Dreaming in Chinese (15 page)

We were stunned. Sandy was normally shy, still learning to stand her ground in front of a class of brash Westerners, and typically did not insert her personality into the business of her teaching. Her defiance was remarkable to me in two ways: one for what she said (the outright declaration) and one for how she said it (her use of pronouns). And they were connected. Sandy recognized and was declaring that, once raised and educated, her destiny was singularly up to her. She could well have been speaking for the whole cohort of people in their twenties, who are growing up in a very different China from that of their parents. Sandy’s generation will not see the cradle-to-grave care and control that the state both provided for and imposed on earlier generations. This was a new world, where she would make her own way.

And when Sandy said, “
I
believe in
myself,
” there was nothing wishy-washy about how she said it. She knew precisely that using those pronouns beamed the attention right on herself. I wondered if she also knew how this use of “self” flew in the face of the tone of her parents’ generation, who grew up during the Cultural Revolution.

From a novel by a Chinese woman who relocated to London:

We Chinese are not encouraged to use the word “self” so often. The old comrades in the work unit would say, how can you think of “self” most of the time but not about others and the whole society?
¹⁷

What I never learned was why Sandy made her declaration in English. This was our Chinese class, after all, and we would have understood her Chinese at that point:
Wǒ xiāngxìn wǒ zìjǐ
“I believe I self.” Did speaking English somehow free Sandy up to go straight for the pronouns and ram her point home? I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know that we were impressed.

15
Yip, Po-Ching, and Rimmington, Don,
Chinese: A Comprehensive Grammar
, Routledge, 2003.

16
http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/05/todays_chapter_on_chinese_educ.php#more

17
Guo, Xiaolu,
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers,
Doubleday, 2007, p. 213.

Rènao
Hot-and-noisy

9.
Think like the Chinese think

W
ALKING HOME ONE
drizzly night along Shanghai’s busy Nanjing Lu, I passed a laborer doing roadwork. He was submerged to his ankles in a soggy trench, wearing rubber flip-flops and wielding a heavy, sparking blowtorch. It looked very dangerous. Most mornings as I walked to school along the same road, I watched a restaurant staff hosing down their concrete deck. They padded around puddles in their bare feet, plugging and unplugging radios, fans and electric tools.

There is more: one day I passed a telephone linesman who hooked his homemade ladder over a set of swinging cables, then clambered up, and edged like a tightrope walker along the tension wires 15 feet above the ground. In Shanghai pairs of window cleaners routinely dangle and sway tens of stories high, buckets and squeegies in hand, secured only to each other at opposite ends of a rope that hooks around some invisible rooftop anchor. One day in Beijing, I watched half a dozen workers struggling to right a toppled and leaking gasoline can atop their rickety cart, puffing all the while on their cigarettes. Daily, I wanted to cry out “
Xiǎoxīn
!” Look out! Be careful! Watch out!

China can be a dangerous place. The papers are filled with reports of mining disasters, bus crashes and construction site collapses. An average of 250 people die every day from accidents of all sorts. A fire in an upper stairwell of Shanghai’s World Financial Center, until recently the tallest building in the world, slowed down work for a while in the summer of 2007. During the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, thousands of the so-called “tofu-dregs schoolhouses”
collapsed from shoddy construction.

In Shanghai, taxi drivers routinely work 24-hour shifts. In that city I can count three separate terrifying taxi rides, where I sat peering from the backseat at the rear-view mirror, watching the driver’s eyelids droop as the car started to weave. Desperate to keep the driver awake, my husband and I would engage in loud faux-arguments, or shamelessly poke and prod the driver to rouse him (or, in one case, her) into consciousness.

Xiǎoxīn
!
(shyao sheen) means “Watch out!”
Xiǎo-xīn
is literally “small heart.” I envision my own heart closing tightly, becoming very small, when I see these dangerous acts. Sometimes
xiǎoxīn
is used as an adjective that means “cautious” or “careful,” as in “He is a naturally cautious driver.” Sometimes mothers cry out “
Xiǎoxīn!
” to their children approaching crosswalks.

My language books tell me that in China “ancient people believed that the heart—
xīn
—was related to thinking and temperament,” in sentiments like desire, fear, love and respect. Hence,
xīn
finds its way into many feeling-related compound words:

Kāixīn
=
kāi
(open) + heart = joyous

Fàngxīn
=
fàng
(put in place) + heart = set your mind at ease

Shāngxīn
=
shāng
(wound) + heart = heart- broken

Rèxīn
=
rè
(hot) + heart = enthusiastic or warm- hearted

Coining compound words, like
kāixīn
(joyous) or
xiǎoxīn
(danger) is one way to give names to new concepts or ideas, inventions, or nuances of sophistication. If simple words cover the basics of civilization—words like hot, cold, sun, moon, food, tree, mother, hand, walk and die—then compound words step up to the next stage with words like whirlpool, snowman, brainstorm, sunglasses, skyline, tiptoe, heartbroken. Chinese has been adding compounds to its lexicon for hundreds, even thousands of years. In Old Chinese, about 20 percent of words were compounds; in modern Chinese, about 80 percent.

English has lots of compound words, too, although not nearly as many as Chinese. English speakers took a different tack to expand their lexicon and mainly added new words by outright borrowing of words from other languages. Thanks largely to the invading Normans in 1066, nearly half the vocabulary of modern English is borrowed from French. There are so many words—words like admire, comic, foliage, imbecile, mountain, simple … Borrowed words provide great clues for tracking how, when and where people bumped into (or pillaged and plundered) each other and influenced (or dominated and subjugated) each other when roaming around the early world. People moved around the earth, leaving their words behind for others, or picking up new ones.

Chinese has just a meager collection of borrowed words. And because of the limited syllable structure in Chinese, it is difficult to “sinify” the words from other languages. So, the small lexicon of Chinese borrowed words bears little resemblance to their origins:
mótè
(model, as in fashion model),
qiǎokèlì
(chocolate),
shālā
(salad),
luómàn
(romance) and
luóji
(logic).

Borrowed words may provide windows into historical population migrations and movements, but compound words open windows into a people’s own evolving culture. Compounds are very homegrown in nature; as we saw earlier,
xīn
, the heart, was so important to Chinese culture that it became the lynchpin of many different ideas and sensibilities.

One way Chinese makes a lot of compound words is to glue together two antonyms, or opposites, into a new whole. This fits right in comfortably with the concept of
yīn yáng
, which still permeates Chinese philosophy, medicine, nature, martial arts and nutrition even today. In
yīn yáng
, two opposing forces connect or meld into each other and make up a greater whole. On one side, the
yīn
is feminine, moon, dark, cold, passive, shady. On the other, the
yáng
is masculine, sun, bright, hot, active, clear (don't blame me!). The aim is to achieve a blend and balance of the two forces.