Back
in Shanghai for a while. Was at a
dinner last night where the Shanghai Hua was shedding fast and furious. For me the language, even more than the
city is a portal back to that first time in China twenty years ago. At that time I was such a fledgling
student of Chinese language I couldn’t discern the difference and Shanghainese in 1993 was much more likely to be the default discourse. So straining to make sense of it,
straining to make sense of Mandarin from a thick Shanghainese accent is an old,
familiar challenge.
I don’t know why the twenty phrases or so that I learned
have stuck so well. Perhaps
because every other month or so I get to come down here and pepper my speech
with cab drivers and hotel staff.
Where is all that Italian I’d practiced one year before heading to
Tuscany? I think all that remains
is “quarto stagoni” (as in a ‘four seasons’ pizza) and
“Where can I find the cathedral?” “Il
Duomo Per Favori.” But “Not
cool”, “I don’t know”, and “you wanna fight about it?” and a dozen other
Shanghai delights are locked in for good.
When I lived her twenty years ago, I was in a “Foreign
Experts Building.” A posh
residence like the one I’ve been provided for this week simply did not exist
then. The building had an Ayi who
cleaned my room in the mornings and she’d come in and through the linguistic
haze, there was one utterance that she kept emphatically repeating, pointing at
the ground, pointing at the kitchen.
I’d smile earnestly and say “thank you” and “I see” in Mandarin, utterly
lost. Mandarin has a finite range
of sounds and there is no sound “GET.”
Meanwhile there is a sound for “DA.” Just enough ambiguity to be completely confusing. What does this “GET DAH!” mean? Getdah! (finger point), Getdah! (finger
point).
Later some local friends laughed and told me that this was
indeed Shanghaineese. What that
wiry old lady was yelling at you was “here.” This made sense and of course the next time she was in my
room we danced in merriment repeating getdah,
getdah, pointing at various things, and smiling: 应有尽有[1].
Laughing about all this my friends told me, it was also the
first line of a good old Shanghainese insult. Ahh,
well, of course, I’ll need to have that as well. “Get dah you gandu
va?” Which I dutifully added
to my pack of vocabulary cards at the time, with the explanation that this was
Shanghainese for “Is there a fool in here?”
Last night, driving with two senior, accomplished financiers
of Shanghainese extraction, from one hotel to a fancy Pudong locale for what
was supposed to have been the final word on Jiangxi food, someone asked a
question to which I replied get dah you
gandu vah? With an incredulous
smile. There was a terrifying
millisecond where the gent turned to me with an eyebrow raised and then he and
the woman who was our host burst out laughing, repeating the phrase. For all the many thousands of Mandarin
words I’ve learned and forgotten over the years, it must be the potential
comedic hook of this banal little phrase that keeps it locked and loaded in my
cerebellum.
My pop had me off with the Rough Guide to Ethiopean Music
which I’d explained yesterday. As
mentioned, I usually tend to be dismissive of these series. There has been a broad range of classic
Ethiopian popular music for years now through the Ethiopiques series. So I figured I sort of knew. Fortunately, there is everything I
don’t know, and everything that has happened since the music stopped with the
revolution and then started up again, that is here for discovery.
Tiruedel Zenebe, for example is someone I’ve never heard of
before. There is a song of hers
called “Gue” which appears to have been from 2011 in which she sings
beautifully in that characteristic Ethiopian way, over a sinister guitar lick
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXdLH4TGF3s
. Though it is difficult to
discern what the song is actually about though the video suggests it's a
critique of some sort of the western Industrial military complex. That, or she's a big fan on 80s American TV.
She is certainly a beautiful young lady, dancing around like
Carmen Miranda in this other Youtube video I spied which no pictures of tanks
or pollution. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFAHzH5v-Is And indeed, though she doesn’t yet have
a Wiki page, (don’t worry Tiruedel, I don’t either) she is referred to as an African
Diva (don’t worry Tiruedel, I will never be referred to this way), on this
other clip featuring a range of performers.
I will continue to dig, into this fascinating Rough Guide
sampler into all that’s happened in Ethiopia after popular music was once again
permissible. This or wonder if there is a fool in here, next time I try to converse about the genre.
[1] yīngyǒujìnyǒu: everything that should be here is here
(idiom); all one can think of is on hand / to have all one needs
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