Newly-minted Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand may be facing opposition from immigrant advocates and Latino lawmakers, but she won points earlier this week with another constituency - the Mandarin-speaking Chinese community - when she gave an interview in Mandarin to the New York City-based Chinese language newspaper, World Journal, on Tuesday.
A reporter with the World Journal called Gillibrand spokeswoman Rachel McEneny if Gillibrand - who studied Mandarin at Dartmouth and studied abroad in China and Taiwan - had a Chinese name.
For the record, she does: Lu Tian Na. For many non-Chinese speakers learning Mandarin, the convention is to take the person’s English last name and pick a word that sounds like the first syllable. The second half (the given name) can be anything. In this case - Gillibrand, who went by Tina Rutnik in college, transliterated her first name as well. Roughly translated, “lu” means continent, “tian” means sky, and “na” means that.
Gillibrand took the phone and spoke with the reporter in Mandarin for around 15 minutes, according to McEneny.
Gillibrand’s interview with the World Journal didn’t turn up anything particularly surprising - she spoke of her interest in US-China relations and her hope to work on those issues as a member of the Foreign Affairs committee. She also spoke about her increased concern about Tibetan issues in China.
Gillibrand wrote her college senior thesis, “The History of Tibetan Resistance to the Chinese Occupation of Tibet 1950-1988,” after traveling to India and China.
The story discussed Gillibrand’s position on immigration - namely the need to give legal immigrants the opportunity to work towards citizenship - but it wasn’t immediately clear from the story if it was from the paper’s interview with Gillibrand, or culled from previous statements. (When asked whether immigration was part of the interview, McEneny replied, “i dont know _ I dont speak the laguage…seriously… “)
On Monday, Gillibrand said this of her position on immigration:
“My view has always been that we need to right-size immigration,” she said. “We need to have the right number of visas to accommodate the right number of workers, particularly for this industry. The agriculture industry’s number one concern is, we need access to legal workers, and we need our immigration system to work for our industry because there is so much talent that we need to keep in this country that are experts in all of these various industries.”
The World Journal complimented Gillibrand’s pronunciation, saying that she spoke with good, straight tones.
That’s a high compliment to a non-native speaker, and here’s why:
Mandarin is tonal language, characterized by Chinese four tones, which give a given word four different meanings, depending on the tone. It’s the hardest thing for non-native speakers to master when learning Chinese. Click on the video below for a sample.
Resource from
http://blogs.timesunion.com/capitol/arch...good-tones
