Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

On the ineffable act of naming, the Beijing-R dissected by the white coats, and the ultimate Beijinger

Sometimes convergence happens.

Not the dream where you’re listening to God Save the Queen belted out by a punk cover band in your company’s cafeteria, talking to Grandma Gertrude about Suzie (who you liked in high school) who’s supposed to show up later in the evening, when suddenly Grandma confides in you that she’s been studying Mandarin (she began tutoring after her 92nd birthday). Excited, the two of you begin a Zhonglish conversation about the finer points of Beijing smog control during the Olympics. You discover that, yes, Grandma did read Imagethief’s smog recipe and laughed until her defibrillator went off. Then your wife comes in and you realize she was actually Suzie only somehow her name and ethnicity changed… But then: you’re awakening; the convergence begins to shimmer and fade away; the puzzle that was coming together turns out to be a box full of corner pieces.

No, this time it’s real convergence. Truly. The evidence is laid out, irrefutable, in three books that happen to be on my desk connecting me back to an e-mail discussion on -ngr from several months ago. The converging ideas from
- Osho on Buddha
- Bohm on meaning
- Pinker on naming
… all line up to illuminate and preserve the mysteries of the er-ized /ng/, i.e. the -ngr, the sound that differentiates tāng and tāngr, like this:


(which comes from this post)

It’s not the kind of convergence that gives you mourning clothes and doom buttons, but it’s convergence all the same, and no one can take that away from you. Unless, that is, you start to doubt yourself… Read the rest of this entry »

More on the “sounds” front: a Beijing dialect vocalization.

Learning what animals say in languages other than your native one is always jolting. Consider, if you will, the utter silliness of Mandarin-speakers thinking dogs should say “wàng wàng” when everyone knows they say “woof woof”.

After a few illogical discussions of that sort, you eventually acknowledge that animal sounds are just convention and try to shrug off your prejudices. But it’s disconcerting to realize there’s a whole class of sounds that you think of as natural, almost innate, that are actually quite conventionalized and culturally specific.

Here’s one from a category I hadn’t thought of: car movement. In the US, the police car of the average seven-year-old almost certainly says “woooo, wooo” while it goes “zoom zoom” or something of the sort. But check out this Beijing police car, zooming in the vernacular: Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes the holidays bring unplanned entertainment — the best kind. Uncle Fred and Aunt Helen re-gifting to your sister-in-law the Christmas ornament she’d so lovingly handmade them three years ago. Your father and father-in-law exchanging giftcards of the same amount to the same store.But who would have thought that a holiday season show in Beijing could give us material to rival… well, let’s set the stage:

FIRE CHIEF [moving towards the door, then stopping]: Speaking of that–the bald soprano? [General silence, embarrassment.]

MRS. SMITH: She always wears her hair in the same style.

FIRE CHIEF: Ah! Then goodbye, ladies and gentlemen.

MR. MARTIN: Good luck, and a good fire!

FIRE CHIEF: Let’s hope so. For everybody.

– “The Bald Soprano” by Eugène Ionesco

Ionesco died not so long ago, 1994, without so much as a peep about what he thought of the Chinese “national event” TV special. You wonder if he would have found new material in it. Or maybe he just would have felt upstaged. After all, his own theater of the absurd, despite its so-called success, never attracted more than a handful of clove-smoking, Sartre-reading, co-ed-leching Dadaist professors.

CCTV, on the other hand, counts an audience in the millions even on the fourth rerun of “Mr. Wang pushes his cart to market,” let alone on an evening variety show the night before Christmas, which if I remember correctly is when the following clip is from: Read the rest of this entry »

OK, so the BJ office party makes free use of merry-making accouterments. Makes sense; they’re all made here.

This was my first Beijing holiday party, and my expectation was that, like everything else in the world, this cultural phenomenon would be heavily internationalized and sterilized, taking many cues from US culture.

And I was partly right. Aside from the noisemakers, it was like… A FULL-BLOODED WALL STREET OFFICE PARTY FROM THE 1970s, with a more equal mix of the sexes and Chinese characteristics.

As the glasses of Australian Shiraz washed down the běijīng kǎoyā (北京烤鸭), it became clear that the American-style sexual harassment lawsuit has yet to make its influence felt in cháoyángmén (朝阳门). No puritanical HR police here. The personnel department was more likely to be leading the frathouse “go-go-go-go-go!” as another full glass went down the hatch in traditional Chinese table-to-table style peer-pressured drinking.

But then again, maybe there was a little teetotalling influence from across the Pacific, because when we got to KTV, the harder stuff was gone and we ended the night on merely an endless stream of beer bottles.

Is this just my company?

[update just minutes after posting: had 潮 instead of 朝 in 朝阳门. oops]

Beijingers are the work-hard-stay-quiet type. I have proof. Listen:

That was my subway in the morning a few days ago. I left in the announcer lady just to prove I hadn’t turned down the volume. Granted it was a bit early for Beijing — 7:45 — but the car was pretty full, albeit not thigh-jammed-between-buttocks full. Read the rest of this entry »

The average Beijing taxi driver is licking his chops to get a foreigner into the back seat so he can drive him three times around the third ring before delivering him to the overpriced Shangri-la on the premise of having confused it for the Hilton.Right?

That’s the going logic. And there’s no shortage of scams in China [scroll down here for a sampling]. Read the rest of this entry »