More Than Words

No, Not the mega-ballad by 90's accoustic duo Extreme.

Okay, so I'm pretty limited with what I can say in Mandarin. I was joking around that I'm like a deaf mute here. Maybe it would be easier to learn sign languauge... It's universal isn't it? Well, except for the letters. Spelling something in English is probably easier than trying to form one of those Chinese symbols with your fingers. Deaf Chinese people must all be double-jointed.

I can probably say about 10-12 words/phrases. I'm always learning new ones, but my brain can only hold so much of the new language. Most stuff gets forgotten before I have a chance to use it again. It's really difficult to remember things! I can repeat them back like some sort of circus monkey when you give me a peanut and everyone gets a kick out of how perfectly I can mimic the words. I can usually resort back to the dozen or so broken phrases I have in the ol' thinking bin. For Donald Sutherland's sake, we'll call them the Dirty Dozen. Maybe he'll get a royalty check from this this. Us Ex-Pat New Brunswickers stick together! Donald Sutherland Donald Sutherland Donald Sutherland Donald Sutherland - there, I just bought him another bottle of Hennessey.

So I've said before that Chinese people love to speak in parables. The lingo is apparently chock full of hoity toity, flowery sayings meant to confuse you. My wife tells me that people intentionally try to confuse you and make the discussion hard to follow so they'll seem smarter than you. Sounds a lot like my old Business Law class! We were watching a tv show the other day and the premise was these 4 guys trying to get to the top of a mountain to meet Kung Fu Master Larry who hangs out there. The strange thing was, they kept stopping every 2 minutes to yak at each other. They actually had a yak with them, carrying their bow staffs & things, but it's just a coincidence that I chose that word. I could have just said, they stopped to talk, but I did what I did, didn't I? Anyway, they started to spout off their meaningless jargon like "You can lead a turnip to water, but bleeding a horse dry is like teaching a carrot a new trick."

On another channel I found a Star Trek movie. I'm not sure which one it was, maybe #6 or 15, I'm not sure. There are so many damn sequels. It was dubbed in Mandarin, of course, but I've seen this one before so I kind of knew what was going on. It was the one where Picard meets Captain Kirk at the end and they fight off Sting and escape from Nexus.. Then Data cries when he finds his cat. I was wondering if they did a direct translation, or if they had ol' Bill Shatner saying things like "A... Bird in the hand is worth... A Kiss from a rose on the bay" (It's not easy to write a dramatic pause like that. I think you have to be from montreal or at least sleep with a few Romulans to get the hang of it.). For the sake of the Chinese viewers, I hope they went with the parables. The more outlandish the better, too. The essence of Captain James T Kirk should be celebrated in every culture.

Oh, and I found out that everything is dubbed here in China. TV, movies, no matter what language they are in. I'm pretty sure the actors speak Chinese anyway, but they are dubbed no matter what. I think it's a deal to get voice actors more work, or maybe you don't have to have a good voice to act over here. The biggest bodybuilder probably sounds like a pipsqueak or one of the Sedin Twins, but insert the Chinese version of Sly Stallone's voice, and you better watch out!

After Star Trek 37 was over, we wandered around until dinner time. We headed home and sat down to eat. Mother-in-law's cell phone kept ringing every 2 minutes and she looked frustrated. Ok, I thought. Time to turn on the White Boy charm! Without using a single word, I made her laugh. When the phone started up again, I pretended to throw it out the window and watch it soar down 18 floors. I did a pretty good panto-mime routine or holding my hand to my mouth like "Uh Oh!" She got a good kick out of that. i saw her telling everyone about it afterwards and she was reinacting what I did. Score one for the son-in-law! Without using a single word from the Dirty Dozen, I just moved up to deck swab on the U.S.S. Mothership-in-law.