[Weekly Update] August 9, 2021

I recently felt into the language YouTuber rabbit hole, watching a bunch of videos about non-Chinese people learning Chinese, Chinese people learning Korean, Korean people reacting to Hong Kong movie stars, Hong Kong students in Paris talking about food, and finally, a French video about the Chinese writing system.

That was a trip.

CHANNEL UPDATE

• Our next video is complete and waiting for approval. It should be available this Wednesday or Thursday.
• As stated last week, this will be a video about Tony Leung, and his acting. No spoiler this time, so you don't have to watch anything ahead of time.
• For our next video, I'm thinking of doing something fast and requires less research. How about talking about all the hidden references in Kung Fu Hustle? It's a film full of references to other Chinese films, novels, myths, and folklores. It should be interesting to our non-Chinese audience.
• I'm also working on the video about John Woo and the history of Gun-Fu. Judging by the amount of research I have to do, it'll likely be a two parter. Stay tuned for more updates on that!

MEDIA TALK

• So, I posted a video on Twitter, and it got a lot of reaction from people. Here is the link.
• That is a clip from a 2011 movie called "Limitless". As you can see, Bradley's Chinese is practically indecipherable. It IS supposed to be actual Chinese. Although I suspect it was Google translated . Bradley Cooper probably just listened to Google pronunciation a bunch of times, and were told to try his best on screen.
• The weirdest thing is, the waiter clearly speaks Chinese, but his line is just as awkward. Due to the rigidity of a film set, he probably didn't have a chance to raise his objection to the awkward line before the filmmakers tell him "It's good enough".
• One thing I didn't mention in the Tweet is that this is pretty much my standard experience hearing Chinese in Hollywood movies.
• Almost equally atrocious is Amy Adams' delivery of a Chinese line in Arrival. While her pronunciation is slightly better, it is still indecipherable without subtitles. It's better because her character can't speak Chinese, and she's just reciting phonetically by seeing into her own memory.
• But it's atrocious because this line is delivered in an emotional key moment, the climax of the film. And I, along with every Chinese speaking audience, got taken out of the film because I have no idea what she's saying.
• Look, I know Chinese isn't an easy language, or a beautiful sounding one. It contains a lot of phonemes that doesn't exist in Hollywood. But if it's such a key moment of the film, maybe it's worth it to put in a bit of effort.
• Another funny, although not as offensive moment came from Keanu Reeves in The Day the Earth Stood Still. In it, Keanu speaks Mandarin to a Chinese person. The weird part is, I'm pretty sure the Chinese actor is a Cantonese speaker. And so, you see him struggle to pronounce some Mandarin lines.
• And of course, the director doesn't speak Mandarin, so no one can give him acting directions, which makes his acting even worse.
• As a result, all you get is two weirdos speaking Mandarin, while neither of them are native speakers. Admittedly, in true Keanu fashion, he managed to make this process charming. Keanu's pronunciation is much better than Amy Adams or Bradley Cooper. You can tell he actually tried to memorize the lines properly.
• This weird scene came mainly due to the fact that most Americans just can't imagine how different dialects can differ. Accents in America is so homogenous compared to the rest of the world.
• China isn't as wild as India, where people have different languages with different writing systems. But still, just 3 hours of driving away from Guangzhou at any direction, and you'll start seeing people speak in dialects you don't understand at all.
• That said, it is still not as offensive as when actors making stuff up. Yes it does happen, mostly in TV shows, especially older ones. But there is also Rush Hour 2, where Chris Tucker's inability to speak Chinese is turned into a joke. I still don't know how I feel about that.
• But not all experience are bad. Michael Jai White's Chinese pronunciation in Black Dynamite is actually pretty impressive for someone who doesn't speak Chinese. It's clean, and easy to understand. The accent is heavy, but you can tell he put in some practice to deliver the joke, and didn't just phone it in.
• But really, if you want someone to speak Chinese in a movie, either have a Chinese language coach, or just hire someone who speaks Chinese. Awkwafina, for example, despite born and raised in New York, studied Chinese for 2 years in Beijing. Her accent is somewhat thick (kinda like me), but it fits into her character in The Farewell perfectly.

And that concludes my rant on botched Chinese in Hollywood.

I'd love to say that with China's rising influence, the Chinese language will be treated better in the future... But that's unlikely. Japan has been influential for a long time, but the language is still often botched in Hollywood. Decades after the Cold War, Russia is still the go to accent for bad guys. And German speaking scientists are guaranteed to be mad. Even if Chinese gets treated well, it doesn't mean other languages will be accepted.

The only way to change this is for the audience to talk about it loudly, and point it out when it happens. To many of us, all of this may seem like offensive stereotypes, but it functions not much differently than other tropes and cliches.

We all loudly protested against jump scares. And as a result, horror films no longer uses jump scare to the degree they used to in the 90s. In a similar vein, we can also let people know to treat our language with just a bit more dignity and respect.