I was talking to my friend Valerio about the Chinese attributing very fixed/rigid traits (and roles) on the basis of gender.
The example I cited him was that of a comment made (in the late 1980s) by a mainland Chinese colleague at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) about the grubby state of my computer keyboard, in Chinese: “This doesn’t look like a computer used by a girl.”
(London, 1988)
When I was working in Taipei (1975–1976), America was Taiwan’s major ally against the communist Chinese on mainland China. The Taiwanese adopted American English, particularly the pronunciation (e.g., the retroflex r in words).
Similar to the Italians, Mandarin Chinese speakers cannot do a lone consonant at the end of a word (e.g., k, d) — they will always insert a vowel after it, so that “bank” comes out as “banker”, “deed” comes out as “deeder”. As there’s no such thing as a “deeder”, the mistake is recognisable, but when you hear them say, “I will ask the banker”, it can be either the establishment or the person.
A Taiwanese colleague used to say, “I will send you a banker checker,” when she meant “bank cheque/check”.
The other Americanisation the Taiwanese had adopted was the pronunciation of the vowel, so “answer” — which is pronounced /‘ɑ:nsə/ (“ahn-ser”) in British English — would be rendered the American way: /ˈæntsɚ/ (“æn-ser”).
On the day I was flying back to Singapore after my two-year contract in Taipei, a Taiwanese man was chatting to two Indonesians who were unable to speak Chinese. I heard the Taiwanese man saying, “I have an ankle in Hong Kong.” He was obviously applying the rule: change any sound that’s like “ahn” to “æn” and it’ll make it American. So, “uncle” became “ankle”.
That was in November 1976.
Today, 6 February 2021, I heard a US-based mainland Chinese woman say very clearly “ænderdog”.
(Taiwan, 1975–1976; USA, 2021)
Listening to Radio 4’s farming programme, I found one particular feature funny, so I wrote:
Haha. A goat farmer started this as a joke, for want of something to do during lockdown: hiring out a couple of her goats to put in an appearance at people’s Zoom meetings.
It took off, as it only costs a fiver, and raises a laugh — and spirits.
It’s now taken off as they’ve misbehaved — peeing on each other’s face. Yes, in public! On Zoom.
For those for whom English is not the first language:
take off:
(London, 2021)
Uncle Lóng was working as a night watchman at some point — I must’ve been 12 by then.
It was some empty building sitting in the middle of nowhere — maybe in some ulu/backwater part of Singapore like Chua(/Choa) Chu Kang in the then-marshland north-west side. Perhaps that’s why it needed a night watchman, to ensure no squatters came and took over the place.
He had to walk some distance through some kind of scrubland / wasteland. After dark, of course, since it was a night watch.
Uncle Lóng might be fat and big, but he was terrified of ghosts. The Chinese call it “small courage” 膽小 / 胆小 dǎnxiǎo. (膽 / 胆 dǎn / gall bladder, guts)
He claimed that during his watch he’d hear footsteps on the floor above, pacing up and down across the floor, all through the night. He even said that one night a leg crashed through the ceiling, and sat there, dangling — nothing the next day in the bright daylight.
So he took the biggest hand torch that was available: industrial size ones, at least a foot long.
He’d walk through the scrubland shining one torch in front to see where he was going.
And shine the second one behind him.
The logic is: if it’s not pitch black behind him, it’s not so scary.
Haha haha I love the logic.
(Singapore, 1960s)
My mother’s cousin, Uncle Lóng (“dragon”) featured in blog The Chinese perspective on “fat vs thin”, lived on my maternal grandma’s coconut plantation in Tampines on the east side of Singapore, near Changi International Airport. If he was going into town (south side of Singapore) for some official business, he would always stop by at Chia Keng (the area where I grew up, between grandma’s and downtown) and take me with him.
I loved car rides (still do — all journeys), and would always say to anyone about to leave the house: “Where are you going?” and before they could give me the answer, I’d follow it up by saying “I want to go!”「你要去哪裏，我也要去」in the same breath.
Uncle Lóng would turn up and find me playing somewhere outside (a bit scruffy and dirty), and say, “Hey, Daftie, do you want to go into town with me?” He always called me Daftie (daft = silly, foolish). I’d say “I’ll go change out of these clothes”, and he’d say, “No need, you’re good as you are”. So off we’d go into town: this big fat man from the coconut plantation, and this little girl all dusty from mucking around in the garden.
In the car, I’d be peering out of the window at everything throughout the journey. He’d warn me to be careful not to stick my head too far out of the window or I’d “get blown away by the wind 被風吹走”.
I love his whacky approach: never mind the head being taken off by a passing car if you stick your head too far out, just make sure you don’t get blown away by the wind haha haha.
One of the places he’d taken me to was a bank downtown — maybe 崇僑銀行 Chung Khiaw Bank.
Outside would be a guard: a Sikh in full uniform (white with red braids, I seem to remember), and a rifle. Uncle Long would tell me if I didn’t behave, the mung-ga-li would arrest me and take me away. (mung-ga-li is the Teochew dialect rendition for all Indians in general, from “Bengali”.)
The Sikh guard seemed about 7ft tall to this little girl, towering above everyone else — I had to look up up up to see his face.
Oh yes, and all that hair too: head hair in a big turban, facial hair in a big beard, hairy arms, hairy everything.
(Singapore, 1960s)
A while ago, one of BBC Radio 4’s programmes talked about people mishearing song lyrics, with hilarious results. Some of them even made more sense than the original.
This reminds me of two cases of people I knew who were involved in mishearing messages.
The first one happened at British Monomarks where I’d worked as a part-time telex operator throughout my first degree.
Subscribers would ring in and dictate their telexes to us.
One of them was a shoe company: they had contracted a factory in Taiwan to make the shoes, which they would sell in the UK.
On this particular occasion, the sender of the telex was placing an order for a batch of shoes, ending the message with a reminder to the factory to “make sure the shoes sit properly” (which was what my colleague heard down the phone line, and duly typed up and sent out).
The people at the Taiwan end must’ve wondered about the way the British cultural perspective works: getting their shoes to “sit properly”, whatever that means.
Manager John Haste couldn’t get over it. He went round saying and chuckling, for a number of days after that, “Make sure the shoes SIT properly! Make sure the shoes SIT properly!”
The second story neatly confirms how easy it is indeed to get “s” and “f” wrong when heard down the phone line.
It had happened to an English chap doing Japanese during my first degree days at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London).
He’d originally got into Oxford University to do zoology. He’d done his end-of-first-year exams. That was the practice in those days: if you can’t even pass the first year exams, you’re deemed to be unable to get through the rest of the next few years of the course.
The telegram from his mother arrived in Greece where he was having his summer holiday. It said: SAILED ALL SUBJECTS. He happily carried on with his holiday.
He got home and found out that it was meant to be: FAILED ALL SUBJECTS.
(UK, late 1970s)
* For those who might need help: to sail through = to succeed easily
See also: https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2020/12/thinking-outside-box-london.html
Talking to friend Valerio about how clumsy I am, I said — without making a conscious effort at choosing my words — that if I don’t exercise mindfulness while taking the stairs,
“when going up I will stumble,
and
when going down I will tumble.”
Valerio was talking about having found a way to fit more tasks into his ever-busy day. He said he’d come up with reading work-related material on his tablet while out on his post-prandial constitutional. Apart from my concern that he might walk into a lamp post, I also felt that reading while walking would slow down his speed, thus negating the exercise element. He said the walking was done in a place with lots of room around (wide path, grassy areas on both sides) — he was presumably addressing the lamp post concern. Trying to bring his focus back to the speed factor for the walk to be effective enough as exercise, I said (without deliberately thinking of doing a rhyme),
“I’m talking about the pace,
I’m not talking about the space.”
On another occasion, I’d offered to cast my eyes over an ex-colleague’s application for a traineeship at the EU. When it arrived, I messaged her, saying (without deliberately doing the alliteration),
“Just nipping out to grab some grub.”
(London, 2021)
