MeiHua/page45

This is the last page! (Well, there's the notes. But they don't count.) Hopefully you still have an intact brain after all this. If not, well, my apologies.

The big "quiz" really was on the Chicken Game page, and if you didn't give that a try you probably should have - but we can't have a review page without a few more questions, just for fun. So here goes.

1. What does thirty percent of every single Kasugai Peach Gummy consist of?

2. The extraordinary graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen has some very real Chinese dialogue and signs in it. Unfortunately they come from a font, and even more unfortunately the book uses simplified characters in what is supposed to be an alternate 1898 England - but it was a great thrill to actually be able to follow a little of the language action in those parts of the book.

I would not ask you to unscramble full-tilt Chinese, but you should be able to tell me what Quong Lee sells. (Hint: Try the character furthest to the right.)

3. The first four small characters at the bottom of this sign are the name of the business. Determine the type of business, and then find the other business on these pages that it is affiliated with (and shares a name with).

For bonus points, what is the large message on the sign about? Hint: Red is a celebratory color, and especially associated with this event.

The answers appear at the bottom of the page. Which is a long way away.

And now the characters. We've got about two hundred here, so it's probably better if I list them in alphabetical order by the main way I've defined each of them. I was going to use a radical/stroke method, the way the dictionaries do, but I was worried you wouldn't be able to find anything.

A few characters you've seen are missing from this list: The incorrect form of STORE which you saw at Eastern Live Poultry; the two characters meaning "arhat" from the vegetarian page; the "edible grass" vegetable cue, because I don't know a good way to gloss it; and the "proceed" or "forward" character which appears, slightly altered, in the lower right of these pages.

Everything else is here.

The part in square brackets, after the Pinyin/putonghua spelling, is the radical the character is (allegedly) filed under. [R] means that it's a radical itself, or near as makes no difference. "Allegedly" because ... well, see the notes for more on that.

Quiz answers:

1. Every Kasugai gummy is 30% FRUIT JUICE.

2.

The actual characters, for the curious: The two offset characters on the left say Quong Lee.

The top row of four say "eastern fine tea" (lit. "east direction ornament tea") - "East" in this case meaning "Orient" (this scene takes place in London). You saw these first two characters used in exactly this way at Eastern Live Poultry, but the character for EAST here is the simplified version, so it's not your fault if you don't recognize it. ("Ornament" is not the same version used in "sub gum," and is simplified to boot.)

The row of three below that say "supplier" - or at least the first two characters do; the third has eluded me so far.

3. The first four small characters are BEAUTIFUL EAST PASTRY HOME ...

... and this is the bakery attached to the Mei Tung Supermarket.

The big messages on the sign are New Year's greetings to the customers. Each line is traditional; the first means "congratulatory new wishes," or good omens, depending on how you read it, and the second is a wish for happiness and wealth - but neither of these really translate, they are standard phrases. The second one you may have heard as "gong xi fa cai."

If you were really paying attention, you recognized HAPPINESS as the second character of the second line.