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.
