“Are you incapable of complexity?” –Mountains beyond Mountains

When twenty-four American teenagers and I stepped off a bus and into our new homes in cities nestled in the heart of China’s Sichuan province to start a six-week study of Chinese, we had been told that we were the brightest crayons in that year’s box of applicants, ready to study the official national language of China, Mandarin Chinese, known within China as “the common language.”

I could talk and ponder for hours about the experience that followed, an experience that simultaneously taught, pushed, and comforted me every day, but instead I will only tell you about one thing, a thing that was mentioned only in passing during the program’s extensive orientation process: the Sichuan provincial dialect.

Now, when I say Sichuan dialect, know that in China there are dialects within dialects, and that two people who grew up fifty miles apart within the same province do not necessarily understand each other, especially in the southeast where the dialects are notoriously complicated. People have rightly argued that many dialects can be considered separate languages within a Chinese language family.

Keeping that in mind, take the Sichuan dialect and add in teenage web slang, personal habits of speech, and a few dozen idioms. This is what our host families, friends, and pretty much everyone else spoke to each other every day, which meant we felt out of the loop just studying the standardized national Mandarin in the classroom. In addition, since many of the host families spoke dialect or heavily accented Mandarin directly to us, we struggled to communicate the little Chinese that we had a solid grasp on, not to mention adequately respond if a nice auntie gave us a beautiful toast completely in dialect while her faith in our understanding twinkled in her eyes.

The reality showed we were effectively studying Mandarin and dialect, and so dialect became like the ubiquitous pepper of Sichuan cuisine; present at every dinner table, handled differently by everyone. Sometimes we successfully bargained with it, sometimes we were laughable as we tried to speak it in a stilted accent to someone who knew it intuitively, and sometimes we completely gave up.

Dialect was another reminder that the world is a lot more complex than anyone likes to think. Historically, there had been no Mandarin, no internet to unify China linguistically, only vast expanses of geographic, cultural, and linguistic variation. I have seen a teenager code-switch from Mandarin to dialect to English, then tell me that she had just finished a masterwork of classically written Chinese literature. I have walked the tactile paths for the blind in a city with a vibrantly oral culture, and visited its school for the deaf and blind. I have watched national news subtitled with the widely understood written language. I have heard a Sichuan dialect speaker sing a song in Guangdong dialect from the bottom of their heart, and listened to an elderly man speak in dialect as thick as the summer heat.  

Let me end this field diary by saying that as a language student I wanted to understand everything and to be understood. I confess I also wished that the standard language and the local dialect were “mutually intelligible”.  But as a person, I grew to appreciate the space between understanding and not understanding, the history that silhouettes China’s linguistic complexity, the laughter and smiles that needed no translation, and of course the food devoured too quickly to ask its name.

 

Julia Bouzaher was born and raised in Northeast Ohio. She enjoys being outdoors,  watching Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown and other television shows, tea, and bread. She has been happily studying languages since the sixth grade. She is a 2020 expected graduate who is looking to major in Environmental Science & Policy and is interested in languages, literature, economics, dark chocolate, government, cultural and landscape studies, and all things in between. Shout out to her big sib, Khulood!

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