“我恨方言”

The title of this post was the content of a text message Alex sent me late one night (ok, not that late but we were in the gorge and sleeping early...). Translated it means "I hate dialects." Like in France, Germany, and other European countries a few hundred years ago, Chinese people do not all speak the same language. A good majority, now, are competent in 普通话 (pu tong hua), or "common speech," or to most Americans, "Mandarin Chinese." This is the language that is spoken in schools, and what an educated person from Guangzhou would speak in while having a conversation with a colleague from Hebei. However, while it is the common language, in many places it is not at all common.

When leaving Beijing, I was relatively confident about my Chinese ability. For the most part, I could understand what was said to me and could also pick up bits and pieces of others' conversations around me. Everyone in Beijing speaks pu tong hua for two reasons: 1. the language is based on the native language of Beijingers. 北京话 is only different from standard mandarin in that the 儿 (er) sound is often added at the end of words. 2. people in Beijing are really from all over the country, so in order to communicate, one must speak Mandarin.

When I got off the train in Changsha, it was like arriving in a totally different country - I didn't understand anything that was being said around me. And in Hunan, even when people would talk to me in Mandarin, it was difficult to understand, as the accent was different, word usage tendencies were different, and often some Chansha hua would slip in. Changsha hua is not entirely different from Mandarin. While there, I attended Camille's end of the semester banquet with her. I spent most of the time being thankful that my end of semester dinner wasn't like this, as we sat through 2 1.5 hour speeches. Yes, really. CCP officials can really talk. I understood the main idea of the first woman's speech and a good portion of what she said, but during the second speech, I struggled to pick up whole phrases, let alone ideas. It sounded enough like Mandarin to have me perplexed as to why I couldn't understand his accent, but I found out later that he was speaking entirely in dialect.

Then when we moved on to Guangxi, things became even more complicated. In Beihai, my student told me that the dialect (basically the only language her parents speak) is basically Cantonese, as Beihai used to be a part of Guangdong. And Cantonese is basically a different language.

A cab driver who I had a long discussion with in Kunming, tried to teach me a few phrases of Kunming hua, if only to demonstrate that it was one of the most difficult dialects in the country. And while trekking in Xishuangbanna, we heard a bunch of different languages, Dai for example, that are much closer to South East Asian languages than to Mandarin. Thankfully, most of the people in the villages speak at least some Mandarin, learned, as our guide told us, by watching TV.

Now, back to Alex's comment. In many ways, I hate dialects too. Mandarin Chinese is an extremely difficult language in itself, and throwing in variants of that language only makes life more frustrating. Pu tong hua allows people from different parts of the country to communicate with each other, just as standardizing French (was that under Richelieu?) allowed people from all over France to communicate with each other. And, obviously, this is something that is increasingly important today. However, there is also something to be said for preserving dialects. There are entire languages lost at astonishing rates; only a few hundred people speak Manchurian. And with a language, goes many elements of a culture. So, its a difficult balance as are most questions about modernity and tradition are.

我回来了！

I am now back in Beijing after about 6 weeks on the road, and it is actually good to be back (of course if the weather weren't so mild, 15C, I might not be saying that). Of course, I have weeks worth of stories to share, and I plan to slowly post them. Below is a (very) brief outline of my trip, so you know where I was and when. Memory is often not linear and connections never are, so my blog posts may jump around a bit. Refer to the timeline or send me an angry email when confused.

Cheers!

PS. I will slowly be posting pictures, but that will be haphazard as well, as my camera had some problems during the trip, so I'll have to steal a bunch from Camille and Zi.

1/19-20: train from Beijing to Changsha, Hunan

1/20-23: stay with Camille in Changsha

1/23-24: overnight train to Guilin, Guangxi

1/24: Guilin

1/25-28: Yangshuo, Guangxi

1/28-30: Nanning, Guangxi

1/30-2/1: Ningming, Guangxi and surrounding area

2/1-2: back in Nanning

2/2 - 5: Beihai, Guangxi, visiting a student of mine

2/5: back in Nanning (again!) for a few hours, plane to Kunming

2/5-7: Kunming, Yunnan (Zi arrives)

2/7-8: overnight bus to Lijiang, Yunnan

2/8: Lijiang

2/9-10: hike in Tiger Leaping Gorge (near Lijiang)

2/11: Camille and I take a bus to Dali, Yunnan; Zi goes back to Beijing

2/11-13: Dali

2/13-14: overnight bus to Jinghong, capital of Xishuangbanna prefecture (still in Yunnan)

2/14-15: Jinghong

2/16-18: trek in Xishuangbanna

2/19: bus to Menghai

2/20: bus to Xiding

2/21: Xiding market, back to Jinghong

2/22 - 23: overnight bus back to Kunming; Camille flies back to Changsha on 23

2/23-25: Kunming; night flight back to Beijing

下雪

Somewhere around 2 weeks ago, when the weather was pretty warm for a period (around 10C which is around 50F....or exactly, i did just check. turns out my internal C->F converter is pretty good), Zi said something about how it was going to keep getting warmer. I laughed at his ignorance of how real winter weather works. Apparently, so did the weather gods. This week has been freezing.....or below freezing actually. Yesterday, the temperature in the morning was -10C (somewhere around 10F), and today it's snowing, with the possibility of more snow this weekend. Oh how I can't wait to head off to warmer climates....

Unfortunately, I picked last night to put my jacket in for dry cleaning (I had been putting it off since it was so cold and finally had to do it....). Thankfully I have enough layers.

我爱谷歌

Yes, Mom and Grandpa, hell has frozen over and Jenny has uploaded photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/jhaskell
I've been pretty bad about consistently taking pictures, but the last picture (of spaghetti i cooked!) is from today, so I will try to improve in the new year ;)

Also, note the cool slideshow feature in blogger. Isn't google awesome?

On another google note, if any of you are new junkies like me - or news junkies not like me - you should check out google reader. It's a cool way to organized RSS feeds for news websites, blogs, etc. If you have a blog, this is probably how I read it. And it has an even cooler feature where you can share news articles with your friends.

北京的圣诞节 (Christmas in Beijing)

It's that time of year, where if I were still a Stanford student, I would have just finished finals and would be at home sleeping in, frantically looking for Christmas gifts for family, and spending time with old friends. The Christmas season has, in many ways, hit China. I was in Walmart the day after Thanksgiving, and they were selling Christmas decorations and playing carols. Malls and restaurants have Christmas decorations up, just like in the States. I'm sure I could easily find a tree to put up in my apartment if I wanted to but getting it up 6 flights of stairs would be quite a task. Still, in China, Christmas is a work day. It's a Tuesday, so I don't have to teach but all my friends are still at work, and the plan probably consists of just a dinner out, which is how young Chinese people celebrate Christmas anyway.

I've been teaching a Christmas lesson this week during which the most interesting discussion question asked about whether its a good thing that Christmas is becoming so popular around the world, even in non-Christian countries. Most students said yes, citing the happiness and love that holidays inspire, as well as the cultural connection it could provide They also inevitably mentioned that businessmen profit greatly from Christmas and that the more days for rest and relaxation, the better. Most classes usually had at least one person who saw a downside. One girl called it "cultural invasion" (and she has a point - globalization brings a lot more of Western culture to China then Chinese culture to the West), while most others emphasized the importance of remembering traditional Chinese festivals instead.

Still, just as America changes its imported holidays, food, traditions, etc, there is a Chinese version of Christmas. Like in the US, it's highly commercialized and people love to shop, though it seems like usually on Christmas Eve. However, for young Chinese, Christmas is about spending time with friends, not family, since their parents do not normally celebrate the holiday and Spring Festival is right around the corner anyway. And most interesting of all (at least for Chinese learners/speakers) is the tradition of giving people apples and oranges. It comes from a play on words in Chinese - apple (苹果) stands for peace (平安 their first syllable is pronounced the same way), while orange (橙) stands for success (成功 ).


See this article for similar insights: http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=10118

Chinglish

I have encountered two definitions of the word "Chinglish": 1. the ridiculous English mistakes that appear on various signs throughout China due to poor translation. Currently the Beijing government is working to get rid of such mistakes, at least within the capital, much to the dismay of most foreign residents, who actually find them amusing and endearing. 2. the Chinese spoken by many Chinese Americans, which often includes English grammar and random English words thrown in.

However, I propose a third: the intentional mixing of Chinese and English (somewhere around a 50/50 split) for the purpose of communication as well as learning the other language. I have three graduate students who I have eaten lunch with a few times now, and this is our preferred language of conversation. It's a lot of fun and at times funny - out of spoken English practice for many years, they aren't as adept at changing languages as I am and have more than one occasion said something in English to a Chinese person.

For a good part of the month of November, I stopped actively studying Chinese out of frustration with myself and what I saw as my lack of progress. However, first of all I realized that I often set bars for myself that are unreasonably high. Second, I've had more "good Chinese days" then bad recently - they include my Chinglish lunches, a 10 minute conversation with another student in Chinese, a developed friendship with my tutor (we talk about lots of random things ranging from politics in both the US and China, random stories, etc), and a conversation with a Chinese professor, in which I mostly listened but also mostly understood what he said.

Anyway, I'm back studying, back blogging, and of course still teaching. Oh and working for the NGO I worked for last summer that has a relationship with the Carter Center and therefore meeting Jimmy Carter on Friday :)

因人而异

I'm very interested in talking to people who have very different lifestyles from mine - hearing their opinions or just talking about random things - but more often than not i'm too shy, embarrassed or don't know what to say to start a conversation. I'm trying to get better at this and also put myself in more situations where random people will start talking to me.

Today I arrived at the school early and picked a random place off campus to eat breakfast. The Western campus is kind of on the Southwestern outskirts of Beijing; it seems as if it was built on what used to be its own small town, where they are now building expensive high rises. I picked a cheap (1 kuai for 豆浆油条), dirty place, and people who came in almost immediately started talking about me to the store owner (though they didn't think I was Russian, Alex), which makes it much easier to start talking *to* them. The one man I talked to had the common misconception that everyone in the US is rich. He thought there were no beggars there, and mentioned the big gap between rich and poor in China, thinking the US was not the same (China's gini coefficient is higher that American's but not by much). They asked me my monthly salary - something apparently everyone shares in China - and were amazed that I had 3 siblings (America doesn't have a one child policy?).

Conversations with my students are interesting too, both during and after class. As an interesting anecdote, many of my students are quite liberal - most are for gay marriage. Though they still hate the Japanese.

Random Interesting Anecdotes from Class...

~I did a lesson that included a list of letters to an advice column about family problems that the students were supposed to come up with solutions to. In one of my graduate student classes, one groups of girls performed a skit, where they suggested sending the rebellious teenage boy down to the countryside so he could learn to appreciate the benefits he had in life. For whatever reason, my immediate thoughts were "how very Chinese." However, many other groups thought that his parents should try harder to understand where he was coming from. I had more than one group devise a "Parent Trap"-like plan to stop two parents from fighting.

~I did a lesson in class today on describing people. The guy I asked to describe Hu Jintao stood up and said "He is cool. That's all."

It's interesting how each class of students has a different feel and leaves me with a different impression. Thankfully the class I was a bit anxious about in the beginning is turning out better than expected.

Autumn in Beijing

During my four years at Stanford, I tried to appreciate how lucky I was weather-wise, even while biking back to the dorm on a chilly, rainy winter evening. I never had to trek through the snow to class and rarely wore gloves and a hat. The one season I did miss, however, was the autumn. And now I finally have my autumn weather back in Beijing. The feel, the smell, the sight of autumn weather makes commuting in the city at least slightly more pleasant. The hints of colder weather to come, however, are making me anxious about the winter to come. As is the cold I caught that kept me at home drowsy and sneezing at the end of last week.

But for the most part, I'm enjoying my autumn - the weather, Mid-Autumn Festival and the yummy (though horribly fattening) mooncakes it brought with it, national week and Camille's visit, teaching, which is at the same time entertaining, frustrating, rewarding, and a headache. Though I'd like to say i'm getting the hang of it. Kind of.

This autumn also brings with it the 17th CCP Party Congress, which means hundreds of party delegates have descended upon Beijing to meet and discuss the party's trajectory, most importantly its hierarchy that will eventually determine Hu Jintao's successor. Hundreds, maybe thousands - i dont know the number - come; few make the decisions.

For the record, I find the whole thing as ridiculous as the next person. I have no idea where they found the people I heard quoted on the news saying the party congress would bring prosperity and harmony, as if the party bigwigs sitting around talking and spending the people's money on travel to Beijing and expensive food and drink will do that. But I also find the NY Times report (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/15/world/asia/16china.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin) on the meeting a bit excessive. First of all, the title is flat out deceiving. Yes, Hu Jintao did rule out any political reform that would undermine the party's grip on power, but first of all, did this actually surprise anyone? Please raise your hand if you were expecting earth-shattering reforms that made it not only legal to form new political parties but also legal to compete with the CCP for power. Yeah, I didn't think so. He did *not* rule out smaller reforms, including intra-party democracy, which, as Joseph Kahn so bluntly points out, does not do much to promote real democracy, but it is a step in the right direction. No one should be expecting the PRC to reform overnight. Baby steps, people.

On another note: I can now read my own blog online legally. The whim of whoever has his hand on the buzzer, censoring subversive sites such as wikipedia and blogspot, has now decided that blogspot is not a threat to harmony and order in the PRC.

Left Behind?

It's been a little bit since I've written a real entry...I've probably spent way too much of my online time waiting for www.espn.com to load, which for some reason is consistently slow in China. For those of you are aren't as big of a sports fan as I am, in the past week, the Philadelphia Phillies won the NL East after being 7 down a mere 17 games before but then lost in 3 to the Colorado Rockies, the hottest team in baseball. So Philly will - once again - have to wait til next year. Additionally, Stanford's football team - which espn described as "lowly" on their website - beat USC, the #2 team in the nation 24-23. It was USC's first home loss since 2001 when they were beaten by, you guessed it, Stanford.

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Camille, my friend from high school who is currently teaching in Hunan, came to visit this past week, as the PRC celebrated its birthday (and we celebrated having a week off from work). We went to all of the requisite sites, including the Great Wall, where we did a exhausting 10km trek from 景山岭 to 司马台. Both sites are farther from Beijing than the place where most tourists go and the views are even more impressive. (see pictures on facebook, once i get around to posting them).

Anyway, at the Great Wall, there are local women who spend their days pestering tourists to buy various souvenirs. A group attached themselves to Camille, Zi and I, one of which even walked with us for what had to be a few kilometers. She told us about random things, and at the end, we were expected to buy something from her - T-shirts - which we knowingly paid way too much for. She said she was a farmer from a local village, trying to put her two kids through school, in a place where you can't make enough money farming. This very well could have been true, especially since in most places in China, you can't make enough money just farming. Stories of people left behind as China has rapidly developed always sadden me, and, like in this case, make it more likely that I will feel sorry for them and spend more money, as this woman knew.

I thought about it later, though, especially the paradox. I had described this woman to myself as "being left behind as China has developed," but she has also greatly benefited from this development selling her souvenirs to tourists. And she probably makes a decent living, especially by the standards in her village, doing so. China is such a complicated place.