Ich Bin Ein Beijinger: As Simple as ABC

When he lived in Beijing about ten years ago, my brother Jay had a friend named Zhang Yi. They struck me as odd companions. Though he’s a fair bit more urbane today, back then Zhang Yi was very much the guileless, small-town naïf. My brother, meanwhile, was silver-tongued even as a child, and his already formidable rhetorical skills were only further honed in law school. Jay had left his high-powered San Francisco firm and come out to Old Chokey, hoping to cash in on China’s first dotcom boom. His mastery of Mandarin, however, had never progressed far beyond the kitchen Chinese that many ABCs acquire in early childhood: household nouns and very basic verbs, an underdeveloped syntax wrapped around rudimentary grammar.

Not long into their friendship, Jay began to suspect that Zhang Yi regarded him as rather stupid. And not just hobbled by language, but quite possibly retarded – a simpleton, lacking a grasp of basic facts and concepts about which Zhang Yi would, with patient condescension, instruct my poor brother.

He knew Jay had been a lawyer, knew he was running an Internet business, but apparently it never occurred to him that, were they able to converse in English, he might find Jay to be a very different person. (In a private conversation later, Zhang Yi confided his suspicion to me, and I couldn’t resist saying, “Yes, I’m afraid Jay’s never been very smart since Mom dropped him.”)

It seems we morph into different people once we move from our native into our acquired tongue, and the difference in personalities can be pretty striking. Most of us become inarticulate dolts – like Jay, or me. In my case, the relatively simple Mandarin I use day-to-day at least comes out sounding convincingly native, but as soon as I’m beyond the bounds of familiar vocabulary I come off like an unlettered, thick-tongued idiot. “It’s hard to believe that people actually pay you to speak,” my wife, who knows only the Chinese me, often remarks.

Even more amusing are the transformations rooted in those two time-honored sources in which so many of us – at least us guys – find our Chinese voices. Sure, we may learn our formal Putonghua in a structured environment, but what really forms our Chinese personas are the everyday conversations with the Chinese-speaking people around us. And for so many of my Anglophone expat guy friends, the closest Mandarin models at hand are wives and girlfriends. Them and our fair city’s famously chatty taxi drivers. Adam, a friend of mine who used to live in Beijing, is typical of guys who’ve learned Mandarin from the women in their lives: “When I speak Chinese, I turn into all my ex-girlfriends,” he laments.

Another friend, Robert, has a deep and decidedly masculine voice in the American English he speaks natively; his Mandarin is technically good, having done the reputable Hopkins program in Nanjing, but he owns to “sounding like a downright pansy” – a result of day-to-day speaking with his Chinese wife. And when Robert speaks in the Sichuan dialect with his wife’s family, his voice “mysteriously jumps two octaves.” Another guy suffering from the same syndrome reminds us, having learned the hard way, that “Real men don’t say ‘ni zhen taoyan!’”

Then there’s the other end of the spectrum: those who regard Beijing cabbie-speak as the ultimate in Chinese machismo. More people than you’d think turn into foul-mouthed, aggressive assholes once they switch into Chinese. Josh, whom I had lunch with the other day, admits to being a perfect example of this. He describes himself as “painfully polite” in English but confesses to having “adopted a cab driver personality” from spending so much time in taxis. Case in point: One night, after picking up an American friend visiting Beijing, he got in a heated altercation with a cabbie on the street outside his apartment. “We insulted each others’ mothers in different ways, indicating various ways in which our respective mothers might be violated,” he recalls. When it was over, his friend stood on the sidewalk with her luggage, afraid to enter. “She didn’t really look at me the same way for the rest of her visit.” Josh knows that there’s no need to drop “c-bombs” when small-arms fire will do, but still, he admits “there’s just something so satisfying about the full-bore Chinese vulgarity, and sometimes you just want to go straight for that.”

Alas, finding a suitable voice and a persona that fits is tough with this language pair, and it’s rare to meet anyone who can express at 100 percent in both languages, let alone do so with the same personality. Humor rarely crosses the divide intact. I’m still waiting for somebody to write Chinese for Sarcastic Middle-Class Liberal Dummies.