The Chinese Puzzle

Chinese is like a little wooden puzzle-box: smooth on the outside, deceptively simple, polished and gleaming. The edges seem finite and self-contained, the rules seem easy to grasp. With only a few moves of the pieces, the surface falls away and reveals a pattern that is both pleasing and strangely basic. Once this layer of pieces is removed, a new surface reveals itself, one with an entirely different set of rules, of possible moves. This layer requires some more careful planning and some strategy. It may take some time for the player to work her way to the next level. Eventually, though, this surface unlocks and discloses still further levels, each more intricate than the last, as the puzzle grows ever inward, smaller and more intricate in the hands but apparently infinite in internal scope. At times it seems impossible, a tightly bound, impenetrable knot with no key or hole or way in through logic or bashing. It seems crafted by devious, alien minds. Other times, the player is content simply to look, and upon looking, to find that each tiny strand of the puzzle, each thread and lock and slip and notch is covered in the tiniest, gentlest designs, beautiful, everyday things rendered powerful and alchemical: water, fire, woman, bow, mouth, moon, grass, field.

These basic elements combine in often-unpredictable ways to create the wonder that is the Chinese writing system. Each character represents a single syllable. In ancient Chinese, these syllables were each considered a separate word, while modern Chinese has adopted compounds and has shown an occasional preference for double-syllables in some objects: zhuo (table) has become zhuozi, for example, and li (pear) has become lizi in some dialects. Each character has (usually) two parts: a simplified version of one of the fundamental images – like fire, or water, or person. This part is called the radical, or xingpang, and provides a clue to the meaning of the character. The second part is a phonetic element, or shengpang, and gives a clue (although not an exact guideline) for the pronunciation of the character. Thus, with a familiarity of the radicals and the most common phonetic pieces, a reader can often guess at both the meaning and the pronunciation of any given character. The reader will probably be wrong, but not wildly wrong, in many cases. Chinese does, however, have homographs, which are words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently. These tend to be much more extreme than homographs in English. An example of a homograph in English might be “lead” (as in, to guide), or “lead,” (as in, the material once used for pipes). In Chinese, however, a character might have pronunciations as different as hang and xing (both 2nd tone).

One of the most frustrating things about being a Chinese learner is the sensation of illiteracy, and the loss of text as a means of acquiring new words. Imagine an English speaker in Mexico: she may be drinking a beer with friends, and can look at the bottle in her hand and read “cerveza,” and thus conclude that the word for “beer” in Spanish is probably “cerveza.” She knows what the word looks like, as well as what it sounds like. She may see signs for a “carniceria,” and see what they sell; she may look at a menu and learn the words for dozens of dishes, even if she’s not yet sure what they taste like. There is no such possibility for this kind of passive learning in China. A learner must be told what a character sounds like – and then it can be learned, memorized, and filed away with the others. There is no literate study without help. There aren’t even any good dictionaries that allow for a consistent and reliable search for a character based upon radical – most are alphabetized according to pronunciation, so again, if you don’t know what a character sounds like, you simply don’t know what it sounds like, you don’t know what it IS, and cannot connect it to any other words you already have in your mental lexicon. It drives me insane.

The characters themselves, though, fascinate. They are, of course, everywhere: the textual field overwhelms the visual field in urban China – everything is print and text, every window, every bus, every storefront emblazoned with these symbols, each mysterious and maddening and slow to relinquish their sense. Once I am able to figure one out, it’s as if the entire knot loosens, and the possibility of real understanding shines through for one giddy instant: “Noodle! That said ‘noodle!’” and then seizes up again as a sea of other unknown characters swim past. When we sit in the back of taxis, my eyes are glued to the windows, staring, straining to decipher signs with the shreds of context I can scrape together as we pass by (the steamed buns in front of a snack place, the rows of bicycles, the photographs in the ads on the side of the bus stop). I catch myself tracing the character strokes with my fingertip on the leg of my jeans, writing, whispering to myself as my brain sifts through the millions of bits of information it has to play with, sorting and connecting and holding little shards of sense up to the light.

I love writing characters. My tutor is very strict: when I cross my “qi” from right to left instead of left to right, she erases it and makes me write it again. I can’t tell any difference in how it looks, but she insists it changes the form in some fundamentally incorrect way, and so I respect her refined sense of order and rewrite it. Sometimes it feels more like I’m drawing than writing, struggling to carve some meaning into the paper with the most elaborate and unforgiving shapes imaginable. Other times, it all makes sense, and I can scribble away like a 7-year-old child, my shapes unpracticed and undisciplined, loopy and ugly and wobbling all over the page, but full of a huge sense of accomplishment. I picture myself with my pen in a fist, and my tongue stuck out of the corner of my mouth, no grace and all determination. One of the few things Mao did that I find myself really grateful for on a daily basis is requiring that the characters be simplified for everyday use. He was convinced that the complexity of the traditional forms contributed to illiteracy, and thought they were simply too difficult to learn. Amen. So, the characters that are typically used now are not the ancient ones, each packed with nuance and subtle history, but rather dumbed-down versions of each, systematically reduced in similar ways so as to retain their semantic and phonetic interrelatedness, but with far fewer strokes and simpler lines. I recognize how this transition could be seen as a loss, but mostly I’m just relieved.

Speaking is another matter. Some days, I feel pretty good about it – I can chat with shopkeepers, I can order in restaurants, I can maintain shaky discourse about teaching or my hometown or (god forbid) the Olympics. My tutor speaks very quickly, so I really only understand maybe 40% of what she says, but she is careful to use Mandarin, or Putonghua – another of Mao’s linguistic interventions, a required standard to be used in place of regional dialects. Of course, dialects persist, (as well they should), but most educated Chinese speakers can also speak Mandarin, to varying degrees. The dialect in Chengdu, known as Sichuanhua, still eludes me for the most part. The pronunciation is quite different from Mandarin, and several elements of vocabulary and grammatical structure are different from what I’m learning, as well, so I often have to ask people to switch to Putonghua if they want me to understand. This is embarrassing for us both; think of it as a tourist in the deep South requesting that a waitress use Ohio Radio English for him to be able to understand what she’s saying. It’s very awkward, but often necessary. The phrase for confessing one’s incomprehension in Chinese is really quite thoughtful; it translates, basically, to “I hear you, but I don’t understand you.” Wo tingbudong.

The hardest part to get right is the tones. There are five tones in Mandarin: 1st tone, which is a flat, level tone at the top of your voice range; 2nd tone, which is a steadily rising tone that starts around the lower end of your range and goes to the upper end; 3rd tone, which starts somewhere in the middle, drops to the very bottom, and then comes back up again; and 4th tone, which is a sharply falling tone that goes from the top of your range to the bottom. The last tone is actually an empty tone, sometimes found in the last syllable of a word, and doesn’t have any real pitch change to speak of. In describing these, they don’t seem that difficult to distinguish, but given that each syllable can have as many as a hundred distinct meanings depending on tone and context, sometimes picking the right sense is harder than one might think. There is also always the looming potential for saying something really, really bad. “Evil,” “bear,” and “boobs” are all basically the same thing, for example, but with minor tonal variations. I’m trying to work out a tongue twister than can use all three.

Some days I feel like I haven’t learned anything. I get frustrated when I don’t understand people’s questions, I get angry when I make mistakes that I know better than to make, and I want to buy groceries at stores where everything is prepackaged and I don’t have to ask for it, and I don’t leave the apartment unless I have to teach a class. Those days feel like my brain is lodged in syrup, and I want to fling my Chinese books off the balcony and scream that their language is stupid nonsensical chatter and that if one more person refers to a soccer field as a “playground,” I’m setting the school on fire and leaving for good. This is the sixth language I’ve studied; I’m ready to be better at it, dammit.

Luckily, I have my guardian angels. Besides meeting with my tutor twice a week, I’ve also started hanging out with one of my undergraduate students on Thursday afternoons. She is brainy and sweet and innocent, but with a strangely mature air about her, in contrast to the squealing, pink-soaked boy-craziness of her counterparts. She is starting to learn German, a language I speak very comfortably, if not perfectly, and so we’ve taken to trading lessons in a casual fashion, sitting outside on the broad lawn before the library, right behind the enormous statue of Confucius. She brings her German book, and I help her with pronunciation and vocabulary, and ask her questions about what she eats for dinner and what time she does her homework, that sort of thing. Her book cracks me up – it’s full of beer and sausages and things she doesn’t know what to do with, like daily planners and dates with French men. It’s a pleasure, though, to escape both English and Chinese, and to do so with someone with an equally hungry and thoughtful taste for languages. Some days we chat in Chinese; I’ve shown her my photos of my family, and of other places I’ve traveled: Europe, Africa, Australia. She loves these stories, but manages not to slip into the obsequious wonder that so many of the students adopt. She asks practical questions and has interesting observations, and is less concerned with my parents’ pastimes than with the fact that I yet again used the wrong tone for the second syllable of the word for “retired.” I like that about her. We also discovered that we have French in common; hers is much more studied than my own, and her accent impeccable, due to several years’ extra-curricular work at the Alliance Francaise here in Chengdu, but I can keep up, and throwing a fourth language into the mix makes for a brain-twisting, heady exercise in expression and recall. We laugh a lot. Her English name is Faith.

Faith has also become my informant for the larger, anthropological experience that is my time here. She has taught me a lot about what it is to be a young Chinese person, their fears and hang-ups, their hopes and assumptions. It seems that, while American kids are always rushing toward adulthood and independence, Chinese people cling to their childhoods as long as they can. For them, adulthood means drudgery and compromise. She will be 20 this summer, but hopes to pass for 15 or 16. This explains a lot in terms of the infantilism of Chinese pop culture: the cutesy look, the baubles and bows and pencil cases shaped like doggies and bears, the dolly-notebooks and the hearts and flowers and happy smiles. I find it nauseating, while for them, it’s a desperate attachment to innocence and to being cared for, before being thrown to the wolves in their Communo-capitalist economy.

One year is really not enough time to learn a language, or a culture, or a place. It’s just enough to start to find a map, to get a feel for things. I’m sure that with more time, the frustrations would fade, and eventually give rise to new ones, more local ones. I wish my Chinese were better. If we had spent a year in Italy, instead, I’m sure I’d be closer to fluent now, able to absorb vocabulary from my environment and share assumptions about the world with the people I practiced with. This experience is different. It’s slow, and painful, and full of fits and starts. Sometimes I am overwhelmed with the beauty and elegance of the Chinese language, its secrets and underlying forms and mysteries. Other times, I think about quitting my study altogether and just drifting for our final two months, like most of the expats do. Few can speak at all, other than the ones who own businesses here or who’ve put in 5 or 6 years already and are planning on being here a long, long time. They eat at Irish pubs and hang out with other foreigners, and are happy to approximate a weak version of their lives back home, wherever that home is. It’s a seductive thought, but an ugly one.

My tutor introduced me to a poem by a very famous Chinese poet, named Li Bai. I was thrilled that I was able to read it, and eventually, understand it. I looked for English translations to post, but was unhappy with each of them, as they disregarded the form in exchange for the content. Poems are both – and this has a delicate rhyme structure that I thought needed to be preserved, so I translated it myself. I am not a poet, but I’m excited to share the first real work of art that I was able to reach in Chinese:

Jing Ye Si
chuáng qián míngyuè guāng
yí shì dì shàng shuāng
jǔ tóu wàng míngyuè
dī tóu sī gùxiāng

(Li Bai, 701-762 AD)

Nocturne
Before my bed, the moonlight gleams
Frost upon the ground, it seems
I lift my head to a clear, bright moon
I lower my head to homeward dreams

~ by knifemaker on April 22, 2008.