frustration
Posted by wangbo in life in Beijing, tilting at windmills on January 16, 2012
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.
shai
Posted by wangbo in Chinese study on January 6, 2012
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.
grinching on bill bryson
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.
random thought
Posted by wangbo in Chinese study, random on December 17, 2011
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.
worried
Posted by wangbo in ranting, tilting at windmills on December 10, 2011
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.
translating in the light
Posted by wangbo in tilting at windmills on December 3, 2011
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…
cyberspace school
Posted by wangbo in tilting at windmills on November 26, 2011
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?
just another little ramble
There’s something that jumps out at me every time I read of the expat denizens of China of the pre-1949, International Settlements era, and that I occasionally find myself pondering in moments of idle speculation. And this morning I decided to get the students’ view and put it on the blackboard in this form:
In the 1920s and 1930s expats in China would visit their homelands only every few years and their holidays would last several months.
Now, most expats I know go home once each year and their visits are only for a few weeks.
And I emphasised what I saw as two key differences between those two situations:
- “every few years” vs. “every year” and “several months” vs. “a few weeks”.
- “visit their homelands” vs. “go home”.
The second of those two was my deliberate choice of wording, but that’s really what I see. I don’t think terribly many expats here these days put down roots or get themselves established to the point of considering China ‘home’. Maybe it’s the field I work in – the foreign teacher system certainly does not encourage people to settle down – but most expats I’ve known over these dozen years have definitely seen China as a very temporary way station, even to the point of referring to the world outside China as “the real world”. And the homeland, the country they migrated from, is still definitely home. But way back then, it seems to me, although expats were definitely seen by Chinese as foreigners in China, expats here were putting down roots and making homes.
Now, one key difference, of course, lies in technology. Back then by sea or overland. International air travel fell into the neo-natal category of industry, and it’s existence was still precarious. Trips back to the homeland, even by plane, could take weeks or even months instead of a day or two.
But I do wonder about that apparent difference in attitude, and I wonder if technology really has changed that much. And I also wonder if the combination of global warming and peak oil will see a return to international travel primarily being by slow ship, train and bus rather than rapid plane. And I wonder: If expats 100-odd years hence are travelling between New Zealand, America and China by ship, will their attitudes to ‘home’ and frequency and duration of trips to their homeland resemble more those of modern expats or those of the expats of the 1920s and 1930s?
bilingual babies
Posted by wangbo in Chinese study, tilting at windmills on November 23, 2011
There are other things I should be doing right now, as always, but this post at Ethnic ChinaLit grabbed my attention for two reasons. First, it’s depressing that so many Chinese parents seem to be abandoning local and minority languages and dialects in favour of Putonghua. The argument that Putonghua is important for their kids’ future economic success is spurious at best. It seems to me that the majority of the world’s people grow up at least bilingual and that learning local or minority or otherwise non-prestige languages has no effect on their future economic well-being. I also don’t buy the argument that learning more languages increases the educational burden on students. It’s common for European students to be taught more than one language, yet every European I’ve ever met has survived the experience intact.
And then there’s this comment:
With the increasing popularity of mixed marriages where only one parent speaks Mongolian, Chinese is the language of choice at home;
And y’know, one of the most frustrating things I’ve found about raising a mixed baby in a mixed marriage is the sheer number of ignorant and sometimes just straight out stupid comments we hear about language. We’ve split the language labour: I speak to our daughter in English, my wife speaks to her in Mandarin – and here I use the word Mandarin because such conversations in this family switch between Putonghua and Yanqinghua depending on the social context. But I’m not concerned about Yanqinghua somehow “polluting” her Putonghua, because as she grows and learns about the world, my daughter will learn quickly and easily the different contexts in which different languages or dialects are appropriate. English with Daddy and her Kiwi grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. Mandarin with the Chinese side, varying between Putonghua in Beijing and Yanqinghua in Yanqing. But some people are terrified this approach will somehow confuse the child. I have never yet seen anything to justify such fears. A colleague and his wife take the same approach with their daughter, who is now two and, so my colleague reports, switches easily and comfortably between English with Daddy and Mandarin with Mummy. The other day at work my wife found herself in yet another of those conversations about mixed babies and mixed languages, and heard a story of a family in Guangdong where one parent speaks Cantonese, the other Putonghua, and a grandparent some other language, and baby switches easily and comfortably between those three languages depending on which big person she’s talking to. And I haven’t done a huge amount of detailed research into this (i.e. none), but everything I’ve read on the topic suggests that that is the case: Given a clear context for each language, baby copes just fine.
Then Mr Humes raises three points, and while the first touches on the structure of the education system, he sums them up quite nicely with this:
These factors contribute to what reporter Bai Yansong labeled the “Mongolian is useless” school of thought (蒙语无用论) that is widespread in society.
Now my wife and I are lucky in that we are native speakers of dialects of two of the world’s more important languages. Nobody questions our choice of languages to teach our daughter; they question whether or not it’s possible to raise a child bilingually without terribly confusing the poor wee thing. But it seems to me that an awful lot of people are running around with an extremely narrow and petty definition of the word “useful” that can be summed up in answering this question: “Can I, without any thought and just at first glance, see an immediate beneficial application of this knowledge/field of study/language to a real-world situation?” There are an awful lot of things in this world – art, literature, music, blue skies scientific research – whose immediate utility is not terribly obvious but which are immensely useful and beneficial. I have, of late and elsewhere, been in the mood to launch into a collossal tirade about how the application of this narrow, petty, and very harmful definition of “useful” is partly responsible for the world’s current economic woes, but for now let’s stick with language. I have been known to, just for fun, tell my boss and his secretary that I’m going to teach my daughter Maori. Of course, that would require me learning Te Reo first – widespread Maori-language education in primary schools was very new when I was a kid, and not very effective. But their response is scorn. Why teach her that useless nonsense? Well, I can think of many reasons, most of which are connected with it being one of the languages of her Daddy’s country, and one with official status, to boot. For starters, if she goes to school in New Zealand she will have to learn some Maori anyway, and I’d expect that to be a lot more than I got, as the curriculum and standard of teacher training should have improved dramatically since then. I also do what I can to ensure the English she learns has a bit more of a New Zealand flavour than the bland, internationalised English I have to use at work, and my impression is that more and more Maori words are being used in everyday New Zealand English. There certainly seem to be more and more Maori words gracing the pages of the New Zealand Herald without the brief, bracketed, weak English translation that used to be the rule for situations in which sensitive mononlingual Pakeha eyes had to cope with a Maori word. But to try and pull myself back on topic: Language is very hefty part of culture, and culture is a very hefty part of identity, and identity is a very necessary aspect of healthy human life. Abandoning a language because it doesn’t enjoy the same economic and political prestige as English or Putonghua is likely to lead to a lot of people growing up with strong and difficult questions about their culture and identity, and it’s not difficult to think of examples of how disaffected, alienated youth contribute to some very unfortunate social phenomena.
Of course, languages are just as mortal as people, and although some, like Latin, leave behind healthy descendants, other languages die childless. But languages, like people, need a bit of TLC, and part of that tender, loving, language care is a healthy pride in one’s language, and part of that pride lies in teaching it to the younger generations, and teaching them the value of that language. And a language’s value does not lie in its immediate economic and political utility, but in its expression of culture, values and identity. And no, learning a minority language does not need to disadvantage any child. The human brain is both flexible and powerful, and polyglotty should be seen as the norm and not as the exclusive and miraculous preserve of a few talented individuals, because so far as I can tell it is the norm and monolingual societies the exception.
And now that I see just how far this post has diverged from the title I gave it, I suppose I should get some lunch then get back to that lesson planning and test marking I was supposed to be doing.
我爱小人书
Posted by wangbo in Chinese study, reading on November 20, 2011
I was a big fan of Asterix and Tintin when I was a kid, and I live very near Panjiayuan, which has a large space dedicated to old books. Well, mostly old books. There are a few stalls in that space selling very new books, too. And so I was very happy when I discovered that among all these old books are many old comics, and among these many old comics are Chinese versions of Tintin books. And so I started buying Tintin books again, and so discovered a particular type of comic – the 小人书/xiǎorénshū that is actually pocket-size, in that each one could easily fit into a child’s pocket (how many “pocket-size” books would only ever be considered small enough to fit in a pocket if one were on a whole other planet inhabited by people 15 metres tall?). And I love these books.