superborb | Entries tagged with meta: chinese

I feel Some Kind of Way whenever I encounter really rigid views of Chinese culture. Twitter forces one to start adding unnecessary caveats and apologies in advance and I want to resist that impulse, but really, sometimes you need to caveat your instincts, especially if you don't have any actual evidence backing them up?

Like, yeah, your first instinct might be that Confucianism is patriarchal and so there can't be any female sect leaders in wuxia, but that's simply not true? Things are sexist enough without adding MORE sexism please. My first instinct personally upon encountering that "disrespectful to Confucianism" (sigh, as if culture were static) narrative was that it seemed incorrect.

And then I went searching for receipts, which @douqi7s provided (from Jin Yong, since this is @douqi7s):
1. Lin Chaoying and Xiaolongnv in Return of the Condor Heroes
2. Abbess Miejue and the entirety of the E'mei sect in Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre
3. Abbess Dingxian and the entirety of the Hengshan sect in Smiling Proud Wanderer

Anyway, this seemed egregiously wrong, but even those things that are commonly known to be correct are more flexible than generally presented. I had the previous post on how heterogeneous practices can be in time, but even more trivial things. In the last episode of Delicious Romance, there's single word name use, so that's unusual, but it's not THE END OF THE WORLD TABOO like fandom sometimes makes it sound. (Definitely unusual though.) People are soooo strict about name taboo, but my grandpa named my dad with one of the characters in his name and if he had a girl, he was going to use the other character. (Also definitely unusual.)

I guess I just feel like fandom sometimes treats Chinese culture like a fantasy setting where there are static unchanging rules, but it encompasses so many people over so much time. And people have instinctive feelings over what feels right, which is very valid, but sometimes their instinct is setting up rigid rules that are either way too rigid or simply wrong.

Of course Chinatowns represent an important part of AsAm and ChnAm history. How could I not know? How could I not have trekked towards it during childhood, during college, during grad school for the taste of food that satisfied, for the groceries you couldn't get elsewhere, for the familiar faces?

Yet, in the end, it's not really a place for me to call my own. The diaspora experience of those who grew up in Chinatowns is not my experience. The languages spoken there aren't my languages, not figuratively, but literally: Cantonese and Hokkien, topolects that are familiar in sound through exposure, but ultimately are a few words I understand in a sea of incomprehension. Chinatowns were built on waves of immigration that I do not belong to, built by people from places my ancestors were not from.

Still, there's the AsAm history that makes me want to claim some small part of it. Is it odd to build an identity based on how you are excluded together? Here is where the anti-Chinese animosity built towards the Exclusion Act. Here is where the Asian Exclusion Act was born. Here is where I grew up under that unifying label of Asian American, though it encompassed such disparate and wide ranging experience.

Since I keep pulling it up, I thought I'd do a quick pinyin-ification / translation of this source https://news.tvbs.com.tw/ttalk/detail/topic/6756. Some caveats here are that it's compiled by a Taiwanese internet person (though this site is a respectable TV channel), so like, this is definitely one person's suggestion. The article itself gives the caveats that as long as both parties feel that it's appropriate there should be no problems. After all, people in real life will use "wrong" titles all the time; the example given in the article is women may "properly" call sister's children 姨甥 (yisheng), but usually 外甥 (waisheng) is now used. There's also, as I've mentioned quite a lot before, a lot of variation especially in the grandparent terms -- the ones used here for grandparent's siblings (not even considering their spouses) are not ones I would use.

( Read more... )

Since I've been reading a lot of random Chinese culture stuff lately and have amassed some fun facts, but it felt weird to just share them as one offs? I will vaguely theme this set "stuff that shows how heterogenous practices can be in time."

1. The degree of relation which counts as incest has varied considerably throughout history and cousins-who-don't-share-a-surname have not counted as incest for most of it. In general (exceptions blah blah), there was a taboo on marrying someone with the same surname (this comes from the Book of Rites), but cousins where your fathers weren't brothers? Marriage material. To emphasize this,

rekishi linked an interesting paper by Bret Hinsch called "The Origins of Han-Dynasty Consort Kin Power," which describes how during not only was marrying your maternal cousin extremely common among royalty in the Han and Zhou dynasties, the word 舅, now used for maternal uncles only, was also used for fathers-in-law, and they were often one and the same.

2. In the past, it was actually common to prepend the husband's surname to the woman's name. The uh, first English language citation I found was in a pinyin guide ahaha, "Chinese Romanization: Pronunciation and Orthography" by Yin Binyong and Mary Felley, which lists it as a separate class of proper names. (For the curious, this is one case where pinyin uses the hyphen; you hyphenate the two last names.)

An interesting side note when I was trying to research this practice: there's actually a perspective that NOT changing your name is more patriarchal because you're always an outsider (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/world/asia/china-women-surnames.html).

3. I had known that the left-over-right cross collar rule for hanfu came from the development of agriculture, where it becomes convenient to store small items in the collar, and conveniently distinguishing Han Chinese from "barbarians" who wore right-over-left for a wider range of motion for archery. This article (https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/27924723) explained how the 马山楚墓 archeological dig, which dates to the Eastern Zhou dynasty, has clothing with both right-over-left and left-over-right in evidence, while the 马王堆 dig, which is from the Han dynasty, only has left-over-right clothing. The article also goes on to explain that in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, which was an unrecognized state that tried to overthrow the Qing, they wore right-over-left as a symbol of resistance.

I was looking at the taiwanese terms for gay/lesbian family members that was making the rounds, and was thinking about how heterogeneous family terms are in China (and obviously the diaspora). More than anything else, I feel like family terms preserve regional differences in topolect. (Especially confusing when the same term means different relatives in different topolects.) I know that for 3 of my 4 grandparents, I use varying degrees of topolect terms instead of standard Mandarin, even though I am generally unable to speak those topolects.

Anyway, how this translates into fic is beyond my abilities, I just wanted to ramble a bit about how fluid the relative terms are compared to how they're often presented. Like, no, I don't have a 外婆wai4po2, I have an a2bu3.

Actually, I think maternal grandmother is one with the most variance across China, with also 姥姥 lao3lao, 阿嬷 a1mo2, 婆婆 po2po, 细爹 xi4die1, 家家 jia1jia1. There was a big kerfluffle a few years ago where some textbooks in Shanghai used laolao instead, and like (I say this with love), Shanghainese people got Very Upset at this northern nonsense. (Waipo is apparently more southern.)

In the MDZS novel, MXTX specifies that the Lan strictly sleep from 9 PM to 5 AM. (And WWX strictly sleeps from 1 AM to 9 AM lol) Why this specific time? From the many times my grandma scolded me, this is bc of TCM beliefs. Venturing too far into the internet for this brings up a lot of woo of dubious historical accuracy, so I just called my grandma to ask, and I'm mostly recording this for future self reference.

(Flashback to ABC Chinese class in college when we'd take turns calling our parents for help.)

Anyway, my grandma says each of the 12 blocks of time (that Chinese timekeeping used to use) are associated with specific health implications. Therefore, you have to calm down and get ready for bed at around 9 PM and be asleep before 11 PM and wake up after 5 AM. The hours right before 5 AM are ~important to stay lying down~ so that your blood will circulate appropriately.

But then she went on to say that my grandpa (a professor) would always stay up late bc the late hours are the quietest and best for reading.

In particular, figuring out how to group words in pinyin is hard! So I wanted to write a reference for myself too. The goal of all these rules is to make it easier to read. There are other systems to romanize Chinese, but as MDZS / the Untamed are from mainland China, pinyin is the official way. This was written with an eye to common use cases in fic with untranslatable words or concepts. Also, like, do whatever you want, this is if you want to do it ~properly~.

Names: I'll use Wei Wuxian as an example. That was the proper way. Camel case (Wei WuXian) and separating the words (Wei Wu Xian) are incorrect.

Names with prefixes: The prefix is separated and capitalized. (Exception: historical figures like Kongzi (Confucius) are written together.) Therefore, it is properly written A Yuan. I know it looks weird. Sorry.

Names with titles: The titles following the name are separated and uncapitalized. Wei qianbei, Lan xiansheng. I know it looks even weirder. Sorry.

Place names: The distinguishing and the general "what this is" part are separated and both are capitalized. Jinlin Tai is correct because "Jinlin" is the distinguishing name for it and "Tai" means tower.

Proper nouns: In general, capitalization follows the same "proper nouns are capitalized" concept as English. Since Chenqing would be a proper noun in English, we capitalize it.

Grouping: Modern Chinese is polysyllabic, despite popular misconception. Therefore, you space pinyin based on words with a single meaning. There can be ambiguity here! Older brother (gege), martial older sister (shijie) are written in a group and uncapitalized. Words with more than four syllables are separated if possible.

If the group results in ambiguity, an apostrophe is used to separate the syllables (second syllable starts with a, o, or e). E.g. pingan could be pin+gan or ping+an, so you'd write ping'an to disambiguate. This is also why the city of Xi'an is written with an apostrophe -- otherwise it could be the single syllable xian.

ETA: Prefixes for non-names: These get grouped with the word they modify. Therefore, ajie is technically correct.

Hopefully that was helpful! It gets a lot more complicated, but this covers most of the common cases I've seen in fic.

ETA2: An update to point out that this is the "official" PRC Pinyin rules, and people may/may not follow them IRL and of course there are different rules in other countries! And I personally wouldn't necessarily follow all the rules (A Yuan could be ambiguous in English for example), but it's nice to break rules on purpose instead of accidentally.