Dreaming in Chinese (19 page)

In the massage parlor, I liked catching glimpses of Chinese habits and real life: the blind man with his small electronic prompter, which beeped to announce the elapsed time; the male customers, unabashed and oblivious, easing into deep, rattling snores as they fully relaxed; the inane one-way conversations overheard on cell phones:

Client: Yeah, I’m having a massage now. (pause)

Client: Oh, OK. OK, I can do that. (pause)

Client: Carrots? Sure, how many? (pause)

Client: In about an hour.

Anmó
looks like
, sounds like “ahn muo.” Most people will tell you they take more naturally to either the visual part or the oral part of Chinese, just like people take differently to music or art or sports. For me, I’ll take listening and speaking over reading and—God forbid!—writing, no contest. Mastering characters seems impossible; I can practice a few characters for an entire week, trying to cram them into my brain. Then if I miss a few days, they have simply disappeared, as though never there in the first place. Conveniently, my husband is the yang to my yin. He has a lot of trouble with the sounds but says that the characters “make sense” to him. When we are out at a restaurant, he can look at the Chinese menu and say to me, “They have pork, or chicken, or noodles.” And then I can ask the waiter for
zhūròu
, or
jī
, or
miàn
. We are a good team, a
dānwèi
.

Anmó
is complicated to write in Chinese, taking 24 strokes to complete the two characters. But it is a useful example to help understand the puzzles and principles of how characters and words work in Chinese.

A Chinese word is generally written with one or two characters, occasionally three, like
lǎobǎixìng
. Each character is pronounced as a single syllable. For example, the word for “wood, tree” is one syllable,
mù
, and is written with one character,
, and sounds like “moo.” The word “teacher” is two syllables,
lǎoshī
, and is written with two characters,
, and sounds like “lao sure.”

Characters are constructed in several different ways. I am grateful for the simplest ones, like the character
,
rén
, which means “person.” This character has a single element, which carries both the meaning and sound rolled into one. And as a bonus, you can imagine that it looks like a little stick drawing of a person, which it originally was. If only characters were all so simple.

Other characters are composed of two parts. In many two-part characters, one part, called a radical, lends the character its meaning. Chinese has about 200 radicals, which carry general meanings like knife, person, strength, bowl, roof, grass, big, mountain, mouth, silk, horse, door, not, hand, wind, sick, field, rice, boat, bitter, walk, village, pig, rain, gold, ghost. The other part gives the character its sound.

For example,
is the character for the word
hàn
, which means “sweat.” The left part of the character,
shuǐ,
is the radical for “water,” so if you can spot the radical
, you can guess that the character will have something to do with liquids, in this case “sweat.”
²¹
The right part of the character,
is “
gān,
” which provides its sound, in the rhymed form “
hàn
,” to the combined character. So the two parts together create a new character,
, which means “sweat” and is said as “
hàn
.”