Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

Regarding neighborhood enmity, L=N, and other hútòng realities.

Reality is never quite what you think it is, let alone the way you relate it to others. To tell a story you have to simplify, abstract, highlight and gloss over, of course. That’s the nature of storytelling. Trouble is, a lot of times what you end up with is wishful thinking, platitudes & nostalgia — an idealized reality that isn’t real at all. Too many storytellers, despite the best of intentions, inadvertently switch from describing reality to describing what they wish reality was (sitcoms, maybe?), or what they think their interlocutor would like reality to be (e.g. Samoans to Margaret Mead), or what someone else once told them reality was (grad students).

The stories you hear about language are no different, of course. If you learn a foreign tongue in school, the storytellers (aka language teachers) give you endless rules to apply — a theoretical way of speaking. Then when you start comparing what’s on the street to what’s in your textbooks, sometimes you wonder if it’s the same thing.

Or let’s say it’s stories about your native language. You grow up listening to cocksure pontificating about how you’re supposed to say it this way or write it that way — usually without any rational justification. By the time you’ve done 18 or 20 years of the education thing they’ve sucked every last drop of life out of your once-juicy prose and you’re left with dessicated husks of language specimens fit for display only in academic journals.

Playing with reality is part of the idea behind Beijing Sounds. Reality is damned interesting — why not listen to it? Reality is fun. Reality is the man behind the curtain and it’s fun to pay a little attention to him — not to expose him as a fraud but because you LIKE him. He’s a helluva lot more interesting than that Wizard shtick. For example:

“Why, anybody can have a brain. That’s a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the Earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain. Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. But they have one thing you haven’t got: a diploma.”

One of the most fertile grounds for the growth of just-so, no-basis-in-reality stories is childhood. Somehow we feel compelled to describe childhood as something it wasn’t. Maybe it’s that we were all happy (or we were always UNhappy). Maybe it’s that our friends were always true, our thoughts pure…

It’s even worse in any sort of cross-cultural story-telling. There’s a lot of preening and primping. The storyteller is usually dead set on showing the unsullied perfection (or unadulterated awfulness) of the culture in question.

So how pleasant indeed to find yourself in conversation with a Beijinger, on a flight back to this dusty capital, and end up hearing a story with nuance: in this case, how the Hǎidiàn kids used the Beijing-R to belittle their hútòng neighbors.

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海淀因为是那个，那个大学区
hǎidiàn yīnwèi shì nèige, nèige dàxué qū
(But) Haidian, because it’s a university district,

所以很多都是 外地来的，不是那种，
suǒyǐ hěn duō dōu shì wàidì lái de, búshì nèizhǒng
a lot of people are from outside (Beijing). They’re not that kind of…

不是本地人，所以那个，
búshì běndìrén, suǒyǐ nèige
They’re not local people, so

在内城里头的是正宗的北京人
zài nèichéng lǐtou de shì zhèngzōng de běijīngrén
in the inner city there are real (orthodox?) Beijingers

所以我们有的时候叫他们胡同儿里来的
suǒyǐ wǒmén yǒu shíhòu jiào tāmen hútòngr lǐ (nǐ) lái de
Therefore we sometimes call them Hutong-ers [Straight outta the Hutong(?)]

但是现在有都，都比较觉得那个
dànshì xiànzài yǒu dōu, dōu bǐjiào juéde nèige
But now there’s a feeling that

从那个内城里来的有很多是那个，那个，
cóng nèige nèichéng lǐ láide yǒu hěn duō shì nèige, nèige
From that inner city comes a lot of

满清的后裔。所以是贵族的了
mǎnqīng de hòuyì. suǒyǐ shì guìzú de le
Manchu descendants, so (they are) “noblemen”

他们住在那个后海哪一边的人，很多都是老。。。
tāmen zhù zài nèige hòuhǎi nàyībiān de rén, hěn duō dōu shì lǎo
The people who live around Houhai,

就是那个比较老的那个家庭，
jiù shì nèige bǐjiào lǎo de nèige jiātíng
really are those old families

就是有背景的家庭.
jiùshì yǒu bèijǐng de jiātíng
there really are well-connected (good background) families

所以北京的人很多区都不一样了
suǒyǐ běijīng de rén hěn duō qū dōu bùyíyàng le
So for Beijingers a lot of districts are quite different.

What she described after this was a classic rivalry. Boyz ‘n the hood without drive-bys, racist cops or teenage sex — just some mild taunting with a Beijing-R. Not a thrillride, maybe, but it’s not the rivalry itself that’s particularly significant. It’s the fact that you get to here about it. It’s not that it says anything damning about Beijingers, or Chinese — or foreigners for that matter. It’s just a sweet little nibble of fresh cilantro in what would otherwise promise to be an airline-food kind of day.

And the layers in this story are nice and smelly, just like that western scallion (i.e. onion, yángcōng, 洋葱) you had for dinner last night. Let’s peel four of them.

1. Wàidìrén in Beijing

A lot of wàidìrén make Beijing home, but like anywhere else, they maybe never feel quite like they belong. If I’ve remembered the details right, my storyteller’s family was from outside of Shanghai where they speak a variety of Wu (the second largest Chinese language after Mandarin, 吴语 Wúyǔ).

2. Man’s love for his fellow man

The natural human condition is to dislike and differentiate. It’s no different in the hútòng than in Benton City, for example, when the high school discus star, on the bus back from the track meet in Prosser, expresses his disgust that one of “our” girls is apparently dating a Prosser boy. It’s amusing. It’s real.

3. Other people talk funny

Everybody, everywhere likes to make fun of the way other people speak. Even if it’s mostly in fun, as it clearly was here.

4. L=N might actually be possible in Beijing

Sorry to bring this up again, but did you hear that N? Now given the controversy L=N brought up last time, trepidation might be in order. And certainly my first thought was that we were dealing with a non-Beijinger here, even though she had lived in Beijing since she was 13. Take a listen to just that phrase:

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hútòngr lǐ (nǐ) lái de

But when I asked the resident informants, they pretty much turned it into an N too.

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hútòngr lǐ (nǐ)

Maybe what’s going on is a rule of Mandarin phonology. I propose a limited version to start with, something like: “L after -ngr becomes N.” But maybe there’s a more general one?

Denouement

Reality doesn’t bite unless attacked. But it is fun when it bites back and sends scurrying those sanitizers, anesthetizers, bowdlerizers, corporatizers, family newspaperizers and popularizers who would have you believe only in the ideal. Wàn suì! to the dirt and fuzz of the hútòngr.