The Pooh of Tao

Searching for a teacher isn't as simple as it used to be.

Gone are the mythical days you trudge along a dusty trail till you turn that serendipitous corner to find a suitable master sketching words into the sand. Turns out you don't find Confucius that way! What you do is spread the words amongst the snoops, the gossips and the internet for someone suitable.

Said a flat no to the kindergarten tutors. Although my knowledge of the language is sadly rudimentary, that doesn't mean I'd want to sit through a school lesson with babbling toddlers around me. Had enough baby spit at work, thank you very much.

Would be great if they'd be able to find a serious, buttoned-up - but terribly shaggable - Mr Siao for a Mandarin teacher.

Sure enough a name comes up.

Friend : Found someone for you.
Paul : A teacher?
Friend : Yes, he teaches adult students. Even a couple of foreigners.
Paul : Sounds great.
Friend : And his name is Teacher Tao.

At least it's not Lao Tzu.


Was that Tao, Mao or Pao?
From the mysterious name on my cell, I expected a wizened, humpbacked octogenarian harrumphing and dry-coughing throughout the lecture even as he added bits of esoteric oriental wisdom to the crumpled notes along with the green tea he served. Wondered if Tao the Yoda carried a bamboo whisk.

Tao : Learn Mandarin, you will.
Paul : Yes?
Tao : Good student, you will be, grasshopper. A cup of tea, you will get me.
Paul : Will caffe mocha do?

All wrong of course.

Teacher Tao. Relatively young. Probably a few years older than me. Few wrinkles. No humpback. Definitely no dry cough. Had the crumpled notes and tea though.

And so the classes begin.

Speakee Chinese

Hands up all those boys who recall the horrid extracurricular lessons we had called POL classes!

Or Pupils' Own Language as they called it. Ostensibly a noble yet misguided attempt by the government - urged on by the strident minority communities - to teach the young their own mother tongues. Mandarin / Tamil lessons two hours a week for only a year. Lofty national aspirations doomed to failure due to a lack of enthusiasm on the part of the disinterested students.

And the uninspired, lacklustre teachers. A fatal combination.

My ten-year-old classmates weren't exactly budding Einsteins but they didn't walk with their paws dragging on the ground either. I'm sure a Mark Thackeray would have been able to inspire us all to pick up our tedious Chinese textbooks. Rather than follow the conventional teaching methods of making us drone on, reciting dull passages in endless mantras.

Hardly motivating for a bunch of rowdy schoolboys.

No wonder we only received 5 out of 100 fr our weekly exams - a consolation prize for being able to scribble our names in complicated Chinese. Meant as a pitiful sop for the unlettered, especially since the rest of the paper ended up with unforgiving red slashes that essentially signified a big fat zero.


Write like this, grasshopper!
So that forgotten chapter in Mandarin remained closed till I started work. Invariably there would be that one stubborn patient who remained stoically uncommunicative until a doctor of Chinese origin happened to stumble by. Then unbidden an impulsive string of Mandarin would come pouring out from the previously taciturn fellow describing terrifying symptoms vaguely forming a multitude of incurable diseases.

Short of claiming Tibetan / Korean ancestry - or making a quick, ignoble escape abandoning the dying man, I really had no choice but to attempt a deplorable display of my incompetence in the language.

After several inarticulate misadventures with purely Chinese-speaking patients, inevitably I picked up a couple of useful phrases, 'Are you dying?' amongst them. The painful fact that half of them haven't managed to learn a word of any other language in ten years of formal schooling galls me but I usually keep my mouth shut on that point.

Though it did goad me into finally learning Mandarin.

Ni Hao! Mr Siao

Guess NTV7 has done it again.

And I'm not talking about another horrid boo-boo like the best-forgotten medical series Ampang Medikal. More in the lines of the excellent though short-lived newsroom drama Frontpage.

And this time it's in Mandarin. With a healthy smattering of Cantonese, Hokkien, Tamil, Malay, Hakka and most every dialect you'd hear walking down the market streets of our cities. Even the Queen's English. About time we celebrated the colourful hodge-podge rojak patois that's spoken in everyday life.



你好吗! If you recall a much beloved staple of television three decades back with the natty Mr Brown and the rest of his multinational students in Mind Your Language, you'd appreciate the recently revamped version showing on NTV7 titled Mr Siao's Mandarin Class. Following a local company's aspirations of breaking into the burgeoning Chinese market, a teacher is hired to offer classes in Mandarin.

Mr Siao, an enthusiastic degree holder in Chinese Literature, takes to his new calling with aplomb only to find his motley crew of students far from enthusiastic. In fact the class is already split into two warring factions - based on group affiliation in the multi-level marketing company.

Don't worry about the language. My lamentable mandarin's quite as bad as the rest of his lackadaisical students unfortunately but I still managed to struggle through some of his conversations. Hilarious seriously. Keep imagining my erstwhile mother-in-law gabbing in Hakka like the eponymous Hakka speaker in the show - an angry ex-hawker turned marketing magnet. :)

As much as I loved it though, I felt a bit irked that the hyperfeminized Brit-accented fellow with his queenish gestures was played for cheap laughs though. Isn't homophobia so very 1990s? Surprised the resident crew didn't give them flak for that. Perhaps distracted by the shocking technicolour clothes ( honestly who's the wardrobe fella! ).

Bet you'd be thinking that I'd go ga-ga for the resident Hokkien-speaking hottie played by actor/model Steve Yap but you do know my predilection for fellas with ties and glasses?


Teacher teacher?

So what the hell, if I had a Mandarin teacher who looked as good as Mr Siao - played by a deliciously hunky Auguste Kwan - I might have ben a more diligent pupil, paid more attention and learnt it better. Pity I never had him for my seriously dull POL ( People's Own Language ) classes in the past. I'd have been a model student for sure.

Mr Siao : 文章可以写得再好一些，保罗。( Could have done better on your essay, Paul. )
Paul : I'll do better, sir. Maybe I need private lessons.
Mr Siao : 额外补习? ( Private lessons? )
Paul : Did I say too much? Just spank me if I'm naughty. Or even better use that hard, hard cane on me.

Hell I'd have loved polishing his apple every morning :)



Don't take my word for it. Go watch it.

Just for avid listeners to pick up a lesson or two, the producers have also added a bonus bit at the end with a quick language tutorial. Love that!

Mark of Intelligence

Been watching Chinese wuxia serials obsessively for the past few days - especially since I found a nifty site that screens them on a daily basis ( not to mention the stack of DVD boxsets I recently purchased ). Hell, it's on all the time, you only need to pick the episode! God bless the internet.

However since my rudimentary knowledge of Mandarin is superficial at best, I have to rely on substandard subtitles to get through the show - especially when the characters start waxing poetic about the moon and the stars.

Hero : My one and only love in my heart, even the milky moonlight under a cloudless midnight sky pales before the radiant glow of your divine beauty.
Heroine : But that hardly compares to the famed skill of your peerless Rain and Thunder swordplay. Just like endless raindrops flying in a summer storm.
Hero : My fragile blossom, I see you underestimate your Five-fingered Devil's Claw of Excruciating Death.
Paul : WTF.

Seriously. Does anyone actually talk like that? Could blame the literal Babel translators of course but I guess we do have to accept that folks from a previous century are far more sweetly sentimental than the practical straight-talkers nowadays who prefer to get down to the nitty gritty. Unfortunately these days it'd probably go something like this...

Hero : Damn foxy, you look bangin' tonight! A burning beacon of raw sexuality.
Heroine : Yo mac daddy, love your sword. Come lemme play wid it.

Far from romantic.

Why have I suddenly been converted into a rabid Chinese serial fan? Apart from the vaunted heroism, boundless patriotism and the death-defying aerial stunts ( not to mention the hilarious though picturesque names given to the various stances and grips ), I find myself liking the varied characters themselves, even with their complex interpersonal relationships. Sure, it's easy enough to extol the manifold virtues of the main protagonists such as the heroic Xiao Feng and Guo Jing - but for me, I've always enjoyed the wily characters. Maybe because I identify more with them but I like characters such as the princely Duan Yu and the cunning Huang Rong who work by wit and guile, and not by sheer strength of muscle or martial art.

Or the prodigious internal energy as they call it :)


Come try my Six Swords Nerve Disabling Stance!
Though most might disagree, I find it far more interesting to watch a hero outwit his opponent by artful cunning rather than disabling the bastard ( who frequently gives that iconic wicked laugh ) with a fulsome show of martial arts prowess resulting in a gory bloodbath. With their astonishing abilities, it would be easy enough to break bone and sinew but how much more difficult to make a villain kowtow to you as a disciple? Or to drive them rabidly insane studying a clandestine martial arts skill that's nigh impossible?

Me, I doubt I'd have made a great wuxia fighter. Far from a paragon of moral rectitude. Hate sweat, practice and heavy weaponry. Though I probably would have picked up Graceful Steps upon the Waves 凌波微步 if only to avoid certain decapitation. But I gotta say I certainly wouldn't have minded playing with poisons and antidotes ( paired with darts and shurikens no doubt ).

Yeah you can call me East Venom. :P

The Plight of the Speechless Chinaman

What do you dream in?

Courtesy of a predominantly English-speaking background - and possibly years of rigorous education in an all-boys missionary school, my mind speaks in English. Dramas, tragedies and romances unfold in my overdeveloped imagination all subtitled in English with only occasional bursts of other Chinese dialects interspersed. Can't recall with perfect clarity but I assume the many vivid dreams I had - even in old Shanghai - were all surprisingly dubbed in English. Even when I speak in other languages, I think first of it in English, run it through my mind with some brief editing ( perhaps even some colourful alliteration :P ) before translating it into the respective dialects.

Believe that the language our mind thinks in actually affects the way the mind works. Like I'm pretty sure Charming Calvin's mind works in Mandarin. :)


Do you speak my language?
Although my bookish father's pretty much a cunning linguist in several languages, it's obviously not hereditary. Piles of Ladybird books and endless reruns of Sesame Street taught me all I know about the English language but that's about it. My Hokkien's pretty good, my Mandarin's somewhat passable and my Cantonese is just enough to keep me safe from getting severely beaten up by tattooed, overly burly DVD salesmen ( especially since I tend to garble up my Cantonese while shopping - who knows if I'm actually saying voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir to one of those dyed blond studs? ).

Mandarin's new to me actually. Half a decade of deplorable POL ( People's Own Language ) classes, where I actually spent my time doodling endlessly over castles in the sky, barely made a dent so don't be shocked that I actually just picked it up barely three years back. Working in the hospital with a thousand and one patients means, we tend to pick up bits and pieces of other local dialects here and there. Wait till you hear my little broken bits of Tamil and Hindi.

These days, I'm at least able to manage a short conversation in Mandarin before my sadly limited vocabulary runs out. Sadly enough, apart from brief elementary questions on the weather ( and possibly horrible medical diseases ), there's only so much I can put into a sentence before I inevitably have to scratch my head thinking of a word. Complex sociopolitical issues stretch my pathetic grasp of the language a little too much and it isn't long before I start ad-libbing with other words to replace those that I haven't a clue.

Wouldn't be surprised if Charming Calvin hasn't had a titter or two at my expense. :)

At least I managed to stumble through several getting-to-know-you meets in Shanghai about a year back, even with their heavily accented Mandarin. Though it wouldn't surprise me if they were actually hiding behind their wolfish smiles over the inept Overseas Born Chinaman.

Probably sounded something like this.

Paul : Halllloooo... me Paul from Malaysia.
Third Cousin : Good evening. Welcome.
Paul : Fly here from Malaysia I did.
Third Cousin : Yes. Did you have a good flight?
Paul : Fly. Fly. I did fly.
Fourth Cousin : Come in, take a seat.
Paul : Chair. Sit. Yes.
Third Cousin in sotto voce to Fourth Cousin : Do you think he's a simpleton?

Must have thought I'm descended from one of the duller branches in the family.