Colonialized Mentality

On the map this place looks enormous.  It must have some full long name that I am not noting.  The obvious name that is listed here on the mapping app, isn’t registering with this cab driver.  He has something loud playing in Shanghainese.  Fragments of cognizance make their way through.  

It’s always an odd aspect of Shanghai.  It goes back to my earliest days of trying to reckon with the place.  Mandarin was mysterious enough to begin with.  But that’s not what most people were speaking.  The atmosphere crackled with completely different sounds.  I had a wiry old ayi who’d come and sweep my room at the Foreign Expert Building I lived in.   She would say a word that my ears caught perfectly but there was no logical mandarin word for: get-dah.  She would point at the ground and then point over to some other place and say many things in a spirited way.  Get-dah!

Later, with others I would imitate this lady and this sound. A young Shanghainse friend laughed and explained that this was local dialct for “here.”   Forgotten lots of  foreign vocabulary over the years but I never forgot that.  It leads you to learning the common Shanghainese rhetorical put down:  “get dah you gan du vah?” “Is there a fool in here?”  Or more simply: “You must be a fool.”

I can also recall a young reporter from that time explaining that he would push the old people he’d interview not to speak Shanghainese.  “We’re a modern city now and we speak Mandarin.”  At that time that struck me as all a bit downtrodden.  It’s your language.  Why not use it?   Why not be proud of your mother’s tongue?  The only place in Mainland China that seemed, at the time to legally allow for bilingualism was in Guangzhou where you would here Cantonese on the public busses, and then repeated in Mandarin. 

“You Shanghainese have a colonialized mentality.” I’d say blithely.  You don’t even use your own dialect to sing Karaoke.   And often they would insist that it was not objectively beautiful.  Everyone else hated it.  Which seemed all the more odd and to simply reinforce my belief.  How you could you be so blisteringly confident in most things on the one hand and hate your own mother tongue on the other?