I’ve been hooked by a Chinese soap opera called 佳人当道. (In English, they have this as “Beautiful Lawyer”, which is not really a straight translation, but it'll do). I’m busy every day keeping up with my Chinese language study, to which end one of my Chinese friends has set up streaming Chinese TV on my computer, which gives me much-needed listening practice. Speaking Chinese is tough enough, but understanding what someone says back at you is more than tough. So, I have to listen a lot. And watching the TV/computer, I found 佳人当道, and I’m hooked, in part because they speak a pretty much up-to-date everyday lingo, which is good for me to hear, and in part because it’s full of rather cute girls.
The show’s set in a law firm called “Dream Team Law Firm” (yes, this is evidently the real world) and is basically about what all soap operas are about: 
the personal lives and loves of the people in it. Most of the main characters of the show are way too young and too
good looking to be lawyers, but since we never see them ever doing any lawyering that doesn’t really matter. They spend most of their time eating and drinking in various bars and restaurants. The girls at times knock back alcohol like there’s no tomorrow. And that’s just at lunchtime. This makes them, I think, untypical Chinese girls. I know some Chinese girls who drink, but the only Chinese girls I know who drink like it's their destiny work in bars, and they have a commercial interest in getting you drunk at the same time as them. The nearest these Dream Team lawyers get to lawyer type stuff is when they carry a piece of paper around so they look sort of like they might be working. The girls have a neat line in business suits, with shirts and ties and short skirts, and the men have finely sculptured hairstyles. Of course, because my language is limited, most of the time when I'm watching I don’t have a clue what’s going on. I understand a lot of the words, but making sense of it all is another matter. But today I understood quite a lot. One of the girl lawyers (I don’t know her name; I haven’t figured out any names yet) has been made pregnant by one of the man lawyers, but his wife is also pregnant, and it’s all very typically complicated and unreal.
So anyway, that’s an hour of every day taken up for the foreseeable future, I think. I need to see what happens, and see if I can figure out what they're saying in the process. What with that and a daily dose of CSI (I have this penchant for realist TV drama, as you can tell) it’s no wonder I’m not writing poems much lately. And this is already one of those times when suddenly you’re inundated by a whole bunch of stuff and you can’t begin to keep pace. By “stuff” (a word I over-use so much I now knowingly over-use it, just to entertain myself) I mean new books, music, people…… all arriving at more or less the same time.
Recently it’s been some books of Chinese poetry (in translation, naturally) to review for Stride, books of prose poetry and “postmodern American fiction” (some of which dates back to before anyone had ever used the term "postmodern") which relate to a new class I’m going to be teaching from Monday, and new music from The Magnetic Fields (great), Vampire Weekend (current big hype thing going on, so it’s dead cool to mention them, not so cool to say they’re ok but not over-exciting; probably good live, though), and Hayden (only got that this morning, but it sounds like good Hayden-type stuff), plus the odds and sods compilation from Eels.
And I saw one of my Chinese friends and teachers this afternoon, and I was more or less able to tell her about what happened in my life between the ages of 30 and 40 in Chinese. Fuck, I could barely do that for you in English....
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