by Huan Hsu
Then began a series of banquets, first for the matchmaker, to dispense of the person who, according to a Jiujiang saying, was “tossed over the wall” once the bride arrived. The next morning was a banquet for the bride’s side. Villagers and beggars lined both sides of the main gate between the banquets to cheer, and rich families would toss silver coins at them like confetti. Then there was another extravagant banquet for the family and villagers. After three days of feasting, the bride returned to her new home, accompanied by a male relative who sent over a porcelain dowry jar for storing oil.
As the section chief of the Jiujiang-Nanchang line, Ting Zan earned a good salary, but in keeping with tradition, he sent most of his income back to his father in Xingang, setting aside just enough to care for his wife and three daughters. His brothers followed suit, and these three revenue streams flowing back to Xingang swelled my great-great-grandfather’s property holdings until he came to own most of the buildings on the main road of Xingang.
By his fiftieth birthday, Liu curtailed his teaching and bookkeeping to devote more time to managing his estate, which had grown to six families. His brothers’ lives had not been as prosperous, and they relied on him for help. The middle brother hadn’t made any effort to study the classics as a youngster and grew into an opium addict who spent his days idling with food and drink like the pampered son of an official. The youngest brother had studied diligently for the imperial exams but couldn’t manage to pass, and the repeated failures destroyed him. There were also nephews, daughters-in-law, grandchildren, a young daughter not yet of marrying age, and various servants to support.
Ting Zan’s work, while prestigious and well compensated, was also arduous. He spent much of his time in the field, where, in addition to the daily responsibilities of supervising the construction of the eighty-mile length of rail, he was tasked with settling disputes between the company and local landowners whose property stood in the path of the lines. If a cemetery happened to be in the way, those families demanded reparations. Ting Zan would lead excavations to first determine the veracity of the claims—locals would sometimes bury animal bones and claim them as their ancestors’ in the hopes of getting a settlement—and then arrange for the reburial of the remains in another location. He worked long hours, ate poorly, and eventually contracted tuberculosis. The railway was completed in 1915, four years after the birth of my grandmother, and Ting Zan retreated to an office in Sha He, the first southbound stop on the line.
ACCORDING TO MY FAMILY, THE FIRST WORD I EVER SPOKE was in Chinese. It was a phrase, actually, uttered when I was eight months old and my mother saw that I had thrown my stuffed rabbit out of my crib. “Where’s your rabbit, Huan?” she asked. I said, “It fell,” and my mother almost fainted. I was supposedly a Chinese chatterbox as a toddler, but I couldn’t remember ever speaking Chinese, other than to mimic or make fun of Chinese people. At home, my parents spoke mostly Chinese to each other and a mixture of Chinese and English to me and my younger brother, while we responded exclusively in English.
Growing up in a Chinese-speaking household must have created enough neural connections that, while dormant for many years, nonetheless would provide me with a head start with the language, though not without the many deficiencies unique to ABCs. My biggest problem was vocabulary, which consisted primarily of what my parents talked about to me when I was a child, effectively limiting my lexicon to that of a seven-year-old with a Christian schoolteacher mother and a scientist father. Thus I knew the words for tithing, church, homework, laboratory, and the phrases for lose face, clean your room, and or I’ll spank your behind into four pieces, but not, say, boring, or surname, or napkin, or department, or any business terms whatsoever. I could say camera but not video camera, because my father thought taking moving pictures was lazy. Whenever I searched for a word, I first tried to recall one of my parents saying it, and if I could hear their voices—discussing Taiwanese politics with their friends, recounting their workdays, ordering me to do chores—I had the word. This could be impressive, as when I could tell people my father worked with electron microscopes. And it could be very embarrassing, as I learned that the Chinese I thought I knew was often either Taiwanese vernacular (with differences like those between British and American English) or diminutives that parents use with children. The first time I tried to buy a cup of juzi shui, or orange juice, at the company’s coffee café, the cashier giggled uncontrollably. I later learned that ju means the color orange, not the fruit (that’s chengzi), and that zhi, not shui, is juice. When I ordered juzi shui, I was basically asking for “orangey yum.”
In Chinese, each word can have up to four tones attached to it, which makes for plentiful opportunities to mangle the language. It isn’t an accent, like the American and British pronunciations of schedule; it’s the difference between saying deficits and defecates. And then there are the homophones. While Westerners spell out difficult or unfamiliar words, Chinese often trace out the characters with their finger, which was useless for illiterates like me.
Though I had a good ear for tones and could reproduce them fairly accurately, I often had trouble remembering them. “Take me to Yan’an Road, please,” I’d say to a taxi driver, hoping that the tones I’d chosen for Yan and an were correct.
“Where?” he’d ask.
“Yan’an Road.” I would repeat it with another combination of tones.
“There is no Yan’an Road.”
I would start to get angry, thinking he was just trying to squirm out of a bad fare. “Of course there is! Yan’an Road, now!” A third combination of tones.
“I’m telling you, mister, there’s no Yan’an Road. Do you know how to write it?”
“No, I don’t. Don’t be so lazy. Just take me to Yan’an Road.” A fourth. There were still twelve more possibilities.
“I’m not being lazy. I have no idea where Yan’an Road is.”
“Then you’re stupid.”
“Whatever you say.”
Eventually, after calling Andrew or someone who spoke better Chinese and who was more familiar with the city and handing the phone to the driver (a much-used tactic among expats), the driver would exclaim, “Oh! Yan-AN Road! Of course.”
After many months of these exchanges, and the withering looks from Andrew that followed, I signed up for the company’s Chinese class, taught by a good-natured woman from human resources named Jewel who wore her hair in a pixie cut and spoke excellent English; she was one of the few local Chinese who would eat lunch with the expats. There were about a dozen students, mostly teachers from the company’s school, and I was the only one of Chinese descent. It was supposedly the intermediate course, for those with some familiarity with the language, but we spent most of the class on basic grammar and characters. Despite my resoluteness in avoiding all things Chinese as a child, I couldn’t avoid developing an intuitive sense of the former, and while the latter was useful, it wasn’t a pressing need. I wanted to arm myself with words, but the other students seemed preoccupied with perfecting their pinyin (China’s official phonetic system for transcribing Chinese characters) and memorizing grammar rules that struck me as esoteric and nitpicky. There was the added distraction of one of the other men in the class, an Italian engineer named Roberto. When we paired up to read a simple dialogue, he demanded that I slow down so that he could translate every character, first into pinyin and then into Italian. “You shouldn’t be in this class,” he grumbled.
I agreed with him but tried to be gracious. “No, I have a lot to learn,” I said.
“No, you shouldn’t,” he said. “You’re just going to keep me from learning.”
One night in class Jewel explained how to modulate a request depending on the situation. She wrote one example on the board, and Roberto asked, “But is it polite?” With his accent, polite sounded like bulai, or “don’t come.” They shouted at each other in confusion until another class member translated.
I decided to call one of the many private language schools in S
hanghai. An ABC friend recommended an outfit called Panda Chinese in Puxi. The office manager tested my Chinese over the phone. I surprised myself at how easily I understood and answered her questions. “You’re too advanced for our beginner class,” she said. “I recommend you sign up for one-on-one tutoring.”
I’d also had enough of the suburban dystopia of the company living quarters and began looking for an apartment in Puxi. After a few weeks searching listings geared toward expat renters (renovated lane houses, often furnished with items from Ikea, which had cachet in China), and exploring Shanghai’s concession architecture, some charming, some neglected, I moved into a one-bedroom apartment in a well-kept lane house on West Nanjing Road, the continuation of the east–west thoroughfare that originated at the Bund and demarcated the northern border of the former French Concession. In my great-great-grandfather’s time, the street was quaint, treelined, and known as Bubbling Well Road, for the natural spring surfacing at its terminus, Jing’An temple. Now only the trees remained, nd from my window I could see three shopping malls full of luxury brands, including flagship Gucci and Louis Vuitton stores, towering above their crowns. Men circulated in the pedestrian traffic hawking fake watches and leather goods to the white faces, and women sat on the plazas selling fruit out of baskets balanced on bamboo yokes, mangosteens one month, bing cherries—always proudly advertised as imported from California and always overripe—another month. During one of the city’s occasional antiterrorism initiatives, a bombsniffing beagle patrolled the plaza wearing a doggie vest emblazoned with “Explosive Dog.”
The language school placed me with a young woman named Crystal who wore short-shorts, chunky wedge sandals to make her taller, and blue eye shadow. She was from Wenzhou, a coastal city about three hundred miles south of Shanghai known for savvy businesspeople. As China reformed its economy in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, Wenzhou received little investment from the central government, but its inhabitants embraced entrepreneurialism as families and friends pooled their money to set up private enterprises, primarily in light manufacturing; the city produced 60 percent of the world’s buttons and 70 percent of its cigarette lighters. Many of those entrepreneurs became astronomically rich. When the Chinese spoke of baofa hu, literally “explosive rich,” a slightly pejorative term for overnight millionaires with more money than taste, they often had Wenzhou people in mind.
Crystal and I followed a workbook, but most of the time we just chatted about our lives and experiences while she explained new words and phrases as they came up. Instead of systematically building a great wall of knowledge brick by brick, I mortared vocabulary ad hoc onto an unstable, incoherent foundation, patching holes with mismatched material selected on the basis of how easily it could be acquired. It was all very Chinese, really.
I met with Crystal three times a week, and many of our sessions centered on questions of Chinese-ness; I was the child who had suddenly discovered the word why? One day Crystal told me about Kong Rong Rang Li, an ancient story of virtue akin to George Washington and the cherry tree. Kong Rong was the sixth of seven brothers in the Han dynasty. When his father brought home some pears and picked out the largest, sweetest one for him, Kong Rong refused it and chose the smallest one instead, explaining that since he was younger, he ought to leave the best fruit for his older brothers. But what about your younger brother? his father asked. Kong Rong replied that as the older brother, it was his obligation to take care of his younger sibling, and thus he should also get a bigger pear.
“Wait, if everyone is taught this story about selflessness, then why are people so selfish?” I said. “I hardly ever see people give up subway seats for elderly or pregnant people. There’s no courtesy getting on or off the subway, going up escalators, standing in line …”
“Yes, a British student of mine once asked me why we keep talking about five thousand years of history and culture,” Crystal said. “It seemed to him that there was only about a hundred years of culture, because all the ancient stuff was gone. And that caused me great shame. He’s right in a way, because now, especially in Shanghai, there is such an emphasis on money and thinking that as long as you have money, nothing else matters. But a lot of it is just because people don’t know. This will slowly improve, like the spitting.”
That led to me asking her about another Chinese habit: wearing pajamas in public. “I get asked this a lot by my students,” Crystal said.
“I heard it’s because historically only the very rich could afford to have two sets of clothes, and that wearing sleeping clothes outside shows how wealthy you are,” I said.
“No!” Crystal said. “That’s completely wrong! Back in the old days, people didn’t have pajamas. They just wore their innermost layer of clothing to sleep in. The tradition is taking off clothes, not changing them. Chinese people just don’t know that pajamas are only for sleeping in. They think, well, they might be designed for sleeping, but they’re really comfortable, so why not wear them on the street? Even my mom, she’ll go downstairs or into our compound’s courtyard and hang out with other ladies in her pajamas. I tell her all the time it’s not right. But she just ignores me or tells me not to worry about her, because she’s the mother and I’m the child.”
“Okay,” I said. “Now what is it with the long fingernails?”
Crystal sighed. “I get that question all the time, too.”
When we moved on to Chinese customs in gift giving (a favorite topic among teachers), I probably wasn’t as enthralled as Crystal’s other students. According to Chinese tradition, a clock, or zhong, signifies the end, and to song zhong, or “send a clock,” is a euphemism for attending a funeral. Small shoes are also discouraged, since they make the wearer’s life painful. So are shoes in general, because they allow one’s partner to run away. Umbrellas make bad gifts, because they are a homonym for “separation.” A green hat for a man means he is a cuckold. Neither black nor white dresses are appropriate for weddings. Chopsticks shouldn’t be placed vertically in a bowl of noodles or rice, as that resembles incense sticks, and incense is associated with death. Buildings seldom have fourth floors, as the number four, or si, is a homonym for “dead.”
Where others might have delighted in these cultural peculiarities, I only saw examples of the Chinese people imprisoned by their own language, their behavior dictated by words that sounded like other words, reminders of China’s obstinacy and failure to innovate. The clunkiness of first sinocizing Western words or ideas before adding them to the lexicon means that the Chinese use the same word for “alligator” and “crocodile” and categorize them as “fish.” Same goes for rat and mouse, and cow and bull. With every new zodiac calendar, the English-language newspapers would debate whether to call it the year of the rat or the mouse, or cow or bull. Fanqie jiang describes “tomato sauce,” “ketchup,” or “salsa,” which may explain why some restaurants serve pasta with ketchup and why even a Westernized Chinese person can still make the mistake of buying a jar of pasta sauce for dipping tortilla chips. There are words for the different pieces of equipment used in skiing and snowboarding, but nothing to differentiate the two sports.
The Chinese language is like an uncooperative child, staying rooted when it needs to move forward and sprawling when one tries to gather it up. Whereas the twenty-six English letters can be combined to reproduce most sounds, assimilate foreign words and ideas, and encourage invention and evolution, Chinese is iconographic, a set of tens of thousands of distinct symbols, each of which represents a certain idea. Like Richard’s company requiring ever more complex machines to produce chips that would keep up with the ever-changing market, every new Chinese word or idea requires an addition to the language, not a repurposing or recombination of existing equipment.
That makes Chinese difficult to reconcile with the digital age. As more documents and records are kept electronically, new complications arise for the written language, ones that have to do with the very characters themselves. Some Chinese characters simply cannot be
input electronically. The creation of a new English typeface simply requires the design of its fifty-two constituent letters. But with tens of thousands of discrete characters in the Chinese language, creating Chinese typefaces is painstaking work, even with the assistance of computers. Despite having invented movable type, the Chinese still have only a handful of type designs at their disposal; most word processing software used in China ships with nearly 150 different Western fonts and just six Chinese ones. Chinese citizens with untypable characters in their names are forced to select new ones; the language is so rigid that even identities become obsolete. Adapting Chinese for digital use is so unwieldy that it often relies on a decidedly analog solution: in the backstreets of Shanghai are old masters creating new types by handwriting each of the 47,000 Chinese characters with a calligraphy brush, an endeavor that literally takes a lifetime to complete. The characters are then individually scanned at type foundries and converted into electronic fonts.