Word: mandarinate
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...known for making long, slow films about the misery of Europe's leisure class. While his compatriot Federico Fellini sketched modern anomie and aimlessness with a cartoonist's quick, broad slashes, Antonioni brought Atomic Age anomie to a kind of life with delicate bush strokes; he was the fastidious, mandarin un-Fellini. For a time, he was unlike anyone, until many directors saw that trail he had blazed and started treading...
...point in my life, I could fluently speak Chinese. Really—I have many fond memories of this elusive ability. As a kid visiting Taiwan, for example, taxi drivers would often compliment the fluency I demonstrated with Mandarin phrases such as, “I’m eight,” “I’m from the United States,” and “Are we there...
...seems then, that my feeling of uneasiness about my questionable knack for putong hua (Chinese for “common language,” Mandarin) is not that I’m seriously handicapped by it. Rather, I’m embarrassed by my ineptitude with a language I’ve spoken since I was born—bothered that there are some parts of my family’s culture that are not naturally inherited but require a conscious effort to understand...
...Foreign Ministry "guide" ushered us through a special gate reserved for "foreign friends." A knot of young Chinese had gathered outside. As we passed, a few made loud comments about the unfairness of having parts of the People's Park reserved only for foreigners. One of my companions, a Mandarin speaker, agreed volubly in Chinese. Immediately a group of young Chinese men and women surrounded us and peppered us with questions that mixed naiveté and aspiration: Are there still slaves in America? Where did you learn to speak Chinese? Do all American families really have three cars...
...Today's fissures in central authority might seem tiny by comparison, but they are significant nonetheless. In the boomtowns of Shanghai and Guangzhou, municipal meetings are often conducted in local dialects, as opposed to the national language, Mandarin. Trade rivalries between provinces have resulted in absurd internal tariffs that foreign manufacturers must pay when transporting their products out of China. And even though Beijing executed the country's former top food and drug regulator for graft last week, the international scandal over tainted Chinese products speaks more to the central government's inability to monitor what's going...