9/17

9/17

http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_17?authkey=Gv1sRgCOCO17fH3O3i8QE

NOTE: I've been told the vocabulary describing relatives is pretty dense and tedious at the end. Feel free to glaze your eyes over that section.

We get up and drive to Tangshan. Mom's cousin, Uncle Biao, is once again ferrying us there in his Buick.

Tangshan has always been a coal town. There's big 100+ ton coal trucks that drive around and ruin the roads. The highspeed road from Beijing down to Tangshan is fine, but once we're local, things slow to a crawl as we deal with major truck traffic and pockmarked roads.

Around noon, we stop off at my mom's mom's younger sister's place in Tangshan city. This relationship is called lao yi in Chinese (youngest sister of one's mother). My mom's lao yi is Biao's mother. Biao is closer to my age than my mother's because of the age difference between the two sisters -- something like 13 years. When my mom's lao yi spoke, it reminded me quite a bit of how my grandmother used to talk. We have a really quick meal and keep going on to Guye district, around which most of my mom's relatives live. While it would be nice to have longer visits with each relative, geography and our timetable make it such that we have to pry ourselves away before getting sucked into any long meals, which you must know by now, is the currency of Chinese hospitality.

We make it to my da yi's apartment (da yi == oldest sister of one's mother). This is where I lived before when I came to China by myself. My da yi, her husband, and my cousin hosted me for most of the time that I spent in Tangshan back in 1997. After unpacking here, we head over to my 2nd Uncle's apartment. Everyone is supposed to be meeting up for dinner. We wait for a long time, but because of the huge uptick in cars, the traffic back into Tangshan has become really bad. My da yi's son, and probably the cousin I'm closest to, Wang Yupo, can't make it into the dinner. This is disappointing, but we proceed to have a fairly tame (by my uncles' drinking standards) meal among the rest of us. I get to meet Yupo's daughter, who was born the year after I last visited. It is also good to reunite with the bevy of uncles and aunts that took care of me while I was over here. The only highlight of the meal worth sharing was a dish of pork brains. I thought it might be kidneys at first, but nope, it was brains. I stared at them for the whole meal, trying to muster the courage to eat one. It wasn't the taste that I feared, but the whole Critonesque fear of getting kuru or something. Eventually, I half a quarter lobe. It tasted fatty and porky, so quite good. But it didn't taste different enough from pork belly that I would risk eating it regularly. I bet fried, it would taste like bacon.

I apologize for freely mixing English and Chinese terms for relative relations. The Chinese relative naming system is pretty complex, and I'd say more relevant than the Nth cousin, x-removed system that exists in English. I describe this just for your entertainment, not to be of use with my story.

First, Chinese has different nows for older and younger siblings. Relative to you:
older-sister: jie
younger-sister: mei
older-brother: ge
younger-brother: di

Sibling seniority:
From the days when multiple brothers and sisters were born to one family, naming by rank makes more sense. It's going to be irrelevant with a couple more generations under the one-child policy. So the eldest brother is called da ge (big older-brother) his siblings. The eldest sister is da jie (big older-sister). The 2nd eldest brother is called er ge (2nd older-brother) by his younger siblings and er di (2nd younger-brother) by his older siblings. The 2nd eldest sister is called er jie or er mei. Then going down the line, each sibling gets labels like that. Usually, older siblings will address younger siblings by their name or nickname instead of by their label. They would only use the label when describing the relationship to someone else. When a younger sibling addresses an older one though, they have to use the label. Exception -- the youngest brother gets the label xiao di (little younger-brother) and the youngest sister gets the label xiao mei. Addendum -- when I led off the examples, I left out that the oldest brother can still be junior to older sisters, or vice versa. To older siblings of sex A, the oldest sibling of sex B is called da di or da mei. But again, this doesn't come up much since by convention, they would be referred to by name. Addendum 2 -- in the South, a variation can be used to describe a family's sons. You could say something like "that family's a er" to mean that family's second eldest son. Note that patrio-implicitly, daughters don't even figure into this ranking. "a" is merely a commonly used exclamation sound.

Mother-side conversion:
How you address aunts and uncles on your mother's side comes from your mother's relationship to them and the corresponding labels. Mother-side uncles use the term jiu, and mother-side aunts use the term yi.

Mother, you:
da ge/di, da jiu
er ge/di, er jiu
san ge/di, san jiu
da jie/mei, da yi
er jie/mei, er yi

Note that since there's only one term for uncle on your mother's side, the term you use doesn't preserve information about the uncle's relative age to your mother. That gets washed out. Finally, another deviation:

Mother, you:
xiao ge/di, lao jiu
xiao jie/mei, lao yi
lao literally means old, but is used informally in very different ways. Here, the meaning is simply the youngest uncle/aunt.

Mother-side grandparents:
Mother, you:
mother, lao lao [again, this literally would be old old, which makes no sense]
father, lao ye


Father-side conversion:
On your father's side, the nouns are different -- shu for uncle, gu for aunt.

Father, you:
da ge/di, da shu in the North, da bai in the South
er ge/di, er shu/bai
xiao ge/di, lao shu/bai

da jie/mei, da gu
xiao jie/mei, lao gu

Father-side grandparents:
mother, nai nai
father, ye ye

When addressing strangers or non-relatives of a different age, it is polite to use the terms:
shu for uncle
a yi for aunt (a just being the same exclamation sound)
nai nai for elderly woman
ye ye for elderly man

It is awkward for people seeking to be friendly to use the terms Mr. and Mrs., which are reserved for formal business type relationships. One more note -- one thing that's tricky about the mother-side and father-side relationships is that different people have different titles for the same relatives. For example, you call your mother's eldest sister da yi, but your cousin who's the son of your mother's brother calls the same aunt da gu.

A note on the Tangshan accent:
The Tangshan dialect is for the most part very similar to standard Mandarin. They have weird rules that transform and lilt the tones of certain words, along with a batch of commonly used slang terms. A slang example --
yesterday, today, tomorrow.
Mandarin: zuo tian, jin tian, ming tian
Beijing slang: zuo tian, jir, mir
Tangshan slang: lir, jir, mir

sound/tone change examples:
Mandarin: fang4 jia4 (to go on vacation)
Tangshan: fang3 jia2

Mandarin: tai4 (excessively, extremely)
Tangshan: tei2 or tei1
While tei is totally permissible under Chinese phonology, that sound in any tone doesn't exist in standard Mandarin. It's interesting to see the Tangshan dialect reach out and fill in the hole.

I'd say you have to have a certain mastery of spoken Mandarin before you can easily coerce phrases that on their face aren't intelligible because of all the wrong tones, into contextually correct phrases. This is easier when dealing with accents in English because there are far fewer homonyms in English compared to Chinese.
To illustrate the overall effect the lilt gives to Tangshan speech, I would compare the difference in accent to how the Beatles sound to us American speakers.