Shanghai Vixen

Ha.

Hmm, I’m debating whether to go check out the “Expat Show” this weekend: out of curiousity whether the expats on show will be in (gilded) cages, or free range.

I was in a bit of a funk for a while last month, with the twin news that Jifu’s wifelet (tm Good Bug) was pregnant and that Yaya is back in town. Jifu’s news I heard from him; Yaya came via Smackeling and a little Birdie, who he is now working for/with. (The moral is: don’t get your crushes jobs with your friends.) They inform he’s gotten fat.

That he hasn’t been in touch suggests that Yaya is avoiding me. Which makes me 1. sad 2. relieved that I don’t have to decide whether or not to avoid him.

Jifu’s news was more unsettling; our kid would have been seven now. I am glad I didn’t have it, but I always felt quite pressured into the abortion, and I resent him for that. He’s the kind of guy who would cavalierly use abortion as birth control - which is a horrible thing to do to your girlfriends.

Yesterday he started texting me, needing a shoulder to cry on: he’s very upset, the wifelet miscarried. 1. Yes, that’s a very upsetting thing, poor them. 2. Please stop dumping about your dead baby on a woman you forced to abort one of your prior dead babies, DICK. Ugh.

It was also fascinatingly funny how ignorant he is about pregnancy. Jifu and wifelet also went to see The Cure at the end of July, turns out it was the first week after the conception. Afterwards, they spent some days in Xiamen, and his wifelet got very tired from the walking around. She miscarried a month later: a check-up revealed that the fetus’ heart had stopped, and had to be removed. Fetal hearts don’t stop from their mothers going to rock concerts, walking around, being tired a month before. Chinese think pregnant women are so goddamn frail - and of course it proves self-fulfilling.

So, it was with much eye-rolling that I listened to Jifu’s ”Damn The Cure - they killed my baby!” whining. At least he has the self-awareness to joke, “It’s because my dick was used by too many women - god’s punishing me!” Although I believe it’s more precise to say that his dick has used too many women. I suggested that after five or six abortions he’s used up his life quotient.

Then, last night, Gym Boy came over; we went for dinner then to bed. I didn’t really feel like getting it on, but had this sense that “Oh, I should get laid…” and of course thus did not enjoy myself much. The lack of sexual chemistry with Gym Boy is increasingly problematic. (It matters less when I’ve had a few martinis before.) The end is imminent. Typical Chinese man, he is convinced that I didn’t cum because I masturbate too much. While insisting that’s an idiotic theory (yet one I’ve heard from Chinese men before him), I didn’t have the heart to explain, “Actually, it’s cos you annoy me.” I wish I could enjoy it more, he’s so nice and so hot, but…it just doesn’t click for me, and I’m not very good at ignoring the fact.

And, when it was all over, we discovered the condom had broke. How ironic, same day as Jifu’s miscarriage news, I have a pregnancy scare. Luckily I live in a country with OTC emergency contraception.

Interesting piece, and glad there’s resistance to the 请说普通话 campaign in the city (although I like to pretend those are aimed at illiterate foreigners) - which granted is necessary given the growing number of xiawuning residents.

Some people are worried that the Shanghai dialect may be dying out and are taking steps to preserve their “mother tongue.” Yao Minji reports on their concern and the launch of a dictionary of the dialect by a famous linguist.

Flora Gu came back to Shanghai after four years of study in America. Unlike most people returning from abroad who frequently mix English into accented Mandarin, Gu insists on speaking Shanghai dialect whenever possible.

“For me, that is the real sound of home,” explains Gu, who says she had no chance to speak the dialect while she was in America although she used both English and Mandarin frequently.

“Only when I phoned my family and friends in Shanghai did I have the chance to speak the dialect. I missed the air in Shanghai, flooded with sound of the dialect. And whenever I’m homesick, I’ll speak the tongue to myself, I even tried to read the Chinese news online using Shanghainese.”

On the other hand, many Shanghai-native kids like third-grader Lin Guochong do not speak a word of Shanghainese. The younger the kids are, the worse their dialect skills are. Teachers and kids are required to speak Mandarin in schools in Shanghai which cuts into the time for them to speak Shanghainese.

“And my parents speak Mandarin to me at home, too. Only grandparents speak a Ningbo-accented Shanghai dialect, of which I usually understand only about 40 percent,” Lin says.

Kids like Lin make people worry about the continued existence and development of the Shanghai dialect. Some, especially among the youngsters, consider it useless because “Shanghai is an international city. Shanghai dialect won’t last forever and will surely become history.”

Others, including well-known linguist Qian Nairong, see the dialect as a significant part of Shanghai’s culture and ask: “What makes it Shanghai if you don’t have any feature of it left?”

“If we can not even protect and promote our mother tongue (Shanghai dialect), how dare we talk about developing an advanced world culture?” asks Qian.

Gu is definitely a follower of Qian’s ideas. She still remembers “when you had to speak the Shanghai dialect, otherwise you would be either discriminated against or cheated in the 1990s. I am not saying that was correct.”

But now, it is considered abrupt and inappropriate to speak Shanghainese in many office buildings, especially in Pudong, when the common languages are usually English and Mandarin.

Philippe Hu works in one of those buildings and says there is only one other Shanghai native among his 70 colleagues.

“I have to speak Mandarin and English during work. Day by day, I actually feel awkward speaking the dialect,” says Hu whose only solution is to use the dialect on instant messengers and SMS. “I’m really worried about losing the tongue because it would be ridiculous to be a Shanghai native without knowing how to speak the language. I mean, even expats in Shanghai can speak a few simple lines.”

However, those like Lin’s parents hold the opposite opinion. Born in Shanghai and both working for foreign enterprises, Lin’s parents are not at all worried about Lin’s not speaking the dialect.

“It is just a dialect, it is not a language. He wouldn’t really need it anyway. My husband and I don’t ever use Shanghainese in our work or social life,” says Lin’s mother. “Plus, how do you define Shanghai native since Shanghai is an immigrant city? By birth place? Then many kids born in Shanghai have parents from out of town, so they won’t even be able to learn the dialect from their parents. How can you force them to learn it?”

Lin’s mother also raised a question about the standard Shanghai dialect. Most residents in the city are only second or third generations of the people who moved to the city in the 1950s. So the dialect has been influenced by the other dialects from surrounding areas including Ningbo, Hangzhou and Yangzhou among other.

They are different from the original dialect which is now spoken by only very few natives who live in outlying areas like Songjiang, Minhang, Nanhui and Jiading districts.

Qian’s answer is simple and direct. “The standard dialect is the one we are using now. Languages develop with the society. I consider the language used by most youths to be the mother tongue of the Shanghainese. If we have to use something that is the most standard, then it must be the one that is most used.”

Putting his words into practice, Qian has even compiled “The Dictionary of Shanghai Dialect,” said to be the most complete book about the tongue. The dictionary was published in August and Qian is currently working on building an input system to type the dialect on computers.

And many Shanghainese are also more and more concerned about protecting the language. Many started writing blogs in the dialect and some even became well known for doing that.

Moreover, there are now more Shanghainese rapping in the dialect online, with some of the more successful ones spreading among the city’s youth. Maybe in the future, we can expect to find the dialect appearing in other cultural forms.

http://www.shanghaidaily.com/sp/article/2007/200709/20070919/article_331660.htm

Languages Die, but Not Their Last Words

Chris Rainier/National Geographic
Charlie Muldunga, right, the last known speaker of Amurdag, with two researchers who are making a record of dying languages, K. David Harrison, left, and Gregory D. S. Anderson.

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Published: September 19, 2007

Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say, nearly half are in danger of extinction and likely to disappear in this century. In fact, one falls out of use about every two weeks.

Some languages vanish in an instant, at the death of the sole surviving speaker. Others are lost gradually in bilingual cultures, as indigenous tongues are overwhelmed by the dominant language at school, in the marketplace and on television.

New research, reported yesterday, has found the five regions where languages are disappearing most rapidly: northern Australia, central South America, North America’s upper Pacific coastal zone, eastern Siberia, and Oklahoma and the southwestern United States. All have indigenous people speaking diverse languages, in falling numbers.

The study was based on field research and data analysis supported by the National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. The findings are described in the October issue of National Geographic and at languagehotspots.org.

In a teleconference with reporters yesterday, K. David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore, said that more than half the languages had no written form and were “vulnerable to loss and being forgotten.” Their loss leaves no dictionary, no text, no record of the accumulated knowledge and history of a vanished culture.

Beginning what is expected to be a long-term project to identify and record endangered languages, Dr. Harrison has traveled to many parts of the world with Gregory D. S. Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute, in Salem, Ore., and Chris Rainier, a filmmaker with the National Geographic Society.

The researchers, focusing on distinct oral languages, not dialects, interviewed and made recordings of the few remaining speakers of a language and collected basic word lists. The individual projects, some lasting three to four years, involve hundreds of hours of recording speech, developing grammars and preparing children’s readers in the obscure language. The research has concentrated on preserving entire language families.

In Australia, where nearly all the 231 spoken tongues are endangered, the researchers came upon three known speakers of Magati Ke in the Northern Territory, and three Yawuru speakers in Western Australia. In July, Dr. Anderson said, they met the sole speaker of Amurdag, a language in the Northern Territory that had been declared extinct.

“This is probably one language that cannot be brought back, but at least we made a record of it,” Dr. Anderson said, noting that the Aborigine who spoke it strained to recall words he had heard from his father, now dead.

Many of the 113 languages in the region from the Andes Mountains into the Amazon basin are poorly known and are giving way to Spanish or Portuguese, or in a few cases, a more dominant indigenous language. In this area, for example, a group known as the Kallawaya use Spanish or Quechua in daily life, but also have a secret tongue mainly for preserving knowledge of medicinal plants, some previously unknown to science.

“How and why this language has survived for more than 400 years, while being spoken by very few, is a mystery,” Dr. Harrison said in a news release.

The dominance of English threatens the survival of the 54 indigenous languages in the Northwest Pacific plateau, a region including British Columbia, Washington and Oregon. Only one person remains who knows Siletz Dee-ni, the last of many languages once spoken on a reservation in Oregon.

In eastern Siberia, the researchers said, government policies have forced speakers of minority languages to use the national and regional languages, like Russian or Sakha.

Forty languages are still spoken in Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico, many of them originally used by Indian tribes and others introduced by Eastern tribes that were forced to resettle on reservations, mainly in Oklahoma. Several of the languages are moribund.

Another measure of the threat to many relatively unknown languages, Dr. Harrison said, is that 83 languages with “global” influence are spoken and written by 80 percent of the world population. Most of the others face extinction at a rate, the researchers said, that exceeds that of birds, mammals, fish and plants.

Oh, man! Poor, sweet Gym Boy!

“I haven’t called you because I’m afraid of annoying you,” he confessed, after asking whether I’d missed him. “Of course!” I’d answered, far too perkily. Of course, my missing him consists of realizing I haven’t had sex for a month and wondering whether I’ve been dumped.

Last Monday, I bumped into Biteable. First time in several months, second time since our February non-breakup; this time he accosted me, asking how I am and giving me an intense look and a dirty, smirky little smile. I was rather lost in my music and my own thoughts, as I usually am at the gym, and couldn’t be bothered to make awkward small talk with the guy who couldn’t be bothered to actually dump me. At the same time, though, damn! Biteable remains the finest-looking man I’ve ever laid my eyes upon, let alone laid. I can’t muster any anger at him, I’m too busy high-fiving myself for having fucked such a hottie. He looks great now, growing his hair long and with flattering new glasses.

I’m breaking the booze ban tonight, after a grueling twelve hour work day, already late on my deadline. The problem with being a journalist is what you think your story is about is never what it turns out to be about. That is also the cool part. But, trying to masticate the perspectives into a coherent narrative gives me indigestion.

My problem, I suspect, is that I get too emotionally absorbed by my work. This piece: all of my sources are friends. The problem is that the logic lays with the more distant friend, while the close two - the artist, the gallery director - have not done their homework.

That’s the fun of my job, I can get so absorbed in the world of exploring ideas, I don’t even notice my utter lack of a social life.

Yesterday was my second day “dry”. Thursday night was a crazy swirl of art parties: the SGA opening, the Contrasts opening, things at Duolun and DDM and elsewhere I didn’t make it too. By the time Brilly, fellow writer A, and I went to the SGA party, I for one was already a little *whee!* There, despite having the waiters put me on a steady IV of water, I quickly became more so.

It was a good party for a really good show, but somehow it - or maybe the general art fair madness - made a bunch of usually cool, laid back scenesters suddenly trot out airs. It was discomfitting. I highly recommend the SGA show, very interesting and the usual LJH wryness I so appreciate. Contrasts was another story, chinesey “traditional” design mixed badly with superficial modernism. About one piece, an actual antique chair that had been dismembered and then bred with pieces of glass and metal, I exclaimed, “My god, they raped that chair!”

But it was more the overall fog of foreigner art snootery that had me pounding the champaigne with too much abandon at [Diamond Ho]’s party. Brilly and I joined with Happy Fish and other art scenesters, but that we were so outnumbered by the tourists and the interlopers, and making nice about another “Ooh, China is so different!” conversation was getting hard. I was fading by the time we got upstairs for the dinner; sitting down was the last thing I remembered…

…until I woke up, still completely drunk, at 6am Friday morning. “Well, this could be worse…” I managed to think as I did the post-blackout-check: phone, ipod, wallet, camera, earrings, all items of clothing did make it back intact, and no injuries sustained. Still skunk drunk I sauntered out in pursuit of breakfast, getting a chongyoubing, a youtiao and some xiaolongbao from the Gaoan Lu street food vendors, enjoying my neighborhood’s early bustle. I brought them home and scarfed them, washed down with doujiang, while beginning a reread of Harry Potter 7 - just to spite Brilly, who the night before resumed her mockery of me for liking that series and other escapism. Until the xiaolongbao made my violently ill, and barfed then went back to bed.

The blackout scares me. I recognize that I am bad at self-control in these free flow situations. I am a guzzler of all fluids, which makes it hard to sip at the booze. I am not an alcoholic, it’s not a craving, but it is a dependence, a crutch, a social dependence, and I drink to drown insecurities and social inadequacies and my intrinsic shyness. I am not an alcoholic, but I do have a drinking problem.

The answer for me is to stop - not forever, hopefully, but long enough to kick the dependence, and when I do resume imbibing to do so more carefully and consciously. The benefits are obvious: more energy, fewer calories, more work done, more money made and less wasted, spurring the progress on both book and body. I had already been contemplating going dry for the fall, with its piles of work and of parties.

Spurring momentum was the nervousness that I had made an ass of myself Thursday after blacking out. I couldn’t reach Brilly yesterday, and was afraid I must have said something horrible to offend her when drunk. Towards all friends, one has little pings of dumb jealousy, incomprehension, criticism that one’s conscious mind dismisses but one’s evil drunk doppleganger can seize upon and bloat into a fight for a fight’s sake. So when Brilly wasn’t answering my calls, I thought, oh shit!

But, I saw her at Ms. Piggy’s show opening last night, and she informed that all was well, we left the Diamond Ho party right after we sat down, which is when I blacked out, and it was a welcome excuse to leave early. Phew. But, still, I should not be getting to that point at all. Bad Vixen - no champers for you! Although, sober and caffeinated, my sense of humor thus prompted from her, “What, you’ve given up booze - to take up crack?!” What, I just voiced ideas for art pieces based on menstrual blood…

Previous to that, Saturday was a Bad Ayi Day. First, my Ayi bitched away that I wanted her to change my bedsheet - I want it once a week, she does it every month or two (gross), and only when I remind her several times. Then, to get even, she started throwing away some things that had fallen on the floor under the bed, which were very obviously important personal/work documents and items, and I got very upset about it. One of them was my yearly planner, which I’d already spent an hour that morning looking frantically for. She just laughed at my being upset - wacky foreigner!

Then, I ran errands, came home to be informed that she had broken my coffee pot. I am attached to my coffee machine, it’s taken care of me for seven years, was a big deal Christmas present from Jifu our first year living together. So, of course, I want to replace the pot, not buy a new machine. “Look, you broke it, you replace it,” I said to her. “It is your responsibility.” She: threw a fit. It’s not the money, it’s the time and the principle - and add to that she was probably careless as already upset about my, like, asking her to do what I pay her to do. So we went round and round this way, both upset for our different reasons (my coffee pot!!! sob!), for nearly an hour. My point was that, whoever paid, she should do the work of replacing it - otherwise I would have to hire my assistant to do it, and charge my Ayi for my assistant’s time. I explained to my Ayi she would just have go to a department store, look for the brand, find out their office number, and call to order a replacement part. (Fuck if I was gonna, she broke it.) This all seemed upsettingly complicated to her, so I caved, went online, found the model/part number as well as several Shanghai service offices, called to check availability and price. She’ll pick it up, I’m not clear which of us will ultimately pay for it, and I’m also unsure whether or not she’s quitting. Whatever: I overpay her to do shoddy work, and a Chinese employer would have fired her ages and ages ago. Sigh.

After bitching on phone/online to Kat and Smackeling, I headed off to the excellent Rejected exhibition, joining there MocaD, who since she complained about her lack of a nickname herein will hereforth be Taipei Trixie. Until she complains again. Joined by her visiting friend E, another Taipei alumnus, we taxied over to Moganshan Lu, collecting Trixie’s colleague M to hit openings. We ended up at Island 6, enjoying the street food BBQ on the divine patio there. Being out with such hard partying friends while not drinking was a new adventure: just as fun, but definitely requiring a lot of self control. After, we decided to check out an expat party thrown by friends of theirs.

On the way out, we discussed the cute Eurasian guy who had sidled up to us at the BBQ, and then had a gab fest about guys in general. It was fun being out with a gaggle of swinging, sexy, single gals, as most of my best friends are married. We all shared an appreciate for hot “halfies” as they put it, and did a giddily self-mocking assessment of our out respective fetishes: E, American, and a prettier and better-figured version of Angelina Jolie, likes the latin men; M, mixed-Asian American, dates anyone but entirely-Asian; Aryan-blonde Trixie like me goes only for East Asian or part, except she disdains my preferred Shanghainese. We concurred that the Chinese- and expecially Taiwanse-American men were out, even more likely than the skankiest white boys to sexually exploit impoverished Chinese women (*cough, Yaya, cough*), and are often obsessed with racial “purity”. We had a great big lust-in for Trixie’s cute Aussie. That’s the problem with the cute “halfie” hunies - on the one hand, they rarely skank out like most white or ethnic-Chinese foreign men, on the other, EVERYONE wants them, including the otherwise “no Asian men” women. Heh, that’s why they can’t skank out - they’d get ripped and shredded in the scuffle if they did!

The expat party was truly scary: mostly white, FoBby, sleezily male, but with plenty of fat white girls scantily dressed in desperate hopes of scoring. We were totally the babe brigade there, but it was rather useless. “Even if you met a decent guy at something like this, would you want to date someone thus met?” I observed. “This wouldn’t even be fun with free drinks!” moaned Trixie. “Wow, I’m a minority again! This IS less diverse than SoCal,” quipped M. Eventually all of us but Trixie, who was looking for someone, fled to wait outside, making snide comments about the incoming party-goers and their growing proportion of age-inappropriate Shanghainese girlfriends. E recalled how living in Taipei made her racist towards white people, which was hard to shake after she moved to New York. I sighed and nodded. Why I avoid them, and am fortunate to have circles where the language and sensibility barriers keeps the shabi laowais out.

Anyhow, I should go out with Trixie and her entourage more often: hot chicks on the prowl for pretty men, with senses of snark as devestating as their smiles. It was difficult not drinking with such a hard-partying crowd, damn them Taipeiers!, but not as bad as I expected. Walking, not stumbling down my lane, with head and wits as clear as they ever are, was quite pleasant. I could get used to this sobriety thing.