate their shopping experience with an array of aspects that might be meaningless to men, such as how they like the way the sales clerks address them, the decoration in the mall and even how a brand tag is attached to an item: whether it’s sealed on the clothes or just strung with a fine nylon! This could be the reason why men tend to enjoy shopping experience much more than women do. They are not susceptible to these subtleties nor they choose to be just for convenience.

It is very common to find in China that a new wife who usually buy things for her family at high prices would be called a wasteful wife by her parents-in-law and a prediction that she is likely to squander the money of the family some time in the future would be made against her automatically.  She could get some credits off the record of being a good wife and a future mother immediately if she does not know how to improve. Stereotypes in China or almost every other country help men to rid the inconvenience of shopping around and women have to go out and do more shopping than their boyfriends or husbands do.

But women are in luck that we actually FEEL happy in simply keeping ourselves fed and clothed with our own careful choices. As a woman, I know how strong the sense of achievement emanated from shopping is, which could drive us further than 8 years. It is said that the habit of collecting berries and roots had been coded in women’s genes since ancient times when modern human beings (homo sapiens) lived on the planet several hundred thousand years ago. Female homo sapiens brought tubers, fruits and vegetables in all colors with all kinds of odors and tastes back to their houses  (or should I say caves?) while the male just brought some plain dead meat which looks and tastes not too differently! Just imagine that and you can realize why women are genetically able to sense so many variations and choose from them.

Why do women shop more often than men do? This is a question for men basically. For a woman, why not feel great when you know there are a lot of good deals out there waiting for you?

by Kerry Maxwell, author of Brave New Words, with recordings by speechinaction

“gas-sipper” also “gas sipper” noun [C] informal
a vehicle which is cheap to drive because it does not use a lot of fuel

“gas-sipping” adjective [U]

‘Should you dump the SUV for a gas-sipper? That’s the question everyone is asking these days …’
Business Wire 30th June 2008

‘Scooter sales appear to be climbing faster than the price of gasoline … Smith said his business has grown 200 percent in the last few months. It’s been so good that he’s now collecting deposits on the gas-sippers until he can catch up with the backlog.’ -Houston Chronicle 3rd July 2008

‘Meanwhile, the Japanese manufacturers are continuing to crank out gas-sipping hybrids (Toyota’s Prius is selling like hotcakes) and companies you never heard of are beginning to market a wide range of hybrid and plug-in electric vehicles for neighborhood or short distance use.’ -Western Farm Press 16th July 2008

Price, recorded mileage, colour … cup-holder? The factors influencing which car to purchase are as diverse as the motorists themselves. If, however, your main priority is fuel consumption – whether that’s for financial or strictly eco-friendly reasons – then what you should be looking to buy is a gas-sipper.

With the cost of fuel reaching record highs on both sides of the Atlantic, suddenly it seems more important than ever to consider those ‘miles to the gallon’ (or ‘litres per 100 kilometres’ in metric terminology). The question is just how far can our beloved four-wheeled friend travel on a full tank of juice? Whereas in recent years we were preoccupied with vehicle size, both for practical and aspirational reasons, we’ve now realised that there’s something to be said for economy, whether wanting to save cash, or the planet. And the English language has responded. The nineties gave us the gas guzzler, and the noughties has correspondingly seen the emergence of the gas sipper.

Following the pattern of gas guzzler and related adjective gas-guzzling, vehicles which are economical on fuel can be described as gas-sipping. As well as conventional cars with low running costs, the term gas-sipper can apply to alternative forms of transport which are cheap to run, such as motor scooters and electric or so-called hybrid cars (cars with more than one power source, such as batteries or an electric motor as well as a conventional engine).

The current period of escalating fuel prices, coupled for many consumers with a growing environmental conscience, has created an unprecedented demand for gas sippers. Scooter manufacturers are reporting record sales. In the car industry, technological innovation becomes increasingly significant, as manufacturers struggle to meet the demand for more energy efficient, gas-sipping models. This is particularly the case in countries whose governments have imposed a gas-guzzler tax, which is a levy on large, energy-inefficient domestic vehicles.

Background

The expression gas-sipper is new for 2008, and is of course an extension of the ‘drinking’ metaphor used in gas guzzler (according to the Macmillan English Dictionary, to guzzle is ‘to eat or drink a lot quickly …’ whereas to sip is ‘to drink in small amounts’). Gas is short for gasoline, a word used in American English whose British equivalent is petrol. Though gas is US only, gas guzzler is used in both varieties, with far less evidence for lexicalisation of expressions such as petrol guzzler.

Related neologisms in this domain are the expressions ecodriving and hyperdriving, (also ecomiling and hypermiling) which refer to the practice of adapting your driving style in order to reduce fuel consumption. Typical measures include better anticipation of traffic flow (therefore reducing the amount of braking and accelerating, which wastes fuel), driving in higher gears, and maintaining a steady (and preferably slower) speed. Drivers who adopt these measures are correspondingly referred to as ecodrivers/ecomilers or hyperdrivers/hypermilers.

Search the Web Google hits on 28th July 2008

gas sipper 32,700
gas-sipping 59,500
fuel sipper 25,800
fuel-sipping 95,500
ecodriving 73,400
hyperdriving 1,100
ecomiling 54
hypermiling 719,000
ecodriver 4,460
ecomiler 6
hypermiler 270,000
gas guzzler 1,030,000
gas-guzzling 876,000

I would like to share a great website where you could find meanings and origins of a staggering amount of English phrases with you. Here is the link to the index page: http://www.phrases.org.uk/index.html. You can discover that there are four columns on this index page:

1. Meaning and Origins (This sub-link is a free but powerful phrase finder engine spawning information of phrases as the title suggests: http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/index.html. You could also browse phrases by the beginning letters of the first words of the phrases you are finding. The explanations you can find through this engine are fully studied and correct.)

2. The Phrase Thesaurus (A thesaurus is something like a dictionary with more synonyms. However, you need to subscribe and pay for this service before you use it.)

3. Bulletin Board (If you still couldn’t find the meanings and origins of the phrases from the first phrase finder engine, have a go on this bulletin board. If you click on the term ‘Discussion Forum’ included in this column, you will be steered to another searching engine powered by the database of Phrase Finder Archives: http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/index.html. All the explanations that you can find through this engine came from the understanding of individuals, mostly native, on the meanings and the origins of the English phrases you are looking for. Please be sure to know that what you have found from this engine might not be the true definitions of the phrases. But this can allow you pick from different perpectives the most accurate meanings and origins. And you have to be really smart to tell the correct meanings or origins from the one-sided ones, which means you also need to use your brain in learning new phrases.)

4. A Phrase A Week (Learning one phrase a week should not be too demanding for all English learners. You can subscribe this for free by typing in your name and email address and the system will send you a phrase a week. )

When to use these phrase finder engines? 

It is a common experience of us that sometimes dictionaries does not tell you the meanings and origins of some phrases such as “go the whole nine yards”. What are you going to do if you are still self-driven to know the meaning of it? It is time for you to try these phrase finder engines! 

This phrase finder engine provides more than 70,000 previous postings on English phrases written by the general public, which might not be able to be located in both online and brick-and-mortal dictionaries. This can help us in getting to know difficult English phrases once we couldn’t find them in a dictionary.

Be smart when you use the third engine “Bulletin Board”.

This is just a reminder for those who are big fans of McDonald’s or KFC that hanburgers and sandwiches are two different types of food.

The thing that defines what a hamburger is is that there is a fried cake of ground BEEF and other ingredients in the middle of the two or more slices of bread. This is what a hamburger looks like:

A sandwich has the same appearance of a hamburger and its fillings include chicken, pork, fish, shrimps and a lot more except beef. Here is a picture of a chicken sandwich:

Finally here comes the latest shrimp sandwiches from KFC:

Yummy!

We have learned a lot of facial expressions and feelings that human beings would experience everyday. I am not confident in that all of you can still remember how to describe those complicated emotions that we have in ourselves every day. However, I do believe you can understand that the cycle of language learning that we introduced during one of our dialogue sessions involves 3 steps: “learning”, “memorizing” and “practising”. A cycle is so in that it is an ongoing process during which every step in it will recur once in a while. There is only one kind of raw materials which needs to be repeatedly used during all of the 3 steps in the learning cycle, which is language input, including new words, sentence patterns and new sound combinations.

An reflection on my own English learning experience also tells me that our human brain espeically an adult brain is heavily reliant on repeated language input when acquiring a foreign language. If you revisit our old training materials and practice those language points in them as often as possible, you will find out it is really worthwhile in doing so for you will become more familiar with the language terms we’ve learned in the past.

 Enough for the linguistic muttering! Let’s revisit those facial expressions and emotions shown in the following pictures: