I'm not the best poster girl for the Shanghainese language...

...but, perhaps, just the loudest one.

I was startled today to come upon an article about myself and Shanghainese in China Daily:


Shanghai dialect gains popularity
(China Daily)Updated: 2008-10-27 10:15

Lisa Movius decided to study the Shanghai dialect after a decade in the city and was motivated by "a growing appreciation for the subtleties of Shanghainese culture".

For a long time she was very anti-Shanghainese, belonging to the "please speak Mandarin" school. The dialect sounded "aggressive and sarcastic" to her unaccustomed ear. During her early weeks in Shanghai, she once overheard a conversation between two Shanghai colleagues. A little later she asked them what they were arguing about. "Arguing? We were saying what a nice day it is today!", they told her.

Ten years on, she realized that she could not understand the local culture without also embracing the actual Shanghai vernacular, she writes in her blog Beleaguering the Shanghainese (http://lisamovius.blogspot.com/).

She began to learn the Shanghai dialect with her friends on such websites as www.chinasmack.com and shanghaidialect.com.



This is simply a sloppy and inaccurate synopsis of an earlier post, but curious that they would bother. I am not sure whether it bespeaks to my own dubious local notoriety, the controversiality of Shanghainese and other regional identities, or the freak factor of a caucasian foreigner trying to learn Shanghainese.

It is also interesting to deconstuct the tone of the article. There is a patronizing element, beginning from calling Sangheiwu a "dialect" when it is most definitely a language. As much if not more so than the bastardized "dialect" of bastardized Europeanish that is American English. But yet there is also an undercurrent of "Yay Shanghainese!" in it. I suspect that different writers and editors pushame-pullyou-ed a mix of "Foreigners are learning Shanghainese - cool!" and "Foreigners are learning Shanghainese - they're crazy weird!" There also seems to be some negative judgement of me for supposedly taking ten years to decide I want to learn Sangheiwu - is is not what I wrote.

I just emailed it to a friend who's Shanghainese and who writes a lot about defending and asserting Shanghainese culture and identity. As I told him, I'm embarassed to be any sort of representative or public advocate for the Shanghainese language - because I am very slow and lazy about learning Sangheiwu. Just I realize that I should, and am trying, albeit not hard enough.