Dreaming in Chinese (3 page)

A matchmaking mother in Shanghai
’
s People
’
s Park

Maybe love,
, is a metaphor for much that is now unfolding and changing in China. One generation, the parents who prowl the park on Sundays matchmaking for their children, is stuck in the old idea of love, while another generation, Julia and Z, is testing new definitions of love. China is betwixt and between on many issues, one of which is love.

2
Guo, Xiaolu,
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers,
Doubleday, 2007, p. 239.

Bú yào!
Don’t want, don’t need!

2.
When rude is polite

M
Y FIRST LANGUAGE
school in China was called Miracle Mandarin. I chose it partly for its jaunty name and partly for its location. Miracle Mandarin held classes in a traditional lane house (we would call it a row house), tucked into a small quiet alley in one of Shanghai’s 1920s-style neighborhoods. During breaks between classes, we students would stand outside for some fresh air and if we were lucky, a sliver of sunshine. The Europeans would all have a smoke. We would watch the comings and goings in the alley: old men emerged for their daily exercise, old women headed off to shop. Once, we watched a family move out of their lane house. For three days, men on tricycle carts came to take away boxes, bedding, cabinets and chairs. Then, carrying everything on their backs, they hauled out the refrigerator, cupboards, a sink, and finally stacks and stacks of wooden boards and frames. They seemed to be dismantling the entire internal structure of the house, loading it onto their tricycles, and riding away.

Each morning, I would trace the same path to and from my school. Just before ten o’clock in the morning, I crossed a dozen lanes of traffic under the busy overpass of Chengdu Road and continued up Nanjing Road past the buildings of the Shanghai TV station. Every day just after one o’clock, I retraced my steps home.

Day after day, then week after week, my route took me past the same group of young guys who were selling knock-off goods on the sidewalk. “Lady! Lady! You buy my bag! Come look my warehouse! I have Gucci! I have Prada!”

Each time, I dutifully slowed down, engaged for a moment, then declined the offers with a string of “
Bú yào. Bú yào. Bú yào
.” “Don’t want. Don’t want. Don’t want.” I figure that some degree of tolerance is the personal duty I owe as a foreign guest in the country. After so many passages, I knew each hawker well enough to tell who had gotten a new haircut. They never seemed to recognize me. I was just another mark.

Finally, one day I had enough. I snapped, and dug for my new vocabulary. “
Zuótiān, bú yào
!
Jīntiān bú yào
!
Míngtiān bú yào
!” I shouted back. “Yesterday, don’t want! Today, don’t want! Tomorrow, don’t want!”

They stopped cold, stunned. Then one irrepressible soul quickly recovered, and with a plaintive look whispered earn-estly “
Hòutiān
?” meaning “Day after tomorrow?”

I actually felt pretty pleased with myself. It’s always great when what you study in the classroom works on the street. But I also felt pretty rude when I yelled out a blunt-seeming “Don’t want!” I know
bú yào
is what Chinese people themselves would say, but it still felt abrupt.

In fact, I often feel like I’m being abrupt and blunt, and even rude when I’m speaking Chinese.
Bú yào
(don’t want),
bú yòng
(don’t need),
méi yǒu
(don’t have)
bú shì
(is not)
bù kěyǐ
(cannot)—all these are standard forms of declining offers or requests or saying no. But each time I use them, I fight the urge to pad them with a few niceties like thank you, excuse me or I’m sorry.

Blunt is what I hear back from the Chinese as well, but from them it does not seem intended as rude. It is just what it is. Here are some classic scenes from my everyday life:

Passengers inside jam-packed subway cars jostle and yell “
Xià chē!,
” “Off the car!” There is no “Excuse me,” “Pardon me” or “Sorry” to be heard.

In a public place, a mobile phone rings and someone screams the greeting “
Wèi!,
” a response that reaches the decibel level of a yell of “FIRE!” in a crowded theater.

“
Fúwùyuán! Fúwùyuán!
” or “Waitress! Waitress!” diners cry to demand a glass, a bowl, or a pair of chopsticks. And no “Miss, could you please get me another beer?”

That is the etiquette of the street. On a more intimate level, the grammar of politeness is equally complex. On the one hand, the people in China can be effortlessly gentle and courteous. Take, for instance, the Beijing tradition of
màn zǒu
.
Màn
means “slowly,” and
zǒu
means “walk,” or together, “walk slowly.”
Màn zǒu
is the tender goodbye offered from every small shopkeeper I have visited in Beijing. It is usually spoken in a quiet voice, and somehow sounds so much more sincere than “Have a nice day.” Sometimes, I would make the trip to my neighborhood laundry with a single shirt for cleaning, just as an excuse to hear the
màn zǒu
when I left the shop.

At the same time, among good friends, the contrasts between the politesse of what you do and the bluntness of what you say can seem baffling. At a restaurant with friends, a delicate choreography will have one person carefully select a few choice morsels from the common bowl and place them on a neighbor’s plate. It is a small, perfect gesture. Another person will pour tea or beer for everyone else before even considering pouring his own. And then, another will announce “
Gěi wǒ yán
!,” literally, “Give me salt!” with no sign of a please or thank you involved. I’m always taken a little aback and, after so many years of training children in Western table manners, bite my tongue to stifle a “Say please!”

My Chinese friends say they notice that Westerners use lots of pleases (
qǐng
) and thank yous (
xièxie
) when speaking Chinese. And actually, they say, we use way too many of them for Chinese taste. A Chinese linguist, Kaidi Zhan, says that using a please as in “Please pass the salt” actually has the opposite effect of politeness here in China. The Chinese way of being polite to each other with words is to shorten the social distance between you. And saying please serves to insert a kind of buffer or space that says, in effect, that we need some formality between us here.
³
One of my tutors, a young guy named Danny, who straddles the line between being a Chinese nationalist and an edgy global youth, nodded his head enthusiastically when I asked him about this interpretation: “Good friends are so close, they are like part of you,” Danny said. “Why would you say please or thank you to yourself? It doesn’t make sense.”

Certainly, Chinese verbal courtliness is minimal compared with Japanese, where foreign-language learners struggle to weave in the “I so kindly request” and “from my lowly position I ask” grace notes that make up about half of every Japanese sentence. One of my random discoveries about the rudimentary, if effective, nature of Chinese manners was about a particularly grating sound that drove me crazy for the year and a half we lived in our apartment building in Beijing.

Every employee in our apartment building had a walkie-talkie. There must have been a rule to keep them on, with volume turned up to the max at all times. These were the old-fashioned walkie-talkies, the kind where the talker screams into his end, and the noise comes screeching out on the other end like the cackle of angry crows. The halls of our building sounded like a radio dispatch room for New York taxis.

The oddity about the walkie-talkie language is that every broadcast ends with a drawn-out vowel, sounding like “aaahh.” The quality is so garbled that I only ever caught a few words. I guess they were saying things like “Plumbing problem in 2105! Will you go check it out—aaahh?” Or “Lots of noise on floor 8. Will you see what’s going on—aaahh?” All day long, there was a barrage of all these calls and replies, all ending with a loud “aaahh.”

Then one day, I was thumbing through one of my Chinese grammar books, and I found something that unlocked the mystery. What I had thought was some horrible and annoying tic is actually a common way of being polite. When you add the particle “a” at the end of an expression, you actually lessen the punch and soften your delivery. The walkie-talkie dispatchers are being nicer to each other by adding all those aaahhs to their speech, serving much the same purpose as the qualifiers “could,” “would” and “might” in English. The “Will you see what’s going on aaahh?” is understood as the more polite “
Could
you see what’s going on?”

I stumbled upon an even more delightful discovery in the so-called dirt market on Beijing’s south side. Foreigners and tourists throng to the weekend market, but the locals do, too. A Chinese woman visiting from Guangzhou, the former Canton, who went with me one day, said she really has no idea why the Chinese love this market. So, we headed for the aisles most crowded with Chinese people to see what they liked to buy.