patrick.net

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.