by J. F. Krause
Almost as soon as I agreed to come to Guangzhou, April and Elaine were on our database to locate people who could provide translation help in Mandarin, Cantonese, and Portuguese. Emily speaks Mandarin almost as fluently as English, and she also is pretty fluent in Cantonese. Her parents came to the US from Hong Kong just before she was born. Roberto is, or was, Macanese, the demonym for natives of Macao. His mom and dad were both mixed Chinese and Portuguese for several generations, but they came to the US when Macao was getting ready to return to legal association with mainline China. I think that’s what happened in Emily’s case as well, although both of the families made the move over ten years before the actual transition. Anyway, in addition to English, Roberto speaks Cantonese as his first language and is also fluent in Portuguese.
On the plane, we all got to know quite a bit about each other. I was pretty familiar with April, Elaine, and Jovantha’s stories, but as we shared our stories again, I realized how much there was to learn yet. I even learned a couple of things about Kevin that I didn’t know.
In April’s case, I knew that she was third generation Japanese-American, but before The
Sickness she had been engaged to a man whose parents came from the Philipines. She was only two weeks away from her wedding when the The Sickness struck. As she told her story, she had the same look so many of us get when we talk of our lives before. I’ve even seen it on children’s faces when they talk about their lives before The Sickness.
Elaine, who is a few years older than April, was married and had two little girls. She lost everyone. In her youth she had actually competed in a couple of rodeos during her high school and early college years. I asked her why she quit, and she looked at me as if the answer was completely obvious. It’s a look I get a lot, and not just from her. She got pregnant, got married, and graduated, evidently in that order. I suppose bareback bronc riding isn’t totally compatible with being pregnant. Elaine and April, while they support and respect me and will do anything for me, tend to think of me as their little brother. I get that a lot, too.
Both of them have been keeping company with men in SLO and I keep wondering how soon it will be before they announce they are engaged and pregnant, or pregnant and engaged which seems to be the new normal these days.
Emily and Roberto didn’t know each other before this trip, but I could see they were already becoming friends. They had a lot in common and I enjoyed hearing them share their stories about growing up Asian in America with parents who still longed for their homeland. I suppose all North Americans have that in common: we all have ancestors who missed their childhood homes when they came to their new homelands. I still miss Georgia. Change is often painful, but that doesn’t mean it should be avoided. Or can be.
Jovantha was from Oklahoma and joined the Marines for the same reason a lot of kids from families with limited means joined the military. She wanted to have the chance to better her future. She was raised with her brother by a single mother in a smallish town until she finished ninth grade and her mother decided there was a better school system in Tulsa, so that’s where she finished school. What I didn’t know was that she was captain of her debate team in high school and that they won the state championship her senior year. She had scholarship offers that she postponed because she actually wanted to be a Marine. She saw her three-year stint in the Marines as just one more good life experience before she accepted one of her scholarship offers and went to college. In a year, she planned to follow her dream and start college in SLO.
What I learned about Kevin was that he loved playing football and was heart broken when his parents made him give it up during eighth grade when one of the other kids on his team got a concussion during practice. He played basketball instead. He still loves basketball, but, according to him, he was a much better football player.
The kids were remarkably well-behaved on the flight. They participated in some of the conversations and played a lot of games. Because we weren’t crammed into our seats throughout the flight, when there was no turbulence, they could get up and move to the area where the flight attendant let them eat snacks and play on the floor. The first flight attendant was Julie again. Julie is from Chicago, and after her marriage, she and her new husband, who was not our pilot this trip, will be settling near Oklahoma City where he will fly out of the Air Force Base there. As I mentioned before, the Navy and the Air Force are fully integrated with the civilian transportation system. She joined in our conversations but still managed to take care of all our requests and play with the kids. Julie had been a flight attendant for twelve years when The Sickness struck. When the plane stopped for a few hours in Honolulu, she left us, and we were joined by Richard. Richard was a kick. Like Julie, he had been a flight attendant before The Sickness. In his case, he had been a flight attendant for almost twenty years. His new boyfriend is also a flight attendant and they see each other for only a couple of days a week, something that would have driven me to despair, but it seems to work for them.
When we landed in Guangzhou, we were met by their speaker and taken to a lovely hotel. We were pampered guests and got a great night’s sleep before I started the scheduled meetings. Kevin and the kids were given a grand tour of the city, the river, and the harbor. I envied them, but I was very glad they had so much to occupy them. Most of our hosts, even though from a Cantonese speaking city, were very fluent in Mandarin so the kids got some great practice in that language. Kevin is like me and has no ability in Mandarin so he, Chad, and Jovantha had to have an interpreter while the older kids could all sort of muddle through depending on their growing proficiency in Mandarin.
Our first meeting started promptly at 9:00 AM. In addition to the speaker from Guangzhou and the speakers from Macao and Hong Kong, there were representatives from the Zhuang community who spoke in Mandarin; two different Christian communities, one Mandarin speaking and one Cantonese speaking; and Shenzhen which is a large Mandarin speaking community. In addition, there were several smaller communities represented.
Before the meeting, I had been able to study up on the communities in the Guangdong region. Based on their own reports, two of the communities I would be talking with were larger than any city we had in North America. Guangzhou and Shenzhen were both vying for positions of influence in the region and, since they spoke different languages, one Cantonese and the other Mandarin, they were having trouble cooperating. It didn’t help that some of their leaders wanted to impose an extended set of rules and responsibilities that pushed the limits of the Rights and Responsibilities of the Coalition.
After introductions, I decided to just get things started. Since The Sickness, the various communities had done a lot of sorting and relocating. This had all been done voluntarily, but there had been some rancor, nevertheless. Early on, Shenzhen had announced that their official language was to be Mandarin. When they did that, many of their first language Cantonese speakers had simply picked up and moved to Cantonese speaking communities, primarily Guangzhou. The only other time I’d even heard about languages being a potential trouble spot had been in French speaking Canada. In the end, Quebec City and Montreal and a couple of the other communities in the area just carried on being French speaking with English being spoken as well, and everyone got along fine.
I started off by asking if there were questions for me. There were several: What languages did I speak? What did I think about what Shenzhen had done? Why were my children learning Mandarin? Was I there to impose solutions on them? There were several others, too, none of which seemed designed to trip me up.
“Let me begin by answering some of your questions. To start, there is no ‘official’ language in the Coalition, and none in SLO, not English, not Spanish, not sign language. My own first language is English as you might expect. I also speak Spanish, but my Spanish-speaking friends tease me a little about my accent and limitations. I also read French, a little. Finally, I’m more or less comfortable with International Sign Language or ISL. Three of my children have begun
studying Mandarin at school, and the fourth child will begin soon. SLO chose Mandarin because we have several native speakers in SLO and also because there are more people in the world who speak Mandarin as their first language than any other language, including English. My children, including our infant daughter, are also all in dual immersion Spanish and English language instruction programs at school as their basic means of learning. If there is time before they graduate high school in a few years, the older two will study Hindi. The younger ones will definitely be able to add Hindi to their studies. In addition, they are learning ISL at school and they get additional practice in ISL with Kevin and me. Kevin is fluent only in English, but, like a lot of native Californians, he can get by in Spanish. He is still learning ISL. My opinion about what Shenzhen did regarding making Mandarin their official language is unimportant. Your opinion is what matters. Finally, the Coalition will not impose any solutions on anyone as long as they meet their obligations regarding the Rights and Responsibilities of Coalition member communities. If the Rights and Responsibilities are not met, the only imposition the Coalition might make is to sever Coalition ties to the community that is at odds with the Coalition. I would remind you, however, that ‘freedom of speech’ is one of the rights in the Rights and Responsibilities.”
“Now, let me ask you some questions. Let’s start with this one: Why do you want to be a member of the Coalition?” I think that caught everyone off guard since it didn’t seem to have anything to do with language. There was no response for a while.
Finally, the Hong Kong speaker answered. “We in Hong Kong decided to belong to the Coalition because of what it stands for. We believe in the Rights and Responsibilities as delineated in the Coalition list. We also want to be able to send our people, our young people, to be trained in the Coalition’s newly established medical schools and also to the different advanced post graduate programs. And we appreciated your assistance, Bobby, in getting our community organized right after ‘The Sickness.” He was more used to having a translator than I was, and he used the translation pauses to think of his next sentence or phrase. I could learn from that.
I hadn’t noticed until the actual translations began by Emily and Roberto, but all the strong Mandarin speakers were near Emily and the strong Cantonese speakers were looking at Roberto. April was positioned beside me, and Elaine was sitting behind the English fluent participants. Jovantha was with Kevin and the kids since we didn’t need her during the actual meetings. “We in Hong Kong also believe strongly in having a common Coalition defense force, especially after what happened in Indiana. Also, not too many generations ago, this area was troubled by pirates and War Lords. We appreciate that benefit of Coalition membership very much. Oh, and our young people would kill us if they had to miss out on their Gap Year in California!” Every one laughed when he said that. I found that very heartening.
“How many of you have young people from your communities in the Gap Year program at Pendleton?” Every single person raised their hands and smilingly nodded their heads. It was very gratifying.
“Ok, how do the rest of you feel about what our colleague from Hong Kong said?” I waited a few seconds and thought I’d have to prime the pump, so to speak, but I was saved from that when the representative from the Zhuang village spoke up in English even though he was sitting with the Mandarin speakers. “We believe in freedom of speech but we have been criticized by….some….for making Zhuang our official language. We plan to teach our children other languages as well, but we want to build a community where the Zhuang language is the foremost language.”
“Let me ask you a few questions, then. You just told me that Zhuang is your official language, but do you require the non Zhuang speakers to learn Zhuang in order to live in your community? Do you forbid anyone from speaking in another language beside Zhuang? Do you allow residents to vote even if they don’t speak Zhuang? Would you provide translations for them so they can vote in an informed manner? I know that’s a lot of questions, but I think they are important.” Emulating Robert from Hong Kong, I’d paused after every questions and gathered my thoughts.
“No one is required to learn Zhuang in order to live in our community. No one is forbidden the right to use their own language in our village. No one is prevented or hindered from voting because of language. We haven’t translated our voting information into other languages, though. Do you think we should?”
“Do you want your voters to be fully informed before voting? Would translations help make them better informed before they vote?” My mom was a big questioner. I hardly ever remember her telling me to do something outright. She led me through a series of questions until I figured it out for myself.
“I understand. We will start translating for anyone who needs us to. But, for now, all the non Zhuang speakers have left our village for a Mandarin or Cantonese one.”
“Is everyone free to come and go as they please in your village?”
“Yes. Except, for the children, of course. They have to obey their guardians.”
“Ok. I think I understand how you do things. I firmly believe that translations of election materials are necessary for anyone who needs them in order to be informed before voting. Do all of you understand what is happening in the Zhuang community? Does anyone have any questions to ask?” I personally couldn’t see any major problems with what the Zhuang were doing, aside from translating official business as needed. Of course, they might have been feeding me a line, but it sounded acceptable to me. We in SLO only provide translations for those who request one, or that we believe need one. The lingua franca in SLO is English even though we have a fair number of people who speak it poorly or not at all. It is not an “official” language, however, but it is the de facto language of our community.
“I’m concerned that this village is speaking Zhuang in the Guangdong region. Guangdong is a Cantonese speaking area.” I didn’t know who said that, but it came from the Cantonese section. Roberto translated it for me.
Before I could speak, someone from the Mandarin area spoke up with Emily translating. “China is a Mandarin speaking country. Why do we have any other languages given official status?”
“Ok, I think we have a question that needs to be considered if we want to make progress. But before we go any further, I want to tell you a story about San Luis Obispo when we were forming our community rules. As you probably know, in the pre-sickness United States there were at least as many guns as we had people. After the sickness, we have about 4 or 5 thousand guns for every man, woman, and child. Before The Sickness, some areas of the country were very gun friendly and others didn’t like them at all. California was in a part of the country where most city dwellers would probably have liked to severely regulate guns, but not everyone agreed with that approach, even in California.
After The Sickness, our local planners realized that, even now, since we were never going to get total agreement, we had to come up with a compromise. After all, if we took guns away from everyone in San Luis Obispo, then the people who wanted to keep their guns would just move down the road to another community. Then, San Luis Obispo, or SLO as I usually call it, would be without guns and the next town over would have all the guns to themselves. No matter how we felt about guns, we didn’t want that. Since guns are a fact of life for us, and we don’t have enough people to find them and destroy them even if we all wanted to do that, and not all of us wanted to, we decided to make sure everyone knows how to handle and care for guns safely. We actually teach gun safety and responsibility at school. It’s a compromise.”
I looked around to see if I’d lost the room with my story about compromise. Seeing no one falling asleep, I went on. “As I see it, there are a lot of people who want to speak Mandarin in the region. There are also a lot of people who want to speak Cantonese and also the Zhuang language. If you try to enforce a rule on people that they don’t want to obey, they can always just move to the next town or neighborhood down the road. You’ve already seen tha
t happen to some extent. We need each other if we are to protect ourselves from future bad guys, and I believe that eventually there will be pirates again and even warlords. It will probably be a few years before they are really dangerous, but I believe they will become a problem we have to deal with and protect ourselves from. So do you want to force people to speak Mandarin or Zhuang or Cantonese and maybe have people leave and no longer cooperate with you, or do you want to work together and find a compromise everyone can live with?”
To their credit, they all appeared to seriously give thought to what I had just said. I realized I liked these people. They were remarkably thoughtful and sincerely concerned about finding a good solution to their problems.
“Forgive me, but I’m going to suggest a possible solution to your problem. In the pre-sickness world, Switzerland had four languages that were spoken by different regions within their own country. People spoke their own language at home, but they also learned each other’s languages at school. In fact, one of the four languages was natively spoken by only a few thousand people, but it was preserved and respected by everyone.”
Again there was silence, but slowly, their heads began to nod as they worked it out for themselves.
“Mr. Caldwell, are you suggesting that we try the Swiss language model?” This question was from the speaker from Macao.
“I suppose I was suggesting something like that, but, of course, the decision is completely up to each of you, and you can easily study how the Swiss solved their language problems. The Coalition only concerns itself if the Rights and Responsibilities are violated by a member community.”