Jung, who was then 38, got lost in the soup of his own psyche. He was haunted by troubling visions and heard inner voices. Grappling with the horror of some of what he saw, he worried in moments that he was, in his own words, “menaced by a psychosis” or “doing a schizophrenia.”

On the other hand, maybe you don’t want to avoid doing a Carl Jung. After all, you remember back* to the days when it all blended together, right? It was way more fun. There was the friend your parents called imaginary, the ability to fly that somehow landed you at the bottom of the stairs when you tried it after breakfast…

So today instead of maintaining the illusory separation, just strap yourself into a shoe and let’s visit wàiguó (外国 = a foreign country, i.e. not China), for no particular reason except that you’re three and you’re killing time in the Smart Kid Academy lobby with Mom and Dad, waiting for older sister to get out of her weekend lesson:

[As usual, the text linked to audio is available on a separate page -- we aim to serve the ubernerd. And let me know if it doesn't work: bjshengr at gmail and dot com]

Text and subtext

Too bad the mother’s comments don’t come through so well [hazards of surreptitious recording in public places]. Most of it’s not transcribed, but you can catch pieces. There’s something quintessentially Chinese Mom about the eat-more-drink-more monologue that runs parallel to the main conversation. As you can hear from the kid’s (non)response, it’s mostly ignored unless it becomes very insistent.

Unshared culture

David Moser’s thoughtful take on the difficulties of learning Chinese mentions the lack of shared history

one of the main reasons Chinese is so difficult for Americans is that our two cultures have been isolated for so long. The reason reading French sentences like “Le président Bush assure le peuple koweitien que le gouvernement américain va continuer à défendre le Koweit contre la menace irakienne,” is about as hard as deciphering pig Latin is not just because of the deep Indo-European family resemblance, but also because the core concepts and cultural assumptions in such utterances stem from the same source. We share the same art history, the same music history, the same history history

That all seems true enough, you say, but surely that’s not going to matter in conversations with three-year-olds?

Of course not, unless your child genius makes no fewer than two references to Chinese culture and history that you have no clue about — because you grew up in a small town in eastern Washington where the only reference you ever made to China was the imagined conversation that would take place when you dug your mud pit deep enough to reach the other side of the earth.

But this is not about being a child genius and therein lies part of the problem. The references are so garbled as to be incomprehensible to someone who doesn’t know them already. To an adult who shares the background, though, it’s child’s play.

The first reference (line 17) is pretty clearly line 2 from this well-known poem Tang dynasty poem by Du Fu:

If you play around with the consonants, it’s pretty easy to go from Du Fu’s “qiān duǒ wàn duǒ yā zhī dī” to our orator’s “Qiānguó wànguó yā zhī lí!”

Above translation available from here — apologies that the Beijing Sounds Tang poetry translators were not on hand this week to vouch for it.

The second reference (line 21) is to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, another bit of history that’s even more lost to graduates of the US educational system than, say, “to each according to his needs“.  Even if you didn’t get the hint, his father did (line 22), and expanded on it, and therefore if you don’t know it you’re going to end up lost in this, the most juvenile of conversations. You can’t chalk it up to having encountered the world’s only three-year-old Chinese history buff. The three-kingdom reference is probably nothing more unusual than the three-men-in-a-tub reference an American kid would make, something that might cross his mind if he was setting out for waiguo in a shoe. It’s just part of the culture, a part that you don’t share. And so you struggle, “The words I know, but the meaning…?”

Ay, maties, have we a real Běijīngrénr (北京人儿 = Beijinger) here? Let us hearken back to the ever-expanding BJSLBC™. To summarize, it now reads like this:

In everyday speech, a Beijinger…

No doubt a Beijinger, and a territorial one at that. You couldn’t ask for a better pirate representative to tap a bunghole and tip back a mug of grog with you this September 19th.

————
*The literal translation here is “oh, from inside the city.” But, as noted last week, I’m thinking this habit — the repeating of a small phrase that someone just said — is much more a speech act dedicated to the task of leading the primary speaker know that the listener is paying attention and is involved in the conversation. In English, this speech act would get instantiated as something like the rhetorical question “oh, yeah?” or as “uh-huh”, etc.
**This sounds stupid and probably was, but the taxi driver got the idea of what I was going to say: that taxi drivers in Beijing are all from Beijing, without exception that I’ve come across. It’s controlled by regulation stipulating local residency. But his point is that Beijing means Greater Beijing, which is a pretty big swath of land and includes a lot of “Beijingers” that the true city slickers still think of as rural farmers.

***BONUS CONTEST! For the culturally savvy soul who is able to elucidate what’s going on in line 7, BJS will offer a free pre-screening of the upcoming sure-to-be megahit starring SJ. Here at the studios, even the native speaker research staff (thanks again, QPH!) were mystified. The whole apple thing is intriguing…