Young China

by Zak Dychtwald

  If you understand the twenty-six symbols that represent one or several sounds in English, you can pronounce just about any word in the English language. With Chinese, if you don’t recognize one character, reading it aloud from the page is impossible. Chinese is a logographic language; every symbol or character represents a word or has an intrinsic meaning. The character 戴, pronounced dài, my last name in Chinese, is not just a sound. Dài means something on its own—“to respect.”

  In the United States people often ask whether I speak Mandarin or Cantonese. China actually has five major groupings of dialects, two of which are Mandarin and Cantonese. From 1849 until the late twentieth century, almost every Chinese emigrating from China to the United States was likely to speak Cantonese, the language of the Guangdong region, formerly known as Canton. Many immigrants even came from Shenzhen. They lived close to Hong Kong’s Victorian Harbor and in an area of the country devastated by floods and famine in the 1840s. The natural disasters prompted the first emigrants to leave to participate in the Gold Rush in the United States and made peasants who remained in that area of China sympathetic to the Taiping Rebellion, which began in 1850. By the time the rebellion ended fourteen years later, southeastern China was in ruins and twenty million people had died. Survivors left if they could. Thus a disproportionate number of people of Chinese descent living abroad speak Cantonese. In reality, there are thirteen Mandarin speakers for every Cantonese speaker, and most Cantonese speakers are now made to speak both.17

  China’s post-90s generation is the first to be predominantly fluent in Mandarin, in large part thanks to TV, Internet, and learning in school. Still, only 70 percent of the entire population speaks Mandarin, leaving four hundred million people, mostly older, able to communicate only with people from their own region.

  In 1956, mainland China switched from traditional Chinese characters to a simplified system. But Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau still use traditional characters. If a Hong Kong restaurant’s menu is in traditional characters, some of my Chinese friends cannot read all of it.

  * * *

  While it’s impossible to understand China if you don’t speak Chinese, knowing the language does not mean you automatically understand China.

  My first real Chinese friend was Huan Huan. We had similar interests, hobbies, and curiosities, and we enjoyed good banter in Chinese. Until I met him, most of my Chinese friendships had formed around our differences. The young Chinese I had met during my first year in China were interested in me as a foreigner. I was interested in them as Chinese. Huan Huan was different. He was the first friend I made after my Chinese language skills caught up with my personality, and he invited me to visit him at his family’s home village for Chinese New Year.

  As I waited for the bus that would carry me to Huan Huan’s village—a twelve-hour trip—I juggled gifts of whiskey, tea, and candied meats from Chengdu. The Chinese custom is to bring local delicacies as a gift. But because modern life has scattered Chinese to different cities and regions, they bring back the specialties of their new home to share with family and neighbors. As a foreigner, two bottles of Irish whiskey qualified as my local delicacy. That night Huan Huan and his family held a large dinner for neighbors and friends at their house. At the table were Huan Huan’s parents, uncles, and his “little brother”—really just a cousin, because, like many Chinese of his generation, Huan Huan was an only child. I worked at being a model guest, paying especially close attention to my pleases and thank yous.

  At some point during the meal, I realized Huan Huan was looking increasingly agitated. After I thanked his mother for more rice, Huan Huan finally called me outside for a private chat.

  “Are you uncomfortable in there?”

  “No, very comfortable.”

  “Is the food to your liking? Is everyone being respectful?”

  “Yes, of course. The food is all excellent.” It was delicious.

  “Then, goddamnit,” he said, “you’ve got to stop saying thank you. Our guests are taking it the wrong way. I told them we were brothers. They think I’ve pulled in a random foreigner off the street to flaunt my life in a big city.”

  Manners don’t translate well from Chinese to English and vice versa. Chinese does not have a word for please. The closest to please is qǐng. The word suggests more of an invitation or a request than an expression of cordialness. “Welcome, Mr. Dychtwald, qǐng follow me to the boardroom.”

  Like please, thank you can be unintentionally off-putting. China’s is a culture of treated meals, of buying things for other people, and of having things bought for you. The buying is an expression of familiarity and affection. “Among friends, there is no need for thank you,” Huan Huan would reprimand me as he paid for our roadside barbecue and beers. “You thank strangers for kindnesses; they are expected of friends.”

  My Chinese friends are quick to point out that in Chinese etiquette, actions speak louder than words. To compliment Huan Huan’s mother’s food, I ate more of it. Everyone noticed. She glowed, wordlessly. If you really want to thank someone for their generosity, repay that person in kind. Huan Huan taught me the silent language of the give and take of relationships in China.

  * * *

  My time in China formed like a wall of the Grand Canyon, layer stacked upon layer of individual experiences that added color and texture to the whole. I can most easily think about those layers through the bits of language I was learning at the time.

  The foundation, or bottom layer, was the discussion of American eating habits and guns on the overnight train. Above that was a layer about drinking etiquette—whom to toast first, how to toast properly. One layer higher was why you say please and thank you to strangers, not to friends. A few layers up were the experiences of learning about the Chinese concept of friendship and the importance of sibling-like relationships to a generation of only children. Shimmering between the dusty layers of everyday life was the pursuit of freedom, evidenced by the tattoos on the wrists, backs, and legs of people across the country. Tempering that freedom was responsibility and tradition—I watched a just-married Chinese couple kneel on stage before their parents to be acknowledged as new members of the family. In a country with no recent history of religion, this was the only formal sealing of the matrimonial bond. Above that layer was death, a layer that I can’t remember or even use the vocabulary I learned—hǔohùa (cremation)—without thinking of my friend Wei Wei, who was made to watch her grandfather’s body enter the furnace at a government-mandated cremation center. That layer was gray like the soot on the pants of Wei Wei’s little sister that came from burning offerings to their grandfather’s spirit throughout the night. The next layer was a Buddhist scholar’s explanation of the difference between everyday Chinese life and Buddhism while we watched a sky burial—a corpse left on a mountaintop to be picked clean by vultures. Unlike China’s current materialistic life of addition—new phones, new cars, new houses—Buddhism is about the process of subtraction, he said. Streaking across the different layers was a vein of quartz that represents an understanding of where modern Confucianism is breaking down and where it continues to bind China together.

  The night before I was to fly back to the States from Chengdu, which had become a home for me in China, I stayed up drinking baijiu (a sorghum alcohol, typically one hundred proof or more) with Tom. At this point almost all my friends were Chinese, as were my current and previous roommates, people I considered my brothers and sisters, people to whom I would reach out or who would reach out to me at important moments. The reward for the hard work of learning the language was rich friendships with people like Tom.

  That night he and I spoke a mixture of Mandarin and Sichuanese dialect as the booze settled in. We talked about the difficulty of trying to span cultures, of presenting China to the world, of the nearly impossible challenge of trying to speak for another culture that has a voice but whose message needs to be translated for a global audience.

  Tom said, “In China, we have a tradition of
旁观者清” (“páng guān zhě qǐng”). The Chinese idiom means “the observer sees clearly.”

  “China does a terrible job of presenting ourselves to the world. With the image of China in Europe, America, and the West, we just look like brainwashed young people, 1984-style governance, hair in queues…” His voice trailed off.

  “Look, man,” he continued, placing his glass on the table. “As long as you don’t make all of us out to be organ-stealing prostitutes, we’re making progress.”

  2

  Bella and the Books

  China’s Competitive Study Culture Forges a Determined Heart

  “The university here is lazy,” Bella sighed as she waited at the front of a pack of students scattered around the entrance to the library. Lights along the campus drive illuminated the dark morning. Bella wore half the clothes in her closet, five thick layers, to ward off the chill. Her breath drifted through the sky. Other students milled about as they sipped the rice porridge that street vendors had ladled, piping hot, into flimsy plastic cups. Others ate egg wraps, cooked on the bottom of an upturned pot placed over hot coals. Bella munched on one of the two vegetable buns she picked up every morning on the way to the library. Pressing its warmth against her bare hands, she said, half asleep, “Our high school library opened earlier than this. Don’t they want us to succeed here?”

  Bella, who was twenty-three, came from Zhejiang Province on China’s eastern coast, just south of Shanghai. “Thin like a willow and just as common”—Bella’s way of describing herself—she blended seamlessly into the crowd of Chinese college students that frigid morning. She had a warm, bright smile and exuded a kindness that could be mistaken for meekness. She had devoted the entire year after her graduation from college to preparing for a test to gain admission to graduate school. The results of the test would define her future. She wanted to become a translator, and a good score on her admissions test was her only ticket.

  At 7:45 a.m. someone finally opened the library doors. Bella raced to secure her usual seat with the same five students who joined her daily at a table for six in a library filled with hundreds.

  Each month Bella would spend more than 320 hours in the Suzhou University library, over eighty hours a week. By that point in Suzhou’s bitter winter, Bella had sat in the same room at the same desk with the same people for five months. Translation books stacked around a small square on a long, rectangular wooden table marked Bella’s territory. Similar book barriers divided the table into six neat spaces, all occupied by students who, like Bella, spent more than ten hours a day in their book-made cubbyholes. The table was one of fifteen in the study room, and the study room was one of twelve in one of Suzhou University’s many libraries.

  I once asked Bella what the young man who had set up shop next to her for the last several months was studying.

  “I’m not sure,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.

  I pointed at the desk. Five economics books marked the border between Bella’s study space and this student’s. She giggled. “Economics.”

  “Where is he from?”

  “Ummmm…” Another shrug.

  “How old is he?” I asked.

  “I think around my age? Maybe a little older.”

  “What is his name?” I ventured.

  “I don’t know. We have never spoken.”

  Bella suppressed a smile, furrowed her brow, and put her hands on her hips in mock severity, then told me, “We’re here to study, remember?”

  Bella would live a full year in this library, laboring every day toward her dream of getting into one of the best translation programs in the country and the opportunity to become a professional translator. The odds? Bella rattled them off from memory: Be one of fourteen students to gain a place from a field of six thousand applicants. Two-tenths of one percent.

  * * *

  It wasn’t so long ago that no one in China received much of a classroom education. In 1975, only about 11 percent of Chinese had graduated from high school. Mandatory education stopped after junior high, and in any case the Cultural Revolution had made a mockery of the classroom. Bella’s parents were members of that uneducated generation. China’s modern economy was built on people like Bella’s parents and grandparents: uneducated laborers with a solid work ethic. Those generations were so hungry to work that they became known for continually asking their managers for overtime in some of the world’s most menial factory positions. These same parents were determined to see their children get a better education.

  In 1999, the Chinese central government and the Ministry of Education announced a lofty college enrollment expansion reform that would increase enrollment by half a million students, nearly double what it was the year earlier. Over the next fifteen years, the annual number of Chinese graduating from higher education ballooned sevenfold. In 2014 Bella was one of 7.26 million Chinese to walk out of university with a new degree.1

  Bella was a member of the largest college graduating class in Chinese history, but that meant hers was the worst year to graduate in terms of job opportunities and the economy. She could not find a job, or at least not one suitable for a young woman with a college education. “The competition,” Bella said, when I asked her what was the hardest part about finding a job in China. “There are so many people like me—a college degree from an okay university, good test scores, so-called motivated team player—that makes it impossible to differentiate ourselves.” In his memoir Decision Points, former US president George W. Bush recalls asking then-Chinese president Hu Jintao, “What keeps you up at night?” The Chinese president responded without hesitating: “Creating 25 million jobs a year.”2

  But not just any jobs. Transitioning from one million college graduates to more than seven million in just fifteen years set a demanding pace for job creation, particularly the higher-end jobs appropriate for college graduates.

  China has not yet built the economy that Bella and her generation of white-collar workers will run; it has not made the transition from a manufacturing giant to a service-sector dynamo. China has the talent but does not yet have the jobs. In the meantime, students submit waves of graduate school applications as they try to differentiate themselves from their peers. Bella was a drop of water in the swell.

  While studying for her graduate school admissions test, Bella slept on a bottom bunk at Suzhou University in a small dorm room that looked out on the side of a concrete bridge spanning one of Suzhou’s famous canals. She shared the room with five other young women. It had no bathroom, and only a shared sink in the hall. Fifty or so young women shared a few toilet stalls. If Bella wanted to shower, she washed in a building ten minutes away in a large, communal shower hall. When it snowed in winter, she washed her hair in a plastic tub with water she boiled in an electric tea kettle. Because the dorm had no heat, she wore much of her wardrobe to bed. Many Westerners might call her lifestyle monkish. But most students in China live the same way.

  Like most in her generation, Bella was an only child, born ten years after China’s family planning program, the now-infamous one-child policy, took effect in 1979. She has translated articles about her generation from Chinese to English. Once she handed me a piece of paper riddled with notes. On top was the title 《小皇帝》 (“Xiǎo huángdì”), “Little Emperors.” She pointed to the middle of the page and asked in Chinese, “Does this term make any sense? I think I’m translating this correctly.” The words were “behavioral ticking time bomb.” This phrase has cropped up in Chinese publications for dozens of years. It was originally translated into Chinese from a 1988 article in The Times of London, “China’s Brat Pack: Generation of Only-Children,” and became part of the collective consciousness of China, both as a warning and a bit of a challenge. These reminders of how the West views China are peppered throughout media and even classroom textbooks. As a country that commemorates its Century of Humiliation—the period between the First Opium War and the end of Japanese occupation (1839–1949)—and its time being referred to as �
��The Sick Man of Asia,” China likes to remind itself of its doubters.

  I nodded yes, her translation made sense. Bella motioned to all the students with their heads bent over their desk and whispered, “Boom!” Mr. Economics lifted his head and looked over the book barrier, adjusting his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose. Bella dived below her book barricade and giggled.

  * * *

  Bella’s family is part of China’s burgeoning middle class. Her father had formed a collective of anglers to sell their catch at the local market in their coastal village. After experiencing minor success, he had started a hair salon, a restaurant, and an arcade. All eventually went under. Despite their failure, the family had made far more money than Bella’s father and grandfather had made by casting nets. Today her father owns and runs several small local restaurants. “My dad may not be the best businessman,” she told me, “but he can fill a table with delicious seafood in no time flat.”

  Bella was very much the center of her family’s attention. She fondly recalled leaving primary school and spying her grandfather in the crowd of eager grandparents waiting outside the school gates. During winter all would be wearing the same navy-blue jacket of thick cotton, a Maoist fashion relic. Practicality was deeply ingrained in that generation. Her grandfather would excitedly hoist seven-year-old Bella onto the back of his bike, and the pair would ride to the local convenience store to get an ice cream. Cones secured, they would then plunk down on a park bench and slurp away in grinning silence.

  “I realized only later that Grandpa liked taking me to get ice cream so much because he wanted to eat it too,” Bella mused. Bella’s grandfather was born in 1940. Much of Europe was already engaged in World War II. Japan had brutally occupied parts of China since 1931. When Bella’s grandfather was five, the Japanese left and Mao’s Communists went to war with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party. Chiang fled to Taiwan in 1949, when Bella’s grandfather was nine. He survived famine when he was eighteen and kept his head down during his late twenties and early thirties to avoid trouble during the Cultural Revolution, when he had had his own kids.