Travels in a new language

Becoming illiterate

Hola Global Jigsaw,

Sorry for the late post. It was a weekend of birthdays in our family and the time got away with me. For this week’s post a sneak pick into an upcoming work of mine.

Let me know what you think and do consider subscribing. I have currently suspended most other work in favour of writing a new book - ergo, I depend on The Global Jigsaw subscriptions more than ever to keep the words flowing. Thank you, truly.

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I am 27 years old and failing to ask for a sachet of sugar to add to my coffee. The waitress persistently points to photos of assorted soups on the menu. “Wo (I) yao (want) tang (sugar),” I try, once again, in my freshly learned Mandarin. “Tang,” she repeats nodding her head in agreement, while pointing to the soups. We gape at each other like a pair of blow fish. It’s an impasse. Journeying in new languages are full of these.

Chinese is a non-alphabetic idiom, more visual - all dashes, dots, and lines- than the phonic varieties that use ‘abc’s or the like. When a Chinese person cannot understand what someone else is saying, they don’t spell it out, but use their index finger to draw it in the air, the sense impression of the strokes lingering a while in the ether.

The alphabets of the two languages that I grew up speaking, English and Hindi, have 26 and 45 letters respectively. These letters are pure sound and only form meaning when combined into words. In contrast, Chinese logograms are called characters and each one is an amalgamation of meaning and sound. There are more than 100,000 different characters in this scriptural universe, although to be considered reasonably literate you need to know “only” between 3,000-6,000.

The tang-tang tussle the waitress and I are having, has to do with the inordinate number of homonyms, or characters that are represented by the same sound –so that they are spelt in the same way in their standardized alphabetic form, called Pinyin.

The Pinyin spelling of “yi,” for instance, is shared by nearly 200 characters, including ones that mean, ‘one,’ ‘cloth,’ ‘to lean,’ ‘she,’ ‘ripple,’ ‘a squeal’ and so on. What distinguishes them - albeit only to an extent - is the tone in which they are enunciated.

Tang in what is called the first tone (a high, flat one) is soup, while tang in second tone, (a rising one, as if asking a question) is sugar. If I could have squiggled 糖 in the air like a local, instead of verbalizing it with the wrong tone, no one would have thought I meant soup, 汤.

Learning Chinese in Pinyin, as I am, as most foreigners do, has severe limitations. A friend tells me the story of a celebrated linguist, Zhao Yuanren, who set out to demonstrate the inadequacies of Pinyin. He composed a 92-character story using 31 different characters about a man called Shi who mistakenly tried to eat ten lions carved from stone.

This is how it reads in Chinese:

石室诗士施氏，嗜狮，誓食十狮。

氏时时适市视狮。

十时，适十狮适市。

是时，适施氏适市。

氏视是十狮，恃矢势，使是十狮逝世。

氏拾是十狮尸，适石室。

石室湿，氏使侍拭石室。

石室拭，氏始试食是十狮。

食时，始识是十狮尸，实十石狮尸。

试释是事。

But this is how it would be alphabetized in Pinyin:

 Shī Shì shí shī shǐ 

Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.

Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.

Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.

Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.

Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.

Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.

Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.

Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.

Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.

Shì shì shì shì.

Finally, here it is in English translation:

The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den

In a stone den was a poet called Shi Shi, who was a lion addict and had resolved to eat ten lions.

He often went to the market to look for lions.

At ten o’clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.

At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market.

He saw those ten lions and, using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die.

He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.

The stone den was damp. So, he asked his servants to wipe it.

After wiping the stone den, he tried to eat those ten lions.

When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were, in fact, ten stone lion corpses.

Try to explain this matter.

Pinyin helps me communicate at a basic level, but being unable to rely on script is akin to an amputation of the most foundational block of sense-making. Scriptural skill is what gave my Brahmin forefathers their status, their arrogant sense of self. But in Beijing, I am illiterate, angootha chaap. The result is an almost permanent state of bafflement, but also one of full attention, synapses firing.

I walk around the city and really look – at how people hold themselves and how they laugh. How they size up worth and how they bite into candied crab apples. Without script, I am displaced to the margins. The least interesting person in any conversation, utterly ignorable. It is from the periphery that I watch, infer, and learn, filling in the gaps with little epiphanies.

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At the restaurant, I finally get sugar for my coffee and am able to move on to the food items on the menu. Amidst the more prosaic items there is something called “Fuck the exploded duck.”

The problem, as ever, when it comes to Chinese-English translations is homonyms. The pinyin word "gan" can mean both "dry" and "to do." The latter is also a colloquialism for “fuck." In Beijing, I find numerous iterations of this particular mistranslation. At a local supermarket, the dry food isle is labeled “assorted fuck.”  On another menu, in another restaurant, a spicy stir fry of green vegetables and dried tofu is described in English as, “benumbed hot vegetables fries fuck silk."

Beijing is gearing up to host the 2008 Olympic Games. And the authorities have decided that to be global necessitates being clothed in English. Worrying about the ability of the Chinese language to accommodate the demands of modernity has a storied intellectual history. But in this moment, there are English signs and hoardings everywhere in the capital city. They are intended to signal openness to the outside world.

I am enthralled by these. I realize that in traveling from one language to another there is something that is lost, yes, but even more that is laid bare. There is a directness, shorn of any euphemistic nuance that makes the translations, searingly accurate. In one hospital I find a sign on a door that reads “vagina examination room.”  At a busy traffic intersection another hospital is heralded by an enormous hoarding proclaiming, Dongda Hospital for Anus and Intestine Disease. (In 2007, the sign is eventually ‘corrected’ to “Dongda Hospital of Proctology”).

The adjective “civilized” is attached to all manner of things. Airports are declared to be “civilized airports,” and neighbourhoods claim the same for themselves. A “civilized” place, I learn to understand, is one where people act with “wenming,” or sophisticated manners: they do not spit, they do form orderly queues.

Photo Credit: Pallavi Aiyar

In our own languages we have the kind of topographical competence that allows us to obscure and reveal simultaneously. But when travelling in a new linguistic landscape, such cleverness becomes difficult. We are forced to be direct, shorn of polish, wholly our flawed, stuttering selves.

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Have you ever been in this situation? Robbed of the power of glibness? How did that make you feel? What did it teach you? Do leave a comment:

Until next week,

Take good care,

Pallavi