Having Fun All The Time

Before I came to China, my former professor, who helped get me the job here, recommended that I read a book by Peter Hessler about two years the author spent living in rural Sichuan as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Hessler came to China in the late 90s to teach English at a lower-level university. He was one of the first foreigners to live in the city since the communist takeover in 1949, and the book was basically a straight-up account of his time as an English teacher. He supplemented the narrative about his experience with several vignettes about people he met while living in the small city of Fuling, but mostly the book was about what it was like to be an English teacher at a university in small-city China.

On the first page of that book (the book is called River Town), Hessler writes,

When we arrived, there was one other foreigner, a German who was spending a semester teaching at a local high school. But we met him only once, and he left not long after we settled in. After that we were the only foreigners in town. The population was about 200,000, which made it a small city by Chinese standards.

Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler

When I read the book, I didn’t know it, but it would be basically a guidebook to my entire first year in China. The town that I moved to, Sanming, has a population of about 200,000. I’m an English teacher at a lower-tier university. My students, like his, are largely from the countryside. I am one of only a few foreigners in town. I rarely see anyone who isn’t native Chinese. The environment is isolating at times, inspiring at the same time, very different from the world I knew before socially, historically, economically, linguistically.

That book was a completely indispensable guide to me in the beginning. Especially with regard to preparing me, mentally, for the discipline it would take to make progress learning Chinese. One of the best things about Hessler’s book is how he patiently describes the process of learning Chinese, from the high-level, like realizing, from month to month, that he could read and understand more than what he could before, to the very specific, like describing his method for studying Chinese characters:

And so Soddy’s question remained: How do you spend your spare time? When I finished teaching I would sit at my desk, which looked out across the Wu River to the city, and I would write:

学   学   学   学   学   学   学   学

While I wrote, I pronounced the word over and over, as carefully as I drew it:

“Xue xue xue xue xue xue xue xue.”

I would write the same character about a hundred times total, and then I would think of ways in which it was used: xuexi, xuesheng, xuexiao. And I would write it on a flash card and put it on a stack that grew steadily on my desk–between five and ten a day, usually.

After I had been in China for about three months, I re-read his book, and seeing how quickly his Chinese had progressed, I became extremely jealous and copied his method precisely.

That was for writing. I had different tools available for learning speaking and listening — better tools, most likely, since I had the Internet at my fingertips, something he didn’t have. I still struggled to keep up with the pace that he made in the book, feeling myself slowly slipping behind as one year became one and thensome (Hessler was practicing reading newspapers at the end of year one, and I’m just getting to that point now after a year and a half). But it was to a large extent his book that pushed me, gave me a goal to shoot for when there was nobody else around me who was trying as hard to learn Chinese (except Chinese school kids, but a foreigner could never compete with them). It was that way with so many things about China — I had read Hessler’s book, and saw the astonishing things he learned and the things he had to do to learn them, and to a large extent I just copied. I learned some of my own tricks along the way, improvising and also reading blogs of other China expats. But his book was the bible. It was the Alpha and the Omega for me in the first months. I am eternally grateful for it.

But, after finishing his second book, Oracle Bones, a few days ago, I think I have found a book about China that I can be more grateful for. I am about to slip from reviewing to fawning, but this is a blog: Oracle Bones has changed everything in subtle ways; after I got through the second half of the book my whole idea of China and Chinese people was changed, and I read the second half just in awe, the book two inches from my face. It seemed like every few pages I was either tearing up or laughing. It was one of the most intense reading experiences I’ve had since Henry Roth tore my heart to pieces in Call It Sleep when I read that novel four or five years ago.

That is, of course, largely because China has become so huge in my world over the past year and a half. Certainly if I had never left the shores of the U.S. and hadn’t struggled for almost 18 months to find a life that seemed sane here, I would not have been so gripped by Hessler’s account of his time in China from 1999 to 2002. But I think there is something transcendent about this particular book (it goes far beyond his third book, Country Driving, which came out last year and which I read last spring) — something that portrayed Chinese people, and how their lives have been driven, torn, shaped, annihilated, by history, that has made this book special to me. Like beautiful fiction, which I wouldn’t have thought a book that is essentially a piece of long-form journalism could ever approach.

To start, Hessler sprinkles the book with fascinating facts that remain imminent for the average expat: Chinese is “logographic”, meaning that each character represents one spoken syllable; a linguist named Zhou Youguang was the main architect of pinyin, the system by which Chinese is romanized (417); the ubiquitous Chinese dish in America called General Tao’s Chicken is named after General Zuo Tongtang who expanded the Chinese empire in the Qing Dynasty (377); and that, after Chinese writing was invented 3000 years ago, “the heavens rained millet and the ghosts wept all night long” (289). Also that the word “oracular” exists.

These are snippets, random notations that were significant to me as a reader, giving sense to things that formerly made no sense. But the true beauty of Oracle Bones is Hessler’s narrative achievement, how he takes a string of unrelated stories and binds them. And, by doing that, how he demonstrates the subjectivity of history. Hessler’s book is not a history book, and it’s not merely a work of reportage: it’s a book about the Chinese world and how mercurial our interpretation of that world is, how it is always changing, how its story is malleable to the point of almost falling apart at any moment, like pizza dough, except in the hands of an experienced teller.

At one point, he breaks away from his whole narrative about China to explain his feelings about journalism as a craft, field and profession:

When I had first arrived in Beijing, the translation from teacher to writer hadn’t seemed so difficult. The basic role was similar: I was the outsider who sifted information between worlds. But over the years, as I thought about what Emily had written, I realized that there would always be something unnatural about being a foreign correspondent. As a teacher, I had taken information from far away–American culture, English literature–and introduced it to a classroom of living Chinese students.

But a writer’s work moved in the opposite direction. I started with living people and then created stories that were published in a distant country. Often, the human subjects of my articles couldn’t even understand the language in which they were written. From my perspective, the publishing world was so remote that it seemed half real. Once a year, I visited editors in New York, and I rarely heard anything from readers of the magazine. Usually, I wrote only two or three articles a year, which was adequate to live simply in a country like China. The fee for a single published word in the New Yorker–more than two dollars–was enough to buy lunch in Beijing. With one long sentence, I could eat for a week. Those were the exchanges of a freelance foreign correspondent: people and places were distilled into words, and the words were sold.

Whenever I received copies of my New Yorker articles, I found myself flipping through the pages, thinking about the gap between the world where I lived and the world where I published. I traded on that gap–that was my margin, and the advertisements reflected the breadth of the divide. In one published story, anecdotes about Fuling students were interspersed with ads for Orb Silversmiths, the Tribeca Grand Hotel, and Wildflower Log Homes (“lots starting at 49k”). The article about Polat was entitled “The Middleman”, and it began with the sentence, “You can buy anything in Yabaolu.”

These paragraphs attest to someone who has done some serious thinking about his role in a country where the majority of people are still scrambling to eat, yet where an American can also conduct interviews, write stories, and make a six-figure salary in U.S. dollars. This is an idea that has been prominent in my mind for over a year. Since I arrived in China I have been diligently taking notes, studying Chinese, trying my best to make sure that I am observing everything completely. I do it not necessarily with the idea that I will write a book, as Hessler did, but simply to record. I want to know what I have been thinking and seeing and experiencing, whether or not I ever write a book about it. But there is something strange, something tarnished about that act. It’s the same problem that all journalism has. You watch, you observe, you note, you write. But what if somebody doesn’t want to be observed? What if somebody doesn’t want to be written about? Your job, your work, is to take a living person and reduce them to words. What happens if they don’t like what they see? How are you supposed to reconcile your work with that fact? This question involves all of journalism, eventually. I imagine, sometimes, a Chinese person going to America and writing a book about his or her experience. How much of what he or she saw, and then noted, and then wrote, would be true? Perhaps it is all about experience. What is relevant to the viewer, the subjectivity about it. I suppose what I appreciate about Hessler’s writing is that he doesn’t deign to be authoritative: he is always there, or at least usually there, admitting that what he sees is limited by his perspective.

The book, as I mentioned earlier, is also about the malleability of history. This is one reason why I hate history books. They are Swiss cheese in my eyes. A history book’s flaws are always at the fore of my mind when I read one. It’s so obvious that history is limited by the perspective of the time in which it is written, but that is so rarely made clear in the writing. Hessler makes an effort to do that. The most powerful story that Hessler follows in his book is one that he admits he knew from the start he would fail to ever learn the facts about: the story of Chen Mengjia, a Chinese scholar who was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution (the period under Mao Zedong’s reign in which China turned in on itself and destroyed many of its cultural relics) and later committed suicide. Hessler splices the story of Chen Mengjia (his given name means “dreaming of home” — Meng4jia1) through the whole book, introducing it briefly and then moving on to other things, touching on it again 50 pages later. We slowly discover that Mengjia was a great scholar who studied the famous oracle bones, the 3000 year-old fossils on which the first Chinese characters appear, who criticized Mao and the party in the 50s for simplifying Chinese characters, and we hear different stories about his death: he committed suicide out of pride after being labeled a rightist, he was killed by Red Guards, he had a racy love life, he was faithful to his wife, until finally, toward the end of the book, Hessler writes about his encounter with Chen Mengjia’s younger brother, Mengxiong (dream of bear). The interview is tense, and becomes moreso when Hessler shows Mengxiong a photocopy of one of the last letters his brother ever wrote — a letter Mengxiong has never seen:

In China, people often speak circuitously when confronted with an uncomfortable memory. The narrative emerges loosely, like string falling slack onto the floor; the listener has to imagine how everything connects. Sometimes the most important details are omitted entirely. But when the Chinese do decide to speak openly, their directness can be overpowering. Often, there is no visible emotion: just the simple straight words. And something about seeing his brother’s letter causes Mengxiong to pick up the story and pull it taught. For the next hour he speaks without fatigue.

He tells about how his older brother had been persecuted, and why, and how he eventually tried to kill himself by taking sleeping pills, but failed. So Mengxiong went to his home, and there encountered Red Guards (the activists who, with Mao Zedong’s support, worked to destroy artifacts, ideas and people who were perceived as “traditional” during the Cultural Revolution) who detained Mengxiong and Mengjia’s wife, shaved off half their hair as a form of punishment, and proceeded to beat them:

“…they took off their leather belts and started beating us. First they used this part–”

The old man touches the leather tip of his belt. Then he slides his hand to the buckle. “After a while, they used this part, the metal. That’s when I started bleeding. They were beating me on the head, and I was wearing a white shirt — it was summertime. It turned entirely red with blood. They weren’t beating Lucy on the head like that. After a while, I was getting seriously hurt, and I asked them to let me get some bandages at the local clinic. I explained that otherwise I was going to bleed too much, and I promised to return immediately. Finally, they agreed. But while I was at the clinic, I made a phone call to my work unit, and they immediately sent some people over. They explained that I was a good person, and the Red Guards let me go. On my way home I saw my wife–not the same wife you’ve met, but my wife at the time. I told her to hurry home. That was a terribly dangerous time. That evening you could hear them all night long, knocking on doors and beating people.”

Mengxiong explains that he couldn’t visit his brother again, and shortly after that his brother killed himself. The sad thing about it, the most immediately sad thing after you read about the brutality, is simply that the people being beaten were often scholars, people who had invested themselves in knowledge and the past, and in many cases in understanding the outside world–Mengjia and his wife had both lived in America for a time. And that is precisely what they were beaten and humiliated for–they had ideas that seemed dangerous. China was working to destroy its past, in a period of self-immolation, and also was working to destroy anything that hinted of the outside world. In that case, anyone who has pursued knowledge is suspect. When the past and the outside world are the enemies, what else is there? There isn’t anything left. That’s what these interviews make clear. That’s what’s so tragic about the whole thing.

And what’s so beautiful about this book. Hessler sees things, meets people, that you can hardly hold in your mind without feeling that it will burst, and yet he writes so stunningly clearly. China is his onion. And as he showed in River Town, he has such a capacity for understanding it, such a gift for learning about things so quickly and absorbing them so deeply, and yet holding on to himself, the reader can only stand and watch in awe. Hessler took a great leap of faith when he wrote this book that his reader would understand the perspective that he was looking through. That’s what lends the book such clarity, such greatness.

Early on in the book, Hessler visits the North Korean border and finds himself in a field in the middle of nowhere, looking at a border marker with no one around. This is the true feeling of the book: wherever Hessler goes, he has the clarity of someone who has been hiking for days without seeing a soul:

I dropped my pack and took a few steps into North Korea, where I balanced my camera on a rock and set the timer. In the photograph, the sky is a deep blue and white clouds hand low on the horizon. I am kneeling and my shadow falls across the stone marker. There is a dirty white bandage on my left hand. The mountains could be the mountains of any country.

When I read this book, I get the feeling that Hessler could be writing about any place, and it would still be this good.

I have been wanting to make a post for a while about some of the amazing things about the Chinese language, so here goes.

There are a million things that are totally different about Chinese, basically everything is different, which reflects and emphasizes to me every day how different the culture must be. Sometimes it is a wonder to me that I can speak or understand any of it because of those differences. Here are just a few.

Almost nothing about Chinese is similar to English. It’s like a language spoken by aliens, in my opinion. For instance:

Chinese has no verb tenses. Which is amazingly easy. Run is run is run is run, whether you did it yesterday, whether you have done it over some unspecified period of time, whether you were doing it or are doing it or have been doing it or will do it or are going to do it. It’s just “run”, or, really, pao.

Chinese has no plurals. Instead, it has measure words. So the way we say “a grain of rice”, and can’t say “a rice”, applies to every single noun in Chinese. Which means there are “measure words” for everything. Like, you have to say a wei of person. Or a tou of cow. Or a jian of clothing. Or a pian of area.

Chinese does not share the verb forms that we use in English. There is no past tense. Instead, there is a Chinese syllable that indicates that a verb is either a completed action or a change of state (the syllable is le). That means that if you are talking about something that happened in the past but was not a completed action or a change of state, there is no grammatical differentiation between that thing and something that could be happening now. For instance, if you felt nauseous yesterday, you would say “I feel nauseous”, or if last year was your Zodiac birth year, you would say “last year is my Zodiac birth year”.

The polite way to say go pee in Chinese is go “small convenience”. Poo is, of course, “big convenience”.

The Chinese word “pipi” means butt. This is the same pronunciation as the English kiddy word for urine.

The change of state verb form also makes it possible to say things that seem totally strange when translated into English. For instance, a common way to tell someone that you’d like to get of the phone with them is “bu gen ni shuo le” or, literally, “I’m not talking to you anymore”. This still kind of hurts my feelings when somebody says it, but people say it all the time.

Chinese is incredibly efficient at saying complex ideas. For instance, today one of my students told me that I have to shave in order to be handsome. The sentence she used to express this was just four syllables: “Yao gua cai shuai“.

Chinese is a tonal language. Which means that the “tone” of a word is integral to its meaning. For instance, the word “wen” means different thing depending on the tone. One of the meanings is ask. Another meaning is kiss. So I once said to one of my students, at the dinner table, “I want to kiss you for a second”, when what I meant was “I want to ask you a quick question”. Wo xiang wen ni yi xia. The students laughed, and then explained the embarrassing thing I had just said.

Learning long strings of numbers is much easier in Chinese because the numbers are easier and quicker to say and hear once you learn the tones. So in English, if someone read me a ten-digit number in one breath without stopping, I wouldn’t be able to write it down. But when somebody tells me their eleven-digit number that way in Chinese I can remember it long enough to write it down without any problem. Which is weird.

In Chinese, “wo zai he jiu” — literally, I’m drinking alcohol, is a common response to the question “hey, what are you doing?” that in Chinese requires no extra explanation or detail. If someone calls you up on the phone and says, hey, what are you doing? You can just say “I’m drinking alcohol!” and they will usually take that as an exhaustive description of what you are doing with no need to add any more information.

Likewise, if you have to change or cancel plans in Chinese you can use the handy expression “wo you shi“, which means “I have an obligation/event/some kind of pressing engagement or affair or matter. The word shi doesn’t really translate well into English because in English we have to explain ourselves when we cancel plans or have something we need to do. But in Chinese you can just beautifully say, “I’m not coming to dinner because I have an event.” And everyone will be like, oh, of course, all right, see you later.

Last but not least, in Chinese the word for want, need and to be going to do (i.e. future tense) are all the same. Yao can mean want, need, or to be going to do. There are subtle ways to differentiate between those three different forms that we have in English, through context and also through using different words in Chinese. But a lot of the time there is no clear grammatical marker to tell you if a person means want, need, or to be done in the future.

I was just walking home from dinner and I overheard one of the most common forms of greeting in Chinese, only this time it was a little different.

The question, in its full-sentence form, would be, “Ni chi fan le ma?” – “Have you eaten dinner yet?”

This time, though, it was just “Chi fan le”, which, directly translated, means, “Eaten dinner.” (I’m pretty sure it was a greeting, not a response to above greeting.) Not exactly a question, or a statement, just a few words thrown together which, in context, have an obvious intent.

Lots of Chinese phrases are like this – if you took them out of context, or if you knew only the vocabulary but not the everyday speaking habits, getting along in China would be totally bewildering. Well, more bewildering than it is in the first place, anyway.

So it got me thinking. Speaking hones a language down to its barest elements. It simplifies statements or questions that, when written, become overly structured and laden with grammar, but when spoken, are simple, elegant, bearing only the necessary elements.

One of the first things I realized when I stepped into the classroom here to teach English was that I would have to make a choice between teaching the grammatically correct form of the language or teaching it how it is spoken. For example, when teaching students how to express a desire for me to repeat something – something they often, surprisingly, didn’t know how to say (they had always said it in Chinese to their English teachers, when they had to), I started to think: should I teach them the grammatically correct sentence we would use to express this? – “Could you please repeat that?” or “Could you please say that once more?” – or should I teach them something natural, i.e. something we would actually say in English, like the phrase “Come again?”

The problem is that for most English speakers, these kind of slangy, natural expressions arise from almost nowhere. They’re not something we ever study while we are in school (standard language classes in formal education pretty much exclusively focus on grammar, writing, the formal word, and completely ignore all the brilliant little idiosyncracies of speech, except maybe for linguistics classes in college, I guess) but those idiosyncracies are, in a sense, the heart and soul of a language. They are the way we communicate, the way we express ourselves when we are working with others, sharing ideas, problem solving, arbitrating the problems and solutions of our work, school, and whatever lives, but they are totally (as far as I can tell based on my conscious awareness of them and the active mental catalog I had of them when I came here to teach) ignored.

Let me give you an example of an idioscyntratic phrase that is pretty popular in English, and that you will have heard a bunch of times if you’re a fan of the T.V. show “The Wire”.

The example is this: “That’s on me” or “That’s on him/her”

This is a simple expression that would have absolutely no meaning at all to a Chinese mid-level learner of English. To a native speaker, especially when heard in context, the statement obviously has to do with assigning a person who bears the blame/burden for a particular blunder or responsibility. But for someone who is learning/has learned English, it could only possibly mean that something is “on” someone. Like a ketchup stain or a pouncing dog. More likely, it’s just going to look like a meaningless line: article, preposition, pronoun. Wha?

Let me give you another example. Early on in my time here, when I had already started teaching, some students helped me sign up for the Chinese chat client QQ. As I mentioned in my previous post, QQ is the ubiqitous MSN-messenger-like chat client in China. But also, since this is China, everybody’s handle, or identifying name on the service, is in Chinese. Which means I rarely knew, in the beginning, who was messaging me. So, of course, one of the first time I got a message from someone on QQ (probably a “hello” or a smiley face; those are pretty run-of-the-mill), I responded, quite innocently, “Who is this?”

I remember sitting there for about three minutes with no response from the person. Then, finally, the student sent me her response:

“What do you mean?”

At first, I was astonished. But then, after some thought, it made sense. If you didn’t know about the oral English habit of using the article “this” rather than a more direct statement using a pronoun, i.e., “Who are you?” or “I am (blank)” in conversation, it would be impossible to be certain of the meaning of the sentence “Who is this?” So I was one line into an English conversation with one of my students, and she was already totally baffled. Great.

Over time I have managed to become aware enough of these English idiosyncracies or differences from Chinese-language idiosyncracies to know when one is coming out of my mouth, so that when an entire classroom of students suddenly appears dumbstruck after I have said something relatively simple, I know how to slow down, back up, look at the phrase, write it on the blackboard, explain it, without getting frustrated or confused at why they don’t understand. It’s true, they have very broad vocabularies as language learners (I’m surprised at how often they throw out words like “simultaneous”, “inevitable”, or “identical”), but they haven’t had exposure to the authentic spoken language, the real living breathing, burnished and raw thing – the thing that is so rare in text books and teaching materials – to know what I’m talking about when I say something like “after you”, or “slow down”, or “I’ll get it” or “could you please hand me that pen”, or…. “Who is this?”

Which, in a way, is a shame, because if they had got the chance to put half the energy into learning speech that they have put into learning reading, writing, and vocabulary, they would be pretty damn near fluent, I think.

But for me, it’s interesting to learn these pared-down, gritty sayings that only make sense if you understand context, frequency of use, and how simple language can be when you have to say it.

“Have you eaten dinner yet?”

“You eat yet?”

Like Tarzan speak, in a way (and I’m grateful to Chinesepod.com for teaching me these kinds of idiomatic speech patterns in Chinese rather than trying to cram grammar down my throat). But it works. And it’s damn beautiful.

Peace out from China.

One of the pros of the past three months in China has been the stabilizing effect it has had on my eating and sleeping habits.

There are two reasons for that. The first is that a very common greeting in this area (and, as I understand it, throughout a lot of China) is, “have you eaten?”

I get asked this question like 5+ times a day, and not just when it is around lunchtime. Students often ask me this at 10:30 in the morning, when it is not clear whether we are closer to breakfast or lunchtime. I usually see my students in front of the main dining halls in the middle of campus. When they see me, an expression usually forms on their face that is something like a confused, dazed, interested smile. The expression is utterly unique and fascinating and is reproduced almost every time I see a student who knows me.

They then say, quietly, “Hello, Mr. Will. Have you eaten yet?”

I think the funny, friendly, gentle look they give me is a mixture of panic (at having to compose an English sentence on the spot to greet me), warmth (at seeing a teacher), and concern (foreigner = lost white man).

The question they ultimately pose to me (after groping around in their minds for the right English words and sentence structure) is usually funny in two ways: first, because what meal is never specified; and second, because it has no actual connection to any possibility of our eating together. The answer — “yes, I have eaten,” or “no, I haven’t eaten” — is as inconsquential as the “good” we English speakers give when asked “How are you?” (which question, by the way, Chinese students know very well, because they shout it at me all the time as I walk across campus — more as a blunt statement than a question).

The second big reason “have you eaten?” is so funny is because of the ruthless order that students seem to impose opon their day here. When I first arrived in China, I often ate lunch at 12:30 or 1 p.m., and dinner at 5:30 or 6 p.m. That kind of a dining schedule is almost unimaginable to some students, I think. About 80 to 90 percent of them, as far as I can observe, start eating lunch somewhere between 11:45 and 12, no earlier or later. The dining hall is all but deserted at 1:05, and it is impossible to get anything that isn’t cold and slimy after 1:25.

All of which is to say that if a student sees me at 12:45 p.m. and asks me if I have eaten, and I haven’t, they usually say, “Oh, why so late?”

So, after struggling to answer this question repeatedly in my first few weeks here, I started just eating lunch at 11:45, and dinner at 5 or 5:30, and leaving my former, just-wing-it, unscheduled eating pattern to the dogs.

Which is actually a lot easier than avoiding eating until late in the day and then wandering around, starved and wild-eyed, desperate for something to eat (which is how I always used to do it).

Another hilarious thing that I will add as a poscript is that students love to give me fruit. I’ll be walking along somewhere, maybe having just finished lunch, and I’ll see a student I know, and he or she will be carrying some fruit, and without fail he or she will offer me a piece of fruit from the bag, if not the whole bag. Students will look exactly as if they have just gone shopping for some fruit for themselves, be coming directly out of the fruit store, see me, and then hand me the bag of fruit and say, “this is for you” and then walk away as if they had planned to give me the fruit all along. It is profoundly weird and funny and sweet.

When I flew to China, the first Chinese person that I actually spoke to was, of course, in America. He was waiting with me in the check-in line, in the JFK Airport.

The flight from New York to Shanghai was, understandably, populated mostly by Chinese people (there were a few Westerners, but I could count them on one hand). This guy was standing in line in front of me with his wife. I heard him say, “He has a nice backpack; that’s a very special backpack,” and realized he was talking about me (I was wearing a big North Face overnight pack that was not particularly special but was out of place among the travel gear of everybody else).

So, I said hello and we talked for a minute. I told him that I was going to Fujian Province.

“Oh, they speak a lot of crazy dialects there,” he said. “I do not understand those people.”

In my bags, I had two books on Chinese and three audiobooks on learning Chinese (Mandarin). One of the things I wanted to do while in China was/is learn Chinese. So that was not terrific news for me.

Since then, I have come to realize that he was right, but not totally (it is possible to understand people here in Fujian, because they do speak Mandarin, if with a very heavy southern accent), and also in more ways than he intended (it’s not just that people in Fujian don’t speak standard Mandarin, but that a good chunk of Chinese people in general do not seem to speak standard Mandarin).

Which all leads to the title of this post, which is, there is no Chinese.

Officially, I guess, that statement is incorrect. Mandarin is the official language of China and is what is primarily spoken in Beijing, apparently. So people from the northern/Beijing area tend to speak fairly standard Mandarin. But go elsewhere in the country and you could come across any number of dialects, heavy accents (like way more prohibitive than just a southern v. northeastern accent in the U.S.), and sometimes just flat out different languages, which is what some of the dialects are (different languages).

Mandarin and Cantonese, for example, are two major dialects/languages in China. Mandarin is the standard language spoken here in the university. So classes are taught in Mandarin (or the case of my classes, English). But all of the students speak their own local dialects.

Some students explained this to me over lunch a week ago. There were about five of them eating with me, and they told me that among them they spoke two different local dialects. One was called Min Nan Yu (Fujian Southern Language) and the other one I didn’t catch the name of. These were just two dialects of Fujian. There are others. The students speak these languages among each other in their dorms, and often can’t understand the students from two doors down, because they have a different local dialect. These students are all from Fujian. Fujian is just one relatively small province in a much, much bigger country. See the image below — Fujian is the red blotch in the SEern section of China.

Fujian, China - Thanks to Wikipedia

Yeah. So if there are multiple dialects spoken in that small red spot, how many languages do you think are spoken throughout China? Lots. I haven’t found an exact number in any reliable source, but apparently there are about 7-ish dialect groups in China, including Mandarin and Cantonese, and any number of permutations of those dialects.

Which means that even if a person knew Mandarin and Cantonese, there is a good chance that in parts of China he/she still wouldn’t be able to communicate with people.

Thankfully, most of my students primarily speak Mandarin and English around me, so I can communicate with them now in English, and there is a distant, snowball-in-hell chance that one day I will be able to understand what they are saying in Mandarin.

But, the catch is, I can’t really learn Mandarin from them. Because…they all have heavy southern accents, and their Mandarin is influenced by their local dialects. Which means that they all say words differently, some correctly, some incorrectly.

The word “water” is a good example. In Mandarin, water is shuǐ (pronounced like “shway”). But some students pronounce it like “sway”, which is incorrect (accented), but which they would correct me on if I tried to learn “water” from them and pronounced it “shway” (which is correct). I ran into this problem over and over again my first two weeks here, before I started taking lessons. I would learn a word one way, and the next day, a different group of students would teach me the same word, pronounced differently.

And that is only one tiny pronounciation difference…the students, because of their accents/dialects, also pronounce their r’s as zh’s and l’s differently, and there are other differences…

On top of all that (all the speaking differences), it turned out that the Chinese writing book that I brought with me to Chinese is also useless. Mainland China now uses a simplified form of Chinese characters for writing, while Hong Kong and Taiwan, and the Chinatowns in America, use an older and more complex version of Chinese writing. So, I might as well line hamster cages with the writing book I got in the U.S.

All of this is to say that I am really glad I am taking Chinese lessons now, because learning Chinese from random students in Fujian, it turns out, is close to impossible.

I have them for 4 hours a week, and each lesson is a small disaster, because I really can’t pronounce the words, but I think I might be learning something. That’s good enough for now.

Naptime. Peace out.