Becoming Chinese; An Essay
I have been interested in China since I was a child for no reason that I can identify. No-one in my family has ever been there and I never knew any Chinese people growing up. I recall feeling a sense of connection to China for one reason only -- that when we lived in Lusaka, Zambia, we Americans all went over to the Chinese Embassy for a ping pong tournament. The year was 1977 and there was some political reason for this. Some nice Chinese diplomat took me out to show me the goldfish in the Embassy’s courtyard, which I now know are called koi, and gave me some beautiful paper cut-outs of brightly colored flowers. I thought those paper cut-outs were the most beautiful and imaginative thing I had ever seen. I treasured them for years. Now they have vanished.
My next encounter with anything Chinese was Chinese food in Chapel Hill at the age of 13 at a place on Franklin Street with a round door. The round door struck me as exotic, almost indecent, and certainly very mysterious. I suspect I had kung pao chicken or maybe shredded beef with garlic sauce and I thought it was the most marvelous thing in the world. Somehow my parents knew all about ordering Chinese food. How? Like I said, no-one in my family had ever been there before and we had just recently come back from 7 years in Africa. Yes there were Chinese railway workers in Africa but no Chinese food as far as I can remember.
Then in high school I took Mrs. Mein's East Asian History class as a junior mainly because that class along with her English History class were the classes all the cool kids took and they were considered quite hard. I took them both my junior year. In English History, I memorized the prologue of the Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English which I can still recite, mostly. In East Asian history, I learned that I really knew nothing about Asia but I remember the Koumintang and the Ming dynasty and a wonderful trip we took to the Met in New York. There was a subterranean Chinese art gallery made all of limestone and I learned about the feng shui of Asian gardens, though I did not know at the time that it was called feng shui. I began to understand how raked pebbles could be both soothing and beautiful. I saw my first bonsai tree, again, not knowing at the time it was called a bonsai tree. At the Met in New York on that cold, rainy autumn day, I learned that Chinese art was much more than paper cut-outs and that there were stories in each painting much like there are parables in Renaissance painting. If you knew the code, the scroll paintings meant something more than just images of men in robes on stone bridges and bright white cherry blossoms against a moldy tan background.
I ended up going to college in New York and Columbia's best library of all its many wonderful libraries was the East Asian library. Only Columbia students could enter it and it was made of deep dark wood with barrister bookcases of inscrutable Asian texts. It was always silent, full of exiled political dissidents and monks studying Buddhism. It was a great place for an undergraduate to study because there was no chance of being distracted by the inscrutable books. I took some classes in East Asian history at Columbia, all Japanese not Chinese, again because Modern Japanese Literature was one of those classes that all the cool kids took. And it was considered hard. So I read Yukio Mishima and Tanizaki, in translation, and learned about snow on mountains and the crushing double weight of conformity and military defeat. New York also had the Asia Society as well as that soothing, calm subterranean Chinese art gallery at the Met. New York and China, or at least Asia, became one in my mind. But still, I knew very little about Asia. Except that I knew that Tiananmen Square had happened because it happened the summer before my freshman year and my mother and I watched it all on the brand new news station CNN from my aunt's house in Ohio. Some of those Tiananmen dissidents ended up at Columbia. I knew that too.
After that my only exposure to China was through Somerset Maugham and other literature of Empire. But even that was focused on other parts of Asia -- the farthest north Somerset Maugham got was Shanghai, which I now know is very southern China. Not the heartland of China. And this I read only in college, on a sojourn to my parent's house in Cairo which was a duplex on an island in the middle of the Nile. I sat up on the spacious veranda with a pitcher of lemonade in the blazing sun, listening to the call to prayer and reading every Somerset Maugham book we had in the house. Malay figured prominently.
And after that China passed largely out of my mind except as a source of convenient take out food once I started practicing law. Kung pao chicken when you are stuck in the office at 9 p.m. is a wonderful thing. I had forgotten that it was probably the first Chinese food I ever ate, way back in Chapel Hill. China never appeared on my list of places to go. It never occurred to me to vacation there. I think I even told someone at some point that going to Asia held no appeal for me because the people were all short and the signs were illegible and the only way to do it would be on a package tour and I couldn't abide package tours.
But many years later I found myself going to Hong Kong for work. Hong Kong was by this time a city returned to China. I was surprised to find that boarding my direct flight in Chicago gave me goose bumps -- I was getting on a plane in an airport I knew all too well and I was going to sit on it for a very long time and then I would be in Asia! A place I still knew virtually nothing about and had never really imagined visiting. I couldn't remember ever being so excited for at trip. And then Hong Kong was nothing like I expected, starting with the scenery and the beauty of the Pearl River Estuary and the wonderful tropical foliage and of course the startling and unidentifiable food. I ate very well and never got fat. I didn't have the slightest idea what I was eating and knew only that it came in copious amounts. Not only did I not get fat, I actually got thin. Not knowing what you are eating is a relief experience because you have no preconceived notions and actually taste the food for whatever it is. Someone was served a 1,000 year old egg (really only six months old) and I know I ate either a sea slug or a sea cucumber I can't remember which. I was told later that it had been raw, which suggests it was the slug not the cucumber. I was stunned at how old and creaky parts of Hong Kong were. On the ferry ride to Macau, towards the end of my trip, I looked longingly in the direction of Guangzhou, the old Canton, and wished I could go there instead. The Chinese people were not inscrutable -- they were giggly and bumptious just like happy people everywhere. Men were men and women were women just like the rest of the world. People got lost and couldn’t figure out their change and had a bad hair day and were late for appointments just like us in the West. People complained about the weather just like we do. And the traffic. And politicians. And I was not on a package tour -- I was there for work and had freedom and an expense account and a prestigious concierge and also an office in town friends. Every meal I ate I ate with someone local (except breakfast). It was thrilled, uplifted.
So when I got back to the States I started to teach myself Mandarin. I got the idea because in Hong Kong my friend Gigi's son taught me the word for food in Mandarin. Knowing exactly one Mandarin word made me realize that maybe I could learn some more Mandarin words. Learning an Asian language had never occurred to me before. Asian languages were for the smartest, most focused, most driven people I had known in college. You had to start when you were three or something, just like gymnastics. I had wasted my early years on Portuguese and French and then later a smattering of Arabic. There was no way I could do Chinese. No way.
But I tried anyway. And I found that learning Mandarin was like learning to sing. You don't speak Mandarin, you sing it. Words that are spelled the same phonetically mean different things depending on how you say them. And words go together in pre-arranged peaks and troughs -- sitting in my room during the blizzards in February learning Mandarin gave me visions of mist-shrouded purple Chinese mountains just like the ones in the Pearl River Estuary because the words go up and down, just like the mountains. The word for "I" is always spoken very low in your voice range way in the back of your throat. It rises slightly -- it sounds very much like an African man saying "oh." The word that you use when you are asking a question is high and melodic and short, like singing the word "Hark!" in the double chorus piece we sang in high school ("Hark! [big pause] What means those holy voices!?") The phrase for "I can speak" starts low in the throat with the word for "I" and then rises high up a peak in the middle for the "can" part and then drops back low in the throat again for the word for "speak." So I spent my blizzard singing through my Mandarin lessons thinking about kung pao chicken and sea slugs and the Pearl River Estuary.
And then a funny thing happened just the other day. I watched a movie version of a Somerset Maugham story set in Shanghai and the very tall beautiful mountains of the inland area around Guangzhou. The story was typical Empire writing -- British bacteriologist marries vapid woman and takes her to the middle of nowhere where she sulks for a month and then decides to help the nuns take care of cholera orphans until her husband the bacteriologist dies of cholera himself. And there were, of course, lots of Chinese in the movie. Speaking Mandarin. And with a shock I realized that instead of just a stream of babbling and gurgling which is what Chinese had always sounded like to me, especially in movies, I recognized some words. Some actual words of Chinese. It was obviously not crucial to the plot or else there would have been subtitles but still, I could understand what the Chinese extras were saying to each other. Which meant the Chinese characters became real people instead of just a background mass of humanity. I started listening closely and eagerly every time the Britishers went out among the locals. The maid swept the floor in on obsequious manner and I could tell that she was muttering "thank you, thank you" the whole time in a bitter and resentful tone. I wouldn't have known that before. The strongman up the river explained violently that he couldn't do something or other and I could catch the occasional "No, I can't" and even a "I don't speak English" and a "Why don't you speak Mandarin?" Scales fell from my eyes. A door opened. The Mysterious East was, perhaps, accessible? A place of humanity and beauty instead of Cold War politics and take-out food? I could imagine myself conversing with a taxi driver in Mandarin (as long as he spoke slowly) and muttering business meal pleasantries to waiters in Mandarin. I could imagine asking for directions. I felt – liberated. I was surprised. And then I realized that what was exhilarating was the anticipation of being able to understand properly a world I had been glimpsing from the sidelines ever since the ping pong tournament at the Chinese Embassy in Zambia. The world became smaller and larger at the same time. My felt my brain zooming around my little apartment re-orienting itself, the way you zoom around a strange hotel room when you wake up, trying to figure out where you are and what you are looking at. I could finally see the "right side" of the map. It was a place, not a shape. And in comparison, our little left side of the map, clinging to the top of the Mercator projection, is but a microcosm.
So now, at almost 40, I have a whole new world to explore.
I have been interested in China since I was a child for no reason that I can identify. No-one in my family has ever been there and I never knew any Chinese people growing up. I recall feeling a sense of connection to China for one reason only -- that when we lived in Lusaka, Zambia, we Americans all went over to the Chinese Embassy for a ping pong tournament. The year was 1977 and there was some political reason for this. Some nice Chinese diplomat took me out to show me the goldfish in the Embassy’s courtyard, which I now know are called koi, and gave me some beautiful paper cut-outs of brightly colored flowers. I thought those paper cut-outs were the most beautiful and imaginative thing I had ever seen. I treasured them for years. Now they have vanished.
My next encounter with anything Chinese was Chinese food in Chapel Hill at the age of 13 at a place on Franklin Street with a round door. The round door struck me as exotic, almost indecent, and certainly very mysterious. I suspect I had kung pao chicken or maybe shredded beef with garlic sauce and I thought it was the most marvelous thing in the world. Somehow my parents knew all about ordering Chinese food. How? Like I said, no-one in my family had ever been there before and we had just recently come back from 7 years in Africa. Yes there were Chinese railway workers in Africa but no Chinese food as far as I can remember.
Then in high school I took Mrs. Mein's East Asian History class as a junior mainly because that class along with her English History class were the classes all the cool kids took and they were considered quite hard. I took them both my junior year. In English History, I memorized the prologue of the Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English which I can still recite, mostly. In East Asian history, I learned that I really knew nothing about Asia but I remember the Koumintang and the Ming dynasty and a wonderful trip we took to the Met in New York. There was a subterranean Chinese art gallery made all of limestone and I learned about the feng shui of Asian gardens, though I did not know at the time that it was called feng shui. I began to understand how raked pebbles could be both soothing and beautiful. I saw my first bonsai tree, again, not knowing at the time it was called a bonsai tree. At the Met in New York on that cold, rainy autumn day, I learned that Chinese art was much more than paper cut-outs and that there were stories in each painting much like there are parables in Renaissance painting. If you knew the code, the scroll paintings meant something more than just images of men in robes on stone bridges and bright white cherry blossoms against a moldy tan background.
I ended up going to college in New York and Columbia's best library of all its many wonderful libraries was the East Asian library. Only Columbia students could enter it and it was made of deep dark wood with barrister bookcases of inscrutable Asian texts. It was always silent, full of exiled political dissidents and monks studying Buddhism. It was a great place for an undergraduate to study because there was no chance of being distracted by the inscrutable books. I took some classes in East Asian history at Columbia, all Japanese not Chinese, again because Modern Japanese Literature was one of those classes that all the cool kids took. And it was considered hard. So I read Yukio Mishima and Tanizaki, in translation, and learned about snow on mountains and the crushing double weight of conformity and military defeat. New York also had the Asia Society as well as that soothing, calm subterranean Chinese art gallery at the Met. New York and China, or at least Asia, became one in my mind. But still, I knew very little about Asia. Except that I knew that Tiananmen Square had happened because it happened the summer before my freshman year and my mother and I watched it all on the brand new news station CNN from my aunt's house in Ohio. Some of those Tiananmen dissidents ended up at Columbia. I knew that too.
After that my only exposure to China was through Somerset Maugham and other literature of Empire. But even that was focused on other parts of Asia -- the farthest north Somerset Maugham got was Shanghai, which I now know is very southern China. Not the heartland of China. And this I read only in college, on a sojourn to my parent's house in Cairo which was a duplex on an island in the middle of the Nile. I sat up on the spacious veranda with a pitcher of lemonade in the blazing sun, listening to the call to prayer and reading every Somerset Maugham book we had in the house. Malay figured prominently.
And after that China passed largely out of my mind except as a source of convenient take out food once I started practicing law. Kung pao chicken when you are stuck in the office at 9 p.m. is a wonderful thing. I had forgotten that it was probably the first Chinese food I ever ate, way back in Chapel Hill. China never appeared on my list of places to go. It never occurred to me to vacation there. I think I even told someone at some point that going to Asia held no appeal for me because the people were all short and the signs were illegible and the only way to do it would be on a package tour and I couldn't abide package tours.
But many years later I found myself going to Hong Kong for work. Hong Kong was by this time a city returned to China. I was surprised to find that boarding my direct flight in Chicago gave me goose bumps -- I was getting on a plane in an airport I knew all too well and I was going to sit on it for a very long time and then I would be in Asia! A place I still knew virtually nothing about and had never really imagined visiting. I couldn't remember ever being so excited for at trip. And then Hong Kong was nothing like I expected, starting with the scenery and the beauty of the Pearl River Estuary and the wonderful tropical foliage and of course the startling and unidentifiable food. I ate very well and never got fat. I didn't have the slightest idea what I was eating and knew only that it came in copious amounts. Not only did I not get fat, I actually got thin. Not knowing what you are eating is a relief experience because you have no preconceived notions and actually taste the food for whatever it is. Someone was served a 1,000 year old egg (really only six months old) and I know I ate either a sea slug or a sea cucumber I can't remember which. I was told later that it had been raw, which suggests it was the slug not the cucumber. I was stunned at how old and creaky parts of Hong Kong were. On the ferry ride to Macau, towards the end of my trip, I looked longingly in the direction of Guangzhou, the old Canton, and wished I could go there instead. The Chinese people were not inscrutable -- they were giggly and bumptious just like happy people everywhere. Men were men and women were women just like the rest of the world. People got lost and couldn’t figure out their change and had a bad hair day and were late for appointments just like us in the West. People complained about the weather just like we do. And the traffic. And politicians. And I was not on a package tour -- I was there for work and had freedom and an expense account and a prestigious concierge and also an office in town friends. Every meal I ate I ate with someone local (except breakfast). It was thrilled, uplifted.
So when I got back to the States I started to teach myself Mandarin. I got the idea because in Hong Kong my friend Gigi's son taught me the word for food in Mandarin. Knowing exactly one Mandarin word made me realize that maybe I could learn some more Mandarin words. Learning an Asian language had never occurred to me before. Asian languages were for the smartest, most focused, most driven people I had known in college. You had to start when you were three or something, just like gymnastics. I had wasted my early years on Portuguese and French and then later a smattering of Arabic. There was no way I could do Chinese. No way.
But I tried anyway. And I found that learning Mandarin was like learning to sing. You don't speak Mandarin, you sing it. Words that are spelled the same phonetically mean different things depending on how you say them. And words go together in pre-arranged peaks and troughs -- sitting in my room during the blizzards in February learning Mandarin gave me visions of mist-shrouded purple Chinese mountains just like the ones in the Pearl River Estuary because the words go up and down, just like the mountains. The word for "I" is always spoken very low in your voice range way in the back of your throat. It rises slightly -- it sounds very much like an African man saying "oh." The word that you use when you are asking a question is high and melodic and short, like singing the word "Hark!" in the double chorus piece we sang in high school ("Hark! [big pause] What means those holy voices!?") The phrase for "I can speak" starts low in the throat with the word for "I" and then rises high up a peak in the middle for the "can" part and then drops back low in the throat again for the word for "speak." So I spent my blizzard singing through my Mandarin lessons thinking about kung pao chicken and sea slugs and the Pearl River Estuary.
And then a funny thing happened just the other day. I watched a movie version of a Somerset Maugham story set in Shanghai and the very tall beautiful mountains of the inland area around Guangzhou. The story was typical Empire writing -- British bacteriologist marries vapid woman and takes her to the middle of nowhere where she sulks for a month and then decides to help the nuns take care of cholera orphans until her husband the bacteriologist dies of cholera himself. And there were, of course, lots of Chinese in the movie. Speaking Mandarin. And with a shock I realized that instead of just a stream of babbling and gurgling which is what Chinese had always sounded like to me, especially in movies, I recognized some words. Some actual words of Chinese. It was obviously not crucial to the plot or else there would have been subtitles but still, I could understand what the Chinese extras were saying to each other. Which meant the Chinese characters became real people instead of just a background mass of humanity. I started listening closely and eagerly every time the Britishers went out among the locals. The maid swept the floor in on obsequious manner and I could tell that she was muttering "thank you, thank you" the whole time in a bitter and resentful tone. I wouldn't have known that before. The strongman up the river explained violently that he couldn't do something or other and I could catch the occasional "No, I can't" and even a "I don't speak English" and a "Why don't you speak Mandarin?" Scales fell from my eyes. A door opened. The Mysterious East was, perhaps, accessible? A place of humanity and beauty instead of Cold War politics and take-out food? I could imagine myself conversing with a taxi driver in Mandarin (as long as he spoke slowly) and muttering business meal pleasantries to waiters in Mandarin. I could imagine asking for directions. I felt – liberated. I was surprised. And then I realized that what was exhilarating was the anticipation of being able to understand properly a world I had been glimpsing from the sidelines ever since the ping pong tournament at the Chinese Embassy in Zambia. The world became smaller and larger at the same time. My felt my brain zooming around my little apartment re-orienting itself, the way you zoom around a strange hotel room when you wake up, trying to figure out where you are and what you are looking at. I could finally see the "right side" of the map. It was a place, not a shape. And in comparison, our little left side of the map, clinging to the top of the Mercator projection, is but a microcosm.
So now, at almost 40, I have a whole new world to explore.
posted by Anonymous @ 9:38 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home