Rendering the Regional

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Rendering the Regional Rendering the Regional Rendering the Regional LOCAL LANGUAGE IN CONTEMPORARY CHINESE MEDIA Edward M.Gunn University of Hawai`i Press Honolulu Publication of this book was aided by the Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University. ( 2006 University of Hawai`i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 111009080706654321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gunn, Edward M. Rendering the regional : local language in contemporary Chinese media / Edward M. Gunn. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8248-2883-6 (alk. paper) 1. Language and cultureÐChina. 2. Language and cultureÐTaiwan. 3. Popular cultureÐChina. 4. Popular cultureÐTaiwan. I. Title. P35.5.C6G86 2005 306.4400951Ðdc22 2005004866 University of Hawai`i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by University of Hawai`i Press Production Staff Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group Contents List of Maps and Illustrations /vi Acknowledgments / vii A Note on Romanizations /ix Introduction / 1 1 (Im)pure Culture in Hong Kong / 17 2 Polyglot Pluralism and Taiwan / 60 3 Guilty Pleasures on the Mainland Stage and in Broadcast Media / 108 4 Inadequacies Explored: Fiction and Film in Mainland China / 157 Conclusion: The Rhetoric of Local Languages / 204 Notes / 211 Sources Cited / 231 Index / 251 ±v± List of Maps and Illustrations Figure 1. Map showing distribution of Sinitic (Han) Languages / 2 Figure 2. Map of locations cited in the text / 6 Figure 3. The Hong Kong ®lm Cageman /42 Figure 4. Illustrated romance and pornography in Hong Kong / 46 Figure 5. Mcmug cartoon series / 47 Figure 6. From the novel Diary of an Ordinary Guy /52 Figure 7. ``The Taste of Apples'' in the Taiwan ®lm Sandwichman /61 Figure 8. The Taiwan telenovela Love /72 Figure 9. ``The Violent Protest of Damao City'' by Song Zelai / 97 Figure 10. ATaiwan media public service message / 105 Figure 11. Print media featuring regional news using local language / 106 Figure 12. ``Maoge'' cartoon series and the playscript for Joyful Loss from Chonqing / 120 Figure 13. The mainland docudrama ``The Black Ashtree'' / 126 Figure 14. The novel Prurient Earth by Lao Cun / 179 Figure 15. The ®lm Blush / 202 ±vi± Acknowledgments IN ADDITION TO the many sources cited elsewhere in the text a very large number of people scattered across many locations have contributed in a variety of ways with the several local languages, or dialects, that I have sought to discuss. Among my informants for Hong Kong and Guangzhou, I would like to thank Jennifer Ma, Tan Pack-ling, Elaine Wang, Kenny Ng, Margaret Chiang, Professor Sam Leung, and Carol Hui Lam. For Taiwan, special thanks go to Dr. Stella Wang, Amy Yun-san Huang, Dr. Chiang Shu-chen and the students at Jiaotong University, Dr. Shen Shiao-ying, Lulu Chen, and Lai Ming-sheng. For Beijing, I offer sincere thanks to Felicia Qiuyun Teng, to Zhang Quan, Jin Shan and the other members of the Institute of Literature in the Beijing Acad- emy of Social Sciences, and to Qian Kun and Qu Jiaojie. For Shanghai and Suzhou, special thanks go to Cao Lei, Professor Shi Rujie, Wu Yanyan, Ge Fei, Tan Xiaoying, Tan Tian, Ding Jingtang and Ding Yanzhao, Li Anyu, and Xu Guangming. For Fujian, I especially thank Professor Lin Baoqing and her student Zheng Bijiao. For Sichuan, I am especially grateful to Professor Jiang Xiaoli, to Professor Cao Shunqing and the faculty of the Chinese and Comparative Literature departments, to Professor Zhang Jin, and to Ren Jingqiu. In Xi'an I was greatly assisted by Wen Shizhen and Yu Genggeng. At Harvard University, Professor Leo Ou-fan Lee and the students of the Con- temporary China Cultural Studies Workshop offered me much good ±vii± viii Acknowledgments advice. Here at Cornell, as well, I am grateful for the comments of Professor Tsu-lin Mei and those of Liu Jin, who is now bringing her own academic background to this topic of study. Without the knowledge, insight, and assistance of these people I could not have begun to explore the many local language sources dis- cussed in this study. They each carry with them an extraordinary knowledge of dialects and communities that rarely ®nds its way to the surface of academic discourse. While I have imposed my own critical voice on their contributions, I hope at least some small portion of their own knowledge has found a constructive place in this small book. ANoteon Romanizations TONE MARKS HAVE been used only in particular instances where tone is a topic. The standard Pinyin romanization system appears throughout to transcribe Putonghua and Guoyu Mandarin vocabulary. For romanization of Hong Kong and Guangzhou Cantonese, the Yale System is used, as found in Read and Write Chinese: A Simpli®ed Guide to the Chinese Characters by Rita Mei-Wah Choy. Romanizations for Taiwanese Southern Min follow those in Xu Jidun (Kho Kek-tun), Changyong Hanzi Taiyu cidian (ATaiwanese language glossary of com- monly used Chinese characters). For Shanghai Wu there is no stan- dard system, and romanizations appearing in this study are adapted from two systems introduced in Qian Nairong, Shanghai fangyan liyu (Shanghai slang), and Ruan Henghui and Wu Jiping, eds., Shanghai- hua liuxingyu cidian (Adictionary of popular expressions in Shanghai Wu). For Sichuan Mandarin there are good sources in Zeng Xiaoyu, ed., Chongqing fangyan cijie (Glossary of Chongqing dialect), and Luo Yunxi et al., eds., Chengduhua fangyan cidian (Lexicon of Chengdu dia- lect). Also helpful is Liang Deman, ed., Sichuan fangyan yu putonghua (Sichuan local language and Putonghua). For other local languages, there are sources using transcriptions of the International Phonetic Alphabet, which are herein adapted to Pinyin romanizations. ±ix± Introduction AFTER THE FORGING of a Chinese empire, a standard style of writing was adopted by the Han dynasty court that over time increas- ingly departed both from the styles of classical texts and from the speech of any region. Toward the end of the millennium and until his death in AD 18, the scholar-poet Yang Xiong surveyed these regional languages, referring to them as fangyan, ``local languages'' or, if youwill, dialects, topolects, or regional speech. 1 He devoted twenty-seven years, it is said, to this labor and died before completing it, probably long before completing it. As centuries passed, traces of the speech of north China, no longer resembling the language of the Han dynasty court, appeared in the writing that the dynasty had standardized. Gradually this northern speech developed a written tra- dition of its own and was adopted as a lingua franca for administration and trade. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, candidates for of®cial positions were required to speak this language, and it became known as guanhua, ``of®cial speech,'' or Mandarin. While this lan- guage, or dialect, became the basis for a Modern Standard Chinese, known either as Guoyu Mandarin (National Language Mandarin) or Putonghua Mandarin (Common Speech Mandarin), the other, local languages of China entered the twentieth century with no sustained tradition of writing, and often none at all. Even prior to the advent of mass formal education and the mass media, writers in late imperial China producing texts of local-language operas, folk verse, and ver- nacular ®ction often tended to adopt Chinese characters from written Mandarin vocabulary when they were uncertain how to transcribe or represent an utterance in a local language, so that the writing of local languages left sporadic and fragmentary traces. ±1± 2 Introduction Figure 1. Distribution of Sinitic (Han) languages. Among ethnic Han languages, these local languages have included many dialects of Mandarin, as well as of Gan, Xiang, Wu, Min, Hakka, and Yue, or Cantonese (see Fig. 1). All of these exist as groupings of dialects, identi®able as related to each other by linguists, but often mutually unintelligible by any standards of daily use. Since I intend to ®nish this manuscript, I will not follow Yang Xiong's example by dwelling here upon the uncounted varieties of local languages that Han Chinese use daily. Yet, for all the power of the state, including the institutions of education and mass media, and for all the in¯uence that a modern, standard Mandarin has had upon their vocabulary, even upon phonology and grammar, local languages remain in wide- spread usage, as mutually unintelligible as they were a century before. Introduction 3 They are still an intimate part of daily life and the ways in which life is imagined. Local languages and cultural identities These local languages have for a long time carried with them various cultural associations, including stereotypes. As one scholar of regional culture in recent Chinese literature has noted, Han dynasty texts al- lude to regional stereotypes. Sima Qian's Shiji (Records of the grand historian), describes the men of Western Chu as ``customarily trucu- lent and easily angered.''2 Ban Gu's Han shu (History of the Han dynasty) comments that ``Shandong produces statesmen; Shanxi pro- duces generals.''3 Chinese have been continuously inventing and re- inventing such local stereotypes down to the present. The relationships between local languages and cultural stereotypes has been extensively surveyed in Leo J. Moser's The Chinese Mosaic: The Peoples and Prov- inces of China (1985), and it remains to explore this topic in literature and the media. During the Republican era, Shen Congwen relied on the historical reputation of the Hunanese (Western Chu) as ®ghters, Lao She on a more recent reputation of Beijing residents as glib and clever speakers. Both made use of local languages to authenticate such orientations. Even writers committed to a modern standard Chinese style could not resist inserting a few phrases of local language when their narratives touched upon a stereotypical event.
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