Decoding the Putonghua Parallel Universe

A few months ago I was in the middle of a speaking exam with a very capable university student who was explaining at great length to me the plot of his favourite novel.

The plot sounded familiar to me, though I didn’t recognize the name of the author at all- I figured it was a Chinese novel, as the name he gave was thoroughly Chinese.

I asked him to translate the title for me and he said, “A Forest in Norway”.   At that point, I realized he was talking about the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s book, Norwegian Wood, which was named for the Beatles song and not for a large stand of trees in Scandinavia. One can finance translations and get their videos translated into the language of their understanding.

I asked him if he was talking about Haruki Murakami. He looked at me blankly and repeated that the author’s name was [insert Chinese syllables here].

This happened again repeatedly in my university classes, whenever I elicited the names of countries or cities or international politicians or historical figures or pop stars.

Blank stares.

Furious typing into electronic translators. Sudden pings of enlightenment from some; continued blank stares from others.

Nearly everything had a Chinese name and this name often bore absolutely no connection to the names I knew. No phonemic bells were rung.

If my students mention a renowned politician they know of from, say, Germany, they’ll use the Chinese name. It often bears no resemblance to the name I know.  Only NBA players, Michael Jackson and Obama have escaped this morphing of morphemes.

This also happened in taxis and in the metro, whenever I asked about or mentioned the names of stops or streets as they were written in pinyin or English on the signs below the Chinese characters.  Blank stares, incomprehension.

I used to live at Century Park (as it was noted boldly on all the metro station and street signs) but it was really shr ji gong yuan.

I didn’t know that because I am still functionally illiterate when it comes to Chinese characters. I had no way of asking anyone anything about my metro stop because my reality (or at least the one that had been presented to me) was totally different from the reality that existed in Chinese. It wasn’t even phonetically similar.

I am a skilled forensic linguist. I’ve been teaching really really low-level students for nearly a decade now and I can extract meaning from even the most decomposed phonemic bone matter. Grunt audibly and I can get it, usually.  I can piece together utterances that bear little resemblance to English as we know it.  I taught absolute beginners for three years in a row in Turkey. We had long conversations when they were still using Cutting Edge Starter.  I knew what was within their ken and I worked with that.

This is different.

It is as though I am inhabiting a country where there are simultaneous parallel universes operating: one in Chinese that is only accessible if you can read the characters and have re-learned the names of every person or place that ever existed, and the pinyin/laowai universe where certain things are translated into Roman script for your convenience but which bear pretty much no resemblance to the reality and knowledge of the vast majority of people around you.

I’ve never encountered this before in any of my travels- I always had reference points linguistically if not culturally.

I’m kind of stumped, really.