Dreaming in Chinese (24 page)

Sure enough. Back on the streets of Beijing, I began to notice how many people carried so many things. One of my friends told me that the Chinese hate to pay to transport anything they could theoretically carry by themselves, and I saw a lot of evidence to support her point. On holidays, people carry the cheap, classic plaid plastic suitcases—ubiquitous in the Third World—on the trains and buses. Migrant workers sling old grain bags, now bursting with quilts and personal belongings, over their shoulders. Farmers in from the countryside balance pails or baskets on wooden yokes across their shoulders. Sometimes women from the countryside carry baskets of cherries on their heads. In the middle of 2008, when plastic bags first went from being free to costing a few cents each, I saw a young woman run across nine lanes of traffic, carrying her groceries awkwardly wrapped up in her jacket. She tripped, the jacket undid, and cans and jars went rolling everywhere.

Sichuan peasant carrying a market basket on her back

People watched and chuckled, some in sympathy but others, I fear, just because they were amused. After years of living in Beijing, I was no longer surprised to see people openly laugh and point at dwarves or very tall people, or gawk and giggle at crippled children doing acrobatics as a form of begging on the streets of Shanghai. Some say the giggles are signs of embarrassment and that staring is just a sign of curiosity; it looked more like simple heartlessness to my foreigner’s eye. The week after the earthquake was different; I saw a stranger’s arm around a shoulder, a “there but for the grace of God” look in people’s eyes. I wondered if a new word I learned,
liǎojiě
,
fit these images.

Liǎojiě
means “to understand.” The shade of meaning covers slightly different terrain from the other words for “understand.” There is
míngbai
, which is more like “I get it”;
zhīdào
, which is more like “know, as in fact”;
rènshi
means “know, as in to be acquainted.”
Liǎojiě
goes deeper. The second character,
jiě
in
liǎojiě
, means to “untie” or “undo,” evoking the sense of deeper understanding that comes from working to untie or resolve something bound and “knotty.”

The rescuers in the earthquake zone certainly had a genuine compassion for the victims of the disaster. It was easy to imagine that they
liǎojiě
, or understood, the situation a little more deeply from bearing such close witness. In China, I was constantly amazed at the difficult personal histories people would reveal to me. One by one came the Cultural Revolution dramas of rustication as a teenager, or families blown apart in the political chaos, or shattering betrayals by neighbors and good friends. It was like talking with Europeans about what had happened during the 1930s and 1940s. Most of today’s Chinese people had not even been born when the Cultural Revolution was under way. Still, I thought there might be something in the recent national memory, a memory of mass vulnerability, that brought forward empathy during such a calamity,
zāihài
, as the earthquake.

I also learned some words that confirmed something I had already guessed about the Chinese: they persevere. Six thousand miles of the Long March, five years of the Great Leap Forward, then the endless Cultural Revolution, and today’s lifetimes still spent in tough factories and on medieval-like farms.

yǒnggǎn
(
brave
);
jīnglì
(
energy
);
jīhu
ì (
chance
);
ānpái
(
plan
);
jiù
(
save
);
huīfù
(
recover
)

“If there is only a one percent chance, we will continue looking.”
Jīhuì
, chance. This was the phrase on everyone’s tongues for nearly a week after the earthquake. In the beginning, the soldiers marched through the night, spurred by Wen Jiabao’s order to reach the epicenter by midnight Tuesday, not even 36 hours after the quake occurred. Then they continued marching, higher into the mountains, dragging supplies and equipment toward the remote villages. Then they found the people and carried them down the mountains. Over and over again.

Theirs was not
yǒnggǎn
, to be brave in the wartime sense, requiring a moment’s heroism under fire, but rather their strength demonstrated an indomitable, elementary
jīnglì,
energy.

Early in the week of the earthquake, rescuers dug with their bare hands. There were no steam shovels, or even hand shovels, picks or axes. They clawed out bricks; they passed armfuls of metal rebar and stacks of splintered wood along a human chain, one by one from the top of a heap to the bottom.

The sun went down, the klieg lights beamed on, and the work continued. They heaved slabs of concrete on cue, and even if you didn’t know how to count in Chinese, you would understand:
Yī, èr, sān … Yī, èr, sān …

How to plan,
ānpái
, this massive rescue? It was simple: the rescuers would keep on until there was nothing more. They portaged boats. They clambered over rocks. They parachuted out of helicopters. They kept digging into the rubble of fallen buildings or the landslide-covered houses. There were three days of miracles, as rescuers pulled one person after another out from the mangled debris. They saved so many lives.
Jiù
, to save.

Then things slowed down and success stories only trickled in: someone was found alive after 160 hours, more than six days. It was impossible not to calculate all that one does in six days—the meals you eat, the work you do, the hours you sleep, the chores. There was another survivor after 176 hours, and another at 179. Then they found another after 195 hours. Finally, impossibly, a woman was pulled from the debris after 216 hours. She was the last. After nine days, the rescuers stopped looking for survivors. For Sichuan to recover,
huīfù
, would take a long, long time.

My list of words learned in the aftermath of the earthquake told me a story in staccato about the Chinese, one of both tenderness and perseverance.

Nǐ de Zhōngwěn hěn hǎo!
Your Chinese is really good!

14.
A little goes a long way

H
OW HARD IS
it
to learn Chinese, really?

I was flipping through the channels on Chinese TV one day, and I paused at a travel program for Chinese tourists about Spain. It was partly in Spanish and partly in Chinese. I watched for a while and then realized, a bit heartsick, that after two years of being in China, I could understand more Spanish than Chinese—and the closest I had ever come to studying Spanish was French!

Language teachers and linguists generally agree that Chinese is one of the world’s most difficult languages for English speakers to learn, along with several others, like Japanese, Russian and Arabic.

I ran into plenty of testimonials supporting that notion. Sometimes the vexation is about holding on to what you drum into your head week after week. One of my first classmates was a young Norwegian woman who was fluent in lots of languages and was a star in our class. One day, she returned to class from being off sick for a week and was uncharacteristically completely tongue-tied. After stumbling a few times, she switched to English and blurted out: “It is
astonishing
how quickly I forget!”

A guy who worked for an American magazine in Beijing was recounting his erratic, unsystematic progress in Chinese. He said he felt proud when he randomly spotted—and understood—a written Chinese character he had been studying for weeks. But on the other hand, he said he frequently fell into despair when he couldn’t come up with the simplest kinds of phrases, like “I can’t find my shoes.”

And another student of Chinese confessed to me that for him the difficulty was all about accent. His Chinese friends, who were always encouraging him, said it would help if he would give them a heads-up before he spoke: “Just let us know when you’re speaking in Chinese, OK?”

I personally found it most perplexing that so little about Chinese resonated with any other language I had ever worked on. Chinese seemed so arbitrary, and there was nothing to grab on to. I could try to memorize the same words two or three or four times over, only to have them slip away again. It probably took a good eighteen months before I pummeled enough into my head to accumulate a critical, usable mass of vocabulary, or to say something without rehearsing it, or to pick up story plots, or to understand conversations I overheard on the street, or accomplish more than the simplest transaction. Approaching any sense of intuition about the language was painfully slow. For me, Chinese is
that
hard.

Chinese dishes out a heavy dose of visual and oral demands, starting with the burdens of characters and tones. Mastering a new word involves several steps. Learning even an easy word like
shì
(to be) means remembering more than that it sounds like “sure.” This is the
shì
with the falling tone, not
shī
,
shí
,
shǐ
(with high tone, rising tone, and falling-rising tone, respectively) or
shi
with no tone at all. And it also means learning that among the homonyms of
shì
with the same falling tone, this
shì
is represented by the character
, not
(market),
(scholar),
(thing, affair),
(look at, regard),
(try, test), to name just a few of the others.