Beijing Sounds

No matter how good my Mandarin is, I know that the Beijing-er can always tell that I am an outsider (外地人）from my accent.

I spent the best part of 2007, living out of a suitcase in Beijing, working on a documentary about the Beijing Olympics.

For someone from a small country like Singapore, Beijing is a sprawling city and I find that I spent a lot of time in a cab, trying to get from one end of the city to another.

Three minutes into my cab ride, The same question always comes up, “小姐，你是哪里人？”　Miss, where are you from?” The subtext is of course, “You do not sound like one of us.”

In the process of making the film, I have come to a better appreciation of the Beijing accent and the Beijing dialect. While I was working on the sound-mix of my documentary, my Beijing born-and-bred sound engineers will cackle at phrases in my film while the nuances are completely lost on me.

It is great fun therefore to read this blog post, explaining what does the Beijing “R” sound mean?

Beijing Sounds – 北京的声儿 (link via Danwei)

My Beijing friends tell me that figuring out whether to end a word or phrase with the “R” sound, or “儿“声，is an art unto itself. I am sure an entire encyclopedia can be written on the “dos” and “don’ts”.

The outsider often betrays their very foreigness by trying too hard, ending each and every phrase with the “R” sound. As a result, they make a laughing stock of themselves.

What comes intuitively to the native Beijing-er may take a life-time of puzzling out for an outsider or 外地人like me.

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Leaning Towers of Beijing

Keel over the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Move aside, the Twin Towers of Kuala Lumpur.

Here come the Twin Leaning Towers of Beijing. The new CCTV (China Central TV) building is one of the growing number of icons designed by international architects in the city of Beijing.

I passed by this building almost every day while I was filming my documentary about the Beijing Olympics. I always felt bemused by the seemingly impossible structure of the towers.

The building is clearly part of the city’s efforts to lay claim to its status as an international metropolis by building futuristic and foreign-looking landmarks.

Call it odd or a show-off piece, it is definitely identifiable. In fact I used it as backdrop to one of the scenes in my film.

This week, the news is that the twin towers finally join, with a walkway connecting the two parts.

As usual, a plethora of ironic observations have surfaced in the international media:

China’s impossible leaning towers join : December 2007 : Richard Spencer : Foreign : Telegraph Blogs

Orwellian architecture in China | The Ministry of Truth | Economist.com

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