Review to date

Long time no blog. It's almost the Chinese New Year, so happy almost Year of the Horse! I've been busy recently, traveling around with my family and then getting back into work, so have fallen behind. And I'm about to head out again, traveling for three weeks through Southeast Asia during the long vacation that everyone has off.

Recently I had to write a blurb for the Luce Foundation, looking back on my year so far. I figured it's also appropriate for my blog. Here's what I said:

I arrived in Beijing this past summer with a leg up, having studied some Mandarin in college, and so I spent my time improving my listening comprehension and oral Mandarin, as well as focusing on specific vocabulary that would be helpful for my job doing research at the School of Psychology at South China Normal University. Working my way through a paper that my soon-to-be boss had published while struggling to explain its contents to my Mandarin teachers was an incredibly rewarding experience, one that made me even more excited to get back into scientific research in the fall. However, I still had one major concern before heading south, a concern that was revisited every time I discussed my change of location with someone new: after taking a few minutes to tell me how much better Beijing is than Guangzhou, they would always inevitably ask me, “So…how about Cantonese?”

As it turns out, I had no reason to worry. As one of China’s largest and most prosperous cities, Guangzhou’s inhabitants come from all over China, and thus Mandarin is the language of choice across the city. Even in my lab, only three of the twenty or so students speak Cantonese, as the other students are all from outside of Guangzhou. So Cantonese is by no means necessary in this city, yet I still seized upon the opportunity to start taking lessons. I did it for a simple reason – because Cantonese is fascinating. Thanks to Hong Kong, it’s the only non-Mandarin Chinese dialect that can be completely written out, but most Guangzhou speakers cannot write it. It has six, seven, or nine tones, depending on who you ask. It preserves many of the syllable-ending sounds from Middle Chinese that Mandarin has lost, resulting in an often completely different-sounding language. My Chinese friends from outside Guangzhou are just as lost in a Cantonese conversation as I. Yet the question of how to classify Cantonese – as a separate language or a simple dialect – is a hard question to get a clear answer for, even in Guangzhou among scientists researching language and the brain.

While my research at SCNU does not involve Cantonese, it does touch on our capacity to speak multiple languages. In one project, I am investigating how the activation of the brain and the parts involved differ while reading a passage in English and in Chinese and, in the other, I am attempting to reconstruct a computational model used to simulate the language network in the brain, originally trained on Japanese words, and train it on English words instead. Working in an environment where everyone is a Mandarin speaker but almost all of the research is published in English, I read papers in English, listen to lectures in Mandarin, discuss results in a combination of English and Mandarin, help translate or edit papers being written in English, and try to explain, in Mandarin, the difficult parts of a paper written in English by a German researcher working in the USA to a Master’s student from Fujian.

Surrounded by language and constantly spending my time thinking about it, I relish my opportunities to escape into wordless pursuits. Whether it’s painting with my boss’s father, baking treats to share among my friends, throwing my tiles across the mahjong table, wandering around the streets of old Guangzhou, tucking into a hearty bowl of tingzaizhou (a rice porridge filled with all manners of odds-and-ends) at dimsum, or simply relishing a cup (or three) of pu’er tea, these provide a much-needed respite. With these pursuits and the intense intellectual stimulation of my work and study, I am excited to see what the next several months living in the organized chaos that is China’s third largest city will bring.

So that's a brief review of my life in Guangzhou so far. One final note, before I leave for Vietnam: were you aware that Chinese traditional medicine prescribes the consumption of rat/mouse (the two animals have the same name in Chinese) meat to stop bed-wetting? One of my friends was secretly fed rat meat by her mother when she young for this reason. Supposedly it works, so that's good to know. I'm going to be the best at parenting ever.