Yunnan's 18 oddities

Every country around the world offers its share of oddities, things considered weird, strange or wacky. Yunnan has its own yellow directory of 'oddball' attractions that have come to be enshrined in what is called 'Yunnan’s 18 Oddities.' They are regional attractions or customs considered to be unfamiliar, unusual or odd.

It may be argued that they were 'unusual’ in the not-too-distant past, 'unusual' that is to outsiders or on levels beyond the understanding of outsiders to the tradition—bamboo hats used as rice or wok covers; eggs tied up vertically in bundles like long-braided hair and sold in markets; trains moving slower than cars because  they have to cut through narrow, precipitous tunnels, or that Yunnan did not have its own domestic railway system in the early twentieth century, but it did have an international railway line built by the French stretching some 460 kilometers from Kunming to Hanoi. These 'oddities' might also well be ‘a tourist stunt,’ as one blogger has written, presented or packaged as part of an ‘exotic,’ ‘mysterious’ Yunnan tour for Chinese and foreign tourists.

Depending on what you have read, online or otherwise, there is no agreement to what exactly are the official 'traditional' or 'representative' 18 Oddities. Let’s look at one 'traditional' list compiled by Zhang Nan published in 2002. According to Zhang, these 'oddities' have circulated as texts transmitted primarily by oral means since the 1940s:

1.       rice cakes called ear pieces.

2.      counting broad beans as you sell them.  

3.    three mosquitoes make a dish.

4.       bamboo tubes used as tobacco water pipes.

5.    vegetables are called bitter vegetables.

6.    eggs sold by binding then up with straw rope.  

7.    bamboo hats used as wok or rice covers.

8.   grass or straw rope used as trouser belts .

9.  unmarried women smoking pipes.

10. young girls are called old women.      

11. toes are exposed all year round.

12. shoes attached with an upright cloth strap. 

13. a coffin hanging from the eaves of a roof.  

14. the bride wearing sunglasses.

15. old women wearing  red hats. 

16. trains don’t travel as fast as cars.

17. trains travel abroad but not in China.

18. policemen are called 'cat food.'

Other variations that make up the 'traditional 18' include:

--going by overhead cable is faster than taking a ferryboat

--fire and water worshipped are gods

--houses built on bamboo or wooden pillars

--rice is cooked in a bamboo tube

The explanations that I have read in Chinese for the above entries are vaguely informative, but then they are not written with an anthropologist in mind, or anybody else who would like to gain a better appreciation or deeper understanding of how these customs or modes of behavior came about.   

Apart from the 'traditional 18' and their variants, there are also '18 folk oddities,' as well as 'new editions' or creative improvisations on the traditional 18. In one text I recently consulted, the editors have ‘tracked down’ 81 unusual attractions in the province!

The 'new editions' have circulated since the late 1970s and early 198os and include 'Seagulls Have Arrived in the Spring City', 'Ants are Jumping Vegetables,' and 'Everybody Loves Across the Bridge Rice Noodles.'

Popular destinations and food have also succumbed to the lure of the 18 oddities. The chain restaurant Across the Bridge Rice Noodles, as one example, opened its doors in Kunming in early September 1990, and its huge popularity spawned its own oddities named after its founding chef and CEO Ji Xinyuan (吉鑫园十八怪).

The traditional 18 oddities have become a permanent fixture of the province, and there is no shortage of creative offshoots. Yunnan is very much a province out of the ordinary—culturally, linguistically, a ‘biodiversity hotspot’ as Conservation International called the province in 2007—but rather than just read what others consider 'unusual', 'odd' or 'unique' about the province, get busy and start compiling a list of your own.

Thirteen Yunnan Poets

'A Selection of Poems by Thirteen Yunnan Poets' (云南十三人诗选), was officially launched in early January at Loft Jindian 1919 in Kunming. It brought together a lively and highly-charged gathering of poets, including veteran poet Yu Jian who was among the special guests handing out humorous awards to each of the young poets.

The thirteen poets are: Shang Zhengcan (尚正灿), Li Xuliang (李续亮), He Wenzhao (和文朝 )Yang Xiaowen (杨晓雯), Shi Yuanxi (施袁喜), Wu Yunli (吴云粒), Zhang Xiangwu (张翔 武), Fu Ziwen (伏自文), Lu Wei (陆薇) Yang Qing (杨青), Hei Niao (黑鸟) Fengren Yuma (蜂人与马) and Ye Feng (野风).

This collection of over one hundred poems has all the big themes-- love, longing, separation, the intimacy of human relationships, the fragility of life, the solace of nature. They are also characterized by rich metaphor, startling imagery, and a compelling sense of immediacy.   

Perhaps the hardest thing for any poet is to include the reader in every verse, a line that refreshes and reinvents our world. Dan Weber, a visual poet and multimedia artist writes that ‘the power that poetry has is the judo throw of a paradigm shift.’ If that shift is done with grace, insight and poise, the poem can wake us up and allow us to see the world with fresh eyes. Whether or not a poem works or whether you 'get it' is not easy to pin down, but there can be no higher praise for the poet if you’re struck by the language and syntax and want to say: 'Now this is a poet.'

A few memorable lines from this collection have stuck. Take for example the following line from Yang Xiaowen’s 'Moments of Forgetfulness' –'on a spring day, I had to confront the premature death of flower.' (p.127), or the following line from Hei Niao’s ‘My Happiness’—'Let the errors of my childhood be shown again like a film' (p.216).     

The shorter poems (less than one page) are much more assured in the directions and more skillfully executed than some of the longer poems. One of my favorite shorter poems in collection is called ‘Alleyway' (胡同)  by Hei Niao:

An alleyway at three o’clock in the morning

I brace myself in the darkness

A man walking in my direction also braces himself

A scary-looking alleyway

We brush past each other.

At that moment when the robbers start their day

A lonely man

Conceals all the weapons of the world. 

(p. 209)

胡同

凌晨三点的胡同

我硬着头皮往前走

凌晨三点的胡同

那人硬着皮头往前走

杀气腾腾的胡同

我们擦肩而过

盗匪出没的时刻

一个孤独的男人

藏着全世界的凶器

a brief encounter
by yu jian
translated by peter micic 

One afternoon I came out from the swimming pool wearing shorts, plastic flip flops and walking my bicycle back home. Suddenly, someone called out: 'Hey, fancy bumping into you here my old school friend.' He was someone who I knew, buried in one of my old photo albums, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember his name.

He was a large, bulky man, and wore a gold ring. It was obvious that he had just come from a power-lunch in some restaurant because I watched him wipe his greasy mouth with one of his thick, stubby hands.

His mobile phone rang and he started yapping away about a consignment of goods, the kind of talk you’d hear on TV soapies. I suddenly realized that he was a former primary school classmate.

He had blown up several times since then. I do remember him as a schoolboy who exuded self-confidence and innocence, but he had none of that now. He couldn’t stop talking. The words just rolled off his mouth. Here was a man who was not just large, but undistinguished, vulgar and arrogant like something odd you’d find stuffed inside one of those elephant-size trousers hanging outside a clothing store.

He was different from the other boys back in our primary school days. He averaged B grades and had a red five pointed star embroidered on his school bag. It was difficult to say what he was now—a boss, a manager, some CEO, a section chief or director, an intriguing mixture of arrogance, self-confidence,  slow-wittedness, stupidity, cruelty, ignorance, sophistication and clout.  If this is what money does to people, I can only shake my head in disgust. 

His clothes showed all the material trappings of wealth and that he had made it in the world, but I had a hard time trying to figure him out. I could tell he was rich, but I could also tell that he was falling apart. If the impression one gives others is a bit of this, a bit of that, then that’s going to make him quite like a good-for-nothing or a fraud. Listen to this guy. He’s director of some investment consulting company, a dubious profession I dare say. 

After exchanging greetings, there was really nothing to talk about so we parted our ways.

'What’s your cell phone number?'

'I don’t have a cell phone.'

'That’s impossible.'

He couldn’t believe there was somebody who didn’t have one.

'You really don’t have a cell phone?'

'No'.

He didn't ask for my home number. Who in their right mind would want to have the number of some guy who stays at home and knows nobody. 

He started to size me up. He noticed that I was walking my bicycle, a 1976 golden rooster. The bicycle factory had long since closed down. He also noticed my cheap plastic flip flops, that I wasn’t wearing a watch, or had any rings on my fingers, and that I was bald.

He was real Mister Know-it-All. He said he would find his name card, but made no effort to fish it out from his pocket. When he finally did he pulled out his mobile phone dialing yet another number from his myriad of contacts then turned around and left.

He got into a grey black car the name of which escapes me. The car brought to mind an old fancy woolen overcoat of the 1960s.

a brief encounter

One late afternoon I walk past Wheatfield Bookstore and notice a black and white poster on the window billing a literary festival in Kunming. There are snapshots of the writers running across the top of the poster. The first writer is Yu Jian, one of China’s bestselling contemporary Chinese poets.

A week later I am reading Yu Jian's  'A Brief Encounter.'  I walk pass Wheatfield Bookstore, stop and look at the same poster on the window and then meet, quite unexpectedly, the author. I can’t remember what we said, but there was no awkwardness or affectation, only an exchange of literary ideas, a love of words, and poetic phrases. And then we fell silent, letting the words hang between us.

Chéngyǔ 成语

The Chinese language is rich in idioms, and although it is possible to converse in non-idiomatic standard Chinese, a foreign learner with only a superficial knowledge of Chinese idioms will be at a serious disadvantage in reading, and even more so when taking part in discussions. Apart from idioms, there are also the allegorical rhymes, onomatopoeia words, words from regional dialects, popular sayings, proverbs, and most importantly the literature—the vernacular and classical Chinese, that will catapult your language to the next level.

By idiom I am referring to what is called 成语(chéngyǔ) in standard Chinese. Like an idiom in English, we can define a 成语 as a combination of words with a special meaning that generally cannot be inferred from its separate parts. The Enlarged Dictionary of Chinese Idioms 中国成语大语词典 I have on my table here lists over 18,000 entries. Many 成语 but not all, are made up of four characters and for this reason the term is sometimes translated as 'a four character idiom.'

Let’s take a look at a two random examples:

1. 车水马龙 (chēshuǐmǎlóng). If we literally translate the idiom it means 'chariots, water, horses, dragons.' Clearly, it is rather difficult if not impossible to figure out this meaning from the separate words. In other words, the meaning of the whole idiom is different from its parts. The sentence has two meanings, a literal one, which means very little, and a metaphorical one which is the idiom. This idiom can be traced back to the Han dynasty when an empress described a stream of horses and carriages on a busy street: 'the chariots are like flowing water, the horses moving to and fro like dragons.' ('车如流水, 马如游龙').

If we bring the idiom to the present, it refers to an incessant or endless stream of cars—heavy traffic on the road, for example, or a scene crowded with people and vehicles. Compare: 人山人海 (lit: 'people mountain, people sea').

2. 见钱眼开 (jiànqián yánkāi). Unlike the first example, if we literally translate this idiom we can guess its meaning: ‘see money, eyes open', in other words, avaricious. Another example of a 成语 that we can pretty well guess its meaning if we read each character literally is 人生如寄 (rénshēngrújì): living in the mortal world is like a sojourner in a hotel, that is, life is short.

If you read the news whether that be that actual news print form (how old-fashioned is that?) or online, start collecting idioms. Many of them will be bookish idioms in contrast to colloquial ones, but keep an eye for one’s that keep cropping up in print as well as one’s your Chinese friends use.

The Language Adventures of René in China

In December last year, a large number of people contact me to ask who on earth is René and what exactly I was trying to achieve by writing 'The Language Adventures of René in China: Essential Expressions for Beginners, vol. 1.'


Below is part of the preface from volume 1 which should give readers a good idea of what I was trying to achieve.
-peter

Chinese language textbooks devote little space to explaining how the language is used in social situations or why Chinese people express themselves in such a way. This volume attempts to explain a number of greetings, common expressions, not to mention other speech acts, that will allow the foreign learner to understand the language better.

Why greetings and expressions might not be readily understood by foreign learners underscores the erroneous assumption that there are "equivalences" between languages. An equivalent of Ní hǎo can be found in the English "Hello" or "Hi", but there are numerous greetings and expressions that do not have equivalences in English.

Davies and Barmé have rightly pointed out this assumption 'presupposes the existence of a formidable metalanguage that has the capacity to match words, ideas, statements, and idioms across languages, according to some mysterious "law" or universal communication.' [1]

More than half a century earlier, the linguist and songwriter Chao Yuen Ren (1892-1982) expressed something similar:


Any utterance in an actual context can be translated fairly accurately, to be sure, but not necessarily by the same means of expression. Thus, the English phrase 'No, thank you!' can be translated more 'idiomatically' by a smile and a polite gesture than by the recent translation borrowing Duoshieh, buyaw le! [duōxiè, bú yào le 多谢,不要了] "Many thanks, I don’t want any more." [2]

The linguistic diversity of China and the large number of regional dialects that are mutually unintelligible to speakers from other parts of the country is aptly summed up in the popular saying 'speech changes every ten li' (shílĭ bù tōngyīn 十里不通音).

This saying highlights issues of comprehension among different regional speakers of the standard language or pŭtōnghuà (普通话) who may come across an initial 'impasse' or 'obstacle' (不通) when hearing standard Chinese spoken by dialect speakers, invariably coloured by local speech habits and accents.

For the foreign learner, accents and pronunciation do cause major practical problems, especially once they leave the classroom setting:


The great majority of Chinese speak standard Chinese with a dialectal accent, which may be so mild as to be scarcely noticeable or so heavy as to make normal conversation impractical. These accented speech variants are usually unknown even to advanced western students of Chinese until they arrive in China and find themselves experiencing much difficulty in communication. [3]

Each entry in this volume contains a common greeting or expression ‘acted out’ by a fictional character called René, a foreigner language student studying in Beijing whose course of study includes a part-time internship in a joint-venture market research company.

René encounters a number of difficulties in communicating with Chinese and makes a number of errors along the way, but he experiences an epiphany of sorts, a moment of understanding, where he realizes that he has expressed himself incorrectly or that a common expression in English finds a different medium of expression in Chinese.Numerous examples could have augmented each entry, but the challenge has been to condense the narrative to one or two pages and allow readers to grasp various aspects of the language quickly and easily.


References:


1. Gloria Davies Voicing Concerns: Contemporary Chinese Critical Inquiry (2001:xi).


2. Chao Yuen Ren Mandarin Primer (1961:50).


3. Liang, DeFrancis and Han, Varieties of Spoken Standard Chinese (1982:1).

Yang Yinliu and his Draft

Yang Yinliu (杨荫浏) wrote a critique of his Draft History of Ancient Chinese Music 中国古代音乐史稿 (hereafter Draft) in the April issue of Music Research (音乐研究) in 1958. It was more of a self-criticism. Yang wrote that he had a far-from-perfect grasp of Communist doctrines and that he had not become ‘proletarianized’ enough.

Yang started on the Draft in 1959 and completed two volumes by July 1977. The two volume work was officially published February 2, 1981. In 1965 Mao Zedong instructed that Yang's book be published without delay and Yang worked frantically to complete the text. At the time, Yang was reluctant to make any revisions, politically that is, and the book ended up on the printing press shelves for another ten years.

References:

Micic, Peter, 'Gathering a Nation's Music: A Life of Yang Yinliu' in Lives in Chinese Music (Helen Rees, ed), University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 91-116, 2009.