Dreaming in Chinese (6 page)

It was hard to work “sitting by a stump waiting for a rabbit” into my conversations, but I did manage to use a little language play of my own one day. I had learned the phrase
xiàn xué xiàn mài
, literally “now study now sell,” or, colloquially, to “use on the spot what you have just learned; teaching something that you only just now learned yourself.” I tried this out on a friend of mine while we were driving along a busy Beijing street in a taxi. The story I was relating wasn’t funny, but the taxi driver, listening in, burst out laughing, giving me pause to imagine that I sounded like a preschooler with a bad knock-knock joke, and that as a foreigner, I should attempt language play judiciously.

The flip side to all the fun and games of Chinese is ambiguity. With so many sounds that have multiple meanings, there is a frequent need to clarify. Context works sometimes, but not always, not by any means.

My favorite way out of this is what I call the “B as in Bob” phenomenon. For example, sometimes when talking on the phone in English, it’s hard to distinguish between the sounds for “s” and “f.” If context isn’t enough to sort out the confusion, you can seek clarification by saying “S as in Sam,” or “F as in France.”

The Chinese use this, too, with whole syllables. Say there is a word in Chinese, like
xīn
, which I know means “new”
. I hear the word
xīn
used in a context where it can’t sensibly mean “new,” so I might ask the speaker, “
Xīnnián de xīn
?” (New as in “New Year?”). He might respond, No, “
kāixīn de xīn
” (Heart as in “open heart,” which means “happy”) where
xīn
means “heart” and
kāixīn
means “happy.” With all the struggles endured in learning Chinese, I enjoy this cheap thrill of using language like an insider.

If I could write and read characters well, I would also try the visual approach to disambiguating. The Chinese write tiny characters for each other to read on scraps of paper, if they’re trying to identify a homonym. Or they draw characters with a finger in the air.

So back to the prolific Chao Yuen Ren and my ongoing search for his books. I did find a few of them. One was the best Chinese grammar that I have come across, written in 1968. The other is a collection of pieces on Chinese language, including his charming linguistic autobiography, in which Chao recounts a lifelong habit of picking up a variety of languages and Chinese dialects. What I continue to love about this man is his fearless Chinese approach to his own language, as something to be both admired and enjoyed.

4
I have seen Chao Yuen Ren also written as Zhao Yuanren. Chao Yuen Ren is written in the Wade-Giles romanization system, which was popular in China from the late nineteenth century through most of the twentieth century. Zhao Yuanren is the rendering in the romanization system of Pinyin, which was introduced in China in 1958, was later adopted internationally, and is still used today. I have chosen the Wade-Giles form here, as I first heard of him as Chao Yuen Ren, and his name appears that way in the books I own that were written by him.

5
Here is a link (all links are current at the time of printing) to a recording of his song, “How Could I Help Thinking of Her” (
“jiāo wǒ rúhé bù xiǎng tā”), which sounds most like a languorous cowboy’s campfire song: http://v.youku.com/v_playlist/f1286025o1p4.html.

6
The variants of
shi
are pronounced with different tones, but even so …

Dǎbāo
Do you do takeout?

4.
Why the Chinese hear tones, and we don’t

A
FTER SEVERAL MONTHS
in China, I developed a bad craving for cheese, which is a precious and hard-to-find luxury in the highly lactose-intolerant nation. Desperate, I stopped in a Taco Bell at the fringe of swank downtown Shanghai, fixed on the idea of a gooey, sloppy, cheesy burrito.

A tall Chinese youth, proudly wearing a black sombrero and sequined velvet vest, greeted me at the entrance. He barked a hearty “
Huānyíng guānglín
!”

“We welcome you!” Any restaurant in China worth its salt will post brigades of enthusiastic greeters at the door. They’re usually lovely young women dressed in traditional
qípáo
with a thigh-high slit up the side. But at Taco Bell, it was boys in oversized sombreros.

I decided on takeout. China has wholly embraced the culture of takeout food and even better, of doggy bags for restaurant leftovers. After another oversized Chinese feast at just about any eatery from the humble to the most glorious, the evening’s host will head home bearing carefully packaged Styrofoam boxes,
dǎbāo
, for the family’s next meal.

Still quite new to China, I had rehearsed my lines to ask for the menu and inquire about takeout. “
Yǒu dǎbāo ma
?” “Do you have takeout?”

When the greeter in the sombrero looked puzzled, I asked again, pointing to the menu, then the door, and miming the act of carrying a bag out the entrance. Still no response.

I cut out the grammar and said simply “
Dǎbāo
?” “Takeout?” Nothing.

Then I tried all sorts of tones on the two syllables of
dabao
: high tones, rising tones, falling tones, falling-then-rising tones and various combinations thereof. All the time I’m thinking: “C’mon, guy! Work with me here! How hard can this be?”

He called for reinforcements from the kitchen. Several more young boys in sombreros emerged, listened intently as I repeated
dabao
over and over again. Finally, one erupted in triumph, “Aaahh—
dǎbāo
!”—this uttered with a very emphatic high tone on the
bāo
. The greeter solemnly answered, “
Yǒu
” (“We have it”). And then they all laughed and went back into the kitchen.

Tones: such a thorn in the side of students of Chinese. But tones actually serve a clever purpose. Since Mandarin has an inventory of only about 400 syllables, about a tenth of English, the language is simply flooded with homonyms—words that sound alike but have different meanings. English has homonyms, too, like “seal,” meaning the animal, the stamp or the verb meaning “to close tightly.” But Mandarin has literally countless homonyms, which makes for a lot of ambiguity.

Tones are a way to get a lot more mileage out of each syllable. If you slap a rising tone onto a syllable, it has one meaning; if you pronounce that same syllable with a falling tone, it means something else.
⁷
Here are just some of the possible meanings for
bao
that the boy in the sombrero may have heard and understood when I tried saying
dabao
using several different tones at the Taco Bell:

Bāo
with the first tone, a high tone, means “bag” or “parcel” as a noun, and “to wrap up” as a verb. (
Dǎbāo
,
the two-syllable word, means “carry-out” or “takeout.”)

Báo
with the second,
rising tone means “hail,” as in the frozen rain pellets.