他的名字是 John Cena
June 17, 2016 10:09 AM   Subscribe

John Cena holds two minutes of his press conference in Chinese, arguably just as well as Mark Zuckerberg's forays into the language. This is partially due to the fact that the WWE offers its stars a free second language program, but is also indicative of the wrestling promoter's big push into India and China. The company just signed their first Chinese national athlete... and, well, WWE has a large fan base in India.
posted by redct (48 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
Do the Chinese think we believe wrestling is not fake?

Goddammit.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 10:16 AM on June 17, 2016


I thought this was really interesting because among other things, his accent reproduces how many words sound to me, as an English speaker who knows a smattering of them, so I could identify them when spoken.
posted by mobunited at 10:23 AM on June 17, 2016


Aw, John Cena is such a cutiepie. His role in 'Trainwreck' involved speaking a little bit of Mandarin as well. I'd link to a video, but it is NSFW and I am at W.
posted by Fig at 10:25 AM on June 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


I finally got around to watching Trainwreck while on mini-vacation a couple of months ago, and I've had a weird little crush on John Cena since then, and this is honestly just making it worse. I'm almost ready to dive into Tumblr for the inevitable John Cena Fuck Yeah pages.
posted by palomar at 10:33 AM on June 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


All of these other Americans trying to speak Chinese make me feel better about how shit I always was at it (I studied abroad in Shanghai in college, lo these many decades ago). See also: the live action shows at Shanghai Disney I've seen on the youtubes with imported cast members. Maybe I'm not just unusually, preternaturally, spectacularly failly at Mandarin! Maybe it really is legitimately difficult! (Brought to you by the fact that I went to college with a bunch of braniac nerds who made this shit look easy.)
posted by soren_lorensen at 10:39 AM on June 17, 2016


(Just to clarify, John Cena didn't do a bad job, but I was always comparing myself to a couple friends who went from zero to native speaker in an absurdly short period of time while I remained at the "ni hao, cesuo zai nar?" level. And in the early 90s I had no one else to compare myself with because learning Mandarin was not yet A Thing in the U.S.)
posted by soren_lorensen at 10:45 AM on June 17, 2016


(1) I had chairman Cena as a substitute teacher in 1997. Though it was for biology class, not Chinese.

(2) I was totally dumbfounded when I was laid up with Delhi-belly for a couple days and saw that WWF seemed to be on every other channel there.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 11:08 AM on June 17, 2016 [3 favorites]


Gonna say that, as a Chinese-Canadian, Mark Zuckerberg and John Cena learning Chinese makes me uncomfortable on a deep, visceral level. I am acutely aware that the reason why white men like them are engaging with my culture is out of capitalism. Their respect for me and my culture is also defined by capitalism, as opposed to being informed by any understanding of power dynamics or race.

As a result, I'm finding myself increasingly exoticized and commodified by these men. I mean, just this morning, I had to fend off this dude who explicitly told me that I was attractive to him because I was Asian. When I told him I was uncomfortable with his remark because it made me feel fetishized, he told me that since he grew up travelling back and forth between Asian countries and Canada, he thought we would get along because we would "mesh culturally". Where did he even get that assumption? I was raised and born here. Beyond that, the way he encroached upon me was entirely entitled - as if he considered me a product for his consumption. I'm not the only one who has been treated this way. The Asian women in my life have also told me how they are intensely comfortable with the white men who behave this way to them as well. We are also disturbed by their trend of speaking for us - it seems like every day that I meet a white man who waxes on about how well they know our language, our culture, us. This, too, is consumption of our culture - these men use knowledge about our culture as social currency to show off how worldly, well-traveled, and diverse they are to other white people. The worst off is when they use these experiences to directly contradict and argue with what we say - especially when we talk about our experiences with racism, they will go, "no, I know your culture, that does not happen." They will wave around their token Asian wife as the counter-example to our point. And then the other white people in the room will listen to them over us. He is Marco Polo; we are the brutish savages he writes about. Why are we not grateful to him, for being an ally?

Where white people see cute, awkward, geeky white men learning another language, I see the spectre of colonism. These are exactly the entitled, privileged, brogressive men who think everything in our society belongs to them in the first place - why should I trust them to engage with my culture respectfully?
posted by Conspire at 11:37 AM on June 17, 2016 [33 favorites]


I have less than zero interest in pro wrestling, but John Cena is comedy gold. "Do you have kids?"
posted by mcstayinskool at 11:49 AM on June 17, 2016 [5 favorites]


Conspire, they're not learning Mandarin for you. He'll, Zuck's wife is from a Cantonese speaking family, he's not learning Mandarin for her either. They're talking directly to the PRC, which is busy as hell learning English for capitalist motives, has no actual respect for or interest in American culture, and is pursuing aggressively colonialist projects of its own. This is kind of like American Evangelical churches engagement with Israel, wherein my presence right here in America as a Jew isn't any part the conversation they're trying to have.
posted by 1adam12 at 11:52 AM on June 17, 2016 [17 favorites]


I'm not sure how that contradicts what I'm saying when I say that the popular image of white men harmlessly learning Chinese impacts me on a personal level? I'm also not sure why you're 'splaining this to me when I'm aware of that myself.
posted by Conspire at 11:56 AM on June 17, 2016 [7 favorites]


I know nothing about this guy beyond this and Trainwreck, and the Trainwreck press interview where Amy Schumer says he improvised most of his Trainwreck lines. Which is to say, of course, that I adore him madly.
posted by BlahLaLa at 12:12 PM on June 17, 2016


I sure do wish someone had been in the audience shouting "WHAT?" every few seconds.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 12:23 PM on June 17, 2016 [3 favorites]


I am acutely aware that the reason why white men like them are engaging with my culture is out of capitalism. Their respect for me and my culture is also defined by capitalism, as opposed to being informed by any understanding of power dynamics or race.

Yes, how dare these white men learn to speak the language of people that they wish to do business with as opposed to just demanding that everyone speak and understand English?!

I have trouble seeing what's wrong with this bare-minimum level of attempting to engage with people.

I guess I can see why it's frustrating to be constantly seeing stories giving gold stars to English speakers who go "above and beyond" and try to become bilingual (which is something that everyone who grows up with a different native language is pressured to do if they want to interact with the wider world). For me this was interesting from the point of view of John Cena whose public persona is not really of a international businessman type.
posted by sparklemotion at 12:42 PM on June 17, 2016 [25 favorites]


Where white people see cute, awkward, geeky white men learning another language, I see the spectre of colonism. These are exactly the entitled, privileged, brogressive men who think everything in our society belongs to them in the first place - why should I trust them to engage with my culture respectfully?

You are absolutely entitled to feel how you wish, but this is a an absurd characterization of John Cena — of all people.

I really don't know how else to respond to the rest of what you said, except to note that I disagree with your assertion that this is some kind of "fetishization" on Cena's part. He did not have to learn anything, but it certainly would demonstrate that he's willing to put in work and learn the language — and perhaps some of the nuances — of a culture he is going to have to do business with.

The other experiences you noted sound creepy and weird, yes. Going from that to calling Cena speaking 2 minutes of Mandarin "the spectre of colonialism" almost made me dismiss that part. YMMV.
posted by Dark Messiah at 12:57 PM on June 17, 2016 [28 favorites]


Ugh, the way this comment thread goes, reminds me of why I find it so hard to be a member here.

Hey, Metafilter, remember how many times POC and QPOC members voice how we are being talked over when we share our experiences, who ask us to be "more reasonable and more well-meaning" because obviously our feelings and connections are not legitimate, and y'all are doing a shitty job and treating our experiences as something to dismiss? You are doing it AGAIN. Stop perpetuating whiteness.

For a crash course, being complicit in systems that profit off of people of color's bodies, experiences, and cultural capital is a THING. Do you want to know how many times I've talked with my parents and others in the Chinese community, who laugh bitterly about white people finally being interested in China because now "we're a global superpower" when as early as 10-15 years before, we'd read bullshit in national magazines about how we are "shadow of our former self" due to British colonialism? Many of us are aware that people are only doing this because Chinese people have money now, and there's a market. If it was any other country, then they'd go learn another language. It's transparent as hell.

Are you all aware of this incredibly bizarre AskMeFi question, where this white guy literally fired dozens of employees in a Chinese company and got offended when everything went against his American colonial commando way? How many people do I know who learn Chinese/Korean/Japanese because they want mixed race white babies and to participate in a "cleaner culture" than theirs. It's 21st century Orientalism. Like, this shit is CONNECTED. It's whiteness in colonialism.

Many of us don't get a chance to view people like John Cena or Mike Zuckerberg in isolation. Like sure, maaaybe John Cena isn't like that. Who knows! May I ask what is your personal relationship to John Cena and defending this? I would love to genuinely know, since I am baffled.

But the fact that Conspire is sharing their visceral, uncomfortable remarks is an incredibly important point of knowledge and worth considering about how invasive whiteness is, when it comes to consumption of cultural and racial identities.

"it seems like every day that I meet a white man who waxes on about how well they know our language, our culture, us. This, too, is consumption of our culture - these men use knowledge about our culture as social currency to show off how worldly, well-traveled, and diverse they are to other white people." Going to re-highlight this.
posted by yueliang at 1:31 PM on June 17, 2016 [29 favorites]


Mod note: Feel like there's some middle space here that can accommodate both the idea of someone feeling uncomfortable personally with some of the like structural weirdness of capitalism and cultural cynicism etc that this touches on and the idea that John Cena giving a WWE presser doesn't make him the anointed representative of that larger body of exploitative/othering bullshit and weirdness driving that feeling; maybe let's not keep pushing this toward a throw down on that front.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:51 PM on June 17, 2016 [7 favorites]


I wish I could still get in to wrestling because I think I could be a huge Cena fan, when I hear about him it's usually cool stuff like this. It's really awesome that he took advantage of the program the WWE offered and really got into it enough to try and make a connection with fans and potential fans in the most populous country in the world. Sharing an example of American culture (a glorious, dumb, dangerous, exploitative, sometimes awesome one) seems like a positive sort of outreach so I'm glad the WWE is taking this shot. Athletes can be excellent cultural bridges. Yao Ming really changed how some sports fans I know thought about China.

I wish I wasn't terrible about learning foriegn language because I watch TV and movies from around the world but subtitles or dubs just aren't as good as knowing the original language. It's cool that a lot of people around the world do know English so you can usually find interviews and stuff where actors and directors can talk to you without the language barrier. I imagine for a non-English first audience consuming English media this is a much less frequent opportunity. Good on Cena.
posted by Drinky Die at 2:15 PM on June 17, 2016 [2 favorites]


🎺 🎺 🎺
posted by foobaz at 2:16 PM on June 17, 2016 [2 favorites]


What would be the right thing for John Cena to do here?

Not attempt to promote his western entertainment enterprise in China?

Promote his western entertainment enterprise in China without attempting to learn even a word of the country's languages?

I think I can understand (though I disagree with) an argument that the first option would be the best. And if that's the answer, then it seems like the problem is that WWE is promoting itself in China, not that John Cena decided to learn Mandarin.

p.s. yueliang, the link to the AskMe that you referenced is broken -- I'd be interested to read it if you wanted to repost.
posted by sparklemotion at 2:19 PM on June 17, 2016 [2 favorites]


I'm surprised that so many people think that I'm specifically singling out John Cena as an individual here, and are invested in having the conversation fixate especially upon that. PoC should be allowed to talk about the collective impact of white people as a group upon them; specifically, I call attention to how we uncritically view the actions of John Cena and Mark Zuckerburg through a white liberal viewpoint, and laud them for promulgating diversity without understanding that there may be unexamined cultural dynamics around racism here. Thus, I provide my own view as a Chinese-Canadian as a foil to that, to demonstrate how the actions of these men are not necessarily uniformly positive or even neutral in impact.

Like, I don't give one shit about what John Cena, as an individual does. I care about how as a culture, we filter and represent his actions, and how as a culture, we enable orientalism and appropriation by refusing to present these actions as anything but uniformly good in the mainstream. I get that white people are so unaccustomed to being seen as anything as special snowflake individuals that they can't snap out of that mentality whenever anyone talks about the trends that specific white people illustrate, but really, that fragility isn't my duty to coddle.
posted by Conspire at 2:29 PM on June 17, 2016 [15 favorites]


Oh, another random thought about athletes and language. When the Phillies won the World Series in 2008 their manager was Charlie Manuel, an older guy who grew up in Virginia and had some rough times when he was a kid. Some idiot fans and media liked to make fun of him when he first got here and the team was bad by making fun of his accent, calling him a country bumpkin and stuff. I always wondered if these people knew he also can speak Japanese because he spent most of his playing career in Japan, where teammates called him the Red Devil (or Red Ogre). He's probably experienced a lot more of the world than your average random Philadelphian and some treated him like a dummy defined by where he was born because of how his voice sounded. People sometimes. They see somebody's skin color or how they talk and just make assumptions about everything they do instead of seeing them as an individual.

Also:

DB: Not that you were ever THAT big, but were you ever tempted to try sumo wrestling while over in Japan?
CM: No, no. But I do like pro wrestling and Antonio Inoki used to live right next door to me. He was a big-name rassler in Japanese wrestling at that time. He was the one who fought [Muhammad] Ali.
DB: So, have you ever been to a Wrestlemania event live?
CM: Yeah, I've been a couple of times. I saw Batista, I saw Vader and the heartthrob, Shawn Michaels in Cleveland. And Sunny, the woman. She was better than all of them.

posted by Drinky Die at 2:34 PM on June 17, 2016 [2 favorites]


I humbly submit that for a business like pro wresting (see Top 20 Most Racist Gimmicks in Wrestling History), this is probably a very small step in the right direction.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 2:37 PM on June 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'm surprised that so many people think that I'm specifically singling out John Cena as an individual here, and are invested in having the conversation fixate especially upon that

Well, the thread is about John Cena. (And to a lesser extent Mark Zuckerberg, which to me feels like kind of a derail b/c god knows I give the side eye to white dudes who hook up with Asian ladies but that's also unfair because I know nothing about his relationship and to give the side eye to him robs his wife of her agency in the relationship and lord knows I'm all about miscegenation so IDK).

PoC should be allowed to talk about the collective impact of white people as a group upon them; specifically, I call attention to how we uncritically view the actions of John Cena and Mark Zuckerburg through a white liberal viewpoint...I care about how as a culture, we filter and represent his actions, and how as a culture, we enable orientalism and appropriation by refusing to present these actions as anything but uniformly good in the mainstream.

These are valid things to discuss, but I find myself at a loss when the specific person and event in question doesn't seem to be displaying or promoting "orientalism [or] appropriation." Like, if you hadn't spoken up, I would have assumed that going to China and talking about an American "sport" that is popular in China in Mandarin is the opposite of "orientalism and appropriation". And hence yeah, neutral to good. When I see this thing being grouped with the collective impact that white people have on Chinese culture, I start to worry that the only way to be respectful would be to have white folks continue to ignore and dismiss China and its people (except when those people can come and be exploited and be model immigrants and cook westernized versions of their food).

I mean, there are lots of really terrible ways that countries and organizations can try to export their culture, and there are lots of terrible ways that white folks pretend to be enlightened through their knowledge of other cultures. But is this really one of those ways? And if so, what should have been done differently?
posted by sparklemotion at 3:23 PM on June 17, 2016 [7 favorites]


Conspire, yueliang, I just want to say that I and no doubt many silent others hear you, but maybe aren't sure how to engage the conversation here without what seems like an empty-posty "yeah, I see what is happening too and that is fucked right up."

Wrestling culture represents the ugliest parts of our violent, hypermasculine, racist/stereotypical, American culture. I would prefer that it were not an ideological export to anywhere.
posted by sibboleth at 3:42 PM on June 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


I don't feel as strongly as, or identical to, how conspire does (speaking as a Chinese-American), but I guess what bothers me a bit about stuff like this is not that white guys are learning Chinese but the framing of how amazing it is that these guys speak Chinese -- "John Cena can speak Mandarin as if being John Cena isn't enough", "John Cena stuns the internet by giving fluent speech in Mandarin," etc., when there are millions of people in the Chinese-speaking (and non-English-speaking) world who learn English to the same degree and who aren't given accolades or fulsomely praised for it.

Obviously, English is in the position of being the undisputed lingua franca of commerce and so there's way more incentive for the average Chinese person to learn English than for the average American to learn Chinese*, but if it's a feat for guys like Cena and Zuckerberg, who presumably had high-quality private tutoring, then it's just as much if not more a feat for the uncelebrated non-Anglophone masses who learn English.

It's the sharp disparity that bothers me, to be clear -- I certainly think that language learning is difficult, as a heritage speaker of Mandarin who has had difficulty maintaining my command of the language in the US.

*Incidentally, I also think that learning Mandarin for the average English-speaker for solely business reasons is a waste of time, mostly because of the incredible amount of effort it takes to become fully literate in Chinese. Sure, you can become fairly fluent in the spoken language, but then you're an illiterate businessman and I am just skeptical about how useful you can be in business if you can't read anything at all.
posted by andrewesque at 4:15 PM on June 17, 2016 [13 favorites]


While I don't think much of the analysis above is wrong, I think no small part of it is just that folks might assume John Cena was a dumb wrestler who can't learn good.
posted by mobunited at 5:01 PM on June 17, 2016 [10 favorites]


a lot of this is an identity thing too, right? I think, for me at least, growing up being Othered by my mostly white peers and always having people be surprised that I might also like their favorite TV shows or athletes, seeing someone like John Cena, hypermasculine, progressive male tap into the little bit of my cultural heritage that I was always granted some special amount of cultural capital for (while being denied myriad other forms of legitimacy) is really kind of troubling

I mean, of course we're living in a globalized world, of course capitalism produces certain behavioral outcomes. but me, as an individual Chinese-American who constantly has to grapple with his identity because of the box people put me in is left really uncomfortable when the white male in my culture can just jump right in, in this tiny space that I've isolated for myself, the bit of heritage that I've stop feeling ashamed of and Othered by, that I'm finally starting to embrace

at least that's how I see it. it's uncomfortable, definitely, it's not the worst, of course, but amidst the myriad other mounds of crap that's tossed my way because of my appearance, it ends up being just another stressor that I really don't want in my life
posted by runt at 5:11 PM on June 17, 2016 [7 favorites]


Does anybody who does speak the language have anything on the reactions from fans in China? I'd be interested to hear more about how the target audience of wrestling fans there have reacted to Cena's surprise but all the articles I can find are from the American perspective. Spike in popularity? Ho-hum no big deal?
posted by Drinky Die at 5:17 PM on June 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


Probably more like a flattering novelty, as is always the case for those who live as the majority in their home countries (see also: Japan).
posted by cendawanita at 5:31 PM on June 17, 2016 [2 favorites]


*Incidentally, I also think that learning Mandarin for the average English-speaker for solely business reasons is a waste of time, mostly because of the incredible amount of effort it takes to become fully literate in Chinese. Sure, you can become fairly fluent in the spoken language, but then you're an illiterate businessman and I am just skeptical about how useful you can be in business if you can't read anything at all.

There are always two kinds of white people in any given Chinese language class: the ones who are there because they are business majors or going to do business in China, and the ones who actually care about Chinese culture and language. The business guys never stick it out the whole semester and the ones who genuinely care are usually weird as hell, by American standards, I guess I mean. I've never met one yet who wasn't out of the mainstream in some way.

I have often wondered at this correlation but apart from the business dudes, so far I have never met a square non-heritage Mandarin student.
posted by chainsofreedom at 5:52 PM on June 17, 2016 [2 favorites]


Watching that kind of weirdly gives me the sensation of what it could be like to have a stroke. His mouth is moving and there are words coming out but I understand none of it, and it's very out of place.
posted by jimmythefish at 9:11 PM on June 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


Orientalism sucks but it sucks the most for black and white Chinese people, because orientalist out looks have been adopted by cultures both inside and outside of Asia and individuals whose skin colors fall outside the norm end up being condescended to and misunderstood by everyone. It would be nice, if people could move beyond this and stop making assumptions about individuals based on skin color and their own past experiences and instead take each person as an individual and make a judgement about them only after they acted like a jerk.

I think that people like John Cena could possibly help with this, but they will continue to be praised or ridiculed as exotics until enough people follow their examples and actually try to live and learn about different cultures. Judging by the comments in both Chinese and English in reaction to the video, we really are the same. In both languages he is praised as cute, intelligent, business minded, etc. and criticized as ugly, stupid, business minded, etc.
posted by wobumingbai at 12:18 AM on June 18, 2016 [5 favorites]


Being able to conduct business better is a perfectly legitimate reason to learn a language (I have hard time thinking of an illegitimate reason to learn a language but that's neither here or there). Mastering a language well enough to actually use it in a professional context takes a lifetime, but every little bit helps. I will also note that learning a language and learning the specific cultural mores that allow you to conduct business well in a country are two very different things and a serious professional planning to do a lot of business in another country will do well to learn both.

andrewesque: Sure, you can become fairly fluent in the spoken language, but then you're an illiterate businessman and I am just skeptical about how useful you can be in business if you can't read anything at all.

Logographic writing systems like Chinese are not some esoteric moon languages that are impossible to learn for the ~average English-speaker~. It takes practice and effort, but is completely doable in very much the same amount of time you'd need to become fluent in the first place.
posted by Soi-hah at 2:31 AM on June 18, 2016


Logographic writing systems like Chinese are not some esoteric moon languages that are impossible to learn for the ~average English-speaker~.

Did I say that? No. I speak and read Chinese well enough to read most novels and newspapers (albeit very slowly from a native speaker's perspective) and travel independently in a Chinese-speaking society, and learned Chinese characters in a largely English-speaking society. So while I'm a heritage speaker which ≠ "average English-speaker learning Chinese" I do have some firsthand experience with what I'm talking about here.

What I am going to state is that learning written Chinese is simply substantially more time- and effort-intensive than learning any other writing system in the world, even when compared to deep orthographies like English (!) or Gaelic, with the possible exception of written Japanese. I don't think it's Orientalizing or condescending to state this (and FWIW I'm not the only Chinese-American who feels this way.)

John DeFrancis reports in The Chinese Language that Chinese colleagues estimate it takes twice as much time (7-8 years) for a Chinese speaker to gain a comparable amount of literacy as a French or Spanish speaker (see point #1). And that's from the point of view of a native speaker, who is going to be surrounded by Chinese 24/7 and who has a very, very strong intrinsic motivation to not be illiterate.

I am just skeptical that the *average* person who is only interested in learning Mandarin for business reasons is going to have the time and/or motivation to learn and more importantly retain the 3000-4000 characters it is generally assumed are required for functional literacy.
posted by andrewesque at 5:03 AM on June 18, 2016 [5 favorites]


I've just come back from a weekend catching up with old friends,
three of us (my cousins and myself) all skipps (mildly derogatory slang for white australians, but given it doesn't come with the weight of any existential threat behind it, I quite like it) and the other four born or mostly raised here by parents from Europe and the middle east. Those with non-aussie born parents talking about their parents transition from exotic outsiders to comfortable conservative and ordinary. (we live in Melbourne) Their confident ease here, the ease with which they talk about their families as 'wogs' and 'lebs', epithets that stung them as kids, but are now reclaimed and inert.

Sometimes when I see older couples with an older white guy and and an asian woman, I admit I find myself examining their relationship with an ungenerous disposition looking for signs of an unequal relationship, with an intensity of scrutiny I don't apply by default to white couples of the same age. But their kids, and the increasing number of asians kids, the increasing ordinariness of asians in this country, give me hope that maybe we are seeing glimmers the country is becoming a place where asians will also get to feel ordinary.
posted by compound eye at 3:34 AM on June 19, 2016 [3 favorites]


I have to work very hard to understand what Cena is trying to say because the intonations are all warped. This was the same case for Zuckerberg's speech. I feel ambivalent about white people picking up Chinese, just as I feel (as a Chinese-American woman) ambivalent about white male East Asian Studies majors (and I have a hard time seeing it as anything beyond a bad case of "my Asian fetish took over my major," and steer clear). That said, I've seen it done very well before, so it's not impossible. I've seen my relatives in China kind of fascinated when they see foreigners actually pick up Chinese, because of how exotic it is (like seeing a dog walk on it's hind legs, heh). But at the level that Cena and Zuckerberg are speaking at... the reaction is more ... generally nonplussed. Nothing to write home about.

Beyond the difficulty of learning how to read and write in Chinese, many people simply can't hear the tones, let alone accurately reproduce them. In non-tonal languages, it might be fine if the intonation is a bit odd... but this isn't the case in Chinese, where tonality is fundamental.
posted by gemutlichkeit at 8:22 AM on June 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


Whoo, sweet, a thread where people can gather and talk about how evil and gross I am for majoring in East Asian Studies and speaking Japanese! What a terrible, terrible person I and people like me are!
posted by Bugbread at 1:56 AM on June 20, 2016 [5 favorites]


How do you not read some of the people in this thread as feeling exactly that way?
posted by Etrigan at 10:39 AM on June 20, 2016 [4 favorites]


There are always two kinds of white people in any given Chinese language class: the ones who are there because they are business majors or going to do business in China, and the ones who actually care about Chinese culture and language. The business guys never stick it out the whole semester and the ones who genuinely care are usually weird as hell, by American standards, I guess I mean. I've never met one yet who wasn't out of the mainstream in some way.

I have often wondered at this correlation but apart from the business dudes, so far I have never met a square non-heritage Mandarin student.


I guess I'm too white to understand how that's not exactly what Bugbread was talking about.
posted by Etrigan at 11:00 AM on June 20, 2016


Mod note: This is sort of going further and further down a weird circular metadiscussion path that I think folks should let lie at his point.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:12 AM on June 20, 2016


I don't feel as strongly as, or identical to, how conspire does (speaking as a Chinese-American), but I guess what bothers me a bit about stuff like this is not that white guys are learning Chinese but the framing of how amazing it is that these guys speak Chinese -- "John Cena can speak Mandarin as if being John Cena isn't enough", "John Cena stuns the internet by giving fluent speech in Mandarin," etc., when there are millions of people in the Chinese-speaking (and non-English-speaking) world who learn English to the same degree and who aren't given accolades or fulsomely praised for it.

This, exactly. Folks who come from Asian countries to the English-speaking world at best have their achievements taken for granted -- of course they would want to come to live here; our country is great! Of course they should speak English well; that's how it works here! -- but that's the absolute best case scenario and not one I'm convinced exists in reality.

Meanwhile English-speaking Westerners, especially white men, are treated like heroes for learning "exotic" foreign languages like Chinese or Japanese (amongst many others, Asian and otherwise). Westerners -- again, especially white men, triple-bolded and underlined -- who chose to live in those countries are treated by other Westerners as though they have special insight into those cultures beyond those of the locals.

This happens even in communities which are otherwise fairly up on Kyriarchy 101. It happens on Metafilter. At this point, anytime Asian or even Asian American culture comes up on the Blue, I expect Western expat commenters to have their opinions given more weight by other MeFites than commenters who actually live that culture. I've seen it happen over and over.

I don't think white people are evil for learning Asian languages/majoring in Asian studies/taking jobs in Asia, but there is a colonialist dynamic and a double standard there that's worth pointing out, even if it's uncomfortable to hear. Speaking as an Asian American woman, I think it's generally if not universally understood on MeFi now that a woman voicing her frustration over sexism is not condemning all men as evil, nor expecting individual men to be able to immediately and completely disengage themselves from a system in which they are unintentionally complicit. It'd be nice to see that communal insight applied to Asian/Asian American topics as well.
posted by bettafish at 1:25 PM on June 20, 2016 [11 favorites]


I have often wondered at this correlation but apart from the business dudes, so far I have never met a square non-heritage Mandarin student.

I guess I'm too white to understand how that's not exactly what Bugbread was talking about.


I guess my comment may have come across as mean or insulting, but I consider myself white and am also a very weird person, and a Mandarin learner. I meant my observation as neutral-to-good and was also describing myself, so.
posted by chainsofreedom at 2:18 PM on June 20, 2016


People of Asian heritage are often derided both within and outside their communities for having any grasp of their heritage languages in the range of nonexistent to insufficient. Asian people who speak English with the equivalent heavy accent possessed by John Cena in this video are characterized in American and European media as foolish, backwards, unassimilated. I have trilingual cousins, but I don't think anyone's lining up to praise their extraordinary linguistic prowess.

The question isn't, "is John Cena a towering asshole for speaking in passable Mandarin for two minutes?" Of course he isn't. The question being asked here is, "why is this news or impressive?" Because it clearly is news, and it clearly is impressive to at least some people. Why is that? What does it say about our cultural assumptions about China and Chinese languages, the ways in which we play upon those assumptions for capitalist enterprise and social hegemony? What does it mean when the WWE's leading face, a man heavily identified with American militarism despite never having served in a formal capacity, a man who previously used to be called the "Doctor of Thugnomics" with all the white appropriation of black hip-hop culture that entailed, turns his attentions to China? What does it mean when a company whose stock in trade is humiliating ethnic stereotypes played uniformly to prop up the concepts of white excellence and American exceptionalism have decided they want to turn their hand towards an already-demonized cultural legacy?

Conspire asked a simple question: why should these people be trusted to deal with Chinese culture respectfully? No one, so far, has answered it, except to say that they're a fool and a reverse racist for being wary of an entertainment that makes money every single time it puts some dumb jobber in a coolie hat.
posted by Errant at 2:57 PM on June 20, 2016 [11 favorites]


I didn't say you were evil. I said that I find it tiring that people, often to the tune of white male East Asian Studies majors, use aspects of my culture and identity as ways to bolster their own image and status in the eyes of the mainstream culture. I'm in medicine, and the example I was just thinking of today was how a white M.D. who pursues additional training in Traditional Chinese Medicine is often viewed as cutting-edge and open-minded in the medical community. Having grown up with some exposure to TCM myself, I have considered exploring training in TCM as well. But the reality is, TCM training combined with my background (Asian M.D. to-be) would make people look twice about my ability to practice even Evidence-Based, Western medicine; in this case, additional training might hurt me. The perception would be totally different, despite the training being the same in both cases. Why is that?

What I'm saying is that white people like learning about cultures-- yay! -- but seem to prefer it when it has been distilled, possibly caricatured, and delivered by messengers they feel more comfortable around (i.e., other white people who have learned a little bit of Mandarin, visited the country, and then are subsequently granted the authority to Tell It Like It Is in ASIA). Practices like T'ai Chi wouldn't have the ethos and following it does today if it originated from, oh, I don't know, Ohio or Kentucky or something. On preview, what conspire said.

The knee-jerk defensiveness upthread is exactly why I don't like to dwell on this topic too much.
posted by gemutlichkeit at 3:12 PM on June 20, 2016 [12 favorites]


Mod note: One deleted; folks this has gotten way more personal than is productive. I think this is really a case of "I've observed that many" not "all", and it's not going to benefit anything to really throw down about the exact parameters of the generalization. It's a generalization, there are exceptions, people's personal experiences are what they are.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 3:30 PM on June 20, 2016


As an American (more specifically as a first-generation Chinese-American) who started learning Mandarin as an adult, when I see American adults learning a second language of any kind, I generally think, "That's pretty cool!" (I think the same thing about non-Americans too, but in the context of this post I'm going to focus on Americans.) Americans aren't known for being multilingual. I'm not proud to say I've been monolingual for most of my life. It's easy to just stick with English when so much of the world can also speak English and the bulk of our required secondary language education is high school Spanish or French. Maybe I'm overreaching, but when I see John Cena giving a press conference in Mandarin I see a potential positive effect of him influencing his fans (or just anyone viewing the video who wouldn't normally pair "WWE wrestler" with "Mandarin student") to consider learning Mandarin, as well as help demystify the difficulty of learning Mandarin.

Like some other commenters here, my views have been influenced by my experiences as a Chinese-American. I don't think my experiences are atypical, but since no one else has brought up something similar, I'd like to share mine to give another view of this topic (not much of a critical view like others have posed, just...my view), with no intention of diminishing anyone else's experiences.

(I ended up writing more than I expected to. Oops. ...TL;DR: The increase in non-Chinese people learning Mandarin helped motivate me to learn Mandarin.)

I didn't learn Mandarin growing up. My parents surely tried to teach my brother and me some Mandarin when we were little, but nothing stuck aside from common greetings or the threat of a spanking. Since they were pretty much fluent in English, they eventually decided to just speak English to us and use Mandarin when speaking with each other. (I don't blame my parents for not trying harder to teach us! I'm sure my bro and I weren't receptive to learning.) I got used to not understanding anything my parents were saying to each other, nor anything my relatives or grandparents talked about whenever we got together. With this being the norm, it was easy for me to believe that Mandarin was too hard for me to learn. I didn't think I was an idiot, but considering I was exposed to Mandarin so often and yet managed to pick up absolutely zilch, then perhaps the part of my brain that was supposed to absorb Mandarin was borked. Knowing that there were over a billion people in the world who could speak Mandarin didn't do much to encourage me since most of them started learning when they were babies. I would've related better to a non-Chinese person trying to learn Mandarin, but as a kid I had practically no examples of such people (one exception: Big Bird! When he went to China! I watched that movie so many times as a kid!). Since I missed the chance to learn Mandarin from birth, I became set in my belief that I would probably never learn Mandarin and that it wasn't a big deal since I lived in the US.

As I got older I realized that, of course, if I tried hard enough then I could learn Mandarin like I could learn anything else...may...be? After 20-something years of being monolingual (my now non-existent high school French doesn't count), I was left with barely a smidge of confidence that I could learn Mandarin. But being exposed to more and more non-Chinese people learning Mandarin helped motivate me and reinforce the idea, "Hey, this is a thing you can do too." I still remember one time when I was eating at a Chinese restaurant and I saw this white kid (high schooler perhaps) order in Mandarin. I probably thought something like, "OH SHIT I CAN'T EVEN DO THAT, FUCK MEEEE."

In 2014, when I was 29 years old, I moved to Taipei to learn Mandarin for nine months (I chose Taipei because my dad now lives there). Since many of the comments here are specifically about white people learning Mandarin and not just non-Chinese people in general, I'll share some examples about my white classmates, but I want to note that most of my classmates in my school (the Mandarin Training Center) weren't white. (For instance, many of my classmates were from Central America. I found out this is because of Taiwan's diplomatic relations with many Central American countries, which results in many students from those countries coming to Taiwan on college scholarships.) My classes were fairly diverse in regards to students' ethnicities and reasons for learning Mandarin. Out of the three classes I took, I was the only American in two of them. In the third class, one white American guy was learning Mandarin, I think, because he was interested in going into diplomacy, and another American guy, who was half white, half Korean, was learning Mandarin because his wife was Taiwanese. I also had a white male classmate from Germany. I think he was studying Mandarin for half a year for fun before returning to Germany to continue studying engineering. Two white male friends I made at the school were learning Chinese for business reasons (but were also interested in Chinese culture) and were four levels ahead of me. I met a white American women who was at the top level in our school and is now getting her masters in Taiwan for Mandarin-English translation and interpretation. I met a white Canadian woman who was learning Mandarin because she was interested in the culture--I think she lives in China now. I also met a few half white, half Chinese students who I assume were mostly there for the same reason as I was, to tap into our heritage. I met other Chinese-American students at various advanced levels, but I didn't meet any who were starting at level-zero kindergarten like I was.

I count those nine months learning Mandarin in Taipei to be one of the most valuable experiences of my life. I think the diversity of my classes made a difference (also, that my classmates were mostly cool and hard working), and know I was lucky to have the opportunity to learn in such a setting. I don't know what my experience would've been like if I had learned Mandarin in the US or in China. As for how much Mandarin I learned in nine months...I'm far, far from being fluent, but I have emerged with a good base in the language and the understanding that it's not nearly as hard as I grew up thinking it was. My Mandarin is both good and bad enough that I don't have much trouble understanding John Cena's Mandarin. I also consider myself to be barely out of the monolingual stage. (Hooray!)

When I returned to the US I tried to encourage my Chinese-American friends who can't speak Mandarin that they could definitely learn it and we weren't born failures, as we used to joke about. I also tried to encourage my Chinese-American friends who can speak Mandarin but can't write it that they could definitely learn characters faster than I did. (Admittedly, learning characters takes a lot of dedication at first, and if you can already speak Mandarin then I don't blame you for not taking on the super fun task of learning thousands of characters.)

Hoo boy, this was a really long comment, sorry. I don't know if I have much of a point here. I understand the more critical discussions about this topic and I'm happy that people more knowledgeable than I am have contributed to them. I just wanted to share my experiences and shed some kind of positive, maybe different light.
posted by roboppy at 3:39 PM on June 20, 2016 [11 favorites]


Where white people see cute, awkward, geeky white men learning another language, I see the spectre of colonism

Luckily, there is a huge barrier to entry when becoming competent in a second language. Huge. As anyone who is actually proficient in a second language knows, it's not like you can just "buy" Mandarin proficiency.

It would really be interesting to determine just how "fluent" Mark Zuckerberg is in the language. My guess is that he is operating at a high beginner, low intermediate level. Good enough to get praised for mastering certain formulaic phrases, but not good enough to negotiate or truly "create" in the language.

Learning a second language and becoming truly proficient in it takes more than time. It takes more than money. It takes determination, concentration, hard work, all that stuff.

It's one of the reasons why children are said to be so much better at learning languages. Neuroplasticity is one reason, but the other reason is because they have so much more time. As an adult I have to work, do housework, take care of my family etc etc.

When I was younger, working shit jobs and single, I had lots of time. I also didn't have any money to do anything (low wages, university loans to repay), so the only thing I could do was learn a second language (Japanese).

Ultimately, the more people that learn a second language, could be "Chinese" (more precisely, Mandarin), could be something else, the better off our planet will be.
posted by My Dad at 3:35 PM on June 26, 2016


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