The Customer Is Always Wrong

I discovered a word I never knew existed: Zhonglish. It is the English language’s ‘gift’ to Chinese, and it can be considered the companion to Chinglish the Chinese language’s gift to English. Its origin is in the Chinese word for China, which in pinyin is Zhongguo. Zhonglish seems to be a much less ostentatious offering, and there are probably reasons why there are fewer visible garbled attempts at communication from the Anglo-Saxon world to the Chinese world than there are in the opposite direction. I have therefore been asking my exchange partners about Zhonglish but have not got many concrete replies yet. I am not sure if this is because examples of it are more often the ephemeral live attempts at speaking rather than the more permanent commercial signs and product names that give testament to Chinglish, or whether this silence is because my partners are simply being polite. I honestly cannot tell at this point.

I read a fascinating article on Chinglish which explains in detail how computer translation software can mess things up so badly. The spectacularly rude ‘fuck the empress’ example, cited from a Chinese website detailing paint application techniques, is priceless.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2443

Maybe this is just another one of those things I will pass through but need to first get out of my system. I am, after all, involved in language in a serious way right now so it is practically inevitable I should arrive here. That said, Chinglish does go quite deep into the concepts underpinning the two languages and it also goes into international trade and migration, so it can touch things beyond the obviously comic examples that abound. What is clear however is that if I am to do anything with this stuff it will be tricky to find a way that doesn’t come over as having an easy laugh at other people’s expense. I will have to be very careful to balance it well and present it in a way that avoids arrogance. Hmmm.

Last night I was treated to a double language exchange; a Dutch research student and I met up with two sisters in a cafe and received instruction in Chinese pronunciation. It was about a quarter of the way through that I realised the two sisters had some serious accents going on and that I was being taught yet another version of Mandarin. Frustrating though their strong Fujian accents were at first, it was good to get a better understanding of how this language is actually spoken in practice. They were also very sweet, encouraging and eager to share their language with Westerners. The older sister who is preparing to move to Australia with her husband spoke reasonable English while the younger sister Elaine, a cosmetics saleswoman, spoke very little. It was the younger sister who was our teacher. In addition to revising mostly familiar language points, they taught us some Xiamen phrases like how to call the staff in a cafe or restaurant. Apparently you say ‘handsome man!’ or ‘pretty woman!’ depending on whether you want the attention of the waiter or waitress. They also told us about some Xiamen superstitions. Apparently pregnant women should not go to funerals in case the departing soul enters the unborn baby as a devil. This was all very welcome information and I have to say I am starting to get a sense of how Xiamen is a city with a character of its own.

I’ve started to jot down a few notes and arrange them in a more visual way on my wall so I can begin to see different ways to put ideas together. As structure is particularly important to my performances (I would be tempted to call them structuralist if that term hadn’t already gained too much baggage) and structure can often lead me to the form of the work, this mapping has to happen now so that the project unfolds on all levels at the same time.

In the West we all know how English translations of Chinese can garble meaning and produce some inadvertently funny results. I’ve come across some pretty unappetising sounding dishes in Chinese menus and I remember trying to make sense of a radio alarm clock’s operating instructions once. The manufactures must have wanted to save money by using google translate to produce the instructions. This one came out so abstract that in places I simply couldn’t even figure out what they wanted to say. Anyway, most of us in the West have had experiences like this in one form or another and I have to say I quite enjoy these rough and ready translations. There are many to see here in China and websites full of them, like this one: http://www.flickr.com/groups/chinglish/

What I was very happy to learn is that there are some examples that travel in the opposite direction too: Westerner’s attempts at communication in Chinese which don’t quite work out. These typically follow a slightly different path apparently. A source of amusement here can be Westerners getting their tones wrong and inadvertently saying nonsensical or even plain rude things in their basic Chinese. I noticed that during my language exchanges there have been occasions in which my partners have had to stifle laughs or have told me ‘be very careful not to say that with a first tone, it should be with a second tone. With a first tone it is a very bad word’.

In a spirit of fairness then, I should try to note failings in communication that happen in both directions. I even have half an idea to try to perform the piece here in China in my faltering Chinese and have a Chinese person translate for me in faltering English. The problem is I rarely come across the right people who speak English as badly as I speak Chinese. Of course a lot of people here do speak little or no English but they are somehow too removed from my world for that to even count. For such a thing to work in a performance there should be an equality of status within the frame of the performance. Elaine, the cosmetics saleswoman is the best candidate I’ve met so far.

I had my Isaac Newton apple on the head moment the day before last. Unlike the famous physicist’s however, mine brought me considerable pain and no immediate insight. I was in the kitchen pouring a cup of hot water for Jia. When I turned around to step away from the water dispenser I bashed my head into the extractor fan above the stove. I made a few involuntary grunts and held my head in my hand to try to contain the shock and pain for a moment before regaining composure somewhat and emerging from the kitchen shaken but with hot water. We joked about it and continued the language exchange. Yesterday I had a large swelling on the side of my head, lost underneath my hair and somewhere above my temple. Today I feel it still. It is on this second day that this blow brought me to an idea. Better late than never I guess.

This collision belongs in the ‘size problems’ category of events and observations. The fan is quite simply too low for me or, I am too damn tall for it. The ‘size problem’ category has been languishing lately it consisting of a series of pictures of me in modest discomfort and of one or two anecdotes. It can however be usefully expanded and serve as a counter point to the ‘images of Westerners’ category I came upon recently. I have had some reservations about the images of Westerners category as is tends to present highly commercial cliches that I am already over familiar with. These have their place and maybe how they are read here will modify them, but they are somewhat impersonal and often obvious stereotypes so I feel a need to create something to contrast them with. So here is this new category that can be defined as things that Chinese people do which I don’t (or at least don’t do well), and in so doing make me more aware of my culture. Placing extractor fans at so low a level is one such thing, crossing busy roads in several stages another and forming sentences that describe things starting from general details to arrive at the specific point only at the end, another still.

OK it is not quite up there with Newton’s general theory of gravity but it is the best I can salvage from this bruising encounter with an extractor fan. What’s more I suspect that Newton’s apple is more than a little apocryphal. I suspect this game of reconstructions is not merely a contemporary one but rather is an old one that has more to do with finding hooks onto which abstract ideas may be placed.

The whole south of China has been experiencing a cold snap for at least the past week. There were reports on the news about how it has even made keeping some schools open very difficult. I have found myself eyeing weather forecasts with increasing frequency looking for an end to this. I’ve even made the depressing forecast comparison on the met office site and realised that on many days it has been slightly warmer in London than it has been here.

First of all I am aware that weather conversations are a British thing, it can be a casual way to strike up conversation with strangers. Complaints, predictions and occasional satisfied comments are common conversational fodder between both strangers and acquaintances. I was surprised that a comparable casual remark people can make is “have you eaten?” Instead of “cold today, isn’t it?” you can enquire whether your interlocutor has eaten.

Looking back on the photos from when I arrived here in Xiamen I see one with good weather. I don’t believe I am under a delusion, it can be fine. I find though that I am wishing it to change, a pointless but harmless mental habit that probably marks me as British. I’m not saying that people are indifferent to the climate here, being a tourist resort I’m sure the businesses lining the beach share my thinking and probably mix it with financial concern too. Still, it is curious to note my growing impatience which I seem unable to let go of.

Last night I was taken to a games club. It was quite popular, mostly with students. One part of it was given over to pool tables and the back room to table top games. We went to the back and played Uno and Saboteur, the latter a card game I was unaware of until last night. My gaming companions played quite competitively and I had the impression this was a very frequent ritual. They told me games like this had become very popular in China in the last two years. We drank hot water, ate oranges, played games and chatted. It struck me as a significantly more healthy way to spend the evening than I remember my undergraduate evenings were back at Wolverhampton Uni. Those nights seemed to be characterised mostly by the Fine Art department regulars getting wasted in the Mandela Bar. As that is my predominant memory of that time I guess it is fair to say that I too was one of those regulars. Small city, not much to do, is the best excuse I can come up with. Seeing this student hangout in Xiamen however, makes me aware how culturally specific my experience was.

I’ll start with corrections. Apparently there is a jogging scene here, it just takes place at different hours. I have a luxury morning schedule and can go running at 9AM when most people are working, that is why I never have company when running, or so I have been told. Next, about people asking for money. Around the Buddhist temple some people do without tuning it into a song and dance routine or a sales pitch. Many of them have disabilities and I wonder if this somehow makes it more accepted.

I am slowly finding more people to do language exchanges with. I have two regular partners at the moment, one an artist and the other an accountant. As well as getting me more accustomed to speaking and listening, the meetings have also have the benefit of taking me to other parts of the city. I recently heard from two more people looking to exchange so I think with them I will more or less have enough people to let me have an hour of Chinese practice every day in addition to the work I do by myself.

Yesterday I went to my first ‘English Corner’ which was held in a centrally located protestant church. English corners are places where people go to practice speaking English. I thought that if I went I could be useful to somebody as I am a native speaker, and maybe I could meet people willing to exchange. It turned out to be somewhat different from what I had expected. It certainly was a in one respect a way for people to practice their English, but it was also in another, a way for the church to spread its message. These two outcomes are not antithetical but neither are they identical so they had to be careful to cover both bases by learning English through memorising scripture and by singing hymns karaoke style.

People drifted in and there were maybe about 30 people present once it got going. There was a ten-minute presentation on Time Management by an American student which contrasted the Western and Chinese approaches to time management in a way I found problematic. Basically he said Westerners create schedules that determine time and Chinese respond to what is happening in a more improvisatory way letting circumstances determine their schedules. This is one of those half-truths that sort of works enough to function but which doesn’t really explain the difference properly as it avoids looking at why this may be and why there may be a necessity to the Chinese way within a Chinese context. What’s more, it generalises people as representatives of their culture. I rather see the ability to determine schedules as being linked to ones power, regardless of which society you are in and also to the degree of to which things are fixed in time more generally around you. If nothing around you is fixed but you insist on fixing things out of habit, it can create pointless conflict. I learnt this working in Croatia one Summer. In any case, without going further into this topic, I was struck by the evangelical missionary side that modern business management can take on when presented here.

In spite of the time management talk the English Corner was actually quite an unusual and even amusing event for me to drop in upon and I met some friendly people there who I will see again. I even have a new exchange partner from this so on the linguistic level the English Corner certainly worked for me. I doubt however that I’ll become a regular churchgoer as a result of it but, like I said, the twin goals are nether antithetical nor identical.

Speaking of time management, I am conscious of how I am diving my time between language learning, city/self observation, cultural background research, artistic documentation and active searching for an artistic form to contain this within. Right now I am privileging language learning as that can feed all the other activities and make my stay here a richer one. At some point the balance will shift and I’ll have to put a performance together in a more urgent way.