mafan

Very surprised to see an advert for recycling in my taxi today. Don't get me wrong- it's not that there is no recycling here in China, it's that it's not in any way obviously done and this is the first reference to it I've ever seen. We have no recycling boxes- everything goes into the same bin, but somewhere further down the line someone is paid to filter through all the rubbish and separate out the recycling. I once heard that the UK ships it's rubbish all the way to China to be sorted before being shipped all the way back again. An apocryphal story maybe, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were true.

The caption underneath says something like 'not so much trouble'. In Chinese, trouble or bother translates as 'mafan', commonly used (by me, anyway) in both Chinese and English sentences,, e.g. 'Oh, don't worry about that, it's far too much mafan.'