The Phuc Diju Jussay?

try saying 'foot.' faster. ok, repeat the word, but replace the last consonant sound with a very soft 'k,' closing your mouth before the offending click can escape. you'll know you're doing it right when your cheeks puff out. now say it in a slightly higher pitch, as if you were at a noisy dinner party and you were trying to get your friend's attention without yelling. "phuc!"

i have 3 different phuc's in 3 separate classes, and whenever i call them by name i'm always mindful of the vietnamese pronunciation, except when i want to express frustration. then i use the american pronunciation, "fuck," as in "what the fuck are you doing?" and "so why the fuck are you late" and "quit fucking around" and "fuck, you do the next one." i sympathize with these phuc's because, as you may know, i'm no stranger to people mispronouncing my name. it's quite common for students to say my name in that higher pitch i described above, which in vietnamese means something like "lunatic." i figure if i can take being called mental, they can surely withstand a nominal likeness to the english language's most infamous 4-letter word.

i've hung out a few times with the eldest phuc, an extremely impressionable but nevertheless cool guy with whom i share a sardonic sense of humor and a perverse passion for pool. he'll be in seattle before the end of the year, so i asked him how he thinks people will react to his name. well aware of the impending controversy/confusion/hilarity, he believes it would be best to just adopt an american nickname, like 'luke' or 'mickey.' (i'd have offered up 'razor,' but i'm reserving that awesome title for my first born.) instead, i suggested he wholly embrace the vulgar nature of his name. when somebody asks him what his name is, he should let out an uncamouflaged f-bomb. "yeah, my name's FUCK, fuck nagooyen" (nguyen). he didn't like that idea at all.

so anyway, phuc, along with every other vietnamese student i've ever had, can be hard to understand sometimes. like last week when he asked me out of nowhere about 'conservate,' with the vowel sounds all over the place and accents on the wrong syllables. typical of what i go through on a daily basis, the exchange went something like this:

"kuh-SA-vat."
"sorry?"
"kunh-SUH-vat."
"huh?"
"kun-suh-vate."
"again?"
"KANH-suh-vate."
"uhh... can you write it?"

...

"ohhhh... yeah. conservate. that's not a word."

my ears have by now adjusted to the idiosyncrasies of the vietnamese version of spoken english, marked most distinctly by a pervasive disregard for accurately enunciating the last consonant sounds. (juice guy anyone? "yeh, thah one chee omeleh an one mango smoo-ie.") and i'm reasonably good at deciphering their b's from p's and g's from c's, which they often don't distinguish clearly. so if one of them asks me where he can find "pig cocks" i won't send him somewhere that sells "big cogs" (though it might not be all that much of a disappointment).

as long as the students stay within the boundaries of a normal conversation, i usually understand what they're talking about. but when they try using low frequency words without context or knowledge of the correct pronunciation, i often have to cycle through a number of similar sounding words to guess what they mean. this becomes quite tedious after a while so if i think it's important, i'll take the time to listen, but often after the second or third time the student repeats it, i have to just acknowledge whatever they said with a simple "ok" or the ever ready "really?" or occasionally an utterly unthoughtful "hmm... interesting." and there's always that old standby the smile-nod-and-move-on which i assure you, judging by their silent dejection, is as inconsiderate and condescending here as wherever you're from.

but today my patience paid off when one of the slightly stuck up high school girls stood up and asked me if she could leave. since i was mid sentence i said "no, wait a second" and continued my inquiry into what another student was saying. she remained standing for a moment until one of her friends said she was sick and had to use the bathroom. in the 4 seconds from when she had first asked me to when i looked at her again, she had contorted her face into such a comically exaggerated expression of agony that i just smiled and waved her by. as soon as she left, one of the older guys said something directed at me that made some of the students around him laugh. i thought it was a comment regarding the lesson so i said:

"sorry?"
"dorra."
"huh?"
"dorry."
"... what?"
"dah-orry."

at this point i'd have just said "ok" and gone on with the lesson, but the boys' giggles and the look of disgust coming from one of the girls signaled to me that this was worth knowing.

"sorry, just say it louder."
"she has DIARRHEA."

of course. once i understood what he was referring to, his mangled meaningless mumble-jumble snapped into the verbal symbol for shit pouring out of someone's ass which, much like people getting smashed in the face and crotch in Dodgeball, has been empirically proven to be pan-culturally humorous.

i can understand why a student would have trouble pronouncing 'diarrhea' what with all those r's and a rogue h. it's gotta be french. but earlier in the day i was baffled when one of the engineers from hanoi, minh, the unanimous winner of the whiny bitch -- excuse me, 'complainy-loo' -- of the year award, asked me what 'jarn' meant. I was surpirised not because i didn't know what he was talking about, but because i couldn't believe he was pronouncing it like that.

"sorry?"
"jarn"
"what?"
"jarn"
"...jarn?"
"yes."

the word was 'yarn.' it appeared in one of the questions on a practice exercise we were doing in class, and i had been explaining what it was for at least a minute before he asked me. it was obvious he hadn't been paying attention so to prove my point and embarrass him a little, i started writing some words on the board: "you," "yet," "yellow..." [shoulda just written 'yes' in retrospect] but before i could finish he said "ah see," and showed me his electronic dictionary which said exactly this: yarn - jarn.

"what is this?"
"the pronunciation: JARN."

i started laughing. "minh, it's wrong. that thing is useless. 'y' is a 'yuh' sound not 'juh.' look at all these words."
"i know but i think uhh you're wrong."

and he was serious, which made me laugh even harder. it was at that time that i remembered all the hanoi students speak with the northern accent which uses "zuh" sounds instead of the southern "yuh's." so i asked all the hanoi students to pronounce the words on the board and they all said the words with a half 'j'-half 'z' kinda sound (but they had to've been humoring me to say "ju" when i know they all usually say "you"), while the southerners had no problems.

i was still reveling in the absurdity of the situation when minh finally admitted i was right, but only after seeing someone else's electronic dictionary with the correct pronunciation. of course i wasn't gonna let him off that easy so i then went on a minute long spiel thanking god that i was right because i'd thought for 23 years of my life i'd been mispronouncing all those words. making sure the irony escaped no one, i suggested they all drop out and instead watch mtv for 6 hours a day, and spend their money on expensive pocket dictionaries and candy.

let's see, what else happened today? someone wrote 'matt suks' outside my door. that was very nice. it was before the above incident occurred, so i originally assumed it was my colleague/housemate/australian/functionally illiterate friend euan, but the spelling was too good. hmmm, was it phuc in my SSP class, the confused 15 year old high school kid not yet aware he'll one day be a raging homo? well at the time, i figured it could be anyone...

"hey fuck, did you write that outside my door?"
"what?"
"you know what. don't play stupid with me, fucker."
"i don't know what..."
"look i know you fucking wrote it."
"..."
"relax man, i'm just fucking with you."
"...teacher, my name is phuc not 'fuck.'"
"that's what i said... ok. everyone open your books to page uhh..."