James Fallows

Attentive readers could possibly have noticed my mentioning, a time or two or twenty, the tendency of NBC Olympic announcers to refer to the site of the 2008 games as Beizhing, with an artsy Frenchified zh- sound, rather than plain old "Jingle Bells"-style Beijing.

But wait! When calling yesterday's prelims, semi-finals, and finals of the men's 3-meter springboard diving, our man Ted Robinson -- that's him at right -- talked time and again about Beijing. His co-announcer, ex-diver Cynthia Potter, didn't take the hint and kept on Beizhing-ing. But we noticed here at home.

More amazing still, Robinson did a creditable job during his many references to the defending Olympic champion in this event, He Chong of China. Mr. He's family name (He, or 何) is a sound that doesn't really exist in English. It's like some combo of hehh and huhh, but farther back in your throat -- as I say, for us it's not a normal sound. But there was Robinson, saying it again and again. (Cynthia Potter was going with "Hay" or "Ay," rhyming with "day.")

I am the last person in the world to be prideful about foreign pronunciation, since I sound like a Yank whatever language I am supposedly trying to speak. And I certainly am not saying that the job of an announcer in one language is to try to parrot all the sounds and names of another language. U.S viewers would rise as one in protest of any NBC newscaster who showily said "Paris" or "México" the way the locals do. But having piled on much of Team Peacock for this anomaly I wanted to note the exception.
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And, hey, maybe this all actually matters. This dispatch just in from a Sinophile reader:

THANK YOU for taking up the issue of how to pronounce "Beijing." PLEASE continue to push this: The soft "French" pronunciation is a national (USA) DISGRACE.

I am a China scholar [from an Ivy League university] who has been studying China for 50 years, with an ex-wife who was Chinese, a Mandarin teacher who was Beijingese, numerous Sinological publications, and so on. During the Beijing Olympics, I was astounded that the American networks couldn't absorb the simple fact that any northern Chinese or CORRECT standard Mandarin speakers with whom they were interacting pronounced Beijing like Jingle Bells.. Those were, after all, the BEIJING Olympics! Not getting THAT right was simply inexcusable.

I really don't know whether this ongoing linguistic atrocity reveals (1) some fatal linguistic ethnocentrism on the part of ALL Americans, or (2) some overall anxiety about confronting a "rising China," or (3) simple incompetence on the part of specific network functionaries in 2008, since perpetuated by similarly incompetent network functionaries (including sometimes on NPR!). I DO know that, in an increasingly symmetrical relationship between the USA and PRC, one country's systematically mispronouncing the name of the capital of the other -- mediated by mass media -- augurs poorly for the mispronouncing country. If the media can't adopt an attentive attitude toward THIS, toward WHAT can we count on their being attentive?    

To repeat, THANK YOU for raising this issue. Doing so challenges our media to attend to more than just issues of pronunciation.

I feel emboldened! But I may now let this go for a while.

It's the first day of the rest of Beijing's life. I have no further thoughts to offer about the Games and their aftermath, so I bid them adieu with these few notebook items.

I also take leave of blog-land for the next week, because of (happy) family gatherings and other duties. The Democrats in Denver and the tennis players in New York will keep everyone occupied:

- The most riveting detail in today's NYT story about Olympic TV ratings success is fingering the person responsible for scheduling the games in the hottest time of the summer. It turns out to have been NBC's Dick Ebersol, and not, as everyone I've talked with had assumed, some astrology-conscious faction within the Beijing Olympic Committee that was obsessed with having the opening ceremony on August 8. Of course that's 08/08/08, heavy on the most traditionally "auspicious" number in Chinese culture.  Details in the very interesting NYT story. Years' worth of pop-culture analysis of modern China, right down the drain!

But maybe it was local people who added the flourish that the ceremonies start at 8:08 pm.

- The last big-deal event I saw was a big deal indeed: gold-medal football/soccer match, Argentina 1-0 over Nigeria. (Tickets offered by a foreign friend at the last minute.*) As a viewer,  I was reminded that soccer is the sport that suffers most in the transition from in-person to TV. TV can capture a whole court's worth of action in basketball, and tennis, and usually baseball and football, though each is different when seen for real. But the soccer field is so big that what you see on TV is little isolated chunks of action rather than any larger flow -- or else, in the wide shots, a whole field with tiny dots moving around and kicking.  

Despite the appeal of on-scene viewing, despite the Argentinian team's long-standing popularity among Chinese fans, despite the gold-medal stakes, and despite everything else, once again the arena was not full. As at most venues, the cheap upper tier seats, where tickets had been opened for sale to the public, were all occupied. A lot of the fancy seats were flat empty. (Click for larger.)




Note in the shot below the Chinese participants who I think edge out the opening-ceremony cheerleaders for the gold medal in stoicism. During the entire match, they had to look constantly into the crowd. This was presumably to be on guard if  anyone tried to charge the field or -- much worse! -- take out some kind of banner. How you could sneak a banner in through the security screenings is mystery on its own. Not once did I see a one of them turn around, even when the crowd roared and the stadium seemed to pulse with excitement. They didn't move or flinch at all. Assuming that they were actual people and not mannequins, I say: Well done! Jia you!

(Note also the optical illusion in the shot: with the curved lines, it looks as if the picture is a trapezoid, with the bottom edge sloping up toward the right, rather than a rectangle. Or maybe the Games have destroyed my eyes and mind.)




- Speaking of empty venues, the photographer Zach Honig went to the Olympic Green some 12 hours after the closing ceremony, and: ghost town!  You can see more of his pictures here.



Enjoy the convention and the US Open. Signing off from Olympic coverage and all things  Internet for a while.
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* I benefited from the strange ticket distribution system, in this way. Before the games, my wife and I felt lucky to have come up with any ticket whatsoever: a first-day, standing-area only ticket to preliminary heats out at the rowing center. Over subsequent days, we ended up seeing quite  a lot of the action, in every case because people who had gotten tickets overseas or through companies ended up with spares. Thanks to our benefactors Tom B, Ken S, Andy R, Howard S, Eliot C, and Melanie C.

For the last week, Beijing's skies have been, mostly, glorious. I went for a long run this afternoon, and got sunburned while doing so, a risk I had not previously feared.

Out the window today


Same window two weeks ago (and much of the preceding six months)


All credit to whoever and whatever made this happen, from the Chinese scientists I quoted a few months ago saying that it would play out more or less the way it did; to the Chinese officials implementing the factory- and traffic- shutdown plans; to the American scientist who accurately predicted that the wind would shift to the proper, cleansing direction two or three days into the Games; to whatever powers were fundamentally responsible for the change of wind. The Japanese concept of 神風 -- kamikaze, "divine wind" -- unavoidably comes to mind.

In the bleak days just before the opening ceremony, I wondered whether the air could be such a problem that it would, through sheer shock, force a reconsideration of China's environmental policies. Now it's possible to imagine the opposite prospect: that Beijingers, having for once seen how transformed and pleasant the city can be when not under a pall, might resist being pushed back into the blear. As Jake Barnes once put it in different circumstances,  Isn't it pretty to think so.