peasant

Zhang Yinzhi is a girl from Hangzhou. She went to Holland to study when she was 18 and then stayed there to teach Chinese. Among her students, according to her, one third are of Chinese descent, the other two thirds are “foreigners”. The starting level of her students with the Chinese background is no better than that of those “foreigners”. It might be quite a few generations already since their ancestors migrated to the country. If anything, they might be just say a few words or sentences in Cantonese or Hakka which might not be helpful at all in speaking Putonghua. They are so called “bananas”, yellow outside but white inside. On the other hand, She has a student who is blond but speaks Putonghua fluently with perfect accent. It turns out he got his primary and middle school education in Beijing when his father worked as a reporter in China. Maybe he is a “boiled egg” white outside and yellow inside? Anyway, the point here is those overseas Chinese students don’t really have much advantage in speaking a good Putonghua. They need to put in as much effort as others to master the language. But it seems they won’t get as much credit if they do.

China holds regular Chinese speech competitions for non-speakers from around the world. About 100 participants would be picked up from preliminary competitions to come to China to tour the famous places and give speeches with the government paying all the expenses. Then about 20 of them would be chosen for the final competition that CCTV would cover. They get various kinds of awards and almost all the 20 finalists would be granted the full scholarship to study in China.

In Zhang’s class, two students were picked up to participate in this event from comprehensive evaluations. The first one is a “banana” and the second one is a “foreigner”. But the organizers in China accepted the second one and denied the first one. The official reason is “the native language background would create unfair competition” but other “insiders” hinted to her that people wont enjoy someone with Chinese face speaking Chinese in the competition.

Zhang questioned the practice and asked if it is that entertaining to listen to a non-native speaker speaking Chinese. She pointed out that native speakers of English often complain about the accent the foreigners have speaking English while the Chinese got all excited to hear a non-native speakers using their mother tone. Often they would compliment lavishly even if a non-speaker just said a sentence or a short phrase, making him/her hesitant to speak more. It is understandable if this happened a few decades ago. Now with the globalization and many foreigners working and living in China, isn’t the time we accept that the non-native speakers can speak Chinese just as non-native English speakers can speak English?

(But practically, the organizers might also have difficulties if they let those with Chinese family background participate unless they compete in different groups, since some would indeed have advantages and make the competition unfair. But I can understand the frustrations of those “bananas” growing up in non-Chinese environment, putting as much effort to study the language and won’t be able to participate in the competition. But they won’t be treated as native speakers of the languages they grow up with either. For example, we heard so much complaint that they were denied the position to teach English even English is indeed their native language.)