Learning Chinese: Deconstructing The Elephant's PooPoo.

Update: Naruwan has some more on the penchant for writing about bodily functions, more specifically "fragrant farts."

Learning a foreign language is both one of the most empowering and humbling endeavors can choose to take. One the one hand, you can speak to people you could never speak to before. It's such a rush to say things in another language and have them understand what you're saying. It's almost like you're privy to some secret code. You make a list of equivalents in your head, like an operative. In the same sense that "the eagles are flying north," may mean that a certain target is changing position, "Il y a trop de moutons sur mon aéroglisseur," means "There are too many sheep on my hovercraft."

That's the empowering part -- enhanced communication and understanding -- the humbling part is the fact that for the first couple years, this enhanced communication, to a native speaker, resembles the sort of ramblings they hear from their six year old nephew who has a prodigious knowledge of international affairs and philosophy.[1] Having a new means to communicate, doesn't mean you do it without stuttering, making mistakes, etc.

You may be the most well spoken Anglophone in town. You may be able to quote Wolfe, Milton, and Shakespeare by heart. You may know that the title of Cormac McCarthy’s book (and the Cohen brothers’ new film) No Country for Old Men is a reference to the Yeat’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium.” Hell, you might be a Gore Vidal or a John Steinbeck.

Yet, none of that guarantees that when you start speaking your second or third language, you’ll do any better than the little kid across from you on the subway you just saw eating his boogers. In fact, that kid’s probably your only hope, because he might be the only person, for the time being, who speaks slow enough for you to understand.

And this is just French. Imagine the rocky path he has to walk to be proficient in Chinese.

Lucky for me, I have an added advantage that perhaps most other expats here learning Chinese don’t: The Elephant’s Poopoo. It was only recently that I realized Fanfan’s family has kept all of their children’s books. This is a boon to me because all children’s books are written with the pronunciations next to the word. It’s for this, actually, even upon making this discovery, I didn’t think much of it, because all of the phonetics in the books are zhuyin and not pinyin (which have been, along with TongYong, the subject of much contention of late).

For instance, take the word “睡” which means “sleep.” In pinyin, the word is spelled shùi, while in zhuyin it’sㄕㄨ乁ˋ. You can see why one is easier for foreigners to learn than the other.

What I’ve found, though, is that once you’ve got a fair vocabulary under your belt, learning zhuyin is rather easy. I’d say that in about a week, I’ve gotten about ninety percent of the symbols memorized, there are a small few of the forty-odd symbols that are a little harder to get to stick.

Doing this has opened up a whole new world of Chinese learning to me. I can now pick up just about any book that was written for someone under, say, ten or eleven and read it.

Read? Yes. Understand? No. But that’s nothing a dictionary and a Taiwanese girlfriend won’t fix.

My first foray into the world of Chinese children’s books is the aforementioned 大象的嗯嗯 or “The Elephant’s Poopoo.”

I should warn you not to be misled by the title or my categorization of the book as a “children’s book.” The Elephant’s Poopoo is anything but – as we well know that all Asians are inherently intellectually superior.

No, dear readers, The Elephant’s Poopoo is an existential tale of brotherhood and triumph over adversity. The opening finds a hippopotamus strolling on a plain, slingshot in hand, when he is overwhelmed by a horrible smell.

好臭！　好臭！ [How stinky! How smelly!] He cries out. He asks himself how anything could smell that bad, what could it be that smells so bad?

Suddenly his pals materialize – the crocodile [鱷魚], the hedgehog [刺蝟], the monkey[猴子], and two other mysterious characters.[2] They work together to locate the source of their olfactory discomfort, and they are amazed at what they find, “There’s a huge pile of poop!” [有一堆好大好大的屎!]

Presented with poop and no poopeur, the animals begin to postulate as to its origins:

“Wow! What big poop!” exclaimed the Hippo.

“Who could pull this off” asked the crocodile.

“It must be an elephant’s,” surmised the (mysterious, invisible) lion.

“Not necessarily,” said the monkey, “This is too big!”

Then the hedgehog takes the line of questioning to a more metaphysical level:

“Perhaps it came from heaven,” postulated the hedgehog.

“How can the heavens poop?” asked the hippo in disbelief.

“If the heavens can pee-pee, why can’t one assume it can pooh-pooh?” asked the croc.

“The ability to pee,” interjected the monkey, “does not substantiate an ability to pooh.”

Then an embarrassed elephant enters the scene, seeing his philosophizing friends gazing at the heavens. He apologizes for his smelly poop and uses his trunk to sweep it away.

The other animals’ disgust and curiosity is swept away with the dung, leaving only admiration:

“I also want to drop a load like that,” said the monkey. [我也想拉這麼大的屎!]

“Me too!” scream the others.

The ask the elephant what he eats in order have such magnificent pooh. The answer is simple:

“Eat a ton, and you’ll be able to pooh big poops, too.” [吃很多東西就會拉大屎.]

So the gang sets a date for the next morning, the big pooping contest, and they all scuttle home to gorge themselves.

The next morning, they come back, bowels full:

“One, two, three, go!”

The pooping contest has begun, and all of the animals strain, red-faced, to make their brown into the gold. In the end, though, it’s the elephant’s proud bread-loaf dunglettes that take the gold medal.

The hedgehog is despondent. How could he ever expect to beat the elephant at a pooping contest? Yet, his luck changes when the rumblings of angry mother’s and father’s come screaming, “What are you kids doing? You’ve stunk up the whole field! You better clean it up this instant!”

Alas, it is the hedgehog who cleans his poop up the fastest, and he feels vindicated, having won something that morning.

Surprisingly, this is not the only feces-related, Chinese children’s book I’ve read here. One morning, bored while my students were taking a test, I picked up a book on the shelf next to me called 誰嗯嗯在我的頭上? or Who Pooped on My Head? – which is about a mole and his quest for knowledge, after being pooped upon when he surfaced one morning. He goes from animal to animal asking, “Did you poop on my head?” Each animal says, “No, it wasn’t me. [splat!] You see, that’s what my poop looks like.”

This all brings me back to the humbling part of learning a foreign language. Sure, of course speaking Chinese is humbling in and of itself, but I’m also faced with the fact that I do almost all of my studying during my commute to and from work, and you wouldn’t imagine the looks I get from those all around me, seeing a grown man with his face buried in a children’s book, reading intently and feverishly taking notes. You have to have a sense of humor to do that, don’t you?

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[1] Here, above all, I'm talking about French. Where most political, philosophical, or medical terms are remarkably similar to English -- démocratie, philologie, and hypertension artérielle, for example.

[2] In a sort of post-modern twist, there are two characters who are either present and never spoken to, or not present and always spoken of. The first is a mouse [老鼠] who is in the pictures on every page, though he’s never spoken to. He even participates in the pooping contest, like some sort of stalking outcast who is so desperate for attention that he’ll do anything he can, even though he’s blatantly being ignored. The second is a lion [獅子] who is always spoken of, as though he’s present, but he’s not once pictured with the group. I’m assuming he’s the groups spiritual council (the “Aslan” figure).