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#3 What Does It Mean to Sound "Taiwanese"?

#3 What Does It Mean to Sound "Taiwanese"?
No, Jioufen was not the inspiration for Spirited Away, but it is still one of Taiwan's most beautiful places.

I have a fun newsletter for you all today, which includes a far-too-long dissection of the Phillies' first few playoff games and some more music, movies, and travel thoughts.

But first (!) I've long wanted to write about the way Mandarin Chinese is spoken in Taiwan and why other Chinese speakers perceive it to be so...cute. (Yes, really!) And lest you get tired of reading my un-credentialed thoughts on this, I also exchange emails with Dr. Chun-yi "Jerry" Peng, a linguistic anthropologist at CUNY Manhattan, who studies perceptions of Taiwanese Mandarin.

OK, let's get started!

A few days ago, I started class by asking one of my teachers why so many Taiwanese people pronounce the Chinese characters 垃圾 as "le se" while mainland Chinese say it as "la ji." There are plenty of instances like this where Taiwanese Mandarin diverges in pronunciation or even grammar from the Mandarin spoken on the mainland. To American learners like me, these changes are often jarring to the ear because the Mandarin we learn in the United States corresponds to the standard Beijing pronunciation with its ubiquitous "er" sound.

When I asked her the question, I expected a fairly standard answer about the influence of Taiwan's indigenous languages or the languages spoken by early Chinese immigrants. Instead, she said, "I could just as easily ask you: why do mainland Chinese say 'la ji' and not 'le se' ?"

The point she made was about perspective. Our perception of how a language sounds and the inferences we make of the speaker's background or education is informed by our politics and historical baggage. This sensation contributes to why Americans in the northeast hear a southern U.S. accent and imbue it with negative connotations. The same sensation applies to speakers of Mandarin who cannot separate their perception of a Taiwanese accent from their perception of Taiwan as a place—far different in its politics and values while still massively influential on the mainland due to its ideological importance to the Chinese Communist government and the longstanding reach of its movies, TV, and music.

I am not a linguist, but these conversations always fascinate me because of the varied forces that go into shaping perceptions of a language—there's the politics, of course, but also the influence of commerce and mass media, not to mention a certain element of personal preference. My grandmother, who left Italy for the United States in her teens, used to recoil with embarrassment when a visitor would speak to her in Standard Italian, demurring that her language was nothing but a southern Italian "dialect" and would sound "low class." That kind of internalized perception has just as much to do with politics and class as it does with pure linguistics.

What fascinates me most about the "perception" of Taiwanese Mandarin is that despite being far (both literally and culturally) from the linguistic "center" of Beijing, Taiwan and its unique standard of Mandarin still commands a level of prestige, if not outright respect, in the mainland Chinese imagination.

I learned this before coming to Taiwan when friends would tell me that Taiwanese Mandarin sounded much more 可爱 ("ke ai," meaning "cute") than the Mandarin I was used to learning. Even someone at my limited level of Mandarin can grasp this notion when interacting with Taiwanese people every day, mostly because Taiwanese Mandarin merges certain sounds in a way that makes them sound less harsh to the ear. For example, 不是 is a common way of expressing negation in Mandarin and is generally pronounced "bu shi." If you're in Beijing, it may sound closer to "bu shar," but in Taiwan, speakers often don't use that aspirated "sh" sound, so it comes out as "bu sihh."

In thinking through aspects of Taiwanese Mandarin, I could think of no one better to speak to than Jerry Peng, who I met this summer as the resident director of my language program in Hsinchu. While having to navigate the unique challenge of dealing with me for a summer, Jerry frequently leaned on his training as a linguistic anthropologist to explain various aspects of how Mandarin is spoken in Taiwan and why certain perceptions about it persist in the Chinese-speaking world. I sent him a few questions this week related to Taiwanese Mandarin, which he was kind enough to answer:

  1. "It seems that mainland Chinese perceptions of Taiwanese Mandarin vary wildly—from viewing it as prestigious to seeing it as overly cutesy or even effeminate. How would you characterize the contemporary perception and has there been any recent shifts?"

I think the contemporary perception of Taiwanese Mandarin gravitates more towards the cutesy and effeminate side. It has to do with the shift of power dynamics between China and Taiwan, as well as from Taiwanese girls trying to project a cute image due to the Japanese influence.

  1. "As Taiwan and China come more into contact through commerce and the influence of movies, music, and TV, has there been any noticeable interest in mainlanders adopting the Taiwanese accent? Or more general fascination with it?"

In the past, we’ve seen mainlanders adopting the Taiwanese accent to project a cool and hip identity, especially in TV shows, but I assume the fascination is fading as the Taiwanese accent is losing its prestige among mainlanders.

  1. "Do you feel 'proud' of speaking the kind of Mandarin that you do? Or have you ever felt pressure to hide your accent?"

I am proud of my accent. However, when I was younger and interviewing for jobs, I was told that I should not have a Taiwanese accent when I teach.

  1. "What is something you find interesting about Chinese linguistics (or linguistics in general) that most people may not know?"

Language is something that we use every day, but we rarely think about the science behind it. There is so much logic behind our everyday use of language that we’re unaware of. What also interests me about linguistics is its interdisciplinary nature: there are aspects of psychology, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, and even computer science.

  1. "Did spending a full summer with me make you more or less interested in visiting Philadelphia?"

I would definitely want to visit Philadelphia again when you are there!

Thanks again to Jerry! In future weeks, we'll hopefully hear about many more aspects of Taiwanese culture from different experts, but for me, there's no more important place to start than with language.

Odds and Ends:

1.

There is a perception that Philadelphia is a town where football is king and all other teams pale in comparison to the Eagles. There is some truth to this. The Eagles dominate any talk radio discussion about the city's sports teams and when they're good, as they were last year (and appear to be this year), it gives the city a kind of swagger that is  insufferable for people from anywhere else.

But, let me lodge a slight addendum here to say that nothing...

...and I mean NOTHING...is more exciting than a Phillies playoff run.

To understand why the energy around the Phillies is so palpable, you have to understand a few basic things about this team. They were founded in 1883, making them one of the oldest professional sports teams on the planet. In that span of time, they've won two World Series, meaning they average a championship every 70 years. By comparison, the Miami Marlins were founded in 1993 and have already won it all twice.

Baseball is a ridiculous sport. Teams play 162 games a season, making the stakes of an individual game all but meaningless despite the outsized presence that each player comes to assume in fans' lives. "Brandon Marsh" means nothing to you if you don't watch baseball, but if you watch guys like him on TV for six months in a row, they come to seem more real than most people you know. The games themselves are hellishly long—only becoming more bearable this year with the introduction of a pitch clock. Baseball is 3 hours of mostly nothing happening until the most incredible thing you've ever seen happens.

Then there's the peculiar quality of this Phillies team, which is one of the highest-paid in the sport while still exuding the quality of a bunch of dudes playing Beer League softball:

Are they going to beat the juggernaut Atlanta Braves AGAIN after somehow pulling it off last year? Who knows, but also, who cares?! This team is fun. They care a lot. And, they're a reminder that sports, for all its corruption and stupidity, is supposed to be fun.

Let Red October commence!

2.

Thanks to the careful intervention of my housemates, I finally knocked out a crucial bucket list item: watching my first Studio Ghibli movie. Enough people have raved to me about these movies that there really is no excuse for me to have waited this long, but alas, it took a weekend trip to Jioufen, a mountain town east of Taipei that shares a visual vocabulary with the movie's fantastical setting, to allow me to confirm that Spirited Away is as good as everyone says! (Jioufen is also the source of this newsletter's header image, which I took while overlooking one of the balconies on the town's central street.)

For the uninitiated, Spirited Away is one of the definitive movies from Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki, whose work exudes a sense of realism and pathos despite often being extraordinarily whimsical and bizarre.

In Spirited Away, a ten-year-old girl enters a magical bathhouse inhabited by spirits, many drawn from traditional Japanese folklore, while seeking a way to find her parents (who are, shall we say, temporarily indisposed). I came to Spirited Away with not much knowledge of Japanese culture, but it immediately reminded me of one of my favorite books, Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are.

Like Sendak, Miyazaki makes art for children, but does not condescend to them or insist that their worlds are unimportant or unserious. There is a surreality to both these artists' work that may lead some to think of their works as "too scary" or weird. Certainly, they are not making Disney movies. But I cannot imagine something as purely "childlike" as the idea of inhabiting a fantasy world and, in that world, finding your real one reflected and refracted. We all inhabit our own worlds as children—and, as our politics shows, as adults—but these worlds are no less real for being imagined.

That is my way of saying: send me more Miyazaki recommendations!

3.

Some music I have not been able to get out of my head recently:

Thanks for reading, everyone! I'll be back in two weeks with another edition of the only newsletter where you can get Taiwanese Mandarin, Calum Scott, and the Phillies in one, tidy package. See you soon.