Dreaming in Chinese

When the Communists came to power in 1949, Mao stamped his own imprints on the language reform movement. He dealt with the writing system in ways that he said would make it more accessible to the masses, and which critics (from the safety of decades later!) have often labeled a dumbing down of the vaunted traditional linguistic system. These included a two-pronged approach. First, they shrank the vocabulary used in public media and official documents and propaganda, so ordinary people would have fewer characters to master in order to become literate. Second, they reduced the number of strokes needed to write thousands of the traditional complex characters (called fántǐzì), creating simplified characters ( jiǎntǐzì). In addition, they finally adopted a phonetic alphabet called Pīnyīn

Mǎmahūhū = mǎ (horse) + hū (tiger) = horsehorsetiger-tiger, or “so-so,” as in “How are things going at work? Well, mǎmahūhū.” I heard a fable about the origin of this word. I usually shun folk etymologies for their lack of linguistic rigor and accountability, but this one is particularly charming: An artist was drawing an animal picture on the wall of his cave. His neighbors came along, saw the work, were impressed, and began arguing over whether the animal was a horse or a tiger. The arguments escalated until the village folk stepped back, got a grip and realized that if they could not agree on what the drawing represented, then perhaps it wasn’t actually so good after all. Hence, horsehorsetigertiger, or mǎmahūhū, became the shortcut way to describe the quality of something as so-so.

When the Communists came to power in 1949, Mao stamped his own imprints on the language reform movement. He dealt with the writing system in ways that he said would make it more accessible to the masses, and which critics (from the safety of decades later!) have often labeled a dumbing down of the vaunted traditional linguistic system. These included a two-pronged approach. First, they shrank the vocabulary used in public media and official documents and propaganda, so ordinary people would have fewer characters to master in order to become literate. Second, they reduced the number of strokes needed to write thousands of the traditional complex characters (called fántǐzì), creating simplified characters ( jiǎntǐzì). In addition, they finally adopted a phonetic alphabet called Pīnyīn, which (more or less) spells out the sounds of Chinese characters using Roman letters. To this day, mainland China uses simplified characters and Pinyin. An unforeseen bonus of Pinyin is its great flexibility for use on computer keyboards and in texting on mobile phones.

was chatting about tā and the characters for writing it with a calligrapher in Xizhou one day. (Chinese chat about things like this!) He told me that the character for she is a new arrival, created not even 100 years ago, in the 1920s, during one of the many periods when the Chinese were debating about their writ

When it comes to finding your bearings in China, east–west is the predominant axis, not our familiar north–south. You start with the east or west:

Chinese can be very superstitious about names. One of my friends had a boyfriend when she was young, whose parents, according to a peasant custom, chose a powerful name intended to ward off guǐ, or evil spirits. His name was Fènduī meaning “pile of shit.”

Other languages have words like this, words that carry a lot of baggage: citoyen during the French Revolution, Volk in Hitler’s Germany. When John F. Kennedy stood at the Berlin Wall in 1963 and said “Ich bin ein Berliner,” the world knew exactly what he meant, which was much more than simply a person who happens to live in Berlin.

Lǎo + bǎi + xìng literally means “old” + “hundred” + “names.” In Chinese it has become a shortcut to convey the sense of “everybody,” since most of the Chinese population share the same family names. Indeed, today, some 85 percent of Chinese people share only 100 such names. Imagine the implications.

Chinese love idioms, proverbs, sayings and morals of the story. They have particular esteem for four-character sayings that sum up a story or fable; others make a historical reference or evoke classics, and others are offered as a nugget of wisdom from everyday life. Chéngyǔ, the most classical of the four-character set phrases, are studied in school. They are cherished as linguistic treasures, far more than are their English counterparts, like “the boy who cried wolf” or to “cross the Rubicon” or “a Trojan horse.”

The Chinese are very superstitious about their language. They consider the number 4 unlucky, like 13 in the West. I couldn’t tell you why 13 is unlucky, but every Chinese can tell you that 4 is unlucky because the word for “four,” sì , sounds like the word for “die,” sǐ . People go to great lengths to avoid using four. There is nary a 4th or 14th or 24th floor in any high-rise building. I always looked for, but only very rarely saw, a license plate or even a telephone number containing the number 4.

Conversely, people pay lots of money to secure a license plate or a phone number with the digit 8, because eight, bā , rhymes with fā, as in fā cái, which means “to become wealthy” in Mandarin. The power of 8 drove the opening of the Beijing Olympics into the rainy season, just so they could begin on the auspicious 08/08/08 at 8:08. (It didn’t rain.)

Similarly, you should never give a clock as a wedding present, because the word for “clock,” zhōng , sounds the same as the word for “end,” zhōng