I keep obsessing over the “House M.D. speaks Mandarin” scenes so here’s a breakdown of why I find it awesome

I, look, if you haven’t watched House M.D., hopefully this post nudges you in that direction. Either way, I hope you can spare about 15-20 minutes to watch two clips and read the rest of my rambling.

First, watch this (2:45 minute watch). Even if you know which scene I’m talking about already and know the catch:

Now rewatch the above clip and observe House’s actions given that you now know he also understands Mandarin and hence understood everything was being said. There are some really subtle implications.

The following is in “(timestamp) comment” format and implies that you can use the above embed video to click back to the timestamps to see what I’m referring to.

• (0:11-0:15) Notice the extended pause before House responds. If we consider this scene with House understanding both the mother (speaking in Mandarin about her cold) and daughter (speaking in English about wanting birth control pills), it probably would’ve taken him a bit longer to mentally process (and anybody learning an additional language knows this pain), as well as figure out that he isn’t supposed to show that he understands the mother and therefore only respond to the daughter.
  
• (1:36-1:43) Now House walks in and both the mother and daughter are speaking hurriedly over each other. It makes sense that in typical House demeanour he wasn’t initially paying attention and probably needed them to speak a bit more slowly for him to properly process what was being said, hence the very blunt “What?”.
  
• (2:07-2:08) The mother is asking the daughter what went wrong, but House (intentionally?) chose to wait for the daughter to respond despite already understanding what the mother said. Notice that without knowing House understood Mandarin, this scene could’ve just looked like he was waiting for the daughter to translate. Another possible subtlety is that House may better understand listening (and reading) Mandarin as opposed to speaking it (notice the pause before he speaks Mandarin himself, very typical when one has to think in a different language), and language learners can tell you that listening to a language and being able to speak it are two distinct and separate skills.

One other thing I really like about this scene is the bit from (1:47-1:54) that might be dead air time but it also gives the chance for the audience to arrive at the same conclusion before House says it. And I think that’s a subtle beauty of certain shows where they also give the audience the same amount of evidence and time to figure out the mystery, because there’s sincerely no hiding it from the actual experts.

Speaking of experts, here’s a recommended video (8 minute watch) that actually translates and breaks down the Mandarin, as well as provides additional insight that only Mandarin speakers would’ve gotten.

Seriously, so much depth and subtlety 🤯 I actually wonder how intentional the Mandarin script was for this.

One thing I appreciate about House M.D. is how well it represents every-day occurrences of seemingly bizarre or markedly different clinic cases of different demographics. In this case, it’s a very a typical scenario of Chinese immigrants and their (diaspora) children growing up in a Western country. A common thing to happen back then is that for immigrant parents who didn’t bother to learn English, the brunt of the work would fall on the children to navigate English paperwork. Things are obviously much more accessible for immigrants now, consider that House M.D. ran during 2004-2012 (yikes, that old?!), so the accessibility and availability of things in different languages were not as prominent back then.
It’s also worth pointing out that official procedure these days for hospitals/doctors is to get an official translator to prevent cases like in this scene: where the children would realise that they can get away with saying something different because their parents wouldn’t know any better.

These scenes undoubtedly demonstrate mastery of understanding how a couple of simple scenes can be understood vastly differently depending on the audience, and getting the acting + direction balanced and smooth in all of these domains. Simply amazing.

It’s also worth reading the Youtube comments in both of these videos to see more of the discussion.