Mandarin
After I heard I won the fellowship in January, I started studying Mandarin. Only now, with two months of four hours a day in 1 on 1 tutoring under my belt, I’m no longer helpless and am somewhere close to two years of university Mandarin. After listening to me speak, Kevin Ho said that it “sounds like you can passively get by” while Maggie Han pegged me at “a fourth-grade vocabulary.” My teacher said I sound like I’m always singing because in Chinese pop music it’s no problem if you pronounce tones wrong.
I think that’s an overestimate. With a little prep and on the topic of my choosing, I can probably write and tell a story like a 4th grader with a speech defect. But my knowledge is very uneven. A 9-year-old Chinese kid would know how to give a car directions and but may not know the word for “rapper,” “interfering in internal affairs” and some random ancient Chinese idioms.
Conversations feel like playing these wooden “roll the ball” toys where you constantly have to avoid holes. Only with topics on my turf (NBA, the Chinese ‘the voice’ but for hip hop, school-related things, iPhone games…) where I ask more questions than I answer (never mind now much of the answer I understand) I can keep it going. If the ball ends up going towards one of those pits and I can’t get it out fast enough, the Chinese person starts to feel awkward and walks away. Thankfully, folks who think I’m novel enough to humor aren’t that hard to find.
Peter Hessler in River Town described how the propaganda posters he saw before he could read felt like mystical oracles taunting him with the secrets to understanding China. Eventually, once he understood them, he was underwhelmed. I read my first full propaganda poster on the taxi out of Guilin to the airport. It said “Love your country. Love your family. Love Guilin.”
But aside from propaganda posters, I’ve been fascinated by the content my limited Mandarin has exposed me to. From Wolf Warrior 2 (below) and the “China Loves Hip Hop” to a ‘Parental Control’-style dating show where the host is a trans woman, this country has not disappointed.
My interactions with Chinese people who I don’t pay to talk to me are also improving. Flying down to Guilin there was a five-year old sitting in the row in front of me who for thirty minutes kept firing off questions I couldn’t understand. On my way out of Guilin to Yunnan, I sat down next to a family whose child was eyeing the fries I had just bought. I offered him one, and we ended up chatting about how he likes to draw and what his favorite foods are. I’m decently confident I can pass as a Chinese kindergartener (like me, they can’t read either!).
I wandered into a live music club in Dali last night and saw three amateur rappers on stage. They were the first kids in China to recognize my Migos shirt. We talked for an hour about Chinese rap, old school vs. trap music, and why one of their favorite rappers was Ol’ Dirty Bastard. When they make it big and tour in Beijing, they told me, I have to dj for them.
I don’t know if I’ll ever have another two months to give myself up so totally to immersion, but it was a fantastic experience. If my initial progress was as slow as standard university Mandarin, I don’t think I’d have had the patience to get where I am today. But now that I’m past the most painful stage, it will be easier to stay motivated by studying more and more interesting Chinese.
Red Rambo: Wolf Warrior 2
The government recently browbeat over a dozen teen idols to star in a movie about the founding of the People’s Liberation Army. That film, which had ads plastered everywhere, made just 50 million dollars at the box office. But another more modern take on patriotic movies, an independently produced flick starring a lone PLA special forces soldier taking up the ‘Yellow Man’s Burden’ in an anonymous African civil war, broke domestic records.
The jingoism is more funny than scary. For instance, take the American born Chinese female lead’s reaction to a rebel attack. Her first instinct is to call the US Embassy because she thinks the Marines will always save the day. While she just gets an answering machine, a few Chinese destroyers are steaming towards the country to rescue their civilians. There are two scenes where just because the Chinese people announce they’re Chinese, rebels who have just been murdering babies decide to hold their fire. Finally, after Red Rambo puts up a good fight, the American mercenary bad guy says “I guess the Chinese military isn’t as lame as I thought.” When the white guy regains the upper hand, he declared “people like you will always be inferior to people like me, so you better get used to it.” Our Chinese hero retorts, with a brutal punch, “that’s fucking history!”
The movie’s portrayal of Africans is, perhaps unsurprisingly, problematic. Almost every African character is either a bloodthirsty soldier or a cute helpless child that needs saving. At one point, the lead says that all Africans need are a bonfire and some music to be happy.
My tutor’s take on the issues I had with the movie surprised me. When I said that it was offensive the Africans were portrayed so simplistically, she replied that “simple” is a Chinese compliment. On the bonfire scene: “Even though they have many disasters, it’s admirable they do not despair.” While I thought that the rebels weren’t killing the Chinese because they respected them, she noted that it was really because they needed China’s support on the UN Security Council. The director wasn’t just highlighting the Chinese saintliness; he wanted to make sure everyone respected them as a global player.
In general, she said the government was pushing the idea of loving your country since now Chinese had safe and “colorful lives.” This got her talking about a recent viral article claiming that China was safer than the US by quoting Quora posts. One post from a Chinese person who went to school in Chicago pointed out all the emails he got from the university about crimes around campus. I explained to her that the school was legally obligated to inform them. A little later on, she mentioned a recent soccer hooligan-style gang fight on the main Guilin bridge where two gangs dressed in different colors beat each other up with metal rods. We tried to find the article she read the night before but it had been taken down.