I was struck by an honest-to-God shibboleth in 2020, as described by this article in the latest issue of Harper’s. Here’s the passage.
“Delete it! Now!” A middle-aged woman wearing a bright-yellow vest with the words protect the children on the back was yelling at another woman, who had been taking pictures with her phone. Protect the Children is a group of housewives, office workers, and retirees who volunteer as mediators, standing between police and protesters to de-escalate confrontations.
“I’m just taking photos!” the other woman, a mainlander, responded in Putonghua.
“Show us your phone!” the yellow-vested woman demanded. She watched intently as the other went through the images on the screen, making sure they were gone. Her voice was filled with fear and distrust. Perhaps the mainland woman was a naïve bystander, but she could also be a patriotic critic of the protests, taking pictures that she would later post on social media to dox demonstrators. Or she could be a spy. It was impossible to know for sure.
I turned to Benny. “Should I be nervous, if I start speaking Putonghua?”
Benny was silent.
“I should be nervous, right?”
“Yes,” Benny said. “Yes, you should.”
The writer was born in mainland China to parents who were among the very first to be allowed to travel abroad to study, following Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Her father was removed from elementary school to till a field in northern China. Seeing the comparative freedom and happiness of Chinese people in the US, but missing their home, they return and decide to raise a family in Hong Kong, in an attempt to meet the two worlds in the middle.
But now Hong Kong is China, again. Kind of. Yi-Ling Liu speaks her parents’ native language, Pitonghua, or roughly, standard mainland Chinese, a quasi-synthetic amalgam of various dialects that emerges from industrialization and broadcast technologies that smoosh everyone’s language into a single box, much like Catholicism did in Spain in the 15th century, or the radio did in Italy in the 20th. As opposed to Cantonese, what’s spoken in Hong Kong.
I’m not the one to explain the protest movement – the central Chinese government is going back on their promises to allow free elections and democratic rule is the gist of it, but it’s more complicated and interesting than that – but I was not aware that the interplay of the mainland and island Chinese languages plays such an important part in how information is shared and transmitted in code to avoid detection by censors. I’ll leave you with this, but you should just read the article, because it’s great.
“Fan song zhong!” a protester shouted, and the crowd repeated after him. “Oppose sending [people] off to China!” Cantonese is supple, playful, full of puns and double entendres. This three-character slogan, when spoken in different tones, translates to “sending [people] off to a funeral.” Switch the tones again, and it means “giving a clock,” which is why the gift of a clock is considered unlucky in China—a wish of death upon the recipient. Hidden, wryly, in the language of protest was the language of loss.
To avoid being caught, Hong Kong protesters have deployed an array of euphemisms when coordinating their actions. “It’s raining,” for example, indicates the firing of tear gas; a “school pickup” is an offer to drive a fellow protester to safety; to “use magic” is to set something aflame; and to “renovate” is to vandalize a street or shop. The act of protest itself is referred to as “dreaming.” “Let’s decide on a meeting point for the dreaming,” a protester might say. “I dreamed I was out on the streets last night,” another might write. The verb for dreaming in Putonghua, the official name for Mandarin Chinese on the mainland, is zuo meng, which suggests that a dream is created, whereas the Cantonese verb faaht moong implies that the dream spreads, radiates, proliferates. “You might have thought you were the only dreamer,” I read in a Facebook post, “but wake up the next day, realizing that you are not the only one.”
Dream State By Yi-Ling Liu in the May 2020 Harper’s