Shake that Thang Tree
2007/6/9: Like the rest of the earth China's naturally very beautiful, and no matter how deep in urbanity you are, with a bit of effort you can soon find yourself in the depths of it. I don't mean parks, parks are all right, but I mean wild places with undergrowth and winding paths. For me it's particularly easy since I live about seven and a half minutes' walk from several very small and leafy and easy-to-climb mountains. This afternoon I decided to grab a bottle of water and go and walk up one.
From my flat you walk past a couple of housing estates, another rubbish depot, grilled street food, trucks piled high with watermelons already, a water processing facility and a dried-up river bed which has a patchwork of small vegetable plots all over its surface. At the foot of the hill you climb up between more vegetable patches in earth that's been tiered to make use of every square inch for beans, spring onions, strawberries, herbs, sorghum, a bit of maize, aubergines etc. You reach the top of the cultivated steps and the slope turns wild. You can walk through the trees and hear the cuckoo, magpies and a call like a pheasant. Big black ants are busy on the ground which looks dry and cracked, though nobody waters the undergrowth and it's green and explosive. The variety of plant life is just endless, and most of what's growing wild here you would only see in botanical gardens in Europe.
There were a few other people on the path, out for their middle class Saturday excursion. I came across one man with his arms around a tree, shaking it and looking expectantly up into the branches. He was youngish and had glasses and he said hello as I passed. I said "What are you looking for?" and he said "[unclear]" and I said "Ah, I see." He pointed to some small green spiky unripe things on the end of a branch, and I said "what are they like ripe, are they sweet?" and he said "very, but there are none left." There were a couple of bright red berries higher up, but they weren't ready to fall. That tree must get a right shaking every year. I left him shaking the tree and went on my pink, unfit way.
A while later I met him on my way down. He was going to shake another tree higher up. I thought I ought to know what kind of tree these were, so I said "Hey, what's it called, that tree?" Chinese first:
......“叫 thāng 树。”
“Thāng 树？……哦，哦，那个thāng是怎么写的？”
“那个，上面 thān个又，下面一个木子。我看你中文说得这么好，你应该知道这个tth。”
...So he said "Called a thang tree."
"A... thang tree? Er... how do you write that thang?" (There's no "th" sound in Chinese.)
"Three handth over a tree radical. But your Chinethe ith tho good, you mutht know that one." Ch-ch-boom.
It seems it's better to lisp in Chinese than in English, since his retroflexive sibilant sounds (sh, ch, zh, where you curl your tongue backwards) aren't affected and his x and even his z were all right. His c in "词" was a bit off. His "sang", however, was a resounding "thang", as in shake that 〜。(桑树, sāngshù, mulberry tree.)