When I was visiting with my new friend at the little noodle shop outside of the grounds of the Terra Cotta Warriors, I asked her what this character displayed on the wall was:

She told me it was “biang” — or maybe “bian” or “bang,”  she wasn’t quite sure.  She only knew it was read  as “biang” in her dialect, and that was really all anyone would need to know.

When I asked her what it meant, she just said, “It’s the biang we use in biang biang mian.”  She went on to describe the local specialty, a type of noodles called biang biang mian.  They are handmade noodles, and very thick.  There’s not much to the soup the noodles are cooked it — just vinegar, soy sauce, and chili oil, I think — but it is a local favorite.

For me, I didn’t get to try the noodles, being that I was too full at the moment and left the city early the next morning.  But I did notice, after she’d told me what the character was, that I saw it all over Xi’an at the little noodle shops lining the roadside.

So there’s a local specialty I missed.  Perfect excuse to go back.

My recent trip to Beijing and Xi’an with friends was fun all around.  I had great traveling companions, and got to visit a city I’ve not been to in a long time (Beijing) and a city I had never been to before (Xi’an).  None of my fellow-travelers spoke Chinese — which is a big part of how our trip came about.  I was there as translator and guide.

Being a guide in Beijing was pretty easy, as was the Shanghai leg of the trip.  Xi’an was a little different, but not because it was the only of the three cities I’d never visited before.  What made it odd was the fact that many of Xi’an’s members of the tourism industry didn’t seem to like the fact that I spoke Chinese and could find my way around without a guide.  We did hire a driver, and he seemed to enjoy my ability with the language and comfort in the culture, but all the guides I met along the way as we visited the sites in Xi’an were less congenial when they learned that we could manage without their services.

That attitude was the only disappointment I found in Xi’an, and I loved nearly everything else about the place, especially the rich history that is hidden underground in the area  around the city.  The Terra Cotta Warriors are, of course, the most famous, and are every bit as amazing when visited in person as you’d expect from the pictures you’ve seen.  There is an air of mystery about them, and it makes for a very nice place to visit.

After my friends and I spent a whole day visiting the Warriors and the huge grounds — very nicely set up for visitors — we made our way out of the exit and decided to finally grab a bite to eat for our lunch, just as the sun was beginning to hint that it would like to sink below the hills that surround the ancient burial ground.  My friends saw a Subway sign, and thought sandwiches sounded good.  Having not been to Xi’an before, I was anxious to try some local specialties, and so we made our way to separate facilities for lunch.

As I sat down to finally try Shaanxi pao mo,  a very different dish from the pao mo I find in Lanzhou la mian eateries in Shanghai, the shop keeper sat down across from me, and we began to chat.

“You’re a tour guide?”

“Well, for now, yeah.  I brought some friends here to see the Warriors.”

“I could tell.  You don’t look like a typical tourist.”

And from there, we continued on, her telling me about local food, and me telling her a little about my first impressions of Xi’an and the Terra Cotta Warriors.  She gave me a good bit of insight into Xi’an in the 20 minutes or so it took me to eat the pao mo, and I really enjoyed the visit.  It made me glad we’d decided on such a late lunch, when there were no crowds to keep my new acquaintance busy.

As I finished my meal, I began to sort through some things I’d bought for friends back home, souvenirs of the Warriors.  The lady who had cooked my noodles came out to join me and her co-worker as we continued our chat.  After a few minutes, the new arrival asked me, “How long have you been in China?”

“I’ve been living here part time for the past 6-7 years.”

The friend who had been chatting with me for the past half hour looked surprised.  ”What?” she said.  ”With your Chinese, I thought you grew up in China!”

Whoever said food is the way to get to someone’s heart only knew half the story.  Flattery is so much more effective.

I’ve been putting in a lot of work on translations this past few weeks, having gotten a few free lance jobs to work on.  The only type of translation I work on is literary translation from Chinese to English, since it is the only thing I am moderately good at, and I have found it to be both challenging and fun.

Some thoughts on the whole process have been in my mind since the projects came in.  For people who are monolingual, the whole experience of translation might seem to be something that anyone who knows two languages should be able to do easily.  After all, if you are fluent in both languages, you just transfer the ideas from one language into another, right?

Well, no.  It’s not like that, really.  It’s not as if we’re addressing a math problem here, where one language system is equivalent to another, and all you have to do to translate is to set up the appropriate equation.  Language doesn’t function that way at all, because language uses a completely different set of faculties than math does.

I’ve been trying to identify my process of translation while I was working on these projects over the past few weeks.  For me, especially with literary translation, the first step is probably the hardest.  What is required in the first step is understanding — not just getting the definitions of words (that’s easy), but really absorbing into your own mind how they are put together.  You have to let the images dance around in the head, and see how they interact in the text you’re working with.

From there, it’s about finding the words to bring those images into your target language.  My first drafts of translations usually come out very odd, as if I’ve suddenly become extraordinarily fluent in “Chinglish.”  After  a look through my first draft, my first thought is usually, “I didn’t even know I could use such broken English….”

From there, I usually go back and find the spots that are troubling just from a language perspective — things that are clearly not relaying the idea that was intended in the original piece.  Well, let’s be honest — they’re a bunch of words put together that really don’t say much at all.  I spend a lot of time with dictionaries here, seeing what angles of certain phrases I might have overlooked.  It’s really, for me, a very fun part of the process, requiring a stretching of the mind to include things that it has seemed to ignore on its own initiative, without me realizing it has done so.

When I’ve begun to iron out the worst of the language problems, I usually try to get a little feedback from someone who understands both languages well.  A second set of eyes often turns up more places where I’ve either made wrong assumptions about certain phrases, or perhaps not worded them very clearly in the translation. Armed with the feedback, I go back to work on tuning up the piece.  By this time, I usually find that I am beginning to feel a good deal of attachment to the author’s original work, even if it was something that did not particularly jump out at me on my first reading.  It seems that the ideas become a little more my own as I try to capture them for the friend who is helping me with my proofreading.

The next step, for me, is working on smoothing out awkward phrases, and also tweaking transitions so that the whole flows the way it should.  It’s more a matter of polishing here than really doing a lot of writing or translating.  I find, at this stage, that my thoughts are becoming more natural in English, and much less foreign.

After this brush-over, it is nice if I have someone who does not understand Chinese to help read the piece.  I’ve found it very helpful to have a non-Chinese-speaker give feedback on whether or not the piece works to English-only (or at least English-predominantly) readers.  And, I’m very lucky to have some friends who are nice enough to offer assistance here!

It is interesting to think through how the process works for me.  I have other friends who have described their translation process rather differently (especially if it is not literary writing).  For me, though, there is something very unique that happens in the process of attempting to take hold of someone else’s thoughts and make them available to other readers.  It’s as if I have to make the thoughts my own in order to express them, but at the same time have to be extremely careful to make sure they remain the author’s thoughts in transmission.

It is really hard work, but something I find myself enjoying more and more as I get further into it.

I had a very odd moment of confusion recently.  I was walking on the road, and saw a sign that had the pinyin “MI XING” written in huge letters.  The thought that came to my mind was to wonder why anyone would talk about superstition in such huge letters on a sign… and in pinyin.  I knew that it couldn’t be quite correct, and so started looking for the characters to see if it wasn’t supposed to be 迷信 (yes, I know… “xin,” not “xing”), but some other phrase that I wasn’t calling to mind.

It was only as I began looking for the characters that I realized that this wasn’t a Chinese sign, but an English one, and it wasn’t pinyin at all, but the word “MIXING.”

I think I’ve been in China too long.

I was very impressed over the weekend.  Just before my family members left Singapore, my niece asked me to take her downtown so that she could buy a Bible that had Chinese characters, Chinese phonetics (hanyu pinyin), and English.  It’s an expensive book, but she used the money that had been given to her in red packets during the Chinese New Year to buy it.  She said she wanted to use it to learn Chinese.  I know that it is possible to learn to read a language this way (and with the environment around you, to speak as well), but have not seen anyone do it.  Watching my niece was amazing.

The night they were preparing to leave, she took the Bible out and started reading.  By verse 2 of Genesis 1, she’d figured out that 神 is God (though that one might cause her some confusion as she goes on).  With a quick look back over the verses she’d read so far, she figured out that 地 was earth, and so 天 must be heaven.  She continued on this way, and put together everything in the first two verses.  She read them aloud for me several times, and then I read them and she repeated (without looking at the printed words) 2 times.  She plans on continuing this method, 2 verses a day, from now until the time she comes back to stay with me again, which she tentatively plans to do in August/September.  By then she should be somewhere in Exodus, and I am going to be interested to see how her language skills are at that time.

I’ve read that it was once pretty common to give kids a text in a classical language and a lexicon, and before you know it, they would be able to read the language without any problem.  I don’t think it is something that is done so often anymore — we are much more hands-on these days, and that is a real pity.  My 13-year-old niece is just the age that a lot of people started this sort of education, back in the day, and I am very intrigued to see how the experiment works out for her.  Watching things click in her mind the other day, I realized that this old-fashioned way of learning certainly has some merit.

If things work out as she plans, she’ll be staying with me for a few weeks in Shanghai toward the end of the summer or early fall.  If she is still interested in the language like she is at this moment, I am thinking I will sign her up to attend language classes every day.  With the environment, and the ground work she is going to do between now and then (and I do believe she will do it — she is a very motivated kid!), she could end up learning Chinese very well in a relatively short time.

Making me completely jealous.  And extremely proud.

Before I left Shanghai for Singapore a couple of weeks ago, I picked up a copy of  Think Like Chinese by Zhang Haihua and Geoff Baker.  The look of the volume was attractive (I know, I know… don’t judge a book by its cover!), and the idea of trying to get inside “the Chinese mind” appeals to me, so I picked it up.  I started reading it on the way home, and just finished it this week.

Overall, I have to say it is good, but it does tend to repeat itself more than seems necessary.  I think that if I were new to China and Chinese culture, this would not bother me so much.  But it seemed the repeated bits were things I’ve known for a long time, and so it got a little slow at times for me.  That said, if I were relatively new to China, I think that seeing the same ideas presented more than once in different contexts might be helpful, so I can’t really hold that against the book.  The only thing, then, that I have to complain about is the fact that there were several typing errors, which is always an irritation.  That’s a pity, because otherwise this book is really pretty good — and I say that despite the fact that my interests in China are not really geared toward setting up a business, which is the very clear focus of the book.

Anyway, I suppose I am not really looking for a reason to complain.  So, I guess I can move on to the good stuff.

Of particular interest to me was a discussion in the very early parts of the book on the importance of the Chinese language in shaping Chinese thought.  I’ve known for a long time that language is a fundamental shaper of Chinese thinking, but what I had never heard that Zhang and Baker bring to the forefront in this book is that in order to learn the Chinese language, one must use a form of “symbolic thinking” that uses both hemispheres of the brain almost simultaneously.  When using English (and most other Western languages), the left brain is primarily used.  For Chinese, both right and left brain are put into action together, with the right brain triggering a fraction of a second before the left.  This is apparently due to both the pictograph nature of the written language and to the tonal system of the spoken language.  It is pretty amazing reading, looking into how this shapes the way the Chinese mind works.  I have to say a big thanks to Zhang and Baker here, because they’ve given me leads for some other reading material I intend to pursue in connection with this idea.

Some other good points raised in the book include the reminders of just how vast a thing “Chinese culture” is.  Zhang and Baker compare it to Europe, with its widely differing cultures from country to country.  Though China’s provinces all lie within one national boundary, the cultural differences are still there, and that needs to be understood by anyone who wants to work in China.  And, even more importantly, this applies all the more to overseas Chinese, most of whom were brought up in a Chinese culture that can be seen as “of the past” in Mainland China, as most overseas Chinese were brought up without the influence of communism.  There is no getting around how big a difference that makes — often meaning that the cultural differences between Mainland Chinese and overseas Chinese is as great as between Mainland Chinese and those of completely different ethnic groups.  I think Think Like Chinese does a pretty good job of emphasizing this point, and it is one that is helpful to keep in mind.

Overall, I find Zhang and Baker’s Think Like Chinese to be a pretty insightful book for people wanting to do business in China, especially for those relatively new to China (more than a year or so, less than 10 years), or those who have limited direct contact with people born and raised in Mainland China.  It is an easy read, and probably worth picking up and giving some attention to before starting a big venture in the Chinese market.

My friend Glen possesses an amazing musical talent.  I always enjoy listening to him at Open Mic, whether he performs in English, Mandarin, or dialect, and I’ve enjoyed seeing his more formal performances in other locales as well.  But Glen has another talent too, one that is not so much for the stage, but for his relationships with his friends. He is an amazingly gifted communicator, even when he is confined to the English language, which is not his first preference.  Even at those times, he can really hold his audience, engaging others in interesting conversation, and keeping everything lively and fun.

Glen, though, sometimes struggles with the thing all of us who have ever tried to learn a language do from time to time — he mixes up words sometimes in a way that can be a little funny, even when he is not trying to be.  Being the good sport he is, he’s allowed me permission to share some of his stories on this blog, and I thought it would be fun to get your votes… which of these two (my favorites) do you think is the bigger blunder?  (I’m sure Glen will enjoy hearing opinions from native English speakers.)

Upon learning that much of Glen’s dazzling musical ability is self-taught, someone asked him, “How did you get to be such a great guitarist?”

Glen’s answer:  ”I’m Jesus.”

(He meant, “I’m a genius.”)

One of Glen’s guitar students came to class, a sweet girl of roughly 10 years in age.  Glen wanted to encourage her to work hard, and so began the lesson saying, “If you play all of this right, without any mistakes, I will give you three strippers.”

(He meant to say, “three stickers.”)

I don’t know what possessed me to do it, but when my friend asked me if I would go to Yunnan with her and her father and act as their translator, I agreed.  It’s something I’ve done often enough since then, but really… this was about 14 years ago, and back then my Chinese was so lousy, I had no business translating at all.  But I did.  And it was fun.

On our first night in Kunming, we decided to go out and have a look at our surroundings.  We’d been traveling together in Thailand for a week already, and didn’t mind having a slow evening to get settled in after our arrival in China.  We came across a movie theatre, and saw that Godzilla was showing, so we popped in and watched the film.  We chose it thinking that it wouldn’t hurt seeing something like that dubbed in Chinese, but were pleasantly surprised to find that it was shown in English.  We were probably the only 3 people in the room who understood the dialogue.

After the show, we saw a roadside display of movie-related merchandise for sale.  There were all sorts of posters and hand-crafted paintings or embroideries of movies that had recently come out of Hollywood.  Scenes from Titanic were emblazoned across all sorts of handmade products.  My friend decided to have a look, and I translated for her as she haggled over the prices.  I squatted down across from the lady selling her wares, and my friend knelt beside me.  Her dad stepped aside and started taking pictures of us.

As we finished, I tried to stand up, but found myself pushed back to a squatting position by the large crowd that had gathered to watch the negotiations.  They were squeezed together, leaning into the space above my friend and I, some hoping to get a look at her long blond hair, and others just wanting to hear the foreigner speak Chinese.  When they realized we’d been blocked in, those nearest us laughed a little, but overall seemed reluctant to give up their front row seats.

I am generally a rather private person, and certainly never set out with a goal to spend my adult life as a roadside performer.  But somehow, that is something I end up being all too often.  I want to say that things have changed some over the years, and that I don’t often find myself in the midst of a crowd hovering about looking for the chance to hear my Chinese.  And that might be true.

Or maybe I’ve just gotten used to it.

This past week, my friend decided she needed some practice driving.  She got her license last year, and hasn’t driven at all since then.  Her friend had a car available for loan to the new driver, as long as she could find a “coach.”

That’s where I come in.

We traveled an hour and a half to reach the site of the loan vehicle.  Upon our arrival, I was given directions for a spot that would have a nice quiet stretch of road for my friend to practice driving.  I was supposed to drive there, and then we would swap places and I would begin coaching.

I’ve never driven in China before.  I learned very quickly that it isn’t all that different from driving anywhere else… at least, not if you’ve been making your home here for half of the year over the past 6 or so years.(It might be a different story otherwise.)  Fortunately, I have made myself quite at home in Shanghai, and so found driving her to be not challenging at all.  It was not nearly as difficult to keep an eye on everything as I thought it would be.  After having gotten a feel for it, I think I will have no problem even when I finally decide to drive in the busier parts of the city.

It was somewhat different for my friend, though.  She hadn’t driven in quite some time, and has not had any real experience behind the wheel other than in her driver’s training course.  It was interesting to see the things that can pose a challenge for a new driver, especially one who did not learn from a very young age.

We managed, though, without any real problems.  There was the normal cursing and sounding of horns from cars behind us that often accompanies a new driver’s first time on the road, but nothing much worse than that.  We did see a very close call involving another car and a very big lorry.  It was odd to see how this car, and all of the others around us, completely disregarded the red lights at every junction, just because this was a supposedly “quiet” road.  The car we saw nearly paid very dearly for it when a lorry came barreling out of a side road.  It’s been a long time since I’ve seen such a close call, and I was very glad it did not upset my friend too badly when she saw it from her vantage point behind the wheel of our car.

It was especially interesting coaching this friend because of the language thing.  It hadn’t crossed my mind that she had learned everything in Chinese, not English.  I didn’t know the terms for brake, clutch, accelerator, shifting gears, and so forth, and so had to pick them up on the fly (well… not exactly flying, thank goodness).  I’ve coached plenty of friends in the past, but had never done so in Chinese before.  That made it more of a challenge this time, and it was pretty fun to pick it all up as we went along.

I was glad for the chance to get out and drive on China’s roads.  And I suspect it is something I’ll do plenty more of in the future.

Language studies can always have “fun” moments, even in the most structured learning environments.  When picking up a new language, there are all sorts of mistakes one might make, some of which can be quite embarrassing.  The potential for this sort of embarrassment can be intensified when trying to pick up a dialect, as Chinese dialects do not have a written system.  A dialect, therefore, is learned by ear, and can only be picked up through exposure to the spoken language.  

In Shanghai, the local dialect is obviously the one you’ll hear most often.  This is quite a different situation from Singapore, my other home, where numerous dialects are spoken.  Hokkien (Fujian), Cantonese, Teow Chew (Chao Zhou), and Hakka (Kejia) are the most common dialects in Singapore (in that order), with a smattering of others that are spoken to a much lesser extent (Hainanese being the next largest after these four).  In daily conversation in Singapore, we tend to mix bits of each of the dialects, along with Mandarin, English, and Malay.

It is not hard to pick up a dialect if you speak Mandarin.  At least, it is not hard to pick up an ability to listen and understand.  Speaking, on the other hand, can be quite tricky.  I dream in the Hakka dialect, though I can barely string a spoken sentence together to save my life. The ability to understand and the ability to speak are two very different skills, and this is nowhere more prominent than in the languages that must be learned strictly by ear.

At one point in time, my listening ability in Hokkien got to be fairly good.  The mother of one of my friends was very sick at the time, and the family needed help looking after her sometimes during the day when everyone was at work.  My schedule allowed me to pop in and see if she was doing ok, and to bring meals when needed.  The only problem was that she did not speak English or Mandarin, but only the Hokkien dialect.  Thankfully, she was able to understand Mandarin, even though she did not speak it, and so we were able to communicate.

I always thought it would be nice for me to try to speak Hokkien to the older lady when I could, even though I knew I would not do so very accurately.  Since it was usually just the two of us at home, it was not too threatening, and so I put aside fears that my accent would be bad and so forth, and just decided to try to employ the sounds I knew so well by ear, but that my tongue had not yet managed to form.  One day, she gave some fruits to me to take home when I left, as a gesture of appreciation.  I told her there was no need, but she insisted.  When I finally took the bag from her hand, I tried to say thank you in her dialect, which is (pronounced “gam xia”).  What came out was not only a bad accent, but bad pronunciation, and I ended up saying “giam siap”… which means stingy.

I suppose developing an ability to listen might just be sufficient after all.