Oracle Bones (70 page)

THE CHAIRMAN’S COMMAND
represented a critical turning point. Afterward, Chinese linguists spent years trying to create a distinctly Chinese alphabet, and in the meantime, they lost the momentum for change. In John DeFrancis’s opinion, it was a missed opportunity, and that’s what makes him so angry. Several times, he tells me that he didn’t return to China for forty-nine years because of his bitterness over the failure of writing reform.

The motivation for Mao’s command, like so many of the Chairman’s decisions, remains a mystery. Once, when I telephone DeFrancis to talk about this
period, he theorizes that perhaps the Korean War or some other aspect of U.S.-China relations had influenced Mao, turning him against the Latin script. DeFrancis urges me to visit with the surviving Chinese linguists who were involved in the project; in particular, I should meet with Zhou Youguang, who is in his late nineties. Back in 1982, when DeFrancis finally made his grudging return visit to China, he had asked Zhou Youguang about that key moment in 1950.

“He said that he knew why Mao made that decision, but he wasn’t free to talk about it,” DeFrancis tells me on the phone. He suggests that China’s increased openness, combined with Zhou’s advanced age, might make the man more disposed to speak freely about the past.

I BEGIN ON
the first floor. Zhou Youguang, along with two other aging linguists, lives in the dormitory at the State Language Commission in downtown Beijing. All three men share the same entryway. It’s a traditional Communist work unit arrangement, a throwback to the days of the planned economy. For reporting, it couldn’t be better. All I have to do is go up and down the stairs, and I’ll meet the most important writing reformers still living in China. The entryway becomes a tower of time and language: the afternoon passes; the reformers get steadily older; their memories shift restlessly through the years of the failed campaign.

At seventy-two, Yin Binyong is the youngest, and he lives on the first floor. For months, he has battled liver cancer, and his body is wasted: tiny chest, brittle limbs. His face is heavily lined, and he has the eyebrows of a Taoist god, great clumps of white that shadow his yellowed eyes. But if the man is in pain, he never shows it. He greets me warmly, pulling out the letter of introduction I have sent. Another scholar had suggested that I contact the reformers by writing a note in Pinyin, the script that uses the Latin alphabet for Chinese. Yin is thrilled that I got in touch without writing a single character.

Half a century ago, he graduated from Sichuan University with a degree in mathematics, and for a spell he was a middle-school math teacher. But he researched linguistics on the side, publishing articles, and eventually he was invited to work on the Beijing writing reform committees. His background is not uncommon—many linguists have skills in math or logic.

“There’s definitely a link,” he says. “You can often use mathematical methods and apply them directly to the study of language. I’ll give you one simple example. Consider animals—which animal has the closest relationship to human beings? You can probably narrow it down just by thinking: cow, horse, dog, pig. But which one is the most important to the way that people live? What do you think?”

“Dog,” I say.

Yin smiles; the eyebrows dance. “That’s your guess,” he says. “But how can you tell for certain? One method is to analyze writing through statistics and frequency studies. This is something that we did during the 1950s. We examined texts, both modern and ancient, to see which animal name appears the most frequently. For all periods, it was the same: the horse. So we concluded that the horse had the most important relationship to human society in China.”

Visions flash before my eyes: a bronze artifact, a buried chariot, a man on horseback riding straight at a wooden gate. Yin continues, “I wrote a paper about this in the 1950s. I also did a study with English and Japanese texts, and they were both the same. But the second-closest animal was different. In English, it’s dog. For us Chinese, it’s cow.”

After the horse diversion, he discusses the challenges of Chinese writing reform. Some people claim that Chinese has too many homonyms to be written with an alphabet; the characters are necessary to distinguish like-sounding words. Yin acknowledges that this is true for classical Chinese, but not for the modern languages. It’s no different from listening to a radio broadcast—Chinese can understand their languages on the radio, without seeing the characters, and that means they could also understand an alphabetized script.

“Of course, that’s theory, and practice is different,” he says. “It’s hard to get people to change when they’ve been using characters for so long. And it’s true that if you shift to an alphabet, you have problems with the old texts. Look at
The Dream of the Red Mansion
, where all of the people of the same generation have names that use the same radical. You lose details like that if you change the writing system. Mostly, though, it’s hard to change old habits. Look at your language—English writing also needs reform. George Bernard Shaw thought it should be changed.”

Spoken English has about forty sounds, which are too many to be handled efficiently by the Latin alphabet—thus the often illogical spelling. George Bernard Shaw, who wrote everything in shorthand, specified in his will that future royalties from his works be used to fund the creation of a new alphabet. In 1958 and 1959, a public contest drew 467 proposed English alphabets, of which four were selected as winners. One of these systems, which had been designed by an architect, became the basis for the “Shavian” alphabet of forty-eight letters. A print run of a single book was published using the new system, a special edition of Shaw’s
Androcles and the Lion
. The four English words of that title appeared as:

By coincidence, the Chinese were also constructing alphabets in the 1950s. But their project was much more serious; it had been commanded by the Chairman, and linguists across the country created more than two thousand proposed Chinese alphabets. Some used Latin letters; others used Cyrillic; a number of proposals incorporated the Japanese syllabaries. There were Chinese alphabets in Arabic. Yin remembers one system that used numbers. Another method combined Latin letters with the Chinese radicals. Under this system, the Chinese character
which is pronounced
fa
, would be written:

Linguists tinkered with the Latin alphabet itself. One system proposed four new letters that would represent specific Chinese sounds:
zh
,
ch
,
sh,
and
ng
. Under the proposal,
ng
would be written like the symbol of the International Phonetic Alphabet:

“The East Germans heard about this,” Yin says. “They quickly designed a typewriter that included those letters, and they sent it to our bureau. They said that if we adopted that system, their factories could produce typewriters. I think that was around 1952, although I can’t remember for certain. I do remember that the typewriter was still sitting around the bureau in the late 1950s. It was a beautiful machine; I have no idea what happened to it.”

In 1955, the reform committee narrowed the field to six alphabetic finalists. One system used Cyrillic letters, and another used the Latin alphabet. The other four finalists were completely new “Chinese” alphabets that were based on the shapes of characters. But a year later, Mao and other leaders decided that the Chinese alphabets weren’t yet usable. They sanctioned the Latin system—the one known as Pinyin—for use in early education and other special purposes, but it wasn’t granted legal status. Meanwhile, they decided to simplify a number of Chinese characters, reducing the stroke counts. For example,
guo
, which traditionally is written
, was changed to
became
became
became
A total of 515 characters were simplified, as well as a number of radicals. At the level of individual characters, it was a
significant change, but the basic writing system remained intact. Chinese was still logographic, and most dialects were still unwritable.