bezdomny ex patria

As in every year, we spent Spring Festival up in the village eating jiaozi, visiting relatives and blowing things up. Well, as family fuselighter in chief (i.e. the only one dumb enough to approach explosives of dubious origin with a naked flame (or lit cigarette, usually – ciggies don’t blow out in the wind). I have noticed my father in law is quite happy to lay fireworks out for me, but retreats quite a conspicuous distance when I light the fuse) while my wife, daugther, mother in law, brother in law and his wife, stayed inside, safe. And the fact my brother in law got married last year meant he had to visit absolutely all his relatives to introduce his wife. This meant a lot of squeezing our car through narrow village lanes, divided into two separate trips, with a boot-load of large, heavy gifts, the first trip with the car and an electric scooter filled to capacity, the second trip only the car as it wasn’t essential for my wife and daughter to visit everybody.

On the second trip we got to the house of a great uncle and great aunt. He’d had a firework explode next to him, deafening him in at least one ear, and was feeling poorly, so he sat on the kang and didn’t say much. Great aunt did most of the talking, and was in quite a nostalgic, teary mood. Now, I’d always had trouble understanding these two, but I’d always put it down to their advancing age and the trouble that can wreak with clear speech combined with the much stronger accents one seems to encounter in older, less educated people. Turns out there was more, and I should’ve recognised certain aspects of great aunt’s speech. Well, in my defence, I only see them once a year at Spring Festival, maybe also when there’s some big family event. So great aunt turned to me and said, “你还喝x吗？”, the x being a word I didn’t catch. Except what she said came out as “nǐ hái hā x ma?” I turned to my mother in law, who translated into standard Yanqinghua. Great aunt’s mood of weepy nostalgia meant I understood even less of the ensuing conversation, which seemed to be largely a review of her life and the people she’d known. Not being familiar with the history of her branch of the family didn’t help either. And it could’ve actually been a fascinating discussion to listen to. But a couple of phrases here and there stood out, for example, “不是这个的” came out as something like “basì jǐgede” and “是这个的” as “sì jǐgede”, with the ‘a’ in ‘ba’ being short and somewhat rounded, about halfway between a regular Pinyin ‘a’ and ‘o’ and somewhat schwa like, and the ‘i’ in sì being pronounced as if it were preceded by ‘x’ or ‘j’ rather than ‘s’.

I asked my mother in law as we left, and she said, “Oh, she’s from out west, Huailai County,” and I allowed myself a Homer Simpson moment. Her pronunciations of 喝 and 不 were Huailaihua pronunciations  I’ve been familiar with for years now. I don’t know why I missed the x in “你还喝x吗？”, considering I was drinking tea it would most likely have been either 茶 or 水, both of which would’ve been pronounced pretty close to standard Putonghua, and which I must’ve heard in Huailaihua plenty of times before. I don’t know which part of Huailai she was from or why her accent seemed so much stronger or somehow subtly different from those of other Huailaihua speakers I’ve heard – all of whom come from one village in northeastern Huailai (ah, the perils of using your family for research) very close to the border and our village, and most of whom moved to Yanqing in their youth, as great aunt did.

Anyways, the next day my brother in law and his wife needed transport out to his mother’s home village – the aforementioned “one village in northeastern Huailai very close to the border and our village” – to visit her younger brother, uncle and aunt, the last of her family to still live in the village that bears their surname.

So I got the car warmed up (winter mornings out there can make it very hard to get the car started, and when it’s started it can take quite a few minutes before the oil in the gearbox is warmed up enough for me to move the gear lever easily or get it properly into gear, and I need to drive a long way before the wiper fluid is warm enough that it will squirt far enough to hit the windscreen, although it is supposed to be good down to minus 25 degrees and Yanqing is not supposed to get that cold – get a bucket of hot water? Done that, it freezes as soon as it hits the glass. But I digress), we loaded up, and off we went northwestwards up the G110. As we passed Xiaying, the Last Village in Beijing (at least, as you travel that road in that direction. Turn around and it’s the First), only 6 kilometres from our own village, the commentary turned to how Xiaying’s accent is quite distinct from that of our village’s. On the one hand, that makes sense, Xiaying is on the border with Huailai, logically speaking it’s accent should sit somewhere between those of Huailai and Yanqing. But it’s only six kilometres up the road.

A couple more kilometres took us winding under the G7 expressway and the Datong-Qinhuangdao Railway (which seems, so far as I can tell, to transport only coal in kilometres-long trains down to the port and the empty coal cars back to Datong for refilling. Fortunately the locomotives are all electric), then up to the border. We entered Hebei with a thud. Literally. There was a sign by the road proclaiming the Hebei border and a line level with that sign right across the road where the smooth G110 leading back into Yanqing dropped into a series of potholes, lumps, bumps, judders, shudders and shakes covered in the most cracked up tarseal you can imagine. The car went thud as it fell from smooth road to once-was-road. All road markings – lane markings, crossings, arrows, speed limits, whatever, disappeared, and with them went any attempt by the drivers to drive where they should’ve been. My brother in law’s talk went from the differences in different villages’ accents to, “Wow, this place hasn’t changed a bit! It’s exactly the same as last time I was here 10 years ago!” I’d been out there once before, the New Year after we got married when we had to do the same tour around absolutely all the relative’s houses, and my reaction was pretty similar, except I’m sure that after so many years of thousands of heavy trucks and no repairs, the road is in even worse state than the first time I was out there.

My brother in law, his wife, and myself where the only ones there who did not speak Huailaihua. Well, I’m not the most talkative type, and was there as driver only, so I kept to myself for the most part and just listened. My brother in law and his wife, both Yanqinghua speakers, took part in conversations, but his wife is even less talkative than me and he was deferential to his elders, so we were pretty much in a sea of Huailaihua. 喝 and 不 pronounced as the hā and ba described above, ‘h’s disappearing from ‘sh’ (hardly unique to Huailai, I know), generally the same pronunciations and rhythm patterns I know from when my mother in law code switches into Huailaihua.

My mother in law generally speaks Yanqinghua, sometimes to other natives from Huailai, like her sister or niece, who now live in Yanqing, but generally speaking, when she is talking to another Huailairen she switches to Huailaihua. Sometimes she code mixes and speaks to us in a mash up of Yanqinghua and Huailaihua, which can draw quite an amusing command to speak proper Yanqinghua from my wife. She can speak standard Putonghua when she wants to, but rarely wants to. What was amusing this time, though, was that she turned to me and forgot to switch back to either Yanqinghua or Putonghua, saying, “nǐ hái hā suì ma?” (你还喝水吗？). But two of the people there were a great uncle and great aunt of roughly a similar age as the great aunt in our village in Yanqing whose accent had given me so much trouble, and yet I understood them perfectly. Sure, there was no weepy nostalgia this time. But nor did I hear 这 pronounced jǐ. As I said, I don’t know which part of Huailai the great aunt in our village was from, but it felt like I’d had enough exposure to the Huailaihua of my mother in law’s home village that it no longer gives me any trouble.

And I left my cellphone in Yanqing, so I couldn’t get any surreptitious recordings. Sorry. You’ll just have to trust my transcriptions of the above remembered snippets of conversation. Oh, sure, I’ve never added any recordings before, but I might start doing that in the future if I get my recording act together.

But I do have to wonder, considering the huge amount of intermarriage between Yanqing and Huailai, how a series of three villages strung along the G110 separated by distances of only 6 to 7 kilometres can maintain distinct accents.

And as I was writing this, Firefox again ate the language bar. Language bars are kinda necessary for polyglot computer users, and having to close and reopen Firefox and rewrite the beginning of this post is a pain in the arse. I hope Firefox isn’t planning on making a habit of this.

1: I just had Firefox eat my language bar. That was weird. I’m pretty sure it was a Firefox problem, because I opened up Maxthon, logged in to Weibo, and the language bar worked. But in Firefox, the language bar vanished and I could not switch to Chinese. Well, I could type all I liked, but only in English-style diacritical free Latin script. I closed Firefox, reopened, problem gone, language bar back and functional, proper toned pīnyīn and 汉字 allowed again.

2: Via Language Log, the benefits of being bilingual. There’s lots of goodness there, but I must admit this paragraph had me a little concerned:

In one recent study, Anat Prior and Tamar Gollan compared Mandarin-English bilinguals, Spanish-English bilinguals, and monolingual English speakers living in San Diego. As you might expect, the Spanish-English speakers flipped between their languages on a daily basis. Mandarin-English speakers, on the other hand, kept their language use more compartmentalized. (Incidentally, Asian immigrants to the U.S. are among the fastest to lose their heritage languages.) All three groups were given a test in which they had to switch between sorting visual images either by their color or by their shape. Only the Spanish-English bilinguals showed a relative advantage when confronted with a sudden category shift; the Mandarin-English speakers were no different on this score than the monolinguals.

If we take “flipped between their languages on a daily basis” to mean frequent code switching and “kept their language use more compartmentalized” to mean less frequent code switching, which is what the linked abstract seems to suggest (“By contrast, Mandarin–English bilinguals, who reported switching languages less frequently than Spanish–English bilinguals”), and assume there’s some social reason for Spanish-English bilinguals in San Diego to code switch more often than Mandarin-English bilinguals (proximity to Mexico? larger hispanophone community?), then it would seem on the face of it to make sense that that particular Mandarin-English community shows no advantage over monolinguals. Now, my daughter gets English from me and Mandarin from her mum, so when she learns to speak, will that frequency of code switching be enough for my daughter to reap the benefits of growing up bilingual? I passed that article on to my wife, whose response was:

09:40

那要是我们回新西兰，你跟我还说中文

09:40

呵呵

Another word I’ve heard a lot since my daughter’s birth – well, no, since she learnt to throw, sounds to me like ròu and it’s very clear from context that it means ‘throw’ (hence me hearing it a lot since she learnt to throw). I mention it now because I heard it the other day from a woman working in a photo studio in the 718 art and media park. Now, I have no idea where she was from, but she was speaking very standard Putonghua and there was no comment on my mother in law’s accent, which normally happens when people from Yanqing and Huailai meet, so I’m going to assume she’s from Neither Yanqing Nor Huailai, which narrows the range of possible hometowns down drastically.

I just checked three dictionaries* and none give either any alternative pronunciation for 扔 (rēng) or any character pronounced rou in any tone with a meaning even remotely close to ‘throw’. Nor does nciku’s entry for ‘throw’ throw up anything similar to what I’m hearing. Now, experience with Yanqinghua means I can think of plenty of words that have no written form**, but I don’t think I’ve ever come across such a word used by a non-Yanqinghua speaker before, certainly not such a word in Putonghua. So this leaves me wondering – is this one of the words common across northern and northeastern Chinese dialects? If so, why doesn’t it have a character? I ask about the lack of a character because in my experience those words common across northern and northeastern dialects can usually be written.

I’m also wondering if this word specifically refers to a throwing action by a baby because I never heard such a word until my daughter discovered she can throw things (and now I hear it a lot because she loves to throw things around). Update: Just before lunch my mother in law used ròu in reference to her throwing out rubbish, so perhaps it’s not limited to babies.

Has anyone else come across this ròu meaning ‘throw’? Is it specifically about babies or young kids throwing things? Sinophone parents, I’m looking at you lot specifically…

*A Chinese-English Dictionary (Revised Edition), Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 1997.

《现代汉语词典（第5版）》商务印书馆，2005.

《新华字典汉英双解 Xinhua Dictionary with English Translation》商务印书馆国际有限公司，2000.

**At the risk of starting a fight: Sure, I can write ròu in pinyin, and doubtless in the myriad other phonetic and phonemic schemes devised for Chinese, as well as IPA, but I say “no written form” because real world written Chinese exists in Chinese characters. The existence of words with no character (and there’s no shortage of them once you get into non-standard dialects) may be an argument for full time Romanisation of everyday written Chinese, but that’s not what I want to explore here.

Sometimes I’m tempted to think you can get just about everything in Beijing. Sometimes the only exceptions to the “Beijing has everything” rule I can think of are limited to things specific to little known island countries in the Pacific. But every now and then Beijing manages to throw a solid brick wall topped with shards of glass and razor wire at you.

We bought my daughter a carseat, the smallest of a Japanese brand’s range. It was supposed to last until she’s three – at least, that’s what the advertising said. All I can say is Japanese three year olds must be minuscule if a 9 month old half-Pakeha/half-Han lass can’t fit inside this thing. Well, she fits in, it’s just the straps are getting a bit too tight, and there’s no point using a carseat if she’s not going to buckle up.

So my wife found a German brand carseat online and ordered it. It seemed to check out, and my logic is German kids are probably of a fairly similar size to Kiwi kids, so chances are it won’t suddenly turn out to be too small. The car seat arrived, it’s big, but not too big for our tiny Suzuki, got stacks of space for the baby, the design looks pretty good – a big, solid brace to hold her in, side impact protection, including for her head, and the whole thing clearly designed to absorb shock like a bike helmet. Sweet.

Then we were taking her to the hospital for a check up and vaccination on Friday afternoon, went down to the car, took out the old carseat, put the new one in, baby in the seat, brace in front of her, and….. the seatbelt was 5cm too short. Bugger. So the poor thing had to be squished into the old carseat. Fortunately it’s only a short journey. We probably should’ve just walked, even.

So I got online and poked around Google a bit. Yes, seatbelt extensions are available. Sweet. So I told my wife to see if she could find them on her Chinese shopping websites, and yes, searches drew results. Sweet. We only need an extra few centimetres.

On Saturday I popped up to Carrefour to see if they had them in their little car accessory section. No, but they did have these odd little buckle things that plug into the regular buckle, then the seatbelt plugs into them. Three or four of them would do the trick. But they didn’t look very good – you know how sometimes metal just looks cheap, and when you get up close and personal it shatters like thin glass? And besides, multiple buckles struck me as being somewhat akin to overloading electrical circuits with multiple multiboxes. Yeah, not the most rational assumption, but that’s what it seemed like.

Now, one good thing about driving in China is the 汽配城/qìpèichéng – large markets for car parts, accessories, repairs, customisation, basically anything you could want or need to do to your car. They’re awesome and fascinating. So on Sunday we went down to the nearest such market, the place where we’d already gotten a few bits and pieces and our windows tinted, and we probably would’ve gone straight for the very store there we’d used before, they’re good people. But to get there meant driving through a multitude of markets, and once we entered the market area, what we saw did not inspire hope. All the markets on the way there had been torn down, even the very new buildings. We got down to where the qìpèichéng and it was also in the final stages of demolition, with just a few remaining sections of framework still visible. Once again, bugger.

“Shilihe!” my wife suggested, and I gave her a bit of a surprise by asking “Where’s that?” See, I’ve developed a bit of a reputation among my in laws and those of my wife’s friends who’ve seen me drive for knowing Beijing’s roads backwards and my navigational skills. For example, on the way back from Yanqing after New Year I gave my wife and her mother a bit of a surprise. I wanted to get petrol, but I wanted to go to a particular petrol station that I knew to be cheaper than the Sinopec stations that seem to dominate rural Yanqing, but I wanted to avoid traffic and take the most direct route. So I did. And just as we were about to pop out at the southern edge of the county town, my wife and her mother suddenly realised they had no idea where they were. But I met the main road from the county town to Badaling and the Expressway exactly where I wanted to and my favourite petrol station just 500m south of there. But I knew which nearby part of Beijing she was referring to, I was quickly reminding myself 3rd or 4th Ring Road (3rd, if you’re interested) and thinking how to get there from where we were. And besides, I’d seen similar establishments along the inside rim of the southeast 4th Ring Road just downstream from where we were. So we wound up at the market at Shibalidian.

My wife ran through all the shops selling things related to seatbelts. No extensions. She phoned the company we got the carseat from. “Well, most European and American cars these days have long enough belts.” Yeah, but not liking to waste our money on absurdly high petrol bills and constant repairs, we drive a Japanese car.  “Oh, go and ask them for a longer seatbelt.” Ok. Except the staff of every shop laughed in her face. Who the hell wants seatbelts?!

Now, I generally drive as close to the maximum (some Chinese roads also have clearly signposted minimum) speed limit that road, traffic and weather conditions allow. I have to say it is quite distressing to be driving down the expressway and see in the car passing me somewhat faster than the speed limit or a prudent speed for the conditions a family’s only child standing in the wheel well of the front passenger seat playing with toys on the dashboard, unrestrained. What’s worse is how often I see this. But I don’t think this lack of attention to basic road safety is going to last. A few months ago the Beijing police posted to their 平安北京 Weibo account a video of crash tests simulating what would happen to a child held in a parent’s arms in the front passenger seat in a crash at only 40km/h. I showed it to my wife and made her describe it to her parents, and since then I have heard not even a single suggestion that my daughter might not need to be strapped in to her carseat. On Weibo a few weeks ago I saw that Beijing had announced it had installed and was about to turn on new high definition cameras that could see, among other less surprising things, whether the driver and front passenger had their seatbelts on, and fines would be in the mail to those who don’t buckle up – and since then I have noticed a lot more drivers with their seatbelts on. My wife recently came across a news story online in which a woman had been holding her 3-month old baby in the front passenger seat when a tire burst. The baby went flying through the windscreen and did not survive. That sealed my wife’s conversion to road safety. Publicity is out there, the police want to improve the situation.

It was suggested to me yesterday that the market for children’s carseats and seatbelt extensions here is composed of Westerners. I disagree. Carseats and other safety devices are easily available from websites, stores and malls targeted, not Jenny Lou style at Western expats, but Jingkelong style at local Chinese. This suggests to me that even if most Chinese families take a “she’ll be right” approach to their children’s safety on the roads, there certainly is a Chinese market of Chinese buyers for children’s car safety products. So I’m surprised and frustrated that we couldn’t get that seatbelt extension or a longer seatbelt.

Oh well, on the way out of the market my wife came up with an ingenious solution that should do the trick. We tested it when we got home, and it seems to work. Still, I will keep my eye out for a proper, decent-quality seatbelt extension, as that would leave me a little more comfortable.

A Chinese word that has grabbed my attention of late is shǎi. I don’t know why I just noticed it now, but my wife and mother in law have been using it a lot, especially when discussing the colour or propensity to dye the water of baby clothes. At first I couldn’t quite figure out if it should be spelt shěr, shǎr, or shǎir, as the vowel in their pronunciation seems to fall somewhere in between those three, and I’ve never been much good at phonology. I also got to wondering if it was an alternate pronunciation of 色 (sè) or a different character. So, now that I’ve got my end of semester paperwork done and handed in and the baby’s asleep, I opened up the dictionary and had a wee look.

So I grabbed A Chinese-English Dictionary (Revised Edition) (FLTRP, 1997) and checked 色, and sure enough it had a see also shǎi note, and on seeing also shǎi the dictionary confirmed that that is an alternate pronunciation also meaning colour with an example sentence “这布掉～吗？” which just happens to be in the exact context I’ve been hearing so often. There’s also a little inf. notation, marking it as informal, and the word 色子 meaning dice.

My 《现代汉语词典（第五版）》 （中国科学院语言研究所词典编辑室编，商务印书馆，2005）confirms that, but also has a note (儿) confirming the 儿话音 I hear, and instead of inf., tells us (口) – I can’t find a list of abbreviations to explain, but it strikes me that there’s a difference between informal and oral. It also gives the word:

色酒：shǎijiǔ（方）名：用葡萄或其他水果为原料制成的酒，一般带有颜色，酒精含量较低。

I wish dictionaries would indicate which dialect or dialects a word marked as dialect comes from. Anyway, in some unspecified dialect there is a word 色酒 meaning an alcoholic drink brewed from grapes or other fruit, generally coloured and with a rather low alcohol content. In other words, a noun for wine, fruit wine and other alcoholic drinks made from fruit. But why is beer not included? This word broken down means “coloured booze”, not “fruit plonk”, and beer is plenty colourful. And does anybody know which dialect or dialects use this word? I just asked my mother in law if she knows the word, and she semi-correctly guessed that it means wine (she asked, “是不是葡萄酒？”) but she denies ever having heard it before. Most curious indeed. What is it about the character 色, which means colour and seems to have no other meaning except in the term 色子, which would indicate specifically “alcoholic drink made from grapes or other fruit”? Sure, colour is used to denote traditional Chinese alcoholic drinks – 白酒 (white booze) and 黄酒 (yellow booze). But how does a non-specific “coloured plonk” tell us “plonk made from grapes”?

Now, I’m pretty sure that I’ve only heard my wife and mother in law and other residents of Yanqing pronounce 色 as shǎir. I’m not sure what that tells me. It’s marked as either informal or spoken depending on the dictionary, not dialect. My initial confusion over the vowel I certainly put down to accent and my wife’s code switching (Putonghua with most people, including me and our daughter; Yanqinghua with her parents, uncles, aunts, brother, cousins, etc), but my mother in law is a native of a village whose name bears her surname in Huailai County and is known to switch between and even mix Huailaihua and Yanqinghua, so she’s not always the most reliable source for information of a dialectological nature. And in any case, it’s not marked dialect in the dictionaries.

Side note: Although they lie in the same basin, Huailai and Yanqing have distinct accents and dialects. Well, a bit like Australasian accents and dialects – distinct to those who know them, indistinguishable to most outsiders. And Yanqinghua can be divided into Eastern and Western variants with even subtler distinctions, just as New Zild can be divided into Southern (Southland and (mostly rural) Otago) and The Rest of the Country, again, with the differences clear to Those In The Know and utterly mysterious to the rest of the world.

And why does 色子 mean “dice”? Is there a separate word for “die”? That would be unusual considering singular/plural distinctions in Chinese are generally limited to words for people and not very strict. Oh, wait, I’m being unnecessarily pedantic again.

Anyway, there’s my little linguistic discoveries for the day.

Some time ago I was reminded that I have a copy of a Bill Bryson book on my shelf waiting to be read. I’d never read any of Bill Bryson’s books before. Bill Bryson. Dude’s supposed to be hilariously funny. That’s what everyone tells me. How is it that I could be leaving this book unread.

So I took it down off the shelf and started reading. Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson. Worth neither buying nor reading. Imagine all the trees that could still be alive today if this book had never been published, or at least that could have been put to better use.

Chapter 1 was just about a deal breaker, but no, I soldiered on, prepared to believe that it might get better. This is, after all, the famous Bill Bryson, who’s supposed to be hillariously funny. It got less bad. Chapter 1 is written from the point of view of someone who suspended his emotional development at a particularly difficult early adolescence and has managed to bend double, insert his head somewhere unfortunate, then collapsed in on himself so that he is viewing the world from the inside of his own pancreas. It is one long and incredibly self-absorbed whinge about how terribly insufferable the bus ride from Oslo, up through Sweden, then back into Norway to Hammerfest is. And yet, not one of the details of the journey leapt out at me to scream “See what an arduous journey I had!” No, instead the tone was far more suggestive of “This is why my wife held a gun to my head until I bought a one-way ticket to Hammerfest and told me to never come back.”

In subsequent chapters he does actually manage to extract himself from his own innards and begin to actually engage with the real world around him, but only just barely, and he never strays too far from yet another Holden Caulfield-esque whinge (and Catcher in the Rye, lest anybody get the wrong idea, is another book whose publication was a crime against trees). I could sum the book up in one sentence: Europe is rubbish, the service is crap, and I hate everything. Whenever Bryson claims to have liked anything or anyone, I simply can’t bring myself to believe him, so overwhelming and constant is the flood of negativity. What I can believe, based on what’s in this book, is that Bryson may well be one of those people who attracts crap service through his own bad attitude. Really, Bill, why would anyone be nice to you when you so clearly hold them personally and their entire country in such utter contempt?

Another thing that struck me about this book was Bryson’s apparent inability to paint any clear pictures in my mind. It was a strange experience reading of his travels through Europe unable to see what it was Bryson was seeing. Surely the whole point of travel writing is to describe one’s experiences in strange and exotic places? Shouldn’t a travel writer therefore be able to paint in the readers’ minds vivid pictures of the places and people they’re meeting? Why is it that reading this book is like trying to see Europe through Linfen smog on a dark winter’s night without my glasses on?

Well, yes, it does have a few laugh out loud moments, but I suspect more despite than because of Bryson’s famed sense of humour. Judging by this book, I can only conclude that Bryson actually does not have a sense of humour, but a vague idea that humour is something akin to the kind of wordplay one finds in Blackadder. He tries hard, and does sometimes succeed, but mostly it just comes across as trying hard.

Unlike Ulysses, Neither Here Nor There is not large enough to use as a doorstop should you accidentally find yourself in possession of a copy. I’m going to put my copy in the box of unwanted books in the foreign teachers’ office on the off chance a current or future colleague actually likes this kind of writing. But the whole way through the book I was thinking, if I wanted an expat whinge session I could pop up to Sanlitun to one of those bars whose clientele is dominated by wankers who never bother to learn a word of the local language because they’re so convinced of their own superiority. But I find it hard to think of anything more boring. I really would rather watch paint dry. So should you come across a copy of Neither Here Nor There, don’t waste your time. Really, just say no.

I don’t know why, it’s a Saturday morning, my wife has gone off to inform Father Christmas of what gifts to bring my daughter, my daughter is taking a nap (life is simple when you’re not yet nine months old), I’m feeling a bit ragged in that ‘almost the end of semester’ kind of way, I’m still caffeinating and had just started reading this when I suddenly thought, wouldn’t the relative sparseness and general lack of pollysyllabic words make Classical Chinese ideal for microblogging?

Now, that’s not even close to hypothesis quality. Not even a random thought, barely makes it to random thot level. Really, it’s just a thotikin. But how to test this wee thotikin? Being the least diligent student of Chinese in all of recorded history, legend and myth, I’m certainly not going to embarrass myself by attempting to actually write anything in Classical Chinese. But glancing at the shelf above me, I see a few bilingual – Classical and Modern Chinese – editions of a few of the Chinese classics. Surely the obvious method would be to find one or two passages of about microbloggable length and compare the original Classical text with the Modern translation for length. A glance in the Hanfeizi reveals a lot of rather long passages, not really microbloggable. Ah, but the Shanhai Jing – surely there’s a book that should have been published on Weibo! So here it is:

石者山

又北二百八十里，曰石者之山，其上无草木，多摇碧。泚水出焉，西流注于河。有兽焉，其状如豹，而文题白身，名曰孟极，是善伏，其鸣自呼。

And putting that into Weibo, including the title and a colon to distinguish it from the text, leaves me 72 characters spare, so I only used 68.

Now, the modern Chinese translation by, er, somebody not me. Can’t find the translator’s name in the book:

再向北二百八十里是石者山，山上不生草木，多产摇碧一类的玉石。泚水发源于这座山，向西流注入黄河。山中有一种野兽，它的形状像豹子，长着有花纹的额头，白色的身子，它的名字叫孟极。这种野兽善于隐藏，它的叫声就像呼叫它自己的名字。

And that, with the same 3 character title and colon, leaves me with only 26 characters, so that’s 114 characters all up. So the Classical Chinese uses only 60% of the characters of the Modern Chinese version.

So how does it compare with English? I’m not the only one to have gotten the impression that one can squeeze a lot more information into 140 Chinese characters than 140 English characters – although it must be said that’s not necessarily true. I was sure I had a trilingual (Classical and Modern Chinese and English) copy of the Daode Jing lying around, but I guess it must be helping clutter up my parents’ house in New Zealand. And in any case, like the Hanfeizi it’s not really a microbloggable book. I do have a similarly trilingual copy of the Zhuangzi with me, but again, not really microbloggable. But I do have a bilingual Classical Chinese and English copy of the Analects. So let’s try some randomly chosen passage.

Book 2, 1:

子曰：“为政以德，譬如北辰，据其所而众星共知。”

A mere 24 characters, punctuation included.

Arthur Waley’s translation:

The Master said, He who rules by moral force is like the pole-star, which remains in its place while all the lesser stars do homage to it.

75 69 (I misread my own handwriting, would you believe. Thanks, Jean, for catching that error) characters, and that’s with the little translators note (te) removed. The original needs only 32 35% of the number of characters of the translation.

So there you go, through what is obviously two super rigorous experiments of great scientific virtue I have proved that in fact, one could, by using Classical Chinese, squeeze into one’s microblog of choice almost twice as much information than by using Modern Chinese and over three times as much information than by using English. Therefore, because verbosity is a virtue, we must all rebel against the character limits imposed on us by the likes of Weibo and Twitter and do all our microblogging in Classical Chinese.

One thing that becoming a father got me thinking seriously about is where I want my child to be educated. The Chinese and New Zealand education systems each have advantages and disadvantages. The big thing in New Zealand’s favour is that it gets pretty decent educational results in a relatively low-stress environment. And then the results of the election came in and I have to say I’m worried.

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Several years ago now, from memory when I was still working in Tianjin, I was on my way to Deshengmen to meet my wife, whence we’d head out to Yanqing for one holiday or another. She had, I think, a job interview, and so I had time to kill. I just happened to be in the Jianguomen area, so stopped in to the old John Bull pub to pass the time. The TV was tuned to one of the Tianjin channels and was broadcasting the opening ceremony of a Tianjin municipal sports meet. Teams were parading around the athletics track, each led by a beautiful young woman carrying a sign bearing the name of the district or work unit the team represented.

This was in the period when John Bull – the pub, at least, but obviously not the building that housed it – was being allowed to crumble into the dust like some ageing, long-forgotten, even by his family, and now thoroughly neglected athlete. Memories of the glory days were still very much alive, but visitors were increasingly rare and more desperately craved, and in any case, memory alone is not enough to iron out the wrinkles and creases and grease the worn out joints of the ageing body of what once was an athlete. There was one other customer in the place to occupy the Filipino bar tender (now, isn’t that illegal? And in any case, even though I can see the need for staff who speak English and other foreign languages in a bar in an embassy district, why the hell would you hire people who can’t speak a word of Chinese to tend bar in China?! But that’s a different rant), a North American. Not an old chap, but a shade more weathered than myself. Living in Shijiazhuang, he said. Popped into Beijing for a bit of a break. Translator, he said.

“You know, I can’t figure out what these signs they’re carrying are supposed to mean.”

I pointed out that a good half of them were the names of Tianjin’s various districts, and the others were fairly clearly the names of work units. He didn’t quite seem to understand. What I couldn’t understand is how he could see a bunch of signs bearing names like “河西区” or “河东区” and not realise they must be the names of districts (区, after all, means district, region and similar things, and is the word used for the urban subdivivisions of a city translated into English as ‘district’) and other signs bearing words like “公司” and “集团” and not realise they must be the names of work units of various kinds.

Could this guy really be a translator? Or was he trying to make his proofreading job sound fancier than it actually was? Or was he one of these people so desperate to not be associated with the foreign teacher stereotype he just decided to make something up?

Anyways, I was reminded of this when Paper Republic pointed me in the direction of this article in which I read:

Robertson himself describes a process wherein his Swedish girlfriend gives him a literal line-by-line translation into English, then reads the Swedish to him to give him “the cadences,” after which he created “relatively free” versions in English.

This approach to translation is not uncommon among poets (W.H. Auden gave us his versions of Icelandic sagas in much the same way).

Can Robertson and Auden be described as translators? Or are they poets drawing inspiration from the poetry of another language and culture, poetry which, through their (apparent) unfamiliarity with the original language and culture they can’t fully understand?

Fortunately the article goes on to say:

All the same, what often frees the student to offer better translations is a deeper knowledge of the language he is working from: a better grasp of the original allows the translator to detach from formal structures and find a new expression for the tone he is learning to feel: in this case, however, every departure from strict transposition is inspired by an intimate and direct experience of the original.
All this to arrive at the obvious conclusion that while expression and creativity in one’s own language is crucial, a long experience in the language we are working from can only improve the translations we make.

Well yes. How can you really translate a language without being intimately familiar with it? As I’ve recently had cause to tell me students, it’s about the ideas not the words. Words are merely vehicles for moving ideas from one brain to others. The more familiar you are with the language the better able you are to fully understand the ideas encoded, and therefore express those ideas in the language you are translating into.

And then I got to wondering if I’ll ever be satisfied with my knowledge of Chinese. The answer is no, and that’s probably a good thing. Satisfaction is one of the reasons people plateau, and when it comes to knowledge, hitting a plateau means going nowhere. What’s the point in that?

… and then my brain went wandering off in various other directions…

Here’s an election day treat from the NZ Herald: an interesting article on the use of technology in education, a review of ideas from Microsoft’s Partners in Learning Forum. And I like that the article has both a disclaimer:

Chris Barton travelled to the Partners in Learning Forum in Washington as a guest of Microsoft.

And a few wee jabs at Microsoft (although nothing untoward):

Microsoft’s Partners in Learning Forums, with their focus on teachers and teaching rather than technology, are very much a soft sell of Microsoft products. But, as a New York Times article this month pointed out, “the courtship of public school officials entrusted with tax dollars is a sensitive matter”.

I wish more NZ journalists would learn to take a few more nibbles at the hands that feed them…

It gives many interesting examples of how technology could be changing education, such as:

Often the learning is informal. Richardson’s children wanted to learn Scratch, an educational programming language developed at the MIT’s Media Lab. They were taught the basics by a 10-year-old expert in Perth, Scotland via a Skype video call.

Seventeen-year-old Mark Klassen is a self-taught cinematographer who freely shares all his work online. As Richardson points out, Klassen learned his craft, including using professional editing software Final Cut, spending “not one minute in a classroom”.

And that’s cool. But it also reminds me of Australia’s experience using technology to educate children in remote communities. And besides, aren’t we all already familiar with how the internet opens us up to a world of information with (ideally…) no geographical limits? Is this really news?

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