Voice of China Sydney 2015, Program Booklet

It’s a weeknight at the Sydney Town Hall, an ornate 19^th century building in the city centre. Almost everyone bustling in the entryway is of Chinese extraction, except the ushers (and me). They’re all ages, and as I pour inside with them I hear Cantonese, Mandarin, Hakka, and a little English. There are posters and flyers using simplified and traditional Chinese characters alongside English text. These scripts are not in-text translations but code-switching sentences working together within each ad to sell Australian Ugg boots or New Zealand throat lozenges. The ticket I hold and the banners on stage are also multilingual. They read “The Voice of China 中国好声音 澳大利亚招募站 Season 4 Australia Audition”. The tickets were free and ‘sold out’ days before this event. It’s the final audition – in a live concert format – for the upcoming season of a popular reality TV franchise, based on ‘Voice of Holland’, and available on a subscription channel in Australia. This is the first season of ‘Voice of China’ in which ‘Overseas Chinese’ can compete for the chance to be ‘The Australian Contender’ and flown to mainland China to film the series.

In-Group, Ethnicity and Language

The Town Hall this night is clearly a space where people operate within “multi-sited transnational social fields encompassing those who leave and those who stay behind”, as Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller (2004, p. 1003) have put it. These sociologists posit that migrants may simultaneously assimilate into a host society and maintain enduring ties to those sharing their ethnic identity, “pivoting” between the two. This is a useful lens through which to regard the event. What is most interesting with ‘Voice of China’ is the use of language to extend who counts as “those who leave”. The contestants have not necessarily actually left China, many are originally from Australia. Maybe their parents, or even their grandparents, once migrated. The audition’s winner [SPOILER ALERT!] is one of the few contestants without a Chinese first name: Leon Lee, a university music student from Sydney.

As these contestants pivot towards China – particularly through their use of Putonghua-Mandarin – so too does the Chinese community pivot towards the diaspora through the vehicle of this show, both by holding these Australian auditions at all and by incorporating Cantonese and Australian English. Together, the singers, hosts, judges and audience are constructing a transnational social field that incorporates both Australia and China; Sydney is not simply a city in Australia but an Asian migration hub located in reference to Beijing. All the fans sitting around me, who might watch other ‘Voice of China’ events in virtual spaces – online and on international pay TV – while living in Sydney, demonstrate the layers of place in one geographic space.

The use of language also reveals interesting dynamics in who counts as having a shared ethnic identity. In an adjustment invisible to the audience, one contestant did not perform in his first language, the Kam-Tai language Zhuang, which is an official ethnic minority language in China. The show’s producers had said he could choose only English, Mandarin or Cantonese songs.

There is a normative equivalence of language and ethnicity being reproduced here. The way in which language features associated with Mandarin, Cantonese and Chinese minority languages “index” (Blommaert and Rampton 2011) Chinese-ness (or do not index it) is shown to be more complicated as the auditions unfurl. It is a linguistic manifestation of a recurrent normative tension over what features are identified with the Zhonghua Minzu. On one hand, Chinese minority languages and common Chinese-heritage dialects in Australia such as Hokkien and Hakka are totally absent from stage. On the other, Cantonese, although it is officially deemed a dialect not a minority language, is used by the hosts, contestants and judges. Despite Cantonese’s status, until recently it, rather than Mandarin, was the language identified as “Chinese” in Australia. Cantonese is also the Chinese language historically strongest in Hong Kong, and after all it’s a Hong Kong station (TVB) organising and presenting these auditions. Cantonese is given equivalent official status in the Town Hall show, with hosting duties meticulously shared between a Mandarin speaking man and a Cantonese-speaking woman.

But there’s still an observable norm of language dominance. When Jessica and Deborah Kwong, two Melbourne sisters, use Cantonese to introduce themselves in their pre-recorded video, then sing a live duet in English, a judge doesn’t hesitate to give all his feedback in Mandarin. They nod as he speaks. It’s only when the next judge takes his turn that the girls ask to switch to “Guangdonghua” (Guangdong Speech, a colloquial name for Cantonese) that we all realise the sisters didn’t understand the first judge. There’s laughter all round, and the judges pledge to ask all future contestants which language they’d prefer. For all the deliberate announcements in Cantonese, not being fluent in Mandarin is not ‘normal’ in this context.

Leon Lee sings a lovely, English-language mash-up of rap, R&B and John Lennon’s Yesterday, ending with a modest xiexie (‘thank you’ in Mandarin). True to their recent pledge, the judges ask if they can comment in Mandarin. Leon explains – in Mandarin – that he speaks it imperfectly but understands it, and the judges proceed.

Only one contestant sings in Cantonese in the round, although many more speak Cantonese in their videos. Their practice again reveals the language expected by ‘Voice of China’s mainland producers and viewers. (While a Hong Kong station produces the auditions, it’s a mainland Chinese station, ZJTV, that produces and airs the series.) Sydney, being oriented to China but not actually in China, is a space where different linguistic norms can apply and so we get a slightly uncomfortable, simultaneous centralization and marginalization of Cantonese.

Translocal and Global

In addition to the associations between language and Chinese identity, tonight’s language practices happen under conditions of globalization. The singers at once use features associated with American English to link to the global scripts of reality TV song contests, and Australian-accented English to localize themselves. Their use of Mandarin can be understood as an additional attempt to localize, to differentiate from the global English language, global pop culture and global TV media.

Some contestants take on American accents in singing English-language songs, including Gaga’s Paparazzi, or employ the style of Anglo Pop music by inserting “yeah yeah yeah” into Mandarin songs. The judges also use features associated with American English – “Dude, your range is incredible,” says one judge – which functions to harmonise the show with the “international” American style of reality TV. However, when the contestants speak English to thank the crowd, they have unabashed Australian accents.

The contestant I’ve come to support, Wei Baocheng, linguistically localises in a different way. He makes his rendition of ‘The Sound of Silence’ more Australian than the American original not through accent but through prosody in his laconic rendition. The judges employ some translanguaging to describe it as “hen[很] laid back” and “hen[很] ’Strayan”. Hen is the Mandarin word for ‘very’, and ’Strayan is a jocular, colloquial term for “Australian”.

Localization is also achieved through song choice, amongst other things. For example, contestant Wang Chen sings the yearning rock ballad “Beijing, Beijing”, popular in China in recent years (and already on Voice of China in 2012). The pathos with which he performs it reinforces that, for him, Sydney Town Hall is oriented to China. Wang is singing about a city at the imagined heart of the community he (and the producers) imagine the audience to be.

Blommaert, J., & Rampton, B. (2011). Language and Superdiversity. Diversities, 13(2), 1-22.

Levitt, P., & Schiller, N. (2006). Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society1 International Migration Review, 38 (3), 1002-1039 DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-7379.2004.tb00227.x

The front cover of the tourist map of multilingual Macau

Last week I had the privilege of visiting the University of Macau and in Macau I discovered yet another unique variation on the many multilingual landscapes we have featured here on Language on the Move.

Macau, a former Portuguese colony, has been a Special Administrative Region of China since 1999. The official languages of Macau are Chinese and Portuguese. English plays an unofficial but highly prominent role: it is the medium of instruction at the University of Macau and at a number of secondary schools. Other schools use Cantonese as medium of instruction and there is one Portuguese-medium school.

Trilingualism in Chinese, Portuguese and English is just the beginning, though. The linguistic situation is further complicated by the diversity of Chinese and the importance of the tourism industry.

The version of Chinese that is local to Macau is Cantonese but Putonghua is gaining in importance. Macau has about half a million residents but welcomes a staggering number of tourists: close to 30 million tourists visit Macau each year. Most of these come from Mainland China and so it is not surprising that in tourism spaces I overheard much more Putonghua than Cantonese. Written Chinese, too, comes in at least three varieties: traditional characters, simplified characters and pinyin. Furthermore, pinyin looks different depending on whether the writer followed English-based or Portuguese-based conventions.

The languages of other tourist markets also feature with maps and signs in Japanese, Korean and Thai.

The linguistic landscape of Macau is thus extremely diverse and each tourist site has its own conventions, as the following examples demonstrate.

A-Ma Temple

Chinese inscriptions at the A-Ma Temple

The famous Taoist temple dedicated to the goddess of seafarers, Matsu, from which the name “Macau” is thought to derive, is enlisted on the UNESCO World Heritage List. On the day we visited it was crowded with Chinese tour groups. The languages on display were ancient Chinese inscriptions in stones and on the temple façades. The prayer tablets where the devout can record their wishes and prayers also seemed to be Chinese only (although there were hundreds of them so I cannot be sure that prayers in other languages were not also hidden away somewhere).

The direction and prohibition signs were either in Chinese only or in Chinese and English (of the non-standardized “Chinglish” variety). One stall selling incense sticks and other devotionalia featured Chinese and Thai signs. Portuguese and what might be called “standard English” were notable for their absence.

Our Lady of Penha Church

Latin and Chinese on a devotional card at La Penha Church

One of Macau’s many Catholic churches (Macau used to be the staging post for the Christianisation of East Asia and has the largest number of Catholic churches by square mile in Asia), Penha Church sits on a hill and affords an excellent view over the harbour and across the bay to the mainland. The church itself is not a tourist destination but the spiritual centre of a community of Trappist nuns from Indonesia.

When we visited, the church was empty. Outside, there were a few newly-wed couples in Western wedding garb who were out to have their pictures taken. As far as I could hear, they received their instructions from the photographers on how to pose in Cantonese.

The languages on the signage could not have been more different from the A-Ma Temple: inscriptions on the façade were also monolingual but monolingual in Portuguese rather than Chinese. Signs about the code of conduct came in three language combinations: Chinese-Only, Chinese-English and English-Chinese.

Signage relating to the spiritual life of the church was either predominantly in Chinese or English, with one or the other language predominating and a few expressions in the other interspersed. To my great surprise, I also discovered some Latin slogans on devotional cards. A collection box, which looked quite old and featured Portuguese, Chinese and English suggests that the English presence in Macau predates the tourism boom and globalized signage of the past decade.

Mandarin House

Trilingual poster at the Mandarin House about 盛 世 危 言 (Warning to a Prosperous Age)

The so-called “Mandarin House” is another UNESCO World Heritage listed building. It used to be the residence of the Qing dynasty reformer Zheng Guanying. When we visited, the building was deserted and other than the attendants we were the only people present making it a very serene space. Information and prohibition signs were relatively standardized and trilingual in Chinese, Portuguese and English although some prohibition signs were more haphazard and contained only Chinese and English.

What was most interesting was the posters about Zheng Guanying’s book Words of Warning to a Prosperous Age (Shengshi weiyan 盛 世 危 言). What little information about the book I could gather from the information panels suggests that it is a highly relevant text for Intercultural Communication Studies. One website sums up the argument as follows:

As a famous reformer of late Qing China, Zheng Guanying was the earliest advocate of representative and participatory political system in the 1870s, the earliest to call for “commercial warfare ” against Western economic imperialism, and one of the earliest to seriously study international law and its relevance to China’s national identity and foreign relations. He was also one of the earliest Chinese to emphasize the combination of Western medicine and Chinese medicine.

His ideas continue to be highly influential in contemporary China and a translation of Shengshi weiyan would be highly desirable. Unfortunately, I have not been able to discover an English translation. I hope this is not another case of “no translation;” if it is, a translation would be highly desirable not only for Chinese Studies but also for Intercultural Communication Studies.

Casinos

Official trilingual “no smoking” sign

A discussion of the touristic linguistic landscape of Macau would not be complete without reference to the casinos because that is where most of the 30 million annual visitors are headed. I got to visit two of them: the Venetian, which is operated by the Las Vegas-based Sands corporation and is an imitation of the Las Vegas Venetian, and City of Dreams, a joint venture between the Macau casino dynasty Ho and the Australian billionaire James Packer. Before anyone gets the wrong idea, the gambling areas occupy only a relatively small part of the casinos and while that is obviously where the action is, I did not enter.

Casino resorts are intended to be spectacular and novel. The Venetian, for instance, looks like a cross between a baroque church and Venetian canals and plazas and City of Dreams features a huge fish tank with (digital) mermaids. However, when it comes to signage there is no trace of the spectacular and unique. In both casinos, commercial signage was completely standardized in the non-language of other global consumer spaces. Direction signs were also standardized in Chinese and English.

Portuguese, by contrast, only had a tiny presence on state-mandated signs, particularly the ubiquitous no-smoking signs, which are in Chinese, Portuguese and English. The biggest surprise were the emergency exit signs: they did not contain any English and were in Portuguese and Chinese only.

Linguistic Pragmatism

Analysts of multilingualism in Macau have described multilingualism in Macau as “an illusion” because official societal Chinese-Portuguese bilingualism is rarely undergirded by individual bilingualism. Indeed, all the people I had extended conversations with were either English speakers from Australia, UK and the USA or Putonghua speakers from Mainland China and Taiwan. With three exceptions none of these had learnt either of the two official languages (the exceptions being an American and a Tawainese who had learnt Cantonese and an Australian who had learnt Portuguese).

Despite the amazing multilingualism in the public signage it may thus well be that the various language communities largely keep themselves to themselves. The fact that each space I visited has its own language practices with regard to signage seems to point in the same direction. If so, it is a pragmatic approach that seems to work perfectly well as a way to manage linguistic diversity and public communication with multiple audiences.

Chinese: What does the Chinese language mean to Western tourists visiting China?

Ingrid’s blog post “Character challenge” has set me thinking about Chinese language learning these days. I have found her observation about learning Chinese characters as “the most intriguing pastime” particularly impressive, especially when I look again at the data I analyzed for my thesis. There I looked (inter alia) at the ways in which English-language travel writers describe their communicative encounters in China.

In my corpus, only few writers seem to have made any attempt to learn Chinese before they traveled to China. However, they usually have a lot to say about the English deficiencies they observe in Chinese locals (as is also the case in hotel reviews).

How does Chinese figure in English-language travel writing? Mostly as an absence. My corpus consists of travelogues from the New York Times and China Daily. Despite their different origins from outside and within China, both newspapers have little to say about any communication occurring in Chinese.

To begin with, Chinese languages tend to be lumped into one single variety, “Chinese.” Regional dialects and ethnic minority languages are generally rendered invisible.

Second, Chinese words or phrases are sometimes used as iconic tokens to refer to local cultural specifics and to signify authenticity. Examples include place names for which a conventional English translation exists such as Changjiang instead of “Yangtze River” and names of Chinese dishes such as xiao long bao (soup dumpling) or baochaoyaohua (fried pig kidney). Other Chinese terms that I’ve found in my corpus included Qipao (a type of clothing), Xiangqi (a game similar to chess), baijiu (an alcoholic drink), pipa (loquat) or shanzha (hawthorn). Instead of serving any communicative function, these snippets of Chinese languages act as “linguistic decorations.” They serve to inject some local flavor authenticating the writers’ touristic experiences and thus contribute to linguascaping the exotic in China.

Third, Chinese languages are also exoticized in meta-comments that make judgments about or express attitudes toward local linguistic practices, serving the purpose of drawing social boundaries and reinforcing similarities and differences between the Self and the Other. For instance, the Guilin accent is described as “fairly different” from Mandarin, Cantonese is labeled as “bird language” or the Jinan dialect is compared to Putonghua spoken by foreigners who cannot grasp the four tones. By recursive logic, such linguistic differentiation is transposed onto the differentiation of destinations and local people. Thus, Guilin is constructed as a peripheral destination; Cantonese speakers are rendered sub-human as their language is compared to animal sounds; and Jinan speakers are made to look foreign and non-belonging.

Finally, some travel writers playfully cross into Chinese languages to enact an elite identity of sophisticated travelers belonging to a global community of tourists. For example, in a travelogue about Yunnan, the travel journalist describes himself as greeting some pilgrims by saying “Tashi delek” (Tibetan greeting). By crossing into Tibetan, the writer momentarily embraces the identities of the Tibetan pilgrims but also maintains his identity as an American tourist. This instance of language crossing presents the travel writer as knowledgeable and well-travelled but not a cultural/linguistic imperialist.

So, what do Chinese languages mean to English-speaking tourists? It’s easy to say what they are not: languages that have any communicative value. Firmly assigned to the Other and lacking any intrinsic interest, they are reduced to commodified snippets serving to affirm touristic identities. One could almost conclude that travel to China is not about China but about the ‘me’ of the tourist.

Publications based on my research are forthcoming. In the meantime, I would refer readers to Jaworski et al. (2003) for further reading.

Jaworski, A., Thurlow, C., Lawson, S., & Ylänne-McEwen, V. (2003). The Uses and Representations of Local Languages in Tourist Destinations: A View from British TV Holiday Programmes Language Awareness, 12 (1), 5-29 DOI: 10.1080/09658410308667063

Multilingual Hong Kong (Katherine Chen and Gray Carper, 2005-2007)

During our visit to Hong Kong, Kimie and I met Katherine Chen, who introduced us to a sociolinguistic film she has co-produced: Multilingual Hong Kong. The film provides fascinating insights into the linguistic landscape of Hong Kong, into Cantonese-English bilingualism and into bilingual language use more generally.

The premise is simple: Katherine is filmed asking Hong Kong pedestrians to translate a commonly code-mixed sentence – “Today I must present a project.” – into Cantonese only. Most of the teenagers and young adults she speaks to are scratching their heads because they can’t do it or break down giggling because the Cantonese equivalents they come up with are too formal, too far off the mark or simply sound funny to them.

All too soon it becomes clear to the viewer that the interviewees have a hard time using” pure” Cantonese, i.e. saying the sentence without resorting to English loanwords for “present” and, particularly, “project.”. However, when asked what they think of code-switching a fair number of them say that it’s bad, that it’s a sign of laziness, that it’s disgusting or that it’s a sign that a person cannot speak proper Cantonese nor proper English.

Other interviewees, however, celebrate their code-switching and code-mixing and say it’s an expression of their Hong Kong identity. One interviewee even says that mixing Cantonese and English increases her levels of happiness!

A counterpoint to these translation efforts and beliefs about code-mixing of ordinary Hong Kong pedestrians is provided in interviews with Hong Kong linguists. One of them is Agnes Lam and she sums up code-mixing with a beautiful metaphor: mixing Cantonese and English is like wearing jade jewellery with foreign clothes.

Multilingual Hong Kong constitutes fascinating viewing for anyone interested in language and culture and in beliefs about bilingualism and practices of bilingualism in Hong Kong and elsewhere.

I would also like to strongly recommend the film as an ideal teaching resource to anyone teaching in sociolinguistics, bilingualism, language and culture, World Englishes, Asian Studies and related areas.

Running time of Multilingual Hong Kong is 30 minutes. A 4-minute preview of the initial segment is available here. The whole film is available through Yuefilms or by contacting Katherine Chen.