Beijing: My Mandarin

My intentions in this series is to go topic by topic rather than day by day, but for a reference, here’s the breakdown for how everything went down:

Saturday: Arrival at airport, Mao’s Livehouse, Hutong in NW core
Sunday: Tiananmen Square (with national day decorations), Forbidden City, Snack Street
Monday: Great Wall, Ming Tombs, Olympic Park
Tuesday: Tiananmen Square, Mao’s Mausoleum (exterior), Summer Palace, “History of Kungfu” show, Hutong near Temple of Heaven, Houhai Bar District
Wednesday: Lama (Yonghe) Temple, Temple of Heaven Park, Beijing Underground (closed), flight back

My Mandarin

Mandarin (or Putonghua as HKU prefers) is one of the languages that I purport to have conversational fluency in. The others are French and Spanish (and of course English). Besides these, I study Cantonese, Japanese, Italian, American Sign Language, and Latin.

So going to Beijing it only made sense to take advantage of the opportunity to practice my Mandarin, and I did.

The second day we were there, we did the tourist trip of going to the Great Wall and the Ming Tombs, which are located a considerable distance outside of the city. It took a few hours to get to the Badaling section of the Great Wall, the specifics of which I will get back to later.

Two years ago, on my first time to China and my first time out of North America, I decided I would use my Mandarin in the same way. Granted, I was really bad. My Mandarin-speaking friends back home claimed to not be able to understand me, and I found myself incapable of making sentences to the effect of “I bought the same thing back in the United States for ten dollars.”

I can now get that sentence across in Mandarin. I might not understand the response, but what I had was better than nothing. After my ten days in China, my Mandarin had improved in confidence but not in skill. People could, in general, understand what I was saying through my incorrect tones and funny articulation.

Back home, I told my friends that people where I went in China could understand my Chinese yet they couldn’t. It turned out that most of them could figure out what I was saying, but because I was so stilted and heavily accented, they chose not to understand me.

This time around, I had a few more years of Mandarin up my sleeves (one to be exact). By practicing with a teacher on top of learning from books, my problem with tones was lowered to a minimum and my vocabulary and grammar drastically improved.

I was armed and ready to go. For haggling, it was casual. At the Great Wall, I got a plaque with my name on it, saying that I’d climbed the Great Wall for ¥5 CNY (about $0.75 USD) and a mock Beijing 2008 Olympics metal for ¥4 CNY (about $0.60 USD).

The weirdest thing about my using Mandarin in Beijing was the benefit of the doubt that they gave me. I know that no matter how hard I try, I will always have at least bits of a foreign accent in the languages that I learn, but in Beijing, the people didn’t seem to care. (But why would they?)

Well, in many places, there’s a tourist price and a local price, and it seemed that my relative fluency in Mandarin was getting me the local price more often than not. It likely has to do with the fact that I’m of Chinese descent, in combination with my use of Mandarin, but let me give you an example.

At the Ming Tombs, we arrived and got off the bus. Now, the Ming (as in dynasty) tombs are scattered all over the place, and it just so happened that the particular tour bus group that we were on took us to this one, which, luckily, was different than the one before.

It was definitely smaller than the tomb I’d seen before. Equally ornate, this particular tomb appeared to be more intimate in a sense. Far from foreign tourist crowds, this particular tomb seemed relatively empty for the Beijing that I had begun to reacquaint myself with.

On the way out, there were carts on the path back to the bus. Some sold fruits and nuts. Others sold dried goods and souvenirs. Of particular interest was the bottled water that they were selling. A friend of mine who happens to be white was charged ¥5 CNY for his bottle. I went up and asked for a bottle in Mandarin. I got mine for ¥2 CNY. After that notable savings (think of it as a percent), I did all my talking in Mandarin.

But no matter how good my haggling skills were (better than average, if I do say so myself), I was no match for the tour guide that was leading us around.

My Mandarin-speaking friend found this particular tour company as we were wandering around the Forbidden City the previous day. We were approached by an agent (one of many) and were told about what was happening. I understood close to none of it.

When we ended up on this bus, the tour guide as well as the tour group except me and three of my friends understood and spoke Mandarin. I was in a bit of a rut, you could say. However, we only paid ¥90 CNY (about $13 USD) for the whole day’s transportation, admission, and lunch as part of the package, so despite the fact that I couldn’t understand the information she was feeding us (I’m sure it was very informative), the day was a good deal as a whole.

We ended the day being dropped off in the Olympic Village, just north of the city core. I knew what to expect but didn’t account for the emotional factor, you could say. But that’s for next time.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
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