In memory of Mr. T'ung Ping-cheng 佟秉正 (London)

I have just heard this week about the demise of Mr. T’ung Ping-cheng 佟秉正.  

This blog is in his memory.

Mr. T’ung was my tutor at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) and, later, my first speaker for the Speech Recognition and Speech Synthesis project.  It was one of two Chinese computer research projects at SOAS that I was working on in the second half of the 1980s.  We used his voice for the recordings for analysis and, ultimately, recognition and synthesis.  

The distance from the mouth to the microphone had to be a consistent distance, for the sound quality.  To this end, I managed to procure a dentist’s chair from the School of Dentistry near UCL (University College London), and pushed it all the way from there to SOAS, with the help of a tiny porter, Mauritian Indian Steve.  The dentist’s chair has a head rest, which would ensure that the head would be fixed and not tilt back during the recording.  

Each time, I’d set up the microphone, and measure the distance.  The first time I did this, I explained to Mr. T’ung why we had to do it.

He said, “How can it be a consistent distance?  If I say 猪 zhū [a rounded, pursed-lip sound], my mouth will be 1cm closer to the microphone.  If I say 西 xī [a peeled-back-lip sound], my mouth will be 0.5cm further back.”

Rest in peace, dear Mr. T’ung.  You will live forever in our collective memory.  We will miss you and your sense of humour very much.

(London, 1985 and 2020)

Rebellious to the core: 1 (London)

A student of mine (let’s call her Geneviève) is from a country where the workers go on strike a lot.  At my level, as a teacher for over 30 years, I also get more resistance from students from that country than I do from students from other cultures.

Back in the first half of the 1990s, one of them, Eva, when told by the co-ordinator that I’d be relieving their regular teacher for the following week’s lesson, immediately went to her office to ask if she couldn’t get someone else.  The co-ordinator told her I was a very good teacher.  Eva said, “Yes, I know, I was taught by her last year in the beginner’s class, but she and my Latin temperament don’t get on.”  (She used to sit at the back of the class and talk to the boy next to her, and would resent being asked to pay attention and to stop disrupting the boy’s own participation.)  (NB:  My evening class students were all mature students — no student under 18 accepted.  I guess we’d call them Adult Education classes in another country, e.g., Singapore.)

Geneviève is a very kind, considerate, caring and unselfish person.  She’s in her mid-70s, and her ways and values are of the old school:  always polite and respectful — she even made her nephew, who was staying with her at the time, come out of his room to greet me when I arrived for our lesson and bid me goodbye when I was leaving after the lesson. 

Geneviève and I get on well.  I even cook Chinese food for her after our lessons, teaching her how to cook rice and do stir-fry along the way.  We then eat the food, and talk about life: our lives, the Chinese culture, her culture, etc.

During the lesson, however, her cultural genes will come to the fore.

We were doing a Listening Comprehension exercise from the textbook:  a dialogue between a Chinese girl and an Italian girl who is in China to learn Chinese.  The piece is for practising the Chinese comparative structure (X-is-greater-than-Y kind of thing), comparing the weather in Beijing with the weather in Shanghai.  

We got to the sentence, “Beijing is colder than Shanghai,” and immediately Geneviève said, “I don’t agree.”  I asked, “Why?”  She said she didn’t think Beijing was colder than Shanghai.  I said, “This is for listening practice.  It doesn’t matter if it’s right or not.  All you need to do is get the original right: if the speaker says it’s X, you translate it as X — never mind the facts.”

We moved on.  A few sentences down the piece, another reference to Beijing being colder than Shanghai: “I don’t agree.”   I said, “But it’s the girl’s personal opinion.  Who are you to disagree?  This piece is not for you to check the facts, it’s for you to translate correctly what’s being said.”  (BTW, this exchange between us was all amicable.)

We returned to the piece a few weeks later, as revision.  (The majority of students find listening the hardest, so I tend to run over old pieces more for listening than I do for reading.  They already know the story, so it helps them the second time round, which boosts their confidence.)  

Got to the bit about Beijing being colder than Shanghai.  Yes, like Pavlov’s dog, up popped: “I don’t agree.”  

I said to her, “How many times have you been to China?”  Two or three times.  How long each time?  About three weeks.  How long in Beijing and how long in Shanghai each time?  A few days.  (She also went to the other famous destinations like Xi’an for the terracotta army and Guilin for the spectacular karst landscape.)  Which season?  Summer.  “So, how do you know that Beijing is not colder than Shanghai?  And anyway, this is the girl’s own opinion, and it’s a listening exercise, so you just need to accurately render X as X and not as Y.”  She subsided.  

Thereafter, however, I’d still get the odd resistance along similar lines — not resistance to me, mind, but to what was in the piece we were using.

The pièce de résistance (haha, can’t resist the pun!), however, has to be the latest offering from her in her homework, only last week.  

One of the sentences for her to translate from English into Chinese says, “Which train would you like to catch?  I don’t mind; either the 7.30 or the 8.15 will do.”  For “I don’t mind”, she produced “我反对” (wǒ fǎnduì / I object).  Rebellious to the core!  It’s so instinctive, ingrained, and entrenched that even in her erroneous translation (“not minding” is not “objecting to”; besides, there’s nothing to object to, anyway), she’d chosen the rebellious version for her translation.  Still makes me smile as I’m writing this.

PS:  In an effort — for fairness’ sake — to see if she might have a point in her disagreeing with Beijing being colder than Shanghai, I searched on google, and found the following:

QUOTE 

While Beijing in December will be colder than Shanghai, it'll be a dry, bracing cold, while the damp cold of Shanghai will just seep into your bones.14 Aug 2011

UNQUOTE

So, she might be justified, after all, in refusing to accept that “Beijing is colder than Shanghai”…

(London, 1993 and 2012–2020)

The purple trail in the Alps (Switzerland)

Having been brought up in tropical Singapore surrounded by the sea, I just love the idea of walking in the mountains.  (The Gentle Giant loved going to the beach for the same reason, in reverse:  he’d been brought up in a country with mountains, so they’re not exotic to him.)

Being Swiss, the Gentle Giant knows the ways of the mountains, one of them being that trails in the mountains are marked at fairly regular intervals to guide the walker, especially when it comes to a fork.  The markings on this particular walk of ours on that occasion were red and yellow:  sometimes as an arrow if it’s a fork, sometimes as two short parallel bars; sometimes on a tree trunk, sometimes on a boulder by the path.

At one point, I noticed purple markings on a boulder here, a rock there.  As we were taking the red route, I didn’t say anything at first.  Then, when I saw a few more of these patches, I asked the Gentle Giant to look at his map to see which route it was.  He said, “There’s no purple trail on this walk.”  

The next time I saw one on a boulder by the path, I pointed it out to him.  It turned out to be bird droppings — the colour was from the wild berries they’d been eating.

(Switzerland, 1988)

Being in a foreign culture (Switzerland)

The Gentle Giant and I took turns visiting each other every six weeks.  

On one of my visits to Switzerland, he took me hiking in the mountains, as usual.  We stopped for lunch somewhere.  I chose a clear soup for the first course, which was absolutely delicious.  It was given as “bouillon” in the menu.  I made a note of it, and when I came across it in a supermarket in Zürich, in a compressed cube (the size of a standard stock cube: approx. 1”x0.5”), I decided to repeat the yummy experience at home (in the Gentle Giant’s flat).  

While he was at work, I prepared the soup course for dinner.  One cube should be enough for two people.  Put the bouillon into boiling water, stirred, and tasted it.  It was incredibly, incredibly strong and salty.  Added some water to dilute it.  Still too strong.  Added some more water.

I ended up having to transfer the stuff to another, much bigger pot, because I had to thin it down something like 20 times, if not more.

When the Gentle Giant got home, I was close to tears.  He explained that bouillon means “soup” but also “stock” (as soup is usually made from stock).  The paste I’d bought was a stock cube: to add to soups (or stews) for extra flavouring, so one just uses a little bit as it’s a flavour enhancer, not the actual thing.  So I was trying to make a soup purely from a stock cube.

He later told the story to his Swiss friends and colleagues, who all had a good laugh.

(See also my blog Sopa Minuta).

Dictionary definition for bouillon: soup or stock.  French, literally ‘liquid in which something has boiled’, from bouillir ‘to boil’.

(Switzerland, 1987/8)

Read my snorts (London)

Speech-writer Peggy Noonan gave the then-presidential candidate George H. W. Bush his most prominent sound bite in his nomination acceptance speech in 1988: “Read My Lips: No New Taxes”.

This reminds me of the desperate attempts by one of the exchange teachers from China during the revision period before the final exams.

This particular exchange teacher had the unfortunate-sounding surname of 朱 Zhū, which means “vermillion”.  (Emperors in the Manchu Qing dynasty would use vermillion ink to write on reports submitted by the ministers, to indicate they’d read them, a practice called 朱批 zhū pī / “vermillion approve”.)  

I say “unfortunate-sounding” because it sounds exactly like zhū 猪, which means “pig”.  

Even more unfortunate for the poor man was his problem with his sinuses, which caused him to make loud nasal noises regularly to try and unblock his bunged-up sinuses.  Unsurprisingly, the students (on the full-time degree programme that he taught) called him “Mr. Pig” behind his back.

Being a teacher from China, Mr. Zhu was more accustomed to students sitting respectfully upright, listening attentively, and dutifully making copious notes of what the teacher is saying.  This would be common enough in an everyday lesson, never mind a revision class just before the final year degree exams, when they should be hanging on to every word uttered by the teacher in case they were all significant.

Such would be the case with a class of Chinese students.  Mr. Zhu’s students in the second and final year of his exchange arrangement at this particular Western university, however, were more laid-back British students.  He was particularly desperate to help them pass their exams — and presumably also to ensure his own teaching reputation was untarnished.

He turned up with a list of vocabulary (some actually used in the exam paper, some red herrings) which he was going to read out as revision.  The students were supposed to be feverishly scribbling away as a last opportunity for gleaning hints at what might be in the exam papers.  

Instead, they were slouched or actually sprawled over their desks: some barely awake, some eating an apple, some doodling, with even the best students note-taking only listlessly.  The students, who told me this story, said he was a very boring and uninspiring teacher.  The same students also gave me an account of what happened at this final revision session:

Mr. Pig:  (reading out, in Chinese, words from his list of vocabulary) 

(I’m just throwing in, at random, a list of words I’ve put together, to illustrate the story — they might not have been the actual words used by Mr. Zhu, it being some 30 years ago now.) 

发展 fāzhǎn / development

改革 gǎigé / reform

经济 jīngjì / economy, economic

增长 zēngzhǎng / growth

提高 tígāo / to raise [the level of something]

促进 cùjìn / to promote [e.g., growth]

制度 zhìdù / system

体系 tǐxì / structure

管理 guǎnlǐ / to manage, management

控制 kòngzhì / to control, control

Mr. Pig was getting desperate about the students’ lack of enthusiasm, so for the words that were actually going to appear in the exam paper, he took the following steps:

Step 1:  Emphasised the relevant word (e.g., 改革 gǎigé / reform), saying it loudly: 改革

Step 2:  If the students didn’t twig and start scribbling it down, he’d say the word loudly a second time, lean forward in his seat and look around the class to check that it was sinking in.

Step 3:  If the students still didn’t take the hint, he’d stand up and say the word a third time but even more loudly, lean forward and look around the class, snort grunt, and sit back down.

The students would grade the words: 

saying loudly = important;  

standing up and saying loudly = very important;  

finishing off with a series of snorts and grunts = definitely coming out in the exam paper.

(London, 1990?/92?)

Antenatal training: 2 (London)

Further to my blog Antenatal training: 1, a BBC Radio 4 journalist approached me one day about the Chinese perspective on pregnancy and childbirth.  I don’t think she was thinking of China’s One Child Policy — rather, all the rituals and customs that go with them: what to do / not do / eat / not eat.  I emailed her with what I know from my younger days in Singapore.  She then asked if I’d like to be interviewed for her radio programme on the subject.  I said no, I am camera-/microphone-shy, I will be happy to help with information but not go on air.  She suggested meeting up for a coffee to talk about it.  

When I arrived at Broadcasting House, she said since I was already there, she’d just show me around to see the set-up.  I think she might’ve been trying to let me see how informal it really is, that it’s not scary at all, hoping I might change my mind.

The fire alarm then went off, so we left the building and had our coffee in one of the back streets.  We carried on talking about the Chinese way of dealing with pregnancy and childbirth.

When I got to the bit about 胎教 (tāijiào / “womb education” = antenatal training) including things to avoid, like not visiting the zoo, in case one’s baby ends up being born looking like a monkey, she whooped with laughter and said, “When my mother was pregnant with my brother, she went to the zoo* in Hong Kong, and he does look a bit like a monkey. Don’t tell my brother that!  He’s very sensitive about it.”

(*or maybe Haw Par Villa, a kind of theme park featuring Chinese legendary characters, gods and spirits.  The Monkey King is a famous Chinese character from the story The Journey to the West 西游记 xīyóu jì / "west wander-around record", about seventh century monk 玄奘 Xuánzàng (/ Tripitaka) who spent 17 years travelling overland to India to collect some Buddhist scriptures, so maybe the monkey-image impact on the unborn baby could've come from a visit to Haw Par Villas.  There's a Haw Par Villa in Singapore, too.)

(London, 200?)

Caught napping? (Singapore)

An old friend who’s now an academic says, “I am attending a Zoom meeting with 156 participants.  It’s a great system.  I’ve always found these meetings terminally boring and want to go to sleep.  Now I can do that!”

Reminds me of what I used to do at school.  I always chose a seat right at the back, so that I'd be out of the teacher’s line of vision.

One day, during a Mandarin lesson, the pace was a bit slow.  I was right at the back, in the corner by the windows.  I intertwined my fingers (as if about to pray, the Christian way), but held them up to forehead level as a shade for my eyes, with my elbows resting on the table.  This way, I could close my eyes without anyone seeing it, as it looked like I was resting my forehead on my partly clasped hands while reading the textbook on the table.

At one point, I felt a nudge from the girl sitting next to me (we were seated two to a row).  I opened my eyes and looked at her, a sort of “What??”  She used her eyes and lips to point at the front of the class.  I turned round to face the class and saw everyone looking at me.

Then I saw that the teacher was also looking at me.

What had happened was the teacher had asked the class what the meaning of a particular word/phrase was.  She went round the whole class but no one could provide the right answer.

I was the last one left.  The teacher called my name.  No response from me.  She called my name again.  Still no response from me.  That was when my neighbour nudged me awake.

Luckily, I gave the right answer...

(Someone told me later on that it was obvious — to the teacher as well, all the way from the front of the class — that I’d been sleeping as my eyes were bloodshot and sleep-laden.)

(to catch someone napping: (British informal) find someone off guard and unprepared to respond)

(Singapore, 1960s)

The Chinese perspective on “fat vs thin” (Singapore)

One of my mother’s two brothers was very particular about hygiene, even to the point of insisting we use communal chopsticks and spoons for shared dishes placed in the middle of the table for everyone — what Westerners would call “serving spoons” — so that we wouldn’t dip our own implements into those shared dishes, even though we were family.  He was thin, which — from the Chinese perspective — means he must be unwell or undernourished, or just not particularly healthy.

My mother had a cousin, Uncle Lóng (“dragon”), who was very easy-going.  He was fairly big — not flabby fat, but not thin.  He was very laid-back about hygiene: if he dropped any (dry) food on the floor, he’d just pick it up, wipe/blow off the dust, and eat it.  

People used to say, “Look at the thin one: he is so fussy about hygiene, yet he’s still so thin!  The fat one’s not bothered about such things, yet he’s so robust!”

See also my blog: One way of putting on weight (or not).

(Singapore, 1960s)

Going round and round in circles (London)

Because of the Covid-19 lockdown, I’ve had to use Skype for teaching the students who normally have face-to-face lessons with me.  One of them is an elderly lady, Hélène, who is even less tech-savvy than I, and is by nature a bit timid in certain things as well.

The most recent Skype lesson, her second, was yesterday.  We were going to start off with feedback on her homework.  I’d set her more than one batch of homework over the last few weeks.

Lesson started.

Hélène: Can you see it?

Me: See what?

My practice during Skype lessons is to send over to students notes and provide prompts, as well as definitions of new vocabulary, in the dialogue box at the bottom of the Skype screen.  In our last Skype lesson a fortnight ago, Hélène had trouble seeing the sentences I was sending through in the dialogue box.  I had to guide her: “Look at the bottom of your screen.  There should be a speech bubble that you see in comic strips.  Click on it — that’s the dialogue box.”

So, when she said “Can you see it?”, I thought it might’ve been something she’d sent over to me.  It turned out to be the first sentence in one of the batches I’d sent her.

A bit later on in the lesson, I went back to that sentence.  This time, it was Hélène who asked, “See what?”, thinking it was something I’d sent over in the dialogue box.  This went on for a few more times, each time one of us misunderstanding the reference to “Can you see it?”.

This reminds me of a phone conversation I once had with the secretary of one of our film directors on The Heart of The Dragon (HOD).  HOD was made by a company specially set up for it, with each producer/director having their own company.  

Nigel’s own company was a corporate training filmmaking company, specialising in communications.  I took the call from the secretary.  Nigel wasn’t in, so she said she’d like to leave a message for him.

Secretary:  Tell Nigel I can do it and you know what I mean…

Me: Do what?  I don’t know what you mean.

Secretary:  No, those are the names of the training films:  “I can do it” and “You know what I mean”.

(London, 2020 and 1983)

It never rains but it pours (London)

I was cycling home after work one Friday evening.  The office had lots of surplus milk, so I was given two pints to take home.  I’d also just bought a bottle of dark soya sauce earlier that day, so I put them in a plastic bag, and strapped them to the rear rack.  

It started to drizzle.  

Came to a halt at a set of traffic lights.  Heard glass shattering behind me.  Thought, “Oh dear, some driver’s run into the back of someone’s car.”  

For some reason, I decided to turn round and look.  What I saw, in the glare of the headlights of the car behind me, was my plastic bag sitting on the road, with a trail of white liquid and a trail of black liquid oozing out of it, running on the road.  

No time to do anything as the lights were about to change to green, so I just picked up the bag and re-strapped it onto the rear rack.  Cycled off when the lights turned green.

Came to another halt at the next set of lights.  Another shattering of glass behind me.  Yes, that plastic bag had come off again.  

By now, the rain had become a heavy drizzle.  

Grabbed the bag, re-strapped it a second time, and cycled off, with a trail of white liquid and a trail of black liquid dripping off the rear rack.  

At the next set of lights, the chain came off.  The heavy drizzle had now turned into a steady downpour.  I just wanted to sit down on the pavement and cry.

I finally arrived home, drenched from head to toe, with a plastic bag with lots of holes and three broken bottles inside, by now sans contents, and a pair of hands all black and greasy from putting the chain back on — in the pouring rain.

(London, 1983)