ACCOMPANYING my son Fred back to school on September 1st, the day schools start across China, we passed a group of students and teachers preparing the red flag for the flag-raising ceremony that marks the re-opening of Fangcaodi primary school after the summer holidays.
He muttered “Ni hao” (hello) to one of the teachers, then asked where his classroom was this year, enunciating the “er” sound in his sentence in true Beijing style. Close your eyes and this blue-eyed Irish boy could be a native Beijinger.
Which he is, of course. Although he wasn’t born here, Fred hadn’t even started to walk when we arrived eight years ago. On September 6th he turns nine and is in fourth class at the state-run school, where everything he learns is through Chinese, including English.
Fred spoke one word of German before we left Germany, and that was “Tschuss” or “goodbye”, which he uttered for the first time as we drove away from our Berlin apartment. He wasn’t speaking much English either.
Once he arrived in Beijing words, including Mandarin words, started to come quickly, and soon he spoke a mixture of both languages. An early meltdown during a jetlagged visit to his great-grandmother in Crumlin saw a two-year-old Fred yelling “Wo bu yao” (“I don’t want to”) as we tried to get him back into the car, much to the bemusement of a young couple passing by.
Beside his bed he has Harry Potter in English, but can read the Chinese version, “Hali Bote”, pronounced “ha-li bo-te” in Mandarin, almost as well.
It’s not for nothing that people say “It’s all Chinese to me” – Mandarin is even harder to learn than those other fiendish tongues, Double Dutch or Greek. It’s not just a question of learning the language, it’s about how to retain the written language. Even Chinese people forget that.
Each word, depending on the tone and context, can have multiple different meanings, so you will often see Chinese people drawing characters in tea spills on a restaurant table and asking questions like “Is that “shu” as in “book” or “shu” as in “summer”? Or do you mean “zhuan” as in “expert” or “zhuan” as in “brick“?”
A big chunk of Fred’s school day is spent repeating characters over and over – rote learning is the only way to learn the thousands of the pictograms that you need to read Chinese. To read newspapers, you probably need about 3,000 characters. It’s a lot of work.
This summer’s holiday was spent partly in Germany, and arriving in Berlin he was amazed by the graffiti – few teenagers would dare to scrawl on a Chinese wall, instead you mostly see the mobile phone numbers of fly-by-night property agents, special massage services and illegal human-organ sellers. One slogan in English contained the word “THATS” and he was puzzled as he read the stylised letter “A” in the middle as a Chinese character for “fan”, which means “ordinary” or “every”.
We have strange arguments about cultural issues. Fred has a directness that is thoroughly Chinese and not at all Irish. In Ireland people rush around saying “sorry” all the time, baffling Fred who asks me: “What have they done to say sorry for?” Chinese families don’t thank each other all the time, since the understanding is that as a family member, you are required to do everything for your relatives, and to bring a chorus of “thank yous” into the equation implies a certain distance, a lack of intimacy, a dearth of familial feeling. Sometimes saying “thank you” can be rude, although it is changing as society becomes more Westernised, particularly in cities.
His expression as he corrects my Chinese is priceless, particularly when I get tones wrong on simple words, and he looks at me like I’m a few jiaozi (dumplings) short of a dim sum lunch.
Fred likes to tell people how he is “Aierlan ren” (“an Irish person”) and he expresses his Irish heritage mostly through sport – he is devoted to Robbie Keane, proudly tells anyone who will listen that my maternal uncle Dinny Lowry won two caps for the Republic as a goalkeeper and gamely tries to interest his friends in the fact that Shamrock Rovers have qualified for the group stages of the Europa League.
While the number of Chinese speakers is growing quickly, most Chinese people are generally too amazed at a young foreigner speaking Mandarin like this to take in what he is saying, but they do ask questions like: “Does Ireland have an army?” and “If Ireland is so small, doesn’t it get pushed around a lot?” In fact, China’s consistent failure to translate its size into any kind of footballing honour is a major source of dissatisfaction.
Fred’s sister Anna is now also speaking a rich Mandarin, filled with the funny Spoonerisms of a three-year-old. When they want to discuss something privately among themselves, they slip into a strong Beijing dialect and speak fast. I can’t keep up. No chance.
The persimmons have just started to fall and leaves are turning as autumn approaches. It’s the nicest time of year, and Fred is aggrieved that he has to go back to the classroom just as the stifling summer is transformed into the cooler, clearer autumn.
Meanwhile, when the school song rings out and the students stand line up to raise the gold-starred red flag, he can sing out the words in Chinese with the best of them. Though no one else at Fangcaodi has an Ireland rugby jersey.