Dreaming in Chinese (21 page)

That is half the battle. The second syllable of the word
ànmó
, massage, is
. The radical in this character is at the bottom
, and it also has the meaning of “hand.” The top part provides the sound
“
má
” (not exact, but close). It happens to mean “hemp” or “jute,” but for this character, we’re only interested in how it sounds.
²³

The entire second character with both its parts together is
mó
, pronounced as “muo” and has the meaning “to rub or touch.” Again, the analysis isn’t precise, but it at least has a vague connection to using your hand to rub or touch something. So finally, the new two-syllable, two-character word that means massage is
ànmó
,
. Phew! And that is one word, for one emotionally important but limited part of the day’s rounds. When all is said and done, a lot of work goes into building characters. The explanations are often vague, but not entirely arbitrary.

Why do the Chinese hang on to this difficult character-based writing system? Characters are cumbersome; some have as many as twenty strokes. They are hard to learn, and even Chinese adults will say they have to keep in practice to prevent getting rusty. They are awkward to look up in dictionaries; words are ordered first according to their radicals, and then by the total number of strokes it takes to draw the character.

Defenders of characters point out their merits. Many Chinese people respect characters for their ancient history and all the mysteries they embody. Today, the writing system works amazingly well to unite everyone in modern polyglot China. No matter what dialect they speak or how heavy their accent, all people can look at the same characters and derive the same meaning—even though they might pronounce the characters and words very differently. Chinese TV makes good use of this; nearly everything spoken on TV carries written subtitles. So TV watchers can cut through the differences of mutually unintelligible Mandarin, Cantonese or Shanghainese dialect, or the heavy southern accents to read the same characters and “understand” what is being said. The Arabic numeral system works the same way. Anyone in the world can look at “3” and know what it means, even though they may pronounce the numeral as three,
trois
,
drei
,
san
, etc. For speakers of other Asian languages, notably Japanese, the characters are a big advantage. Even though the grammar and structure of Japanese and Chinese, for example, are very different, the characters have similar meanings, so the Japanese can get a pretty good idea what signs, or names, or other writing means in China, and vice versa.

For the Chinese people, characters can also be a means to cut through the ambiguities of the spoken language. Chinese has so many homonyms, but each sound-alike word is represented by its own character with its own particular meaning. When Chinese people get stalled in a conversation and need to clarify a homonym, you often see the speaker scribbling out the shape of a character, “writing” on the palm of his or her hand with a finger if there’s no pen or paper available, to illustrate its meaning to the listener.

As for the
ànmó
, the massages, I took advantage of every one that came my way. One stands out. My husband and I had just spent two long days with fresh-faced Chinese students at the Hunan Institute of Science and Technology in Yueyang. This is a tradition-bound place in central China, near the birthplace of Mao and still the heart of his most loyal following. The students were impressive in their English skills; English is one of the five compulsory topics on the viciously competitive nationwide university entrance exams, the
gāokǎo
, so all these kids, like those at other selective universities, had made the cut. During the first hour with the students, an interpreter translated our talks into Chinese. But he quickly retired, as it became clear that they were following everything we said.

After all the talking, all the picture taking, all the dining and toasting, all the campus touring, our hosts presented us with university pins and red-bound diplomas inscribed with honorary university degrees. They also invited us out into the cold rainy night for a communal foot massage.

So off we trooped with four or five distinguished university professors. Our destination, a glitzy glass and granite massage parlor that would have been at home in Las Vegas, belonged to a well-known chain. The giant building was ablaze against the dreary night, festooned with bright neon lights, an indoor palm tree theme, and an amusement park atmosphere. We climbed the wide staircase, past the tropical ferns and across watery lagoons, and entered a long, narrow room, where we flopped down side by side on massage beds in front of a blaring television.

The therapists arrived with buckets of scalding water for the rituals of foot washing. They parboiled our feet, swaddled them in hot towels, and prodded, pummeled, and pinched. My feet looked normal, but my husband’s feet looked like bright-red lobsters. A pedicurist arrived to address the toenails of the one woman professor, and another distinguished professor had his ears “candled,” a (much-disputed) practice that is claimed to suction wax and debris from the ear canal by means of a hollow, burning candle inserted into the ear. It became midnight and beyond. My eyes were weeping from fatigue and the onset of a bad cold,
gǎnmào
. I wanted nothing more than to flee back to the (austere, frigid Mao-era) guest-house room and wrap myself in as many blankets as I could find. Our host insisted I felt bad only because my yin and yang were out of kilter, and that it was nothing a good session of cupping couldn’t fix. Cupping is the millennia-old Taoist medical practice that aims to suck bad toxins out of the body. In a fog of fatigue and with a leap of faith, I agreed to try it.

I lay on my stomach as the therapist approached. He placed six small glass cups in two neat rows along my back. With a cigarette lighter, he created a fiery-icy vacuum, sealing the glass cups to my back. He didn’t actually burn my skin; he lit a fire inside each of the cups, inverted as if they were light bulbs. Then as soon as the fire had used up the oxygen within the cup, he placed it down on my bare back, where the instantaneous vacuum sucked my skin about an inch deep into each cup. I saw a terrible shadow of apprehension cross my husband’s face as he watched the skin from my back get pulled up into the glass cups.

The sensation was not unpleasant, and it did not rival the shock back in the government rest house at 2
A.M.
, when I peered over my shoulder into the mirror and saw six perfectly round, angry red welts, the size of small tangerines, across my back. After a numbing ten hours’ sleep, I awoke with a start. Every trace of my cold was gone, and furthermore, although the welts have long since faded, I haven’t caught a cold since. Once back in Shanghai, I began to notice all the young buff Chinese guys, and sometimes girls, at the gym, who were sporting tank tops designed to show off their cupping welts, clearly marks of some kind of pride.

I never gave much thought to massages before we went to China. But
ànmó
took me by surprise. Both the written characters and the real-life event became symbolic to me, in a funny kind of way, of my China experience. The characters were difficult and complicated and I never could master them—just like everyday life in China. The massages themselves were curiously energizing and humanly close to the
lǎobǎixìng
, the people—also like every day in China. Every time I go back to China, I will fondly return to the blind men to appreciate the modernizing country’s consideration for one of its most respected customs.

21
This radical form,
shuǐ
, water, never stands alone as a character, but always appears in combination with another piece to form a whole new character. The full form of the character
shuǐ
also means water, and it can stand alone as a word.