The Death of Imagination

Tomorrow is the Moon Festival so today we made the trip down to South Chinatown for mooncakes. I knew we were cutting it close and I wouldn't've been surprised to find that they were out of their proprietary mixed nut mooncakes. I didn't expect that they'd be out of mooncakes altogether. We ended up buying a couple from Chiu Quon instead (lotus paste and winter melon, so the Old Man will end up having a bite or two at most). We also got a few other sweets to tide us over, since Nuphy wasn't due to meet up with us for another half hour.

We all vaguely remembered having spotted on our last visit a place we'd like to try in future, but as none of us could recall the name or any details, I simply Googled "best dumplings Chinatown", since monshu said he wanted jiǎozi. Among the chaff we found Mike Sula's write-up from last February of a place in the Richland Food Court called Qing Xiang Yuan (青香苑) which specialised in a kind of soup dumpling called guàntángjiǎozi (灌湯餃子). That didn't catch my attention as much as the fact that they were hand-filled to order, so we made a beeline for the place and texted Nuphy the location.

Sula had lamented that the food court was "almost always nearly empty", but that wasn't the case today, which meant that there was a 20-minute wait for food. But that and the fact that the locale was almost too authentic (the bunker-like lack of ambience and general grottiness bringing back culture shock from our trip to Beijing) were the only drawbacks. If anything, the dumplings exceeded my expectations, being every bit as tender and fresh as the ones we got in China but more juicy and perhaps even more delicate as well. We kept going back until we'd had three orders: lamb and coriander, pork and leek, and zucchini and mushroom (alas, the least interesting of the three).

Both the old farts had brought their appetites, though, so the GWO ended up ordering a big plate of yakisoba from the Taiwanese/Japanese noodly place in the corner while Nuphy plumped for the "spicy lamb chops" from 紅辣椒 (the English name might be "Snack Planet" unless that's where he got his mango smoothie). Fortunately for me, the chiles and chili flakes were sprinkled on after the fact, so I could shake them off to sample the meat, which was curiously fluffy in texture. Oddly, none of the places served hot tea (I joked with the Old Man about asking for some dumpling water, like we had to drink in Chongqing)--not even the sushi place in the corner.

We decided to walk off lunch with a circuit through the mall, which was packed with attendees for the Moon Festival, and then back to Feida, since Nuphy wanted jindeui. Amazingly, they were out of those, too, so we looped back to the Saint Anna Bakery, stopping on the way to check out the new Chinatown Branch of CPL. We were impressed by the exterior on our last trip, but lots of beautiful buildings are badly non-functional inside. Not this one. It's a great space, with enclosed community rooms on the main floor for activities (including what looked like it could've been a funeral) and study rooms upstairs. The noisier areas are concentrated on the north side, and it gets quieter going south towards the study room as the stacks switch from English to Chinese. (There seemed a roughly equal number of both and plenty of new acquisitions.) I had a great chat with one of the staff, who turned out to be a graduate of UofC's library school back when there still was such a thing.

Saint Anna was a blast from the past as well. I don't think it's changed since that mall was built over two decades ago. Unfortunately, this meant the sweets were less than satisfactory (not to speak of the bag tea), but the experience was something else. A smiling 91 year-old came up to compliment me on my beard and chat briefly about his trajectory, which had him landing here in '62 and eventually starting a business hauling computer waste back to Hong Kong for recycling. Nuphy asked me about the specials pasted on the wall, and I attracted the attention of the waitress trying to explain the difference between the flesh and moon radicals. (Sadly, I managed to misread 酸 "sour" as 脆 "crispy", only discovering my mistake as a thumbed through McCawley on the trip back.)

Formally, "lesbian" is translated into Chinese as 女同性戀者 ("female same sex lover"). But since this is a mouthful, it gets shortened to 女同 or transcribed as 蕾絲邊 lěisībiàn instead. That's actually kind of long for colloquial Chinese as well, particularly if it's qualified in any way. So in turn, 蕾絲邊 gets clipped to simply 蕾 (lit. "bud") in compounds like 歐蕾 (歐 here representing 歐德 ōudě, a transcription of "old" and not a shortening of 歐洲 or 歐羅巴 "Europe").

But here's the rub: 歐蕾 ōulěi is also used to transcribe "au lait" as in 咖啡歐蕾 café au lait. I imagine someone was just looking for a fancy name for their strawberry milkshake and misfired badly.

To be honest, monshu's been something of a slacker recently in the business of keeping me on my toes. But he may just have made up for lost time with his latest object d'art acquisition. There are many ways a kanji identification request can bedevil me, but perhaps none more effective than to find a character that is perfectly clearly written, whose every element is familiar to me, but which is nonetheless unfamiliar and--worse--unfindable.

The character in question is 蜑. It looks straightforward: the radical must be 虫 ("insect"), which leaves 延 (yán "stretch") as the phonetic, right? Trouble was, I couldn't find this character anywhere. In fact, I couldn't even get close. I finally dug out my Nelson's and found 蜒, which is glossed as "serpentine". It's not that unusual to find variants with the radical in a different place. But I just couldn't get the semantics to work out. The other two characters next to it were 少女 "young woman", and what would this be doing written on a piece in the shape of a boat?

I wish I could say I cracked this on my own, but ultimately the seller came to my rescue with the translation "young woman diver". Apparently, the kun reading for 蜑 is あま ama which (in addition to all its other meanings) apparently means "diver". This obscure character appears to be the only gender-neutral way to write this. In ordinary usage, one either uses the characters 海人 (lit. "sea man") for a male diver or 海女 ("sea woman") for a female. The reading of 蜑少女 is actually あまおとめ ama-otome.

But why didn't any of my Chinese dictionaries have 蜑? Perhaps it's not actually a Chinese character? What I mean is, there are kanji which are 和製 "Japanese-made". For example, 榊 sakaki, the sacred tree of Shinto. (A simple combination of 木 "tree " and　神 "divine".) Could this be one? It is listed in Wiktionary, but with the reading dàn. That is, it seems to be treated as a variant of 蛋 "egg". Which does fit with the phonetic value of 延 but otherwise makes no sense in reference to the Japanese usage.

The one and only connexion that occurs to me is 蛋家 (Cant. Dahngā), now euphemistically called 水上人 "on-water people" in the same way as the Japanese eta have become burakumin. And like Japan's Burakumin, they have the curious distinction of being an ethnic group which is physically and linguistically indistinguishable from the majority population and yet treated as outcastes. Unlike the Eta, the Tanka have always been "boat people". And their name is also written 蜑家, with the same mystery character.

Before he left early for the day (hopefully without first infecting me with whatever ails him), Pablo asked me about a DVD of My neighbour Totoro his wife had bought. Despite having a parallel title in English on the cover, it turned out to be in some other language and they weren't sure what. I glanced, saw kana, and said it must be in Japanese. But I was puzzled by the presence of the characters "龙猫" ("dragon cat") under "トトロ". At first, I thought this might be something to do with that crazy Japanese habit of using completely arbitrary and unpredictable readings for names (e.g. the comic title 悪魔, read "Deimos"). But I was surprised not to have encountred this before. I had a closer look and saw that it was actually a Mainland Chinese release.

But the questions didn't end there. To confirm my suspicions, I looked up the film in the English Wikipedia and then went to the Chinese version of the page. The default version of this is Mainland in simplified characters, but the title it gives is not "龙猫" but "邻居托托罗" (a literal translation of the Japanese name incorporating a transcription of "Totoro" into Mandarin pronunciation). Out of habit, I changed the display to Taiwanese Mandarin with traditional characters and the title changed to "龍貓", the traditional equivalent of "龙猫". Neither version of the article uses the half-transcribed title again, so I'm not really sure what is going on.

I've long felt the need for a Chinese equivalent to Japanese wapurō-baka and now I finally have one, thanks to this Los Angeles Times article: tíbǐwàngzì (提筆忘字). Literally, this means "pick up brush, forget character". (The Japanese, a contraction of "word processor idiot", is more explicit regarding the cause of the phenomenon.)

It's a linguistically sound article overall, with only a couple of questionable statements. One is:

The Chinese do more text messaging than anybody else in the world, perhaps because it is an inexpensive way to communicate and because the Chinese language can squeeze a lot of information into a small space. (One example is a single character, pronounced "zha," which means the red dots that appear on your nose when you are drunk.)

Sure enough, the character 皻 zhā does exist and is glossed by Lin Yu-tang as "Red blotch (esp. on nose from excessive drinking)". But he follows this with the compound 酒皻 jiǔzhā (酒 means "alcoholic beverage"), which is probably the more frequent form given that zhā in isolation could also mean "investigate" (its most common meaning), "pierce", and "dregs". At this length, it's no more impressive an example of compression than say, German Fahne ("the smell of alcohol on one's breath") or English punt.

But that's a quibble. There are the usual quotes about the ineffable cultural patrimony that is lost when someone writes jiǔzhā instead of 酒皻, but the author of the piece remains agnostic. It's a refreshing change from that piece of NYT garbage recently trashed by Language Log.

I was perusing the Reader at lunchtime and came across this curious line in a review of the Chinese film 盲山 (Blind Mountain): "In Mandarin and Shaanxi with subtitles." Curious, because "Shaanxi" is the name of a province, not a language. More curious still because 陝西話 or "Shaanxi talk" is another name for Guanzhong dialect (關中), whose prestige standard is the speech of Xi'an, and Guanzhong dialect is Mandarin. True, some versions of Mandarin are greatly divergent from the Beijing-based standard (Sichuan speakers in particular get singled out for incomprehensibility), but Guanzhonghua isn't one of them. So altogether, it's rather like saying "In English and Ohio with subtitles."

Of course, not everyone in Ohio speaks the same dialect and the same is true of Shaanxi. In the northernmost areas, the local speech varieties are reckoned to the Lüliang (呂梁) dialect of the Jin sublanguage (which, such distinctions being subjective in any case, some linguists consider just another kind of Mandarin). In the mountainous south begins the Southwest Mandarin speech area which stretches thousands of kilometres through Sichuan to the edges of Yunnan and even into northernmost Thailand. This, it turns out, is probably the dialect group intended, as Chinese-language summaries of the film describe it as taking place in the Qinling (秦嶺) range of southern Shaanxi.

But how did the reviewer know this? No mention of "Shaanxi" as a language appears in any other English-language reviews and summaries I've found online, so presumably it's not part of the press packet materials, and it beggars belief to imagine that a reviewer named "Andrea Gronvall" has the technical background to distinguish Chinese speech varieties. My guess is that there must be some reference to dialect differences in the film, which concerns the kidnapping of an "urban university graduate" who is forcibly married to a mountain villager. There may even be something in the subtitles about the coarse, unintelligible "Shaanxi dialect" of the natives.

A couple of you asked if I brought back any egregious examples of Engrish from my travels. As we say in the vernacular: BOY HOWDY! English was ubiquitous in China--we saw it on street signs, menus, monuments, advertisements, museum displays, tickets, t-shirts, and even the asphalt. And where there is English in Asia, there is inevitably Engrish.

In general, we found more of it the farther we strayed from Beijing. Some of this (such as the elimination of the celebrated "Racist Park" sign) is no doubt due to Olympics preparation, but I'm sure it has as much to do with the drop off in foreign language skills as you leave the metropolis behind. Our worst tourist guide in terms of intelligibility was in the little (in Chinese terms, this means a population of less than 1,000,000) river town of Fengdu. It was also there that I netted this pearl of incompletely digested translation:

It was said if you can put u-
pstone to downstone in made of togethe-
r. It can recover heart sick.

(Punctuation as in the original; Chinese equivalent: 又传将上下两半衲合，可医治心病.)

Actually, the entire description of the 星辰礅 (sorry, can't remember the "English" name) in the "Ghost City" of Fengdu was like that, but this was all I could scrawl down in the time I had. (It was more than just his bad English that made him the worst guide we dealt with.)

Even venerable Xi'an was far enough from Beijing's Foreign Studies University to present us with some real gems, chief among them "No Lion-Pressing Drive". This was on the road to Xi'an Xianying International Airport; unfortunately, we went by too fast for me to grab the characters, but our surmise is that it has something to do with staying in your own lion, er, lane. At the airport itself, we were presented with a choice of "Recycling" (可回收) or "Unrecycling" (不可回收) on all the trashbins. And if we were hungry, we had in addition to the usual options that of "Restemdessert". (Still haven't figured out this one; the equivalent Chinese was 西点, which looks to me like an abbreviation of 西式点心 "Western style snacks", 点心 diǎnxīn being the etymological equivalent of our own "dim sum". How you get from that to "Restemdessert" is an exercise best left for the student.)

Of course, the real treasure troves were the menus, so I'll think I'll save those beauties for another entry.

I was obsessing a bit this morning about not being ready to speak to people in China. I meant to find someone for one-on-one conversational practice sessions, but then my fundamentally lazy nature got the upper hand.

Later, on the way to work, I found myself caught behind a group of six Chinese speakers on the sidewalk. I steered past the first pair, but the next two were completely oblivious. So I said, "Qǐng ràng yi ràng!" ("Please give way!") and they scooted to one side. I followed up with "Xièxiè!" as I rushed past and they responded in unison "Méi guānxì!" ("No problem!") Then, presumably upon realising I was lǎowài, they burst into giggles.

Maybe I'll be fine after all.

Finally, some dream Chinese! The setting was odd: I was sitting on a bench-like structure (possibly a low shed?) attached to the back of a garage. The beach/park began on the other side of the alley and extended to the Lake. The odd part was that the seat I was on was moving northwards through the alley. Somehow, it was the same seat attached to the same building, yet every time I looked up from my book, I had moved further along. It did halt occasionally, much as if I were on the el, and I remember at one point wondering how I was going to get past a mob of noisy revellers.

In any case, a woman noticed my little red dictionary and said something that sounded like "Wo wei gu?" I didn't really register it at first, since she was with some other folks who I found vaguely annoying. But then I looked at her and asked, "Was that Chinese?" When she said yes, I tried to ask "Where did you learn that?" but for some reason it came out as 我學那個的在哪裏的? I don't know what the 的s are doing there, since they add nothing and are totally incorrect. Perhaps I was thinking of 了 and got confused? The 我 "I" for 你 "you" substitution is, curiously enough, one that we sometimes had trouble with in class. Hopefully, if I were actually in this situation, I would have the presence of mind to say 那個你學了哪裏?