Mit Danmark  

死狼啊/O Dead Wolf!: A Danish Joke

It took 40 minutes from ferry port to Vigeland Park on foot. The method of taking the bus never crossed my mind. Walking was the basic means of transportation during my days in Denmark, but I told my friends I did take the bus, Bus Route “Number 11”, that was what kids from Beijing called walking on foot.

It was the first time we traveled by Norwegian cruise, or a cruise of any kind, so everything was pure excitement on the first night and we didn’t go to bed until almost dawn. This earlier excitement turned into absolute exhaustion after docking in Oslo. We took the cheapest 3-day cruise: it was two days round trip, traveling from Copenhagen to Oslo with one-day, in fact only several hours, for touring Oslo and for achieving the mighty ambitions of sightseeing too many places by Bus Number 11.

“Please,” YQ turned to me and hurried me up: “Walk –F---a—s---t---e---r—laaaaaaaah… , Walk –---a—s---t---e---r——laaaaaaaah…”. That is the typical pronunciation of Cantonese Mandarin. They drag all the vowels and slow the talking speed and add an “aaaa……..” at end of most of what they say.

“How can she be faster if you use this kind of voice?” SG, my Beijing friend, asked impatiently. He was the manager of the three of us, planning the travel route, and managing our shared funds of a shameful amount.

He was right, YQ’s soft little voice, her clumsy Cantonese Mandarin, her way of dragging out vowels, her way of hurrying me up using her usual little soft voice and her “la….” at the end of each sentence: “Please –be ---fa—ster—laaa……..” ,Please –be ---fa—ster—laaa……..” hypnotized me and it sounded like a soft cradlesong in my ear: “—Please ---be—s—l---e---e—p--y—Please –sleep----tight----”

“Let me show you how to do it,” after that hulking SG, “the Beijing Big Man” turned to me and with dart fierce looks of hate, looking belligerently: “Rock King, Be fucking faster!”

I always believe that the Beijing dialect has a special effect as a thunderstorm, adding urgency, authority, power, and indignation in order giving, slogans, rallies and river bank boat-towing. It is an interesting phenomenon that I enjoy to observe, what differences languages are able to make by changing stress, intonation and wording.

SG’s thunderstorm proved my theory right yet again and gave me an immediate body shaking and right away I walked faster!

Once YQ said to me:“Ni Ji Dao Ma?”, that is the Cantonese way to pronounce “Ni Zhi Dao Ma ?”, “Did you know?” in Mandarin.

“Did you know,” YQ said to me: “We Cantonese people like to eat ‘xié.’”

“Xié – ‘shoes’?” I was puzzled: “But why do Cantonese like to eat shoes?”

I heard that the soldiers during the Long March ate shoes, belts, tree barks, or just whatever they could find in wartime for survival. But why, do Cantonese people, the well-known gastronomes LIKE to eat shoes, a surviving necessity?

“No! No! We don’t like to eat ‘xié’ ! We like to eat ‘xié’!” , YQ cried.

“You don’t like to eat shoes but like to eat shoes?”,  I was totally lost in this logic.

YQ tried harder: “We don’t like to eat ‘xié’! But we like to eat ‘xiě’!”

She changed to the 3^rd tone, not ‘xié’, but ‘xiě’.

 “Xiě? Blood? ”, I thought I finally got it: “We Northerners do too.”

Concealed blood is commonly used in Chinese cuisine, such as Pork Blood Spinach Soup, and is eaten to restore our inner energy.

“Ai-ya! Not Blood!” YQ cried and shifted to Danish: “Vi spiser Slanger.”

“Slanger?”—In Chinese it sounds like ‘O Dead Wolf’—“The Snakes? That is what you meant!” I finally got it. This time I finally got it.

“Xié”, shoes, “Xiě”, blood, and “She”, snake, it is too much to demand a Cantonese girl to master all of these minute pronunciation differences in Mandarin.

So that shifting to Danish was the often what we used when I was in Denmark, in order to understand another Chinese girl, my fellow citizen.

Cultural Notes(文化注解)：

1). This article was firstly written in English and then rewritten in Chinese.

2). Several attempts of the Cantonese girl YQ's pronunciation of snake, “xié”and “xiě” sound like "shoe" and "blood" in Mandrin Chinese and thus caused my confusion. The correct way pronouncing it, is "She" , in a rising tone.