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March 14, 2006
China Day 2: American blogger in China
As we headed out to the bus Tuesday morning, Jen picked up a copy of the China Daily from the concierge. Interestingly enough, this story graced the front page:
Reports of blogs' death were greatly exaggerated
[China Daily 14 mar '06]
March 8 was International Women's Day, but for Wang Xiaofeng it might as well have been April Fool's Day.
On that day, the senior writer for Beijing-based Sanlian Life Weekly shut down his popular blog, as did Yuan Lei, an entertainment reporter for Guangzhou-based Southern Weekend.
Carol Brey-Casiano, the leader of our delegation, announced in our briefing that I was blogging the trip, and since then I've had a flurry of questions about it. Blogging in an environment where blogging is not as normal as, say, blogging a conference like Computers in Libraries, is interesting, since it has an element of novelty here.
Anyway, the article. So it turns out that later Leonard, one of our National Guides, was noticing me typing away and complimented me on my speed. We got to talking about my blogging experience, and how that really has made me even lighter in the fingers. He then shared with the the Chinese word for blog and blogger (apparently they are the same): boke, pronounced BwO ker (capital letters emphasizing the syllable, but the w is lowercase because it's really a little, light w sound). So, while "woo shee me gwoyen" (I'm going phoenetic in spelling here) is "I am an American," "woo shee me bwoker" is "I am a blogger."
"Boke" is apparently a very, very new word in Chinese, which Leonard learned from his 15-year old son. He kept hearing his son say it, and he had to stop him and ask what it meant.
As we walked out to the bus, Leonard explained that there aren't really many famous bloggers in China, but there are two in particular, a television personality and a journalist, and I mentioned the story in the paper. Lo and behold, the blogs from the story were from the two very famous bloggers in China, playing a prank on the foreign media for all their hype of the allegedly political nature of all blogs in China. Interesting that the famous bloggers here are not very political at all (or, at least they keep saying that to foreign media, but no one believes them), while the bloggers famous in America are indeed the blogs taken down for political content.
It's all about cultural perspective.
March 14, 2006 2:02 PM