Dreaming in Chinese (18 page)

Logic might seem to have been on the reformers’ side. But the debates over a phonetic versus not-phonetic alphabet were fraught. The arguments—academic, political, social, linguistic, emotional, regional—were messy and angry. Every group had a bone to pick. Which phonetic system was best designed? What should the symbols look like? Whose pronunciation should be considered “standard”? Who was on whose side? Et cetera.

At one point, reflective of the chaos, one small group even suggested throwing the whole mess over in favor of Esperanto, the man-made language, which, they reasoned, would be less fettered for all in many ways.

Esperanto was quickly abandoned as a far-out idea, although staunch proponents of the language live on in China. Improbably enough, Esperanto provided the entrée for our family’s first visit to China. We were living in Japan in 1986, and received an invitation to attend the World Esperanto Congress in Beijing, provided we could learn a little Esperanto first. So we patched together a few conversations and taught them to our kids:

Mi estas malsata. Cu estas ajo mangi?

I am hungry. Is there something to eat?

Cu ni estas en Hangzhou jam?

Are we in Hangzhou yet?

We learned enough, and for three weeks, we dragged around China with two busloads of Esperanto speakers from all over the world, including one little girl from New Zealand, who was the same age as our kids and whose parents were raising her as a native speaker of Esperanto. (I always wondered what happened to her). The group’s sessions were conducted in Esperanto, but whenever a critical housekeeping detail arose, like what time the buses would roll in the morning, the speakers switched to English.

The arguments over a phonetic writing system droned on for decades. Different systems fell in and out of favor, but none really got traction. The old, impractical, but apparently impossible-to-replace character system lived on.

When the Communists came to power in 1949, Mao stamped his own imprints on the language reform movement. He dealt with the writing system in ways that he said would make it more accessible to the masses, and which critics (from the safety of decades later!) have often labeled a dumbing down of the vaunted traditional linguistic system. These included a two-pronged approach. First, they shrank the vocabulary used in public media and official documents and propaganda, so ordinary people would have fewer characters to master in order to become literate. Second, they reduced the number of strokes needed to write thousands of the traditional complex characters (called
fántǐzì
), creating simplified characters (
jiǎntǐzì
). In addition, they finally adopted a phonetic alphabet called
Pīnyīn
, which (more or less) spells out the sounds of Chinese characters using Roman letters. To this day, mainland China uses simplified characters and Pinyin. An unforeseen bonus of Pinyin is its great flexibility for use on computer keyboards and in texting on mobile phones.

The language reforms of the twentieth century represented a massive, daunting linguistic engineering task. Languages are constantly changing, but normally they change slowly and organically, with less imposition and decree. These reforms, and many of their final implementations, represented something more like the sudden shift of tectonic plates during an earthquake, akin to the degree of the political and social shifts in China during the same time.

Today, the Mandarin Putonghua works pretty well as a national language. Most Chinese can understand it and speak it, although they may speak with a heavy accent and also may conduct many of their everyday affairs in their local dialect.
²⁰
Some of the older generation and some ethnic minorities, like Uighurs, who are not educated in Putonghua, are still left out. Young Uighurs who make it to university even now have to pass a Mandarin test or study it remedially.

Here is a sense of the language varieties heard around China. Mandarin with regional accents: when speaking Mandarin, the Chinese can generally understand each other despite their heavy regional accents, which are as different as those of Brits, Aussies, Americans, Jamaicans and Nigerians when they are speaking English. Other Sino-Tibetan languages: more than 300 million Chinese speak another language besides Mandarin, including languages like Cantonese, Wu, Gan, Min, Hakka, Yue and Xiang. While these languages all belong to the same greater Sino-Tibetan language family that includes Mandarin, they can be as different from each other as French is from Spanish or Italian. Beyond Sino-Tibetan languages: even farther afield linguistically, many of China’s 50-plus minority populations speak other languages, including many that are not Sino-Tibetan. For example, the Mongolians, the Uighurs and the Manchus all speak Altaic languages, which are closely related to Turkish and Korean. Then there are the smaller groups such as Bai, Miao and Yi, which are of various origins.

Out on the streets of China, this actual linguistic hodge-podge complicates life for Mandarin language learners like me. When I hailed a taxi in Shenzhen, in the far south of China bordering on Hong Kong, I couldn’t exchange a single comprehensible word with the Cantonese-speaking driver. At first, I thought it was my own shortcoming, but my Chinese friends from Beijing told me they were in the same boat: Cantonese, with its different sound system, word order and lexicon, is as foreign to them as native speakers of Mandarin as German is to me. (If they’d written notes to each other, of course, they would have understood each other fine, since they use the same version of the written Chinese language.)

The major languages of eastern China

I tried for weeks—in vain—to talk with the regulars at my morning Shanghai tai chi practice. Eventually I realized with some embarrassment that it wasn’t my poor Mandarin or what I took as their “heavy accents” that got in our way, but rather that they were speaking Shanghainese, a Wu language that is, again, about as similar to Mandarin as German is to English. My friend Ding, a Shanghai native, lives a bilingual day, flipping back and forth between Shanghainese and Mandarin, depending on what kind of business or errands she is doing.

Mandarin is reaching well beyond China now. It is starting to replace Cantonese as the lingua franca of Chinatowns around the world. Cantonese had been their traditional language because so many of China’s earlier emigrants came from Cantonese-speaking areas in the south. In the US, Mandarin is taking off in popularity as a foreign-language study option, and the number of bilingual Mandarin-English grade schools is growing. While the visionaries in China’s nascent republic 100 years ago might have been a little disappointed that there is still a polyglot of languages in 21st-century mainland China, they probably would have been surprised and heartened at Mandarin’s global reach.

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There is a fuzziness around the definitions of dialect and language. Generally, and for purposes here, dialects share more vocabulary with each other, more grammar, and are more likely to be mutually understood. Languages are further apart in all these respects. For example, some people say Shanghainese (a Wu language) and Cantonese are dialects of Chinese; others say they are all separate languages.

Hànzì
Characters

11.
The essence of being Chinese

O
NE PAIR OF
characters that pops up everywhere around China is
,
ànmó
, which means massage. There it is on signs along a row of Shanghai’s New Age spas on trendy Dagu Lu. Or scribbled by hand on cardboard scraps propped up along plaster walls in construction zones. Oversized signs with
appear in upper-story windows of commercial buildings. Small signs are in back-street barber shops that operate as hair salons by day and foot massage parlors by night. Massage is part of the menu at places like Beijing’s slightly suspicious and rundown-looking No.1 Relaxing Club, which was right across from our apartment, or at the garish, Greek-temple-looking “waterworks” in the diplomatic neighborhood. And there is the blind-man massage
, the no-frills workingman’s experience performed in modest surroundings by well-trained, state-subsidized blind people.

Blind-man massage is my favorite, a cheap and easy tonic for a nerve-racking day. If I was out on rounds of frustrating errands, I could just slip into the neighborhood blind-man massage parlor. There I lay down in a roomful of office workers on their furtive lunchtime breaks and weary shoppers taking a respite. We all came in buttoned up and stressed out, savored our massages (while we were fully clothed), and then left, rumpled but mellow.