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…?”

[Go to website or bottom of this post to listen to audio]
Yǒuxiē zhèige chībǎo le méi shì gàn de wàiguórén ā,
有些这个吃饱了没事干的外国人啊
Some of these foreigners with full stomachs and nothing to do

duì wǒmen de shìqing zhǐshǒuhuàjiǎo.
对我们的事情指手画脚
point fingers at our affairs.

Zhōngguó — Yī, bù shūchū gémìng, èr, bù shūchū jī’è hé pínkùn
中国，一，不输出革命，二，不输出饥饿和贫困*
China — first does not export revolution; second does not export hunger or poverty;

Sān, bù qù zhēteng nǐmen [see Note 1 below]
三，不去折腾你们
third doesn’t go and cause trouble for (bother) you.

Ā, háiyǒu shénme hǎo shuō de?
啊还有什么好说的？
Is there anything else they can say?

Now due to the miserable production rate of the unionized Beijing Sounds workers, it’s not often that articles are able to address current events in a timely manner. But in this case, we pulled out all the stops (and a couple extra bottles of 金六福 for the graveyard folks) in order to comment. Because history demands that we defend zhēteng. Specifically, this history which we might as well replay:

[Go to website or bottom of this post to listen to audio]

wánr shì shénme?
玩儿是什么?
What is “wánr”?

wánr shì zhēteng
玩儿是折腾
“wánr” is playing crazy/running around

nà wán shì shénme?
那玩是什么?
Then what is “wán”?

wán shì zuò nèr wánr xiǎodōngxi
玩是座那儿玩儿小东西
“wán” is sitting there playing with some little thing

nǎyīge hǎo?
哪一个好?
Which one is better?

wánr hǎo
玩儿好
wánr-play is better

shéi shuō wánr hǎo?
谁说玩儿好?
Who says “wánr” is better?

wǒ shuō wánr hǎo
我说玩儿好
I say “wánr” is better

nà nǐ lǎolao ne?
那你姥姥呢?
Then what about Grandma?

lǎolao shuō wán hǎo
姥姥说玩好
Grandma says “wán” is better

nà wèishénme nǐ juéde wánr hǎo?
那为什么你觉得玩儿好?
Then why do you feel that “wánr” is better?

yīnwèi wánr hǎo wánr!
因为玩儿好玩儿！
Because wánr-play is more fun!

Emphasis added. You might quarrel with the translation of zhēteng from that post last year — “playing crazy / running around” — but there’s no escaping the connotation that PBS puts on it. Although the Vice President may resent foreigners engaging in it, and Grandma may ask the Granddaughter not to do it (bié zhēteng / 别折腾! is as common a phrase as “calm down!”), still there’s no denying: zhēteng is pretty good fun!

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Note 1:

Just one more linguisticky question: What’s up with nǐmen (你们 = you, plural) here?

Sān bù qù zhēteng nǐmen
三不去折腾你们
third doesn’t go and cause trouble for (bother) you.

I suppose if we knew the context, it might turn out that Xi is talking to his audience very directly, “we don’t bother YOU”. But that seems pretty directly rude. Barring that, does it mean he’s using nǐmen in the generic sense to mean “anyone”? Beijing Sounds is guilty of doing this to a fault — in English. And it’s apparently not linguistically uncommon: BJS once referenced this Jabal al-Lughat blog post noting that in Darja (Algerian Arabic) the “impersonal you” is even grammaticalized. But somehow I have no familiarity with this usage in Mandarin, which means nothing except that I need to post this now and hope that others can enlighten.

———–

* Thanks, Sima, for the correction (via email) of 步 where it should have had 不. The funny thing is that I had corrected another instance of this earlier and apparently missed this one. After a while you start to trust your IME to just magically give you the right characters, especially for simple stuff. Yet…

OK, now update 2: I’ve changed the punctuation to try to make it clear that he is enumerating: 一二三