Mantis Versus

"You can observe a lot by watching." -Yogi Berra

Tag: Chinese English

The Real China: Handsome Foreign Spies and Open Secrets

April 21, 2016 / / 1 Comment

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Posters across Beijing are warning Chinese women to beware of handsome foreign men who might be romancing state secrets out of them. You can see the full comic-style poster and read about it here and here.

As the consensus most shuai guh (handsome guy) among the students and teachers at my university, I should state now that the only secrets I blazed abroad were the open secrets: that China is a rotten, awful country deserving of universal censure, a place of proverbial lawlessness and pollution, with foul-mouthed pushy masses of people fouling the earth with their trash, spit, and excrement, and the cars, buses, and bikes on the streets destroying any peace with their recklessness and blaring horns, and all the selfish, crowded ugliness happening under the sagging smog of the dishwater-colored sky.

But back to the story of the comic, one thing I’ve never understood is how so-called handsome foreign men are even persuading local Chinese women to date them. All my small talk fizzled out before it ever got flirtatious.

Me: So, what do you like to do?

Aggressively Introverted Chinese girl: I LIKE… WATCH TV.

Me, smiling solicitously: Okay. Do you like anything else?

Her: JUST WATCH TV.

Me, giggling nervously: Okay, that’s good. Do you like TV dramas? Prison Break?

Her: …

Me, after a deflating pause: Do you like sleeping?

Her: YES. I LIKE.

[END CONVERSATION AS BOTH LOOK AROUND FOR SOMETHING TO DISTRACT THEMSELVES WITH.]

I learned to assume that everyone in China counted sleeping or dreaming as a hobby. One girl took being a cold fish to an extreme though and told me she had no interests, nothing, even despite me pressing her if she liked the staples of sleep and TV. In a way, that’s a lot more interesting than saying “JUST WATCH TV.”

So, I have no idea how the few foreign guys I saw in China with Chinese girlfriends got that way. I assume they wore it on their sleeve that they were looking for a Chinese girlfriend and they found their inverse half in a worldly metropolis like Beijing.

And- hold everything- since when was it that foreigners were spying on China and not the other way around? Is there a single piece of military equipment, a single automobile, computer, clothing line, or Chinese toy that was not blatantly cheated and copied from foreign sources? A friend of mine works as an engineer for a car company and he’s told me how his management has issued real warnings- not simple cartoons that are getting laughed at in China and abroad- about sharing too much data with Chinese clients because of the now obvious business wisdom that China steals and spies out whatever intellectual property it can.

But this is communist tyranny. Everything corrupts from the inside, from the top down, with the stiff-browed leaders perpetually making highhanded, doublespeak excuses and laughably see-through shows of triumphal patriotism and Big Brother brainwashing. What an awful country.

In fact, at one dinner a few talented English students of mine confessed to me that they all three wanted foreign boyfriends because they found them much more handsome and appealing than Chinese men. Now, I met a lot of decent, likable guys in China, but I could see the ladies’ point. The Chinese husbands I witnessed too often showed off domineering, drinking, dismissive, pouty, entitled behavior, not caring who was watching and seeming to have no appreciation for how much more attractive and shapely their wives were compared to them.

As I’ve said before, the greatest threat from foreign guests in China, handsome or not, is when they see China for what it really is.

Mantis vs. Chinese

December 3, 2015 / / 0 Comments

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(Continued from Plumbing and Blocks: A Metaphor for Language)
(Part 2/4: The Basics of the Chinese Language)
(Part 1/4: Why I Stopped Learning Chinese)

Why I Stopped Learning Chinese

In college, I had a Chinese professor, teaching a course on China, who boasted that Chinese has the easiest grammar of any language, and if anyone could write a paper identifying a language to demonstrate otherwise, he would give that student an A for the semester. Well, after living among the Chinese and hearing their language daily, also hearing their incessant boasts about how ancient and great their civilization was, how everything was first invented, done, or developed in China (even pizza, preposterously, of all things), and after losing patience with the Chinese way of life, I will offer some hyperbole of my own: Chinese is the worst language I have ever heard. Just the same as there might be some language spoken by a tribe in Papua New Guinea that linguists could contend might have simpler grammar than Chinese, there might be a language on this earth that sounds worse than Chinese, but my ears have not discovered it.

Now “heard” implies listening to spoken Chinese, and listening and speaking are only half of the major divisions of language (the other two dimensions being reading and writing). Based on what I have written already, I will leave it to the reader to imagine how inefficient and tedious it is, not to mention culturally exclusive, to use the Chinese writing system.

Those artful symbols seem so impressive until one tries to use them for all of life’s daily reading and writing purposes. Then, constantly stumped by the appearance of new words and having no idea how to pronounce them, and wishing that words could just be spelled out with a pen or keyboard instead of having to make an artful or sloppy piece of calligraphy with a regimented writing method, it dawns on the newcomer: using pictographic and ideographic symbols for all of a written language isn’t such a good idea.

English words may be irregular and their phonics flawed, but they work efficiently and they are very flexible and adaptable. There is a reason computer keyboards the world over use Roman letters, and it is not because an Englishman has possession of their patent. It is because those letters were developed through the millennia of several civilizations, and the result is language units proved by the furnace of culture and time. They work- very well.

Yes, Chinese writing also works (any extant written language can be said to work- people use it, don’t they?), but I would argue not nearly as well. The Koreans and Japanese, who developed their written languages from Chinese, both saw the need to break the written characters down and create alphabets out of them. The Chinese, who take inordinate pride in their history and tradition, have never seen the need to do likewise. Pinyin transliteration is the closest they have come to compromising with reasonability.

When using a word from a foreign language, something Chinese is hamstrung from doing, but something I think English does exceptionally well (English speakers, think of all the foreign words you know from languages like Spanish and Japanese, and all the French phrases you recognize- now, do you speak those languages?), Chinese has to use its existing characters and sound the word out- poorly. Remember, their smallest language unit is the word, not the letter.

Example: my home state, Iowa, in Chinese pinyin combines three unrelated words to form “Ài-hé-huá.” Those three words are literally “love,” “lotus,” and the adjective for “Chinese” or “Han” culture. So, basically the combination is gibberish, and a Chinese has to have familiarity with these quasi-phonetic combinations to know that the words are not lost but are pitifully trying to indicate a place name. In America, place names popularly use words from Native American languages, and Roman letters do a better than decent job of retaining the sound of the original language, though it takes an awful lot of k’s, vowels, and sign space to do so.

The written Chinese characters are what beguile foreign eyes and entice them to think Chinese must be such an exotic and esoteric language, but that is not the case. Once the alluring bait is taken, the sucker realizes the truth- that the incredible visual symbols are masking childishly simple words that mostly sound like “cheese” and “seizure.” I am almost serious. Chinese has so many sounds similar to “sh-” and “ch-” and “j-” that learning their language made me think I was in a speech therapy class meant to manage the way I pushed air through my teeth.

On the topic of the spoken word, I have to admit I am not much of an authority. I never heard Chinese spoken. I heard it barked, shouted, growled, blurted, hissed, sputtered, ejected, muttered, whined, scolded, chided, coughed, screeched, yelled, howled, whispered through closed lips, called out impatiently by a screeching woman, sung in a thin, tinny falsetto voice, and histrionically recited by a man for an audience, but I never heard it spoken. If one’s only exposure to spoken Chinese is a foreign film, it goes without saying that those actors were speaking stylized lines clearly enough for the boom microphone to pick them up. If one has heard the clamor of a kitchen in a Chinese restaurant, that is more like what I am referring to.

It is not the people’s fault that the language comes out so rushed, so clipped- that is the natural tendency when speaking the short, friction-filled sounds of Chinese. If the context ever demands enunciation, like in the narration of television commercials, and spoken Chinese is put on display, then the resulting sound is absurd and buffoonish. I expected viewers to crack up at the overdone, pompous voices on television- the voices having to fall up and down and flit erratically like a dollar bill in the wind in order to precisely hit the jarring tone changes between every Chinese syllable- but my Chinese friends’ faces were unflinching. They could not hear the ridiculousness of the language because they were native to it and the sounds could not be heard, only their meaning.

Those clownish Chinese voices were artificial, not representative of the voices I suffered in my daily experience. Those voices spat out the harsh, static sounds of the language that made me wince. Even though I had attained a base level of Chinese that would have allowed me to speak to shopkeepers and ask for directions, had I felt brave, I almost always avoided opening my mouth to get the locals’ attention. I didn’t want to be shouted at in return. When I took a taxi and had to communicate, I would mutely hand the driver a slip of paper with my destination written on it. Sometimes that wasn’t enough. The driver would badger me and try to get more money out of me, and I would testily mutter in Chinese, “I don’t understand. I don’t understand…” over and over until the driver would give up in frustration of I did and exited the cab.

It was a surprising contrast to my experiences traveling in Thailand and speaking to the rare Thai person met in America. In those cases, I was giddy to try out what few phrases I knew, and I was pleasantly satisfied when the happy stranger would smile and pleasantly reply to me in a clean voice. Most of the Thai people I have attempted to speak to really were friendly and accommodating, and the experience showed me how common humanity could bridge the gulf of culture and language.

In China, the people did not speak anything like a friendly, clear, accommodating voice. Even when a sweet young lady wanted to say something smilingly polite, the sounds of Chinese are so pinched and abrupt that the message sounded like she had a mouth full of food. I felt no compulsion to talk to the Chinese in their own tongue; I had a distaste for the exercise that bordered on revulsion.

I would put it like this: in English, there are three moods: the indicative mood, for statements and questions; the imperative, for giving commands and advice; and the subjunctive, to express conditional statements or wishes (e.g. “If I were rich, I would buy a new house.”). In Chinese, I observed only one mood: angry. Every interaction was quickly spoken and short-tempered. Several times an English-speaking Chinese student or friend would excuse a violent-sounding scene to me by saying, “Those people sound like they are arguing, but they are just talking” or “She just asked him what time the bus arrives.”

I could sense mild embarrassment in my Chinese apologist, and could not but question to myself when Chinese culture at large was going to take the hint from foreigners’ faces- white(r) with shock- and stop excusing the cacophony inherent in their speaking voices and make heartfelt reforms in their language and the way they spoke it.

I do not need to understand Japanese, by contrast, to pick up on the great politeness and reserve the Japanese speak with. Body language, tone of voice, and the sound of their words reveal it to me. Being around Chinese speakers in the many and various chaotic, crowded, and disgusting settings of a real Chinese city, I was struck by the intensity of volume and spirit the Chinese would begin speaking with in the blink of an eye. I could read in their voices and body language that they were agitated and distressed, at once bound close enough in community that strangers could quickly strike up a conversation as if they were a married couple resuming a paused feud, and distant enough that no one received strangers with a kind smile, a slowly spoken reply, and a gentle nod of the head. If felt as if the whole country was composed of stock brokers, always chattering and shouting- never speaking- and shoving each other to get to the front of whichever line they were in.

It dawned on me then, that I found no innate appeal in the Chinese language. The visuals of the written characters had worn thin and let me down, and I could not bring myself to adopt the people’s hot, quarrelsome way of speaking. I have often heard other languages spoken and found much beauty and appeal in them. Hearing the acrobatic lisps of Spanish speakers, the fluid friction of German, or the low, flowing syllables of Japanese attracts me and makes me curious about the depths their language conceals. I find I have a thirst to know their treasures of language and culture.

In China, I heard what seemed like endless boasting about their civilization, but after living in the real conditions of China, submerged in the torrent of choppy spoken sounds, I lost interest in their culture. I knew it was all a sham. The Chinese can school me in Confucian social order and harmony when their drivers learn to yield to traffic lights and pedestrians, when their people learn to form a line at the cafeteria, the train station, or of all places a national monument or museum, like the one dedicated to the Nanking Massacre, where all solemnity was broken during my visit by the mass of inconsiderate boors who would barge in with their elbows and stand to take pictures in front of others.

I realized this epiphany in real-life experience: language and culture are so intricately connected that it can be said language is culture. It was no accident that people who yelled at each other as a matter of course also honked their car horns nonstop at each other, pushed each other in all public places, and showed no shyness when spitting or having their children defecate in front of each other. Chinese culture had me disgusted, and its language had done little better. I wanted a part of neither.

Language, if one does not speak it, is an incredibly vast and deep system, seemingly impossible to conform one’s mind to. If one does speak the language, it is nothing at all. It takes no special effort for me to think in English. Learning Chinese though, or any other foreign language, would require great effort and that I took the time to live in Chinese-speaking society. Learning a foreign language then is a great compliment. The learner is declaring that this language and culture is worth his time, so much so that he is willing to make it a singular pursuit. The end goal is participation in a new culture and society. Again, it is nothing for me to visit a local restaurant, peruse the menu, and place my order, but for a foreigner dreaming the American dream, this is an impressive feat and a big step towards integration.

Integration became the furthest thing from my mind in China. I wanted relief; I wanted to leave. As the second semester waned, my Chinese studies all but completely ceased. I would still talk to Aunt Fong in Chinese, but I bitterly left my Chinese workbooks to gather dust. I did not want to be part of Chinese society. I did not want to remain in their country. Those are the real motivations for learning Chinese. Not wanting to remain in China, I no longer had those goals. Therefore, I stopped learning Chinese.

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A Lesson and a Concession

Going through the effort to learn Chinese, and especially the exercise of thinking about language, has made me think differently than the common views on language. My perspective is this: when I hear someone explain a feature of a foreign language, I do not treat it like a rule, I treat it like a proposal. So, for example, when someone shows me that the written character for the Chinese singular pronoun “I” or “me”: 我, takes seven marks of the pen, I do not stroke my chin and say, “How interesting. Your writing system must contain much meaning within these complex symbols.” No, I open my eyes widely in a bewildered stare and ask, “Are you serious? Do you realize how tedious and time-consuming that will be to spend seven strokes on such a basic word? Not to mention, you’re going to have to design these abstract symbols of yours for every single word– every concept, function, feeling, action, and object.

‘Your stick figure makes sense for the word ‘man’ (人), but how do you propose to make an iconic representation for a word like ‘discontent’? No, stop. Don’t draw your symbol for me. Inventing it is the easy part. How do you propose you will teach every literate person in your society how to read and write each of your thousands of symbols? Your schools will be little more than factories where robotic children are forced to learn by rote to such an extent that they will lose all aptitude for critical thinking or creativity. But if that is what you want, carry on with the symbol making.”

And again, “You are proposing to make every word a one-syllable sound? And because your language units come as simple, solid words, you are going to do away with an alphabet altogether? No, no, no, that will never work. Think of what will happen when you try and introduce a new sound, when you need a new word to describe a new thing, or to incorporate a foreign word. How will you do it? How will you pass along to everyone the pronunciation of the new word? Your language units are already fixed, and there are no phonics or other universal standards of word sounds, so how will you solve the problem of making new words? You say all new words will be compound words? And foreign words can be approximately sounded out with your existing word sounds? Well, that sounds like an awfully broad use of the word ‘approximately.’ Listening to you say ‘Washington’ (Hua-sheng-dun) sounds like a man speaking with a frozen jaw.

“But your compound words idea- are you forgetting that using only single-syllable sounds is already going to force you to overlap and border similar sounds to the point that you will have to rely on those awkward, ugly tones to differentiate between the sounds? Even then, many of the words will still have the exact same sound and tone. There are more things in heaven and earth, Hu Rui-Xiao, than are dreamt of in your language units. Your words and sounds are far too limited. Combining your monosyllables into compound words might be a solution to the problem of making new words, but it only compounds the original problem of having too many words with similar sounds or the exact same sounds. It’s indistinguishable.

“Imagine this scenario: you are on the phone with your friend and you ask about the ‘ma’ vehicle. It’s spoken over the phone, and it’s in Chinese, so your words are doubly indistinct.

“Your friend asks you, ‘DID YOU SAY “MAHN” (慢)? YOU WANT THE “SLOW” VEHICLE?’

“You impatiently correct him, ‘NO, CAN’T YOU HEAR? I SAID “MA,” NOT “MAHN.”’

“He then rightly defends himself, ‘BUT THE TWO SOUND IDENTICAL. BOTH ARE SPOKEN QUICKLY AND THE VOWEL ISN’T FULLY FORMED, SO “MAHN” SOUNDS JUST LIKE “MA.” IT IS ONLY THE DIFFERENCE OF ABRUPTLY CEASING THE SOUND WITH AN OPEN MOUTH VERSUS LIGHTLY AND IMPERCEPTIBLY TOUCHING THE TONGUE TO THE ROOF OF THE MOUTH, CUTTING THE FULL SOUND OF THE WORD SHORT.’

“You proceed, ‘LOOK, I DIDN’T CALL YOU TO ARGUE ABOUT HOW UNCLEAR OUR LANGUAGE IS, I JUST CALLED TO ASK ABOUT THE “MA” VEHICLE.’

“Your friend again says, ‘DID YOU SAY “MA” (马) AS IN THE BEAST OF BURDEN WITH LONG LEGS AND A FAST GALLOP, OR DID YOU SAY “MA” (妈) AS IN A WOMAN WHO BEARS CHILDREN AND RAISES THEM?’

“Fed up with the runaround, you repeat yourself, ‘I SAID “MA”!’

“Your friend, no less confused, replies, ‘I STILL CAN’T UNDERSTAND YOU. I WOULD ASK YOU TO SPELL IT OUT- “D” AS IN “DOG,” “B” AS IN “BOY”- BUT WE DON’T HAVE AN ALPHABET. HOW DO WE EVER EXCHANGE EMAIL ADDRESSES WITH ONE ANOTHER?’

“You, by this point screaming, not just loud-talking, repeat again, ‘I SAID “MA”!’

“Your friend will say, ‘STOP SHOUTING!’

“And you will say, ‘I’M NOT SHOUTING! I’M ONLY SPEAKING CHINESE TO YOU. BRING THE “MA” VEHICLE!’

“Your friend finally compromises, ‘I’LL JUST ATTACH THE HORSE TRAILER TO YOUR MOTHER’S CAR AND DRIVE THEM BOTH OVER TO YOU.’

“Now, my friend, is this the kind of interaction you want to set yourself up for? Then please, be reasonable and develop some phonics, an alphabet, and a wider range of sounds. It will require that you make something new, that you innovate rather than repeating and venerating the works of the past. So, I will leave it to you, my Chinese friend, to move toward the path of sensible innovation or remain where you are in the haphazard slough of fixed civilization. I know which option you should pursue, but I fear which one you will stubbornly hold onto.”

I may sound exceptionally jaded to the Chinese language and its culture, but my dissatisfaction is in due proportion to the height of my expectations and the depth of my real disappointment. I had so much hope and time invested in Chinese, and what was the result of my labors? I could use a spare Chinese word or phrase in a discussion with a bilingual friend, but hearing and seeing the Chinese language in public had become too wearisome.

I did not care to cross over with both feet and become familiar with a language that rushed out in such hostile and harsh sounds. I did not want to talk to someone using a voice like that, and I felt no personal trust with a person who spoke to me like that. We would sound like two dogs fighting over a bone, and any fluent onlookers would have to interpret for foreign ears that we were just commenting on how lovely the weather was going to be for our upcoming holiday.

At least, if I had learned a language like Russian, I would have sounded nefarious and arch. People would hear me and either think I was scheming something or lamenting my woeful place in this world. Almost any other language, and people would say what a charming and alluring accent I had. Speaking Chinese is seductive to no one. When Chinese speakers use English, the Mandarin speakers speak ploddingly, breathily, but with not much of a flavorful accent, and the Cantonese speakers, who have nine standard tones in their language, sound like banjo strings being plucked, tightened, and unwound.

And as far as I know, no Chinese words or idioms have proven themselves worthy to use in English, other than food names (e.g. “bok choy” or “chow mein”), and the simplified phrases “Chop, chop” and “Long time, no see” (this is a common Chinese saying, but it is not for certain that the English phrase came from the Chinese parallel).

Contrast that with French, a language whose artful phrases seem tailor-made for flourishes in English sentences. It sounds so much more sophisticated to say “C’est la vie” instead of our plain “That’s life.” The only advantageous Chinese words I have found are their numbers (credit for this insight is owed to Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers: The Story of Success). Chinese numbers are pronounced quicker than English numbers, so they are easier to speak and remember, and there are no irregular numbers like “eleven.” In Chinese, that would be “ten-one.”

After my studies and my time in China, I was left with a smattering of simple, practical knowledge of a language that I did not want to use in its homeland, and which is mostly useless to me in America, where Chinese is a lingua franca to no one, and where the first and second generation Chinese immigrants can either speak English to outsiders, or if incompetent, can keep up a cold, distant front with those outside their group. I am not denying that Chinese people can be friendly or work and speak with others. I am not interpreting language fluency as friendliness. I am saying that in my experience with foreign immigrants and visitors, I have found it easy to talk with the Japanese and Thais, for example, but difficult to approach the Chinese, get on their wavelength, and establish trust.

When I spoke Thai to the Thais or talked about Japan to the Japanese, they smiled and talked back, but when I have gone against my better intuition and dared to speak Chinese to the Chinese in America, they mostly seemed shocked or uncomfortable with it, uninterested in talking to me. That is in America though. In China, there were times when my white face attracted a crowd, and many Chinese students eagerly peppered me with cheerful questions.

I do not feel vengeful toward China and its people, mostly I feel disappointment and exasperation which I issue in the form of real observation and rebuke. If the Chinese were humble about their language, if they disfavored boasting about their country and culture, I would see no need to be critical. I have no quarrel with the bashful, modest languages of the world, however absurd and unwieldy they may be. My problem is with pride and pretense, especially when it is undeserved. A language that sounds like ice dropped into a deep fryer should be more embarrassed of itself. Instead it proclaims itself and pretends it is unknowable, not able to be understood by outsiders. No, the problem with China is when it is seen and known, when it is exposed to outsiders and they are able to comment on it.

Lastly, my concession, which is only necessary. I have made quite a few censorious remarks on the Chinese language. I need to remember my place and keep things in perspective. St. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 14, wrote that “Even things without life, whether flute or harp, when they make a sound, unless they make a distinction in the sounds, how will it be known what is piped or played?” At this point, the pride and vanity of my flesh smile and say, “No distinction in the sounds? Surely he must be talking about Chinese.”

But then I am corrected by Scripture, later in the same chapter: “There are, it may be, so many kinds of languages in the world, and none of them is without significance.” There I am shown, there my whole argument is tempered: Chinese is not without significance. It still has great beauty and use among a great number of people. I found it unpalatable, and I have my reasons for disliking its modern form and practice, but these are after all entirely subjective opinions.

My problem is not really about the essence of a language, but the way it is rudely and irrationally practiced today.

I am one displeased individual who must remember that Chinese has its significance and purpose apart from me. I do not care to speak it or study it, but it is still worth speaking and studying in itself. I will leave it to those at peace with Chinese culture to do so.

I still love China.

I still love China.

Plumbing and Blocks: A Metaphor for Language

December 2, 2015 / / 0 Comments

(Continued from “The Basics of the Chinese Language.”)

(Part One: “Why I Stopped Learning Chinese.”)

(Note: my references throughout are to Mandarin Chinese, or the standard dialect of Chinese which I learned and was exposed to. Cantonese and other major dialects I did not live with nor learn.)

From Part 2: For those more familiar with Chinese, please forgive me where I have been imprecise or ignorant. And for those unfamiliar, I hope I have provided you with some insight and a feel for my experience with Chinese, which is admittedly very limited. Before I get into my complaint on the Chinese language, I would now like to offer a personal observation, an analogy for Chinese and English that is entirely subjective but I think an accurate and easy way to understand the essential difference between the two languages.

Plumbing and Blocks

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English is like plumbing. The thousands of words English has accumulated from other languages like the many pieces and parts stored in the bins of an old plumber’s workshop. An old hand can look at a problem and assemble a solution any number of ways using parts and pieces from different language bins. A simple problem- choosing the right word to complete a sentence- is like a simple repair of a leaking faucet. If the leak was caused by a hairline crack in the pipes, the plumber could plug or patch the leak for a quick fix, or replace the section of pipe altogether. In the same way, English words can be substituted with any of our language’s many synonyms, or the select word can be removed altogether and replaced with another. If the entire sentence is corroded, then the plumber needs to get to work, tinkering and replacing all the seals, pipes, washers, valves, screws, and nuts, i.e. the verb tense, the mood, the word choices, the tone, the syntax, the use of the right nouns, and adjectives that fit just right. Everything must fit together and allow the flow of water- in this metaphor, meaning- without leaks breaking out between pipe connections- i.e. word combinations- that do not fit each other. It is all complex and intricate. Word choices must fit the job, and all words must agree with the verb tenses and flow together towards the sentence’s intended meaning.

For illustration, let us suppose that I want to communicate and describe my upset stomach. Think of all the words and phrases at my disposal. My workshop is filled with shelves of plumbing parts to choose from. My mental plumber can select words originating from several different source languages or put together common English words to form phrases. I could simply plug the leak, saying, “I’m sick.” That will do, but the problem could be better addressed. I could alternatively say, “I’m ill” or “I’m feeling ill.” These sentences say the same thing, but when choosing between words the difference is that between using basic PVC plastic piping, that will work for basic applications but cannot handle high water temperatures, and using copper pipes that are stronger and better able to fortify the flow of meaning. In plumbing, it is water pressure, water temperature, and the location of pipes that determines the material- metal or plastic- to be used for the job. In English, the considerations for word choice are eloquence, context, and meaning.

In this illustration, eloquence is not necessary, yet word choice can still improve my chances of having my specific meaning understood the way choosing the right size washer or O-ring will ensure my pipe fittings do not leak. “I feel bad,” needs to be narrowed down. What is the problem? “My stomach hurts” will work. That efficient sentence is simple yet specific enough to communicate the intended meaning. But again, plumbing can be complex and so can sentence-making- choosing the right words and assembling them to fit the problem. “My stomach is upset” or “It hurts” will not inform my listener what kind of cure I need. I could add another sentence and build a longer connection of pipes. “I think I ate something bad.” Or “I ate something that disagreed with me.” There is a descriptive personification! I never knew food to be opinionated, but I intuitively understand the sense meant by saying that it “disagreed with my stomach.” If I want to attempt a diagnosis, I could say, “I think…” or “Maybe…” to venture a guess, or if I feel certain I could say without introduction, “It is food poisoning.” Think of all the options! So many different word choices and sentences for the same problem. English has shelves and shelves of subtly differing parts which can be sorted through and assembled together.

One could choose the bin labeled “Medical Words” and dig through and choose a word like “diarrhea” if that were my stomach’s problem. Then, the word chosen is from Greek, meaning “flowing through” (speaking of plumbing), and used medically in English it carries the meaning of all the associated symptoms, causes, and cures. Perhaps it is another medical problem with my stomach, so I face a different set of options. I can say, “It’s acid indigestion,” or using Greek again, “It’s pyrosis,” or more colloquially, “It’s heartburn.” So many options for so many things, and an abundance of words to build from.

Lastly, I could select words based on formality, feel, and context. “I’m sick” works simply, with anyone, but “My tummy hurts” is how a child attracts the attention and affection of her mother. If I am concerned with the feel of my words, their connotation, I can swap my source language box. I could go to the “Latin” box of plumbing parts (a very large box in English’s workshop) and pick out “nauseous.” (Note that the Latin “nausea” is in turn based on a Greek word, and English words commonly trace their ancestry back through more than one source language, so in this respect the analogy of boxes of plumbing parts breaks down. Perhaps parts that originated from one language box were sorted in with another?) “Nauseous” is such a strong, multi-syllable word. Very Latin. It has much more dignity than “sick,” in case I need to dress up my sickness for a discriminating audience. I wouldn’t want a dinner party, for the sake of my humorous example, to have to think about the unclean processes of the human body.

And if I’m really sick, I could exclaim/announce/shout/expel/interject/or cry out, “I’m going to throw up!” or “I’m gonna hurl!” or “I’m about to puke!” or “I think I’m ready to vomit!” or “spew” or any number of vulgar, colloquial, or slang terms. English goes on and on. In my experience of Chinese (language, culture, and people) the same standard words, phrases, and expressions were pretty much universally used by everyone in a rote way. It was not a normal thing for me to hear someone put their individual spin on a common saying.

Switching between source languages (in English, usually French, Latin, Greek, or Old English and Germanic) for descriptive words works just like changing a single valve or pipe in a plumbing system. I could say “daily” using a common English word, or I could say “every day” and make a phrase out of two simple pieces, or combine them into “everyday” and make a word with a subtly different meaning. Or, I could resort to Latin and seem sophisticated by using “quotidian.” Maybe the context requires the flair of French, and I say, du jour. Or, I might want to make a philosophical point about the common experience of daily life, so I go back to the “Latin” box and cull up “mundane.” Think of all the possibilities that can be fit together as an ad hoc (Latin again) solution for the sentence and context at hand. Daily allowance = “per diem.” I live life “day by day” or “one day at a time.”

It is a wonder how anyone can stay above water in the overflow of word choices that is the English language. But as the old plumber knows from experience just about where to look in his crowded, cluttered workplace to find the part he is thinking of, so does the English-speaking brain know which set of words to choose from. In this respect, English is not all that different from Chinese or any other language, but the number of words and word bins to choose from is much more abundant, overflowing, multitudinous, ample, bounteous, copious, profuse, populous, numerous, voluminous, and perhaps superfluous.

What is most like plumbing in English is word agreement and flow, the necessity that all the parts of a sentence are fit together properly and that they support the flow of meaning in one direction, just like a plumbing system must fit together properly and support water flow in one direction. Incongruent word choice is like ill-fitting pipes; they disturb the mind like drips from a leak. If a small child said, “Mommy, my tummy is nauseous,” one would assume the child was either precocious or trying out a newly learned vocabulary word. In the same way all the words in a sentence must work together, and the sentence must fit the style and tone of the context.

Most critically, to English and plumbing, the flow of the sentence must be consistent and in one direction. If I incorrectly used a verb tense and said, “I is going to the store now,” then my sentence has sprung a leak. My sentence still carries water- the meaning comes across, but there is a leak of verb confusion. A major meaning flow problem would be like saying, “I have been to go to the store tomorrow.” A listener has no idea what time frame this action is meant to take place, the same as a poorly assembled plumbing system could send water flowing in conflicting directions or into dead ends, with the result of burst pipes and major water leak.

This analogy could be expanded to cover even more aspects of English, but I have already written more than enough to make my point convincing: English is like plumbing.

chinese blocks

Chinese, now, is like blocks, the colorful wooden cubes that small children play with. If the reader can excuse the unintended condescension of the analogy, I will explain. Those six-sided playthings are one simple, solid object that has different images painted on each side. Each of the six sides has four edges and can be rotated to face one of four ways. The blocks can be arranged individually and then in combination with other blocks any way the child wants them. This is very Chinese.

In Chinese, words are very simple, having one syllable with the usual pattern of one consonant followed by one vowel, but by altering the tone of the word- rotating the block onto one of its four edges- the face of the block appears differently. It is still the same block face, the same consonant and vowel, but that adjustment in orientation (tone) makes it a different word. Also, as each block has six sides which would have to be examined and handled many times before the whole surface of the block was exactly remembered in the mind’s eye, so the written words of Chinese must be examined and handled- broken down according to root characters and brush strokes, then written out countless times- until that visual memory is unshakably implanted in the brain.

Most pertinent to this analogy, imagine a child (or adult) setting up some blocks any way he wanted on a shelf, metaphorically building a sentence, then objecting strongly when someone else- a foreign language learner- tried to do the same. It would be baffling. The foreigner would question the idea that the blocks really could be arranged in any order, the way Chinese can combine so many words together and is alleged to have no grammar (I have heard this boastful “no grammar” claim before, but I will leave it to a boring linguist to deconstruct it). The foreigner would object, “But I did it just like you!” The native speaker would know though. He had trained his eyes to catch even the slightest difference in the arrangement of his blocks. “There is no grammar,” but the Chinese know which words go together, and though they often cannot explain it, they can perceive when their words aren’t used just right.

In my pronunciation practice with Uncle Jiang and others, I felt like I was setting up my blocks on a display shelf for their scrutiny, and they would huffily say, “No!” and then rearrange my blocks- my pronunciation- by sliding a block over with their finger just a hair. I am a native English speaker, so I thought, “What’s the difference? I speak my words approximately the same as they do.” But no, they could tell. My pronunciation of Chinese tones, which might have sounded identical or close enough to me, could be found outrageous by them. Chinese grammar has no rules save the capricious feelings of its native users, like the whimsy of a child’s arrangement of his toys, and Chinese pronunciation is just as subtle as that of a child who insists his toys must be exactly arranged.

Also note: blocks do not connect. Pipes must connect by being inserted together, being arranged in a system having the right shapes and distances and gravitational flow. But blocks can be stacked or set side by side in any arrangement; there are no joints or threads with which to connect one block to another. Words in Chinese come whole; there is no conjugation of verbs or modification of nouns and adjectives to connect them to another word. Chinese does not have “go, to go, am going, did go, will go, went, gone.” Chinese has “go, go, go.”

Chinese words can simply be set next to each other. One block can easily be swapped out for another equally-sized block and the arrangement will hold, so long as it is a native speaker who knows how to delicately arrange the clumsy objects. If you don’t have the touch, your hearers will soon be calling out “Jenga!”

Yes, Chinese is like blocks. Now that I have essayed to demonstrate this and acquainted the reader with the nature of English and Chinese as I very much imperfectly understand them, I can commence my complaint.

To be continued.

The Basics of the Chinese Language

December 1, 2015 / / 0 Comments
Laoshi Dustin teaches Chinese.

Laoshi Dustin teaches Chinese.

(Continued from “Why I Stopped Learning Chinese”)
(Note: my references throughout are to Mandarin Chinese, or the standard dialect of Chinese which I learned and was exposed to. Cantonese and other major dialects I did not live with nor learn.)

For comparison between the two languages, English and Chinese, let’s look at the word “good.” To do so, I will need to begin a new section which anyone who is already learned in the Chinese language will find tedious and unnecessary. I urge these readers to skip past this post and save me the embarrassment of having my mistaken explanations and generalities corrected.

“Good” is a simple word, easily spelled in English, and to write it one merely has to use the letters he has long been master of: g-o-o-d. In Chinese, the equivalent word is written “好.” This is likewise a simple word in the Chinese writing system, which grades written characters according to their complexity (that is, the number of strokes needed to write a word). In Chinese, a complex character can have upward of twenty strokes. For purposes of reader comprehension only, consider the printed English alphabet, wherein all the letters are written with one or two strokes of the pen, unless one is writing for calligraphic purposes and uses three separate marks to make a letter like “k” or “m.”

The relatively simple Chinese word “好” has six strokes. It is made of two symbols set side by side. “女” (three strokes) which means “woman” and is a pictogram, or pictorial symbol, of a woman grown large with child, and “子” (also three strokes) which means “child” and is a pictogram of a baby wrapped tightly in nursing clothes. Don’t ask how these symbols are supposed to resemble a woman and a baby (I think the “woman” symbol looks like a passable stick figure drawing). It is like the rule of constellations: someone discovers a pattern, he gets the right to name it, it catches on with people, and soon everyone points to the sky and says, “Look, a bear!” when everyone knows full well that the stars look nothing like a bear, major or minor.

Chinese writing today developed out of primitive symbols (not necessarily inferior, just primitive) inscribed onto a hard surface (i.e. bamboo, inscribed with a reed pen, and before that the preserved written artifacts came on bones or tortoise shells). Brush and ink were found to be a better writing method, much quicker, and so the characters began to take on their elegant abstract shapes. With words like “好” we get a glimpse into the Chinese mind. A woman with child is a good thing. Hence the characters for “woman” and “child” form an ideogram (a symbol not of the visual world but the conceptual) for the quintessential representation of good. Not surprising then that China is the most populous country on earth and Han Chinese the largest people group. The character for “home” (家) is a symbol of a roof with an abstract pig underneath, so in ancient China, it was a pig that made a house a home.

Not every written word in Chinese can be broken down to find these charming insights. Not by a long shot. And not many words are simple pictographic symbols, like “木” for tree, “林” for woods, and “森” for forest. The majority are a combination of two or three simple characters: a root to give a hint about the sound or meaning of the word, and an accompanying symbol to distinguish the individual word and perhaps further suggest meaning. As an example, the character for bird is “鸟.” Most every type of bird: chicken, turkey, hawk, pigeon, and so forth, has this character embedded somewhere in its Chinese symbol. In the most basic arrangement, “鸟” is paired side by side with a second, distinguishing symbol to give a hint about the word’s pronunciation or specific meaning. “Chicken,” for example, is written “鸡,” and “duck” is written “鸭.” “Bird” is on the right, indicating the category or type of word (birds), and the distinguishing symbol is on the left. These side by side examples are only one basic form though. The root characters might also be stacked above or below others and contained within other symbols, and very commonly it looks more complex and confusing than the clear side by side examples. Their present-day forms have progressed through stages that have seen the words modified and added to considerably. It takes a lot of deciphering to get at the root of the words and understand their etymology.

So, the memorizing of Chinese characters is aided by mnemonics, but still there is the Herculean task of memorizing the symbols for thousands of individual words if one aspires to achieve an educated level of literacy. Word by word must be written stroke by stroke, over and over again until the stroke order and writing motions are lodged in the brain. If the rote practice of writing characters is abandoned, then how to write them is soon forgotten. The eye still recognizes words when reading them, and the mind has a vague memory of the written symbol, but it is indistinct. Attempting to write the word is useless because Chinese characters must be exactly and intricately drawn. Imagine if writing the word “it” was not a matter of remembering “i” followed by “t,” but memorizing “dot, down stroke, horizontal stroke, downward stroke” in that order. Then imagine memorizing stroke by stroke, first through last, in order, for words with one or two dozen strokes, multiplied by the thousands of words needed to build an educated Chinese written vocabulary.

The popularity of computer keyboards and text messaging has given rise to the modern Chinese observation: “take pen, forget character.” Even Chinese students, who have studied written characters their whole life, struggle to recall how to write certain words, especially when they have ceased writing practice in favor of the keyboard. Our resourceful yet stupid American youths can simply make up their spelling based on text messaging: “r u gone 2 tha gym?” Forgetful Chinese cannot ignorantly staple strokes together because the characters need to be written exactly, or pretty near, standard.

And the students in China strive harder than the pupils in any other language to achieve basic literacy and to acquire a working written vocabulary. Even though the Chinese language has only several thousand written characters in common usage, it takes years to master them all. Each of these characters has to be practiced dozens of times in a writing book before it can be used freely. At the height of my personal studies, I estimated that I could write close to three hundred words off the top of my head, and I recognized at least five hundred by sight- which is not enough to be very helpful in real conversation. I rapidly lost the ability to write mostly all of these words after ceasing regular use. Note: while the written language uses a relatively small number of written characters, these characters are regularly combined in Chinese to form new compound words (example: “How much?” is a two-word combination that is literally “Many-few?”), so the number of words used by a speaker or writer of Chinese, like any language, is practically unquantifiable. It all depends.

But how about typing these symbols on a computer? And how do foreign speakers learn the sounds of the written words if Chinese symbols have no phonics? The answer is a writing system called pinyin, which I mentioned earlier. Pinyin (pronounced in Chinese like “peen-yeen,” spoken through the nose with the tongue held against the roof of the mouth and the open lips fixed in place) uses Roman letters to imitate the sounds of spoken Chinese, only the letters have been loosely adapted and assigned new sounds. For example, “qi” in pinyin Chinese sounds like “chee” spoken quickly through a pinched mouth. “Xi” sounds like “shee,” also spoken with a quick, hissing sound.

Additionally, pinyin uses tonal marks over the vowels in a word to indicate which of the four tones to use. The tones are critical in Chinese for meaning and comprehension. Saying “ma” with a high-pitched even tone could mean “mother” or “to wipe,” whereas saying “ma” with a rising, low to high-pitched tone means “horse.” The simple consonant and vowel pairing “ma” can make seven different, common words, using four tones and one neutral tone (no inflection or stress in the voice). Even with four differentiating tones, words still overlap on the same sound, like “mother” and “to wipe.” All the possible syllables in Chinese have these tonal variations which can change the meaning of the word completely. In English, clearly, saying the same word with a different tone does not change the essential meaning, only the emotional tone or context.

Every syllable in Chinese must have a tone, and every word in Chinese is a one-syllable word, a compound of two one-syllable words, or possibly a phrase of several one-syllable words. Also, syllables must be a consonant followed by a vowel, sometimes ending in the open consonant sounds “-n” and “-ng.” Therefore, fa, fan, and fang, are possible sounds for Chinese words, but a consonant-vowel-consonant combination like fal or fat is not.

To understand how this works out, let’s go back to “好,” the Chinese word for “good.” In pinyin, its sound is written “hǎo.” That is one syllable, a consonant followed by a vowel sound, with a tone mark over the “a” to indicate a rising tone. This pinyin script teaches someone familiar with Chinese pronunciation how to pronounce “好” (it sounds like the question word “how” spoken with a low, rising voice from the back of the mouth). Now, if using a computer or sending a text message, pinyin can be used to input “好” or any of the thousands of other idiosyncratic Chinese characters that would never fit on a keyboard. The user would type “h-a-o,” then the computer program would display a list of the common words that are written “hao” in pinyin. “好” is a very common word, so it would probably be in the first slot in the program’s list, so the user would press “1” and “好” would be entered onscreen. There are other Chinese writing computer programs that go by stroke input, but I found pinyin input to be the easiest method and much more user-friendly; it didn’t require a working knowledge of the written characters’ stroke order.

Typing "nihao" (for "hello") into a pinyin input gives these options. Option 1 is the most likely option; in this case, "hello." To select Option 1, the user presses either 1 or the space bar.

Typing “nihao” (for “hello”) into a pinyin input gives these options. Option 1 is the most likely option; in this case, “hello.” To select Option 1, the user presses either 1 or the space bar.

The list of options for every syllable input might have had you wondering why such a thing was necessary. Again, it is because every possible consonant and vowel combination is differentiated by the four tones, and the words sometimes overlap, having the exact same sound and tone. “Ma” and “hao” can make many different Chinese words. The pinyin letters are the same, but nonetheless the words are written with a different Chinese character. Chinese is very limited in its possible consonant-vowel combinations. Certain consonants can only be paired with certain vowels. Imagine in English if “she” was possible but “show” was not, and you will have a simple abstraction of what Chinese is like. Looking at the pinyin section of a Chinese dictionary, it becomes readily apparent that the Chinese language is a moderate collection of permutations. Nearly all the words are limited, single consonant and single vowel combinations. English allows for most any pronounceable consonant cluster, and consonants and vowels can form whatever syllables are practically demanded. A word like “strict,” for example, starts with “str-,” a three-consonant cluster inconceivable in Chinese, and it also ends in a hard-stop consonant cluster: “-ct.” Chinese words, written in pinyin, cannot do that. They must end in short, open vowels or in an open consonant sound: “-n” or “-ng.”

Having short, one-syllable words and limited combinations of consonants and vowels necessitates that Chinese has far fewer written words (characters) than English. Chinese uses compound words to create new words from its basic building blocks: one-syllable words, so it is not lacking when the people need a new word to express a new concept. It is only that the new words are all compounds of the existing, simple words. A funny example from the modern age: “computer” in Chinese is a compound word combing their words for “electric” and “brain.” Very simple, perhaps charmingly so, from an English speaker’s perspective. But it must be considered that English accepts all comers in its world word buffet, so long as the word works and has a nice feel or pronunciation. So the English language has an unmatchable amount of words by way of its borrowing from other languages. Regardless, the words and sounds of Chinese are nonetheless quite limited. The sounds are very often similar, indistinguishable to the untrained ear, or even actually identical, indistinguishable no matter whose ears you use.

One other thing, besides pinyin, which was implemented as part of the latest stage of the development of the Chinese language, that being Chairman Mao’s cultural reforms and the intent to make the written language easier to use: simplified Chinese. Simplified Chinese is basically making shortcuts in the complex, intricate, and numerous strokes of many Chinese words. Taking the pen to write “龍” (“dragon”) requires 16 brush or (commonly) pen strokes in traditional Chinese. Making it simpler, but still somehow recognizable, simplified Chinese writes the same word/symbol as “龙” and only uses 5 strokes. An economical alternative trying to make a written language which is by nature cumbersome a little less so.

One word which could use the simplified treatment, which relates back to one of my original questions on the Chinese language, is the character for “I”: 我. The most common pronoun and most common word in speech is pronounced simply (it sounds like “wuh”), but it is written with seven marks of the pen. These seven marks, while written rapidly, are astonishingly too numerous- at least four or five too many- for such a common word.
I know this passage has been tedious, an informal information dump, but I believe it is relevant and necessary to include in my discussion on the topic.

For those more familiar with Chinese, please forgive me where I have been imprecise or ignorant. I will forgive you for not skipping over this section as I asked you to. And for those unfamiliar, I hope I have provided you with some insight and a feel for my experience with Chinese, which is admittedly very limited. Before I get into my complaint on the Chinese language, I would now like to offer a personal observation, an analogy for Chinese and English that is entirely subjective but I think an accurate and easy way to understand the essential difference between the two languages.

Continued in Plumbing and Blocks: A Metaphor for Language

The Real China: The Chinese Classroom

November 13, 2015 / / 1 Comment

As a foreign teacher in China, I was only expected to teach oral English. Grammar and reading were the domain of the Chinese English teachers. My expertise, coming from an English-speaking country, was speaking and teaching Chinese students how to speak. My native English ability made me valuable to the university- enough that they would pay for a good portion of my flight costs and provide me an apartment for the 11-month term of my contract- because I could not only model proper pronunciation, but take this language that students had been studying in grammar books and speak it. Yes, grammar and language knowledge (and especially knowing how to teach) are important for teaching English as a Second Language, but if you can form new sentences in English, at will (this is the test for language fluency), then you are an expert. Growing up in English-speaking culture and speaking this language from childhood will alert you, naturally, when a Chinese student asks, “Where are you come from?” and grant you the authority to correct him, “It’s ‘Where do you come from?’” No grammar credentials needed.

But I had studied English in college and taken an English language teaching course, so I had some ideas about how best to get students to work through the language. The zeal of naivety is a powerful substitute for real experience.

I had a real problem though that every language must face: no one can learn to speak by watching a native; they must be guided to attempt speaking for themselves.

I had gathered from Chinese students and from their English teachers, both foreign and Chinese, that the oral English classes followed a regular pattern where the teacher would give a topic at the end of one class (e.g. “Where would you like to live in the future?”), and during the next class the students would speak (i.e. read or recite) what they had prepared. I could see the benefit in that: the Chinese classroom is all about following precedent, and speaking extemporaneously terrified most pupils with the dread of embarrassment in front of their peers. I might not know what word to use and then I’ll be standing in front of everyone like a fool, without anything to say!

Also, if the right topic were chosen, the students would be eager to share (in my experiences, an eager class response did occur a few times, but it was rare. The dead look on students’ faces usually said, “You expect me to talk about what?”). So if I chose to follow this method, the students wouldn’t balk at something new, a good portion of the class could pretend that they were really speaking English, and a few bold adventurers might actually wade into new conversational waters.

I decided not to do that though. Speaking is its own language skill, and real speech and conversations follow conventions and patterns that occur in real time. Speech has many forms, and even though public speaking on prepared topics is one of those forms, I wanted my students to practice speaking spontaneously in real life scenarios. So, for my lesson structure, I would introduce and explain the speaking topic of the day (e.g. “Asking for Information”), then demonstrate an exercise for the first scenario (“You are trying to find the school library, so you ask a professor for directions.”). After that, I would tell the students to role-play this with a partner, and after about five minutes- more or less- I would call for everyone’s attention and have a couple sets of partners repeat their role-play conversation for everyone so that we could review the exercise as a class. A sensible plan, perhaps, but there were some inherent problems of the Chinese classroom I could not overcome.

I mentioned that Chinese students follow precedent and avoid speaking up to prevent loss of face. This is not just a natural temperament shared by many. It is a near-universal disposition, a product of the culture that has been built in by all the small things that shape the students’ everyday experience. In contrast, American students are expected to speak up and they are rewarded for it. When I was a high school student I dreaded having to raise my hand to earn my “Participation” grade. Shyness and reserve are either mildly disdained or avoided. Many American classrooms today are shaped by expectations for open discussions. The theory is that student and teacher interaction is best facilitated through a circular or U-shaped seating arrangement where everyone can see each other’s face and the teacher is about equidistant from every desk (lecture halls are different, of course, and not every classroom is set up this way).

In China, every classroom I taught in was a large, long room with a chalkboard and podium in the front, facing rows of long, narrow desks and benches- bolted to each other and bolted into the floor. I saw no exceptions to this. Some classrooms had better furnishings- that is, they had a computer and a projector or a better chalkboard or a podium that was sturdy and didn’t fall apart when you set your bag on it.

A typical classroom at my university. The back chalkboard was always painted on with writing and pictures, usually some kind of slogan. In this case, the large characters say "Teacher's Day," Which is celebrated on September 10th in China.

A typical classroom at my university. The back chalkboard was always painted on with writing and pictures, usually some kind of slogan. In this case, the large characters say “Teacher’s Day,” which is celebrated on September 10th in China.

From my teacher’s vantage point, it looked like Venetian blinds laid out, with 30 to 50 students crammed in between the slats. The desks were only a bench top with (maybe) some cubbyhole space beneath to hold pens and a couple books. And the seating was very narrow and uncomfortable; there wasn’t enough room to stretch out, so most students would hunch forward and lean into the desks with their chests. Try sitting side-by-side with someone on a constricting bench and carrying on a conversation with them. This, and being asleep, is why people don’t speak up in church. And it is why Chinese students, having spent their young lives this way, will not speak in class. Goad or coax them as I would, they would not. They would not speak up in my class, they would not speak up for a pass, they would not speak up here or there, they would not speak up anywhere.

Add to the seating arrangement the Chinese reverence for the teacher, who usually lectures, and phones and other various distractions, and you have the ingredients that prevent interaction. Seating might seem like a small, surmountable thing, able to be overcome by planning and will, but its dominant effect is subtle and psychological, shaping the teachers’ and students’ ideas on classroom learning. It physically inhibits social interaction between students sitting in the desks by directing their eyes forward, and without an environment conducive to social interaction there is no conversation. Students believe the teacher doesn’t notice them individually, they disappear into the block of seats. No one wants to speak up and break the anonymous silence. That would put everyone’s eyes on them.

This is the Chinese classroom, and sitting in this environment for the large majority of their day, for most of their life, has shaped those students to the degree that I could ask them if 600 RMB ($100 U.S.) was the typical monthly rent for an apartment and repeat myself, rephrase the question, ask loudly, “Yes? No?” and still not get an answer from anyone. It was infuriating. Over and over I experienced that you can bring a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink. When lesson planning, if I came to a part where the students had to give their input, I would ask myself, “Can they be creative? Can I trust them to participate and move the flow of the lesson?” Having learned quickly from classroom experience, I knew whenever I asked myself this question that the answer was no. I would either start my lesson plan over or work out an alternative for when the students would sit in stupefied silence.

I met four students who lived in this UNFINISHED off-campus apartment.

I met four students who lived in this UNFINISHED off-campus apartment.

This is their kitchen. I hope they weren't paying $100 a month for this.

This is their kitchen. I hope they weren’t paying $100 a month for this.

Really, the way things worked out, I learned that during the role-play time a small number of students would do the exercise I asked them to do, most might mumble to whoever was sitting next to them and kept an eye out for me, keeping their voices so low that I couldn’t hear them no matter what they were saying in whichever language they were saying it in, and a good number made little effort to conceal themselves doing math homework, reading for another class, taking my picture on their cell phone, sleeping, or text messaging. I had to accept the bad and work with it. Discipline is tough to maintain period; across languages and cultures a novice like myself stood no chance.

In my teacher training prior to China, I was taught to walk around, listen in, and offer correction or answer questions as needed. But when the students are huddled together in a block of long, narrow desks, I could only look on from the outside (that’s not a bad metaphor for China: a mass of humanity crowded together, indecipherable and impenetrable from the outside). So I would pace up the aisles and shimmy sideways, banging my knees, as I passed through the last row of desks, making a pretense of listening in and observing the students’ faces and behaviors.

I noticed all the little details that they had in common. How they would twirl their pens compulsively, each one fluidly repeating their favorite motion and passing the pen around their fingers. As a student, I was a compulsive doodler, but I never noticed any artists in China, only dexterous pen acrobats. And when they wrote, they all used their right hand- no exceptions. I asked a Chinese teacher if I observed that correctly, and she said yes, all students are taught to write with their right hand. I had to infer that this was because of the complexity of the Chinese writing system, where each word has a precise way to be written and the stroke order must be memorized.

When I watch Americans write, I sometimes notice people who invert or reverse the stroke orders I learned in school. That is, they might write the letter “e” starting clockwise from the tail and spiraling in, opposite the way that I do. But handwriting is sloppy in America. It’s very common and trite to hear people joke that they can’t even read their own writing. I always questioned what the purpose of handwriting was if it was illegible, even to the hand that scribbled it. Why not scratch whatever symbols come to mind if the writing doesn’t even look like English script? But that’s America, where anything goes, and being casual and nonjudgmental are unimpeachable virtues.

Not so in China, where students are still expected to meet a standard other than being diverse or tolerant. With Chinese characters, if a writer painted with the ink brush in the left hand, it would look slightly different; every stroke would be off because the hand would have to push the brush instead of pull. Plus, every Chinese word must be memorized. There are no phonics to make learning new words easier, the mnemonics are not at all intuitive, and everyone is expected to learn to write the characters the same way. Repetition is the only way. When each word must be memorized, and universal literacy is on the line, that demands that everyone studies hard, using the same method.

Strangely related to my classroom handwriting observations, I recoiled at the sight of the long fingernails that some of the girls and a lot of the young men grew out on their little finger. I never learned the real reason for this style. One friend told me it was convenient to have one long nail to scratch things and handle things and whatnot. Perhaps. As an observer, I can say that it was effective in raising the hair on the back of my neck in mild disgust.

Not the best picture, but it's the only one I have where you can see the long pinky nail. Look closely at my stylist's right hand.

Not the best picture, but it’s the only one I have where you can see the long pinky nail. Look closely at my stylist’s right hand.

I would scan the students’ shirts and smirk in confusion if I saw English words misspelled or words arranged randomly. If the clothing companies wanted to use English, I thought, why don’t they just copy and paste text they find online? These companies copy everything else. Occasionally, one student might have had on an American college sweatshirt or a sweater that read “Nebraska.” I would always ask those students, “Have you been to Nebraska? Do you know what that means?” Of course, they had no idea, and I usually had to point at their shirt and tug at mine to indicate to them that I was asking about their shirt.

I became used to seeing variations of the same five basic hairstyles for girls (four of which had bangs that stopped even with the brow line) and the same three styles for boys (buzzed short, combed across, and the popular “poof”- a tangled mess of hair that stuck up as if they woke up and never combed it). When I saw a male university student with long strands down to his shoulder blades, it shocked me. I’m sure it was the same reaction middle America had to the first longhairs of the 60’s. So, bored by the interchangeable bobs, I differentiated the students by character traits and fashion choices; things like brightly colored eyeglass frames, over-sized frames on some girls, or even frames worn without lenses. I thought that it was foolish, if not pretentious to wear frames without needing vision correction, but those who wore them defended the fashionable practice for its “cool” style.

Most of my female students' hairstyles conformed to this.

Most of my female students’ hairstyles conformed to this.

Every so often I would see some sort of English reading material on a student’s desk space. I would ask her if she was reading the book for class or pleasure, and maybe try and milk some questions out of it if I thought the student was friendly and able to handle a bit of small talk. Some students, though, I knew to just walk by. Either they would clam up with embarrassment and fail to respond audibly, or I had learned from past experience that there was no way they were going to put together a complete English sentence. One student, when I asked her a question related to the class exercise, looked me right in the eye and quietly but coldly told me, “Please, leave me alone.” And that I did, for the rest of the year.

In the middle school I taught at, more so than at the university, I noticed a lot of calligraphy practice books and pens with special writing nibs. Throughout China, I observed brushwork and fanciful writing fonts far more often than images and icons. The Chinese writing system is what the people grew up learning, what they practiced, and hence, what they loved. It is always on the Chinese mind. I even acquired the Chinese habit of breaking down the characters I saw into brush strokes and practicing their stroke order with my finger on my palm or thigh.

And speaking of writing, I have to note the absence of pencils and erasers. The Chinese didn’t write with them (not that, in America, pencils are preferred over pens for writing purposes, but they are more common in my observation). So whenever the students made a mistake, they would pull out a thin wheel of tape, run it over the section they wanted to remove, and peel away a thin layer of paper from their sheet. This mandatory school supply could be spotted on most desks, and during a written test the tape wheels would be passed back and forth as students nervously tore away at their paper.

These weren't for white correction tape. They had clear tape meant to pull off the top layers of ink and paper.

These weren’t for white correction tape. They had clear tape meant to pull off the top layers of ink and paper.

One unsightly thing I could not help but notice was the soft black hairs on a few girls’ upper lip, and my occasional glimpses of coarse leg hairs and underarm hair. I hesitate to mention it, I don’t mean to shame any of the young women, but body hair was a not uncommon part of real life in China. Most of the Chinese I saw grew hardly any body hair, but when it did sprout up, it was obvious against their light skin. I don’t know how the Chinese view it, but it always startled me whenever I saw girls with leg and armpit hair. Please note, this was not the norm I saw, and on average I would say that most had fair features and smooth skin.

But the truly disgusting thing I observed among my students, the feature that both sickened and infuriated me, was the sight of red, purplish, puffy hands. I’m sensitive to the shape of hands, and by that I mean that I notice the look and character of individuals’ hands, which probably began from my love of drawing, so when I first saw a girl with fat, square fingers instead of slender curves, I passed it off as a physical anomaly that I would not want to hold hands with. But then I saw it again, and then again on another girl: the skin was past red and now had the deep purple color of a contusion. What was wrong with these girls’ hands? I had never seen this before. Skinny girls with fat, square hands.

The question had an obvious answer. Just as my face was sore and red from constant exposure to the cold, these girls had chilblains on their hands from sitting in unheated classrooms throughout the winter, taking notes with un-gloved hands. Yes, because we were south of the Huaihe River (the geographic dividing line), the Chinese government did not allow central heating in buildings, except for department stores and some hotels and restaurants. Because we were right on the southern edge of the Huaihe River, that meant our city was as far north as one could get in China and still not have central heating. So, all winter long, from dormitory to dining hall (or “canteen”), from the classroom to the library or anywhere else, everyone had to wear layers of winter clothing, but either finding it superfluous or an unnecessary expense, most students went without hats and gloves. Perhaps the circumstances could not be helped, but seeing how inflamed those girls hands became, and seeing how normal they thought it, how overlooked it was, how assumed it was, was a small detail that swelled my indignation.

We're wearing coats because there was no heat in our classroom. Side note: my student, John, in the purple coat in the upper left, wore glasses just for show. They either had no lenses or non-corrective lenses

We’re wearing coats because there was no heat in our classroom. Side note: my student, John, in the purple coat in the upper left, wore glasses just for show. They either had no lenses or non-corrective lenses

The Real China: “No! This is not a potato!”

November 10, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Either to make conversation or as a language quiz, Uncle Jiang would often ask me, “Dustin, what is this?” He was not the only one.

Usually, he asked it when we sat down for dinner. He would pick something up with his chopsticks and ask for its English name. I didn’t know who was supposed to be “the grasshopper” and who the old sage in this situation. Many times, my answer was simple. “Porridge. This is porridge.” In America, we would probably call it Chinese porridge or just use the Chinese name, as we do for Kung Bao chicken and all the other mainstays on a Chinese menu, but the basic vocabulary word Uncle Jiang was looking for was porridge.

Other times, I was surprised when he asked me for an English word and then disagreed (!) with my answer. I held a piece of sweet potato in my chopsticks once, and Uncle Jiang asked me, pointing at the purple tuber, “Dustin, what are you eating?”

“This is a sweet potato,” I replied without thinking twice.

“No!” he said, “This is not a potato!”

He looked indignant, even shocked. I had no idea what to tell him. Maybe appease him by calling it a yam? I stumbled, trying to explain in simple English that a potato is a potato and a sweet potato is a sweet potato, two different things. I supposed he thought I meant it was a sweet-tasting (normal) potato, and I had to infer that the two vegetables do not have similar names in Chinese or occupy similar categories in Chinese thought. Well, why not? I cannot imagine any object more similar to a potato than a sweet potato.

The source of the controversy. I don't know what else to call it besides "purple sweet potato."

The source of the controversy. I don’t know what else to call it besides “purple sweet potato.”

When I brought one of the boiled purple sweet potatoes to have as my breakfast before class, it was the same routine. My students were surprised by my breakfast, a vegetable grown in their own soil, and asked me, “What is that?”

“A sweet potato,” I told them.

“No! It is not a potato!” they argued, as adamant as Uncle Jiang.

Then why did you ask me? I wanted to counter. Or Fine. You tell me what it is. It’s your vegetable. I have never seen a purple sweet potato like that in my neighborhood of the US.

I was befuddled that they could disagree with me on a term from my native language. How was that possible? I was considered the expert, so they would ask me questions about English vocabulary and acceptable grammar, but they wouldn’t accept my answer if it conflicted with their understanding of what a “sweet potato” should be in Chinese terms.

At the dining hall (or “canteen”, as the students called it) I had a plate of silver noodles once. Or so I thought they were called from reading labels at Chinese buffets. Once again, my students asked me for the name of the mystery item I was eating.

I took a breath. “These are noodles.”

“No! It is not noodles!”

This time I vigorously tried explaining myself. I told them that anything that fits the shape- long, stringy, and noodle-like – is a noodle. If it looks like a noodle, if it tastes like a noodle, it is a noodle. I think they disagreed because this noodle was made from a different flour than the noodles they knew as “noodles.”

Even the rainbow-colored Funnoodle is a member of the noodle family. (Sorry, no silver.)

Even the rainbow-colored Funnoodle is a member of the noodle family. (Sorry, no silver.)

“It may be a rice noodle,” I bargained, “But this is a carbohydrate in a long, thin shape. IT IS a noodle.” I don’t think I had them convinced. Really, the English language did not have appropriately nuanced food categories to satisfy them.

Besides noodles, Chinese cuisine is big on dumplings, each type with its own name, and so they were crestfallen when, one after one, I would answer my questioners, “Dumpling. Dumpling. That is also a dumpling. Yes, this is a dumpling, too.”

Their furrowed brow seemed to say, “But this one is sweet and is made by rolling a ball of rice flour! That one is pork inside a boiled wrapper. This one has shrimp and is fried in oil. They are different!”

One time, Uncle Jiang changed the game on me. He wasn’t going to wait for me to give him a none-too-specific vocabulary word, he would supply it himself. Over breakfast, he called the golden sweetener “bee honey.” I gave him a doubtful look. He held out for a second, then asked, “Bee honey, or honey?” As I told him it was the latter, I wondered what kind of honey these Chinese had been keeping secret from the outside world that they would need to specify “bee” honey. Surely, Marco Polo would have reported on a non-bee creature also capable of producing honey. And, if this mystical being could do it without regurgitating nectar, it would outsell the “bee honey” tenfold.

I guessed that the Chinese word for honey was a typical Chinese compound word, probably combining “bee” plus a word to indicate the fluid product of honey. (Yes, the Chinese word for honey is a compound word that translates literally “bee honey.”) China did have a multitude of honey varieties (hardly any peanut butter on their shelves but ample honey sections in every grocery store), and canvas roadside tents where a vendor would hang out all day napping and apparently selling jars of honey he had supposedly harvested himself, from bees.

(Here’s an interesting link from a beekeeper with insight into Chinese honey and an encounter with a street beekeeper… er, a beekeeper selling honey on the streets.)

The most egregious battle over appellation came after dinner at my friend Ma Chao’s house. (Ma Chao’s family name means “horse.” I would like to meet an American named Tom Horse or Tom Yellow, two common Chinese surnames, instead of Tom Butler or Tom Cooper.) At the dinner were Ma Chao, Aunt Fong, a kung fu teacher, an English-speaking Director of Foreign Relations at a local university who went by Mike for his English name, one of Aunt Fong’s friends, and me. We made it through dinner without arguing over potatoes, dumplings, or noodles. Then, after dinner, when everyone was all liquored up (as Chinese dinner guests are wont to be), Ma Chao brought out his weapons (as a few of my Chinese friends were wont to do).

Like many kung fu enthusiasts, Ma Chao was a collector of swords and polearms. Ma Chao, Mike, and Aunt Fong’s friend, Lily all wanted to handle them and pose for pictures. I thought that the inebriated swinging blades at each other was a stupid idea, but as the saying goes, when in Rome, disregard personal safety. At their urging, I came over to the living room to take some pictures with them.

Ma Chao and me, handling his weapons.

Ma Chao and me, handling his weapons.

Ma Chao handed me his sword, and Mike, as my translator, informed me, “That is a knife.The Chinese name is dao.”

The sword I held required both hands on the hilt, and the blade was around three feet long.

“No,” I told him flatly, “this is a sword.”

“No!” Mike riposted, “It is a knife.” He pointed to the cutting edge and said, “See? It is only sharp on one side.”

I explained, “It doesn’t matter if the other side is dull, that only means it is a single-edged sword. But it is a sword!” In my flustered state, I rushed my words, not caring if I lost my listeners over technical details.

“No,” Mike insisted, “sword is for a different word. This is a dao, it is a knife.”

“A knife?” I exclaimed, “Look how long it is!”

That sword could have severed limbs in one stroke. “If it uses two hands and the blade is longer than my forearm, it is a sword!”

I wanted to ask him how he would classify a pointed rapier without a cutting edge. Or, hand him a dictionary and have him look up broadsword. I’m sure it would have been of no use.

Lily pretends to behead me with a Chinese "knife."

Lily pretends to behead me with a Chinese “knife.”

His stance, like that of all my vocabulary quiz masters, was fixed and intractable. I had experienced the same stubborn reaction by enough people that I could tell it was a phenomenon of culture and language, not a personal idiosyncrasy. Somehow, a people that had been raised in rigid classrooms, taught to copy and repeat everything they heard, became skeptical and as combative as a wild donkey when my foreign authority told them what was what in English.

I was left to question what kind of argument would persuade them of a vocabulary word’s legitimacy. What I wouldn’t give to see Uncle Jiang and Mike on a Webster’s usage panel. “No! It is not a transitive verb! It is a noun.”

Mike's opinion would carry a lot of weight at Webster's so long as he was carrying this Chinese pole weapon (guandao) with him.

Mike’s opinion would carry a lot of weight at Webster’s so long as he was carrying this Chinese pole weapon (guandao) with him.

The Real China: Jobs, James, and Chinese Names

November 5, 2015 / / 0 Comments

It is customary for Chinese students to choose an English name. Not every student does so, but many use their English name as a nickname among friends or as a profile name online, and, of course, for use in English class. There are two major factors involved in this name selection that collide and, while not quite forming a perfect storm, do spread a spattering of bizarre and comical English names.

First, there are the inner workings of Chinese culture that guide students’ thinking and, when it comes to selecting a name from a foreign source, quite often lead them wrong. It is not as easy as an American using Juan for John in Spanish class. Chinese as a language has no common ground with English, so translations between the two cannot maintain the spirit and sound of the original language. (There are a few exceptions to this, like using the English name Lee for the Chinese family name Li).

Added to that, Chinese names follow an old rubric of traditional conventions that are embedded in their culture and family. Unlike Americans, Chinese parents cannot simply flip through a book of baby names and choose Ethan because that name is fashionable now and they like the way it sounds. A Chinese baby will have a family name followed by (traditionally) a generation name and a given name. (A “generation name” means that a brother and sister might both have the second name Ming or “Bright,” followed by their unique given name.)

Once, I had a student ask me to help her choose an English name that was related to water and meant calm. With the vast collection of meaningless names in English-speaking culture, that was not an easy task. Lacking an encyclopedic knowledge of names, I focused on “calm” and suggested she use what came to mind: Serena, but she sifted through some possibilities and settled on Delphine. An unusual name; when I looked it up I found one site that said it was associated with dolphins and one site that said the name meant “calmness,” so this girl got what she was looking for. Now, I think Delphine is a pretty name and her choice worked out, but she vetted quite a few candidates first and asked a native speaker about the soundness of each.

Now, imagine the pitfalls awaiting those who would strike out independently to choose their own name. If the shoe were on the other foot, imagine you tried choosing your own Chinese name. My guess is that it would be some variant of a famous Chinese actor’s name, or you might just tack “Lee” onto the end of your real name. And by the way, did you know that Bruce Lee’s full Chinese name translates to Lee (Li) Little Dragon? I knew his nickname was “The Dragon,” but I found that in Chinese culture, not only are children named after objects, but with dragons being as popular as they are, children can be named Little Dragon. American parents anymore seem to go for an even ratio of traditional to made-up/nonsense names, but Little Dragon Hansen would still make the “News of the Weird” section of the newspaper.

My first Chinese name was given to me by my friend and Chinese tutor, Caili Ma. She asked what my name meant, then listened to the pronunciation of my surname, and came up with Li Da-Sen (李大森). I think the written characters are beautiful and the name has a good sound, but my Aunt Fong told me it was no good based on Tai Chi naming principles (e.g. Make sure the written name has a good number of horizontal strokes), plus it was the name of an evil character in some kind of story or myth. I insisted that I wanted to keep the name to honor my friend, Caili, but Aunt Fong insisted that Caili would be fine with the change, and her friends all echoed that it had an unpleasant meaning and persuaded me to go with Le Da-Sheng (乐达声), which means “joy” and “to pass on.” In my opinion, the name looks ugly on paper and doesn’t sound much better, but it’s not my language, so I had to defer to Aunt Fong on this one.

At my house with Caili. She probably considered calling me "White Giant."

At my house with Caili. She probably considered calling me “White Giant.”

This brings me to the second factor in poor English name selection: the naïve or ignorant preference for favorite words and names heard in English language popular culture. Chinese students often like to watch foreign television shows and films online. Many like the serials from South Korea and Thailand, the anime from Japan, and popular dramas and comedies from America (I mentioned this before, but I was told on multiple first meetings that I looked like the Michael Scofield character from Prison Break). Even though Friends was big in China, I never met any Ross or Rachel’s. So while the English language media has its influence, I don’t mean to suggest that young Chinese students made a custom out of naming themselves for their favorite fictional character. Although this does happen a fair amount and “Elizabeth” was a very popular name for girls due to the popularity of Pride and Prejudice in its film and novel forms. And one girl, a very good student actually, had chosen Wasabe as her “English” name (go figure) because it was the name of a character in one of her favorite movies.

So what were the names chosen for English class and online profiles, both popular and ridiculous? Well, the most popular names were the most sensible: Leo and Lily. This was a simple switch from the Chinese surnames Li, Le, and Liu (pronounced “Lee”, “Luh”, and “Lyo”). There were also quite a few traditional names like James, John, and Amanda. In one class, a couple students even added English surnames, so I had the very plain John Smith and the Batman villain-inspired James Riddler. James was an odd duck, and yes, I made a point of calling these students by their full names in class because I got a kick out of calling Chinese students John Smith and James Riddler.

Speaking of ducks and other animals, in that same class I had a student who went by Monkey, another who went by Koala, and of course following Koala there was a student named Bear. These guys didn’t have much explanation for their names (“Because I’m a monkey! He, he!”), but I remember Bear said his was a nickname donned him for his temper. Bear was really pleasant in class; the first day I thought he was a member of the faculty or somebody’s parent because he had a dark, strong complexion that made him look 20 years older than everyone else. I would have believed him if he told me, “I’m Koala’s dad, and that’s why my name is Bear.”

From l-r their names (used in English class) are Maxwell, Sun Xue Tao, Monkey, Bear, Li Wei Ying, and Goofy

From l-r their names (used in English class) are Maxwell, Sun Xue Tao, Monkey, Bear, Li Wei Ying, and Goofy

I had a student with the name of Jobs, and I asked him, “You mean like Steve Jobs? Why not go by Steve?” Well, I had several classes do an exercise where they thought up interview questions for famous people like Steve Jobs. To a person, every student began their question, “Jobs, may I ask you such and such?” And I kept correcting them, “You can’t just call him ‘Jobs.’ If you’re speaking to him, you should call him Mr. Jobs.” This surname convention confused me when students would ask me about the ever popular NBA and if I liked James. “Do I like James? James who?”

Then they would ask, “Do you like James or Kobe?”

And it would dawn on me, “Oh, you mean LeBron James. Everyone just calls him LeBron.” Well, not in China they don’t.

One student went by Jet, after Jet Li, which I thought was pretty cool but not very practical or respectable if he ever found himself living or doing business internationally. Respectability, though, was not usually a consideration for Chinese English names.

As for other movie and television characters, one girl went by Sherry (this name was used quite a bit because it is not too distant from the sound of several Chinese names) who wanted to change her name because another of her classmates also went by Sherry. So she opted for Conan, her favorite anime character. I tried to convince her otherwise, but she loved the name so much she didn’t care that it was for boys. See what I mean about the absurdities of choosing a pet name or word?

I pleaded with Conan to go by a different name, so she eventually went back to Sherry. Also, China: not always bad

I pleaded with Conan to go by a different name, so she eventually went back to Sherry. Also, China: not always bad

Disasters could still happen when sticking close to the original Chinese name and trying to adapt it. Although I had a student with a Chinese name that meant “Little Moon” who aptly went by Luna in English, I also had a student who went by Goofy because it sounded like his Chinese name, Gao Fei, and he readily admitted that he was a goofy person. Goofy was a fluent English speaker with a broad knowledge of English speaking culture, he just liked using a strange name because it was a suitable nickname for him and that’s how friends knew him online.

And there were real names that were just awkward or antiquated, like Queena and Hyacinth, which I find to both be lovely names, but do strike me as peculiar. As a side note, I do wish I could have met a Tim, Gary, or Al (I did meet a Bill and a Rick), with a run-of-the-mill American name.

The most shameful, unknowingly stupid names, though, came when Chinese speakers chose objects- words with literal meanings- and declared them to be their English name. Now, for women this can work. There were Lily’s, like I mentioned, and other plant names like Daisy and Ivy. Nature names like Summer also work to an extent. I met a girl named Spring and I told her, “Summer, Autumn, and Winter are all women’s names, but I’ve never heard of Spring as a name, and I can’t explain why.” I still don’t understand why not.

One girl covered every base by going with Season (at least I think that was her intent, she may have been a big fan of nutmeg). I also met a Snowy and a Rainbow, who was a sweet girl, so I had to stifle myself from blurting out to her, “Rainbow is not a name!”

One male student went by Sky. Not short for Skyler, simply Sky. He was probably the most entertaining student I had; whenever I called on him (and believe me, I made sure to “randomly” call on him at least once per class) the whole class would react with anticipation and start cracking up as he formed sentences through convulsions of laughter. He was responsible for the third funniest moment I had in the classroom, which went like this: I was leading a discussion about Chinese perceptions of America and American perceptions of China, and the students were quiet and unresponsive as usual, so I was repeating myself, “What’s famous in China? Come on, what’s famous in China?” A murmur started to build and I asked, “What?”

The class responded, “You!”

I said, “Well, maybe I’m famous here in this town” (a small city where I was the only white foreigner). Then Sky, with a big, sideways grin across his face, spoke up and said, “You are famous in my heart!” Everyone lost it for a moment and I had to wipe the tears away from my eyes and laugh it all out before I could regain my composure.

On the last day of class, I insisted on taking a picture with Sky. I should have insisted on using a tripod.

On the last day of class, I insisted on taking a picture with Sky. I should have insisted on using a tripod.

Other odd literal names included Key, and pet names like Cookie and Cherry. One student was called Loose, and that sounded too stupid to be true- surely I misheard that- so I called him Lewis until I saw Loose written down on the attendance sheet. Loose himself never corrected me because A) he never showed up to class, and B) he couldn’t understand a word of spoken English. The mixed bag of nonsense was filled with names like Effil, Vienen, Disie (Disie was a middle school English teacher and ought to have known better), and Songsux (“My Chinese name is Song, so my English name is Songsux. It has no meaning!” I didn’t have the heart to burst his bubble).

All of these bizarre names are neither the exception nor the rule, but a farcical phenomenon when meeting Chinese English speakers of any ability. This sampling does not deny that there were plenty of good choices like Amy, Emily, Peter, Paul, Jenny, and the (sigh) Twilight-inspired Bella. I think my favorite of all was Milton, the name chosen, fittingly, by the head of the university’s English department.

I have saved my favorite stupid name for last, a run-off between two outlandish competitors. The first was from a middle school boy who came up to me and shouted in that Chinese way of speaking, “My English name Beyond.”

“Beyond?!” I said, and I didn’t know whether to guffaw or bridle so I did both. “That’s not even a noun, it’s an adverb.” It is a preposition, too. I think the kid was excited with his choice, and I didn’t mean to crush him by being far less than impressed, but that name was just too much.

The other unforgettable, infamous name shocked me when I was out to lunch with a group of other foreign English teachers and a few Chinese students and teachers. One Chinese owner of a small English school, a little pudgy and maybe a couple years older than I was, came up to me and shook my hand with a look on his face and such conviction in his grip that I felt like I were a national hero who had just returned from a rocket trip to the moon. “Hello, I am Hamburger,” he said, “I really like to make a friend with you.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “Hamburger, I really like your name.” Hamburger was one of those who became a little obsessive of me and wanted to be possessive of my time. I met a lot of “really like to make a friend with you’s” in China.

One last thing I’ll mention on names. My Aunt Fong had chosen the name Rose for herself, and her husband, my “Uncle” Jiang, asked me for assistance in selecting an English name and told me he liked the name Jack. That is what he ended up choosing, so it was Jack and Rose. It was unplanned, and it inspired a few sweet giggles, but it was romantic nonetheless.

No, they didn't have a tree planted by either Gallagher or his brother (whom he sold his comedy act to). I checked.

The Real China: Chinglish

October 30, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Asia is famous, at least on the internet, for garbled translations of English (or should I say the Orient is famous since nobody knows about Kyrgyzstan). T-shirts and street signs mash up text that is ostensibly English, but grammar, word order, and especially coherency are completely off. The result of Chinese people using English in conversation and signage- Chinglish- is often bizarrely meaningless or outrageously vulgar.

Aunt Fong is here. Where are you?

Aunt Fong is here. Where are you?

I did see a fair share of pathway markers with Chinglish cautions in Chinese tourist sports. Next to a scenic stream, visitors were warned “Water depth! don’t near.” In a wooded area a sign minded onlookers “Experienced vicissitudes. No ravages undergone,” which I tried to follow, but failed. I got stuck halfway experiencing things when I realized I didn’t know what a vicissitude was.

These signs were good for a chuckle, as were the t-shirts I saw on young people that had everything from random words strung together, to letters mashed from a keyboard, to outright curse words that made my jaw drop. The kids wearing these clothes had no idea what they said; they only liked the “cool” style of English words. I was there to witness one college student’s embarrassment when my Foreign Affairs Officer at the university where I taught, Amy Hu, told the girl that the English text on her shirt was a description of breast feeding. Sometimes the naïve students’ t-shirts left me mortified, other times I just laughed, but I couldn’t really fault them since I come from a nation of gullible tattoo freaks who willingly and illiterately ink awkward Chinese characters onto their skin.

More common than the phenomenon of Chinglish text, sometimes more interesting but often only frustrating, were the spoken English sentences made by Chinese who were trying to transliterate typical Chinese phrases using English words.

Here are the most common Chinese-to-English phrases I heard during my stay:

“No, thank you.” (Instead of “You’re welcome.”)
In Chinese, it is standard to reply to thanks by saying bie keqi (sounds like “bee-yeh kutch”), which means roughly “Don’t be polite,” or bu yong xie (boo yowng shee-ay): “No need to thank me,” equivalent to “You’re welcome.” So a polite Chinese person, after hearing me say “Thank you,” was tripped up by the similarity of the Chinese phrases and would tell me “No, thank you,” sometimes being corrected by a classmate: “It’s ‘You’re welcome!’”

Pronounced, by Chinese speakers unused to that tricky th- sound, as “Sank you.”

IMG_1865

“He/She” Confusion
In China, the men are men and the women are women, but you could never trust who was which if you heard them spoken of by another person. For example, someone might begin talking about his mother, but then he would make a switch and say, “He lived in the south as a girl.” If the contradiction were ever as glaring as that, I would give my friend an obvious hint. “He lived?” They would pick up on my playful disbelief right away: “I mean she!” But I learned to be skeptical and expect conflation between “he” and “she.” In Chinese, “he” and “she” are pronounced the same (“ta” for both) and written not all that differently. It amazed me that these simple pronouns could be a stumbling stone for so many errors. That is, until I noticed myself switching pronouns when I tried to rush out a sentence in their language.

IMG_2043

“My brother/My sister”
These terms weren’t confused with each other; they were often substituted for “my cousin” or “my friend.” I heard quite a few young people mention their brother or sister and I started to become suspicious. “Don’t you all have a One-Child Policy?”

Many of the young people I met in my semi-rural province did have siblings because- I assumed- they were out of the government’s iron grip, probably because they lived in the country where enforcement was lax and it was an open secret that there were ways around the One-Child Policy. Some had parents who must have been wealthy enough to pay the fines and exorbitant extra costs of raising and educating a second child.

Once, I asked a young lady why she called her cousin her “brother.” She told me there wasn’t a good word for “cousin” in Chinese. Moreover, she grew up as an only child and so did her cousin, and because they were frequently around each other at every family gathering, they felt close like siblings and naturally called each other “brother” and “sister.”

One thing to note: having China’s One-Child Policy in mind will confuse you if you ever meet the people in China. There were many single-child households, sure, but there were also many young people with a (real) brother or sister. I would ask them, “What about the One-Child Policy? Are your parents in trouble with the government? Is your little brother a secret?” I never got a satisfactory response to my question. It was either a flat yes or no, or a “Yes, but we do” or “No, we can.” They had a hard time explaining it. Actually, none elected to give me a worthy explanation. Probably not unlike explaining the allowances granted by Freedom of Speech laws to a man from a state-controlled culture, or American gun laws and the Right to Bear Arms to a novice foreign visitor.

China's version of the Fountain of Youth.

China’s version of the Fountain of Youth, the Immortal Bed.

“I very like it.”
Grammatically, the sentence could be “I really like it,” or “I like it very much,” or even “I very much like it.” This is a fine distinction, easily unknown or forgotten by my congenial Chinese friends. It is easy to understand how someone learning English would say “I very like it” after they learned that “very” is an intensifying adverb to turn a word like “good” into the superlative “very good.”

“I know.”
I was not so charitable toward this phrase. No, I almost lost my temper and made a classroom outburst the first time I heard a middle school student say, “We know.” It was when I went to the chalkboard to make a distinction about two similar phrases. Maybe I was explaining the difference between replying, “I’m sorry?” and “Say again” to the Chinese students who thought that the latter was the preferred way to ask someone to repeat themselves. I don’t remember for sure. But as I was writing and explaining myself, a student said, “We know.” I immediately snapped over my shoulder and eyed the students to try and identify who said it. It sounded like an openly condescending remark, made by a student rolling their eyes at the redundant teacher. Being very green and lacking confidence in my authority as a foreign teacher, I held my peace and went on with the lesson. I wanted to scold them, “You know? Then why did you make the mistake?! Don’t stop me when I’m teaching you, you little smart alecks!”

When I saw this sign, I thought there had better be monkeys.

When I saw this sign, I thought there had better be wild monkeys.

I heard “I know” or “We know” replies a few other times, in class and in conversation, and it started to make me suspicious. It was spoken with a flat tone at times, not with a sarcastic edge, and it was spoken politely in friendly conversation with a smiling student. Something was amiss. Finally, after learning enough Chinese to become familiar with everyday phrases, I learned that a common response used to indicate understanding is, literally translated, “I know.” In English, if someone tells me news and I tell them, “I know,” of course it usually means “I already knew that.” In Chinese, “I know” (“Wo zhidao”, said “Wuh jih-dao”) means the English equivalent of “I see.” Or, the difference between telling someone you understand them and telling them they’re behind the curve because you understood that already.

Sure enough, the sign delivered.

The sign delivered as promised.

“Read. Follow me.”
It was either this or “Look. Follow me.” Or “Watch me.” Chinese is a language of simple commands, having no use for spare words to make a sentence flow or sound more polite. Chinese speakers, steeped in this straightforward grammar structure, naturally adapted it to English sentences.

The robotic commands I heard in China sounded very abrupt to my ears, conditioned to catch the subtle differences in tone between English words. A Chinese speaker with beginning or intermediate English skills might use Tarzan talk or baby talk, but I always gave them credit. I knew what they meant and I knew they had put forth a lot of effort to learn to speak English. Also, I knew firsthand how difficult and time-consuming it was to acquire a foreign language, and English was such a foreign language compared to Chinese.

Besides, once the students of English had worked with the language for a few years and been exposed to enough American movies, they started to phrase things naturally.

Sound advice.

Sound advice.

“Good, good study. Day, day up.”
This is a literal translation, I understood, from a motto of Chairman Mao. The very first time I heard someone use this cheer, the group of Chinese friends I was with laughed at the “Chinglish,” but I understood it perfectly, immediately. It seemed like a clever way to use English; the simplicity streamlined the words’ meaning. I heard this phrase fairly often, usually as a rallying cry after group exercise or spoken by students in discussions on difficult homework assignments.

Perhaps this is the finest example for English speakers, using the building blocks of our own language, of how Chinese works. Super simple, with no inflection or function words in between the main thoughts.

This one almost makes sense.

This one almost makes sense.

“Have a good sleep.”
Whenever I went out to lunch with someone (usually students I met in the cafeteria) they would bid me farewell by wishing me a good sleep. Naptime was assumed, a part of the culture built into work and school schedules. So it was expected that after our lunch was over, I would go back to my apartment and sleep. My friends were only being polite. This phrase is fine grammatically; it stood out to me only because I have never heard an American wish me a good nap and in China I heard it every time I went off to my after lunch rest.

“Wish you happy every day.”
My friendly well-wishers would also end conversations, text messages, greeting cards, and online chats with “Wish you happy every day.” I’ve never heard an American say this, either, and I doubt it was part of the Chinese English language textbooks. I had to assume that people were transliterating a standard Chinese phrase.

“I’m fine, thank you.”

Speaking of English textbooks, in China (and all over eastern Asia) the students are taught to respond to the basic greeting, “Hello. How are you?” with “I’m fine, thank you.” It sounds as wooden and forced as you might imagine an uncomfortable Chinese student would sound when reciting strange, foreign sounds.

My fellow foreign English teacher, Grant (the Australian), and I would always tell students on the campus, “You don’t have to say, ‘I’m fine, thank you.’ You can say, ‘I’m good. How are you?’ or anything you want.” Grant would add a “mate” in there. It would have been a sweet dream for me to see a Chinese student referring to his friends as “blokes” or “mates.”

IMG_1864

“What a pity.”
The other stock phrase that was over-used to perplexing effect was “What a pity.” I heard this one tossed out hundreds of times over every mild disappointment. In America, the standard reaction I’ve heard to bad news is “That’s too bad” or “I’m sorry (to hear that).” Among my peers, I’m sorry to report, the popular reply is “That sucks.” My generation is no longer aware that this phrase is vulgar, and the Chinese were unaware that “What a pity” is thought quaint by contemporary Americans.

It sounds, I don’t know, British? There is something overly refined about “What a pity” that strikes Americans as something that might be spoken by a Gibson girl or white-gloved old matron. Americans are far too proud of their middle class-ness and informality to casually say, “What a pity.”

In my mind, I thought of the James Bond arch-villain, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and his more famous parody, Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers’ movies.

By the time I saw the sign, somebody or bodies hadn't obeyed the sign, since the smiling flower was gone and not saying hello to anybody.

By the time I saw the sign, somebody or bodies hadn’t obeyed the sign, since the smiling flower was gone and not saying hello to anybody.

One time, I missed a Chinese lesson with my very strict teacher, Uncle Jiang. Aunt Fong had taken me out on an errand and told me it would be all right to postpone the lesson, but soon her husband called her up and chattered some harsh vibrations over the cell phone. Then, Aunt Fong handed the phone to me, stupefied. My first phone conversation in China with someone whose English skills were quite limited. What was I supposed to say?

“Hello?” I said.

“What a pity…” Uncle Jiang slowly growled. His voice was low; angry emotion seethed inside but he restrained it, I imagined, through clenched teeth and flared nostrils.

It was the first time I had heard “What a pity” in this kind of a context. I didn’t pick up on his meaning, and I tried to relay the explanation that Aunt Fong had told me in the clearest bullet points. “I’m with Aunt Fong. We are near your home. She is taking me to dinner. We will eat dinner.”

Uncle Jiang wasn’t interested in listening. “What a pity…” he breathily said again. I was confused at first, then taken aback. I could feel his rage through the phone. He went on and lectured me that when we agree to a meeting time, we have to commit to it. This happened during week 2 or 3 of our Chinese-English study, and up till that point I thought we intended to work hard but had mutually agreed to meet together as friends. Uncle Jiang didn’t take a casual interpretation.

“Okay… Okay… Okay,” I replied to him. It was my first brush with Chinese temper tantrums. While in China, I would witness a few other occasions where a man would become moody as a little boy and expect everyone to cater to him. This behavior was contemptible when I saw it in husbands or young adults, but it was worst in government officials and media spokesmen. I figured that Confucian social structure and the pampering of male children resulted in self-centered men who abused the attention they were entitled. Let me qualify this statement though: I saw Chinese men in private life on limited occasions. Mostly, in public, I saw standard behavior that I would expect from men anywhere, but with Chinese characteristics: joviality, conviviality, excitability, boisterousness, slovenliness, loudness. I am not saying that temper tantrums were typical, only that there were more than a couple conspicuous instances where I was shocked to see a man acting babyish, and disgusted to see the people around him having to accommodate him. Of course, American men lose their tempers too, just not with the same pouting I saw in China.

In the media, Chinese government spokesmen act contemptuous and high-handed when dismissing U.S. claims of computer hacking, for example, and they are outright bullies when denying claims in South China Seas territorial disputes with their Asian neighbors. When I see it, I have to soothe my indignation by humorously imagining them delicately stroking a white cat and haughtily saying, “What a pity.”

This blog, like this "world" in China, is non-smoking.

This blog, like this “world” in China, is non-smoking.

“What are you doing?” “Where are you going?”
Moving on to a lighter topic, “What are you doing?” was a typical Chinese greeting. Another traditional greeting was “Have you eaten?” I was told that this became common in China’s impoverished past, when people were many and food was scarce. Asking your neighbor if he had eaten showed your concern and indicated you were willing to feed him if he were hungry.

In the same way, friends and acquaintances meant to show concern and polite interest by asking me “Where are you going?” whenever I left my campus apartment. It could feel very direct and intrusive, as if I were being interrogated over suspicious activity. After righting my balance, I was able to rattle off a casual answer. In a way, I had to admit that it was a better information-gathering question than “How are you?” If someone replies, “Good,” then what is there to work with? In my experience the reply to that reply is “That’s good” and the dialogue is over. But if someone tells you what they are up to, then that might be enough to open a small conversational door. At least it’s better than the dead-end of “How are you?” “I’m good.” “That’s good.”

For once the English is perfectly proper. A good minder, too.

For once the English is perfectly proper. A good minder, too.

“Eat medicine”
This one was minor, but instead of pairing “medicine” with the verb “take,” the Chinese transliterated their own verb-noun pairing and said, in English, “eat medicine.”

I mention this because “eat medicine” sounded odd to my ear (you don’t eat medicine- that would involve chewing- you swallow it or drink it), and because it serves as a representative example of the many minor discrepancies in language and conceptual thinking between Chinese and English. (These minor phrasal discrepancies can be found in any language compared with another.)

Think about this one: why do we say “take medicine” but the Chinese say “eat medicine”? It is essentially describing the same thing, but the words “take” and “eat” have different usages and associations. In one language, “eat” can mean the intake of something like medicine, in the other it involves food and insults, but not medicine, and chewing and swallowing.

“Where are you come from?”
This phrase was the main offender while I was in China. Other Chinglish transliterations or mistranslations could be funny, confusing, awkward, charming, strange, nonsensical, off-putting, or just plain incorrect, but “Where are you come from?” annoyed me harshly and persistently.

Whenever a curious stranger approached me and asked me this question, my spine shivered, my hair rose on the back of my neck, and my jaw stiffened. Its sound was as pleasant to me as the screeches of an engine run without oil.

Most times, when speaking with a Chinese friend, student, or new acquaintance, I was very gracious with them and appreciative that they were trying to speak English with me. It took courage. So I had patience and I tried to build them up, only seldom correcting a language error when they were having difficulty. With “Where are you come from?” though, I insisted on slipping in “It’s ‘Where do you come from?’” in the snippy tone of a grammar pedant. I could not let it pass. It I could have, I would have rounded up all the attempted English speakers in China and conducted a one-hour class to drill “Where do you come from?” until no one could forget it.

You may ask what was so bad about this grammar error in particular. Well, I would have to answer its prevalence- sprouting up everywhere like an invasive weed- and more so its ugliness. It takes the brain along one path: “Where are you…” and then startles it with the jarring contradiction “…come from.” Plus, it was often blurted out with a glib smile, as if an enemy were insulting my injury with a grin.

This sign definitely wasn't minded by native Chinese speakers, a few of whom I saw carving their name into the Great Wall with car keys.

Signs aren’t always worth much to native speakers anyways. I saw a few of them carving their names into the Great Wall with car keys.

There were other common confusions I tried to clarify when I could, when necessary. The most prevalent item was the difference between “What’s the matter?” and “What’s the matter with you?” a significant tonal distinction in English but a similar meaning if the words are analyzed by a Chinese student. In these cases I was calm and I picked my battles- an English class I would correct, but a casual acquaintance I would not. I knew my place.

Any grammar ire was reserved for “Where are you come from?” which I immediately corrected before giving them my answer. Perhaps I gave them the impression that most Americans are difficult and sharp. Maybe I should have told them “I am come from France.”

Translates fine, but I thought it was funny that this amusement park was called "China Dinosaurs Park" and not just "Dinosaurs' Park."

Translates fine, but I thought it was funny that this amusement park was called “China Dinosaurs Park” and not just “Dinosaurs’ Park.”

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