The Maginot Line, Shanghai dialect, Bugs Bunny and Me.

My name is Michael C. Lee, definitely not a millionaire nor owner of either mansion or yacht. I do own a company called cawidgetwerx, a guitar, and some computer stuff. But I am a jazz trained musician and improvisation is second nature.

What do these all have in common? It’s a long story. I guess I’ll start with me. I am a first generation Chinese American, a native English speaker, and Jazz musician among other things. My father was born in Canton, China, my mother in Shanghai, China. Both were native speakers of their local dialects and ESL speakers. The Chinese language to me is a mix of different phrases I learned as a kid which consists of both Mandarin and Cantonese and both pronounced badly with a Shanghai accent. While I know it is a written language I have no concept how to express what bits I can semi articulate in any written form; traditional or ASCII (pinyin). My phonetic ability is so poor to begin with it takes several tries to get an idea across. Never would I have thought to be in a situation like last night – which was texting a friend in China on Skype and limited to text only.

Now there is a proper way to express the language in ASCII called pinyin and I have no clue how it works. Nor do I know the traditional written form save for a few symbols like horse. The first paragraph describes a pretty complex situation and I had to explain exactly that concept using only text chat and no accents or other emphasis items you get with a spoken conversation. That’s difficult.

Naturally I fell back to my jazz training and improvised. It worked like a charm. No, that’s not correct. It was still really difficult but I succeeded in the end.

The Shanghai dialect is a weird item. It is classified as a completely separate language having only two intonations rather than four as is the case with Mandarin and Cantonese. But, that’s my accent, and I was a 5 year old kid getting around in that city alone just fine using it.

I wonder who knows what the Maginot Line is?
It was a fortification system build in the 1930s in France. My mother knew about it and I learned of it through her. She never pronounced it correctly – she said it with a two tone Shanghai accent which places the emphasis on the exact wrong syllables than the correct English would, and I learned it the same way. Later in life I learned the correct way to say the name. What this means is I have no clue how to turn any of the pidgin spoken phrases in cantonese or mandarin (with the Shanghai accent no less) into an english word that anyone else could make sense of.

Enter Bugs Bunny. I watched a lot of cartoons as a kid and now. Bugs Bunny is my favorite because he gets away with causing loads of trouble and looking like a saint. In Jungian terms, Bugs is the Trickster Archetype which in Chinese folk stories is embodied by the Monkey character in A Journey to the West

Monkey is much admired for being clever and I felt the same about Bugs as I knew both stories from early childhood on. Is this starting to sound insane? Perhaps you shouldn’t be reading it then. I have no desire to ruin anyone’s peace of mind after all.

Pause and think.

Read the Journey to the West link at wikipedia. Hey cool, there are Chinese traditional written characters in that article that copy and paste into Skype!

Bingo.

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