Huntsman and Pretentious Mandarin
When I lived in China there was an unspoken rule that guided conversations among English-speaking foreigners: if one or more Chinese people were present, then use of Mandarin was permitted. But if everyone in the room was a native English speaker, using Mandarin was insufferably pretentious and thus prohibited.
There were exceptions, of course. In some situations, Mandarin simply functions better than English, particularly when in China. To this day, I'm still tempted to use words such as 麻烦 (ma fan) to describe an annoying situation or 没有 (mei you) for an all-encompassing expression of "no". Conversations in English among Mandarin-fluent foreigners in China are often peppered with various Mandarin words and sayings. But simply speaking Chinese for its own sake was considered the height of pretension and thus normally avoided.
I was reminded of this rule when watching this clip of a recent Republican debate in which Jon Huntsman, formerly US Ambassador to China, inserted Mandarin into an otherwise banal rebuke of Mitt Romney. For those unable to view the video, Huntsman says "As they would say in China, 他不太了解这个情形" - he doesn't quite understand the situation". Romney threw his hands up and laughed derisively, but otherwise the moment appeared to pass.
Yet Huntsman's gratuitous use of Mandarin on the campaign trail hasn't gone unnoticed among GOP voters, as this Politico piece points out. For one, the Republican drift toward anti-intellectualism has led the party base to view fluency in any foreign language as suspicious- just look at Newt Gingrich's jab at Romney's own ability to speak French. Huntsman was already in deep trouble with the GOP for agreeing to serve as President Obama's ambassador in the first place, so additional reminders of his time in Beijing likely hurt him more than they could help.
But I wonder if some of the backlash just results from the sheer pretension of Huntsman's Mandarin use. If he were using Mandarin to recite some sort of Confucian proverb, perhaps that'd be one thing. But to use Mandarin in such a banal way when a perfectly equivalent English expression is available seems, frankly, weird. It isn't surprising, then, that this once formidable contender for the GOP nomination has failed to connect with Republican voters.
January 15th, 2012 - 22:39
Interesting subject. On the other hand, perhaps it shows the guy’s just a real down to earth human and isn’t wake-to-sleep conscious of the banal, straightjacket-specificities of political ‘best practice’. This is possibly a good thing.
January 16th, 2012 - 20:52
Possibly, and to be fair he didn’t pander nearly as much as he could have during the campaign. But something about his use of Chinese still strikes me as a bit off.