I look forward to bringing educational and fun experiences in Asia to my granddaughter Mila, who lives in Oklahoma, USA. She can learn about the world vicariously through all my adventures. I got a flat stuffed toy to join me. She is reversible. One side is a little girl, with angel wings and the other is a ladybug. I call her LadyB. I sent the same toy to Mila, which she can name as she sees fit. My Chinese name is Gonggong (公公), which means grandfather in Chinese.

I want to also share my China life with other youngsters and adults, so enjoy the stories. Hopefully you can show them around.

I posted the first 15 on Facebook and got many complaints from fans who hate it, don’t use it or got banned, of which there are many. Not just them, but Facebook – not to mention Instagram, Reddit, Quora, SoundCloud, StumbleUpon/Mix, Substack, TikTok, X and YouTube – all heavily shadow ban me, as you can see below, so I decided to start posting them on China Rising Radio Sinoland, where I have the artistic freedom that you deserve to fully enjoy. Catching up with #10 here.

Typical Facebook censorship. All three of their explanations are utter BS. It’s there, but you have to dig to get to it.

ADVENTURES IN ASIA WITH LADYB AND GONGGONG
Story #10: The amazing Chinese language that we love and sometimes drives us craz
Puli Town, Nantou County, Taiwan Province, China.

Dear Granddaughter Mila,

LadyB and I are wrapping our heads around Taiwan Province’s different way of writing Chinese. Mainland China, Singapore and 99% of people learning Chinese overseas use simplified characters and its Latin letter transliteration system called Pinyin. Taiwan and many overseas Chinese communities (San Francisco, Paris, etc.) continue to use the prewar traditional characters and the Wade-Giles letter transliteration system.

About 3,500 of the most commonly used characters are simplified outside Taiwan. This difference can only be a few brush strokes, but some are very different. Here is an example,

English meaning: cluster

Mainland Chinese义丛 = 8 brush strokes

Taiwanese Chinese義叢  = 30 brush strokes

Both are pronounced: yìcóng, and this is the Mainland Pinyin transliteration. But, Taiwan still uses prewar Wade-Giles transliteration, which is written as i ts’ung. Not the same thing.

Yet, both Taiwan and Mainland China speak the same language, called Mandarin, so that part is not a problem. For millennia, Chinese have bee using the same written language to communicate, while there are thousands of mutually unintelligible dialects when speaking. Throughout history, it was quite common for Chinese from different regions to “talk” by writing responses to each other! After liberation in 1949, Mandarin was mandated in all education, media and official work. Therefore, now everybody across China, including Taiwan Province, can talk with each other.

Speaking, reading and writing Mainland Chinese is a HUGE advantage for us, but we are having to learn the traditional forms of all the simplified characters. Using the must-have Asian version of WhatsApp, called Line (it’s Japanese) we type simplified characters for our Taiwanese friends, and they respond with traditional characters. If we cannot decipher them, we copy and paste their messages into a translator on our phones, to get the simplified Mainland version of the same texts. Whew!

LadyB and I reading traditional Chinese characters. YOWZER!

We loaded the Taiwanese keyboard onto our phones and computers, called Zhuyin fuhao, or Bopomofo, since they don’t use Mainland’s Pinyin (a-z). Zhuyin looks a lot like Japanese! This makes sense, because Taiwan was colonized by Japan, 1895-1945, and this writing system was adopted in 1913. We can’t use it, but if a Taiwanese needs to find something online or on a map on our phones, we can let them input on ours to find it.

The non-Latin transliteration system, Zhuyin Fuhao (also called Bopomofo), that Taiwan uses instead of Pinyin. Looks like Greek to us!

To complicate matters more, signage everywhere uses the Wade-Giles Latin transliteration system, to complement the Chinese. It is 90% different than Mainland Chinese Pinyin and we don’t know it. Thus, we spend time writing traditional characters on our phones to get the Mainland simplified equivalents. Whew again!

Confucius tells us that patience and perseverance build character. In any case, LadyB never stops smiling. She’s an inspiration to us all!

Love, Grandfather Gonggong