It’s time for all the university sophomores in Tianjin to do their mandatory military training. According to my students, this means they have to buy a super-low-quality blue camouflage uniform (the seats split on several of my student’s classmates when they sat down) and march around in formation all day for a week or two. According to what we hear and see out our windows in the sports field beside our apartment, it means a lot of goose-stepping and yelling one-two-three-four. My students didn’t like doing it but said it made them more patriotic.

I didn’t set out to go get a picture, but we were out taking a walk happened upon a … squadron? … doing their drills. Here’s a shot of the young ladies:

I asked my students about it and this immediately led to a common and annoying language problem that plagues both English speakers learning Chinese and Chinese speakers learning English.

Basically, in everyday Mandarin it’s context rather than grammar that determines the difference between “they made me” and “they let me.” My EFL students routinely say things like, “My boss let me work late yesterday” or “they always let us work overtime” because in their heads they’re thinking in Chinese, and in Chinese they’d use the same verb to express both of the above concepts (ordering sb. to do something and allowing sb. to do something). A student today tried to tell me that the drill sergeants “let them” stand very still for a long time, so I hammered out some sentences with her and double-checked with my Chinese coworkers:

The military training officer doesn’t let us (让) talk or look around.
教官不让我们说话或者左顾右盼。
jiàoguān búràng wǒmen shuōhuà huòzhě zuǒgùyòupàn.

The military training officer makes us (让) goose-step for a long time.
教官让我们踢很长时间正步。
jiàoguān ràng wǒmen tī hěn cháng shíjiān zhèngbù.

Sure, people could use other words to say it more specifically, but they don’t! They just say “让” and expect you to know what they mean from the situation. If I try to use more specific words when speaking Chinese, it comes off sounding funny because usually they wouldn’t bother in most situations. Like much of China, that’s just how it is; you can like it, you can leave it, but you’re not gonna change it.

We’re playing a Taboo-style English exercise where I give a student a word and she has to make her classmates guess it, but she can’t say the word or certain specified related words. I give one mid-20′s female student Japanese, along with China and island.

“Who do we all hate?”
“Japanese!”

It was the fastest correct guess all class.

For more about common Mainlander feelings toward the Japanese, see:

• Why they hate the Japanese

Long, long ago in course called Spiritual Development of Children, our prof criticized The Giving Tree for promoting unhealthy male-female relationships. The tree is female, and in relationship to the male just gives and gives and gives until she/it has nothing left to give but a stump for the old man to sit on, while the male just takes and takes and takes until he’s too old to take anything else. I can see her point, but hopefully having this book on our bookshelf when we were kids hasn’t turned me into calloused selfish misogynist. ;) As a kid I can remember thinking that the tree was really nice, though I wasn’t sure what kind of relationship it was supposed to represent. Anyway, one of our students did a presentation on The Giving Tree this week for an English competition, and I thought her interpretation of the story was interesting. (You can watch the story, read by author Shel Silverstein, here or below.)

My student didn’t know that it was a well-known English children’s book. The story, unattributed and in various forms with various titles, is apparently floating around the Chinese internet (she used this version, called “Boy and Tree Story”). In her English version for the performance, the boy sells the tree’s apples to buy toys, chops off the branches to build a house, chops down the trunk to build a boat so he can go sailing and relax, and finally as an old man returns to sit on the stump, where he smiles with tears in his eyes. She acted out the story with some classmates and then gave this speech:

This is a story of everyone. The tree likes our parents. When we were young, we loved to play with mom and dad…… When we grown up, we left them, we just came to them when we need something or when we are in trouble. No matter what, parents will always be there and give everything they could to make you happy. You may think the boy is cruel to the tree but that how all of us are treating our parents. Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who are in fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.

I thought it was interesting that she saw it as representing child-parent relationships. It makes sense, but as a kid growing up with this book I’d never thought of the story in that way. Coincidentally, a different student in an unrelated class told me about “gnawing the old” (啃老), which, according to her, refers to the way adult children still depend on their parents. The image on the right is one that came up when I googled the Chinese term.

(P.S. — I don’t understand why Chinese EFL students insist on including platitudes or vaguely profound inspirational sayings in everything, but that last line of her speech is very typical. So was playing Josh Groban’s “You Raise Me Up.”) YouTube video below:

You realize just how related the Chinese and English languages aren’t when you come across transliterated words. Using Chinese syllables to pronounce English words often results in something completely unrecognizable and counterintuitive to native English speakers; we could never guess what the original English word was, and, if we’ve studied any Chinese ourselves, we often feel we could come up with alternative transliterations that make much more sense.

“Qiáo ěr” (乔尔) is “Joel”, for example, but “zhōu ōu” is one of a couple alternatives that sound closer to me. “Obama” is “ào bā mǎ” (奥巴马, like “ow! bama”) even though in Chinese you could easily transliterate the vowels almost exactly (“ōu bā mǎ” / 欧巴马). The other day one of my students did this in reverse as a joke. He held up a sign for me to read that said: “Pieces war found.” To a Chinese ear it sounds like “pì shì wǒ fàngde” (屁是我放的), which basically means, “I’m the one who farted.” They thought it was funny and so did I, but only because it requires a really bad Chinese accent to make the connection between those English words and that Chinese sentence. I doubt that a native English who’s never studied Chinese would be able to connect those dots.

Last night a Chinese friend showed me Chinese blog post of unintentionally funny English translations on Chinese signage that included this worksheet of a naughty elementary student. Apparently someone’s harbouring some negative feelings toward his or her English homework:

Not only are they trying to pronounce English with Chinese syllables, but rather than just use meaningless rough phonetic equivalents they deliberately chose certain characters to turn the English words into a Chinese joke (or at least vent some homework frustrations?):

1. bus (bà sǐ / 爸死 / “dad is dead”)
2. yes (yé sǐ / 爷死 / “grandpa is dead”)
3. girls (gē sǐ / 哥死 / “older brother is dead”)
4. miss (mèi sǐ / 妹死 / “little sister is dead”)
5. school (sǐ guāng / 死光 / “dead completely / die off”)
6. pea (pì / 屁 / “fart”)
7. yesterday (yē sǐ tā diē / 噎死他爹 / “Choke to death, his dad”)
8. guess (gāi sǐ / 该死 / “should die” [This is how they usually translate swear words like "darn!" (but stronger) in movie subtitles.])
9. dangerous (dān jiǎo lā shǐ / 单脚拉屎 / “stand on one foot, poop”)
10. five (fèi wù / 废物 / “rubbish / useless (person)”)

1. Hands,hands,two hands. I have two hands (hàn zǐ hàn zǐ, tōu hàn zǐ, ǎn hái lái tōu hàn zǐ / 汉子汉子偷汉子俺还来偷汉子 / “guy guy steal a guy [cheat on your husband], I’m still stealing a guy”)
2. How are you. What is you name (hào ā yóu. wǒ sǐ yòu nèn / 耗啊油，我死又嫩)

The Chinese isn’t all correct and some is totally meaningless; he’s just cramming the characters into the English sounds. But you can see what he’s going for. Someone needs to give these kids a break, or a spanking…

Other Chinese education system stuff:

• The future looks… dysfunctional?
• “Water Brain” — high quality animation depicts the Chinese student experience
• Spinning the grades

So I’ve just got off work and I’m about to leave the building for the ten minute walk to the subway. One of my upper level English students sees that I’m planning to eat a pear on the way and she’s immediately concerned.

“You’re going to eat that outside?”

“Of course!”

“But it’s cold and windy! You can’t eat that outside!”

“Why not?” I know exactly what’s coming.

“You’ll get wind in your stomach!” The other students voice their agreement.

I know what she’s talking about because I’ve heard this before. Fear of getting cold “wind” in your “stomach” is considered at least as reasonable as covering your mouth when you cough to avoid spreading germs. But this time, instead of having the same old predictable conversation about how foreigners don’t know anything about getting “wind” in their “stomachs” or our “fire” going up and down, I decide to have fun with it.

“It’s no problem. Foreigners can’t get wind in their stomachs. Only Chinese people can get that disease. Getting wind in your stomach is a special disease only for Chinese people.”

She doesn’t believe me, and gives me an annoyed look to boot, like she’s not sure if I’m making fun of her/China/Chinese medicine or not. And I’m not, mostly; I’m just curious to see what will happen if I appeal to inherent biological differences between foreigners and Chinese (something that’s not uncommon for Chinese people to do in other situations) instead of chalking it up to cultural differences that affect how our respective societies understand health.

When Tianjiners wear face masks (口罩) in public it’s not because of air pollution or swine flu. These are cloth face masks, not medical face masks, and people wear them because it’s cold outside and they don’t want to get “wind” in their “stomachs” (受风 — to receive/suffer wind). I put quotes around those words because in Chinese medical theory they both carry important nuances and added dimensions that don’t correspond exactly with what we normally mean when when we say wind and stomach. (I borrowed this image from a Chinese website. It’s supposedly from Tianjin.)

For more about Chinese medicine:

• Chinese Medicine: Getting a Clue (Part 1)
• Q&A with an American doctor who practices TCM

One of my friends in particular loves to practice his Chinglish on me. I in turn refuse to reply in English, opting instead to inflict him with my own Chinglish. For example, he just sent me this text:

Great! man I will going to the shan xi road on this Sunday. I’ll waiting for you at entrance. Time is 10:20am. Don’t be late,man! By the way! Don’t forget one thing. I needs give your lilian add hers cloths. Winter already was coming! I’m a superman. I can’t feel cold. Haha! How interesting! I said. All right then! Good night! Man Wish your baby has a sweet dream! See you soon!

I have no doubt that my Chinese sounds like this sometimes often. It always helps to keep a little perspective!

(P.S. – Friends don’t let friends use Grand Theft Auto to study English.)

Related Posts:

• Meet Liú Wěi – Coming of Age in a Changing China

What a half-hour’s bike ride during Friday morning rush hour can get you in Tianjin:

• People who stared at me: 4
• People who took no notice of me: hundreds
• Red lights: 8/11 (meaning I had to stop for 3)
• Buses I wanted to curse at: all of them, but 4 especially noxious ones in particular
• Groups of migrant construction workers protesting their late wages: 1
• Cars on fire: 1
• Buildings I should be able to see but can’t because of the air pollution: dozens? scores? hundreds?
• Years shaved off my life due to the air pollution: incalculable

Five days a week I bike half an hour one way to work; so 13.2 kilometers total there and back according to google maps. The numbers above are only for the morning commute to work. There really was a car on fire this morning.

I like that Chinese people sometimes choose unusual English names or transliterate their names into English (when they can), not because we get to laugh at the occasionally odd results (though that is fun), but because a good Chinglish name often contains some self-expression while still being workable in English (Apple, Moon, Star, Rainbow, etc.); in perhaps an indirect or vague sort of way it expresses part of them and the fact that they’re Chinese and Chinese people do names differently than we do. Why shouldn’t they carve out their own space in the English name landscape? Of course other names, while nice in Chinese, are simply no good in English (Drizzle, Ripple); they’re too strange or silly to actually function as truly usable English names. I’ll let you decide for yourselves which of my current students’ names below have real potential. They’re listed in the order they came to mind:

• AK (yes, like the gun, she picked it on purpose because she likes guns.)
• Falcon (formerly Eagle: he had an annoying coworker named after some other kind of bird in Chinese, Sparrow I think, so for his English name he chose a bird that eats his coworker’s kind of bird.)
• Gaga
• Florra (She wanted to be different, but a bunch of other Chinese women who also wanted to be different already had the idea of using the Spanish word for flower, so she added an r.)
• Enya
• Eack (was supposed to be “Ike”, but somehow he spelled it wrong).
• Kobe
• Bryant
• Carter (we knew a “Spippen” in Taibei).
• Ray (don’t know why she picked this).
• Cherry
• Candy
• Duke
• Evian
• Edword (because he likes words).
• Win (I forget why she said she picked this)
• Queena
• Long (going for “dragon” (龙)? I don’t know.)
• Sharpay
• Coco

(This is exactly why it took me several months before finally settling on a Chinese name.)

Related Posts:

• Choosing a Chinese name – part 5
• Choosing a Chinese name – part 4
• Dragging this out…
• Chinese name suggestions
• Choosing Chinese Names: more dangerous than you think

“That is SOOO so so so FAKE!” exclaims my 16-year-old English student from Beijing this morning when I show her the iconic China photo on the front page of today’s Vancouver Sun. She isn’t angry but she’s keyed up, the strength of her feelings quickly exceeding that of her English vocabulary. After insisting that the man never actually got run over and that he voluntarily put himself in harms way, she changes targets, “…was one of the student leader, and she SOOO so so so SO SUCKS!” I know which particular student leader she’s referring to and I’ve heard this character assassination before. So apparently she’s heard something about the event. This is one of the ESL students to whom I gave some Google and YouTube homework about this particular event a month ago.

Before I showed her the paper, I asked her, “Did you know that today is special? The whole world is thinking about China. All the major newspapers have stories about China. Do you know why?” She didn’t. Her guess: swine flu.

Today’s Vancouver Sun, which I’d nabbed from the staff room before my morning one-on-one tutoring session, carried two decent articles and some photos to mark this historic day. I was curious about how much or how little my student knew about the event, plus I wanted her to see some decent representative examples of how Canadians think and write about China.

I didn’t argue or push it with her, as I didn’t think that’d be appropriate. I guessed correctly that she’d be interested in how China is portrayed in the local papers and was curious about her reaction. After a bit we discussed another unrelated story illustrating interesting aspects of Canadian society and before calling it a day.

(P.S. – Comments are closed on this one. This topic is still officially taboo in China and I’m not here to be political, so I’m not gonna risk getting blocked over it.

P.P.S. – If you’re concerned that I was being unethical with this student, please see this clarification of what actually happened.)

Related Posts:

• Nothing to My Name / 一无所有

A rather Vancouver moment.

Today we took one of my Chinese students, a teenager from Beijing, to the Crystal Mall in Vancouver, B.C. for lunch and shopping. On the way home we were listening to Vancouver’s mostly-Chinese radio station, 96.1 FM, when a little English lesson segment came on introducing “The jig is up!” to the Chinese population of Vancouver. We listened to see how they’d translate it (完蛋了！), but I couldn’t help laughing and shaking my head when they gave the unfortunately appropriate example sentence: “The police found marijuana in his car. The jig is up!” At least Vancouver’s Chinese immigrant population is learning locally relevant English…

My Chinese students say the Crystal Mall is the current big Chinese hang-out (Chinatown is apparently for the older generation of Hong Kongers). If you combined a Tianjin supermarket with a Tianjin vegetable market, cleaned it up, made it a little less crowded, mixed in some 繁体字, and improved everyone’s English, you’d have the Crystal Mall. You can use Chinese in all the stores and they’ll hardly bat an eye.

We all had fun (Sara’s first time on the Skytrain), and it was good Chinese speaking time for us. I think we’ll do this again.