The reason this trip is called an OIP trip is because it’s an Overseas
Immersion Programme. However, for the past few days (Close to a week now- Wow,
time flies by so fast!), I realize that I haven’t been “immersing” into Tianjin
very well. Fortunately, today’s IS (Interdisciplinary Studies) lecture was here
to the rescue!
The lecture of today was about Tianjin. The lecturer went into detail on
how Tianjin’s name originated, the culture that they (the people of Tianjin) have
and certain outstanding milestones in Tianjin’s impressive 600 years of
history.
The title slide of the IS lecture
The lecturer telling us about Tianjin
It was in the 2nd part of her lecture that things started to
get more interesting- The topics were on food, dialect as well as traditions
and taboo.
On the topic of food, I was surprised to learn that during a dinner
party, there was an unwritten rule of where each person should sit. I have,
appended below, a picture showing where the host and guests should sit.
As far as I know, here in Singapore, we don’t have a “sitting ettiquette”.
But the basic rule we follow is that the most senior person (in rank or age)
sits first and the rest of us take our place around him/her.
After explaining to us about the “sitting ettiquette”, the lecturer
showed us pictures of yummy-looking food that the people of Tianjin usually eat
for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
2 pictures showing some meals that are usually eaten for breakfast
The order in which dishes are served during a dinner party (Picture of
dessert not shown)
On her topic on dialects, the lecturer told us that the Chinese from the
other states in China felt that the way the people in Tianjin talked was
strange. She said that there are some words that the people in Tianjin use (but
the other native Chinese speakers don’t) when they are talking. As can be seen
below in the 1st bullet point, be
r (pronounced as ber-er) means extremely or very. So if someone says “Ze xie xuesheng men be r hao”, he/ she
means that “These students are very good”.
The 2nd word is gen r
(pronounced as gen-er). I think it means logical. Unfortunately, I have no example
sentence that I can think of to explain it better, my apologies.
The last bullet point is ma. When
used, it cuts short the number of characters in a sentence. A sentence like “Ni zai gan shen me?” (What are you
doing?) when spoken by a person native to Tianjin can sound like “Ni zai gan ma?”.
For this one, I can find its similarity to our Singaporean Singlish
(that’s English with a Singapore twist!) except that instead of shortening the
sentence, we extend it (and almost every other sentence) with a “lah”, “leh”, “lor”
or “meh”.
In the chapter on traditions and taboo, we students discovered that the
Chinese celebrate their festivals more seriously than us. An example is that they
only eat certain food on certain days (some dumplings are only eaten during
certain festivals or celebrations, like the Spring festival). As to taboos, we
Singapore Chinese too follow the rule of not poking our chopsticks into our
rice (as this is disrespectful to our elders).
Until the lecturer said so, I did not know that giving a pear to someone
was a taboo. In Chinese, 给梨 (“gei li”,
translated as “give pear”), sounds like 给离 (translated as “give leave”)-
which means that you and the person will never see each other again, forever.
In a nutshell, I found this talk to be an eye-opener on the culture,
food and language of the people in Tianjin. I also found it quite interesting
to be able to compare the similarities and differences of the above stated
topics in Tianjin and Singapore.
Now as I end my blog entry, I daresay that I’m a little more “immersed”
into Tianjin’s culture than I was before.
Good night, dear reader. I hope you
have be r hao (very good) dreams!
Best regards,
Marianne
Marianne
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