Some reflections on a Chinese language post from My Chinese Blog Experiment, called Top 10找 on Baidu: 什么是幸福? You can also read about some of my other Chinese Language Posts here.

This post is actually a sort of a supplement to a post made by a friend of mine, Dan Johnson, on his great website, Chinese: Beyond the Textbook. Dan has probably implemented the pinyin hover tool as well as anyone I’ve seen. Or I should say, he takes useful chinese text or dialogues, and annotates it with pinyin in order to produce interesting texts for Chinese study. One of the problems that many foreigners face when studying Chinese - or at least, it’s a problem I faced - is that the dialogues and sample texts that you study are really goddamned boring.

I mean, every text seems to have a Mary (Mali) and a John (Yuehan), and there’s probably an Ali somewhere in there also. And most likely the craziest situation those three are likely to have is Mary running a fever, and the boys bringing her to the campus clinic for some Chinese over-the-counter goodness. Maybe if Mary put out more, it’d make for better dialogues… 我的天啊！

Anyway, to combat this kind of mind-numbing fuckery, Dan has posted tons of somewhat more unconventional texts, one of which was from the movie Gimme Kudos/求求你，表扬我. This is the wittiest thing I’ve ever seen in my short time flirting with the Chinese language:

古：什么叫幸福？ - What is happiness?
杨：幸福啊？ - Happiness?
古：嗯，你怎么看？ - Mmm, in your opinion.
杨：幸福……那就是……我饿了 - Happiness . . . is . . . if I’m hungry . . .
看别人手里拿个肉包子 - and I see someone holding a meat bun . . .
那他就比我幸福。 - then he is happier than me.
我冷了 - I’m cold . . .
看别人穿了一件厚棉袄 - and I see someone wearing a thick coat . . .
他就比我幸福 - he’s happier than me.
我想上茅房 - I need the toilet . . .
就一个坑 - but there’s only one . . .
你蹲那了 - and you’re squatting there . . .
你就比我幸福 - then you’re happier than me.

(some girls behind him snigger)

杨：可笑吗？ - what’s so funny?
没上过茅房啊 - you’ve never been to the toilet?

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So why write about “What is Happiness?” on my Chinese Blog?

Well, 2 reasons really. The first being, this Chinese blog is, as I’ve stated an experiment. I’m interested in learning about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in China. I’ve targeted one of the most common searches on Baidu, and I’m gonna see if it results in some traffic. I’m not gonna lie to you. I’m relatively new to making websites, and I’m experimenting to see what works. I’ve put all the keywords in the title, I’ve put the keywords in heading and meta tags as well. I’m curious to see if any hits come back, based on search engine results alone. I’m also experimenting with having Chinese characters in the url. And that’s something that may or may not work in my favor. It remains to be seen.

The second reason I wrote this post, is essentially the whole reason why I keep a Chinese Blog to begin - and that’s simply to try to improve my Chinese. And what better way to do so that to choose a topic that I like, and one that can be of some value to readers as well — that being, the eternal search for happiness.

Does the Search for Happiness End at Baidu?

With any luck the search for happiness on baidu will bring a few Chinese people to my post. Now what was my answer to “What is happiness?” Well, while I absolutely love this little speech from gimme kudos, I think it does shed some light on one inherent characteristic of Chinese culture. And that’s the all-too-common instinct to compare yourself with others. Chinese people are often very concerned with rankings. Number 1 in population, number 3 is geographical size, third country on the moon, blah blah blah… David Letterman would have a field day if he brought the top ten list over the wall.

What’s My suggestion for attaining happiness?

Stop comparing yourself to others. Because no matter how much you have, there’s always gonna be someone else with more.

And that goes for everyone. Not just China.

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