Chinese don’t say “nali, nali” anymore

A Review to Multi-Canon and Acculturation

PGDELT Gao Yufen

At the very beginning of the implementation of the “open to the outside world” policy, a Chinese official and his wife were invited to a western country, when a foreign friend paid his compliment to the official’s wife and said “ Your wife is beautiful” through the interpreter, the official answered “nali, nali” according to the then Chinese way of responding to praise. And the interpreter was one who never went out of China and knew nothing about western way of accepting compliment so he interpreted “nali, nali" into “where, where” literally. The foreigner was dumbfounded and answered “Everywhere”.

Later, the story was told all over China and became a classic example to illustrate how important to learn the culture while learning a foreign language. A heated discussion was launched: “ Should we communicate with foreigners in the way the foreigners do?” That is to say “ Should we learn the culture when we learn a foreign language?” Of course the answer is “Yes.”

Thereafter, Chinese students began to learn English and the culture it is embedded in. Whatever skills an English teacher is teaching, s/he is supposed to teach some cultural background knowledge. A few years later, the effort gets the satisfying result. People, especially young people have changed their way of reacting to people’s compliment. Moreover, their other behaviors have also changed to somewhat western ways. When you praise someone you are sure to get the answer ‘Thank you.”

Therefore, when I read Mr. Wang Dakun’s Multi-Canons and Acculturation (Guideline, June, 1998) I was surprised that he still held the opinion that Chinese students reacted to compliment “with humility and modesty and try to deny the compliment because that is how they would respond according to their culture.” Every Chinese may find that that was the phenomenon more than twenty years ago. The example he gave in the paper had long been a history.

According to Dr.Toh, “Human beings create and re-create their relations with one another, through which acquire a sense of themselves and the societies in which they live.” The world is ever changing. The development of economy brings about changes to people’s living condition and consequently it influences the way people behave to each other. In the past, Chinese people’s living condition was not good. People lived in a crowded Siheyuan (Chinese traditional courtyard) or box-like buildings. There they cooked in the public kitchens and used the same toilets. After meal people living in the same courtyard chatted together. Whenever anything happened, all the neighbors came to help. Therefore, there was less privacy.

However, everything has been changed dramatically since 1980s. With the improvement of living condition and more and more influence from western cultures people have already changed their way of behaving to people. Women, especially those beyond youth don’t like being asked about their age and of course the people around them act accordingly. So if a foreigner (or an overseas Chinese away from China many years) comes to China with the assumption s/he gets from Mr. Wang’s article, in order “ to show friendship and intimacy” s/he asks a female friend’s age or income he will probably be thought of as rude or outdated.

I’d like to point out, too, here, is that Mr. Wang was wrong concerning how Chinese students who learn English greet others in his article. Mr. Wang wrote in his article:

Some students call the family name of foreigners directly without any titles before them just as they call the name of their Chinese friends. And it is time to leave, the use of “Where are you going?” or “Are you going to…?” as a way of parting is very common among students.

When Chinese address a Chinese, there are several ways of doing that. Here I would like to illustrate them in the table below. (Suppose the Addressee’s family name is Zhang, the given name is Zhizhong)

Speaker	Addressee	The way Zhang Zhizhong is addressed
Old	Young	Xiao Zhang (seldom Zhang Zhizhong) Zhizhong
Young	Old	LaoZhang (this is the way with less respect) Zhang shushu / Zhang baibai (uncle Zhang)
Old	Old	Lao Zhang Zhizhong (seldom Zhang Zhizhong)
Young	Young	Zhizhong (to show intimacy) Zhang Zhizhong (not very familiar with him)
Boss	Boss	Title with Family name (not with very good relationship or not familiar with) Zhizhong (with good relationship or just to show intimacy)
Boss	Employee	Zhang Zhizhong Xiao Zhang (if Zhang is young) Lao Zhang (if he is not young)

So when Chinese people show their intimacy to peers or friends they call them the given name not their family name. When they address their foreign teacher they call his or her surname not family name (if not Mr.X). As for greetings and leave taking, the truth is that Chinese greet a Chinese “chi le ma?”(Have you eaten your meal?). It is the traditional Chinese way, but now “ni hao”(hello) is widely used. At the same time many people will greet friends or acquaintance with the sentence “ni qu na?”(“Where are you going”) when they meet in the street. When they part they say “Come to my home when you are free” or “Bye” in a western way.

Now Western culture has already been widely accepted by Chinese people, it is especially prevalent among the young. And the methods about how to teach western cultures that Mr. Wang advocated in his article are widely used in foreign language teaching in most Chinese universities and colleges. In fact the problem in China now is that more and more people are westernized and they are losing their own culture. When I taught in China, I found all of my students celebrated Valentine’s Day and Christmas but few of them remembered the Dragon Boat Day or Mid-Autumn Festival. When they learned writing, they could only write what they had already read about, that is to say, they could only use the so-called “standard English” to write about things happened in the English-Spoken-Country way. They could never express something with Chinese unique characters. For example, when I asked them to describe the differences of their hometown before and after “the open door policy”, my students had trouble in describing their old house because they only knew words “ apartment”, “villa”, “flat”, “ cottage” etc. But their thatched old house was totally different from apartment or villa or cottage, etc.

Another example is “Mian Ao（棉袄）” which the northern Chinese wear to pass the cold winter. It is a kind of hand-made coat with cotton padded into two layers of cloth. But it has a hidden meaning of warmth and intimacy (There is an old Chinese saying: daughter is the mother’s little Mian Ao). When my students wrote they usually used a simple word “coat”, thus the deep meaning was lost.

Therefore, I think Mr. Wang Dakun was generally right if he wrote the article at the beginning of 1980s, but not in 1990s. And Mr. Wang should also put forward ways of teaching Chinese culture in college English class. Because according to H. G. Widdowson, students should be taught the authentic language. While the authentic language for learning does need to be specially designed for pedagogic purposes so that it can be made real in the context of the students’ own world. Further more, “with ethnic and linguistic pluralism, English is used to impart native cultural values and historical traditions (Kachru, 1994).” If all the English learners only acculturate the English(es) culture(s), how did Englishes’ cultures come into being? How did “multi-canons” come into being? As everyone knows that Chinese culture has a long history and is full of wisdom. It has extensive knowledge and profound scholarship. Therefore, to make Chinese culture known to the whole world is to enrich the mind of whole race of human being. Under the present circumstances, English teachers of China should make a comparison between Chinese culture and other Englishes’ cultures while teaching. When teaching English to Chinese students we teachers should teach them not only English as a language, the Englishes’ cultures, but also how to express Chinese things in English, how to appropriate English to spread our Chinese 50 -thousand-year culture. If there is British English, American English and the Englishes “ loaded with various cultures and heritages, which shape a variety of cultural identities-Nigerian, Indian, Singaporean, Papua New Guinean---that are distinct from the Judeo-Christian identity of the language”, why can’t we have our Chinese English loaded with Chinese character? If we don’t use English to introduce Chinese culture to the outside world, how can other people acculturate our culture?

Mr. Wang said: “What we share as members of the international English-using speech community is the medium. The medium has no constrains on what message we transmit through it…In a world of multi-canons, users of Englishes need not behave like other users of Englishes, but must be understood and appreciated in context.” Therefore, we English teachers of China have the responsibility to disseminate our culture so that others will be able to understand our English, to acculturate our culture. If so, when we face the compliment from a westerner and respond with “nali, nali”, the westerner will not be surprised. Rather, s/he will accept it as perfect Chinese way of accepting compliment.

References

Action, W. R. and Walker de Felix. 1986. “Acculturation and Mind”. In Valdes, J. M. (ed) 1988. Culture Bound: Bridge the Cultural Gap in Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press.

Kachru, B. B. 1994. “The Speaking Tree: A Medium of Plural Canons”. In Tickoo, M. (ed.) 1995. Language and Culture in Multilingual Societies. SEAMEO RELC

Philipson, R.1992. Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford University Press.

Quirk, R. 1991. “The Question of Standard in the International Use of English”. In Tickoo, M.L. (ed) 1991. Languages and Standards: Issues Attitudes and Case Studies. SEAMEORELC.

Safnil, 1996. How to Integrate Cultural Aspects into English Classrooms, Guidelines, 18:2, 73-77.

Wang Dakun (1998) “Multi-Canons and Acculturation”, Guidelines 20.1, June 1998

Widdowson, H. G. (1994) “The ownership of English”, TESOL Quarterly 28:2, 377-388.

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