Mantis Versus

"You can observe a lot by watching." -Yogi Berra

Page 2 of 6

More of the Most -est in the World*

*i.e. places I’ve been to, according to me.

SAM_0618

Vainest: South Korea
Runner-up: Everyone else

If I had to sum up the Korean character in one word, it would be vain. They’re so vain, they probably think that “song” is about them- “Song? Hey! That’s my name, too! Whenever I got out, the people always shout…” The ubiquitous Korean smart phone was used about a third of the time for social media, a third of the time for playing games, and the rest of the time as a pocket mirror for fixing hair and make-up. This was done in subways and restaurants and cafes and pretty much every other public place you could think of. Occasionally, the phones were used for talking in loud, exaggerated, whiny voices. South Korea is also the only place I’ve seen mirrors posted in a public place (a subway corridor, for example) and seen people regularly stop in front of it and check their hair as onlookers walked past. Whatever the activity, the hair and outfit had to be just right. Even in freezing weather, people would not wear hats because that would ruin their hairdo, and I only noticed a few people who would wear gloves. Even then, the gloves had to be thin and fashionable. When hiking, a popular weekend pastime, the hikers had to have matching brand name clothes in bright colors of orange and purple over black. Make-up and hairspray were still expected. This coordinated outfit policy applied to every activity and every outing. I could go on, but a picture of vanity is worth a thousand words.

A holiday in Korea is a time to stand in front of scenery with a selfie stick. These people are lined up to take their photo in front of the angel wings mural. I think I saw more angel wings profile pictures in Korea than I saw people named Kim.

A holiday in Korea is a time to stand in front of scenery with a selfie stick. These people are lined up to take their photo in front of the angel wings mural. I think I saw more angel wings profile pictures in Korea than I saw people named Kim.

These compulsory hiking outfits are actually on the tame side. They could be spotted everywhere throughout the city, usually on the subway, not just on the mountain trails.

These compulsory hiking outfits are actually on the tame side. They could be spotted everywhere throughout the city, usually on the subway, not just on the mountain trails.

The Korean need to be seen has its charms, too. Where else could I meet a man with such a flashy blue suit?

The Korean need to be seen has its charms. Where else could I meet a man with such a flashy blue suit?

A "Where's Waldo?" of people taking pictures, cameras, and matching couples' outfits.

A “Where’s Waldo?” scene of people taking pictures, cameras, and matching couples’ outfits.

Everyone and everywhere else is vain, too (“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” says the preacher), but South Korea has made vanity a conspicuous, obvious obsession.

Prettiest Women: ?

Men love to discuss this question, and when I discussed it with my friend, James, we settled on the 2015 Miss Universe champion and runner-up, or vice versa, he saying Colombia and I saying the Philippines. I knew it was an uneasy guess when I made it, having based it on exposure to only a few Filipino beauties in person and on TV, and the consensus opinion of some fellow travelers on the best-looking women in Asia. I suppose I tested out my theory through living in China and South Korea and traveling through Japan, the Philippines, and throughout the US, but it seems like I’ve never been able to pin down a satisfying, conclusive answer to this question. In the Philippines, it seemed like most women were the size of middle school students, and their anthem was Confederate Railroad’s “Trashy Women.” Yeah, an’ I like my women just a little on the trashy side/ When they wear their clothes too tight and their hair is dyed. No, they weren’t wearing Dolly Parton wigs (those belong to the Philippine drag queens), but neither were they near as gorgeous as the fabled women from TV.

In Korea, the women were circumspect about looking fashionable, as mentioned above, and they had shapely, healthy physiques, yet it seemed that their general good looks were shared by all and few stood out from the pack. This is not at all a bad handicap, but the rub is that there are few stunning stand-outs, and the exemplars look less exemplary in comparison.

In China, the women also looked alarmingly undernourished to me, and they mostly dressed in a simple, childish way, and while China no doubt has some stunning beauties and a high standard for the average woman, I still just could not say definitively that Chinese women, or any group of women, were THE best looking. I think it’s an insoluble question that will constantly tempt and try men’s minds if they’re not careful.

Homeliest Women: USA

I’m sorry, I know that the US has all kinds of women from all over the world, and it attracts the best and brightest and most beautiful, but of all the people I’ve been exposed to, America has shown me the most out-of-control obese and slovenly women, and the women with the laziest, most careless clothing choices, and the women with the loudest mouths and ugliest attitudes. In the other countries I’ve been to, my beauty advice would be to drop the beauty products and pick up some beef and barbells; in my home country I’d say to drop the beer and beef patties and take up yoga.

From peopleofwalmart.com. Made in the USA.

From peopleofwalmart.com. Made in the USA.

Ugliest Cities: South Korea
Runner-up: China

Modern Korean architecture is the ugliest I’ve seen, which is quite a mark considering how much I hate the indistinguishable assembly line architecture of all the shoe-box lookalike, atrociously angled modern buildings in my own country. Korean infrastructure, from streets to skyscrapers, has been put up slapdash wherever it will fit in between the mountains and the existing city sprawl. The multi-story buildings are mostly of one template, with aggressive neon signage scrawled across every exterior, with each floor of a building advertising itself in a stack of monotonous eyesores. Where the buildings are meant to be on display, like a church building, the sight is offensively ugly, a cheap imitation of a style copied from overseas. I’m not the only person to have noticed the garish, shantytown structures.

The church building I frequented most often was supposed to be inspired by Noah's ark, but just looking at this "ship" I could tell it wouldn't float.

The church building I frequented most often was supposed to be inspired by Noah’s ark, but just looking at this “ship” I could tell it wouldn’t float.

"Just put that next house anywhere." Re Korean vanity, they nicknamed this area Korea's Santorini.  My thought was that it twinned Rio de Janeiro's favelas.

“Just put that next house anywhere.” Re Korean vanity, they nicknamed this area Korea’s Santorini. My thought was that it twinned Rio de Janeiro’s favelas.

Good luck ever finding the place you're looking for in Korea's urban jungle.

Good luck ever finding the place you’re looking for in Korea’s urban jungle.

China comes in at second place for building cityscapes only a communist could love. Absurdly large avenues and towers in abandoned planned cities, government buildings of hasty construction and childish sophistication, garish street lamps and accents, and obtusely abstract, gray, decaying modern compositions all around. Plus, China’s vaunted antiquities were very dingy and dusty looking, in my observation. There are way too many ancient buildings for China to restore and keep up them all, but I suppose they could attempt it as a jobs-creation program for their billion-plus population.

Shanghai's Oriental Pearl tower, which is about to the Chinese as the Eiffel Tower is to the French. This might be the ugliest landmark I've ever seen in person.

Shanghai’s Oriental Pearl tower, which is about to the Chinese as the Eiffel Tower is to the French. This might be the ugliest landmark I’ve ever seen in person.

A clothing market next to a bus station in Beijing. Who thought this looked good enough to build?

A clothing market next to a bus station in Beijing. Who thought this looked good enough to build?

Most every panorama in China is seen through a veil of pollution.

Most every panorama in China is seen through a veil of pollution.

Prettiest Cities: Japan
Runner-up: USA

This one’s a close contest, but I’ll give Japan the edge because of how uniformly clean and neat in appearance all the cities and towns were. They’re maintained to picture-perfect precision, like the backdrop of a movie shoot.

Old district in Kyoto. It's hard to even find chewing gum stains on the pavement.

Old district in Kyoto. It’s hard to even find chewing gum stains on the pavement.

I love the stately styles of American homes from centuries past. Walking through a traditional American downtown, surrounded by a neighborhood of ornately styled homes and mansions, is a refreshing dose of beauty.

From scenic Galena, Illinois. Too bad all the cars are obstructing the view.

From scenic Galena, Illinois. Too bad all the cars are obstructing the view.

A mansion in Galena.

A mansion in Galena.

An elegant old house in my neighborhood.

An elegant old house in my neighborhood.

More categories to come.

The World’s Best, Worst, Most, Least, -est, -iest, and -un’s*

This is a popular time of year for lists of all kinds, and while mine isn’t confined to the year 2015 alone, I thought it might be a fitting time to share. It’s a survey of the superlative places, or better put, the places most notable for each superlative category in the whole world*. (*that I’ve been to**.) (**not just in 2015, but in my lifetime.) While my list isn’t as timely as other common year-end lists, it more than compensates for this in originality of categories. Let’s begin with something fairly typical and move on from there. The…

Best Food: Japan
Runner-up: Thailand
Honorable Mention: New York City

Japan’s famous dishes: sushi, noodles, yakitori (barbecue), teppanyaki (the showy iron hibachi grill food) is all great, but in all my time in Japan, every single thing I tried except for the donuts and desserts was excellent. Japanese tastes are usually right on, in my book, except when it comes to sweet foods. They’d probably find a saltine cracker “too sweet. Oh, no, too sweet.” I have no idea how those seaweed-eaters stay so skinny with all that good food around. Maybe because it’s all incredibly expensive?

Thailand is the country with my second-favorite food. Its people and restaurants are close to my heart. Unlike Japan, almost every place you eat at in Thailand is inexpensive and unpretentious. And there are street food vendors galore, so you never run out of new things to try.

New York is probably the place with the best food I’ve tried in my own country, with the very large caveat that it’s all way overpriced, as if the whole city were inside an airport terminal, and way too classy for a simple Iowan like me to navigate and feel welcome in. A longtime resident there asked me my favorite food in the city, and to get out of her glaring spotlight, I replied generically, “Uh, I like the pizza.” But that wasn’t enough to get me off the hook. “Like what, you mean a pie? Or by the slice? What kind of pizza?” She grilled me so bad I wished I had told her I only ate peanut butter sandwiches, but then she probably would have interrogated me on what kind of peanut butter and bread I used and then humiliated me for using mass market name brands.

Best Meal Experience: China
Runner-up: Korea

I’ve written about how fun (and wild) Chinese dinners could be here and here. In short, Chinese dinners, in celebration with family and friends, are hours-long events with many rounds of food, drinking, toasts, and merrymaking. While the average meal was pretty dismal in China, a big dinner was filled with dozens and dozens of different dishes to choose from, and the fun atmosphere of the event filled a whole evening. The dinners really were the highlight of my time in China.

I’m not crazy about Korean food, (unlike Koreans, whom I believe are in a sense really deranged about their own food, with anecdotes of Korean airline travelers telling security guards that they need to bring their kimchi on board because Koreans can’t eat the food in other countries- look it up), but Korea is a great place to eat out with friends. For one, Korea is jam-packed with independently-owned restaurants, most of which are furnished with long tables meant for very large groups. And the up-all-night culture means there is always a place you can find to take a group of one or two dozen people at any time for barbecue or a crowd-pleaser like chicken and beer or spicy chicken stew (jjimdak). While I disagreed with all the sour pickles being served at every Korean meal, I could never turn down barbecue, a fool-proof and plentiful option in the busy streets of Korea.

Jjimdak, from http://english.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/FOD/FO_EN_6_4_4.jsp?cid=586927

Jjimdak, from http://english.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/FOD/FO_EN_6_4_4.jsp?cid=586927

Worst Meal Experience: USA
Runner-up: China

In America, the places available to eat at where I live mostly expect you to sit down, order, eat, pay, and go quickly, with a waitress (cue the authoritarian Millennial: “That’s SERVER.”) constantly coming up and asking you, “How’s everything for ya?” or “How’s that tastin’ for ya?” or anything else “for ya?” Then, after turning down dessert “for ya” by asking for “just the check,” you chat a little, then leave and go home and scroll through your phone. Boring. Any place in America that doesn’t follow this model, in my experience, has been a neat independent place, or more likely, an elite dining experience far out of my price range and cultural comfort zone.

Runner-up is China, because although the special dinners there were great fun, they always brought stomach pain in their wake, and the average meal there was something lousy that you would expect to find as a sight gag in a dreary scene of a movie. Limp, oil-soaked vegetables, hardly any protein, unrecognizable bland, soft-textured, gelatinous foods, stinky foods like smelly tofu, and all of it prepared below acceptable hygienic standards. Okay, maybe not ALL of it, all of it, was prepared with poor hygiene, but enough must have been that I had stomach pain on a weekly basis and spent three days in the hospital at the end of my year-long stay.

Worst Food Instincts: Korea
Runner-up: USA

I think, long ago in the time dominated by robed, funny hat-wearing Confucian scholars, the isolated peninsula of Korea considered its mountainous terrain, cold winters, and limited fruit and vegetable production potential, and began philosophically analyzing everything edible with the question, “But what if we pickle it?” As in, “These green beans would taste great if freshly picked and then boiled or grilled, but what if we pickle them?” Americans think they have a taste for the exotic when they express a fondness for kimchi, but little do they realize that Koreans eat kimchi at literally every meal. Kimchi is not just the cabbage stuff either, there are several kinds of kimchi, with the most common being the cabbage and radish kinds, and there are all kinds of pickled foods eaten for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Being helpless to find a healthy meal anywhere in Korea of lean meats and fresh vegetables, or fresh fruits, without breaking the bank, was an aggravating experience that made me want to toss my sanity to the wind and lash out to a Korean audience, “I DON’T KNOW HOW YOU PEOPLE GOT SO BIG! ALL YOU EAT IS CARBS AND PICKLES! AND YOU TAKE THE ELEVATOR AND ESCALATOR EVERYWHERE INSTEAD OF WALKING. BUT YOU’RE THE THICKEST, HEALTHIEST-LOOKING PEOPLE IN THE ORIENT! WHAT GIVES?!” (Cue the authoritarian Millennial again: “It’s called EAST ASIA. Oriental is a rug.” Cue everyone born in East Asia who has learned English and wasn’t educated overseas: “But we say Orient.”)

America gets the shame of being runner-up in this category because of our obvious, out-of-control instincts to manufacture food with high sugar content, and to load comfort foods with craving-inducing things like bacon and melted cheese and so on. Absurd Frankenstein sandwiches like KFC’s Double Down, made out of two “buns” of fried chicken with cheese and bacon in between are a successful parody of America’s eat-whatever-looks-tasty mentality, and could possibly be a surprisingly healthy alternative, like the Double Down is, to even fattier sugar and carb-loaded cousins. (Compare the classic Burger King Whopper and the Double and Triple Whopper.) It’s a shame to have to talk about and try to explain the American diet to acquaintances overseas, and I think a very sad and shameful reality for us Americans to live with. Why do we continue to eat this way?

The Double Down sandwich, from http://www.cbsnews.com/news/kfcs-double-down-sandwich-smart-marketing-and-not-as-gross-as-youd-think/

The Double Down sandwich, from http://www.cbsnews.com/news/kfcs-double-down-sandwich-smart-marketing-and-not-as-gross-as-youd-think/

Smelliest Place: Busan, Korea
Runner-up: China
Dishonorable Mentions: Key West, Florida and New York City

When I first came to Busan, an exceptionally glib Korean man introduced himself to me and asked where I was from. When I said Iowa, he responded by telling me, garnished with an unctuous ear-to-ear grin, how he had driven through Iowa once and been bombarded by the wafting stench of manure. Yes, I replied through politely gritted teeth, there are quite a lot of farms in Iowa. I knew it was undignified at the time, but I only had a faint idea how outrageous it was for a Busan resident to be having a laugh at the unpleasant smells of any other place.

Iowa is the US’s leading producer of corn and pork, and there are many other farms producing other crops and livestock, so the farm stink settling over its lonesome highways is an unfortunate byproduct of agricultural necessity. Iowans prefer to endure it with a good-humored perspective by repeating the tongue-in-cheek line “That’s the smell of money.” But Busan’s smell? It’s not a necessary byproduct of anything. It is, as far as I could tell, the smell of incompetent plumbing and infrastructure. Every open creek winding through this otherwise picturesque city reeks like an open sewer, as do most of its busy shopping centers if the competing smells of frying oil and grilling meat aren’t enough to mask it. I’ve lived in Iowa most of my life, yet I only smell bad smells on those occasional trips through the country, and even then it’s not a guaranteed fact of every long drive. In Busan, I smelled the sewer every day. It didn’t matter how I tried to mind my own business, that sewer stink found me. No matter how posh-looking or exciting the lights, sounds, and crowds are in any district in Busan, the fumes of human waste will sneak their way in and bring everyone’s haughty upturned nose back down to ugly reality. When I took walks or runs along Busan’s riverside recreational paths, which was quite a lot since the only other place to take a long walk was up a mountain, I sometimes tried holding my breath or masking my face around open drains. The intense, vomit-inducing odor was the most powerful urban stink I had been overcome with outside of China.

China, in my nickname borrowed after Thailand’s “Land of Smiles,” was the Land of Smells. It could have been shoddy plumbing like Korea, which it partially was, but it was also plant and animal waste left after street markets, restaurant refuse rotting outside, human and animal droppings on the sidewalks and streets, and the world’s worst air pollution. I went on an unwisely long run once on a blazing hot summer day in China, traversing along a riverside road from one city to another, and on my way back, passing alongside a farmer with his small herd of cows, I doubled over from the heat, dehydration, and the burning, sulfurous smell of an adjacent glass factory. I thought I would either retch or faint, and if I fainted, I figured my unconscious body would lie baking in the blazing sun until some concerned passerby called for help. Which could have been a long time, since passersby in China aren’t often concerned (see “the Little Yue Yue event”). I soldiered on, but the rest of my stay in China was never sweet-smelling. Pretty much all of China stinks, or if not, it probably means that you’ve been there long enough to have gotten used to the smell.

Dishonorable mentions of Key West, Florida, for the smell of decomposing seaweed and sargassum around its many island beaches which smells nearly like diarrhea and can be smelled for miles around, and New York City, for the smell of ammonia in every dank corner that I assume comes from human urine.

Safest Place: South Korea
Runner-up: Iowa and Middle America

I begrudgingly award this honor to South Korea because they love bragging about themselves, and Korea’s public safety is one of their most vaunted features. Yes, to answer the question asked of every foreign guest in South Korea, I did feel safe there. I much appreciated the public trust there that made it a casual, thoughtless thing to leave one’s bag and phone unattended at a coffee shop while going to the restroom. I was at times shocked when I saw school-aged girls walking alone through unlit parks and back roads to go home after their late night tutoring and study sessions. In big city America, that would be known as “looking for trouble.” But as far as I know, these girls were rarely if ever harassed. Also, the young men in Korea seldom adopt a tough, confrontational attitude as far as I saw, and I never felt the animosity of aggressive men jockeying for social rank and strong appearance like I have in America. Mostly, people minded their own business, and accidents and slip-ups could usually be smoothed over with a meek apology. There is one glaring inconsistency in Korea’s public safety record: drivers, especially scooter and motorcycle drivers, are reckless and boorish, driving over sidewalks or driving through red lights as they please, racking up an alarming number of pedestrian injuries and deaths every year. So, to rain on Koreans’ pride parade, I would point out that I never feared for my life so much as a pedestrian or car passenger in my hometown.

Speaking of, public safety often never crosses my mind where I live. To avoid the element of danger, I just stay away from bars and crowded nightlife areas. Contrary to the world’s fears about Americans’ private gun ownership, the real danger from guns is from inner-city gangs, drug and alcohol-related crime, robberies, and suicides. If you live in Middle America, like I do, these terrible facts of life can mostly be avoided. I’ve never bought into the hysteria that the average American gun owner has a loose hand cannon just waiting to go off. I should mention though, that like Korea, I worry about traffic accidents and injuries. I’ve thought to myself many times that if I died violently, it would probably be from being crashed into by a teenager texting while driving. Big roads and cars dominate American life, and there’s no way to avoid them.

Most Dangerous: China
Runner-up: Manila, Philippines

If I had to pick a “Most Dangerous” place, I would say China because I almost died there and because many times I thought a wild taxi driver or purposeful truck driver callous to the human life of pedestrians would plow into me without a care. I thought I could have been crushed by panic spreading through one of the many crowds I was inevitably caught in, or from getting sick through poor hygienic conditions, pollution, and exposure to the cold (Chinese buildings aren’t allowed to have central heating unless they’re above the geographical mid-line set by the government, or unless they’re a big public or commercial space like a train station or mall).

I also feared for my life in the mean streets of Manila, where I was eyed as prey by nearly every onlooker, and where relatively safe transportation is hard to procure unless you tip a police officer to flag down a taxi whose driver is likewise eager to extort extra money out of you. Plus, every shopping center and public transportation hub has armed police and metal detectors, and pistol and shotgun-wielding police were a common sight outside of shops and banks. There was a worry of attacks by political groups, but even more so I was afraid that a lax officer’s casual grip on his shotgun handle would send an accidental spray into the street. Manila is also the only place I’ve been pick-pocketed, so that infamy earns it high marks of distinction on the dangerous list.

More ranks of honor and dishonor to come.

Christmas in China

December isn’t the Christmas Season in China. Well, it is in some ways, surprisingly, but the people aren’t taken with the Christmas Spirit as Americans were once upon a time.

Walking through the shopping streets in the early dark of winter, I began to notice more and more window decoupage displays of white paper snowflakes over red and green backgrounds. Next to the fashion mannequins, there might have been stacks of presents wrapped in shiny paper, and the whole scene would be advertised with text that read “Ho! Ho! Ho!” or misspelled, gibberish renderings of “Merry Christmas” and other holiday greetings. If a store had a Santa dummy (the Chinese called him Christmas Man), he would usually be dressed in gold or red, maybe silver, and he was always playing the saxophone. I asked one of my students why Santa was always playing the sax, and I received the only answer one can give to such a question: “I don’t know.”

CUH-RIS-A-MERS MAN!

CUH-RIS-A-MERS MAN!

"M-R-R-E everyone!"

“M-R-R-E everyone!”

The surprising part of Christmas in China, to me, came when I devoted lessons to Christmas, asking students what they knew about it and how people celebrated. My classes knew the melody of “Jingle Bells” and a few other classics, which seemed natural enough, and they also shared the new Chinese tradition of giving apples stamped with a Christmas pattern to their friends- stencils of a reindeer or “Christmas Man” surrounded by the Chinese characters for “Merry Christmas.” I found one of these apples in the spring, after losing it in between my refrigerator and kitchen cupboards, and it still had the same color and firmness as the day I received it. I shudder to think what they sprayed or injected their produce with; the bananas were also uniformly yellow.

All the chemicals in Chinese food made my stomach shake like a bowl full of jelly.

All the chemicals in Chinese food made my stomach shake like a bowl full of jelly.

What truly surprised me was when I asked my students as a class, “What do you do for Christmas?” and several of them replied without shyness, “Go to church.” China was still convalescing from Mao and his brand of communism, I thought, and I assumed that like the university professors and public officials who professed the faith, students in school would be hush-hush about church.

Assembling for worship in China, of course, isn’t taken for granted as it is in America, where buildings for every Christian denomination- and then some- can be found within walking distance of every residential area. The public church buildings in China (Three Self Patriotic Movement churches) were registered with the state, and people could openly attend, but state controls hamstrung evangelical efforts and what ministers could preach and teach. It is “the church” with bureaucrats of the Communist Party as head.

Those birds un-caged by state controls, the house churches, were many and various in China, and these were all treated with secrecy for fear of government action (i.e. arrest and imprisonment). So, when I had students freely tell me they were going to attend church with their grandmothers on Christmas, I was taken aback. I was stunned for a moment, and I knew to not ask them what type of church they attended in front of their classmates. Perhaps they went to one of the public churches, and they could share so without reprisal, or maybe it was that they were part of a house church, and attitudes had relaxed to the point that young students thought nothing of discussing it openly. I was left to assume the former, not able to dig into the issue in front of a class of peers, only slowly having my questions about the church in China answered in small increments as time went by. Those small peaks I did get inside church life in China were densely filtered by screens of language and culture.

When I asked my two classes of university students what they were doing on Sunday, the 25th, I heard a groan in reply: “Tests.”

“Tests on Christmas!” I exclaimed, like a claymation character from a Rankin/Bass movie, “That’s terrible.” They concurred.

Earlier that week, I spoke to a Chinese English teacher who told me that one of her fondest school memories was when her foreign English teacher threw a Christmas Party for his students. So, I decided to brighten my students’ day. After they finished their tests, they could come over to my apartment that Sunday for a Christmas Party.

Now, between my two college classes (I had 18 other classes of middle school students), I probably had 45 students, but I did the invitation math I had learned in America and expected 15 people to come, 20 tops, and then only an hour after the official start time. I figured that it would be safe to host the event in my apartment with such a modest crowd, and besides, I had no idea how to reserve a room on campus.

Six o’clock sharp came, official party time, and I had candy and a Christmas cake on the table (cake in China is just like cake in America, only it tastes bad. Imagine the quality of cake you might find in a tawdry convenience store, and that is what cake in China tastes like). I had yet to button up my shirt, but I heard a knock at my door and my phone was beeping with text messages asking me to clarify directions to my apartment. I let the first batch of students in, and from that point on there was a continual stream of new guests. I learned a valuable lesson about Chinese culture that night: if you invite people to a party, they will show up.

Maybe five to seven of my especially anti-social university students didn’t come that night, but the rest of the 45 did come, and some even brought friends. A student who never came to my class (because 10 o’clock was too early in the morning for him) even showed up. At one point, I had over thirty people in my living room. I opened every window to let in the winter wind and try and alleviate the collection of body heat. We could hardly move or hear each other speak, but everyone was in high spirits, with students taking turns to sing solos, and candy and cake being obliterated on and around the table.

A ring of people lined my living room and poured into the kitchen and study.

A ring of people lined my living room and poured into the kitchen and study.

Another thing about cake in China- it’s often double-layered with a thin spread of cream or jelly filling in between, and there is a light, fluffy frosting on the outside. Not unusual for a cake, but the tall and triangular slices, I want to note, carried messy potential inside and out. It would be tricky to eat such a big, sloppy slice as it was, but in China, people do not keep forks or dinner plates in their kitchen. And cake is one food that will cause the Chinese to relent and admit it cannot be eaten sensibly in a bowl with chopsticks, so Chinese bakeries supply cake buyers with a stack of thin, four-inch paper plates and tiny plastic forks that would be better used to spear cheese cubes.

Also, in China, people devour all of your treats. They don't pretend they're uninterested and walk away from leftovers as in American culture.

Also, in China, people devour all of your treats. They don’t pretend they’re uninterested and walk away from leftovers as in American culture.

Big, sloppy cake did not combine neatly with tiny plates and forks. Twenty different mouths slicing cake on my coffee table and struggling to cut it into bites with underpowered forks against handheld, flimsy plates turned my living room into a mess quicker than Old St. Nick could ascend a chimney. I didn’t mind so much, I was too busy trying to accept gifts and play the host by saying hello to the unmanageable mob of people. It was a fantastically big end to the holiday weekend.

The night before, Christmas Eve, I was with Aunt Fong in her hometown, a much larger city than my university town. She took me to a hotel, where a church group had rented a ballroom to put on a Christmas program. People lined the long rows of folding tables, watching the front as new groups came out to sing or speakers shared a teaching or narration. Of course, Aunt Fong had to show me off, so she brought me up front, stuck a microphone in my hand, and had me sing a Christmas song for everyone. Speaking as a man who hates approaching people and feels uncomfortable talking to cashiers at the store, I can say honestly that I was an exceptionally good sport about singing for a ballroom-full of Chinese strangers.

Aunt Fong showing me off. The hat was not my choice.

Aunt Fong showing me off. The hat was not my choice.

I'm the tall blurry one in the back. Aunt Fong is on my right.

I’m the tall blurry one in the back. Aunt Fong is on my right.

After the Christmas program ended, Aunt Fong and I headed toward the shopping district. Meanwhile, my phone received “Merry Christmas!” text messages without ceasing. We were out after ten o’clock at night, but the streets and stores were filled with people, probably more crowded than I had ever seen them in that city. That is a noteworthy event. But no one was caroling or wishing passersby “Merry Christmas!” Instead, it seemed like a tame version of a Mardi Gras festival. Children were buying balloons shaped into spirals and other creative shapes, people were wearing carnival masks, and food vendors were on every street corner. I had a hard time getting my bearings in the midst of the colors, crowd, and confusion, and it felt dreamlike as Aunt Fong pulled me through the streets and shopping malls.

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The next morning, I returned to my university apartment. Grant and Sue, my Australian neighbors on the fourth floor, had invited me over for Christmas dinner. Also, there was Lee Ahram, the Korean teacher, and Theresa, a Chinese student who had studied in Brisbane- Grant and Sue’s hometown. Sue, savvy shopper that she was, had managed to find a countertop toaster oven, probably the only one in the whole city, so she was able to prepare roasted chicken and potatoes for our meal. China, like many countries in Asia, only has gas burners in its residential kitchens; because the only ways people prepare food at home are by boiling or stir-frying (less commonly, foods could also be steamed over a burner, or stewed or braised).

Grant, Theresa, Sue, and Ahram.

Grant, Theresa, Sue, and Ahram.

Western meals were difficult to prepare in China. Besides the difference in produce, it was hard to come by certain ingredients and spices, and there were no ovens to bake anything. People were stuck with bad store-bought cake.

So, Sue’s Christmas dinner was a special meal for a special time for our group of assorted foreigners. We were far from our families at home, which was a daily heartache around the holidays, but we had a bond as strangers in a strange land who pined for a Christmas celebration with some solemnity and familial warmth.

At the end of the meal, Sue brought out plates of Christmas pudding, which I was as eager to see as I was to taste. Being an American, the only pudding I had ever seen was Jell-O pudding, and on rare occasion, bread pudding. I had heard talk about pudding in British media, and I had always assumed it was some formless dessert that only the English could love, and that America should probably send a delegation to tell them to start building some structure into their dishes.

Well, the Christmas pudding was formless, but it was a custard not far off from American pudding. Sue had spooned it over a slice of, I think, fruit cake. I can say for sure it was custard and a slice of dense cake. I thought it was pretty good, but Sue lamented that it didn’t turn out quite right; she had to use a can of not very good custard mix, the only kind she could find.

It was all well and good by me. My time in China was often a lonely and isolated experience; having that mid-year holiday celebration was a reviving oasis.

One of my favorite and Aunt Fong's least favorite photos. The girl on the left was a student of mine named Tiffany.

One of my favorite and Aunt Fong’s least favorite photos. The girl on the left was a student of mine named Tiffany.

Normal in China: Dancing in the Park

Women in face masks, undaunted, dancing through the smog. (Image found at https://www.pinterest.com/pin/14636767510958867/)

Women in face masks, undaunted, dancing through the smog. (Image found at https://www.pinterest.com/pin/14636767510958867/)

While Korea may be the break dancing capital of Asia, if not the world, the people of China also have dancing fever.

I didn’t know a thing about dancing in China before I saw the country firsthand; I just happened to skip over “Chinese dance” in all my Wikipedia searches. While in China, it never would have occurred to me to look for it, but dancing was everywhere. Dancing ladies were everywhere. They could be found in every park- on my campus, throughout every city I visited- arranged in an informal rank and file grid. One woman would lead from the front, playing dance songs from a portable stereo and demonstrating the dance as the lines of older ladies behind her struggled a half-beat behind to match her moves. They listened to anything with an active beat, so there were bouncy techno songs as well as easy-listening pop songs, even songs that sounded like Chinese opera overlaid with a beat that could support choreography. The dances were all free-flowing line dances where the women would step back and forth, swing their arms, and twirl. Nothing too agile or challenging.

Like clockwork, the dancing ladies could be depended on to be at the park at the same time every morning or evening. In the evenings, the largest dancing groups would gather after sunset in the plazas near the largest parks and shopping districts. Upwards of a hundred women would form their lines and move to the beat (or lag slightly behind it) as a semi-disciplined square. It was clear that some of the women near the front of the group had put in their practice hours and could hit their marks. Most, though, were playing catch-up as they rehearsed, trying to commit the dance moves to memory as they stomped in a circle and craned their necks to watch the leader from over their shoulders. I didn’t fault them for it. I admired the group spirit and the regular, dutiful exercise habit.

The dancing groups had found a way to come together for daily activity and social interaction. They were diligent, yet informal groups. They didn’t require a gym membership and no one had to register for a class or sign a waiver, as they would be expected to do in America. And yet it was organized, it was not like a game of pick-up basketball or football which lacked cohesion and broke up over a rules dispute or because of flagging participation by the players. The dancing groups became a happy, everyday sight for me, and after a while I found the familiar dance songs repeating in my head. What a wonderful thing, I thought, if only Americans would refuse to commute home by car to sit alone in front of screens and instead join up to learn to dance or exercise together.

Here are some photos of people doing kung fu and exercising in the park. Their presence was an everyday sight.

Cross beams could be found in every park. Mostly older folks would come stretch their leg up on one and hold a ballet stretch for several minutes. I saw a couple small old ladies who could stretch their foot up on a beam higher than their head.

Cross beams could be found in every park. Mostly older folks would come stretch their leg up on one and hold a ballet stretch for several minutes. I saw a couple small old ladies who could stretch their foot up on a beam higher than their head.

Outdoor badminton and basketball courts were common, as were outdoor ping-pong tables.

Outdoor badminton and basketball courts were very common, as were outdoor ping-pong tables.

You could always find men performing impressive feats of strength or acrobatics. They don't walk around with bodybuilder muscles, but you never knew which old man in China had surprising strength.

You could always find men performing impressive feats of strength or acrobatics. They don’t walk around with bodybuilder muscles, but you never knew which old man in China had surprising strength.

This man is doing some kind of kung fu routine.

This man is doing some kind of kung fu routine.

Crowds like this were very common. The city had a few modern indoor gyms, but most people were used to neighborhood outdoor facilities.

Crowds like this were very common. The city had a few modern indoor gyms, but most people were used to neighborhood outdoor facilities.

Plenty of other activities happened at the parks, too. Old men would bike their birds out for some fresh air exhibition, kids and adults would fly kites year round, at night there was sometimes outdoor karaoke, and there might be weekly outdoor flea markets on the plaza spaces.

Plenty of other activities happened at the parks, too. Old men would bike their birds out for some fresh air exhibition, kids and adults would fly kites year round, at night there was sometimes outdoor karaoke, and there might be weekly outdoor flea markets on the plaza spaces.

Probably the roughest living I saw in China were these houseboats on the riverside park.

Probably the roughest living I saw in China were these houseboats on the riverside park. Good balance required to navigate those gangplanks.

I'm not sure, but the geese might have belonged to the house boat people. There were some shoddy old farm houses in the park itself, and the geese also could have belonged to those people.

I’m not sure, but the geese might have belonged to the house boat people. There were some shoddy old farm houses in the park itself, and the geese also could have belonged to those people.

The Real China: Hospitals

Patients in the front lobby waiting for their number their number to be called.

Patients in the front lobby waiting for their number their number to be called.

Imagine taking your children here or seeking urgent help for yourself in this chaos. This was in Shanghai, a first-tier city, so keep in mind that these are much better-than-average facilities. I visited hospitals in third-tier cities that looked like they had been abandoned until recently; hallways were dark, floors were dirty, beds were messes of blankets and floor mats, and in one instance, the urinal emptied onto the floor.

Here, I squeezed into a packed elevator and rode it up to the 15th floor, with people pushing out and shoving in, hearing the weight alarm beep, and shuffling out again, for several stops on the ride up. In another stuffed elevator, a woman at the control panel screamed violently at a passenger whose bag was blocking the door. In Chinese, there are no polite words and phrases like “Please move.” In the 15th floor lobby, people with tumors and other obvious maladies were waiting shoulder to shoulder, or making room so that a physician could take pictures of a screaming little girl’s deformed hand as her parents stretched her wrist out against the wall. There was no privacy, no order, no expectation to be seen in a timely or sympathetic fashion. China, to any civilized visitor, is a nightmare experience of constant crowds, filth, noise, and stress.

Waiting in line and pushing through the masses in a modern Chinese hospital.

Waiting in line and pushing through the masses in a modern Chinese hospital.

My Hospital Experiences in Semi-Urban China

The first time I entered a Chinese hospital, I was tagging along with Aunt Fong as she visited her sister, a nurse. I wanted out.

Once we were in the exam room- a bare, concrete floor with peeling plaster walls, filled with only a clunky wooden table, and a metal cabinet with glass cupboard doors, illuminated by the dim fluorescent bulb overhead and the street lights filtered in through the barred windows- I thought this must be a place where Chinese police take suspects to confess. To get out of that hospital, I probably would have signed whatever bogus papers they put in front of me, detailing my alleged crimes against their People’s Republic.

I seriously was giving thanks to God that I did not presently need the services of the hospital. This was at night, after hours, when there were no patients in the lobby or quiet hallways, so I was spared from seeing anyone suffering. About two months later, I did need the services of the larger city hospital, badly.

At Sanda (kickboxing) practice, my instructor would always pair me up with his nephew, who was easily many levels above the rest of the class, and who never pulled his punches when it came time to pummel me. It happened that he and I were sparring in front of the older students in the class (a lot of elementary and junior high-aged students also came to practice after school, but they were usually occupied with horseplay at the other end of the gym). Whenever there is an audience, the act increases in intensity and commitment. I never set out to hurt anyone while sparring, but the goal of landing blows means pain is never completely avoidable, and the natural rhythm of two sparring partners will go back and forth and often escalate. My instructor’s nephew and I often had sustained battles that were basically real fights, only lacking a referee and a bell to separate us. I had to bring more intensity than I naturally preferred; the beatings would not soften on my account.

That night in October, when my sparring partner and I were the center of attention, he was landing shots and getting the best of me as usual. I became frustrated, but I didn’t try and rush at him in anger. Without much thought, I quickly snapped my left leg up and let a kick fly against his face. The timing for a head kick is difficult to make, but this strike landed solid. There was an audible thud, I saw my opponent’s pupils rattle, and I stepped back in shock.

I started pleading how sorry I was; my instructor applauded me and told me good job, not to worry, there would be no hard feelings. I still feared a reprisal from a young man who was very capable of dishing one out. As he went into the bathroom to wash out the blood in his mouth and check for injuries, I meekly retreated to the edge of the mat to check my foot. Meanwhile, all the older students were in an uproar, telling me enthusiastically how great the kick was and encouraging me to knock him out, pumping their fists and cheering “K.O.!” I suspected they also had received punishment from my sparring partner’s fists and shins.

On my foot, there was a small cut, right on the top of the base of my second toe, the small joint where the metatarsal meets the phalange. I wanted to wash it off and put a bandage on it, but everyone forbid me. Aunt Fong even put a plastic bag around my foot before I took a shower. The locals were more terrified of their water supply than I was. They might have been right to be so cautious, but over the next few days, things went from bad to worse. Their methods- rubbing the gash with alcohol swabs and taping a square of gauze over it- did me no good either.

The day after the incident, I was walking with a limp and feeling shameful that such a small wound would force me out of practice. I couldn’t understand why my foot was so stiff and painful from one gash. It was no matter, I consoled myself, I had no school the next week because of the National Day holiday, and I could relax and recover on my vacation in Shanghai.

Aunt Fong and I had planned the trip, but business prevented her from joining us at the last moment, so I went with Uncle Jiang by train and met his sister and her daughter in China’s largest city. They were on holiday, too, and our group met up with Uncle Jiang’s son, who lived and worked in the city, for a few days of sightseeing.

Limping my way through the Shanghai crowds.

Limping my way through the Shanghai crowds.

The first day, I soldiered on, hobbling through the shoulder-to-shoulder and chest-to-back street crowds. Back at the hotel, we examined my foot and saw it had bled through both the gauze and my sock. The yellow, orange, and pink discharge look awful, and my foot was swollen and painful to the touch. Removing or slipping on my shoe caused me to wince sharply in pain. I tried to convince myself that my wound would heal in a few days and I could tough out the pain, but Uncle Jiang saw things otherwise. After checking my foot and replacing the gauze, he said no more outings (no discussion), so our group spent most of the next two days in the hotel room. I did get to walk outside on occasion to get something to eat.

I at least got in one day of sightseeing in upscale Pudong, Shanghai.

I at least got in one day of sightseeing in upscale Pudong, Shanghai.

For the remaining time on our Shanghai holiday, my foot swelled more and more, and when I took off my shoe in the crowded train station as we waited for our homebound train, the wound was so infected that it oozed out pus when I touched it with an alcohol swab. It was disgusting, painful, and scary all at once. I was afraid for my foot.

After a breezy ride back from Shanghai on the G Train, Uncled Jiang and I took a taxi straight to a hotel restaurant to meet Aunt Fong some of their old medical college colleagues. After eating, she whisked me off to the medical college hospital for what would turn out to be a traumatic afternoon.

The street in front of the hospital was closed to traffic, so knickknack and toy vendors rolled out tarps to hawk their wares, and patients and their family members poured out to the lobby’s many open doors like ants out of a mound. Since Aunt Fong worked for the medical college affiliated with the hospital, she led me around as she pleased, trying to find a doctor she knew personally. We never stopped at a desk to check-in or pause at any time to sit and fill out paperwork and wait. Aunt Fong rushed through the place, with me limping behind, the scenery pouring over me and stupefying my thoughts. Aunt Fong cut through the crowd without turning her head; I oscillated left and right between patients with bandaged heads and open wounds and the huddles of country farmers on the chairs and on the floor. The atmosphere was not unlike the bedlam of the nearby street markets. Any area was fair game for sitting or lying down, the sound of people loudly talking rang through the halls, patients crowded around doctors as they filled out prescriptions one-by-one for the scattered line-up of people in the exam room, and the building interior looked as if it hadn’t been maintained in the past 30 years.

Looking at the walls with thin paint and the floors worn smooth, the old white window casings and wire grating, I was aghast how doctors could practice medicine here and how patients could convalesce while lying in a mess of blankets, for example, in a bed in the hallway. American hospitals try and remove the unpleasantness and make the painful, uncomfortable experience as tolerable as possible. Their freshly painted walls, bright lighting, area carpeting, padded chairs, wall art, informative posters, private waiting rooms, and well-ordered interchange between departments all project sterility and a soothing sense of expertise. While the fear of procedures and bad news prevents patients from relaxing, the hospitals have been designed and built to reduce as much anxiety as can be.

I don’t know what to compare the Chinese hospital environment to, except the many other dilapidated public buildings in China in need of a good janitor and maintenance team, or better yet, a wrecking crew. I will say this: whenever I’ve seen pictures of America from around the turn of the 20th century, I have always gotten a feeling that the buildings were unclean and full of cracked glass and dirty residue that gathered in the corners. I would question: is this the poor photographic quality, or was the world really so dingy back then? The people themselves looked desperate and skeletal, having grim, hollow expressions and wearing clothes that appeared tattered and dirty, as if they had been collecting dust in an attic. If the people were dressed nicely, as many were, I marvel at how dignified they looked in contrast to the casual gym shirts, sweat pants, yoga pants, jeans, and sandals of Americans today.

Skeletal, grim, tattered, dirty, dingy, cracked- that is how the Chinese hospital looked to me. It was as if I were wearing X-ray specs from an old comic book, only instead of see-through, the filter placed over my eyes made everything dirty, dim, and faded. Every square foot of building and every haggard figure combined to form a visual masterwork on the themes of urban despair and the horrors of poverty. It would be futile to try and tally all the character traits of the twelve-story building and its hundreds of inhabitants, their dusty cotton jackets and dirt-stained hands. All I can intimate about the hospital in writing (it deserved an oil treatment from a Realist painter) is the feel of my pallid complexion and stiff throat as I tried to calm myself and will my shaky body to walk smoothly through the halls of grime, injury, and disease. I was filled with disquiet and I brindled like a leashed animal being dragged forward after it smelled medicine and fear, although I had to play the part of a steady man of reserve.

Please don’t misunderstand my narrative on the hospital and its patients. I do not look down on the poor or disparage them (I’m poor by American standards, but that is a very relative standard). My terror was in the confines of a chaotic facility where poverty and pestilence joined forces to put on a show of suffering. A local friend I met, who had spent two years studying in America, told me that the government had opened up the city’s hospitals to all the surrounding country towns, so the facilities had become overrun with mobs of travelers seeking help. Relatives of the ill often did not have the money to afford a simple hotel room, so they would lay out cardboard and blankets and sleep in the elevator lobbies. In the wild mix of humanity, filling every exam room and waiting area, could be found the local city residents, in casual clothes, and the rural poor- no romantic country swains of pastoral imagery, but more like the crowds who mocked and scoffed at Don Quixote, wearing thick, all-weather coats and pants.

The different types of people were so many, and so intermixed, that I could not separate who was who or what office each area performed. I was overwhelmed. People walked into exam rooms as they pleased and watched the physician over his shoulder as he wrote a prescription for someone else. The talking never stopped. But as rude and unruly as the masses were, I could not help but feel great sorrow and pity when I saw painfully sick men on a hospital bed in the hallway (there was not enough space for every patient in the rooms) surrounded by family members who were weary from standing around all day. I felt helpless, not having a way to heal or comfort these people.

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After Aunt Fong found a couple different doctors to ask for information (she never paused to greet anyone, she would immediately start speaking at someone and they would answer right back) we got on an overcrowded elevator (the only kind of elevator in a Chinese public building), headed for the 11th floor. She walked straight past the Nurses’ Station counter and into the small doctors’ and nurses’ office. One of Aunt Fong’s friends from the luncheon, herself a medical doctor, was along with us, and she and my aunt hurriedly made conversation with the staff in the office until they found the doctor they were looking for. A faceless man wearing the uniform white lab coat and face mask sat me down on a chair and set my injured foot up on a stool. After examining the infected wound and making some remarks to Aunt Fong and her friend, he went to the cabinet and pulled out a large pair of tweezers, cotton alcohol swabs, and a metal pan.

Aunt Fong’s friend looked at me with pity and gripped my shoulder. Aunt Fong grabbed my hand and told me, “Close yo’w eyes.” I focused, trying to recite familiar psalms in my head as the doctor went to work. The acute pain of the tweezers inside my skin caused me to grit my teeth and breathe hard out my nostrils. I thought it was terrible but I could suffer through it. The doctor’s work took time, and the waves of pain soon made me start to sweat. Before long, I began to feel flushed with intense heat.

I opened my eyes just enough to see the doctor finishing. I weakly tried to wave him away. My neck could no longer keep my head erect and I knew I was about to pass out. Aunt Fong and her friend urged me to sit up, but I remained slumped over with my head between my knees. They lifted me under their shoulders, and with one Chinese woman under each of my long arms, they walked me past the Nurses’ Station and into an exam room. The sight of a six-foot tall (nearly two meters to them) limp, foreign body stumbling forward with assistance was quite a sight for them and I inspired a lot of giggles when I returned the next week for a check-up.

I stood out in China.

I stood out in China.

After lying down for a while and regaining the color in my face, we were back on the elevator, going down and turning away surplus doctors and patients who tried boarding on the floors between the eleventh and the ground.
There was still the matter of the bones in my rigid foot. Aunt Fong led me down another hallway and grabbed a radiologist who was having a smoke in the hallway, outside the X-Ray room. He held his lit cigarette with one hand as he adjusted the camera above my foot with his free hand. I quietly laughed at the scene, unthinkable now in America, and let the comic relief soothe my earlier experience.

My foot healed, slowly, and after several more doctor visits (with alcohol swabs and metal pans, but no tweezers) and a few months’ time, I was able to curl my toes again and walk without limping. I never saw a bill for any of those visits. I assumed that in China it was all about who you know (which it is) and Aunt Fong had called on her relationships to help me out. Really, I just followed her, received care, and didn’t ask questions.

At the university, I did pay once for antibiotics when I came down with bad, flu-like symptoms. Two students escorted me from room to room and helped translate for me so the doctor could write me a prescription. I learned from the students that their mandatory student health insurance cost 100 yuan per year, which is around 17 American dollars.

Yet, there was one incident that did threaten to leave me with an onerous medical bill, which brings me back to the Monday after the awful weekend bus trip. After two days sitting in pain for hours at the sales office and declining food, I lay about Aunt Fong’s apartment, reading books and not even stirring to eat. I got up several times throughout the day to use the toilet, but other than that I did not have the strength to do anything other than lie in pain. Rightfully worried, Aunt Fong took me to the hospital that night.

By luck, I was able to go to the newly built city hospital on its first day open to the public. It already had people sleeping in the elevator lobbies and lounging on the steps outside, but the equipment inside was clean and unused. Before this hospital was available, the closest “Western” hospital was a short train ride away in Nanjing. Sue, the Australian, made her husband, Grant, promise to immediately take her there if anything serious ever happened to her.

A nurse inserted an IV into my arm, and she let two bags of fluid drain into my dehydrated body. An hour later, I stood up to go back to Aunt Fong’s. Or so I thought.

I made it into the elevator with her, but as the doors started to close, I felt my body slumping to the ground. For a moment, I lost consciousness, then I struggled to blink open my eyes and watch as the elevator’s button panel tilted to an oblique angle before me. Aunt Fong was making panicked noises as she tugged on my arm and pulled me out of the elevator. The sounds were murky, but I could hear her crying out for help and running down the hall. The clamor of footsteps came rushing back to me, and I couldn’t open my eyes wide enough to see the doctors or nurses, but I felt two of them pick me up and sit me in a wheelchair.

Fong bian,” I breathed out softly. I needed to use the bathroom, I told them, immediately. It must have been the IV fluids; I needed to clear out my system. They wheeled me to the bathroom quickly, then two aides cautiously watched me over the squatting toilet, and in a dire moment like that there was no thought of shame. I sat back on the wheelchair for a short ride, then they transferred me to a bed and rushed me down the hallways as fast as they could push me.

The fluorescent lights overhead blurred past my vision like dashed freeway lines. I struggled to blink my eyes open, afraid that if I closed them I would slip away and fall asleep in the biblical sense. I could hear the doctors’ urgent voices and Aunt Fong asking panicked questions as she ran alongside them. Repeating the refrain of familiar psalms in my head, I willed myself not to lose consciousness.

I was taken to the top floor and wheeled to an open stall in the Intensive Care Unit. Sometime during the rush, a nurse squeezed two tubes of glucose into my mouth as another gave me two or three injections- I’m not clear on how many I actually received. I remembered that a friend of mine who trained in emergency medicine told me that the glucose was a disgusting, gelatinous blob, but going down it tasted sweet and smooth to me. If the FDA allowed it, I’m sure companies could market it as a new snack for sugar-happy American children; many of the yogurts and puddings on store shelves are not far off.

Aunt Fong told me that she stayed with another nurse by my bedside that night. After I was started on a new IV drip she watched me drift to sleep and then worried over my heart rate on the monitor. In the morning, a doctor who spoke English told me that they were concerned about my heart rate because it was so slow. “In fact,” he said, “last night it stopped two times.” I learned that the hospital wanted me to stay for two more days as they built up my dehydrated body with IV fluids and monitored my heart.

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Most of that first morning I spent alone, then Uncle Jiang and Aunt Fong came by to visit me. Aunt Fong brought me a bowl of noodles to eat, and for the first time in a few days I was hungry. Uncle Jiang kept me company for a while when Aunt Fong had to go to her office or attend department meetings at her medical college. He and I didn’t talk much to each other. I just read from my e-book and he would look up English words in his pocket electronic translator or frequently instruct me, “Rest. Rest. You must… have a rest.” He would motion toward me as if pushing my forehead back to recline.

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When it was only Aunt Fong and me, I told her, “I thought I was going to die last night. I thought I might die here in China.” She told me she feared the same thing and said that if I had died, she would die, too.
Over the next couple days, my boredom was greatly relieved when a few friends I met through Aunt Fong came and visited me, her nephew brought me some movies to watch, and the university’s Director of Foreign Affairs, Mr. “Oliver” Zhang, stopped by to give me some chocolates and offer condolences.

By the second day, I felt decent enough to really walk out of the hospital (I was tired of having a nurse follow me into the bathroom and hold up the heart monitor attached to my body by round stickers), but the doctors still wanted to perform one more test. A man I assumed to be a senior doctor at the hospital, due to the squad of nurses and interns following him around, filled a syringe full of silver liquid and plunged it into my IV tube. My heart rate, which had recently settled into the 50’s after surging up and down the first day, zoomed up to 130 beats per minute, then plateaued and gradually slowed down. The head doctor gave me a thumbs-up, smiled, and exclaimed, “Very good!” My heart rate while asleep was below 40 beats per minute, which alarmed them, but the test proved my heart was in good condition and pumping at a healthy pace.

The silver test fluid also blurred my vision for the rest of the evening, but that was the last I had to endure. The nurses monitored me overnight again, and in the morning I was free to go. Walking out, I observed the loungers lying on the floor of the elevator lobby and the overflowing trash bins. I pointed out to Aunt Fong how disordered and slovenly things were, especially remarkable since this was the first week this hospital has been open. As I had tried pointing out to her many times before, China does not “need time.” The problem of China is not modernization, infrastructure, or money. As a trashed, brand new hospital shows, the problem is the culture of the people. They feel clean in their conscience when acting dirty. This is not to pick on poor farmers who had no change of clothing or clean beds to sleep in. Poverty doesn’t force people to throw their trash on hospital floors.

My view from my top floor hospital window. The window pane itself was clean, it was the outside which was so dirty.

My view from my top floor hospital window. The window pane itself was clean, it was the outside which was so dirty.

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Naturally, I was relieved to put the whole experience behind me. I thought it would all be over after I walked out the doors, just the same as my other escorted hospital visits. Then, I watched Aunt Fong on the phone in her dining room, pacing the wooden floor,nearly in hysterics with the person on the other end. After she hung up, she hugged me, in tears. I owed the hospital a couple thousand dollars for my stay. Aunt Fong wasn’t speaking on the phone to the hospital, though. She related to me that she was speaking to the heads of my university, and she had become so emotional because of what had happened to me. She expected my school to take responsibility, and they ended up covering my bill.

I don’t understand how it all worked out, I was simply full of thanks that I was treated and it was paid for. As part of my university teaching contract, I didn’t have health insurance, only a very small stipend for healthcare expenses. I asked about this before I signed on the dotted line, and the university said that China’s healthcare was “different.” No fuller explanation was ever given, I think mostly because the Chinese themselves don’t understand their systems.

I inferred from the way banking and other institutions were run in China that healthcare treatment (appointments, procedures, and payment) must be based on relationships and the discretion of the business. What I mean is, a person cannot go to a Chinese bank and expect the same treatment for the same services every time. The bank isn’t governed strictly by a system of policies. If the bank teller tells you she cannot make a money transfer without certain documents and several mangers’ approval, as an example, you cannot tell her that the teller you spoke with last week did it all by himself without needing any extra documents. If she says it cannot be done, then arguing about written rules or past experience is moot. Chinese culture does not place a great amount of value or authority in written policies and standards. Business relationships are extensions of personal relationships. How your individual case is handled, in law and business, is largely up to the mood of the authority figure.

A friendly mediator in this environment is likely to tell you to jump through hoops or wait until another time. Have patience, because “that’s China.” Now, I was never directly held up by this type of runaround, but I was aware of the way the system worked. At any moment, the baton of responsibility and social power might be passed. In the Chinese mentality, people did not expect to get anywhere or receive the treatment they desired unless they had personal connections to someone with power, who could pull the right levers, in which case no paperwork was needed and all problems were solved. Perhaps the Chinese are mostly right about how the world works, and they have only made an implicit social phenomenon explicit.

So those were my hospital experiences in China. There were other times I visited hospitals- I visited a major hospital in Shanghai, I briefly walked through a hallway and bathroom of a city hospital in semi-rural China, I went to a patient room in a small hospital near my university by walking up unlit stone steps in a dark alley, I visited a new mother and her infant daughter lying in a narrow room with a row of five beds and other women and their families pressed close together, and I saw a young man with a broken arm wrapped up in the sorriest looking cast and sling I have ever seen- but I mention these major episodes in the spirit of my other stories written here. I do not offer, I could not offer, a survey on the Chinese healthcare system. What I can share is my individual experience, which another foreign traveler would share much of if he ventured into the heart of China (except the 3-day stay, hopefully), and I can share my perspective on particular Chinese customs and culture.

If you ever set foot in the real China, you very likely might see things differently; I’ve met people who are both much more enthused and much more jaded on China than I am. One thing, though, you could not disagree over with me: visiting a Chinese hospital will make you count your blessings in having lived in the West.

The Real China: A Timeshare Adventure (Pt. 2/2)

Continued from Part 1

The trap was sprung. Aunt Fong and I were stranded at a makeshift timeshare sales office in the back corner of an isolated construction lot, in an out-of-the-way part of a city I didn’t even know the name of.

Once inside, we briefly wandered through the sales office, looking over the enlarged map on the wall and the model display of the future, finished apartment complex. China, currently undergoing a construction boom, has sales offices throughout its cities with large display models like those. They always inspired me with childish daydreams of filling the streets with army men and tanks, playing out big battles or defending civilians against a rogue, mutated lizard. Out back of the sales office was a lawn area with two rectangular fountain pools, some shade trees, and three different demo buildings to show all the tourist/prospects what their timeshare purchase would be like. (I refer to the apartments as timeshare units, but I do not know for sure that the Chinese used the infamous timeshare system prevalent in American vacation spots. However it was, they were trying to stick us poor saps with vacation property.)

I wonder if this grandmother daydreamed like me about marauding through this model of the Forbidden City (at a theme park in Southern China).

I wonder if this grandmother daydreamed like me about marauding through this model of the Forbidden City (at a theme park in Southern China).

Our walkthrough lasted 30 minutes at most, and most of those minutes were spent flattening up against a wall or shuffling through a crowded hallway to get a look at a bed or shower stall with all the other trapped souls loitering their time away. Reluctantly, my aunt led me back into the sales office to find a seat. I have no idea what Aunt Fong told our inescapable sales rep as he pulled his white plastic chair up next to ours, but the mood was one of tension and futility. I could not feel sorry for him; anyone caught in the sales game (as I shamefully once was) ought to relieve themselves of the dirty business.

It must have been plain, even to the men on that sales mission who were primarily focused on scoring money, that Aunt Fong and I were an unfortunate woman and her foreign “son” who had been duped into this scam, and no amount of salesmanship would have turned us into buyers. Salesmen, unscrupulous curs by nature, have no shame and they believe that every objection can be overcome, so they will hound a prospect until he gives up his money or, in a fit of anger or frankness, spits out the real objection (or curse words) and walks away. For Aunt Fong and me, there was no exit, but the young sales rep could see there was no use harrying us- doting middle-aged women and their foreign honorary sons do not buy vacation property.

It did not matter that our assigned sales rep was content to coast through this misery with us by offering refills for our water cups and bothering us only occasionally; his teammates rotated with him in a system that ensured the tourists were always talking to someone and had new, fresh personalities constantly entering and working them over. In China, I had seen how the morning shift employees would line up outside the store’s front doors and either be berated by the boss or receive a pep talk and have a group cheer (even the security guards at my university’s gates would do this before they went to loafing in the guard booth for the day), so I could only imagine how awful the strategy meetings were for these college-aged kids who were selling timeshares to unsuspecting tourists in this weekend getaway racket. Every time a new sales rep or manager came over to us, I knew it was because they had a sales manager or president breathing down the back of their neck, and if they didn’t perform, he would call them out in front of everyone at the sales meeting.

I considered that all these sales reps were just kids trying to pay for college, or without the grades to get into a good college program, and now the cult-like company environment had them believing they had to pressure innocents in order to make money. (Money! That most sacred of words to a salesman’s ears, surely containing more pleasures than paradise.) But I knew better than to pity the youths; sales companies quickly filter out those with any qualms about the ethics of scamming, cheating, charming, and cozening (hence the high turnover of the fainthearted), so anyone still working for this timeshare company was either nearly out the door or, just as likely, a performer who had refined his craft to make regular sales and, more importantly, someone covetous of filthy lucre. Feeling sorry for the hopeless squad of salesman would be like feeling sorry for a hungry snake coming upon a bird’s nest only to find it empty. Let it starve. The world does not need more timeshares.

I was so innocent before at the beach, not knowing what sales agony lie in store.

I was so innocent before at the beach, not knowing what sales agony lie in store.

During the first hour, I slowly lost hope. My stomach felt worse than terrible, the constant presence of the sales rep made everything awkward and without a moment’s privacy, and the mass of people crowded throughout the confines, combined with the dance music, drumming, and shrill announcements over the PA system, made it impossible to focus on a single, clear thought. When the man behind the main counter began whacking away at the drum for the third time, and the thin girl once again rose into a fever pitch of exclamation, Aunt Fong asked me if I knew what she was hollering into the microphone about. Yes, I nodded, they had gotten some wearied soul to sign on the dotted line. Those “lucky” buyers then became the envy of everyone else when they were allowed to take their families into a small, private room shut off from the main sales office.

I reasoned after the fourth or fifth announcement, when an hour had gone by and things seemed to relatively slow down (there were no new busloads of people and no new sales celebrations), that surely, everyone had been subjected to the sales pitch and had time enough to make a final decision. Our business was done here; let us go. I was neglecting to factor in the callous, unrelenting hearts of the managers behind this sales tactic. They were going to hold us there as long as they wanted and squeeze us until more signed contracts came out. Like juicing a lemon, the effort and time put into the final drops- just to make sure all the juice that could be gotten out was gotten out- was far more than the first effort of squeezing the fresh fruit.

During the second hour, after I had made a trip to the bathroom, seeking some stomach relief in vain, and come back to sit next to Aunt Fong, she told me to close my eyes and rest. She would do this all the time in China’s various and sundry crowded, chaotic scenes. I protested about the futility of trying to ignore bedlam this way, but she would always insist I follow her relaxation technique. So, absurdly, as the dance music thumped on and people walked and talked around us, I followed her lead and lay back in my chair to try and relax.

Our assigned sales rep at least had the sense not to try selling us at that point, but that didn’t stop his sales buddy from tagging in and loudly speaking at us. He was barking away like a man possessed towards two people who would not even open their eyes to look at him. He tried selling us by starting a conversation with me, a foreigner who could not understand a word he said. I finally opened my eyes and stared at him, mystified that he was going on at length when I clearly comprehended none of it, and I tried telling him a couple times, in Chinese, that I didn’t understand. “Ting bu dong. Ting bu dong.” It was no matter. He chattered on until Aunt Fong bitterly scolded him and told him to get lost. He retreated, but still we could get no peace. Inevitably, other salesmen came in to take his place. They were on a tag team system, sent out by an overbearing sales manager, and would not leave prospects alone. The large stereo speakers, not twenty feet away, continued pounding out a dance beat.

So, Aunt Fong and I retreated to the back lawn and pulled some chairs underneath a shade tree. As the din of the sales routine reverberated and repeated around us- tourists never really changing places as new faces came in to badger them- I began contemplating if I could sneak off into one of the demo apartments and stretch out on the bed for a nap. My pain showed no signs of subsiding and I was growing weaker by the minute. After another half hour, Aunt Fong went out to the bus and convinced someone to open it so she could get her bag. Then, at least we had some bread and snacks to give us energy and occupy our time. Plus, I had my notebook, so I did my best to focus on writing over hours three and four.

Writing in relative luxury- I had one of the only chairs on the lawn with a back and arm rests, most everyone else sat on stools for hours.

Writing in relative luxury- I had one of the only chairs on the lawn with a back and arm rests, most everyone else sat on stools for hours.

Yes, hours three and four. I spent them wilting in the oppression of the summer heat and sales bleed. When my eyes drifted from my notebook, I entertained myself watching two little boys, one wearing only sandals and the other nearly naked, as they ran around the lawn and splashed in the fountains. They skipped about, having the time of their lives, blissfully unaware of everyone else’s misery. Their hilarity, I thought, was a picture of the incurable optimist who believes attitude creates every situation, rather than believe that being stranded at a sales company office creates the situation. Those bare-bottomed little boys may well have found the only way to be happy during that sales pitch. Like most optimists, they ought to have been embarrassed by their naked idiocy, but they were only thinking of the glee they had running without clothes. I smiled, not at their pluck, but because I was the only one who seemed to notice two naked boys running around. Back at the university, a student once summed up Chinese opinion on public child nudity by remarking, “What? It’s natural.”

Someone needs to sell that baby a sense of shame.

Someone needs to sell that baby a sense of shame.

Then, in my plastic lawn chair, my head drooping in defeat, I noticed a bright green praying mantis balancing on the blades of grass. I tried to pick him up, but he always hopped out of range of my fingers, so I switched to taking pictures of him as he crawled around. Eventually, he walked over to a tree trunk and started climbing. I was captivated and watched him until he was so high that he disappeared in the sunlight. Then I was left with only my notebook for entertainment and at least another hour waiting in that chair.

Mantis vs. tree.

Mantis vs. Tree

Finally, well beyond four hours after we were stranded in that cursed sales office, people started standing up, the sales reps quickly stacked the chairs, and we were back on the bus. Our captivity stretched well into dinnertime, so they had to relent. I was expecting a mutiny at any point during that unendurable afternoon. I imagined that there would surely be impatient individuals who would cause a major fuss if this were an American group. I couldn’t fathom how a Chinese crowd, known for their lack of manners, had failed to cause an uproar.

The bus driver took us right back to the restaurant we had eaten lunch at, which both dampened any enthusiasm I might have had for dinner and clued me in that the sales company and restaurant owner had a business arrangement with each other. The sight of food didn’t move my appetite and my stomach gripes had grown more turbulent, so I didn’t try eating any food. Not even when the man sitting next to me, another tourist (with a bald head, side tufts of hair, and glasses that made him look like an ostrich), dug a fish head out of the soup and plopped it into my bowl as a show of friendly hospitality to a foreigner. I listlessly stared at it, and he blurted out some choppy sentences in Chinese through a foamy mouth full of food. Aunt Fong insisted he was being very friendly. I spent the rest of the dinner declining food offers and waiting for the evening to end.

After eating, they took us straight back to the hotel. We had spent so long at the sales office that there was no time for any after-dinner activities, which was fine by me. I took some medicine from Aunt Fong and went straight to bed.

On Sunday morning, the sales reps came around again, banging on our door and hauling our luggage out to the bus. They drove us out to another dopey Buddha statue on the beach, so I walked along the shoreline and looked out at the sea for twenty minutes. Then, it was back on the bus, where I hung my head and wished that we would turn onto the highway and just start the long trip back to Bengbu. But I was awoken out of my gloom by a bump! bump! and the awful, terribly familiar shaking of the bus. Oh, please, they can’t be serious. This isn’t happening.

We were headed back to the sales office.

This baby was probably the only one excited to go back. I think even the sales reps and managers hated themselves for putting us through that grind.

This baby was probably the only one excited to go back. I think even the sales reps and managers hated themselves for putting us through that grind.

In the words of Karl Childers from Sling Blade, “I seen red.” I didn’t have the strength or the language faculties to say anything, but why weren’t the other passengers on the bus protesting? Americans, I had a feeling, would rise up and demand that bus be turned around. I reflected on tense situations I had witnessed in the past, growing up in the States, and usually there were one or two fiery individuals who would raise a ruckus and give voice to the complaints of the silent majority. In those instances, I could hold my tongue and quietly observe the battle unfold. Perhaps, I surmised, now I was in the middle of China’s group-minded culture, where no one wanted to be the one to speak up, draw attention to themselves, and risk losing face. Or perhaps everyone’s psyche was crushed from the day before and we all believed we had no option but to helplessly sit through the sales pitch again. Every sales pitch has its psychology plotted out, so the timeshare company probably expected, reasonably, that a second dose of the sales office would leave all the tourists so exhausted that they had no sales resistance.

I began reasoning with myself again. Maybe they only needed to check over some documents from yesterday. One of the sales reps will run in while we wait here on the bus.

We came to a stop and the sales reps immediately stood up; everyone else followed. No! No! Come on, people! Let’s kick out the windows or do whatever we have to- we are not going back into that office! Do not go gentle!

I was in a feverish sweat. Sitting in the back row, watching the backs of the others as they filed out, I resolved not to leave my seat. I was terribly sick, I had no energy, this sales treatment was an outrage, and all I wanted was to lie down and rest. By the time everyone except Aunt Fong, me, and a couple sales reps had left the bus, I recognized that my protest was futile. I would be shut inside a hot bus with hardly any ventilation. Aunt Fong, recognizing my current infirmity, looked at me sorrowfully and helped me to my feet. “Don’t angry. Don’t angry,” she said.

Off the bus, I grimaced in pain and searched for the nearest place I could lie down and escape the sun. Aunt Fong and I didn’t even start down the walkway into the sales office, lined with yesterday’s haggard, colorful streamers that were pathetically flitting in the wind. I hobbled across the dirt roadway and sat down under a tree where the bullfrog-shaped bus driver and his wife had already claimed the only decent seating. Sitting on a wooden post, supporting myself with my hands on my knees and barely having the strength to stay erect, I watched a scene on the dirt roadway.

Outside the bus, Aunt Fong was quarreling with some of the sales managers. She was furiously shrieking at them, and one, maybe the head manager, was posturing and shouting right back at her in between drags of his cigarette. Aunt Fong was inconsolable; I was enraged. My downcast face and posture didn’t show it, but I was filled with wrath beyond the point that polite people care to admit they are capable of. I wanted to commit violence. I imagined myself marching into the sales office and overturning the tables and driving all the sales reps out, kicking over the speakers, and tossing that big drum into the model table. I wanted to yell at someone or run off and take the bus out of that miserable resort.

I was incapacitated by illness, so I wasn’t capable of any of those actions, but as I watched Aunt Fong and the sales manager continue to fight with raised voices, I swore to myself that if that manager went from aggressive, dismissive gesturing with outstretched arms to placing his hands on Aunt Fong or so much as poking her in the chest with his finger, I was going to be up and off my seat. It would have required everything I had and my body would be completely spent, but I was ready and willing to pay the price. I was going to lay hands on this Chinese ruffian and take him down to Brazilian jiu-jitsu town. I didn’t care if he had learned Tai Chi in the park from Kung-Fucious himself, I had spent enough time grappling to take him down, sit on his chest, and make him sorry he ever considered selling us timeshare. I would probably double over in pain afterwards and vomit what little was left in my stomach, but I believed I could will myself to efficiently tackle that scoundrel and serve him his comeuppance.

I watched intently for a moment of contact between him and Aunt Fong, but it didn’t happen. After telling them off, she broke away from the small huddle and hurried over to me, still slumped on the wooden post in a sullen pose. She took my hand in hers, knelt down in the dirt so she could look up into my downcast eyes, and with tears streaming out of hers, she pleaded with me, saying, “Sorry. Sorry. I’m sorry.” I reached my hand out and tried to comfort her with my languid arm. Tears were running down my face, too.

“No, no, mei gwanshee. Mei-yo wuntee.” Never mind. No problem, I told her.

After a moment together, we went back under the shade trees out behind the sales office to find a better seat. This time, I did not even have the energy to eat or entertain myself. I read and struggled to sleep, tormented by the discomfort of the cheap lawn chair and the unceasing noise around me. It was Sunday, and trapped as I was I still tried to have a rest and read through passages of my Bible. I know, that must seem like a great contrast between my feelings of wrathful violence a few moments earlier. I suppose my spirit has passes from Psalm 83 to 84. A great thirst for God’s vengeance, to a desire for peace in His presence.

Trying, and failing, to sleep on a long, sick Sunday afternoon.

Trying, and failing, to sleep on a long, sick Sunday afternoon.

About three hours later, we were allowed back on the bus.

Lunch was at the same restaurant as before. This time, I didn’t even pick up my chopsticks. The smell and sight of food, and the stuffy, enclosed space of the dining room had me feeling even worse than before, so I spent the duration of the meal seeking fresh air out on the street curb, next to the smokers. They asked me where I was from and if I played basketball. They laughed at themselves for teasing a six-foot tall American with such a novel question.

In time, we were back on the bus and on the highway. I spent the trip alternating my posture as I reclined on the back row of seats, failing to ever fall into a deep sleep. So, I passed the time straining my eyes to try and read the subtitles of the movie on the overhead televisions. Stopping mid-way at a rest area, I sought a moment of solitude by walking around the back of the bathrooms and shops. My assigned sales rep was at my heels in a moment; he couldn’t let me be, even then. As I solemnly circled the parking lot and ambled back onto the bus, I refused to respond to his pleasantries or the looks of anyone else involved with the company. They disgusted me and I never wanted to see any of them ever again.

照片5306

After an exhausting, seemingly interminable ride, we were back from whence we came, in Aunt Fong’s city, at a time when people were in bed and the streetlights were the only thing filling the lonely streets. The bus pulled up to the corner where this whole regretful experience began. People poured out of that bus as fast as they could, desperately hailing down taxis, no one saying the least word to each other or even making eye contact to acknowledge another and tacitly bid them good bye. I thrust through the sparse line of people on the sidewalk and pulled my luggage out from the cargo space below the bus, not content to allow our sales rep to show me the courtesy, stepping past him to grab hold of it myself.

Aunt Fong and I looked left and right for a cab. As she walked down the sidewalk, I paused, noticing the attractive sales rep standing by herself on that forlorn street corner. I had felt this dilemma approaching in my stomach as we neared the end of our trip. I could have easily walked up to this young woman, one of the most attractive I had seen in China, and asked her for her phone number. Two nights ago she had outright told me she was interested in me. But she was part of this ugly, devious sales company, earning her wages by beguiling the unsuspecting. I hated that company and I wanted to be rid of even the memory of it.

I wasn’t going to be like Lot’s wife. In that instant I turned away from her and looked over my other shoulder to see that Aunt Fong had found a free cab. I strode forward without ever looking back. She and I were back at her apartment in a moment; then I was in my bed on the floor of the guest bedroom. I wanted to put this awful weekend behind me. Compared to it, all the other bad weekends in China were only runners-up.

I say bad “weekends” and not “times” because, while I managed to make it through the weekend without collapsing and being taken to the hospital, I could not maintain throughout the week. My three-day hospital stay would begin starting Monday night.

The Real China: A Timeshare Adventure (Pt. 1/2)

Finishing my last grading in China.

Grading my final tests in China.

It was July. I had just finished grading my semester tests; my time in China was coming to an end. This meant that my time with Aunt Fong was coming to an end.

My university had been good enough to give me until the end of the month on my work visa, so I had four weeks of time to do what I willed in their country. Being a Chinese socialist state, “doing as I willed” did not include viewing YouTube, blogs, Facebook, or other social media online, but likewise being a dilapidated society in the midst of industrial revolution, I probably could have demo-rigged an old concrete farmhouse with fireworks and been let off with a stern talking to. Realistically, in China I was free to set off fireworks at will, start fires on the sidewalk, and use the street as a human waste receptacle with intersections.

By the end of my journey, I was so sapped of energy and enthusiasm that I barely had the spirit to go on. Had I not had the strong desire in my heart to stay with my Chinese aunt, I would have gladly booked a flight the week after classes ended and bid China a hasty “88” (that’s a texting abbreviation for “bye, bye”; eight, in Mandarin Chinese, is pronounced “ba”). I had spent part of every week with stomach cramps or diarrhea, I had come to my wits’ end with classes who would not speak freely no matter how easy the atmosphere or how soft I made myself (if a rare student did have the audacity to ask a question to the foreign teacher, they struggled to say something worthwhile), and, as if I have not made it plain already, I was completely disgusted with the Chinese lifestyle and living within Chinese society in a Chinese city.

Before you think to lecture me on having the open-mindedness to accept a different culture, or chastise me for my bitter attitude, I think it should be noted that my treatment of China, her people and culture, has been nicer than necessary. Too generous, even. China is a country where, if you fell down dead (or unconscious) on the subway, the other passengers would leave your body to lie there as they scrambled out of the car like it was on fire, justifying it later with pathetic excuses about liability risk and fear of disease. If your small child wandered away from you and got run over by a van, don’t expect the people nearby to notice her or do anything about it. Don’t even expect those neighbors of yours to recognize you or your child when the police and newspapers come questioning. That’s community life for many in this collectivist society.

Sure, those two events might be notorious and not normative, but they result from a norm of cold indifference to strangers- with “strangers” being a much broader category in Chinese thought versus Western assumptions. I saw appalling things all the time there, even if they weren’t great enough to attract the same media attention. As I observed in the real China, periled strangers are someone else’s problem (as are safety standards, cleanliness, basic resources, etc.). Even family are viewed in terms of cruel economic survival. Getting wealthy for one’s own is the spirit of the times; living life for softer reasons would seem extravagantly foolish.

And let me advise the reader that, before I ever came to China, I spent five weeks in out-of-the-way, Thailand, sleeping under a mosquito net, using a bucket and a barrel for showering and washing my waste down a hole in the bathroom, and being chased by feral dog packs when I ran past the neighboring farm houses- and I loved it. Poor conditions don’t scare me. What bothers me are filthy, crowded cities run by a society shaped by communist groupthink, irrationality, and intense pride in inane, centuries-old cultural tidbits.

My bathroom in Thailand. I didn't love THIS part; I learned to live with it though.

My bathroom in Thailand. I didn’t love THIS part; I learned to live with it though.

At least, in the midst of the squalor, I could find comic relief in the chickens trotting around wherever they pleased.

Being in that situation for so long, practically alone except for an occasional group outing with other English teachers who could venture into deeper conversational waters than “Do you like NBA?”, not being able to speak my thoughts and feelings- at length and in depth- was probably the burden that weighed on me most in China. Many times, I would find myself wanting to cry out to someone, “Can you believe these people?” only to look around and see everyone else either involved in said situation or blissfully unaware of what had me in shock. They were these people. Silently, I would cry out, “None of you notice that girl using the sidewalk as a bathroom? That 9-year old girl, squatting right there? You do notice, but you don’t care!?” My perspective would neither be understood nor welcomed, so my moments of exasperation had to be swallowed and left to fester as unanswered objections and misery.

Throughout all of these “Can you believe this?” experiences, Aunt Fong would plead with me, “Don’t angry China.” She would even beg me to blame her for my disappointment, the one person in China and in my life who was with me whenever she could be and always looked out for me. She made sure I had meals, checked on me at my university, took me to the Sanda (kickboxing) gym and introduced me to the instructor, took me along on various dinners and social outings with her friends, and planned weekend and holiday trips so I could see and potentially enjoy China. Far from being blameworthy, Aunt Fong was my constant companion in China and the only reason I stayed longer than my teaching duties required.

Near the last of my evil days in China, my evil countenance said it all. Aunt Fong, at left, was still keeping a sunny demeanor.

Near the last of my evil days in China, my evil countenance said it all. Aunt Fong, at left, was still keeping a sunny demeanor.

Well, it so happened that while in my summertime blues, feeling diseased, dejected, and disgusted, Aunt Fong felt inspired for us to take a weekend bus trip to the coast and tour a resort town. It wasn’t her first plan (that trip fell through), but as we returned to her apartment complex one afternoon, she stopped to pick up a flyer and listen to the pitch of a sales representative (a young lady who looked like she might be a college sophomore) standing at a marketing table outside her apartment gates. At the time, I had no idea what the trip was all about; I didn’t even recognize the section of map enlarged in the brochure.

All I knew was that Aunt Fong was initially excited about it and thought it would be a great opportunity for me to see a beautiful seaside area. In her mind, she still thought she could win me over on China and get me to stick around another year. Of course, as soon as Uncle Jiang learned of the trip, he chided me, while chewing sunflower seeds and pacing the living room floor, “No! ….no! Tell her, ‘No….’” He was very convincing, groaning out syllables in a gruff tone and setting his face in an inflexible frown.

It only put me in an uncomfortable spot. There was no way I was going to dash Aunt Fong’s hopes and tell her no, and I could likewise neither tell Uncle Jiang to his face, “It ain’t happenin’.”

The next afternoon, when a different sales rep, a young man in his early 20’s, came over to my aunt’s apartment to sign us up and collect the trip fee, she looked at me tentatively and checked if I really wanted to go. “How much is it?” I asked. Cheap, she said, and she was paying.

“How long is the bus ride?” I asked her through Chinese, English, and the mutual understanding we had developed through our time together. It would take about 10 hours to drive to our vacation spot, which would be spent riding Friday night through early, early Saturday morning. Then, on Sunday afternoon we would have to load up and make the return trip home. I wasn’t excited about spending 20 hours plus of the weekend in transit, trying unsuccessfully to sleep on a Chinese bus, so the reason I asked this question was to convey to Aunt Fong that I did not think this trip was worth the travel. I had heard that the Chinese were practitioners of the indirect response; so was I.

There was a moment where she waited on me, looking sympathetic and unsure of my answer, and I sighed and shifted uncomfortably as I begrudgingly told her okay. The sales rep knew enough English to tell me that when I was at the beach, pictured in the brochure, my heart would feel amazing. That wasn’t the point. My aunt thought it would be a good trip and we could have fun seeing a new place. She wanted to make me happy, and I wanted to make her happy, so I consented.

I was miserable, but if being happy would make her happy, I was willing to give it a try.

I was miserable, but if being happy would make her happy, I was willing to give it a try.

On Friday evening we loaded our bags and took a taxi to the travel company’s office. I refer to them as a travel company, not because I fully understood their business, but because as a naïve outsider I had to make inferences and plug along despite my gaps in comprehending the situation.

We waited an exceptionally long time in a building lobby that could have served as a set for a Jackie Chan movie where he beats up the thugs in their derelict, dumpy hideout. Then, we chanced fate and squeezed into a typically trashy Chinese elevator and rode up with ten other people. It was not the first time I was in a precariously slow elevator and my group tripped the weight limit buzzer or had to turn people away.

Upstairs, we walked into a room clearly separated into plain-clothed travelers and business-dressed sales reps. Most of them were young men with white dress shirts and black slacks, and there were a couple young ladies in sexy black mini-skirts. There was always something a little off about Chinese dress clothes, which were almost always in the typical Western style. They were cheap-looking with frilly style accents like a fanciful extra button or a diagonal seam running across a pant leg. I surveyed the scene of that waiting room in an instant and groaned about what I feared was coming. Not a sales pitch, it’s Friday night, let’s just get on the road. I had sat through a sales pitch a few weeks before, when on a tour group through the famous Yellow Mountain, but that was only for tea, so the ladies walked around with samples (some of them quite good) and I and the two students who accompanied me just slumped in our seats and drifted to sleep until the 30-minute meeting was over.

Sleeping, the unanswerable objection to any sales pitch.

Sleeping, the unanswerable objection to any sales pitch.

At the travel office, they didn’t pitch anything to us. Not yet. They led us down the hall to another room for some reason I wasn’t privy to, then a minute later we were back into the elevator that looked like it had been stripped for parts, then onto the bus. All the young people in business dress accompanied us tourists on board, a ratio of one company rep to two tourists. It hadn’t yet dawned on me why we would possibly need so many hired hands to accompany us on a weekend getaway. Cheap Chinese labor costs, I guessed.

Our group, 30 to 40 large, piled into our seats and snacked as we gabbed and watched a movie on the overhead screens. (One thing about China: no business or public transportation system attempted to forbid outside food or drink. People chewed seeds and spit the shells out, noisily tore through plastic to get to eggs, noodles, or pickled meats, and they littered on the ground whenever they didn’t have a waste bag convenient, which was often in the lacking infrastructure of China. In China, trash is what you make it.) To my relief, Aunt Fong suggested we move out of our restricting seats so I could stretch out my long legs in the back row. Once there, the young company employees seated in the back area turned around out of curiosity and struck up an excited conversation with this charming middle-aged woman and her foreign friend. The young men asked me the usual questions, but their English was decent enough, plus the excitement of the trip spurned them on, so they tried more than I used to to have a good back-and-forth talk with me.

Then, unprovoked by anyone, one of the two young ladies working for the company, sitting near the back row, turned around in her seat and blurted in Chinese that she thought I was handsome and wanted to know if I had a girlfriend. This girl was very easy on the eyes, and for a moment I thought my luck in China might have changed. I had no idea how I would functionally communicate with her, but during that bus ride she conveyed that there was a water park back in Aunt Fong’s home city that we could go to together. I was left to think over her advances as I uncomfortably shifted on the back row of seats, letting my feet hang down in the aisle until it bothered my back, then lying flat across the seats until it hurt my neck. Through the quiet hours of the night, I phased in and out of semi-consciousness until our bus slowed to a lurch and released its air brakes outside the hotel.

The time was right before sunrise on Saturday morning, and we had a couple hours until the company reps would come knock on our door to make way to our first destination. Aunt Fong was exhausted, but I was restless after the poor sleep, so I left her to snooze in our hotel room while I went out for a run. Our hotel was situated at the top of a steep hill, overlooking a shabby amusement park, garden area, and groups of hotels lining the valley along the river. As I explored, I observed how unusually clean and empty the streets were, how new the buildings looked, how planned and color-coordinated they seemed, and how many trees were planted along the broad sidewalks. Every other Chinese city I had been to was clamoring with people, scooters, cars, and animals by sun-up. This place was practically deserted by those standards, and judging by appearances it resembled a seaside American vacation spot- the skies were even (mostly) blue!

I came back to the hotel room, had to rouse poor Aunt Fong awake from her brief snooze, and set out with her and a company rep closely at our heels, who hurriedly insisted that he carry our bags for us. After driving through the town for a half-hour and listening to the other female representative clamor into a microphone (“SHA-SHA-SHEY-BAR-BAH-SHEE-BAH-BAI-SHA-SHEE-SHOO-SHOW-JI-KWAI-BAI-BAR-SHU-SHA-SHA-SHOW!”), presumably to build everyone’s excitement for the trip (and that must be one of the most awful sounds I have ever been subjected to– shrill Chinese barked over a scratchy speaker system), the bus pulled over and our group was ushered off to see our first site.

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An overwhelming crowd of tourists, each shadowed by a young company rep, milled around at the gate below a mountain whereon was nestled a very large, seated Buddha statue. The company escort assigned to my aunt and me (the same man who came to her apartment and signed us up), started to become obnoxious, walking step by step beside us and forwardly offering to take our picture at the gate. It still hadn’t dawned on me why there were so many travel company employees accompanying the tourists on the trip, why there could possibly be a need for one rep for every two tourists. I figured we could take our own pictures. Chinese crowds might be exceptionally callous, but there were always a few friendly volunteers to help hold a camera. Like most things I didn’t understand about China, I chalked this nonsense up to the way people there did things.

I wasn’t the least bit interested or impressed with the mountain’s idol, so after observing it momentarily I went back to milling about aimlessly, like all the other tourists, for the next 30 minutes. 30 minutes of pacing around a blank plaza and parking lot. Okay, there were a couple gates with some frilly ornamental carving and Chinese characters on them, like there are gates in front of every other place in China, but other than that there was nothing to do there. Eventually, everyone made it back to the bus and we continued on through the town. That was a letdown, I thought, this beach had better be impressive.

It wasn’t. It was populated with swimmers and loungers- some in tight one-piece swimsuits, some in bizarre, bright orange, Chinese beachwear- but my group was only there to walk along the broad concrete barrier that served as a lookout point. It was also a station for another dopey statue, this one a crescent moon with a face. The company rep took our picture again (what a burn that is to yield to a courtesy you don’t wish for), then Aunt Fong and I walked down to spend a moment on the beach. I was less than overjoyed at that point. One, the setting didn’t seem all that great- spending a half-hour each at a simple beach and the base of a small mountain was nowhere near worth a 10-hour bus ride. And two, the vigor I felt earlier during my morning jog had fast dissipated. I struggled to put on a happy face and pose on the beach as Aunt Fong took my picture, and as we marched back to the bus I felt my familiar stomach pain returning.

Note the breathing mask, parasol, and bright orange purse and shoes, de rigueur for the young Chinese lady at that time.

Note the breathing mask, parasol, and bright orange purse and shoes, de rigueur for the young Chinese lady at that time.

China's version of McDonald's Mac Tonight "Moon Man" character from the '80's?

China’s version of McDonald’s Mac Tonight “Moon Man” character from the ’80’s?

They took us to a restaurant, where we filed through the kitchen and up two flights of very narrow stairs, then into a dining room that struggled to contain four large, round tables and enough chairs to fit most everyone on the bus. (Walking through the kitchen, or inside then outside then inside, or past a utility room or a small bedroom, or even walking past the pens of the sheep you were about to eat, was not uncommon in small, family-owned restaurants.) I grimaced at the sight of the food set before us. Except for the mantou (steamed buns), most everything had the familiar reddish-orange tint of overly spiced, oily food.

At that point, my stomach pain and appetite were about even, so I tentatively choked down some food, which seemed foolish because the unsavory food was the primary culprit causing my recurring stomach pain in China. Consider though, I had no alternative food source than what was set in front of me. China does not have prevalent convenience stores in most areas, and the snack shops they do have are not very accommodating to Western palettes (more spiced meats and tofu, and instant ramen noodles). So, to feed my natural hunger and try and maintain strength, I would usually stick with the safest options, like noodles and soup, and avoid irritating dishes containing chili peppers.

My eating strategy was no help. Back on the bus I lay down and shut my eyes, resting the back of my hand across my face for relief. I didn’t care where our tour group went to next; I only wanted a long bus ride so I could take a nap. But then- !

The bus began sloshing one way then another, slowly bouncing up and down as it crawled forward. What is this? I sat up, angered and annoyed, and looked out the window. We were at a construction site. The bus driver was navigating over potholes on a dirt service road. I thought for sure he was either lost or incompetent, having chosen a stupid place to make a U-turn, but after five minutes of abuse by shocks, winding past hollow concrete structures, the driver parked in a row behind two or three other buses and the company reps made a commotion to hustle us off right away.

Hollow apartment buildings outside and the tension of a hot bus inside, the darkness descends.

Hollow apartment buildings outside and the tension of a hot bus inside, the darkness descends.

In a daze of sleep and sickness, I asked myself what the rush was, why we needed to see the end of this construction lot, and again “What was wrong with these people?” Then, out in the bright summer light, I surveyed the apartment buildings under construction and heard the blare of loud dance music, drums, and a girl’s voice screaming over the large PA system inside the ranch-style building in front of us. Then, I watched as the bus driver locked the door and walked off with his wife to find a napping spot. I swallowed hard.

They had stranded us for a timeshare pitch.

The multi-colored streamers, loud sounds, and legions of sales reps were intended to excite us, but I could not have felt more dread. Facts of life, transferred from American to Chinese terms, usually turned out louder, smellier, dirtier, much more populated, and just plain miserable. We faced the nefarious timeshare pitch, but not in comparatively tame America- in China. What horrors did our captors have planned for us?

As I drug my feet down the salesmen-lined walkway leading into the building, I glowered at their broad, crocodilian smiles and glib welcome cheers. Aunt Fong was tugging at my arm, pleading, “Don’t angry. Don’t angry.” I was too far out of my senses to know what to do other than resent having to spend part of my afternoon inside their sales office. If I had my health, I would have followed my plan of exploring the construction site and the surrounding town on foot. I strongly considered this option later on, as our annoying sales rep followed me out to the open lot where they liked to show their marks the site of the next proposed apartment building. Sadly, I could feel I didn’t have the strength to walk off. My body was quivering and I thought I might need to use the sales office’s nearby toilets, however filthy, at any moment.

Could I just walk off and explore?

Could I just walk off and explore?

Reasoning with myself (the desperate recourse of a man stuck in a hopeless situation), I suspected that my aunt and I would be held for an hour and then, after our repeated refusals, they would have to let us go. After an hour, all the tourists will have said yes or several times said no, so that will be all, right? I was underestimating the depth of indecency within the timeshare salesmen of what must surely be the country with the greatest impropriety in the Orient, if not the whole of Asia.

Continued in Part 2.

Mantis vs. Chinese

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(Continued from Plumbing and Blocks: A Metaphor for Language)
(Part 2/4: The Basics of the Chinese Language)
(Part 1/4: Why I Stopped Learning Chinese)

Why I Stopped Learning Chinese

In college, I had a Chinese professor, teaching a course on China, who boasted that Chinese has the easiest grammar of any language, and if anyone could write a paper identifying a language to demonstrate otherwise, he would give that student an A for the semester. Well, after living among the Chinese and hearing their language daily, also hearing their incessant boasts about how ancient and great their civilization was, how everything was first invented, done, or developed in China (even pizza, preposterously, of all things), and after losing patience with the Chinese way of life, I will offer some hyperbole of my own: Chinese is the worst language I have ever heard. Just the same as there might be some language spoken by a tribe in Papua New Guinea that linguists could contend might have simpler grammar than Chinese, there might be a language on this earth that sounds worse than Chinese, but my ears have not discovered it.

Now “heard” implies listening to spoken Chinese, and listening and speaking are only half of the major divisions of language (the other two dimensions being reading and writing). Based on what I have written already, I will leave it to the reader to imagine how inefficient and tedious it is, not to mention culturally exclusive, to use the Chinese writing system.

Those artful symbols seem so impressive until one tries to use them for all of life’s daily reading and writing purposes. Then, constantly stumped by the appearance of new words and having no idea how to pronounce them, and wishing that words could just be spelled out with a pen or keyboard instead of having to make an artful or sloppy piece of calligraphy with a regimented writing method, it dawns on the newcomer: using pictographic and ideographic symbols for all of a written language isn’t such a good idea.

English words may be irregular and their phonics flawed, but they work efficiently and they are very flexible and adaptable. There is a reason computer keyboards the world over use Roman letters, and it is not because an Englishman has possession of their patent. It is because those letters were developed through the millennia of several civilizations, and the result is language units proved by the furnace of culture and time. They work- very well.

Yes, Chinese writing also works (any extant written language can be said to work- people use it, don’t they?), but I would argue not nearly as well. The Koreans and Japanese, who developed their written languages from Chinese, both saw the need to break the written characters down and create alphabets out of them. The Chinese, who take inordinate pride in their history and tradition, have never seen the need to do likewise. Pinyin transliteration is the closest they have come to compromising with reasonability.

When using a word from a foreign language, something Chinese is hamstrung from doing, but something I think English does exceptionally well (English speakers, think of all the foreign words you know from languages like Spanish and Japanese, and all the French phrases you recognize- now, do you speak those languages?), Chinese has to use its existing characters and sound the word out- poorly. Remember, their smallest language unit is the word, not the letter.

Example: my home state, Iowa, in Chinese pinyin combines three unrelated words to form “Ài-hé-huá.” Those three words are literally “love,” “lotus,” and the adjective for “Chinese” or “Han” culture. So, basically the combination is gibberish, and a Chinese has to have familiarity with these quasi-phonetic combinations to know that the words are not lost but are pitifully trying to indicate a place name. In America, place names popularly use words from Native American languages, and Roman letters do a better than decent job of retaining the sound of the original language, though it takes an awful lot of k’s, vowels, and sign space to do so.

The written Chinese characters are what beguile foreign eyes and entice them to think Chinese must be such an exotic and esoteric language, but that is not the case. Once the alluring bait is taken, the sucker realizes the truth- that the incredible visual symbols are masking childishly simple words that mostly sound like “cheese” and “seizure.” I am almost serious. Chinese has so many sounds similar to “sh-” and “ch-” and “j-” that learning their language made me think I was in a speech therapy class meant to manage the way I pushed air through my teeth.

On the topic of the spoken word, I have to admit I am not much of an authority. I never heard Chinese spoken. I heard it barked, shouted, growled, blurted, hissed, sputtered, ejected, muttered, whined, scolded, chided, coughed, screeched, yelled, howled, whispered through closed lips, called out impatiently by a screeching woman, sung in a thin, tinny falsetto voice, and histrionically recited by a man for an audience, but I never heard it spoken. If one’s only exposure to spoken Chinese is a foreign film, it goes without saying that those actors were speaking stylized lines clearly enough for the boom microphone to pick them up. If one has heard the clamor of a kitchen in a Chinese restaurant, that is more like what I am referring to.

It is not the people’s fault that the language comes out so rushed, so clipped- that is the natural tendency when speaking the short, friction-filled sounds of Chinese. If the context ever demands enunciation, like in the narration of television commercials, and spoken Chinese is put on display, then the resulting sound is absurd and buffoonish. I expected viewers to crack up at the overdone, pompous voices on television- the voices having to fall up and down and flit erratically like a dollar bill in the wind in order to precisely hit the jarring tone changes between every Chinese syllable- but my Chinese friends’ faces were unflinching. They could not hear the ridiculousness of the language because they were native to it and the sounds could not be heard, only their meaning.

Those clownish Chinese voices were artificial, not representative of the voices I suffered in my daily experience. Those voices spat out the harsh, static sounds of the language that made me wince. Even though I had attained a base level of Chinese that would have allowed me to speak to shopkeepers and ask for directions, had I felt brave, I almost always avoided opening my mouth to get the locals’ attention. I didn’t want to be shouted at in return. When I took a taxi and had to communicate, I would mutely hand the driver a slip of paper with my destination written on it. Sometimes that wasn’t enough. The driver would badger me and try to get more money out of me, and I would testily mutter in Chinese, “I don’t understand. I don’t understand…” over and over until the driver would give up in frustration of I did and exited the cab.

It was a surprising contrast to my experiences traveling in Thailand and speaking to the rare Thai person met in America. In those cases, I was giddy to try out what few phrases I knew, and I was pleasantly satisfied when the happy stranger would smile and pleasantly reply to me in a clean voice. Most of the Thai people I have attempted to speak to really were friendly and accommodating, and the experience showed me how common humanity could bridge the gulf of culture and language.

In China, the people did not speak anything like a friendly, clear, accommodating voice. Even when a sweet young lady wanted to say something smilingly polite, the sounds of Chinese are so pinched and abrupt that the message sounded like she had a mouth full of food. I felt no compulsion to talk to the Chinese in their own tongue; I had a distaste for the exercise that bordered on revulsion.

I would put it like this: in English, there are three moods: the indicative mood, for statements and questions; the imperative, for giving commands and advice; and the subjunctive, to express conditional statements or wishes (e.g. “If I were rich, I would buy a new house.”). In Chinese, I observed only one mood: angry. Every interaction was quickly spoken and short-tempered. Several times an English-speaking Chinese student or friend would excuse a violent-sounding scene to me by saying, “Those people sound like they are arguing, but they are just talking” or “She just asked him what time the bus arrives.”

I could sense mild embarrassment in my Chinese apologist, and could not but question to myself when Chinese culture at large was going to take the hint from foreigners’ faces- white(r) with shock- and stop excusing the cacophony inherent in their speaking voices and make heartfelt reforms in their language and the way they spoke it.

I do not need to understand Japanese, by contrast, to pick up on the great politeness and reserve the Japanese speak with. Body language, tone of voice, and the sound of their words reveal it to me. Being around Chinese speakers in the many and various chaotic, crowded, and disgusting settings of a real Chinese city, I was struck by the intensity of volume and spirit the Chinese would begin speaking with in the blink of an eye. I could read in their voices and body language that they were agitated and distressed, at once bound close enough in community that strangers could quickly strike up a conversation as if they were a married couple resuming a paused feud, and distant enough that no one received strangers with a kind smile, a slowly spoken reply, and a gentle nod of the head. If felt as if the whole country was composed of stock brokers, always chattering and shouting- never speaking- and shoving each other to get to the front of whichever line they were in.

It dawned on me then, that I found no innate appeal in the Chinese language. The visuals of the written characters had worn thin and let me down, and I could not bring myself to adopt the people’s hot, quarrelsome way of speaking. I have often heard other languages spoken and found much beauty and appeal in them. Hearing the acrobatic lisps of Spanish speakers, the fluid friction of German, or the low, flowing syllables of Japanese attracts me and makes me curious about the depths their language conceals. I find I have a thirst to know their treasures of language and culture.

In China, I heard what seemed like endless boasting about their civilization, but after living in the real conditions of China, submerged in the torrent of choppy spoken sounds, I lost interest in their culture. I knew it was all a sham. The Chinese can school me in Confucian social order and harmony when their drivers learn to yield to traffic lights and pedestrians, when their people learn to form a line at the cafeteria, the train station, or of all places a national monument or museum, like the one dedicated to the Nanking Massacre, where all solemnity was broken during my visit by the mass of inconsiderate boors who would barge in with their elbows and stand to take pictures in front of others.

I realized this epiphany in real-life experience: language and culture are so intricately connected that it can be said language is culture. It was no accident that people who yelled at each other as a matter of course also honked their car horns nonstop at each other, pushed each other in all public places, and showed no shyness when spitting or having their children defecate in front of each other. Chinese culture had me disgusted, and its language had done little better. I wanted a part of neither.

Language, if one does not speak it, is an incredibly vast and deep system, seemingly impossible to conform one’s mind to. If one does speak the language, it is nothing at all. It takes no special effort for me to think in English. Learning Chinese though, or any other foreign language, would require great effort and that I took the time to live in Chinese-speaking society. Learning a foreign language then is a great compliment. The learner is declaring that this language and culture is worth his time, so much so that he is willing to make it a singular pursuit. The end goal is participation in a new culture and society. Again, it is nothing for me to visit a local restaurant, peruse the menu, and place my order, but for a foreigner dreaming the American dream, this is an impressive feat and a big step towards integration.

Integration became the furthest thing from my mind in China. I wanted relief; I wanted to leave. As the second semester waned, my Chinese studies all but completely ceased. I would still talk to Aunt Fong in Chinese, but I bitterly left my Chinese workbooks to gather dust. I did not want to be part of Chinese society. I did not want to remain in their country. Those are the real motivations for learning Chinese. Not wanting to remain in China, I no longer had those goals. Therefore, I stopped learning Chinese.

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A Lesson and a Concession

Going through the effort to learn Chinese, and especially the exercise of thinking about language, has made me think differently than the common views on language. My perspective is this: when I hear someone explain a feature of a foreign language, I do not treat it like a rule, I treat it like a proposal. So, for example, when someone shows me that the written character for the Chinese singular pronoun “I” or “me”: 我, takes seven marks of the pen, I do not stroke my chin and say, “How interesting. Your writing system must contain much meaning within these complex symbols.” No, I open my eyes widely in a bewildered stare and ask, “Are you serious? Do you realize how tedious and time-consuming that will be to spend seven strokes on such a basic word? Not to mention, you’re going to have to design these abstract symbols of yours for every single word– every concept, function, feeling, action, and object.

‘Your stick figure makes sense for the word ‘man’ (人), but how do you propose to make an iconic representation for a word like ‘discontent’? No, stop. Don’t draw your symbol for me. Inventing it is the easy part. How do you propose you will teach every literate person in your society how to read and write each of your thousands of symbols? Your schools will be little more than factories where robotic children are forced to learn by rote to such an extent that they will lose all aptitude for critical thinking or creativity. But if that is what you want, carry on with the symbol making.”

And again, “You are proposing to make every word a one-syllable sound? And because your language units come as simple, solid words, you are going to do away with an alphabet altogether? No, no, no, that will never work. Think of what will happen when you try and introduce a new sound, when you need a new word to describe a new thing, or to incorporate a foreign word. How will you do it? How will you pass along to everyone the pronunciation of the new word? Your language units are already fixed, and there are no phonics or other universal standards of word sounds, so how will you solve the problem of making new words? You say all new words will be compound words? And foreign words can be approximately sounded out with your existing word sounds? Well, that sounds like an awfully broad use of the word ‘approximately.’ Listening to you say ‘Washington’ (Hua-sheng-dun) sounds like a man speaking with a frozen jaw.

“But your compound words idea- are you forgetting that using only single-syllable sounds is already going to force you to overlap and border similar sounds to the point that you will have to rely on those awkward, ugly tones to differentiate between the sounds? Even then, many of the words will still have the exact same sound and tone. There are more things in heaven and earth, Hu Rui-Xiao, than are dreamt of in your language units. Your words and sounds are far too limited. Combining your monosyllables into compound words might be a solution to the problem of making new words, but it only compounds the original problem of having too many words with similar sounds or the exact same sounds. It’s indistinguishable.

“Imagine this scenario: you are on the phone with your friend and you ask about the ‘ma’ vehicle. It’s spoken over the phone, and it’s in Chinese, so your words are doubly indistinct.

“Your friend asks you, ‘DID YOU SAY “MAHN” (慢)? YOU WANT THE “SLOW” VEHICLE?’

“You impatiently correct him, ‘NO, CAN’T YOU HEAR? I SAID “MA,” NOT “MAHN.”’

“He then rightly defends himself, ‘BUT THE TWO SOUND IDENTICAL. BOTH ARE SPOKEN QUICKLY AND THE VOWEL ISN’T FULLY FORMED, SO “MAHN” SOUNDS JUST LIKE “MA.” IT IS ONLY THE DIFFERENCE OF ABRUPTLY CEASING THE SOUND WITH AN OPEN MOUTH VERSUS LIGHTLY AND IMPERCEPTIBLY TOUCHING THE TONGUE TO THE ROOF OF THE MOUTH, CUTTING THE FULL SOUND OF THE WORD SHORT.’

“You proceed, ‘LOOK, I DIDN’T CALL YOU TO ARGUE ABOUT HOW UNCLEAR OUR LANGUAGE IS, I JUST CALLED TO ASK ABOUT THE “MA” VEHICLE.’

“Your friend again says, ‘DID YOU SAY “MA” (马) AS IN THE BEAST OF BURDEN WITH LONG LEGS AND A FAST GALLOP, OR DID YOU SAY “MA” (妈) AS IN A WOMAN WHO BEARS CHILDREN AND RAISES THEM?’

“Fed up with the runaround, you repeat yourself, ‘I SAID “MA”!’

“Your friend, no less confused, replies, ‘I STILL CAN’T UNDERSTAND YOU. I WOULD ASK YOU TO SPELL IT OUT- “D” AS IN “DOG,” “B” AS IN “BOY”- BUT WE DON’T HAVE AN ALPHABET. HOW DO WE EVER EXCHANGE EMAIL ADDRESSES WITH ONE ANOTHER?’

“You, by this point screaming, not just loud-talking, repeat again, ‘I SAID “MA”!’

“Your friend will say, ‘STOP SHOUTING!’

“And you will say, ‘I’M NOT SHOUTING! I’M ONLY SPEAKING CHINESE TO YOU. BRING THE “MA” VEHICLE!’

“Your friend finally compromises, ‘I’LL JUST ATTACH THE HORSE TRAILER TO YOUR MOTHER’S CAR AND DRIVE THEM BOTH OVER TO YOU.’

“Now, my friend, is this the kind of interaction you want to set yourself up for? Then please, be reasonable and develop some phonics, an alphabet, and a wider range of sounds. It will require that you make something new, that you innovate rather than repeating and venerating the works of the past. So, I will leave it to you, my Chinese friend, to move toward the path of sensible innovation or remain where you are in the haphazard slough of fixed civilization. I know which option you should pursue, but I fear which one you will stubbornly hold onto.”

I may sound exceptionally jaded to the Chinese language and its culture, but my dissatisfaction is in due proportion to the height of my expectations and the depth of my real disappointment. I had so much hope and time invested in Chinese, and what was the result of my labors? I could use a spare Chinese word or phrase in a discussion with a bilingual friend, but hearing and seeing the Chinese language in public had become too wearisome.

I did not care to cross over with both feet and become familiar with a language that rushed out in such hostile and harsh sounds. I did not want to talk to someone using a voice like that, and I felt no personal trust with a person who spoke to me like that. We would sound like two dogs fighting over a bone, and any fluent onlookers would have to interpret for foreign ears that we were just commenting on how lovely the weather was going to be for our upcoming holiday.

At least, if I had learned a language like Russian, I would have sounded nefarious and arch. People would hear me and either think I was scheming something or lamenting my woeful place in this world. Almost any other language, and people would say what a charming and alluring accent I had. Speaking Chinese is seductive to no one. When Chinese speakers use English, the Mandarin speakers speak ploddingly, breathily, but with not much of a flavorful accent, and the Cantonese speakers, who have nine standard tones in their language, sound like banjo strings being plucked, tightened, and unwound.

And as far as I know, no Chinese words or idioms have proven themselves worthy to use in English, other than food names (e.g. “bok choy” or “chow mein”), and the simplified phrases “Chop, chop” and “Long time, no see” (this is a common Chinese saying, but it is not for certain that the English phrase came from the Chinese parallel).

Contrast that with French, a language whose artful phrases seem tailor-made for flourishes in English sentences. It sounds so much more sophisticated to say “C’est la vie” instead of our plain “That’s life.” The only advantageous Chinese words I have found are their numbers (credit for this insight is owed to Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers: The Story of Success). Chinese numbers are pronounced quicker than English numbers, so they are easier to speak and remember, and there are no irregular numbers like “eleven.” In Chinese, that would be “ten-one.”

After my studies and my time in China, I was left with a smattering of simple, practical knowledge of a language that I did not want to use in its homeland, and which is mostly useless to me in America, where Chinese is a lingua franca to no one, and where the first and second generation Chinese immigrants can either speak English to outsiders, or if incompetent, can keep up a cold, distant front with those outside their group. I am not denying that Chinese people can be friendly or work and speak with others. I am not interpreting language fluency as friendliness. I am saying that in my experience with foreign immigrants and visitors, I have found it easy to talk with the Japanese and Thais, for example, but difficult to approach the Chinese, get on their wavelength, and establish trust.

When I spoke Thai to the Thais or talked about Japan to the Japanese, they smiled and talked back, but when I have gone against my better intuition and dared to speak Chinese to the Chinese in America, they mostly seemed shocked or uncomfortable with it, uninterested in talking to me. That is in America though. In China, there were times when my white face attracted a crowd, and many Chinese students eagerly peppered me with cheerful questions.

I do not feel vengeful toward China and its people, mostly I feel disappointment and exasperation which I issue in the form of real observation and rebuke. If the Chinese were humble about their language, if they disfavored boasting about their country and culture, I would see no need to be critical. I have no quarrel with the bashful, modest languages of the world, however absurd and unwieldy they may be. My problem is with pride and pretense, especially when it is undeserved. A language that sounds like ice dropped into a deep fryer should be more embarrassed of itself. Instead it proclaims itself and pretends it is unknowable, not able to be understood by outsiders. No, the problem with China is when it is seen and known, when it is exposed to outsiders and they are able to comment on it.

Lastly, my concession, which is only necessary. I have made quite a few censorious remarks on the Chinese language. I need to remember my place and keep things in perspective. St. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 14, wrote that “Even things without life, whether flute or harp, when they make a sound, unless they make a distinction in the sounds, how will it be known what is piped or played?” At this point, the pride and vanity of my flesh smile and say, “No distinction in the sounds? Surely he must be talking about Chinese.”

But then I am corrected by Scripture, later in the same chapter: “There are, it may be, so many kinds of languages in the world, and none of them is without significance.” There I am shown, there my whole argument is tempered: Chinese is not without significance. It still has great beauty and use among a great number of people. I found it unpalatable, and I have my reasons for disliking its modern form and practice, but these are after all entirely subjective opinions.

My problem is not really about the essence of a language, but the way it is rudely and irrationally practiced today.

I am one displeased individual who must remember that Chinese has its significance and purpose apart from me. I do not care to speak it or study it, but it is still worth speaking and studying in itself. I will leave it to those at peace with Chinese culture to do so.

I still love China.

I still love China.

Plumbing and Blocks: A Metaphor for Language

(Continued from “The Basics of the Chinese Language.”)

(Part One: “Why I Stopped Learning Chinese.”)

(Note: my references throughout are to Mandarin Chinese, or the standard dialect of Chinese which I learned and was exposed to. Cantonese and other major dialects I did not live with nor learn.)

From Part 2: For those more familiar with Chinese, please forgive me where I have been imprecise or ignorant. And for those unfamiliar, I hope I have provided you with some insight and a feel for my experience with Chinese, which is admittedly very limited. Before I get into my complaint on the Chinese language, I would now like to offer a personal observation, an analogy for Chinese and English that is entirely subjective but I think an accurate and easy way to understand the essential difference between the two languages.

Plumbing and Blocks

SAM_2653_2

English is like plumbing. The thousands of words English has accumulated from other languages like the many pieces and parts stored in the bins of an old plumber’s workshop. An old hand can look at a problem and assemble a solution any number of ways using parts and pieces from different language bins. A simple problem- choosing the right word to complete a sentence- is like a simple repair of a leaking faucet. If the leak was caused by a hairline crack in the pipes, the plumber could plug or patch the leak for a quick fix, or replace the section of pipe altogether. In the same way, English words can be substituted with any of our language’s many synonyms, or the select word can be removed altogether and replaced with another. If the entire sentence is corroded, then the plumber needs to get to work, tinkering and replacing all the seals, pipes, washers, valves, screws, and nuts, i.e. the verb tense, the mood, the word choices, the tone, the syntax, the use of the right nouns, and adjectives that fit just right. Everything must fit together and allow the flow of water- in this metaphor, meaning- without leaks breaking out between pipe connections- i.e. word combinations- that do not fit each other. It is all complex and intricate. Word choices must fit the job, and all words must agree with the verb tenses and flow together towards the sentence’s intended meaning.

For illustration, let us suppose that I want to communicate and describe my upset stomach. Think of all the words and phrases at my disposal. My workshop is filled with shelves of plumbing parts to choose from. My mental plumber can select words originating from several different source languages or put together common English words to form phrases. I could simply plug the leak, saying, “I’m sick.” That will do, but the problem could be better addressed. I could alternatively say, “I’m ill” or “I’m feeling ill.” These sentences say the same thing, but when choosing between words the difference is that between using basic PVC plastic piping, that will work for basic applications but cannot handle high water temperatures, and using copper pipes that are stronger and better able to fortify the flow of meaning. In plumbing, it is water pressure, water temperature, and the location of pipes that determines the material- metal or plastic- to be used for the job. In English, the considerations for word choice are eloquence, context, and meaning.

In this illustration, eloquence is not necessary, yet word choice can still improve my chances of having my specific meaning understood the way choosing the right size washer or O-ring will ensure my pipe fittings do not leak. “I feel bad,” needs to be narrowed down. What is the problem? “My stomach hurts” will work. That efficient sentence is simple yet specific enough to communicate the intended meaning. But again, plumbing can be complex and so can sentence-making- choosing the right words and assembling them to fit the problem. “My stomach is upset” or “It hurts” will not inform my listener what kind of cure I need. I could add another sentence and build a longer connection of pipes. “I think I ate something bad.” Or “I ate something that disagreed with me.” There is a descriptive personification! I never knew food to be opinionated, but I intuitively understand the sense meant by saying that it “disagreed with my stomach.” If I want to attempt a diagnosis, I could say, “I think…” or “Maybe…” to venture a guess, or if I feel certain I could say without introduction, “It is food poisoning.” Think of all the options! So many different word choices and sentences for the same problem. English has shelves and shelves of subtly differing parts which can be sorted through and assembled together.

One could choose the bin labeled “Medical Words” and dig through and choose a word like “diarrhea” if that were my stomach’s problem. Then, the word chosen is from Greek, meaning “flowing through” (speaking of plumbing), and used medically in English it carries the meaning of all the associated symptoms, causes, and cures. Perhaps it is another medical problem with my stomach, so I face a different set of options. I can say, “It’s acid indigestion,” or using Greek again, “It’s pyrosis,” or more colloquially, “It’s heartburn.” So many options for so many things, and an abundance of words to build from.

Lastly, I could select words based on formality, feel, and context. “I’m sick” works simply, with anyone, but “My tummy hurts” is how a child attracts the attention and affection of her mother. If I am concerned with the feel of my words, their connotation, I can swap my source language box. I could go to the “Latin” box of plumbing parts (a very large box in English’s workshop) and pick out “nauseous.” (Note that the Latin “nausea” is in turn based on a Greek word, and English words commonly trace their ancestry back through more than one source language, so in this respect the analogy of boxes of plumbing parts breaks down. Perhaps parts that originated from one language box were sorted in with another?) “Nauseous” is such a strong, multi-syllable word. Very Latin. It has much more dignity than “sick,” in case I need to dress up my sickness for a discriminating audience. I wouldn’t want a dinner party, for the sake of my humorous example, to have to think about the unclean processes of the human body.

And if I’m really sick, I could exclaim/announce/shout/expel/interject/or cry out, “I’m going to throw up!” or “I’m gonna hurl!” or “I’m about to puke!” or “I think I’m ready to vomit!” or “spew” or any number of vulgar, colloquial, or slang terms. English goes on and on. In my experience of Chinese (language, culture, and people) the same standard words, phrases, and expressions were pretty much universally used by everyone in a rote way. It was not a normal thing for me to hear someone put their individual spin on a common saying.

Switching between source languages (in English, usually French, Latin, Greek, or Old English and Germanic) for descriptive words works just like changing a single valve or pipe in a plumbing system. I could say “daily” using a common English word, or I could say “every day” and make a phrase out of two simple pieces, or combine them into “everyday” and make a word with a subtly different meaning. Or, I could resort to Latin and seem sophisticated by using “quotidian.” Maybe the context requires the flair of French, and I say, du jour. Or, I might want to make a philosophical point about the common experience of daily life, so I go back to the “Latin” box and cull up “mundane.” Think of all the possibilities that can be fit together as an ad hoc (Latin again) solution for the sentence and context at hand. Daily allowance = “per diem.” I live life “day by day” or “one day at a time.”

It is a wonder how anyone can stay above water in the overflow of word choices that is the English language. But as the old plumber knows from experience just about where to look in his crowded, cluttered workplace to find the part he is thinking of, so does the English-speaking brain know which set of words to choose from. In this respect, English is not all that different from Chinese or any other language, but the number of words and word bins to choose from is much more abundant, overflowing, multitudinous, ample, bounteous, copious, profuse, populous, numerous, voluminous, and perhaps superfluous.

What is most like plumbing in English is word agreement and flow, the necessity that all the parts of a sentence are fit together properly and that they support the flow of meaning in one direction, just like a plumbing system must fit together properly and support water flow in one direction. Incongruent word choice is like ill-fitting pipes; they disturb the mind like drips from a leak. If a small child said, “Mommy, my tummy is nauseous,” one would assume the child was either precocious or trying out a newly learned vocabulary word. In the same way all the words in a sentence must work together, and the sentence must fit the style and tone of the context.

Most critically, to English and plumbing, the flow of the sentence must be consistent and in one direction. If I incorrectly used a verb tense and said, “I is going to the store now,” then my sentence has sprung a leak. My sentence still carries water- the meaning comes across, but there is a leak of verb confusion. A major meaning flow problem would be like saying, “I have been to go to the store tomorrow.” A listener has no idea what time frame this action is meant to take place, the same as a poorly assembled plumbing system could send water flowing in conflicting directions or into dead ends, with the result of burst pipes and major water leak.

This analogy could be expanded to cover even more aspects of English, but I have already written more than enough to make my point convincing: English is like plumbing.

chinese blocks

Chinese, now, is like blocks, the colorful wooden cubes that small children play with. If the reader can excuse the unintended condescension of the analogy, I will explain. Those six-sided playthings are one simple, solid object that has different images painted on each side. Each of the six sides has four edges and can be rotated to face one of four ways. The blocks can be arranged individually and then in combination with other blocks any way the child wants them. This is very Chinese.

In Chinese, words are very simple, having one syllable with the usual pattern of one consonant followed by one vowel, but by altering the tone of the word- rotating the block onto one of its four edges- the face of the block appears differently. It is still the same block face, the same consonant and vowel, but that adjustment in orientation (tone) makes it a different word. Also, as each block has six sides which would have to be examined and handled many times before the whole surface of the block was exactly remembered in the mind’s eye, so the written words of Chinese must be examined and handled- broken down according to root characters and brush strokes, then written out countless times- until that visual memory is unshakably implanted in the brain.

Most pertinent to this analogy, imagine a child (or adult) setting up some blocks any way he wanted on a shelf, metaphorically building a sentence, then objecting strongly when someone else- a foreign language learner- tried to do the same. It would be baffling. The foreigner would question the idea that the blocks really could be arranged in any order, the way Chinese can combine so many words together and is alleged to have no grammar (I have heard this boastful “no grammar” claim before, but I will leave it to a boring linguist to deconstruct it). The foreigner would object, “But I did it just like you!” The native speaker would know though. He had trained his eyes to catch even the slightest difference in the arrangement of his blocks. “There is no grammar,” but the Chinese know which words go together, and though they often cannot explain it, they can perceive when their words aren’t used just right.

In my pronunciation practice with Uncle Jiang and others, I felt like I was setting up my blocks on a display shelf for their scrutiny, and they would huffily say, “No!” and then rearrange my blocks- my pronunciation- by sliding a block over with their finger just a hair. I am a native English speaker, so I thought, “What’s the difference? I speak my words approximately the same as they do.” But no, they could tell. My pronunciation of Chinese tones, which might have sounded identical or close enough to me, could be found outrageous by them. Chinese grammar has no rules save the capricious feelings of its native users, like the whimsy of a child’s arrangement of his toys, and Chinese pronunciation is just as subtle as that of a child who insists his toys must be exactly arranged.

Also note: blocks do not connect. Pipes must connect by being inserted together, being arranged in a system having the right shapes and distances and gravitational flow. But blocks can be stacked or set side by side in any arrangement; there are no joints or threads with which to connect one block to another. Words in Chinese come whole; there is no conjugation of verbs or modification of nouns and adjectives to connect them to another word. Chinese does not have “go, to go, am going, did go, will go, went, gone.” Chinese has “go, go, go.”

Chinese words can simply be set next to each other. One block can easily be swapped out for another equally-sized block and the arrangement will hold, so long as it is a native speaker who knows how to delicately arrange the clumsy objects. If you don’t have the touch, your hearers will soon be calling out “Jenga!”

Yes, Chinese is like blocks. Now that I have essayed to demonstrate this and acquainted the reader with the nature of English and Chinese as I very much imperfectly understand them, I can commence my complaint.

To be continued.

The Basics of the Chinese Language

Laoshi Dustin teaches Chinese.

Laoshi Dustin teaches Chinese.

(Continued from “Why I Stopped Learning Chinese”)
(Note: my references throughout are to Mandarin Chinese, or the standard dialect of Chinese which I learned and was exposed to. Cantonese and other major dialects I did not live with nor learn.)

For comparison between the two languages, English and Chinese, let’s look at the word “good.” To do so, I will need to begin a new section which anyone who is already learned in the Chinese language will find tedious and unnecessary. I urge these readers to skip past this post and save me the embarrassment of having my mistaken explanations and generalities corrected.

“Good” is a simple word, easily spelled in English, and to write it one merely has to use the letters he has long been master of: g-o-o-d. In Chinese, the equivalent word is written “好.” This is likewise a simple word in the Chinese writing system, which grades written characters according to their complexity (that is, the number of strokes needed to write a word). In Chinese, a complex character can have upward of twenty strokes. For purposes of reader comprehension only, consider the printed English alphabet, wherein all the letters are written with one or two strokes of the pen, unless one is writing for calligraphic purposes and uses three separate marks to make a letter like “k” or “m.”

The relatively simple Chinese word “好” has six strokes. It is made of two symbols set side by side. “女” (three strokes) which means “woman” and is a pictogram, or pictorial symbol, of a woman grown large with child, and “子” (also three strokes) which means “child” and is a pictogram of a baby wrapped tightly in nursing clothes. Don’t ask how these symbols are supposed to resemble a woman and a baby (I think the “woman” symbol looks like a passable stick figure drawing). It is like the rule of constellations: someone discovers a pattern, he gets the right to name it, it catches on with people, and soon everyone points to the sky and says, “Look, a bear!” when everyone knows full well that the stars look nothing like a bear, major or minor.

Chinese writing today developed out of primitive symbols (not necessarily inferior, just primitive) inscribed onto a hard surface (i.e. bamboo, inscribed with a reed pen, and before that the preserved written artifacts came on bones or tortoise shells). Brush and ink were found to be a better writing method, much quicker, and so the characters began to take on their elegant abstract shapes. With words like “好” we get a glimpse into the Chinese mind. A woman with child is a good thing. Hence the characters for “woman” and “child” form an ideogram (a symbol not of the visual world but the conceptual) for the quintessential representation of good. Not surprising then that China is the most populous country on earth and Han Chinese the largest people group. The character for “home” (家) is a symbol of a roof with an abstract pig underneath, so in ancient China, it was a pig that made a house a home.

Not every written word in Chinese can be broken down to find these charming insights. Not by a long shot. And not many words are simple pictographic symbols, like “木” for tree, “林” for woods, and “森” for forest. The majority are a combination of two or three simple characters: a root to give a hint about the sound or meaning of the word, and an accompanying symbol to distinguish the individual word and perhaps further suggest meaning. As an example, the character for bird is “鸟.” Most every type of bird: chicken, turkey, hawk, pigeon, and so forth, has this character embedded somewhere in its Chinese symbol. In the most basic arrangement, “鸟” is paired side by side with a second, distinguishing symbol to give a hint about the word’s pronunciation or specific meaning. “Chicken,” for example, is written “鸡,” and “duck” is written “鸭.” “Bird” is on the right, indicating the category or type of word (birds), and the distinguishing symbol is on the left. These side by side examples are only one basic form though. The root characters might also be stacked above or below others and contained within other symbols, and very commonly it looks more complex and confusing than the clear side by side examples. Their present-day forms have progressed through stages that have seen the words modified and added to considerably. It takes a lot of deciphering to get at the root of the words and understand their etymology.

So, the memorizing of Chinese characters is aided by mnemonics, but still there is the Herculean task of memorizing the symbols for thousands of individual words if one aspires to achieve an educated level of literacy. Word by word must be written stroke by stroke, over and over again until the stroke order and writing motions are lodged in the brain. If the rote practice of writing characters is abandoned, then how to write them is soon forgotten. The eye still recognizes words when reading them, and the mind has a vague memory of the written symbol, but it is indistinct. Attempting to write the word is useless because Chinese characters must be exactly and intricately drawn. Imagine if writing the word “it” was not a matter of remembering “i” followed by “t,” but memorizing “dot, down stroke, horizontal stroke, downward stroke” in that order. Then imagine memorizing stroke by stroke, first through last, in order, for words with one or two dozen strokes, multiplied by the thousands of words needed to build an educated Chinese written vocabulary.

The popularity of computer keyboards and text messaging has given rise to the modern Chinese observation: “take pen, forget character.” Even Chinese students, who have studied written characters their whole life, struggle to recall how to write certain words, especially when they have ceased writing practice in favor of the keyboard. Our resourceful yet stupid American youths can simply make up their spelling based on text messaging: “r u gone 2 tha gym?” Forgetful Chinese cannot ignorantly staple strokes together because the characters need to be written exactly, or pretty near, standard.

And the students in China strive harder than the pupils in any other language to achieve basic literacy and to acquire a working written vocabulary. Even though the Chinese language has only several thousand written characters in common usage, it takes years to master them all. Each of these characters has to be practiced dozens of times in a writing book before it can be used freely. At the height of my personal studies, I estimated that I could write close to three hundred words off the top of my head, and I recognized at least five hundred by sight- which is not enough to be very helpful in real conversation. I rapidly lost the ability to write mostly all of these words after ceasing regular use. Note: while the written language uses a relatively small number of written characters, these characters are regularly combined in Chinese to form new compound words (example: “How much?” is a two-word combination that is literally “Many-few?”), so the number of words used by a speaker or writer of Chinese, like any language, is practically unquantifiable. It all depends.

But how about typing these symbols on a computer? And how do foreign speakers learn the sounds of the written words if Chinese symbols have no phonics? The answer is a writing system called pinyin, which I mentioned earlier. Pinyin (pronounced in Chinese like “peen-yeen,” spoken through the nose with the tongue held against the roof of the mouth and the open lips fixed in place) uses Roman letters to imitate the sounds of spoken Chinese, only the letters have been loosely adapted and assigned new sounds. For example, “qi” in pinyin Chinese sounds like “chee” spoken quickly through a pinched mouth. “Xi” sounds like “shee,” also spoken with a quick, hissing sound.

Additionally, pinyin uses tonal marks over the vowels in a word to indicate which of the four tones to use. The tones are critical in Chinese for meaning and comprehension. Saying “ma” with a high-pitched even tone could mean “mother” or “to wipe,” whereas saying “ma” with a rising, low to high-pitched tone means “horse.” The simple consonant and vowel pairing “ma” can make seven different, common words, using four tones and one neutral tone (no inflection or stress in the voice). Even with four differentiating tones, words still overlap on the same sound, like “mother” and “to wipe.” All the possible syllables in Chinese have these tonal variations which can change the meaning of the word completely. In English, clearly, saying the same word with a different tone does not change the essential meaning, only the emotional tone or context.

Every syllable in Chinese must have a tone, and every word in Chinese is a one-syllable word, a compound of two one-syllable words, or possibly a phrase of several one-syllable words. Also, syllables must be a consonant followed by a vowel, sometimes ending in the open consonant sounds “-n” and “-ng.” Therefore, fa, fan, and fang, are possible sounds for Chinese words, but a consonant-vowel-consonant combination like fal or fat is not.

To understand how this works out, let’s go back to “好,” the Chinese word for “good.” In pinyin, its sound is written “hǎo.” That is one syllable, a consonant followed by a vowel sound, with a tone mark over the “a” to indicate a rising tone. This pinyin script teaches someone familiar with Chinese pronunciation how to pronounce “好” (it sounds like the question word “how” spoken with a low, rising voice from the back of the mouth). Now, if using a computer or sending a text message, pinyin can be used to input “好” or any of the thousands of other idiosyncratic Chinese characters that would never fit on a keyboard. The user would type “h-a-o,” then the computer program would display a list of the common words that are written “hao” in pinyin. “好” is a very common word, so it would probably be in the first slot in the program’s list, so the user would press “1” and “好” would be entered onscreen. There are other Chinese writing computer programs that go by stroke input, but I found pinyin input to be the easiest method and much more user-friendly; it didn’t require a working knowledge of the written characters’ stroke order.

Typing "nihao" (for "hello") into a pinyin input gives these options. Option 1 is the most likely option; in this case, "hello." To select Option 1, the user presses either 1 or the space bar.

Typing “nihao” (for “hello”) into a pinyin input gives these options. Option 1 is the most likely option; in this case, “hello.” To select Option 1, the user presses either 1 or the space bar.

The list of options for every syllable input might have had you wondering why such a thing was necessary. Again, it is because every possible consonant and vowel combination is differentiated by the four tones, and the words sometimes overlap, having the exact same sound and tone. “Ma” and “hao” can make many different Chinese words. The pinyin letters are the same, but nonetheless the words are written with a different Chinese character. Chinese is very limited in its possible consonant-vowel combinations. Certain consonants can only be paired with certain vowels. Imagine in English if “she” was possible but “show” was not, and you will have a simple abstraction of what Chinese is like. Looking at the pinyin section of a Chinese dictionary, it becomes readily apparent that the Chinese language is a moderate collection of permutations. Nearly all the words are limited, single consonant and single vowel combinations. English allows for most any pronounceable consonant cluster, and consonants and vowels can form whatever syllables are practically demanded. A word like “strict,” for example, starts with “str-,” a three-consonant cluster inconceivable in Chinese, and it also ends in a hard-stop consonant cluster: “-ct.” Chinese words, written in pinyin, cannot do that. They must end in short, open vowels or in an open consonant sound: “-n” or “-ng.”

Having short, one-syllable words and limited combinations of consonants and vowels necessitates that Chinese has far fewer written words (characters) than English. Chinese uses compound words to create new words from its basic building blocks: one-syllable words, so it is not lacking when the people need a new word to express a new concept. It is only that the new words are all compounds of the existing, simple words. A funny example from the modern age: “computer” in Chinese is a compound word combing their words for “electric” and “brain.” Very simple, perhaps charmingly so, from an English speaker’s perspective. But it must be considered that English accepts all comers in its world word buffet, so long as the word works and has a nice feel or pronunciation. So the English language has an unmatchable amount of words by way of its borrowing from other languages. Regardless, the words and sounds of Chinese are nonetheless quite limited. The sounds are very often similar, indistinguishable to the untrained ear, or even actually identical, indistinguishable no matter whose ears you use.

One other thing, besides pinyin, which was implemented as part of the latest stage of the development of the Chinese language, that being Chairman Mao’s cultural reforms and the intent to make the written language easier to use: simplified Chinese. Simplified Chinese is basically making shortcuts in the complex, intricate, and numerous strokes of many Chinese words. Taking the pen to write “龍” (“dragon”) requires 16 brush or (commonly) pen strokes in traditional Chinese. Making it simpler, but still somehow recognizable, simplified Chinese writes the same word/symbol as “龙” and only uses 5 strokes. An economical alternative trying to make a written language which is by nature cumbersome a little less so.

One word which could use the simplified treatment, which relates back to one of my original questions on the Chinese language, is the character for “I”: 我. The most common pronoun and most common word in speech is pronounced simply (it sounds like “wuh”), but it is written with seven marks of the pen. These seven marks, while written rapidly, are astonishingly too numerous- at least four or five too many- for such a common word.
I know this passage has been tedious, an informal information dump, but I believe it is relevant and necessary to include in my discussion on the topic.

For those more familiar with Chinese, please forgive me where I have been imprecise or ignorant. I will forgive you for not skipping over this section as I asked you to. And for those unfamiliar, I hope I have provided you with some insight and a feel for my experience with Chinese, which is admittedly very limited. Before I get into my complaint on the Chinese language, I would now like to offer a personal observation, an analogy for Chinese and English that is entirely subjective but I think an accurate and easy way to understand the essential difference between the two languages.

Continued in Plumbing and Blocks: A Metaphor for Language

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