The English makes it look simple enough. “If I was” (”if I were” if you’re old-fashioned) clearly indicates that she was not a radish seller. In fact Beijing Sounds has her resume on file (as well as the results of the independent investigator — one can never be too careful about these things) showing that YU was a doctor her whole career — no radish peeling stints at all.

But how, asked Albert in the comments, would the translator have known to translate the IF had they not known already that she was not a radish seller?! After all, what the first phrase says is, “wǒ shì mài luóbo de” which by itself could be understood perfectly clearly to mean “I am/was a radish seller.” So couldn’t it just as well have been: “When I was a radish seller…”?

Counterfactual Conundrums

The trap set by YU was to make me think the answer to his question was clear-cut and closed-ended. To quote my own followup comment:

you point out something I was puzzled by too: there’s no “if”. Nothing at all, so far as I can figure out. Yet it is indeed an imaginary situation. I think YR Chao had something to say about this construction. I’ll try to look it up … tomorrow

[more than two weeks ago, but who's keeping track?]

YR Chao did indeed have something to say about this construction. As usual, he stated clearly and simply [p.116 of A Grammar of Spoken Chinese -- for you Gwoyeu Romatzyh fans, note that you can see that romanization in action by clicking on the link]:

A conditional clause can occur without an ‘if’-word by merely having the adverb jiù/就’then’ in the consequent clause or by having negatives in one or both clauses, depending on the sense, as: 你打电话给他，我就不用写信了 [Nǐ dǎdiànhuà gěi tā, wǒ jiù bùyòng xiě xìn le].

Quite analogous. If you take YU’s phrase, clean up the disfluencies and hesitations, and adjust for tense since she clearly indicated talking about the past, you get:

wǒ shì mài luóbo de, wǒ jiù zài nèr xiāo
word-for-word: I was radish seller, I jiù ["then" in YR Chao's terms] would peel right there
translated: If I was a radish seller I would do the peeling right there

Everything is fine if you stop right there. But what if you decide you want an extra source or a different angle. You go online and start searching and submit you come across this:

Chinese, unlike English, does not have any means for expressing counterfactual implicational statements such as “If John were to go to the library, he would see Mary” or “If John had gone to the library, he would have seen Mary” as distinct from the descriptive and straightforward implication alternatives. Chinese, in other words, has no way to express distinctly that mood which in English and other Indo-European languages invites the reader or listener to shunt aside reality considerations and consider a state of affairs known to be false for the purpose of drawing implications as to what might be or might have been if that state of affairs were true.

The paper is by Alfred H. Bloom and since the Beijing Sounds accounting department refused to approve $14 in JSTOR fees, you only get this quote from the first page, which they do provide, grudgingly (as in — the page comes as a picture, not text, so you have to retype even to get your fair use out of it).

Having just provided an example of a Mandarin phrase that clearly shunts aside reality, the editorial team might be excused for immediately throwing this paper onto the pile labeled Horseshit. Yet, yet — since the Beijing Sounds editorial policy is, after all, to presume innocence, to presume that people aren’t just, to use the vernacular, making shit up– maybe we should give it a second chance. If anyone can offer some guidance as to why Bloom’s assertions might be correct or at least interesting, the Beijing Sounds studios promise to complete a full and timely (as in: it will take a lot of time) investigation. Just as nice would be if you know more references to where this has been argued, pro/con.

[UPDATE: Since I now have the entire article and have discovered that the aforementioned $14 would have bought me only a couple additional paragraphs, I've taken the liberty of pasting the final paragraphs of the very short article below. Again, you can see the first page on the link above, and the rest of the article below. Sorry JSTOR and Bloom for depriving you of rightfully earned revenues. Please contact Beijing Sounds in-house counsel for discussion of revenue-sharing opportunities.