Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

On learning from elders — the core principles

The currency at Beijing Sounds is recordings of course. Youtube, Youku — they’re equally negotiable (and better than the sad sack USD these days). Or leave the recorder running and get candids on your friends, your relatives, your shopkeepers and taxi drivers. Money!

The truly gold-backed currency, though, is no mere sound file. It’s the special issue, hard-to-find back room recording. What makes the back room recording the gold standard is the observation that what people actually do is different from what they say they do, or what they believe they do, or what somebody remembers that they do, because these “reporting” activities are prone to egregious errors, willful misstatements and utter misapprehensions. So while it might seem easy enough to get a recording of real language, in fact it gets very hard to observe what people actually do in context because the contexts are behind the closed doors of the home, or in meetings at the workplace, or between close friends — places that are hard to get your ears into unless you have an inside track.

With more or less success this is what Beijing Sounds attempts from time to time: to slip a microphone into the back room so you can hear things you wouldn’t normally have access to (within the strictures of the site’s R-rating, of course). So far the microphone has listened in on a lot:

A boozed-up office party

Silly kids’ rhymes and quasi-words

A discussion about the Beijing-R among Beijingers

A waitress’s apology to a customer

A rider pushing towards the subway door and (in the same post) a hiring manager telling a job applicant thanks-but-no-thanks

A Saturday-afternoon art teacher telling her kids to take responsibility for their own stuff

A nearly-silent Beijing subway

A onetime Beijinger discussing neighborhood rivalries

And taxi drivers (1) trying to communicate with a befuddled Zhonglish speaker, or (2) waxing philosophical about the difficulties of Chinese characters

But up until today there’s been one character in the back room who has been conspicuously absent from the recordings, except in the occasional tangential reference.

Grandma

Her absence is conspicuous because Grandma (aka Lǎolao), the matriarch of our clan, plays an outsized role in the care, feeding and education of six-year-old Princess Beijing Sounds (PBS), the sole progeny of the (party-line-toeing) Beijing Sounds household. In the course of this unrelenting stream of work, Grandma and her charge have exposed the Beijing Sounds studio to countless monologues, conversations, lectures, scoldings, naggings, cajolings, arguments, admonitions, and pleadings in pure Běijīnghuà.

Her limited exposure on the blog is even more odd because PBS’s father, your humble reporter, syz, credits much of his modest abilities in Mandarin and his reasonably good health to Grandma’s conversations and food respectively. Without her there would almost certainly be no Beijing Sounds.

So where has she been? Banished from the studio for some offense? Not exactly. The recorder’s been on all the while, and she has made a cameo here and there. But to be honest, the introduction is daunting. After all, how would you begin to introduce an entire educational system, an institution, a repository of historical knowledge — all rolled up in the angst-ridden and psychologically conflicted package we call a human being? (Not to say she’s unusual in the latter regard; we’ve all got our demons.) The only way I know is the way I’ll attempt it here: bit by bit.

Introducing: Yuèmǔ University

The yuèmǔ (岳母 = a man’s mother-in-law*) school of Mandarin education is not for everyone. But then, you don’t necessarily enroll by choice anyway. Maybe you don’t even realize you’re going to attend at all; you certainly never planned on it. Sure, you made a conscious decision when you married into the tradition (it’s your wife’s alma mater) and you knew you’d do the requisite campus visit. But did you ever seriously think about signing up?!

The brochure makes it look tempting, to be sure. I mean, really, who can turn down that image? Classic Beijing home cooking — steaming dumplings, fresh bǐng (饼, a flatbread), pork-and-dill bāozi (包子, steamed buns) — served hot every day! Served by your professor, no less, who while filling your stomach offers context-based lessons steeped in generations of Běijīnghuà. And the non-language coursework doesn’t really seem that bad: something about how to conserve electricity, not waste food and water, save money, keep your areas clean, and so forth. Hey, you know most of this stuff already, right?

When you meet her, the head matron is enthusiastic as well. So all right, take the plunge! — might as well sign up for that full summer course. Yeah, it’s a bit long compared to the fortnight “executive education” stints you had in mind, but you shrug your shoulders and immerse yourself in it anyway. After all, how often would you get the chance in any other reality to spend nights and weekends with real native Mandarin speakers from Beijing?!

How was that summer course, then? “Intense. Eye-opening.” You can almost imagine the quotes that you would come up with, with just the slightest twinge of euphemism, gracing next year’s recruitment flyer. When it’s all over — or at least a few months after that — you start to think it was a pretty good deal. There might have been the constant turning off of lights when you were still in a room, búyào làngfèi!” (不要浪费 = Don’t waste!) And perhaps the no-meals-out policy was a little too strictly adhered to, “Go to some lousy restaurant?! Look at all this food we’ve got here at home.” And a few times it really would have made sense to use the dishwasher instead of handwashing, “Waste of water and electricity!” But really, the whole experience was good, if intense, and you learned a helluva lot of pidgin Mandarin and probably saved on some household expenses to boot.

It’s not until baby is on the way that you realize the “summer term” was just a teaser course. Actually, it appears now that you’re enrolling for a solid year, with special coursework on nouns and grammar related to breast-feeding and poop.

Whoa, hey now! A year is a different beast. “Honey, shouldn’t we discuss…” — oh, that’s right. Pregnancy = establishment of marital law.

As the in-law year comes and the in-law year goes, and runs into another in-law year, the funny thing is only that you once thought a year was a long time. Suddenly you find yourself going on six years. Those dreams of graduation are part of a quaint and idealistic past. This doesn’t come as a revelation, only a gradual dawning inspired by small moments of truth. You’ve come to accept that graduation is no longer a goal and you start thinking it odd that there are people who don’t live with their in-laws.

Lesson 1: Absorbing it all

So maybe you’ll be a student for life. If that’s so, at the very least you can try not to be sophomoric the whole time. Why not document some of the non-stop lessons that come with attendance at Yuèmǔ U? They come so rapidfire, and in so many categories, that the hope right now is just to hang on for the ride and some day aspire to go back and make sense of it all.

This debut class is from an ordinary day at Yuèmǔ U, with Grandma getting PBS ready for a post-dinner outing with a friend. For the Y.U. headmistress, such an event is a dramatic balancing act of sometimes-opposing goals: eating, safety, and proper clothing must all roll into five minutes of frenzied activity. [I've taken out the dull spots to save time, but trust me: it was almost this fast. Apologies for the wretched sound quality at the end.]

[Update 5/9/8: Thanks to Albert (of Laowai Chinese fame, comment below) I realize my explanation of the situation was totally inadequate. In this clip, Grandma is getting PBS ready to go on an outing with her friend. The friend's father is the one who is going to take the two of them, hence the "shūshu" reference.]

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PBS:
喝奶!
Hē nǎi!
[I want to] drink milk!

Grandma:
喝吧，喝吧。慢点儿，慢点儿 啊。
Hēba, hēba. Màn diǎnr, màn diǎnr, ā
Drink, drink. Slow down a little now!

一会儿就吐了，喝那么快。
Yīhuǐr jiù tù le, hē nème kuài.
Pretty soon you’ll throw it up, drinking so fast.

[now at the front door about to leave]

你到那儿乖乖的。
Nǐ dào nèr guāiguāi de.
Be good when you get there.

你老跟着叔叔, 一个人儿。你老跟着他。
Nǐ lǎo gēnzhe shūshu, yígè rénr. Nǐ lǎo gēnzhe tā.
Stay with her dad [lit: "the uncle"], he’s just one person only. You Always stay with him. [somewhat better translation, thank's to Randy's comments]

听见了吗？ 不许上什么地方，啊！
Tīngjiàn le ma? Bùxū shàng shénme dìfang, ā!
Do you hear me? Don’t go running off somewhere!

PBS: 阿。 Ā!
OK.

Grandma:
甭带围脖儿了。一会儿该丢了
Béng dài wéibór. Yīhuǐr gāi diū le.
You don’t need to take the scarf; it’s likely to get lost.

There was a time when this conversation was exotic. Now into my seventh year at the U, I think I get it. But for the uninitiated there is much to miss. Please tolerate a little explication below. But first one language note

Eating

First, what was that “Hē nǎi!” business?! You should know that it came up suddenly at the end of the meal. In response, your correspondent immediately got up to pour a glass of milk.

Now you may be thinking… “I’ve heard that the one-child policy makes for a nation of little emperors (princesses?). But isn’t this too much? How about some manners here in the lessons at Beijing Sounds?!”

Manners are important, and we’ll get to them in good time. But there is a deeper principle — an axiom, really — at work in today’s Y.U. lesson. Namely:

“Kids will not eat unless you are constantly berating them to do it.”

Sounds easy enough, and this may be true in your own culture as well. Y.U. has no monopoly on the tradition. But the inevitable corollary is that any request for food (that is good for you — even Y.U. draws the line at junk food), no matter how it is made, is legitimate and to be greeted with delight and immediate gratification. Damn the manners, feed the kid!

As a side note, it’s unusual that we happened to catch Grandma saying “slow down” on the milk. Y.U. rarely advocates for slower consumption of anything. Partly that’s because PBS is not known for her rapid eating prowess, so inhalation is not a problem. But the general rule among Y.U. educators that I’ve observed is to constantly push the child eat faster. I think it’s in line with the aforementioned axiom, following the corollary which, in this case, is that you should stuff as much in the kid as quickly as possible before the natural sense of satiety can catch up. Today’s “slow down” was just a very temporary exception.

Safety

Not much here, you might think. Tell the kid to be good and stay with the adult. Every caretaker would say that.

True. But what you’re missing without the full classwork at Y.U. is the angst-ridden decision: should Grandma go with them? Clearly it was decided in the negative, but I assure you it wasn’t easy. After all, it’s only the one dad watching two — TWO! — 6-year-old girls. Think of what could happen while watching a girls’ elementary school ice-skating competition! The general principle is not perhaps as bedrock as it is in the “eating” category, but certainly Y.U.’s aim is to have one caretaker per child, preferably two. And men (even, or perhaps especially, fathers) have to earn the right to count as a fully-qualified caretaker. No PC mumbo jumbo on this campus.

Proper clothing

In the decision not to require a scarf on this coolish evening, Grandma has let the “throw away nothing” principle win out over the competing “dress for Siberia” principle. You could almost hear the arguments as she contemplated the scarf on the hook. On the one hand, to send the child out without enough clothing to induce a fever is surely neglectful. On the other hand, Grandma is a realist. Excess clothing will be removed when out of sight. And it will drop to the floor. And it will be forgotten in the mad rush — a violation of “throw away (lose) nothing”. On the other hand, it’s an ice rink. But then again, it’s packed with 300 schoolgirls and their relatives. The vacillation is vaguely Tevyean.

Conclusion

The point is not to be exclusively utilitarian — Yuèmǔ U. can be sublime and illuminating as well. But those things are harder. They require more intense back room recording sessions and we’ll save them for another day. In the meantime: Eat well, be good, and dress warm!

—————-

* Do these observations apply equally well to the pómǔ (婆母 = woman’s mother-in-law) school? I’d be curious to hear.