Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

In your hometown, you pretty much know what everyone’s going to say before they say it. There’s really no new thing under the sun. In Eden Prairie, MN, the grocery bagger’s going to ask me about paper or plastic, the restaurant greeter’s going to apologize for my wait, and so on. It’s the flip side of knowing what to say in a given social situation — knowing what to listen for reduces the complexity of the task faced by your overtaxed linguistic processor.

But the farther you get from home, the more you have to adjust your expectations. Here are a couple I missed recently.

Part I: Listening for the apology

An American, North Korean and Beijinger are sharing a row towards the far back of an overseas flight. When the meal service finally reaches them, the flight attendant says, “I’m sorry, but there was a shortage of the beef. Can I serve you the chicken?”

The American responds indignantly: “Shortage, what’s that?!”
The North Korean looks mystified: “Beef, what’s that?”
The Beijinger, too, furrows his brow: “Sorry, what’s that?”

Recycled ethnic jokes aside, Americans do have a perception that Beijingers don’t apologize. But is it fair? Well, I’ll show you that an American can totally miss a Beijinger apology. Here’s what the waitress said after my lunch date and I had waited an inordinately long time for the bill:

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jiǔ děng le*
久等了
waited a long time

At the time, I stared at her blankly and had to ask my Beijinger lunch partner what she said.

“Ah, that was an apology?!”

For the American ear, what was missing was the ’sorry.’ Had she prefaced her statement with a duì bù qǐ (对不起 = sorry) I think I would have followed the rest. My lunch date assured me that, to her ear, this was a reasonably apologetic statement. She said it would also be fine to add the duì bù qǐ in the front, but it would be optional.

But in the U.S., at least, a waitress who came up to your table and said “waited a long time” would not be waiting a long time for unemployment.

Moral: The apology might be there if you know what to listen for.

Part II: What kind of receipt do you want?
Other times you don’t know what to listen for because it just has no equivalent in your own culture. This was another stumper I got by asking for a receipt after a massage:

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Nǐ kāi fā piào [unclear] fúwù fèi háishì zhāodài fèi
你开发票。。。服务费还是招待费？
Your receipt … service expense or accommodation expense

I asked her to repeat the question, but to no avail — ended up just taking whatever she gave me. In defense of my ignorance, even my Beijinger friends were unclear about the meaning of this clip when I played it back. It helped a little when I explained that I’d just gotten a massage. They theorized that certain classes of business expenses are reimbursable and others are not. The cashier was asking how I wanted the receipt classified so that I could get reimbursed. In the grand tradition of Chinese tax avoidance, both descriptors — fúwù [service] or zhāodài [accommodation] — are pretty ambiguous. And, no, for the record, I wasn’t submitting any of this for reimbursement, dammit, I just wanted a receipt!

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* First, full disclosure: this particular recording is a reenactment — my lunch partner recorded it for me since I missed it the first time. Second, for the phonetically interested, her slow and careful pronunciation of jiǔděng nicely exemplifies the rule that governs pronunciation of side-by-side Tone 3s. That is: the first Tone 3 becomes a Tone 2 so that it sounds like jiúděng.

[correction 12/13/07 -- "fà piào" should be "fā piào", oops]