Dreaming in Chinese (2 page)

O
NE SPRING DAY
in Beijing, I was trudging home from the local market with bags of bright vegetables and fresh, soft tofu. Few people were out, and my eyes were on the ground to watch my step around the minor rubble and broken bits of pavement. It was not a pretty walk. Then I heard it, sotto voce but clearly distinguishable above the whine of nearby traffic: “Hello, I love you. Buy my jade. I love you!”

I looked up as a handsome young man, a Uighur, strolled briskly past me, his hands full of jade bracelets. The Uighurs are a beleaguered minority in China, Muslims who came from central Asia. They are darkly attractive, with deep eyes and unruly hair. It’s easy for a foreigner in China to feel a quick bond with the Uighurs, however irrational and unwarranted, for their Western looks.

I knew this man must have come from the farthest northwestern edge of China, the Xinjiang region. The street signs there grow long and cluttered with scripts in Russian, Arabic, Chinese and English. Xinjiang is an outpost, lying beyond the deserts and mountains of Gansu Province. In Gansu, farmers till the soil around the crumbled remains at the end of the Great Wall as though it were a nuisance rather than a relic. When my husband and I recently traveled to Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital city, people stared at us curiously, still unused to foreigners.

Uighurs often journey from Xinjiang, traveling a thousand miles or more to sell their home region’s plump, chewy raisins or sweet almonds to the city slickers in Shanghai and Beijing. Some will sell jade. I imagine them bartering for their jade by dark of night in the bustling Xinjiang markets, where I saw piles of ruby- and lapis-colored rugs and knives made with ox-horn handles.

The first time I bought raisins from a Uighur’s overflowing pushcart, while we were in Shanghai, I took them home to wash them, hoping that enough sudsy scrubbing would immunize my husband and me against the germs that had passed through a hundred hands between a Xinjiang arbor and our apartment kitchen. I rinsed the raisins again and again, but each new bowl of water turned brown. I laid them out on a towel to dry, just as I had seen the farmers lay out their fiery red peppers along rural roadsides. The raisins grew fat with water, but sat uneaten; dull, tasteless and messy. Finally, I threw them away. Then I bought a second batch, which we dared to eat straight from the Uighur’s cart. They were delicious. I kept buying raisins and have never washed them since. By now, we have eaten a lot of dirty raisins, and they haven’t made us sicker than anything else in China has.

I didn’t end up buying jade from the Uighur who called out that morning, but I fell for his “I love you” in an instant.
Wǒ ài nǐ
, I thought. How often I heard those words in China.
Wǒ ài nǐ
is the staple of pop songs, movie titles and ring tones on young girls’ mobile phones. Rock stars dance to
wǒ ài nǐ
music on China TV’s ever-popular Las Vegas–like extravaganzas.

While the word
ài
, to love, can be tossed around lightly in China, I also caught hints of something more complicated. Why, for example, do so many of the Chinese-Western couples we know describe the same mutual incompatability in romance? The Westerners lament that the Chinese can never quite utter the words “I love you,” and never, ever their native
Wǒ ài nǐ
; the Chinese scoff that Westerners say “I love you” cavalierly, sounding hollow and insincere.

And why did one of my Chinese friends, upon learning that I have two sons, ask me which one I love more, as if love were some kind of a zero-sum calculation? It was a question so alien that it sent me on a mission to find the true Chinese meaning of
ài
.

I spent a few days with a woman named Julia, who explained to me her version of love and marriage in China. Julia is like many Chinese women in their thirties whom I have met; she has a husband, a career, a new baby and a mother-in-law who babysits. “Sounds like a good deal to me,” I told Julia, thinking how many women in America struggle to arrange what comes as part of the filial bargain in China. For now, China’s first generation of only children, like Julia, are becoming parents of only children. The four grandparents, often retired and living nearby, care for and dote on their only, shared grandchild. Pick any park in China, and you’ll see smiling grandpas pushing strollers.

Julia figured, rightly, that my husband and I had been married for a long time. She said that I must love my husband very much to be married so long. An odd comment, I thought. I wasn’t sure if it was a compliment, or a statement of longing, or an opening for a question back. “Of course,” I said, and added rather lamely, “I’m sure you must love your husband a lot, too.”

“Yes,” she said, “I love him for now.”

For now? Was this all about cold convenience? Did her husband and all those grandparents suspect she might be here right now confiding in me, someone she barely knew? Or was there something else, some veil across the language between us?

I found some clues in a novel that I bought after watching a Chinese girl, my seatmate on an interminable long-haul flight from San Francisco to Beijing, reading it straight through. The book has an intriguing title:
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
. It tells the edgy story of a Chinese girl from the countryside who makes her way to London. Z, as the narrator calls herself in London, struggles from the beginning of the story to the end over her love affair with a British hold-over hippy. She struggles with his artist’s temperament, she struggles with the concept of love and she struggles with the grammar of the not-perfectly-translatable words
ài
and “love.”

“
Love,” this English word: like other English words it has tense. “Loved” or “will love” or “have loved.” All these specific tenses mean Love is time-limited thing. Not infinite. It only exist in particular period of time
[sic]
. In Chinese, Love is “
” (ài). It has no tense. No past and future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.
²

So here was Z, deploring the idea that her ability to love should be confined by the boundaries of time and the tenses of English verbs. And there was Julia, talking about love in cold, practical terms, and actually punctuating its transitory nature by saying she loved her husband “for now.” Two Chinese women whose ideas of modern love were so different, apparently bound up with how they used the word.

Z is right about the grammar of English and Chinese verbs. Chinese verbs are simple; there is a single form of a verb,
ài
, which never changes form for tense as English verbs do (love, loved, loved; sing, sang, sung) or for person (I love, she loves).

Every day in China, I praised the simplicity of Chinese grammar and the absence of the forced march of memorization, which makes Latin, with its
amo-amas-amat
and the like, notorious—and which makes English, with its irregular and random-seeming verb variations, so hard for foreigners to master. But I also found it disorienting. Verb tense is so second-nature for speakers of most Western languages that we hardly notice it; yet we feel unfinished without it. We English speakers use tense to build information about time right into the verb itself. If I say “I sang a song,” using the past-tense form of the verb “sing,” I mean that this action happened at an earlier point in time. In Chinese, since there is no tense, you instead have to throw in some words of context to indicate time, like yesterday or today or tomorrow. For example,
Zuótiān wǒ chànggē
is literally “Yesterday I sing song.”

Chinese can also add a few shades of meaning to a verb with something called aspect. You might use aspect, for example, when you want to stress that the action you’re talking about is continuing or ongoing, as opposed to saying something more general.

Here is how it works: say I ask Julia how she helps her child fall asleep at night, she might say that every night she sings a song to her: “
Wǒ chànggē
” or “I sing a song.” Very straightforward, nothing going on with aspect. But now imagine the scene where Julia is singing a song to her daughter, the phone rings, it is for her, and she is summoned to talk. She might want to say that she’ll call back because she is busy singing a song to her daughter: “
Wǒ zài chànggē
” or “I am singing a song.” In this case, she wants to stress that the action is ongoing, and she is engaged in doing it right now. She does that by using the aspect word
zài
. You can think of it as “-ing” in English. Some languages, like Russian and Greek, have very elaborate sets of aspect expressions that add different nuances of meaning. Other languages, like Chinese, have just a few.

Maybe, I thought, these entanglements of tense and aspect and how to use them in a foreign language explained the trouble I was having understanding Julia. Maybe she didn’t mean she loved her husband “for now” in a temporary way, but rather she was being more existential, or even more romantic, like “I am in love with my husband.” I hoped that was so. But I also know that problems with love go beyond problems of grammar.

Certainly, China’s changing concepts of love and marriage have not segued gracefully through the twentieth century. Rather they have lurched along, matching in turbulence the country’s changing identities: Confucianism; an East-West Confucian-Christian mélange during the brief Nationalist period; the revolutionary and doctrinaire Communist era; the new “Socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which the rest of the world thinks of as capitalism with an authoritarian state. The Confucian tradition of harmonious but strictly regulated love and marriage gave way to Mao’s more egalitarian, yet politically correct, marriage, followed by a cracking apart of the old rules, and now circling back to a Confucian revival alongside youthful love-by-choice in the newly affluent era.

When I was out on the streets, looking at the faces of the people I passed, I sometimes tried to guess where they had been as China was cycling through the chaos of the decades of their lives. Had their education halted just as they were entering high school? Had they been sent to the countryside, and how did they return? Were they married for politics, or love, or by arrangement? What did they believe about love and relationships in their day, and do they still believe it now? Different ideas of love and marriage coexist in China today, albeit not always seamlessly, as I have seen played out in small public dramas.

The cherry blossom spring flower festival this year happened to coincide with the first gloriously warm and clear weekend days of the season. All of Beijing was out of doors after the dank and dreary winter. On Sunday, at Yuyuantan Park on the west side of the city, boys bought their girls sprigs of bright pink and white plastic cherry blossoms, which the girls wound into wreaths and wore in their hair. The lake was crowded with pedal boats, and farmers sold baby chicks and bunnies from cardboard boxes. Everyone was paired off, or so it seemed. Young couples filled the subways and the parks that day, all locked in embrace. They held hands, they hugged, they kissed, they spooned, all mindless or careless of their public display. I would say these are the youth of the marry-for-love generation.

On that same day, had we been in Shanghai’s People’s Park instead, we would no doubt have again seen the serious matchmaking meetings that we observed there every weekend while we lived in Shanghai. Parents in their fifties, worried about their unmarried offspring in their late twenties, would gather in the northwest corner of the park with their homemade signs describing their children. This son was born in the year of the monkey, was 1.8 meters tall (5' 11"), had a job in a small private company, and had Type A blood. That daughter was a graduate of East China Normal University, was 1.6 meters tall (5' 3"), Type A blood, of Han ethnic group, and her picture was cute.

The parents would circle around tentatively, reading others’ posters, huddling with their spouses, and perhaps sidling toward another couple to strike up a conversation and see where things might go from there. The grown children were never in evidence. (Who knows? They may have been locked in embrace on the Number 2 subway line at that very moment!) These were adults of another era, and were still trying to arrange marriages for their very modern youth.