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Well, it was a dialect called Fujianese, which I think is a variant of Mandarin, but I am not sure. Almost all of our clients were from the Fujian province, that is where most Chinese immigrants to NYC in the 90's came from. We did have a guy from northern China one time, and one the clients who actually was entitled to political asylum was a doctor from someplace else in China, a big city that I had never heard of, but everyone else was from Fujian province, usually the area around Fuzhou city.

I think Mandarin is the official language in the PRC, and when the INS sent a Mandarin interpreter to the hearings the clients could understand them but my impression from talking to people was that Fujianese is a pretty distinct dialect, they spoke about it as if it were another language entirely.

Joe,

Standard Mandarin is the dialect of the area around Beijing. Once you move away from that area, there's variations in what is considered Mandarin and also regional dialects. You're right about Fujianese, I can't understand Fujianese at all, that's totally different from Mandarin. Same with Cantonese, I can't understand that at all.

Usually, the more educated you are, the more standard your Mandarin. The education system is now set up so that all the urban dwellers in the coastal provinces can speak pretty good Mandarin, but I've been to Hunan and Sichuan, and their Mandarin is not quite as standard. Your clients were probably Fujianese peasants so their "Mandarin" would be pretty poor. (BTW, NYC seems to have a huge Fujianese population that causes a lot of problems within the Chinese community. The established Cantonese residents really resent them.)

I was brought up in Shanghai, everyone was taught in Mandarin from first grade. However, if you listen carefully, you can still tell that my Mandarin has less tongue curling than someone from Beijing. Shanghainese is just as hard to learn (if not harder) than other dialects, my mother's mother came with the Red Army from Shandong when she was 18, she still can't speak Shanghainese. (Or think in Shanghainese, she named my mother and her siblings names that sound very similar in Shanghainese, which results in a lot of confusion in my family.)

Astrid,

Thanks. You said what I was thinking, I didn't want to say "peasants," but that's what they were in terms of background. One time a INS in-house translator I knew, who was not from Fujian, admitted that he could only understand about half of what my clients said while testifying! That didn't phase him in the least, though, he kept on going to the hearings. I asked him if he at least accurately translated the judge's questions, and he said no, he just sort of paraphrased.

The system was like that. Sometimes no INS translator would be avaiable and they'd let us bring our own! Our secretaries would not even bother translating the question or the client's response, instead they'd simply tell the INS whatever they wanted to hear.

I really hope to pick up Chinese again later in life. There are a lot of Chinese people in my neighborhood now but they are from Taiwan and HK and I do not understand them at all, not one bit. It was nice to be on the same wavelength with people and my limited knowledge of Chinese really helped with that when I was living in NYC.

Joe,

"I didn’t want to say “peasants"

LOL! No need for PC here. The Chinese are some of the least PC people there are. There were (are?) a lot of Fujianese people trafficing rings and it created a terrible situation in the NYC community, with lots of gangs, violence, virtual slavery, and so on. They were probabably told to tell you about their "Catholicism" and whatever. 99% of it was phoney.

Taiwan "Mandarin" is pretty different from Mainland Mandarin. The difference would be at least as much as between a Southerner and a Yankee.

Chinese is a great language to pick up, if you can. Chinese people are always really impressed by white guys (and yeah, more often than not, it is a guy) who understands or can speak Chinese.