It was cold in the office yesterday. The new building’s heat pump was not working for some reason. Back at the apartment in Dameisha at night, we still hear a barrage of fire-cracker pops and fireworks go off, as the week-long celebration of the Lunar New Year continues. It is cold in the apartment as well. Our $12 space heaters from Shenzhen’s Walmart are not quite up to the task of warming up the entire apartment, of course.
Anyway, sticking to the theme of cold: below are the snowy cover pages of the English & Chinese versions of ‘Tintin in Tibet’. Tintin translates to Ding Ding in Chinese.
[From Wikipedia] The Adventures of Tintin (Les Aventures de Tintin) is a series of comic strips created by the Belgian artist Georges Rémi (1907–1983), who wrote under the pen name of Hergé. Tintin in Tibet is the twentieth book in the series. It is said to have been Hergé’s favorite of the Tintin series (previously The Secret of the Unicorn), and was written during a personally difficult time in his life, as he was divorcing from his first wife. The story is unlike any previous Tintin books, before or since: there is a small number of characters and no enemies, villains, spies or gangsters. This adventure revolves around a rescue mission of Tintin’s Chinese friend Chang Chong-Chen.
It is also unusually emotional for a Tintin story: moments of strong emotion for the characters include Tintin’s enduring belief in Chang’s survival, the discovery of the teddy bear in the snow, Haddock’s attempting to sacrifice himself to save Tintin, Tharkey’s return, Tintin’s discovery of Chang, and the yeti losing his only friend. Indeed Tintin is seen to cry when he believes Chang’s fate, something he is only seen to do three times throughout the entire series (the other occurrences being in The Blue Lotus and Flight 714).