Stepping Stones Across the River

Ever seen the casual use of Chinese in the USA on clothing, hats, tattoos, or simply thrown in to some art to look cool. It probably sounds a lot like this.

Those who study Chinese know there are…..tones

We fear them like an attitudinal drill Sergeant, we know we are in for trouble. Fortunately, most of us don’t know just what kind of trouble until we are well into acquisition of the language. At which point there is no retreat.

Sinosplice is a great blog for those who have an interest in learning Mandarin or glimpses into the nuances of Chinese life. Its author John Pasden, of Chinesepod fame, recently wrote this great entry concerning the learning and use of tones in Chinese. Perhaps it helps that he has a degree in applied linguistics, but I suspect it is his love of language and interest in Chinese that pushes him into territories from which he brings back gems like this.

Anyone who has studied Chinese for any length of time knows that trying to fit the Chinese that comes out of our mouths into the directional arrows that point the directions of tone is at best a static approximation of a more slippery and organic process. In truth, anyone who has studied Chinese for any length of time knows that trying to fit the Chinese that comes out of our mouths into the directional arrows that point the directions of tone is at best a static approximation of a more slippery and organic process. Like navigating a black diamond ski slope, there are key moments when the edges grab and carve, the rest of the time it is float and fly.

This model introduced at Sinosplice suggests another approach to engaging tones.

Should you be working on your Chinese, keep it mind as you both listen and talk. I’ve found it makes a difference.

This morning in the elevator, oddly enough, I got most of the chitter-chatter gossip. Stepping out onto the grit ground concrete stairs the soap opera of who cussed out whose wife falls into my ears with startling clarity.

I don’t understand the Beijing accent that well.

But, today it is suddenly different. Instead of syllables disappearing into tongue curled “rrrrr” thin air, I hear them being swallowed in the throat.

It is like a Cockney accent; except it is Chinese.

There really is no word for “went,” “ate,” “drove,” “wrote.”
It all happens now; go, eat, drive, write .
Just like unmodified verbs always express the action occurring in the moment of here and now.

It makes the grammar of Chinese terribly simple. No verbs to conjugate. No agreements to facilitate between a noun and its ver-being. In English, we conjugate, but in Chinese we make use of these constructs called “resultive verb endings.”
They are like verbs with footnotes.

吃不下- eat, not go down (I’m stuffed)
走不動- walk, not move (too tired to take another step)
想不出- think, not come out (it’s on the tip of my tongue
)
看不起- look, not go up (look down on someone)
看得出來- look, as it is (it seems that)
吃得慣- eat, being accustomed to (used to eating something)

Simple? Yes! But, it drives us westerners, with our perchance for making nouns and verbs agree with each other, a bit crazy from time to time.
But, perhaps not as crazy as the Chinese (with their ever present linguistic focus on the present) must feel when trying to run their thoughts through the grammatical constructs of the English language.

They often 想不起來 (can not think it through) so, we end up with:

“The spasm was as serious as contraction, causing the eyes and mouth deviated and salivation in sleep.”

Recently, her menstruation was postdated and with distending pain in abdomen.
Now her complexion was dark, nose obstructed with thick and sticky discharge which was repeatedly onset when exposed to cold or without obvious reasons.

Now his toothache better-and-worse made him unable to eat and unable to sleep.
…he felt obstructed in the ear, especially in raining days.

Three times of acupuncture made her pain stopped.

Chinese medicine is already a foreign language even when it is in English. As is so often the case, the square pegs of one language, have a rough go at morphing into the round pegs of another. It would not be such challenge if it were only words and grammar that needed to be filtered; there is also the trapdoor of underlying cultural assumptions.

That, however, is a story for another time.

At times it is Monty Pythonsque.

The blue haze of tobacco that tints the restaurants with their “no smoking” placards on every table.
The Erguotou drinking bloodshot eyed good-old-boys; smoke wafting from full purple lips into nostrils against the backdrop of a poster pleading “please no smoking in our environment friendly enjoyable restaurant.”
To the untrained eye, there are no rules against smoking in the middle kingdom.

Not all lessons in culture come from speaking Chinese.
Teaching English provides a financial bridge between departing America and settling into a stable Chinese life. Like any immigrant who sells whatever they can, my American accented English goes to the highest bidder. In this case the Haidian district office of the Chinese Centers of Disease Control.

I strive to be a respectful teacher. My lessons are absent of references to Tibet, democracy, the political status of Taiwan, and the racist confusion of how America could have elected a black man. 
But, there are occasions, usually around public health, when potentially face losing issues come up. I figure as we are in the same line of work it is worth bringing up.

“I see these placards on tables in restaurants. On every table. –No Smoking– What’s the point? Anyone can smoke anywhere in China.”
“Oh, of course they should be there. Smoking is against the rules.”

Sometimes when deep-sea fishing you hook into something, but you are not really sure you want to bring it to the surface. There is some monstrous shit down there.
“OK, let me see if I get this. Smoking is against the rules?”  -Yes

“People smoke freely in Chinese restaurants, or anywhere for that matter?”  -Yes

“Even if it is against the rules?”  -Yes


“Help me out here, I’m a foreigner, I’m missing something, smoking in restaurants is against the rules but people do it.”

-Oh, yes, it is against the rules, but it is not against the law.

I suspect we have similar kinds of logic in the USA. Perhaps that is why when middle class people screw up their business they go broke, and when rich privileged people do the same they go to Washington.
Rules and Laws are not the same thing.

Just because you are paranoid does not mean they aren’t out to get you. it is like breathing; an automatic sub-consciousness habit, like a fish knows how to swim. Foreigners in China develop a kind of radar that alerts us to when we are being the charged the “big nose” tax. The extra mark up that goes with “you are a foreigner so you are rich so I must squeeze a few extra RMB from your wallet. At times it makes for an entertaining exchange, like an friendly sword flight. Othertimes it is like a snarl of rush hour traffic.

The HR department needs a copy of my passport coverpage and visa, and it is too much trouble for them to walk across the hall and use the copy machine, so I’m at the little shop down the street that yesterday copied my resume for 2 cents. Today, copying a passport is 5 cents. What is the difference? Today the white boy is there by himself, yesterday the China girl with was him and doing the talking.

*

As the copies begin to spit out I’m informed of today’s price; it throws the switch of “foreigner tax” and taps a shot of fight or flight adrenaline into the bloodstream.?”Forget the extra copies! One is fine. Yesterday I paid 2 cents, today its five. What the fuck?”?”Sir, we charge 5 cents to copy government documents.”?”Right, that’s funny. Very creative. Give me my passport.”?”Sir, really, look here.”

Sure enough on the posted price list plain as day, indeed copying government documents costs 5 cents.

I am thinking “I really need a longer fuse,” as the familar Beijing chirp of a cricket fills the little copy shop.

Beijing men love to collect crickets which they keep in dried out gourds. There used to be a Bird Market housed in an old maze of hutongs, out by the Panjiayuan Antique Market, that also sold crickets and kites; last time I went by there it had transformed into a 3 lane highway.

“Oh, you have crickets. I used to go to the cricket market in the bird market, but it seems to have disappeared into a highway. Where did you get your bugs?”

“The market is still there, it just moved across the ring road. Take the #100 bus. It goes right by.”

Patience. The lesson is patience. It is so easy to trip the switch of anger.?
What if instead it tripped the feeling of curiosity?