At First Glance

This is a small love letter to the woman I woke up with this Mother’s Day morning. She’d been groaning, sneezing and muttering semi-coherently for a couple of achy days, but today she just feels a little crappy. Her 12-year-old son was a little off this morning, too, after a late-night binge of Marvel comic heroes, and managed to soil his hand-crafted M-D artwork with a surly Well, I gave you a card, didn’t I? His father, disgruntled at the attitude, had to nonetheless admit that he hadn’t come up with even the card. It’s all that my girl really wants on this (and her birth) day.

I knew when I married her that she was eager to be a mother, but I hadn’t known how good she’d be at it. She’s a woman of quicksilver emotions, a ResultsMaker, and when we finally decided it was time to face the reality of my single-dad situation, her first meeting with my three sons was a sit-com disaster without the laugh-track. (Well, I did chuckle ruefully, resignedly, when I thought, after months of sweet, scary and resuscitating courtship, Well, this just isn’t going to work at ALL.) It did, though, finally, and her exasperation, sometimes worn on her sleeve (and as a flaming Easter bonnet), never lasts long. After an anxious few years of game and loverly trying, we finally scored a biological Bingo! and Son Four made his dramatic, long-legged entrance.

My bride, the Impatientor, stunned me by being a serene, contented companion for her own little bundle of boy. As he has grown, as he walks ever more proudly erect in expectation of the day when he surpasses his mother’s height, she has always been his steadfast supporter, even when he drives her nuts, as is pretty much a weekly drama. She loves that boy with eager, reckless abandon. She is an angel who rushes to love where fools would fear to tread; she'll get stung by it, over and over, and yet she never stops making honey in that buzzing little nest we call home.

Of course I always think of my own mother, six years gone now. Most of us remember her as the gently beaming matriarch of overflowing family dinners, gazing with rapture on her brood and all those grandchildren. But she was a fiery one, too, someone who wanted to get things done, and did, and somehow survived five children (including me) with dignity and nerves (semi)intact. Today, an old song from my mother’s youth is playing in my head: I want a girl just like the girl / Who married dear old dad! And more than I ever thought likely, in more than a few respects, I got what I never realized I was looking for: a woman eager to love, easy to laugh, and as loyal as the longest days are long, someone like my Mum.

Thanks, Diana, and happy Mother’s Day. You’re a beauty. (And happy thoughts of you, too, mother dear.) 

The tones, the tones, bane of my existence and forger of linguistic atrocities! You probably know enough of Chinese languages – Shanghaiese, or Cantonese, or the pu tong hua (“common speech”) that we call Mandarin – to recall that they are tonal. People used to say, and some probably still do, that Chinese people speak in a “sing song” way, but now that I’ve been listening to this music for a few years, I can’t help thinking that English must sound blunt and monotonous to folks here. (Actually, the French have been muttering about that for a long time, so no surprise there, I guess.) Yes, the tones do add melody to the language, and a certain intensity, too; for the first year I lived in China, I saw arguments breaking out everywhere for what seemed like no reason. Whenever I was with students or friends who could speak English, I’d ask, Are you angry right now? Or, What are those guys fighting about? The answer was wonderment, or confusion, or just a chuckling, They’re talking about soup/the weather/what was for lunch in the cafeteria. I was constantly fooled by hearing rising, strident tones that, in English, generally mean consternation or incredulity or rage, whereas in Chinese languages the tone of voice is not so much for adding emotional connotation but rather for just saying what you mean.

Here is the most frequently used Mandarin example: depending on your tone of voice, one syllable – “ma” – can mean “mother” (first, flat tone), “hemp” (second, rising tone; hard to distinguish sometimes, but it’s like a questioning tone in English), “horse” (third, falling-then-rising tone), or “criticize” (a verb, said in the fourth, a falling tone). Yes, and stuck on the end of a sentence, with no particular tone at all, ma indicates that a question has been asked; one of the many initial difficulties of Chinese is that, unlike most Western languages, a person’s voice doesn’t rise at the end of a question. Chinese grammar is much more straightforward than the structure of English, but hearing and knowing the meaning associated with tones – and the example above only gives some of the meanings for “ma” – well, it’s a tad discouraging. I repeatedly catch myself in yet another spasm of eye-rolling optimism: someone’s name, or a phrase I’ve heard, makes me excited that I’ve made (yes!) another linguistic connection. Oh, I get it! I ask, and I have a 93% chance of being told, no, that’s a different “feng”, that’s first tone not second or, even more bewildering to an illiterate like me, my patient friends explain that it’s the same tone, but a different character. Sounds exactly the same, is written the same in pinyin (the word's transliteration into alphabetic form), but is represented by a different pictorial character and has a completely other meaning. Thanks. (Sighing ensues.) 

Two years ago in an oral English class for Master’s students, I called upon Ms. Gao, proud to have said her name with a clear tone, not the usual English monotone. There were some embarrassed murmurs, Ms. Gao lowered her head, and a few of the guys in the back snorted and grinned. I had pronounced her name in the third tone (my favourite, my default tone, the rising/falling one) instead of the first (the flat tone). Gao can mean “high”, it can be a family name, and several other things I don’t know about yet. That day, though, in calling her name (which roughly rhymes with “plough”), I suddenly needed to learn some new vocabulary, at her blushing expense. To wit: I had just called this shy young scholar “Miss Sex Act”, at least in some people’s slang vocabulary.

Last week, it happened again with one of my favourite freshman writing students, Zhu Jiarong. I called upon Ms. Zhu, and got a bigger laugh than any of my intentional jokes do. Her surname is in the fourth tone, an abruptly falling sound, whereas I had used the first (flat) tone, one that sounds to me like a raised-voice command. I was just trying to be emphatic, to keep the kiddies awake, but instead I managed to call her “Miss Pig”. The class howled, Ms. Zhu quietly told me what I’d called her, and she had the grace and good humour to allow my embarrassment to trump hers, and to smilingly accept my dui bu qi! 

The good news? I am very skilled in making pu tong hua apologies. I can easily express regret for the fewness of the songs I know in that music-filled language, and the tone-deaf flatness of the words and expressions that I DO know. I can get myself into a pickup basketball game, call fouls, implore guys to pass the ball, and congratulate them for a big rebound, a sweet shot or making a generally hao qiu! There are a few other kinds of conversation that I can sometimes understand and take a limited part in, though often I need one of my friends to be the Chinese to Chinese translator.  I’m trying to get more systematic and regular in my study, but WOW. I have a lot of work to do. I used to think I had a decent ear for language, even for music, but my linguistic adventures here often leave me feeling like half a Beethoven: deaf to the melodies, but also unable to remember and produce them.  

I can’t say this one was “better read than never”, which faithful readers of this site expect my book reviews to be (sub)titled. I don’t really know why I read it, although I did like the cover photo of a summery small girl leaping into a river, even more than I disliked the magenta cast of the author’s name – REBECCA WELLS – on the front and the full-back-jacket glossy of the writer. The dust jacket of the book fairly screamed Back away now, Howdy, this ain’t meant for the likes o’ you, but it was in my bedroom (ah, the price of marriage is a sometime surprise!) and I was tired and I never meant to actually finish it and besides I’d heard of Ms. Wells’s Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and thought I’d do a little slumming in the bestseller swamp. Arrogance is bliss, too.

By the way, the book is called The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder, and the selfsame Ms. Ponder is the small-town Louisiana girl who narrates the piece, from her childhood to a second shot at thirty-something love. There’s a whole Ya-Ya thing, I've been hearing, among North American women (the original set of stories, Little Altars Everywhere, spawned two novels on the same characters), but this novel is not part of that sisterhood. However, I do now feel that I am something of an honorary sister myself. I should be, for I now know more about girl talk, haircuts, and fashion choices than seems strictly necessary. I now have a vague sense of the difference between a "page boy" cut and whatever.

Yes, it is about as chicky as chick-lit can get, and makes something like The Help look like timeless literature. At times the writing just made me groan, partly because it’s often rather ponderous (did Ms. Wells choose that character name as a defence against nerdy criticism?) and partly because the author was unstoppable enough to do it. That counts, for me, in BIG numerals, so I followed Calla's loves and curling irons through to the end. I was darned glad when I got there, but I know something of Cajun cookery and New Orleans nightspots and the inner spirit of hairdressing than I did before. Maybe that counts, too.

At my most benevolent, I can review Crowning Glory (it’s a biblical reference to women’s hairdos) as a positive boost to the reading of books by unpretentious women. I can see it as testament to the natural human desire for stories. Stories, stories, tell us more stories! I have a grudging admiration for someone who can get her derriere in front of a keyboard long enough to make novels, and to make what must be a remarkably fine living doing it, without any very obvious writerly skills. (Except for the most obvious, though not widely credited skill: sitting down over and over again to generate and manipulate words that may never be seen by anybody-but-you.) It’s a very moral book, uplifting even though some key characters (conveniently, or not) suffer and die, and Wells does have a spiritual inclination and an eye for quirky, almost random details that lighten her generally pedestrian prose.

It irritates me. It’s a stone in my shoe, and I think I’m going to leave it in there for awhile. Maybe that’s why I read the thing, instead of the many better books that I’ve paid to read but which stare accusingly from the window-ledge of my study. Reading about Calla Lily Ponder required nothing of me but idling hours, which is both the good news about it and the damnation. Wells’s novel – my first and last experience of her work – reminded me of something that Robert Benchley, early 20^th-century writer, humorist and actor, said: “It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.” His sarcasm comes true, in the case of Ms. Wells, and I suspect that she wouldn’t care at all that a frustrated writer like me is grumpy about her work. She knows what she’s doing.    

Blurt 23: Not much is more irritating than boomerang criticism. I nag my son on his indolence one morning when I circle and circle and still can’t find my writing desk. I natter about the chronic sleep shortage of Chinese students, while shackled by my own fatigue.

Momo, a nickname for her that I overuse shamelessly and mispronounce incorrigibly, is one of my favourite students. She’ll volunteer her paper if it contains an example of a writing fault I’ve been discussing with the class. She has one of those shining, intently learning faces that every teacher is nourished by, and she writes an English journal with ferocious interest and effort. Ms. Zhu also reads enough English that she can insert a bit of tasty slang in her writing. I was beyond delighted to find, as I checked her Journal progress, a few paragraphs about a significant disappointment that she had experienced. Looking back on it, she wrote, “I bummered at that time!” 

It helps that Momo is such a great kid, but this is one of my recent favourite bits of Chinglish. They’re easy to find. Constantly, the Chinese fad for clothing with English (or Franglish, or Germlish) writing on it has results that are just stupid: the knockoff NBA basketball jerseys for the mighty “Laekrs”, or the pretty little girl whose jacket was adorned with the charming message “happy fuck styling”. Such clothing is made, often with utter randomness, by underpaid workers who have no English for people who can’t read it. Occasionally, though, even one of my reasonably high-functioning students messes up, like the quiet young man of great gentleness and dignity who blushed when I teased him about his parka, which shouted a knockoff Playboy logo (complete with bunny ears). He hadn’t really noticed it. It’s too easy, as a mocking party game, for ex-pats to compare notes on the most recent encounter with idiocy. As in many areas, China is rushing madly to raise its standard of English, yet typically with that peculiar Chinese confidence (or shame?) that means they don’t check the translation with anybody. Humility, though, comes in considering the converse: if China suddenly became the most dominant economic and cultural engine on the planet, and North Americans and Europeans were forced to learn Mandarin or be left hopelessly behind, how many eye-rollingly stupid mistakes would we make? (I have no way of verifying this, but I can’t help but think that many of the fashionable tattoos with Chinese characters, proudly worn by Western hipsters and athletes, must say some pretty goofy things.) And by the way: we’re not so far from the Chinese language having a global relevance that’s going to make English chauvinists squirm, so maybe we shouldn't giggle too loudly or too long about adventures in Chinglish.

So I try my best to enjoy some of the more creative examples. Sometimes it’s frustrating, as a writing teacher, since even some of the things that they are taught make for turgid or ridiculous writing. No Chinese student will “try” something, for instance. They will always “have a try”. Still, it’s often charming, and sometimes it’s so darned economical that we adopt it linguistically, as we did with the classic bit of Chinglish long time no see! On every occasion where I have appreciated, or chuckled at, or otherwise faced the mangling of “my language” with good humour and grace, I never bummered at that time.