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Beer pick: Lost in Translation IPA, Talking Waters Brewing, Montevideo
Lost in Translation has a lot of hop flavor without too much hop bitterness. A very pleasant IPA with layers of juicy flavors.
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Bruce LeBlanc, Special to the TimesPublished 8:00 a.m. CT May 22, 2021
Like many stories of craft breweries, the Talking Waters Brewery was started by three avid homebrewers, Nick Patton, Phil Zachman and John Skogland. All three-love craft beer and the friendly community that comes with quality beer.
Being that the small town of Montevideo and the surrounding area had no brewery, they decided in 2016 to open the towns first Craft Brewery. Now we can enjoy the fruits of their labor in cans locally.
Lost in Translation, a juicy DDH IPA, has a hazy yellow-gold color with a huge fluffy white head. It has a tropical and citrusy aroma.
The flavor starts with semisweet pale malts followed by an assertive hop character. The Citra, Mosaic and El Dorado hops lend citrusy and tropical flavors. Hints of mango, grapefruit and pear fill the palate.
Lost in Translation has a lot of hop flavor without too much hop bitterness. A very pleasant IPA with layers of juicy flavors. Be sure to give it a try next time you are looking for beer and be sure to stop in at their friendly brewery next time you are in the Montevideo area.
Learn more about craft beers from Cloudy Town Brewers on Facebook: http://bit.ly/2fL9bFT.
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NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Language barrier has always been a big problem for people who speak different languages. There are many translation apps trying to solve this problem, however, the language obstacles to people's remote communication has not yet been well resolved. It is impossible for a person to make a phone call to another one who speaks a different language that he totally does not understand. But iTourTranslator , which has various functions such as phone call translation, video call translation, conference translation, etc., has pushed way the barrier and made it a past story.
When using iTourTranslator , the caller only need to know the phone number of the recipient ,whose phone can be a mobile phone or a landline phone and the receiver, who doesn’t need to download the app, just pick up the phone and answer it. When the caller speaks Spanish, the receiver will hear English and when the receiver answer in English, it will be translated to Spanish. iTourTranslator supports dozens of languages including English, Spanish, German, French, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Arabic, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Portuguese, Catalan and Thai. Click the link below for the demo video. https://youtu.be/dyj9cQA3nQ0
People can also use iTourTranslator to translate WhatsApp voice call. The Caller sends a link to his or her friend on social platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Line, Telegram or Wechat. When the receiver clicks the link in WhatsApp, the voice call or video call can be made, and the call will be translated in real time. The receiver does not need to download iTourTranslator, nor need to register it, which is very convenient.
People can also use iTourTranslator to have a meeting, and the voice in the meeting will be translated in real time. The function of the meeting in iTourTranslator is similar to that of Zoom. Considering that many users like to use Zoom or Teams for meetings, iTourTranslator has developed a real-time translation function. When users use software such as Zoom or Teams during a meeting, by turning on the real-time translation function in iTourTranslator app, the speech in the meeting will be translated into bilingual subtitles in real time.
The sudden cancellation on Friday of the second hearing in China’s biggest #MeToo case shows just how arduous the legal journey is for women who have been subjected to sexual harassment and exploitation. While Xianzi defies the trolls and continues her fight for legal action against her harasser, many other Chinese women have been sucked into the vortex of an indifferent legal system and a hateful public.
On June 20, 2018, a teenager in Gansu Province jumped from an eighth-story window, to the cheers of the crowd below and on the livestreaming app Kuaishou. Nineteen-year-old Li Yiyi had struggled to go on living after her teacher sexually assaulted her in September 2016. Plagued by depression and PTSD, she spent the years after the attack out of school, criss-crossing the country with her father seeking treatment. When the court dismissed her case, Li’s father tried to shield her from the news. But his daughter found out, and days later was sitting on the ledge of a department store in Qingyang City with onlookers egging her on and posting comments on social media asking her to hurry up and jump. Four hours later, Li declined a firefighter’s outstretched hand and leapt.
Despite the outrage immediately following her death, Li’s family today feels forgotten. The criminal case against her assaulter, Wu Yonghou, was reopened thanks largely to Li’s father, but the court ultimately ruled that the teacher’s “obscene behavior” had not been the sole cause of Li’s suicide. The family did win compensation from Wu and the school in a civil case, concluded in January 2021, but not even enough to pay off the debt accumulated over two years of their daughter’s medical treatment. Wu’s assault devastated not only Li, but her entire family, now financially and emotionally drained by their struggles to save their daughter and bring her teacher to justice.
In this longform report for Sohu News WeChat account @media-fox (极昼工作室), translated in full by CDT below, Cai Jiaxin conducts extensive interviews with Li Yiyi’s family, focusing on her father, and brings this tragedy back out of the shadows:
A firefighter tries to save Li Yiyi (online photo)
Dreams
Li Wenjun’s daughter had come back. The grape vines in the courtyard had all withered for the season. She was sweeping up the sawdust on the ground. His daughter looked as she did at 14 or 15—youthful, cute, clever. The weather had already cooled off. Wenjun squatted in front of the furnace room, tidying up the kindling.
These last two years, Li Wenjun often has vivid dreams like this one. At night, when he closes his eyes, scene after scene of his daughter floats to the surface of his mind: sometimes, he’s up on a windowsill wiping down the glass, his daughter by his side wringing out the rags; other times, he’s preparing vegetables with his daughter busily cooking beside him.
More often than not, he’s haunted by nightmares: he’s walking along a wide, flat road, with no one else around, when suddenly the road begins to collapse in front of him. He wakes up in a panic, yet he dares not make any sudden movements, for fear of waking up his 14-year-old son, who sleeps head-to-head with him on an L-shaped sofa. The boy has nightmares, too. He sometimes jumps up out of sleep or starts screaming. Wenjun springs up and soothes him, gently calming his confused son.
In the next room, Xiao Xuemei hears these midnight disturbances as clear as day. It’s cold at night; her hands and feet ache. She tosses and turns. Sometimes she picks up her phone and scrolls through pictures of her daughter from when she was 1, 5, 10… up until the year she left.
In 2016, Li Wenjun and Xiao Xuemei’s daughter, Li Yiyi, a student at Qingyang No. 6 Secondary School, was molested by her homeroom teacher, Wu Yonghou. She was subsequently diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. On June 20, 2018, after two excruciating years, 19-year-old Yiyi jumped from the eighth floor of a commercial building in Qingyang City, Gansu Province. Even since that day, restful nights have been hard to come by.
By day, they seem like an ordinary family. Freshly-made meals appear on the table like clockwork. They eat together, listening to their son fill them in on his schoolwork and day-to-day life. Xiao Xuemei keeps an aloe plant to help treat their son’s acne. Next to it she has a lucky bamboo plant growing out of a glass of water. Li Wenjun’s 80-year-old father sits with them, eating quietly. No one has told him the real reason why Yiyi passed away. “Maybe he knows,” Wenjun says. “We probably won’t say.”
The days pass uneventfully in their less-than-80-square-meter apartment. This is the life Li Wenjun has rebuilt for himself. After his daughter’s death, he reunited with his former wife. He rented a two-bedroom apartment in the city so they could live with their son while he attended secondary school. He fell in love with the apartment as soon as he laid eyes on it—the huge window in the living room, the snow-white walls and floor tiles. He made sure to bring the white sofa, coffee table, and television stand from his old place. Rent is 830 yuan a month—not a trivial expense. But “the light is really good. My son and the old man will be happier here,” Wenjun explains.
When their son goes off to school, the cheerful facade disintegrates. Xiao Xuemei hides in her room, painstakingly recalling every detail of her daughter’s life. When Li Yiyi was 10 she learned to make steamed bread. One time, she snuck into the kitchen and rolled out a batch of dough while her mother was busy washing clothes. The pair loved buying matching mother-daughter outfits. But no matter how much she agonizes over these memories, her daughter remains forever out of reach. In moments like these, all she can do is open up the dresser drawer with her daughter’s old clothes and pinch the fabric between her fingers, just to feel it. The outfits she used to wear, her old khaki jacket—“I miss her so much.”
When Li Wenjun needs to clear his mind, he goes out alone. It’s springtime now. Green buds sprout from the willows lining the streets of Qingyang. But under the willows, he looks like a withered old tree. Though only 49, his posture is slightly stooped, he moves slowly, and frosty white hair covers his temples. He’s lost over 15 kilograms over the past two years. His eyes appear sunken and filled with sorrow, unable to focus.
In April 2020, Wu Yonghou was sentenced to two years in prison for the crime of forcing another person into an obscene act. The court took into account the time he had already served, and Wu was released in August. Li Wenjun heard nothing more about him for over half a year. The ruling in the civil case came out in January 2021: Wu and Qingyang No. 6 were to pay 67,000 RMB and 16,000 RMB, respectively, in compensation to the Li family.
It seemed the case would end there. The tower Yiyi jumped from stands less than a kilometer away from the family apartment. That strip of road had been under construction over the last two years, and it looks almost completely different now. There is an underground shopping center and a large department store. The shops lining the street bustle as before. It feels as if the city has moved on—the fate of that 19-year-old-girl has faded into the past.
Only the Li family is stuck. Whenever Wenjun drives by that building, he turns his head away so that he doesn’t see it. The evening sunlight gleams across his face. The mole below his right eye makes him look even more bereaved, this father who has lost his daughter.
Wenjun still wants to fight for justice for his daughter and his family, but “I don’t know what I should do next.” They’re still tens of thousands of yuan in debt for their daughter’s medical treatment. The settlement money, less than 85,000 yuan, fell far short of paying it off. Now their daughter is gone, their son is still young, and both Wenjun and Xiao Xuemei are plagued by illness. He wants to file a lawsuit, but he can’t find a lawyer willing to take the case.
Just like Xiao Xuemei facing the cliffs in her nightmares, “There’s nowhere to go,” Li says.
“There’s Nothing Daddy Can Do”
When he is alone, Li Wenjun often takes out the court documents—looking them over, circling things, taking notes—before carefully placing them back into their see-through plastic folder. His hands shaking, he makes sure all the pages lay flat, so as to not ruffle the corners. Like his despair, the legal documents keep piling up.
He feels he’s already done everything a father could possibly do. The first time he noticed something amiss with his daughter was September 6, 2016. That day, Yiyi’s face was all red when she got home from school. She sweated profusely the whole night, soaking her hair. Wenjun assumed she was feeling pressured by her studies. Still, he went down to the school to talk with her teacher, Wu Yonghou, whom he found at the teachers’ residence on campus. “What happened to my daughter?” he asked him,. Wu turned his back to Wenjun and faced the wall. “Nothing at all. She’s fine,” Wu said sullenly.
Over a month later, his daughter finally told him what had happened. On the evening of September 5, during study hall, Yiyi’s stomach began to hurt, so she went to rest alone at the teachers’ residence. Wu Yonghou seized the opportunity: he grabbed her and held her down. He touched her back, then tore her clothing, kissing her forehead, cheeks, ears, lips and other areas.
Wenjun’s first reaction was to rush to take revenge. But his daughter stopped him. “Don’t be angry, don’t be impulsive, don’t leave me.”
Xiao Xuemei was working in Shanghai at the time. They didn’t immediately tell her about the situation because Yiyi was concerned over Xuemei’s health. Everything fell on Wenjun’s shoulders. He had no idea what was happening, but he promised his daughter, “You just focus on getting better. Everything else, you leave up to Dad.”
Thanks to Wenjun’s persistence, the police finally opened a case. The Xifeng Branch of the Qingyang Public Security Bureau placed Wu Yonghou in administrative detention for ten days in May 2017. Yiyi did not approve. “They’re basically just giving him a ten-day vacation,” she said coldly to her father.
Wenjun then went to the juvenile division of the public prosecutor’s office. A few months later, he received formal notice they had decided against prosecution. He didn’t know how he could face his daughter with this news. He hid the notice. But Yiyi eventually came across it. “Dad, just drop it,” she told him, disheartened.
Those words remain knotted in Wenjun’s heart. This was the first time he felt so helpless as a father.
He worried that his daughter would commit suicide. She attempted many times. She took sleeping pills, jumped from buildings, turned on the gas, hid pesticides… From Qingyang to Xi’an, Shanghai, and Beijing, Wenjun ran all over working on the case and taking his daughter to different hospitals.
The doctors insisted that someone had to monitor her 24 hours a day. At night, while Yiyi was in her room, Wenjun sat on the living room sofa, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee to stay awake. Worried he’d fall asleep, he didn’t dare lay down. He stayed sitting upright until morning broke.
The doctors also recommended that he try to give his daughter everything she needed, even if it meant spending a little more money. He did as they asked. Because of the medication she had been taking, Yiyi was quickly gaining weight. He kept buying her new clothes, only to have to throw them away soon after. The stuffed animals and dolls he brought home would soon be cast aside.
Wenjun tried to understand this illness—one he had never heard of before. He always said: She can’t control herself. She doesn’t drop things on purpose. She has double vision. She just doesn’t get a good grip on things, and they drop to the floor.
The most gratifying moments came when his daughter asked him for something. Normally, she didn’t express interest in anything in particular. On trips to Beijing, all she wanted to do was lay down in the hotel room. Wenjun encouraged her to get out and have a look around: Shichahai, the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven… Once, she said she wanted to go to Sanlitun to see Black Swan Cake. The father-daughter duo stood outside the display window, shocked at the price tag—over 300,000 yuan for a multi-layered cake! He cherished these moments taking his daughter out shopping. He spent 120 yuan on a white short-sleeved shirt for her that day.
Wenjun ran himself ragged. His body was aging rapidly. Waiting to see his daughter in a crowded hospital hallway one day, he suddenly began experiencing heart palpitations. His chest tightened up and he broke out in a cold sweat. He was sent to the emergency room.
Two tough years went by. Treatment, shopping, normal household expenses—hundreds of thousands of yuan in savings quickly evaporated. Wenjun began asking people to lend him money. Despite it all, he still had hope. “I always thought, as long as I put in the work, my daughter will get better.”
After learning about the debt her family was in, Yiyi told her father that she wanted to get a job. She was spending her days at home, having suspended her studies. Her head physician agreed. But Wenjun was worried. He followed behind her as she walked to her job and brought her food and medicine at set times and locations each day.
In May 2018, Wenjun took his daughter to Beijing for treatment, and made plans with the doctors for her to spend time at the hospital in July. Around that time, Yiyi started reposting information about the college entrance exams. She also started having severe mood swings. On June 19, out of the blue, she told her father that she wanted to go to college, that it was her dream to study media in Shanghai—her previous dream. The next day, she jumped from the eighth floor of a commercial building in downtown Qingyang.
“All I wanted, with my whole heart, was to protect my daughter. In the end, I couldn’t. All these years of effort—all for nothing,” Wenjun said.
“My Daughter”
A few spells of springtime rain passed over Qingyang. Some moisture still remained in the March air as Wenjun went back to his ancestral village, Tielichuancun. The family home there still retained some traces of his daughter—her clothes and books sat untouched. “If nothing had happened, my daughter would’ve been graduating and looking for a job this year,” Wenjun remarked softly as we walked through the village. He paused, then let out a sigh.
Tielichuancun lies 30 kilometers outside of central Qingyang. His daughter was born there in 1999. They named her Yiyi, “meaning beautiful and graceful,” Wenjun explained.
Wenjun still talks about “my daughter” out of habit. Signs of his daughter’s presence abound throughout the village. “My daughter used to take her easel and musical instruments down to the river to play with her friends.” In spring wildflowers covered the hillside, and “my daughter used to always bring a bouquet back to the house and arrange them in a bottle with water.” Passing by Malian Bridge, he pointed to a tree growing out of a gap in one of the supports. “My daughter said you have to be strong, like this tree.”
Now that they are separated by death, these scenes sting.
Wenjun stood atop a 20-meter-high cliff. The spring wind blew all around. Dust and grass swept up in the wind made him squint, blurring his vision. He didn’t seem to notice the wind as he pointed to a mud-brick hut in the distance. “That’s where my daughter grew up.” The topic of conversation changed once again. One time, his daughter was sitting on the cliff, yelling, “Don’t come over! Don’t come over!” The dried grass and mud under his feet were loose and soft. Worried and afraid, he cried, “Yiyi, you come over here first, alright?”
“Dad, don’t save me. It hurts too much,” Yiyi cried during those two years of illness. It takes Wenjun’s breath away every time he recalls those words.
He misses how she was before she was sick. The first time she made sushi, Wenjun bought her a bamboo mat and seaweed sheets. His son barred the door while his daughter messed around in the kitchen, shouting, “I want to surprise you, Dad!” Another time, they were at a restaurant and his daughter discovered the secret ingredient for delicious red-braised pork—honey, instead of white sugar. She whipped up a batch for her Dad as soon as they got home. Her Grandpa has dentures, so Yiyi used to carefully pick out all the bones from fish for him.
Wenjun pampered her, too. He called his chef friend when Yiyi needed help with confusing recipes. When he was working in Shanghai, before 2010, he bought her gifts every time he had a day off. If he couldn’t fit all the gifts in his bag, he’d take his clean change of clothes out to make room.
In 2014, they built a new two-story house back in the village. Wenjun decided to get a crystal chandelier that Yiyi liked for the living room, even though he knew it would be difficult to keep clean. It took four workers an entire day to install the huge fixture, which had over ten thousand little parts. After Wenjun and Xiao Xuemei divorced in 2013, Xiao Xuemei moved to Shanghai to find work, and Wenjun volunteered to take custody of the two children. “The kids need a hot meal when they get home,” he says.
Yiyi’s classmate Liu Chen will never forget the figure of Li Wenjun, the man who always appeared in the doorway to their classroom with hot water or hot food for Yiyi whenever she was having abdominal pain, a common occurrence. “He was a really responsible guy. He took really good care of her,” Liu says.
Yiyi’s homeroom was the next door down from Liu’s. He remembers her as hard-working and quiet, the first to arrive at school virtually every day. She didn’t wander around much between classes. Together, there were over 100 students in the two homerooms. They had physics together. One day, Liu was having difficulty understanding the lecture. Yiyi, sitting next to him, saw him furrowing his brow. “I’ll explain it to you,” she offered. After that, they often worked on physics together. Yiyi was a scrupulous student, always able to recognize key points. Sometimes Liu wasn’t willing to admit that she caught things faster than he did: “That’s what I thought, too, just now,” he would say. She would just smile. “She never called me out on it.”
Liu later heard that Yiyi was going through mental health issues. He occasionally saw her around school with an absent-minded look about her. He didn’t think much about it; it was right before college entrance exams. He was in a university chemistry class when he heard about Yiyi’s fall. Liu’s chemistry grades were poor in high school. Wu Yonghou used to call him up to solve problems at the blackboard. If he got it wrong, Wu would pat him on the head. What Wu did to Yiyi, Liu found “inconceivable.”
After her passing, visions of Yiyi flashed before Liu’s eyes every time physics came up. He’s already a college freshman, waking up at 6:00 a.m. to prepare for the CET-4 and graduate school exams. He has even become the top playmaker on the school basketball team.
It was the kind of future Yiyi had wanted for herself. She had served on the class art committee at Qingyang No. 6. Her English and physics grades were top-notch. At home on the weekends, she was always pushing her brother to do his homework—the two of them would race to see who could finish the fastest.
In 2017, struggling with mental illness, she dropped out of school. “I just had never considered not going to college,” she told her father in tears.
It became a needle in her heart. She once invited an old classmate on break from college to dinner at the Li household in Tielichuancun. Wenjun prepared a table full of dishes. But right before they were supposed to meet, Yiyi’s mood suddenly became unstable and she got on a bus straight back to Qingyang. Wenjun rushed after her. When he returned to Tielichuancun days later, all the food on the table had grown fuzzy with mold.
Searching
Li Wenjun never gave up appealing the case. More than two months after his daughter’s passing, the Gansu Province Prosecutor reopened an investigation.
Was Yiyi suffering from depression or in a depressed state before she was molested? This was the focus of the trial, the question that would determine how much responsibility Wu Yonghou bore for Yiyi’s death.
Beijing Anding Hospital issued its final diagnosis: post-traumatic stress disorder. Wenjun looked it up online: suicidal behavior may be exhibited in the month following a trauma. She was molested on September 5 and first attempted suicide at home on October 7. “The timing checks out,” Wenjun said. This made him even more sure that Wu had directly caused his daughter’s illness.
Wenjun began searching all over for Yiyi’s high school classmates to help prove that his daughter had not been depressed before the incident.
But he failed to connect with even a single person. He called every number on his list. Only one answered the phone, but after listening to Wenjun, the person on the other line simply told him they didn’t know. Wenjun and his lawyer once even drove to a university 100 kilometers away to meet with a group of Yiyi’s former classmates. The students were accompanied by school advisors, who all sat to one side of the room. None of the students said a word. Wenjun had no choice but to give up. The mother of one of Yiyi’s classmates even blocked Wenjun outside their door, begging him to stop bothering her kid.
Unbeknownst to Wenjun for a long time after the incident, Yiyi’s physics teacher, Mr. Luo, was a key witness. Luo’s daughter and Yiyi had been classmates. On the day of the incident, Luo had his daughter take Yiyi back to the teachers’ residence to rest. At about 9:00 p.m., Luo returned and saw “Li Yiyi laying on the bed. Wu Yonghou was sitting at an angle, facing Yiyi. The electricity was out at the time; the room was really dark.” He noticed that “Yiyi’s hair was a little messy, and she sounded a bit as if she was sobbing when she responded to me.”
Luo has always been an upfront guy. His wife, Chen Qingyang, complains, “Whatever he knows, he just says it—low EQ.” When Luo got home that night, he asked his wife, “Did Yiyi have her hair in a braid today?” He felt something was wrong. “Yes,” his wife replied. Luo told her what he saw, pointing out that Yiyi’s hair was loose. Chen shook her hands, dismissing his suspicions. “No way. Mr. Wu is such an introvert. And he’s so old, too.”
Chen remembers Yiyi as “really good-looking. Her teeth weren’t straight, but it was very cute.” Yiyi used to come to their home to get help on physics from Luo. She would hop down the stairs, stick her head in the door, and ask, “Is Teacher Luo home?” She spoke bashfully but cheerfully. Later, some time after the incident, Chen saw Yiyi on a public bus, sitting next to the window in the back row. Yiyi had her head resting in her hand, her hair covering both sides of her face. “She was like a completely different person.”
Chen couldn’t understand how Yiyi suddenly became so ill. “Depression’s something that develops over a long time,” she thought. “How could she get sick just like that?” Recently, when she heard Yiyi’s diagnosis, she was dumbfounded. “So it really was that incident?”
Wenjun tried getting in touch with Luo to learn what he knew about what happened, but was told not to pursue him. The Luo family was going through enough trouble over the incident, someone familiar with the situation told Wenjun. Thinking back, Chen wasn’t willing to talk much about it, either. She just shakes her head. “Don’t even bring up how difficult those two years were for us.” Eventually, Wenjun had to give up on them. He understood the situation Luo was in, and he never blamed Luo for having Yiyi go rest in the teacher’s break room. He even thanked him for looking out for his daughter.
But key information for the case didn’t break for a long time, and Wenjun fell into isolation and helplessness. The reality of the situation pressed on, step by step. His son’s fourth grade essay, “Elder Sister, I Love You,” was submitted as evidence in court.
“Because Sister was under a lot of pressure in her second year of high school, she couldn’t take it, and she became very sick in the last half of the school year. Exactly what illness she had, I’m not sure. From then on, her temper became really bad,” the essay reads. “Sometimes she got so sick the doctors didn’t even know what to do. I was really worried. What could I do? I felt really hurt because you got sick. I was sad because you were going through a lot of pain.”
Brother and sister were seven years apart, but they had been close. Wenjun used to bring them candy from Shanghai, giving half of the haul to each of them. His son would quickly eat his. Yiyi would tease him: “Call me ‘Elder Sister,’ and I’ll give you my candy.” His son would end up eating it all. When they were out shopping and he got tired, she let him sit on her feet and lean back on her legs to rest.
Wenjun knew Yiyi was still working hard at her studies during winter break of that year. There’s no way she was that sick then—his son must have mixed up the time. But the appeals court did not admit this opinion to the court. The official criminal ruling stated that although the brother was a minor, his essay constituted a clear and objective narration of the facts and his feelings regarding the matter. Therefore, they “could not rule out that the individual, surnamed Li, had not already been suffering from depression or had been in a depressive state before the incident.”
“Although Wu Yonghou’s obscene behavior towards Li contributed causal force,” the ruling concluded, “it was not the only reason for her suicide.”
Furious, Wenjun kept shouting the last line of the ruling. “Contributed causal force—what’s that supposed to mean?”
To him, this meant there were other reasons his daughter became ill, like her family situation. People commenting online said she was affected by her parents’ divorce. But Wenjun thinks there isn’t much of a connection. He and his wife rarely fought in front of the kids. When Yiyi learned her parents were divorcing, she said: These are adult matters. I respect your choices.
Wenjun still hasn’t told his son about Wu’s role. But he’s growing older by the day, and wants to know the truth. “I’m definitely not going to let him think that his sister’s illness was because of me, as a father.”
He continued to appeal.
Good Dreams Don’t Last
Yiyi’s ashes were scattered on the hillside, blown away by the wind. According to local custom, unmarried girls who pass away cannot have headstones. Wenjun was also worried her remains might be stolen for a ghost marriage. For everyone else who had been caught in the vortex of this saga, life returned to normal.
Later on, Wenjun ran into two of Yiyi’s classmates. The winter of the year his daughter passed away, a classmate came to visit Wenjun with her parents. He really wanted to talk with her for longer that day, but with her parents around, it wasn’t so easy. Another time, a girl came up to him at the mall, calling him “uncle.” He recognized her: she used to come over to cook and do homework with his daughter. He really looked forward to encountering Yiyi’s classmates, but it was always so hurried when he did. There was so much he wanted to say, but he always held back.
Zhu Yonghai, the principal of Qingyang No. 6, was promoted and named the new principal of Qingyang No. 1 Secondary School, a key school in the city. Mr. Luo is still teaching physics at Qingyang No. 6. According to Chen Qingyang, her husband once ran into Wu Yonghou after he was released from prison. “He was walking down the street. He looked really dejected.” Wu even said hello to Luo. “Be careful on the road, especially at night,” Wu told him.
Only the Li family fell into a hidden abyss, left to swallow their pain. For a long time, Li Wenjun and Xiao Xuemei didn’t feel as if their daughter was really gone. They always heard her voice, sometimes her laughter, sometimes her voice calling “Dad” and “Mom”… it seemed uncannily real. But though they looked up and down their apartment, no trace of their daughter was ever to be found.
Wenjun holds a lot of regret. Before she fell ill, his daughter liked to whisper in his ear about the “misty regions south of the Yangtze.” When he took her to Shanghai for treatment, he rushed back to Qingyang. He didn’t think about it until after she was gone—he should have taken her to see Suzhou and Shaoxing.
He stopped talking to friends and to his neighbors down the hall. Their front door usually stayed shut tight, and the entire apartment smelled of Chinese medicine. Not long ago, Wenjun’s father had a stroke and was hospitalized. Wenjun rushed around taking care of his father, ultimately landing himself in the hospital with exhaustion. A year ago he was diagnosed with diabetes, and now his nerve endings are deteriorating. Scabs appear one after another on his lower legs. He has stared so long at his phone that his eyes are uncontrollably watery and sore.
When Wenjun was in the hospital, his son couldn’t sleep. Two “Combat Continent” comic books and a stuffed animal sat at the head of his bed every night. The events of the past few years have left their mark on him. When his sister overdosed, the then-ten-year-old boy stood staring blankly outside the door to the emergency room. The day his sister died, Wenjun told his son that his sister had gone to a far away place and would never come back.
The following day, Xiao Xuemei saw her son sitting alone, “not crying, not smiling.” Sometimes, out of nowhere, he’ll mention that he misses his sister.
Li Wenjun’s relationship with his son has gradually returned to normal. They had previously been very close. Back when he was taking Yiyi for treatment, if his son had a cold or a fever he had no choice but to leave him in the care of relatives. His son wasn’t able to understand at the time. “He must have thought his dad and sister were off doing something without him.” Over the last two years, Wenjun has explained to his son, “When your sister was sick, she didn’t have control over herself. I worried it would affect your studies, so I left before dinner every day to go out looking for her.”
“Dad, you should have told me sooner,” his son replied. “That way I’d understand that Sister wasn’t mad at me.”
This was a rare moment of relief for Wenjun. He felt he owed a great debt to his son, and so gave him his undivided attention. There was a period when his son became moody and agitated, taking much longer than usual to complete his school work. Wenjun went right to his teacher. They had just begun studying geometry, his teacher explained, and his son hadn’t made the mental adjustment yet. It’s OK, Wenjun explained to his son, everybody goes through challenges. Then they went to buy workbooks.
Now 14, his son has grown into a polite and mature young man. When a guest recently visited their home, he greeted them with a nod before going to the kitchen to chat with his mom. Later, at dinner, the topic of college came up. He glanced at his mother, then said, “No matter where I go, I’ll be sure to bring Mom and Dad with me.”
Wenjun thought about taking his son out of Qingyang, but it just wasn’t a viable option. In 2019, Wenjun worked for a time as a guest room manager at a local hotel, but his health began declining after just four months, and his doctor made him stop. Xiao Xuemei was in a similar situation. In Qingyang, jobs other than menial cooking and cleaning were hard to come by for someone of her age and in her condition. She went to work in a restaurant, where she made 70 RMB for ten hours a day. After one month, her wrists hurt so much that she couldn’t lift her hands.
A few months later, rent came due, and Wenjun didn’t know how he’d cobble the money together. He used to believe that “as long as you work hard, there will always be a way.” Before the incident, Wenjun was a hotel business contractor. He had some money in savings and planned to buy a home in the city. But after his daughter fell ill, he lost his business and his contacts.
Xiao Xuemei worked in Hangzhou during the two years of Yiyi’s illness. The two of them video-chatted every few days. Xiao had plans for her daughter. After she got better, she wanted Yiyi to come study baking in Hangzhou. In their last phone conversation, Yiyi expressed concern for her mother, working so hard away from home. She reminded her mother to make sure she got enough rest. Xiao wired Yiyi 200 RMB and told her to buy herself a dress and waited patiently for her daughter in Hangzhou. In the end, the only thing that came to her was the news of her daughter’s passing.
“Perhaps it’s fate,” says Xiao. She had hoped her daughter could have a tombstone, “Somewhere I could go visit when I wanted.” But there was nothing she could do. Now, the only place she can meet with her daughter is in her dreams.
She once dreamed she saw her daughter lying in bed. She asked Yiyi, “Where have you been? I’ve been looking for you for so long.”
“Mom, after I jumped, someone saved me,” Yiyi replied. “They did some experiments on me, and it worked. I’m back now.”
Xiao woke with a start. She shook her head, tears welling up in her eyes. Good dreams don’t last, she told herself.
To protect the privacy of individuals interviewed for this story, the following are pseudonyms: Li Wenjun, Xiao Xuemei, Chen Qingyang, and Liu Chen. [Chinese]
A single word has been responsible for considerable consternation and bafflement among puzzle solvers recently. It is short, relatively common and, yes, it’s clean. Twice over the past two months the word has tantalisingly offered itself as an answer in our Polygon puzzle, only for those spoilsports at The Times to shake our heads and deny solvers another notch towards the next target score.
One reader, Suzie Webster, explained: “Quite often I find a word that is disallowed; for example, today I am not allowed to use ‘audio’. Please will someone come back to me and explain who or what sits in judgment?”
While Polygon is set by a “who”, the brilliant Roger Phillips, all the decisions on valid answers come back to a “what”,
Our guest this week is a lexicographer. That's someone who studies words and, in this case, edits dictionaries. Emily Brewster is a senior editor at Merriam-Webster and host of the podcast Word Matters.
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Emily answers a question from 8-year-old Emma in Kentucky, who wants to know how words are added to the dictionary. But before we can answer that, we'll tackle 7-year-old Julia's question, "How are new words created?" Join us for an episode about how words are created, when they've reached a critical level of use to get their own dictionary entry, and when words are removed from the dictionary. Get ready for some word nerdery!
Download our learning guides: PDF | Google Slide | Transcript
"How do words get added to the dictionary?" - Emma, 8, Kentucky
Lexicographers like Emily Brewster read and listen a lot and pay attention to the new words that people are using. They collect these examples and determine how many instances there are of the word and what different kinds of sources are using the word.
"If all the examples are only appearing on TikTok, then that tells us one thing about the word. But as soon as they're also appearing in, you know, a magazine that you would see at the dentist's office, then that tells us something else about the word's status," Emily explains. "So we are always looking for information, for evidence, of how words are being used by the people who speak the English language. And when we have enough evidence that the word is really part of the language, that it's a word that most people already will recognize when they hear it, that's when we know that it's ready to be added to the dictionary."
For example, the word COVID-19 was a word created by the World Health Organization about a year and a half ago. "It got into our dictionary faster than any other word in the history of the dictionary has ever been added. Because what we knew immediately was that this word was not going away, that everybody was talking about this word," Emily says.
Sometimes dictionary editors update the definition of words that were already included. For example, the definitions of "pod" and "bubble" were updated this past January to include a new meaning: people you might have grouped up with when you weren't seeing other people because of the pandemic.
Other new words recently added to the dictionary include: "makerspace," where people get together in a common area and often share tools to make their own projects; "BIPOC," an abbreviation for Black, Indigenous and People of Color; and "second gentleman," in reference to Vice President Kamala Harris's husband.
Once it's been established that a word is in widespread use, an editor will carefully read through evidence of the word in use and formulate a meaning in very careful language. Another editor will determine how old a word is and its earliest usage, another will look at the word's history, and the word will get a pronunciation. Then it's ready to be added to the dictionary.
Merriam-Webster updates their online dictionary with new words or new definitions of words a few times a year. Emily says words don't usually get taken out of dictionaries, but editors do make choices about which words appear in print dictionaries.
Back in 1998, bookstores in English-speaking Canada suddenly looked like their counterparts in France, with their windows and floor displays dominated not by novels or popular nonfiction but by dictionaries. More precisely, piles of the first edition of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary.
It rapidly became a best seller and the talk of the nation. Until then there had not been a general purpose dictionary covering contemporary Canadian English.
What’s more, thanks to regular appearances in the media, Katherine Barber, the founding editor of the dictionary, was as much a celebrity as some of Canada’s leading authors.
Late last month, Ms. Barber died at the age of 61. Cancer that had been under control had spread to her brain and she died in April.
The obituary I wrote about Ms. Barber is, perhaps inevitably, almost as much about the Canadian variety of English as it is about her life.
[Read:Katherine Barber, Who Defined Canadian English, Is Dead at 61]
When the article appeared online, it provoked a lot of Twitter conversation about Canadianisms, particularly over the correct term for underwear. In the first sentence of the obituary, I went with “gotchies,” which the first edition of the dictionary casts as the “diminutive of GOTCH.”
But many people had other ideas, including: ginch, gonch, ginches, gitch, gitchies and gaunch. (Forgive me if I missed some.)
Judy Gombita, a Torontonian who favors “gotchies,” finally offered this analysis: “So the word definitely BEGINS with a G and often ends with CH, but the in-between varies widely across English Canada’s regions.”
The underwear debate underscored a key aspect of Ms. Barber’s approach to language. While she was called Word Lady during her regular CBC Radio time slot, she always emphasized that no single word, spelling or pronunciation defined the “correct” form of Canadian English. Her work was about discovering how English-speaking Canadians used their language rather than telling them what they should be saying and writing.
People outside of Canada have long been exposed to Canadianisms in film and television series exported from here. “Letterkenny,” the streaming comedy series set in a fictional southern Ontario town, has taken that to new heights. While some of the (printable) terms used by its characters are standard hockey slang or Canadian English, like laneway and rez (for reserve), its writers have gone on to create their own fictional dialect.
This article from Babble, an online language learning company, makes a compelling case that the fictional speech in Letterkenny is a “conlang” or constructed language like Newspeak in George Orwell’s “1984” or Nadsat, the mix of Russian and English that Anthony Burgess created for “A Clockwork Orange.”
As I wrote in Ms. Barber’s obituary, declining sales of print dictionaries mean that the Canadian Oxford has not been updated since its second edition was published in 2004.
Some, apparently younger, Twitter users posted that they had never heard some of the Canadianisms I included in the obituary. And while new Canadianisms have likely come along over the last 17 years, the fluidity of languages means that many others have just as probably fallen into obscurity. When I was growing up, the largest piece of furniture in my parents’ room that was devoted to sitting was the chesterfield. Its counterpart in my household is now getting new slip covers and no one has called it anything other than a sofa or a couch during the process.
There has been one update of sorts, however. Among the many sources Ms. Barber and her crew drew on was the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, which was published in 1967. It was a very different creature than the Canadian Oxford. Intended for scholars, it was essentially a collection of Canadian words going back to the arrival of English speakers in what became Canada rather than a general reference dictionary and a snapshot of Canadian English use, spelling and pronunciations at that time.
In 2017, an expanded and updated second edition of the Dictionary of Canadianisms appeared online. Its website is currently being updated, so it is currently only available in a less-than-ideal digital archived form at the moment.
Somehow, I never interviewed Ms. Barber. But her wit, good humor and enthusiasm always came through on the radio and on television. Her great passion was ballet and she was as well known in those circles as she was in the world of language.
But her sister, Martha Hanna, told me that Ms. Barber’s interest in language didn’t extend to crossword puzzles.
“She said: ‘I don’t want to spend my life thinking about how to answer these stupid questions,’” Ms. Hanna, herself a crossword enthusiast, said of Ms. Barber. “Perhaps she knew words too well to find crosswords amusing.”
Trans Canada
Visitors to the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale can’t actually see the Canadian Pavilion. It’s been covered over with material added to make it a giant green screen. A smartphone app transforms the exhibition hall into a shifting array of Canadian buildings, including Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, and Hatley Castle in Victoria. The exhibition inside looks at how Canadian cities and towns are often impostors, doubling as other places around the world in movies and on television.
On Thursday, the Canadiens and the Maple Leafs met for the first time in a post season game since 1979. The Hab won 2-1, but I am not taking sides. Curtis Rush reports that the return of the playoff rivalry has been muted by pandemic restrictions. “Montreal is still known for its fashion and cuisine, flair and intimate quaintness, while diverse Toronto is known for its brashness, flashy skyline and economic clout,” he wrote. “Both fan bases claim they live in hockey’s mecca.”
A native of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has reported about Canada for The New York Times for the past 16 years. Follow him on Twitter at @ianrausten.
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TEHRAN – A Georgian translation of Persian poet and mystic Molana Jalal ad-Din Rumi’s Masnavi-ye Manavi was introduced at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi last week.
Georgian poet Giorgi Lobzhanidze is the translator of the Persian masterpiece, which has been published in two volumes with contributions from the Iranian Culture Center in Tbilisi, the center announced on Thursday.
In his short speech made during the unveiling ceremony of the book, Lobzhanidze talked about the technical complexities of the translation of the book and the mysteries surrounding the numerous concepts the collection carries.
He also said that Rumi used the Holy Quran, hadiths from the Prophet Muhammad (S) and allegories to express his mystic thoughts and Islamic teachings, and praised Rumi’s knowledge of the three sources of his inspiration.
He also noted that Rumi’s thoughts have been expressed by many people from cultural communities across the world as his thoughts are universal.
He also recited verses from Masnavi-ye Manavi at the ceremony, which was attended by a group of Georgian cultural figures and literati, including the rector of Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, George Sharvashidze.
He called the Georgian translation of the Masnavi-ye Manavi a great blessing and stressed the key role Rumi’s works played to improve the cultural relations between Iran and other countries, in particular, with Georgia.
He also expressed his thanks to Lobzhanidze for the translation of the book from the Persian classical literature, as well as to the Iranian Culture Center for its contributions to this cultural endeavor.
Lobzhanidze, an oriental studies and Arabian language graduate of Tbilisi State University, is the director of the Oriental Studies Department at the Center of Cultural Relations of Georgia.
In 1997, he came to Iran to work on his Ph.D. research project in religion and mysticism at the University of Tehran. After returning to Georgia in 1999, he again started working at Tbilisi State University.
In 2005, he wrote his doctoral thesis on the topic “Jesus and Virgin Marry in the Quran”. He is currently known as a distinguished translator of a new generation. He is a translator of the Quran, and the collection “Persian Fairy Tales” and the Gulistan by Persian poet Sadi, “The Water’s Footsteps” by Sohrab Sepehri and “Another Birth” by Forugh Farokhzad.
Lobzhanidze has also composed five poetry collections, “A Teacher of Arabic”, “Noontime Shadows”, “A Bouquet of Dandelions”, “Boiling Temperature” and “Orphan’s Kveri”.
Photo: A Georgian translation of Persian poet and mystic Molana Jalal ad-Din Rumi’s Masnavi-ye Manavi by Giorgi Lobzhanidze was introduced at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University in Georgia.
