3 Speaking Chinese

Speaking Chinese

To have another language is to possess a second soul. -Charlemagne, Holy Roman Emperor

One day in September my landlady surprised me by unleashing a spate of dialogs in four separate languages, five if you count English, which she could speak at an intermediate level. It was a Sunday and she wanted Mandy to accompany her to a luncheon across town. She was forced to bring me along because I was glued to Mandy for survival at that point. Just before we left the house Wu Tai Tai engaged her husband in a conversation using Hakka, a language from mainland China spoken by about 20% of the people on Taiwan. As we got into the taxi she barked orders at the driver in one of the Taiwanese dialects, there are several spoken on the island. As she turned to Mandy she spoke Cantonese, Wu Tai Tai's preferred language and the language of her mother who was born in Canton, now called Guangzhou. Mostly the landlady ignored me because she was insecure about speaking English, and why bother? I was supposed to be learning Chinese. When Wu Tai Tai did address me it was in Mandarin, which Mandy usually had to translate. In America if someone spoke four languages within ten minutes I would call her as a genius, some kind of United Nations super-translator. But here on Taiwan it was daily life and everyone did it, negotiating transactions with local born Taiwanese merchants or checking in with mainland born grandparents and parents who preferred to speak their native tongue. Fortunately for me, people could speak Mandarin, Taiwan's "official language" even if they preferred to speak Taiwanese. The Taiwanese dialects had been banned from use in schools and or by the media until the 1990s so while I was in Taipei, television and radio was dominated by Mandarin

speakers with high class Beijing accents, kind of like the Queen's English being mandated for use on television and radio in the United States. After five months of studying Chinese for four hours a day plus hours of after school study, I was able to distinguish between the different dialects and Mandarin became so clear to me that it sounded like a gorgeous song flowing with precision and musicality. To my ears it was lyrical; the French of Chinese dialects. Mandarin was a beautiful and superior language, highly cultured and perfect sounding. Cantonese confused me because I could understand about 30% of what was said, similar to what a Dutch speaker would understand of German, and yet I could never understand the gist or meaning. The dialect of Shanghai was totally in comprehensible to me with absolutely no cross over with Mandarin, but it sounded exotic and enticing, hearing it made me wish I could go to the mainland and learn to speak it too. *** Everyday for nine months, from September until June, I attended daily classes at the Mandarin Training Center where I studied Mandarin Chinese four hours each morning. My classes were small with only four students per class. Amy was in a class with fun people who shared her sense of playfulness, and were committed to learning just enough to get by for a year. I was in a class with other like minded serious students, convinced that if only we studied more we could learn more and eventually speak more and then achieve who knew what? Maybe read an elementary level story one day! Even as I stared up at the north face of a Himalayan sized insurmountable mountain of thousands of Chinese characters, not to mention the task of memorizing hundreds of Chinese idiomatic phrases that were considered essential to speaking real Chinese, I remained motivated and never lost hope. I studied hours a day for an entire year and by the time I left I recognized merely several hundred characters, still a far, far cry from what was needed to read a newspaper or book. Fortunately I was lost in the journey of learning something new and never lost time reflecting on the ultimate goal and or considering if it was even remotely achievable and if it were, so what? What would I even do with speaking Chinese? Some students mentioned working for the

Coca Cola company in China but I knew I was no sales girl and I could not even imagine living on mainland China for an extended period of time. I was, I hoped a bright scholar who would find my way as I wandered along between my stint in Taiwan and completing my Bachelor's degree in History, with a slight emphasis on Chinese history and culture. I had vague notions of attending law school but was not really committed to that vision. Every afternoon from 1:00 - 3:00 the California students broke into three separate tracks of study - business, visual arts and history. Amy and Mandy were in the business track and studied international economics and the Asian economies. As part of their emphasis they were required to find an internship. They both secured internships at the American Consulate in Taipei where they wrote reports and got to know the American Ex-patriots who staffed the office. There was no American Embassy in Taiwan because the United States had revoked its recognition of Taiwan's government in exchange for recognizing the People's Republic of China in 1979. The internship was a boon to Amy who used it to make friends and influence people. The following summer she was able to use her connections within the expat community to find us a fabulous place to house sit for a few months. That summer, she also encouraged me to gain some practical skills by recommending me for an unpaid internship at the consulate. My assignment was to research and write a report about banking laws in Taiwan. I interviewed several bank presidents asking questions I did not comprehend then fumbled my through a written report no one ever read. Altogether, it was a great experience and helped to fill my empty resume. While I was away at college my sophomore year, my father began studying Mandarin at the local Junior College as a hobby. That was probably the main reason he decided to send me to Taiwan rather than Sweden, he was hoping to go visit a Chinese-speaking place and practice. After I had been accepted to the education abroad program he asked his Mandarin teacher to give me a Chinese name. My name begins with the letter "A" so I was given the name Anmei, which means "peace and beauty". It is also a very common name somewhat like Jenny or Michelle. My surname, which is written and spoken first in a Chinese name, became Su. My full Chinese

name was therefore, Su An Mei. I was happy with my name because even though the surname was difficult to write, my given name was fairly simple. I thought it sounded lyrical as well. My father gave me a photocopied leaflet from his textbook to study before I left. It was five pages of Chinese radicals, 214 characters to be exact. The fifty most important, or commonly used radicals were printed larger than the less common radicals. Chinese is universal as a written language for the Han people. Speakers of all dialects from Mandarin to Cantonese read and write using the same characters for each word. The difference lay in how the character is pronounced. The written language is thousands of years old, maybe even the oldest written language of all. The beauty of written Chinese is that originally the first words were pictures of actual objects like the sun, moon or mountains. These types of characters are known as pictographs. These words are easy for the mind to memorize because they mimic the objects they represent. Many of the radicals are themselves pictographs, such as hand, water, heart or bamboo, and these radicals become the basic building blocks used to represent more complicated ideas, such as feelings and descriptive adjectives. Before I arrived, I did not bother to learn how to pronounce the radicals because they were not commonly used words alone. Instead they were built into pieces of common words. New ideas needed to be represented as Chinese civilization evolved. These types of characters are called ideographs because they represent ideas that are difficult to represent with a concrete symbol. Examples of these characters are the words for up and down or numbers. Later on as civilization became more complex, new characters were created and even combined with other characters and then pushed together, these are known as compounds. So that even my name, An, meaning Peace, has a radical, or pictograph meaning roof with the word for woman, and ideograph written below it. Together the two pictures, "roof "written above "woman", created a new word that meant "peace" or "peaceful". The radicals were also the means of looking up words in a Chinese dictionary. If you want to look up a word you do not know, you must dissect it into parts and recognize the radical. Next you turn to the pages of a Chinese-English dictionary containing all the characters built around that radical. To look up the first character in my name, An, you would go to the section of the

dictionary based on the radical "roof". The placement of radicals within the dictionary is organized by number of strokes, or the number of lines it takes to write the character. In the case of "roof" there are three strokes, or three lines needed to write the character. Three stroke radicals would obviously follow one and two stroke radicals. It turned out to be time well spent memorizing the 50 radicals, I was ahead of the curve when my boots hit the ground in Taipei. I could immediately understand the concepts behind a character and also can equipped with a system for memorizing and organizing characters in my head. I have always been a visual learner. In my mind, I see people, objects and landscapes as a series of paintings or photographs. When I first encountered the written Chinese language it was like a revelation to me. It made so much more sense than writing with abstract letters. Chinese characters, unlike symbolic letters, were visually and aesthetically appealing to the mind. Characters engaged thinking and represented concrete ideas, giving the brain a system for organizing large chunks of information. I was stunned by the pure simplicity and profundity of writing a completely distinct picture for every single concept the human mind could imagine. It made an alphabet look like a simplified way to recycle tiny bits of data, which works but certainly is not visually pleasing. An alphabet did convey meaning after all, but not with anything remotely approaching artistry or divinity. An alphabet was like beating a child's drum while Chinese characters were like an orchestra. I was caught by the magic of pictures and meaning united. I was bedazzled and fell in love. I became a devoted student of Chinese characters. I wrote them on flash cards and gazed at them while riding the bus or sitting on a train. I paged through the dictionary admiring the system of categorization. Another mind-bending concept was the Chinese approach to numbers. Chinese numbers were an abstract sound disassociated with a symbol the way numbers are in English and all the other Latin based languages. In Chinese written numbers made sense logically and mathematically. No wonder Asians were capable at math, their system was embedded with actual meaning. For example, in English the numbers one through ten are fine. The problems begin with the teens, which make no sense. We say thirteen, putting the sound for "three" in front of the sound "teen",

which means "ten". We say the word in reverse of what it actually means numerically. It is not an explanation of the concept, just a sound. On the other hand, the Chinese say the number thirteen quite literally shi san, "ten three", which is what thirteen means. Likewise, the number twenty, which is English is a meaning less word. In Chinese it is called "two ten", er shi, which has embedded meaning. In this way a Chinese child not only learns the work for an abstract concept, she actually learns the meaning of the number. Two ten is what the number twenty really means. Think about doing addition in your head with this superior system. Try adding twenty-seven and twelve quickly in your head. Now try adding "two ten seven plus ten two". See how much easier it is to understand why the answer is "three ten nine"? Math already makes so much more sense to me just knowing basic numbers in Chinese. In banks and post offices Chinese clerks used abacuses instead of calculators or computers, which were virtually non-existent in offices at that time. The Abacus was an ancient tool that also supported a profound understanding of numbers and their values. The abacus was divided into two decks separated by a center beam. Beads on the upper deck represent five, while beads on the lower deck represent one. From right to left the columns represent the ones, tens, hundred, thousands, etc. As a person touches each bead and moves them toward the center beam, he can visually see the value of numbers he is adding or subtracting. To solve the problem of American innumeracy and mathematical apathy, I would recommend that everyone be taught Chinese numbers and how to use an abacus. While I was in Taiwan I overhead my professors debate whether or not computers would be good or bad for the preservation and use of Chinese characters. Some people worried that Chinese characters would become extinct as computers became more prevalent. At that time computers were not as powerful as they are today and people worried that Chinese characters were too graphically large for computers to display. It would take up too much memory to show a character as opposed to smaller letters. Now of course we know graphic and data capacity is not a problem for computers and that the Internet will have more users reading Chinese websites than English in just a few years.

And so I fell in love with written Chinese and devoted myself memorizing as many characters as my mind could remember. It wasn't until about five moths later that the honeymoon was over and Chinese characters became normalized in my head as a writing system instead of an artistic endeavor. At that point it dawned on me that there wasn't any hope I could ever learn to read a newspaper let alone a book. Just to understand something as mundane as local news covering a traffic jam or an obituary, I would need to recognize and comprehend at least 1,500 to 2,000 characters . Forget about ever being able to write words, my handwriting was set to letters and relearning to write in pictures was beyond the ability of my hand-eye coordination. When I wrote Chinese characters, they looked by broken sticks piled together rather than symmetrical, geometric structures conveying meaning. As a twenty-year old, learning to read, write, speak and comprehend Chinese in one year's time was a mountain too high to climb. Chinese children needed decades to master the reading and writing of so many characters. It was like playing the piano, one needed daily practice with years of study just to play a simple tune. An alphabet, I came to realized, was a superior system to convey meaning for adult language learners, who only need to master 26 bits of script and then combined them in thousands of ways to represent all the ideas humans could invent. Other students in my study abroad program were not so easily seduced by the study of Chinese as I. Our group of students were like migrants to California during the Gold Rush in 1849, some got caught up in the lust for gold and devoted time to looking for that elusive nugget of gold while others saw an opportunity to sell gold pans and wound up making a fortune. It took Amy about two weeks to realize that studying Chinese was an activity best left to dreamers. She let her eyes drift across the land and saw the obvious best use of her time, teaching English to the desperately academic Chinese people. Amy mastered as much street Chinese as she needed to survive then moved on to making money and preparing for a future career. She took a job at an afternoon tutorial school for elementary children. These schools were called bu shi ban and they lined the streets of Taipei and every other city in Taiwan. Chinese parents were fanatical believers that education had the power to elevate their children out of

poverty. Children attended school every weekday and half days on Saturday for a total of over 200 days a year. In contrast, American children attend school 180 days a year. In the later afternoons and evenings the middle class kids or the aspiring middle class kids were sent to tutorial centers called bu shi ban. Crews of Americans, English, Canadians and Australians staffed the English centers. They preferred teachers whose accents were American. The Canadians were accepted because they sounded like Americans except for a few vowels that the Chinese didn't recognize anyway. The Australians were looked down upon for their strange accents and funny slang while the English, who were so used to being worshiped for their diction were greeted with apathy. So the American Midwestern, generic Californian accent reigned supreme in the bu shi ban system of Taipei. Some of the English teachers had come to Taipei strictly to work, others were like us, college students attending classes in Taiwan and trying to make some money on the side. The full time employees ran the schools and the part timers like Amy taught the classes. Amy had a class of about twenty rambunctious kids between the ages of five and ten. Just because they were studious and motivated didn't make them well behaved. She had to work to entertain them and keep them on task. Fortunately she had a strict curriculum, so all she had to do was show up and act everything out for the kids, click through a slide show on the classroom wall and then go home. She was a hit, the most popular teacher in the school because of her beauty, enthusiasm and natural ability to engage children. After about a month of teaching she talked me into taking a job at the school where she worked. I started teaching the last couple weeks of October. I lasted about five weeks before I quit in December. The money was great, I was paid like a highly educated professionals. Amy and I made more that we could ever make per hour back home in California as college kids. My hourly wage was four times what I had been paid to work in the college library. Yet, I was completely stressed out. The first few classes I was a nervous wreck. The kids were loud, obnoxious and demanding. They wanted me to dance and sing and make silly faces. I was too reserved for all this play. The parents stood outside the classroom peering in though the windows, judging me, critiquing me and complaining about me to the management. There was a manager named Mary

who would barge into my classroom and yell at the students to pay attention and settle down. This made me want to tear my hair out. I felt uncomfortable and shy. I yearned to go back to my bedroom in the basement of Wu Tai Tai's house and study my Chinese flash cards or meander through the streets of Taipei stepping into Chinese medicine shops or sipping hot tea in a cafe while underlining my History of Chinese International Relations textbook. I had not traveled 12 hours by plane across the Pacific Ocean to make money, I moralized, and I was here to learn from the Chinese people, not to teach them. So, like an aristocrat who needs no money and would rather pursue the arts, I quit my teaching job leaving the students and parent in the lurch without a replacement. My abandoned students were redistributed into other classes increasing the number of students other teachers had to serve. My personal stress level however, plummeted and I was liberated to continue my quiet life of wandering, studying and chatting with anyone willing to hang out and do nothing for an afternoon or all evening. Amy thought I was nuts to quit highly paid, secure employment, how could I walk away from that kind of income, regardless of stress levels? And who cared about reading stupid textbooks or memorizing a list of mundane words when our teachers would give us A's just for showing up to each class? These were all valid questions and insights but at the time I was determined to make my year in Taiwan exceptional because I knew my life after college would be a marathon of years working for managers trying making money. Amy continued to teach and make money while I relied on my parents to send me money so I could pay rent and eat. Amy paid for most of our dinners out and probably bought me snacks and drinks when we went to nightclubs. Fortunately for my lifestyle, within a few months I had met a Chinese man who was willing and able to pay for my meals, entertainment and weekend getaways. The seeds of our future careers were apparent even then as I watched Amy excel in that Taipei classroom, awed by her energy, charisma, and motivation knowing she was destined for greatness later in life. I on the other hand, realized I was not so motivated to work and simply preferred to wander along, enjoying beautiful scenery and just enjoying quiet conversations over tea. Amy graduated from college, went on to law school and eventually became a hugely successful attorney for a well known high

tech company, while I went on to become a school teacher, even after my first failed foray into classroom management. I always liked to study and learn new things, teaching was a way to continue doing that and even get paid a little bit along the way. ***

One my last day as a classroom teacher at the English Language School management announced to the shock and dismay of the parents that I was leaving as of right this minute. The students would be spread out amongst the other classes next week. At the time I did not even consider what this meant for the other teachers or for the students and parents. I just wanted to get out of there and back to my quiet bookish life. As I was making my escape, a young mother followed me out the door and pulled on my sleeve. "Hello," she said nervously in English, “you teach my sons, please?" We were standing in the stairwell and the mother gestured to her five year old twin boys. They were identical twin boys dressed exactly alike. Their names were Cary and Cory and they had been enthusiastic but well behaved in class. The boys looked up at me with wide, curious eyes. How could I say no? We exchanged phone numbers and I figured nothing would come of it. She told me her name was Zhang Yu Ching. She looked like she was in her twenties, probably not that much other than I. Later that evening, the young mother called my house. She could not speak English so she spoke with my landlady. The two of them hashed out the details of when and where I would teach the boys and how much I would be paid. I honestly didn't care what they paid me, I figured it would be fun to teach two children rather than twenty. Wu Tai Tai hung up the phone and told me the good news. The family lived within walking distance and that they wanted me to come twice a week for an hour. The pay would be ten dollars and hour, which was half what I made at the school, but seemed like enough in a country where lunch only cost me about three bucks. The following Saturday, Wu Tai Tai walked me through the maze of streets to where the

woman and children lived. They lived down a quiet street with houses rather than apartments. We passed a yard with chicken sitting in cages. A low, white wall surrounded the house and we entered the courtyard to knock on the door. The woman and children answered the door with excitement and anticipation. Wu Tai Tai left me with the young family, and I felt confidant I could find my way home. Worst-case scenario, if I got lost I could jump in a taxicab. Zhang Yu Ching reached for my hand and pulled me into the living room. She led me to a large comfy chair and seated the two boys on the beige couch across from me. We were separated by a glass coffee table piled with books, paper and crayons. I had arrived totally unprepared for the first class. Fortunately for me, Yu Ching had supplies. She had English books for children, alphabet flash cards and coloring books. From that day forward, from October until I left in August, I went to their house and sat in the chair across from the mother and her two boys on the couch. I taught them simple conversation, letters and phonics. Eventually I taught the boys to read simple children's books. As time went on I got savvier in my teaching and found books and magazines to engage the boys. The boys were very serious and studious. They sat on the couch and never jumped up or ran away. Now, as a mother of my own twin four year-olds, I am amazed by Yu Ching's ability to instill such discipline in her boys at such an early age. She told me that the boys were five, but they may have been four. Chinese people count the year spent in the womb when they tell you their age. Over time I came to treasure my two hours a week with Yu Ching and her boys. They were so happy to see me and treated me like a welcome friend. I missed my mother, father, and two sisters so much the year I was away, I felt like an orphan. Yu Ching and her boys felt like a safe haven for me, a family with a warm home where I could rest for an hour and escape the overwhelming city outside. Yu Ching had never been around a foreigner so she felt honored and excited to see me. It took many months for the two of us to move toward friendship simply because we could not communicate. When I first met her I had only been in the county for two months. I could barely talk about my family members or what I had eaten for breakfast. By the end of my stay in

Taiwan, I was much more skilled at conversation and we spent an hour after each English lesson, talking and drinking tea. Yu Ching, who seemed reserved and shy at first opened up to me and told me all about her husband, her in-laws and her hometown. She and her husband had been born in a city to the south called Pingdong, which was famous for a temple to the patron goddess of Taiwan, Matzu. By July, after knowing the family for six months, Yu Ching felt comfotable enough to invite me to go on vacation with the family down to her hometown.