In 1987, when my mother was 57 (the age I will be in September this year) she set out for China. Recently widowed, she had spent the previous year earning a Master’s degree in education at Harvard. On the side, she took a yearlong undergraduate course in Chinese, and she’d secured a position teaching English in Xi’an. At the time, I was proud of her courage and initiative. Thirty years later, after some recent travels of my own in China, I feel a deeper and more profound admiration for my mother. In studying Chinese and setting out solo from New England for a dusty, crowded, noisy Asian city she was putting a new life together and making sense of new experiences, word by word.
This summer (2019) I spent seven weeks traveling in southwestern China with my husband Bryan and our 15-year-old son. In the weeks leading up to our summer wanderings, I worried about setting aside the book manuscript I’m writing, based on twenty years of research in youth development in South Africa. With a publisher’s deadline looming in December (and some seriously slow progress drafting chapters to date), the prospect of putting the project on hold for nearly two months was terrifying. The words had been slow in coming, and so many remained unwritten. Foregoing weeks of writing seemed like a bad idea. Irresponsible, even. But I tamed my anxiety, and threw myself into the adventure at hand.
When we arrived in China in June, I knew just three phrases. Ni hao (hello). Xiexie (thank you). Ni de dianhua (your phone — a phrase I learned from my friend Eddie Lee thirty years ago when it referred strictly to landlines, with surprising currency today when everybody has a mobile phone). Other than that, nada, niente, rien du tout.
As we roved from the southern port city of Guangzhou to outer Tibet (including a few days in Xi’an to see where my mother had lived and and taught), I focused on learning and speaking a little more Chinese each day.
After a few weeks in China and a bit of help from Bryan and the language app Duolingo, I could say a few things (and sometimes be understood). I could ask — politely — directions to the toilet: “Excuse me, sorry to bother you…”). I could ask for water (hot, boiled, cold, or warm). I could ask your name and tell you where I am from. I could say “Good bye,” “No,” “I don’t want any,” “That’s OK, don’t bother,” and “We’ve already eaten.” (Very helpful phrases when walking through a market or along a restaurant street.) I could say “OK!,” “Same thing,” and “That’s right.” I could ask if there is ice cream, or coffee, or cold beer (also very helpful). I could say “I don’t want meat,” and “I would like green vegetables.” I could count to ten (which also means I could count to 999!), and say “just looking,” or — if I were serious about buying — “how much is it?” In Xi’an, I even successfully asked a hotel receptionist for a rubber band (to secure a cloth over my camera lens).
People often say that Chinese is a “difficult” language. Certainly, reading and writing present a challenge since there is absolutely no phonetic relationship between sound and symbol. But my tentative forays into Mandarin confirm a basic linguistic principle: languages vary in different ways, but overall they are more or less equally complex. We may have an easier time learning languages whose particular complexities are similar to those of our own native language, but no spoken language itself is significantly more or less complex than any other.
In the case of Chinese, for instance, there are no verb conjugations. This is a HUGE simplification for speakers of Romance languages (in English, I hope and he hopes are different; in French, j’espere and nous esperons are different; but in Chinese (wo xi and women xi) the verb xi doesn’t change form to accommodate the subject. Same with past and future tenses: the verb form doesn’t change, but a time marker (e.g., tomorrow, yesterday) is added to the sentence to indicate tense. Nice!
On the other hand, Chinese has tones. We also have tones in English, of course, to indicate surprise, disapproval, questioning, emphasis, puzzlement, hesitancy, and so on. But in Chinese, the four tones (which can be described as rising, falling, flat, and high-low) actually change the basic denotative meaning of the morpheme. On the simple side, this means there are fewer morphemes in spoken Chinese. On the complex side, it means that each morpheme might have four different meanings, depending on the tone applied to it. Are you talking about your mother or your horse? Do you want to eat dumplings, or go to sleep? Obviously, these subtle distinctions can have serious consequences.
They also render the language flexible and efficient. On a rainy day in Yangshuo, we visited the Historic Cultural Park and “Good View Gardens.” There, in 1834, the city’s mayor carved a single Chinese character into a rock wall. This one character, formed of four separate parts (radicals), can be read as sixteen different ‘words’ (I think this is because each radical can be spoken in four tones). The one-character poem (see illustration) is translated:
How beautiful the landscape here
We should work and study hard
While we are young.
One character, sixteen words, one quintessentially Chinese poem speaking to us nearly two centuries later, from a cliff in the rain. Wow. (Well, so much for being young, but here’s to working and studying hard even at the ripe old age of 57, I thought, and being able to appreciate this extraordinary landscape.)
Even before we arrived in Yangshuo I had begun mentally composing ‘found poetry’ from the random T-shirt slogans that are so popular in China. Word by word, phrase by phrase, I built found poems in in my mind. Passersby on the street, metro riders, shopkeepers—I ‘stole’ words and phrases from people wearing T-shirts embellished with English writing. (Most of the time, this writing is not related to the wearer’s intentions in any way, and in fact the wearers usually have no idea what their attire is conveying.) The 16-word poem on the rock wall in Yangshuo inspired me to write these poems down.
I began to see this in this process a compelling, peripatetic language arts lesson: Gather words and phrases from people’s clothing, and create a unique poem. (See resource list for writing and teaching found poetry below.) I gave myself three guidelines:
Only one T-shirt word or phrase per line of the poem (each line represents only one T-shirt)
Add or change punctuation as you see fit, but be able to explain your choices
Poem’s title must also represent one T-shirt, and may be repeated in the poem
In each city we visited, I collected T-shirt writings and composed short poems unique to that city. A poem from Yangshuo (others in sidebar):
Run
Run with us Victory girls, Run. You inspire me.
Keep moving. Sensations turn into space. I think, For the love of Nike,
Go for it,
Just go for it!
Shut up and run.
Today is "d" day. Start now.
Composing these poems made me think about the sorts of choices I want my students to consider: syntax, vocabulary, punctuation; the relationship between form and meaning and context that is at the heart of my focus as a language arts teacher. Guidelines are also important, since creativity in syntax and punctuation is actually sparked by parameters like the ones above.
Beyond pedagogical implications, my experience in China had an interesting impact on my English expressions, appealing to my literal-minded tendency. One day, I asked Bryan and William if there was “water coming down from the sky” (they laughed at me). I found it easy to transliterate the English on signs in public places such as “Warm Prompt” (Gentle Reminder) and “Dual Path” (Round-trip).
Day by day on our summer adventure, together we figured out our next steps. We had a general idea of where we might go of course, but the particulars (towns to stop in, where to sleep, what to see once there) were up for grabs. Day by day, place by place, we navigated a country bursting with extraordinary landscapes, friendly people, fabulous food, a profusion of behaviorist propaganda, and the development of infrastructure on a massive scale.
And as we moved from place to place, I tried out new phrases to enhance my new experiences. “Excuse me, where is the toilet?” was useful while waiting for a bus at a crossroads outside Guilin. “Do you have cold water?” came in handy at the Kunming zoo. “What’s your name?” was a good opening with children everywhere. But as in any language, a simple “hello,” “thank you,” and “good bye” — while basic — proved the most invaluable for making connections, prompting smiles, and establishing good will. (I love the fact that “thank you” only sounds right if you shape your mouth into a smile while you say it, a lovely detail that Bryan pointed out to me early in our journey.)
Toward the end of our travels, as we were heading for Tibet, I found myself regretting that I wasn’t going to learn more Chinese. Sitting on a bus bound for Kunming, I started putting some words together, muttering under my breath: Wo bu hai shuo zhenguen (“I don’t speak Chinese). At first, I thought ‘what an odd statement to learn at the end of our trip.’ But then it dawned on me: I was making sense out of words, not just parroting phrases. And I had the unmistakable feeling that — given more time and opportunity — I could learn to speak Chinese. So being able to say I don’t speak Chinese was not simply a linguistic negation; it was also a paradoxical affirmation of the feeling that I could learn to speak it. The Chinese language did not seem like an inscrutable monolith. Word by word, Chinese was making sense.
In one of her 1987 letters from Xi’an, my mother lamented that her conversational Chinese wasn’t progressing as much as she would have liked — the Chinese people she met and worked with all wanted to practice their English. But she persisted, continuing to learn Chinese and make Chinese friends even after she returned to Canada, where she lived until her death in 2005. My recent small forays into Chinese language and culture brought me closer to her experience, and to understanding the way we ultimately make sense of any major task or life experience or course we teach not by swallowing it whole, but by wandering through it: but bit by bit, piece by piece, word by word.
Sitting on a homeward-bound plane somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, I cherished the time spent traveling in China with my family. I once again admired my mother’s initiative, and her confidence that — given a broad general objective — her particular story would unfold in an unexpected but gratifying way. And I felt less anxious about the unfinished writing task waiting for me at home. I will tackle it, like any big adventure or creative project, word by word.
Poems from Yangshuo
Lost highway
Brisk rhythm,
Power off.
“Oops!”
I got this: Memory, Courage,
Chocolate.
Beautiful, I can't hear you
Go back to the past, Fight for your dream. You are the light of my youth, You are the April of my life. You figure it out.
Poems from Guangxhou
Fairyland
Head for the hills,
Super family.
Cancel nervous!
Don’t follow the crowd.
Freedom for all: The mountains are calling.
Oh. Hi! Peak.
Adoration
I miss you.
Freakin’
Miss you,
Mr. Smile.
Heartbreaker.
Rest on
I’m retired, do it!
Exit,
Be original,
Think like a proton.
Yep, I hear a beer calling.
Rest on.