Matter over mind (China/Japan)

My beloved and inspirational tutor and supervisor at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), Dr. Paul Mulligan Thompson*, was born in China (of Irish missionary parents) and brought up there until the age of 16.  He spoke fluent Chinese and taught classical Chinese, just to name one of the long list of things he was able to do. 

One day, he was in Beijing and asked a local chap, in Mandarin, how to get to Tian’anmen Square.  The chap took a quick look at him and turned his face away.  Paul Thompson repeated the question, and again the man wouldn’t respond.   

After a third time of this, Paul Thompson thought, “Maybe the man can’t even understand Mandarin.  There are so many people in Beijing who are from other regions, after all.”  He decided to check with the man, in Mandarin: “Can you understand Mandarin?”  In answer, the man pointed in a particular direction without any hesitation and said, in Mandarin: “Tian’anmen Square is that way!” 

So he did understand in the first place, but his eyes saw a Westerner, so his ears and brain couldn’t process the sounds he was hearing, even though it was his own language, until the last question made him register belatedly the fact that the Westerner had been speaking in Mandarin after all.

I’d heard about a Japanese journalist, back in the late 70s or early 80s, who went out into the streets of Tokyo with a blond wig and blue contact lenses, and raised the bridge of his nose.  When he stopped people in the street and asked them questions in perfect Japanese, nobody understood him.

Then about a BBC journalist who was fluent in Chinese and went to a village to interview some locals.  The old woman she approached in Chinese, asking if she could answer some questions, kept saying, “I don’t speak a foreign language.”  The BBC reporter said, still in Chinese, “But I’m speaking in Chinese.”  Old woman:  “No, no, no, I can’t speak a foreign language.”

*https://www.theguardian.com/news/2007/jun/27/guardianobituaries.obituaries