Presumptuous behaviour (China)

 

Presumptuous:  (dictionary definition) (of a person or their behaviour) failing to observe the limits of what is permitted or appropriate.

The series I’m watching at the moment has a scene where the two boys (late teens) arrive in Guangzhou (old rendition Canton).  As they disembark from the train, some of their bags are grabbed by two men who are freelance porters looking to earn a bit of money carrying people’s bags for the short distance from the platform to the front entrance.  When the boys challenged them, they reduced the original fee of 5 yuan to 3 yuan, then called the boys penny pinchers when the boys said no.  This is set in the late 80s.

    It reminds me of something that had happened on my second trip to China in 1997, with my brother and a then-student (a Westerner — let’s call her Mary).

    It was a two-destination trip:  first to 厦门 Xiamen (old rendition Amoy, famous for the soya sauce brand name) in 福建省 Fujian province, then to my father’s birthplace in the 潮州 Cháozhōu / Teochew dialect area of 广东省 Guangdong province, both in S.E. China.

    My brother had been to my father’s village a number of times, and had asked me more than once if I’d like to go.  He’d caught me in a nostalgic mood when he asked yet again in 1997, so I thought I’d give it a go, although I’d sworn in 1988 after my 37-day film shoot that I wouldn’t go back there ever again, nor have anything to do with the people or the culture.

    After a few days in Xiamen, we took a long distance coach bound for 汕头 Shantou (old rendition Swatow), the nearest town in 广东省 Guangdong province for my father’s village.  The coach driver had forgotten about our request to be dropped off at an earlier spot in the outskirts (where we were to be picked up by my brother’s contact), so Mary and I were left standing somewhere beyond the meeting point while my brother walked back to see if he could find his contact.

    There we were, two women (one of whom was a Westerner) standing by a main road leading to Shantou, with luggage and other bags sitting at our feet.  We could’ve been wanting a minibus into town, it’s true.  All the minibuses heading that way would slow down and ask if we’d like to get on board, to which we shook our heads and said no.

    One of them, however, actually came to a halt, in spite of our having declined.  The conductor got off, grabbed two of our bags and started to get back on the bus.

    Incidentally, he had picked out the two most expensive-looking bags:  one was my brother’s leather attache case, the other was an airport duty free goods bag with a couple of bottles of whisky in it.

    I grabbed his shirt from behind, shouting, “Hey, put those bags down!”

    He held on to them, saying, “Oh, Miss, I’m only helping you to put them on the bus.”

    I said, “But we’d said no, we didn’t want to go into town.  Put those bags down, or else…” and at this point, I’d picked up a huge plastic bag with a big tin in it, swinging it, à la cowboy with a lasso, in the air above my head.

    What he didn’t know was that the tin was filled with pastry called Kueh Kapit*, each shaped like a hollow cigar, therefore very light.  The hollow cigar-shape pastries take up a lot of room, hence the size of the tin.  It was this big tin in the huge plastic bag I was swinging in the air above my head, threatening to whack his head with it, that the bag-grabbing minibus conductor saw.  He immediately put the two bags down, and they scooted off.

    This story with the dramatic last bit had my family laughing for days after that.

(China, 1997)

PS:  I’m normally a flight, rather than fight, person.  Having been brought up to think that it’s unfeminine behaviour to fight in public, my brain freezes up when there’s any friction or potential confrontation.  Even if I was in the right or being wrongly accused of something, I’m unable to react.  I might come up with the right defence some five days, if not weeks, later, so I don’t know where I got the courage from on that particular day, or how I managed to react so quickly.

* (AI overview) In Singapore, a hollow, cigar-shaped pastry resembling a love letter is called Kuih Kapit. It's a thin, crispy crepe-like biscuit, often enjoyed during Chinese New Year. The name "love letter" comes from its historical use in conveying affectionate messages between lovers. The pastry is made by pouring batter onto a hot, patterned mold and then rolled into a cylinder while still warm.

Chinese regional linguistic variations

An ex-student doing a family tree has been picking whatever's left of my brain on anything to do with Chinese that crops up in her project, e.g., the pinyin romanisation for the characters of names provided by some relative for members on the family tree.

    One of the names she gave me had a mismatch between the character and the pinyin romanisation against it.

    After giving her the right pinyin, I explained why such "errors" (according to the rules of the adopted standard spelling system) occurred, as below:

    The Chinese do not think in terms of letters of the alphabet strung together (romanisation, in this case pinyin), but in ideograms (i.e., characters), so what might be obvious to the English-speaking mind (e.g., there’s a difference between z and zh, -n and -ng) won’t be to them.  

    This means that one will find someone with the surname 張 / 张 spelling his own surname as Zang rather than Zhang.  People speaking with a Taiwan accent will say tīn for 听 tīng / listen.  And so on.  [Hence the "wrong" pinyin for the name she sent over.]

    To give you an idea of the linguistic challenges faced by outsiders (non-Taiwanese in the case of Taiwan, me specifically in 1975–6):

    In my initial days in Taipei, I was given some coins by my flatmate from Tainan 台南 (in the south, where they mainly speak the southern Chinese Minnan dialect) for making calls from the public phone box.  

    They were copper coins worth NT$.1, and had the image of a telephone set on one side and the words 電話專用 (diànhuà zhuān yòng / “telephone special use”) on the other.  

    I’d interpreted that to mean “need those coins for phone calls”, not the usual silver NT$.1 coins, which were the same size.  (It turned out to be: “these copper coins are phone tokens only, can’t use them to pay for shopping”, rather than “can make phone calls only with these copper coins, not other coins”, like the Italian gettone* telephone tokens which couldn’t be used for any other purpose.)

    When I ran out of the phone tokens, I asked my Tainan flatmate, “打電話的錢，怎麼換 / dǎ diànhuà de qián, zěnme huàn”, for where do I go to (ex)change NT$.1 coins for these special phone tokens?  

    She said, in Chinese, “Oh, you know those slots on the top of the telephone towards the back?  You just insert the coin into that slot.”  I didn’t understand what she was on about, so I repeated my question.  Got the same answer back.

    A few more attempts later, I discovered that southerners change [ha! word play] all “f” sounds to “h” (e.g., 吃飯 chi fan becomes chi huan), so she was saying huàn-jìn-qù for 放進去 fàng-jìn-qù / “release enter go” / put/insert [it] in.  After twigging, I said, “啊，你是說放進去 / ah, ni shi shuo fàng-jìn-qù / ah, you mean insert it?”  She nodded, “對對，huàn-jìn-qù, huàn-jìn-qù,” just doing an umbrella “h” for both 換 and 放, completely unable to hear the difference between my 換 huàn / to change and my 放 fàng / to release.

    A year later, we had a new draftsman (at Conoco Taiwan).  When he found out that I was from Singapore, he said to me, “ni fui bu fui shuo Zhongguo fua?”  Huh??  It turned out that he was from the Hakka 客家 kèjiā dialect group, who turn all “h” sounds to “f” (會不會 huì bu huì to fui bu fui and 中國話 Zhongguo huà to Zhongguo fua), so he was saying “Do you know how to speak Mandarin?”.  To convey the confusion-causing version from him, I've made up the English to be, "Do few know fow to speak Mandarin?"  

    I didn’t know until I met him that the Fujian/Minnan speakers did the f-to-h conversion whilst the Hakka speakers went the opposite direction.  So, unless you know beforehand which dialect group the speaker is from, your brain wouldn’t be ready to do the conversion.

    For someone fresh from Singapore who’d never been exposed to these regional variations, it was terribly confusing — I spent a lot of time trying to decode things said to me, which is fun in hindsight but was very much “Is my Mandarin THAT bad?!?!“ at the time.

    I have since discovered, in dribs and drabs over the years here in London, that, apart from the Fujian/Minnan and Hakka regional variations I was thrown into in Taiwan in 1975–6, there are more of these horrors out there (not in any order of importance / significance):

• h/f and n/l:  People from the province of 湖南 Húnán will say they’re from Fúlán (I actually looked up the map of Fujian province one year, thinking Fúlán must be in Fujian as there is a Fúzhōu in Fujian, so the Fu in Fulan must be another Fujian town; took ages of trawling before it dawned on me)
• -ng/-om ending:  People from 雲南 / 云南 / Yunnan province will say Kom fuzi for 孔夫子 Kǒng fūzi / Confucius; and chom for 蟲 / 虫 chóng / insect
• n/l:  Cantonese speakers will say lei for nei (你 / nǐ / you)

    As an interpreter, I shudder to think how many more there are of such variations out there — as many as there are places, I imagine (big or small, provinces or even villages).  

    Talking about it here has just brought alive a memory from my childhood days:  we at home used to laugh at other Teochew (dialect) speakers for saying things differently from us (e.g., for “dark”, ang ang instead of am am), and that’s just the same Teochew dialect group alone!  

    Someone once told me that Norwegians are like that too.  Places that might be, say, only half a mile apart as the crow flies will have such different accents because they’re separated by fjords, so the distance between them is actually much much bigger:  to reach each other, they have to go all the way down to sea level, then all the way up again, so they’re really very far apart from each other, reflected in the huge linguistic differences.

* Gettone:  http://wisardcoin.altervista.org/Standard_Files/Articles/Gettone_ENG.PDF 

The nature vs nurture of food: 06 (Saltiness)

 

I’m from a S.E.Chinese dialect group, Teochew (Cháozhōu / 潮州), whose speakers eat their food quite bland on the whole.

    As a child, I’d hear these generalised statements, “The Cantonese eat their food very salty and oily.”  (True or not, I’m just reporting what I’d grown up hearing the adults say.)

    The Brazilian friend, who’s mentioned in the other Nature vs nurture blog (on the size of the cooked ingredients), dipped into a Chinese dish I brought one day and said, “You didn’t put any salt in it??!!”

    She and her Portuguese husband love Chinese cooking, and Chinese cooking ingredients (e.g., soya sauce).  They don’t just add soya sauce to the food while it’s being cooked (which is what the Chinese do).  They would also sometimes actually drizzle soya sauce fairly liberally over their Western cooking at the dining table.

    She even makes what she calls “ramen”: Chinese egg noodles with a stir-fried mixed veg and meat.  Yes, I did find it too salty for my palate.

    So, it’s very much nurture when it comes to saltiness and other flavouring intensity.

Sibling rivalry (Worldwide)

Growing up in Singapore as a child from the Teochew (Cháozhōu 潮州, S.E.China) dialect group, I’d hear derogatory / pejorative remarks made about other dialect groups.  

The Cantonese (S.E.China) put too much oil and salt in their cooking.  

The Hokkiens (from Fújiàn 福建 Province, S.E.China) are uncouth — they apparently have the biggest range and the most vulgar of swear words and phrases, so vulgar I didn’t dare listen, never mind repeat.  

The Hainanese (from Hainan Island, S.E.China) were called “white stomach”, which is a kind of sea fish: it has a white underbelly and floats in the water upside down, white underbelly facing up, thus making it very easy for fishermen to spot and catch them, hence stupid.  

Similarly, there were jokes / comments about the Malays and the Indians.

When I went to work in Taipei, I heard similarly critical comments about three regions (there must be others):  people from Anhui Province (further north of S.E.China, inland westwards from Shanghai) are fierce;  people from Sichuan Province (S.W.China) and Hunan Province (central China) are fiery (because of the hot food they consume) and can outdo anyone in a row.

Coming to London, I came across jokes about (and labels for) the Irish and the Scots, sometimes about northern English people.

When I started going out with a Swiss man, I heard that the Swiss have jokes about the Austrians, and the French have jokes about the Belgians.

It then dawned on me that it’s geographical proximity (and therefore familiarity) that decides who the targets of disparagement would be.  

The Chinese community in Singapore in the 1960s consisted mainly of Hokkiens (the biggest group at the time), the Cantonese, the Teochews, the Hainanese and the Hakkas.  It’s not a coincidence, I think, that they’re all from S.E.China.  There were no derogatory remarks about people from Anhui, Sichuan or Hunan, because we didn’t have them in Singapore at the time.

Ditto the English jokes/comments about the Irish and the Scots.  Ditto the Swiss and French ones.  They’re all neighbours, or close enough.  I have a feeling there’ll be Scandinavian ones about each other. 

I call this “sibling rivalry”.  

It can also be applied to people from the same sex:  in my experience, women tend to be more competitive with (and often, catty about) other women, and men with men, rather than across the sexual divide.

An example from my personal experience: when I started my relationship with the Swiss man, I told a good friend, Bernhard, about it, adding, “And he’s a German speaker, too!”  Bernhard, who’s German, said, “That’s what he thinks.”

Update 271117:  An ex-student’s father, who’s from Tianjin, China, said last night when I told him the Hainanese story: "People in mainland China think people from Hainan are very clever."  Proves my Sibling Rivalry theory, I think — Tianjin in north China is much further from Hainan Island in the south-east, therefore no bitching...