Your 'Chinese self' is a moron

Another reason why I don't learn Chinese....

There's a funny and perceptive piece by Kaiser Kuo in his Ich Bin Ein Beijinger column in The Beijinger magazine this month (online here) in which he notes that even people who appear to have reached quite a good level of fluency in Chinese are, in reality, still very limited in the grammar and vocabulary at their disposal and the range of situations they can comfortably operate in. Hence, you can find yourself coming across as a child or an idiot when you try to engage in Mandarin conversation with a native speaker. This is something else that discourages me from making much of an effort with the language. I know I'm never going to be able to function in it with genuine fluency (but I have the bumbling basics to be able to order food or buy train tickets; and that's all I feel I need).

Now, I suspect there's a certain amount of false modesty in this article. I've met Kaiser a few times, and his Chinese seems pretty damned good to me (after all, he's been here, on and off, for something like 25 years now; and he's sung in a Chinese rock band, for heaven's sake!). Then again, perhaps he has a bit of an inferiority complex, because overseas Chinese tend to be held to higher standards: the local Chinese tend to assume initially that anyone who looks Chinese must be a native speaker, and, even when they discover that this is not the case, they seem to believe that all ethnic Chinese have an innate capacity to learn and excel in Mandarin. The people who always complain to me most about how difficult they find it to learn Mandarin (and/or to use their Mandarin effectively in day-to-day situations) are foreign-born Chinese - even though they are, in almost all cases, at least starting off with the advantage of having spoken the language a bit with their grandparents when they were kids.

Kaiser's point, I think, is that really high-level fluency - the sort of fluency we aspire to, the sort of fluency that would allow us to communicate as freely as we do in our native tongue, the sort of fluency that would allow us to fully convey our personality and our sense of humour - is, if not quite impossible to achieve, then at least extremely rare. Most people who think they're 'fluent' (and are indeed impressively so in many situations) still suffer from certain deficiencies which impede completely natural, unselfconscious communication.

A further amusing observation which Mr K calls to our attention is this: since most foreigners get to practice their Mandarin primarily with their wives/girlfriends* or with taxi drivers, their 'Chinese persona' tends to be coloured by these models - to veer wildly between Carrie Bradshaw and Jake La Motta.

* Although I feel that the gender imbalance in the expat population has narrowed in the last few years, there are probably still considerably more men than women. And, for a variety of reasons, foreign guys do - mostly - seem to dig Chinese chicks.... whereas Chinese men are less universally admired.