Hang on.
There’s something fishy in the won ton soup. We’d always been led to believe
that one of Kevin Rudd’s great skills was his talent for Mandarin, supposedly
honed with First Class Honours at the ANU and finessed during his stint as a
diplomat in Beijing. Yet it now turns out – if youtube is anything to go by –
that our once and (potentially) future PM can barely string two words together in
the language of the Middle Kingdom without exploding into a hissy fit of curses
and f-bombs.
“Mate this is
just impossible,” he snarled at his cameraman, as he struggled to get his
tongue around a greeting video. But how hard can it be? The words were
displayed on an auto-cue for him to read in the privacy of his own studio. The
editor was standing by to cut the good bits together and leave out the
mistakes. The message was presumably along the lines of “Sorry I couldn’t be
there with you tonight, but I hope you all have a great time.” Hardly an orthoepic
dissertation on aspiratory consonants
in the Pinghua dialect.
Yet somehow
the whiz-kid from Eumundi ended up all over the place, like a plate of left
over dim sums at Sunday yum cha. “Just give me simple sentences! This f***ing
language! How can anyone do this?” he dummy-spat, fretting like a Gonksi-ite
schoolkid who’s just found out he’s come bottom of the class.
Was it all
just a myth? Is Kevin’s lauded mastery of Mandarin no better than his mastery
of economics (“save capitalism
from itself”), diplomacy ("those
Chinese f***ers are trying to rat-f***
us”), science (“the greatest moral challenge of our time”) or team management (“a psychopath with
a giant ego”)?
Surely he
hasn’t been hoodwinking us all along?
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