标题: About 100,000 Claims Home in Ordos. But Who Pays? [打印本页] 作者: choi 时间: 3-9-2015 18:30 标题: About 100,000 Claims Home in Ordos. But Who Pays? 本帖最后由 choi 于 3-10-2015 05:51 编辑
Jody Rosen, 鬼城不空，还原真实的鄂尔多斯. 纽约时报中文网, Mar 9, 2015
cn.tmagazine.com/culture/20150309/t09ordos/
, which is translated from
Jody Rosen, The Colossal Strangeness of China’s Most Excellent Tourist City. Ordos, like so many of the country’s hundred of new towns, is famous for being empty--a symbol, some would say, of the hubris of rampant urbanization. But the few people who live there see it differently. T Magazine, New York Times, Mar 6, 2015.
tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/06/ordos-china-tourist-city/
Excerpt in the window of print:
“Ordos is not empty, but is weird: part windswept frontier outpost, part demented college town, with the vague mirage of another tacky desert colony, Las Vegas, shimmering in the strobe-lit mist at the fountain show.
“The real-estate situation in Ordos has turned macabre. Video billboards along the city’s major roadways display mug shots of fugitive developers who have skipped towns, fleeing their debts.
Excerpt in the window of print:
“Ordos is not empty, but is weird: part windswept frontier outpost, part demented college town, with the vague mirage of another tacky desert colony, Las Vegas, shimmering in the strobe-lit mist at the fountain show.
“The real-estate situation in Ordos has turned macabre. Video billboards along the city’s major roadways display mug shots of fugitive developers who have skipped towns, fleeing their debts.
Quote:
"Today, the real-estate situation in Ordos has turned macabre. Video billboards along the city’s major roadways display mug shots of fugitive developers who have skipped town, fleeing their debts. There are rumors about the dynamiting of buildings in Kangbashi: about owners of unoccupied apartment towers who hope to create value through destruction, reselling freshly cleared land to new investors.
“It didn’t matter much: With or without business, the government-run tourist office paid their [carriage drivers’] salaries. * * * But the carriage drivers [who were former farmers] agreed: Urban living was good, and their lot now was far better than it had been when they tilled the hard Inner Mongolian earth. I asked the men where they had lived before moving to their apartments in Kangbashi. One of them, a 56-year-old man named Li Yonh Xiang, spoke up. “I lived here,” he said. Li had been born and raised just steps from the bench where he was sitting.
Note:
(a) "ORDOS, A MAGICAL LAND in the just north of China, is a dazzling pearl in the world history and culture. That’s what it says — verbatim, in ungrammatical English — on a plaque that greets you as you enter a rotunda in the Ordos Museum."
(i) cn.nytimes.com's translation: 鄂尔多斯是位于中国正北方的一片神奇土地，这里也是世界历史和文化中一颗璀璨的明珠——走进鄂尔多斯博物馆的一个圆形大厅，迎接访客的一块铭牌用不太符合语法的英文这样写道。
(ii) I read the English several times, did not know what was "ungramatical." (Come on, foreigners are better in English grammar than native speakers in US and UK.) Finally I would say "just north" is a poor choice of words--I have not seen it, and its meaning is unclear. That was when I read the translation. Even with translation, I still do not know why it is located 正北方.
(b) "The word Ordos itself is a kind of boast: In Mongolian, it means 'many palaces.'”
"'Ordos' means 'palaces' in the Mongolian language." Wikipedia
(c) "The land surrounding Ordos City sits on one-sixth of China’s coal reserves. In the early 2000s, China began awarding mining rights [there] to private companies, which generated massive tax revenues, swelling municipal coffers. The government poured much of that windfall into the development of a monumental new district, Kangbashi New Area [康巴什新区 a subdivision of Ordos: en.wikipedia.org]; hundreds of millions of dollars in capital investment flowed in, spurring a construction boom on a staggering scale."
(d) "FOR THE NEWLY ARRIVED visitor, the most shocking thing about Ordos may be its cleanliness. On a mild, overcast day this past autumn, the sleek steel-and-glass terminal at Ejin Horo Airport gave off the gleam of a model kitchen at a high-end department store. The city’s impeccably landscaped roadways were equally pristine. In fact, the first human beings spotted on a taxi ride from the airport into the center of Ordos weren’t pedestrians — there were few of those — but municipal cleaning crews, tidying the sidewalks and broad, multilane thoroughfares. It was an absurdist scene worthy of Ionesco or Beckett: corps of street sweepers pushing brooms on streets that didn’t need to be swept."
(i) Ordos Ejin Horo Airport 鄂尔多斯伊金霍洛机场
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordos_Ejin_Horo_Airport
(located in Ejin Horo Banner 伊金霍洛旗; rebuilt in 2005)
(ii) gleam (vi): "(Of a smooth surface or object) reflect light because well polished <Victor buffed the glass until it gleamed>" www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/gleam
(iii) Eugène Ionesco
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Ionesco
(e) "The Ordos Museum is a mammoth blob that owes something to Frank Gehry; next door, there’s an enormous library designed to look like books stacked on a shelf."
(i) Ordos Museum 鄂尔多斯博物馆, designed by MAD Architect (based in Beijing and Los Angeles; "MAD建筑事务所由中国建筑师马岩松于2004年建立")
(section 2.2 The origins of his first play)
(ii) "owes something to Frank Gehry"
This clause strongly hints Mr Gehry is not the architect. And he is not.
(iii) The Library Of Ordos 鄂尔多斯图书馆
(f) "Everywhere you look, there are horses: murals of Mongol warriors on horseback, a suspension bridge with stanchions in the shape of stallions’ manes."
Well, try as I may, I fail to find a photo (or the name) of it.
(g) “downtown Kangbashi’s signature evening entertainment: the ‘fountain show 音乐喷泉,’ a synchronized display of gushing water, flashing lights and bombastic New Age music. It is billed as Asia’s largest such show, and it looks it”
(h) “The filmmakers Adam Smith and Song Ting 宋婷 spent two years shooting ‘The Land of Many Palaces 宫殿之城,’ a feature documentary about Ordos and its citizens, which debuted in January. * * * [They] estimate that about 100,000 currently live in the city. * * * In 2006, the headquarters of the local government was moved to Kangbashi from the Dongsheng 东胜 District, 20 miles north”