About Tourism, the series

Engraved into a sizable hunk of Labrador granite, on a pedestal in the executive anteroom at the Beijing Sounds Studios:

Tourist, n. One who favors packaged over live, who inches squeamishly past the teeming fauna of his own backyard — with its outrageous comedies, its epic contests, its tawdry intrigues — in order to reach the specimen cabinet at his neighbor’s place.

It’s not a promising mindset with which to start the summer travel season. Yet that’s exactly what July and August 2009 brought to the Beijing Studios staff: tourism of the first degree…

• in Shanghai and Nanjing: a tagalong (follow-the-spouse type) business trip with a steady diet of meandering street-walking and cold-hotel-pool swimming
• in Xi’an and surrounding Shaanxi² province, the Forbidden City, and the Great Wall: excursions with Grandfather and Grandmother Beijing Sounds visiting China for the first time

This series, then, takes the optimistic and contrarian view that there might, in fact — counter to all past experience, deeply-held biases, and scientifically-derived hypotheses — be some reason to haul the microphone outside the boundaries* of this fine capital city and open up one’s ears to the sounds beyond.

Reason #1: Biang biang miàn

The young syz was a bit of a spelling and grammar fascist, quite unlike the huckster of namby-pamby descriptive linguistics that you find running the Beijing Sounds Studios today. There’s something soothingly absolute about spelling, just as there is about hanzi-writing: it’s right, or it’s wrong (or so you think before you have the misfortune of experience). And also not unlike hanzi-learning for Chinese, spelling acquisition for previously unknown English words can go on forever, providing endless titillation for the binary mind.

Granted, English spelling has some limitations that hanzi does not. For one, it has an absolute prohibition against the invention of new letters, a cranky and artificial barrier that users of hanzi thankfully do not have to deal with. Even the esteemed Dr. Seuss was not able to overthrow this capricious, reactionary, antidisestablishmentarian regime.

English spelling also provides some vague circumscription regarding the sounds that a particular letter is allowed to represent. C, for example, can only be /k/ or /s/ (or occasionally /sh/, or, with some coercion from American tongues, /zh/, or, for aficionados, even /th/ if it’s a foreign borrowing from Spain-Spanish and you’re trying to sound international). Moreover, it serves up an /s/ only if followed by “i” or “e”, unless you’re associated with an emperor.

Hanzi supporters have tried to argue that this anti-proletarian rule does not apply to their party at all. They claim, to paraphrase Humpty Dumpty: “when I use a character it makes whatever sound I choose it to make, neither more nor less”. But in practice they are quite wrong. Hanzi, too, are limited in the sounds they are allowed to represent. The following elegant system of pronunciation rules applies in roughly the order given, with some recombination just to keep it spicy:

-

In short, there are limitations on hanzi pronunciation just as there are with English letters. But endless permutation and spawning? Both systems offer this in spades: English with letters, and Hanzi with character components. Thus in the same way some Puldyer Legg comes up with supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, some Dòu Nǐwánr (窦你玩) comes up with…

[As is now usual, the transcript below is available on this page with audio synchronized to text. UPDATE: Thanks QPH for corrections to transcript]

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

		YU	Biāngbiāng miàn	Biang biang 面	Biang biang noodles
		SYZ	Shénme?	什么？	What?
		PBS	Biàng biang miàn!	Biang biang 面！	Biang biang noodles!
		YU	Tā chá zhèi zì ne!	他查这字呢！	He’s looking up this character!
		LY	Méiyǒu zhèi zì.	没有这字。	This character’s not in there.
		SYZ	Méiyǒu zhèi zì?	没有这字？	Not in there?
		LY	Mèiyǒu zhèi zì. Zhèi yígè zì shì yī, èr, sān, sì, wǔ, liù — wǔgè zì — shì jǐgè zì zǔchéng de.	没有这字。这一个字是一，二，三，四，五，六——五个字——是几个字组成的。	It’s not in there. This one character is made up of one, two, three, four, five, six — five characters — it’s made up of several characters.
			Tā zhèr — Shǎnxīrén zào de zì, cídiǎn shang méiyǒu.	它这儿——陕西人造的字，辞典上没有。	It’s here — Shaanxi people made up this character; it’s not in the dictionary.
		SYZ	Shì ma? Nà — nà wǒ qù zhàoxiàng le.	是吗？那——那我去照相了。	Really? Then — then I’ll go take a picture.
		LY	Zhàoxiàng	照相	Okay.¹
		YU	Nǐ qù zhàoxiàng ba.	你去照相吧。	Go ahead.¹
		SYZ	Nà zhèige jiùshi kāi wánxiào de nèige zì, háishì…?	那这个就是开玩笑的那个字，还是…?	Then is this just a joke character, or…?
		LY	Tā yě shì Shǎnxīrén dōu rènshi de zì, a. Tā shì — tā dāngdìrén zào de ne.	它也是陕西人都认识的字啊。它是——它当地人造的呢。	It’s a character that Shaanxi people all know. It’s — it’s something the locals made up.
		SYZ	Nà dàodǐ shì shénme miàn, shì tèbié kuān –	那到底是什么面，是特别宽——	So what kind of noodles are they, really, are they really wide –
		LY	Jiùshi miàntiáor, dànshì nèi miàntiáor kuān, nèi miàntiáor tèbié kuān, tǐng cháng.	就是面条儿，但是那面条儿宽，那面条儿特别宽，挺长。	They’re just noodles, but the noodles are wide, really wide and quite long.
			Ránhòu ne, tā zhè zhǔle yíhòu ne, jiùshi ná — zhálàjiāoyóu	然后呢，他这煮了以后呢，就是拿——炸辣椒油	Then, after he (i.e. someone) boils them he just takes — fried chili oil
			wǎngshàng yì pō, tā zème chī.	往上一泼，他这么吃。	and sprinkles it on, that’s how he eats it.
			Jiùshi Shǎnxīrén de Shǎnxī tèdiǎn, gēn nèige shénme? Ròujiāmó, zhájiàngmiàn, guāntāngbāor, yángròupào.	就是山陕西人的陕西特点，跟那个什么？肉夹馍，炸酱面，灌汤包，羊肉泡。	It’s one of the Shaanxi people’s Shaanxi specialties, like the pulled pork sandwich [etc. for other names -- otherwise I'll botch the translations].

Talk about the common people taking back their writing system! “We’ll invent one so topsy-turvy that even the Unicode people won’t make a place for it.” The ironic appeal of Biang is that it’s far better known than thousands of “standard” characters that are included with your fonts. And its beauty is especially poignant because it violates Mandarin’s phonemic norms, which would normally allow no such sound as “biang.”

It’s pretty dangerous to know just a little bit about something, so they say, and speech acts are a subject about which syz’s knowledge is about as bountiful as honesty on Valentine’s day. If the old saw is true, then, reading the rest of this post is like running with scissors.

So limited is the knowledge of speech acts at the Beijing Sounds studios that never once up until now has the term been used, despite the subject matter having presented the opportunity on multiple occasions. This post, for example, bumbled around with ungainly phrasing to the effect that “a big part of language learning is knowing what to say/listen for in a given social situation.” In that case it mentioned

• What phrase a waitress would use to apologize
• What a cashier would ask you about your massage receipt

Or earlier there was this post, that brought up how a Beijinger would

• Get introduced to a brother-in-law’s coworker
• Close a phone conversation with a sure-to-be-unsuccessful job applicant
• Inch through a crowd towards the subway door

The point in each case was that the appropriate words were often different from Mandarin to English — even though the situation was the same. In the case of the slow-service waitress, the apology took an almost unrecognizable form; in the case of the brother-in-law’s coworker, maybe the act involved no words at all.

It’s not like I didn’t try to find the right word. Distant whispers from grad school kept saying that there was some better way to describe this idea. A simple term, clear and transparent. But what? How do you look up a term when you only half-know the idea? It’s almost as bad as trying to remember where a tune is from. You ask a few people you think might know, but you describe it badly. You go through hours of tangentially interesting but ultimately fruitless web searching…

Then finally, a year after you were trying to think of the word, you stumble across it in a humdrum way, used just as you wanted to remember it in someone else’s blog entry.

Ah, yes, some of it starts to come back. John Searle (also of Chinese Room fame) wrote in his book, Speech Acts, that a speech act would need three components:

1. Performing an utterance act — i.e. a bunch of words/sounds come out
2. Performing a propositional act — i.e. there is a reference and a predicate that goes with it
3. Performing an illocutionary act — i.e. trying to accomplish some social act; e.g. warn, request, apologize, demand, argue…

OK, sort of makes sense if you work backwards, right?

1. Try to do something that involves other people
2. Make a reference to it
3. Verbalize that reference

If you apply it to the apologizing waitress

1. She’s trying to apologize
2. (and 3.) she makes a speech act to complete the task

The trouble for the Zhonglish speaker unfamiliar with Beijing culture is that if (1.) it is not clear what social act is being undertaken, and (3.) the actual speech is unfamiliar, then you end up with utter misapprehension even though you might understand the actual words involved.

So try this one on for size. Let’s say your father-in-law has been visiting for the day and now the conversation has wound down and the chive dumplings (韭菜饺子 / jiǔcài jiǎozi) have been pretty thoroughly digested. It’s time for him to be heading back to the southern suburbs of the city so you can spend some time getting packed for the next day’s flight to the US. You’re seeing him off and Lǎoye （老爷 = maternal grandfather) puts his arm around your shoulders…

[Go to website or bottom of this post to listen to audio]
wǒ bù sòng nǐ le
我不送你了
I won’t be seeing you off*

And he heads off to the subway.

What just happened is that he said goodbye, of course, but he did it in a way the an English-speaker could get away with only in a spaghetti western. And then only if he were lugubrious and grim-faced. And even there it would imply something more than a simple goodbye — maybe something more like “I’m off to handle manly work of a dangerous and ineffable nature.”

But in our case he’s really just making a bit of an apology for skipping out on the Chinese ritual sendoff, in which you typically escort guests into the bowels of the airport until security has to restrain you or if (god forbid!) they are leaving by car it is preferable to attempt to pile in the back seat with them and provide snacks from your rucksack in the hope that you might actually accompany them home safely (you could always return by train).

More to the point: he’s saying goodbye.

“See you next time” or “have a safe trip”? That stuff’s for foreigners.

————-

*There’s probably a whole thesis in how to properly translate 了 / le in this case. Maybe you grammar types can take it on.