MEET THE LI FAMILY

Here are Cameron's Suzhou hosts: the Li family. The father, Li Baiosheng, is an architectural engineer, which Cam found very interesting, as her paternal grandfather was a distinguished architect and her dad is trained as an engineer.


The host mother, Zhang Xiaoling, is a nursing student.


Cameron's host sister is Li Jianing, a sixteen-year-old high school scholar. (In China, she is considered 17, as the Chinese count one's original birthday as year one.)


One grandmother, who lives with them, gave up her bedroom for Cameron this summer. She is sleeping in her granddaughter Jianging's room. Grandmother also does most of the cooking for the family and is going to teach Cameron how to make vegetarian Chinese dumplings.


Though she speaks some Mandarin, Grandmother's first language is a Wu dialect called Suzhouhua, known as one of the most flowing and elegant languages in China. In 2011, Cameron found that many in Shanghai also spoke a Wu dialect that English speakers called "Shanghai-nese". Cam told me that many elderly Chinese, like Grandmother, only learned Mandarin (or Putonghua) as adults, when Chairman Mao united a nation of myriad regional variations by making his native tongue the official language.


To fully appreciate the communication challenges Cam faces in China, you can read this description of the many varieties of Chinese languages. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Chinese

~ Posted by Pam Hughes