The apocalypse can’t be far off, since my mom just sent me her first ever piece of e-mail. (I can already picture her saying “Bad son!” if she ever reads the previous sentence.) Anyways, here it is:

This is a screen shot because I’m lame and can’t figure out how to save Chinese characters to a HTML file in a way that displays correctly. (Unicode? Big5 Encoding? UTF-8? WTF?)

Of the ten distinct characters there I know 7. This is a completely misleading indication of my familiarity with written Chinese, because two of those make up my name, two are pronouns, one (repeated twice) is my sister’s nickname, and the last two in combination with a pronoun make up a standard greeting. In particular, I’m missing all the verbs in the second sentence. Verbs are highly useful for comprehension. Mimi me. Is this a desperate cry for help from Mom’s part? Has my sister finally snapped and done something drastic?

(Okay, I’m being a dork: my mom helpfully appended an English translation. Bleh.)

Drafting a reply will not be fun, judging by the last time I played around with Chinese input methods (when I was back home setting up her computer). I just need to remember the most important thing: after I enter the Romanized pinyin “ma” on the (thankfully multilingual friendly) Mac, of the pictographs presented, “mother” will be more complicated than “horse”. I think.