Formidable or terrible?

Yesterday was a fine day in Beijing—very clear, with a blue sky, and temperatures in the lower 40s. You could actually see the Fragrant Hills. Beijing is quite flat, on a plateau, but it has hills to the north (where the Great Wall passes through) and to the west, which are the Fragrant Hills, known in Chinese as Xiang Shan. That is really only significant because Hong Kong in Chinese is actually Xiang Gang, which means “Fragrant Harbor.” I guess fishiness is fragrant to someone.

I ran 13 miles yesterday, in the Yuyuantan Park, another park near here (about 1.6 miles away, according to the TOMS). I wanted to just tune out and wear my iPod but decided not to, partially due to having to deal with traffic to get to the park (fear not, parental units and other folk inclined to worry, I only turn on the iPod once I get to a safe spot) but also because I wanted to really be present on my run. That was a good choice—I had a few interesting encounters. Yuyuantan also features a lake in the middle, bigger than the Purple Bamboo Park—Yuyuantan is 2.4 miles around for one lap. At one end of the lake were people ice fishing, although I’d guess the ice is rather precarious, given all the warm days we’ve had. At the other end were people swimming! Mostly middle-aged men. Some of them started yelling at me that I should be swimming as I ran by, which leads us to today’s Chinese word. I responded to them that swimming was far too lihai for me—lihai being a fairly untranslatable word, kind of like re’nao. It means “terrible, formidable” according to my dictionary. They replied that my Chinese was “lihai.” (I’m hoping here that what they were going for was the “formidable” rather than the “terrible”!). I later stopped for a bottle of water (40 cents, in case you were wondering) and the man asked where I was from. When I replied “Mei Guo (United States),” he said, “People who have been there say it is kind of like tiantang (paradise, heaven).” I replied that we have problems of our own. In Chinese, the word for the United States, Mei Guo, means “beautiful country” and I wonder how literally they take that.

I am actually not always happy to admit being from the U.S. these days, given the lack of popularity of our country overseas, but people are generally kind. A few, lately, have said, “Oh, I thought you looked French.” I’ve been afraid to ask what that means!