Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [7]
Take the issue of Chinese characters. There are 20,000 of them. Fortunately, you don’t need to learn all 20,000, just 7,000 should you wish to understand what an educated Chinese person is talking about. Three thousand might get you through a newspaper. But as I delved into this black and yellow Reference Book For The Rest Of Us, I soon realized that if it was indeed sufficient to teach Chinese to a dummy, then clearly I must be a feeble-minded moron. I was not going to learn 3,000 characters. In truth, I was rather taken aback by how complex a Chinese character is. I had always assumed that a character was essentially a pictograph and that to discern its meaning one simply had to understand Chinese drawing. Happy would be a happy face with Chinese characteristics. Like nearly everything else I assumed about China, I was wrong. The vast majority of Chinese characters are singular mixtures of the phonetic and the semantic. They are unique composites that offer both meaning and sound. But then, remembering that human beings cannot produce 20,000 unique sounds, even if you were to include belching and hawking great globs of phlegm (which I think counts in Chinese), the linguistic powers that be—whoever they are—threw in tones, possibly to ensure that no foreigner over the age of thirty would have any chance whatsoever of understanding the Chinese language. There are four primary tones, which means that if I were to pronounce the exact same sound in four different tones, I would be conveying four distinct meanings. You see how difficult this gets.
To further muddy the waters, there was the question of which Chinese language in particular should I be studying. There is, of course, Mandarin Chinese, which is spoken in Beijing, but take a train south to Shanghai, and you will find yourself surrounded by people—many, many people, this being China—who speak the Shanghainese dialect of Wu Chinese, and who will look at you a little quizzically as you try to order dim sum (they’ll look at you quizzically anyway). Travel even farther south to Guangdong Province and Hong Kong and you will enter the world of the Cantonese, who speak a language also said to be Chinese, but which is utterly unintelligible to the speakers of Wu and Mandarin. There are seven other major linguistic groups within the Chinese language, and within each there are a plethora of dialects, which are called fangyan, or “speech of a place.” And then there are sub-fangyan, of course. For a traveler, this is not good.
And so, as I arrived at the airport to begin the long flight to Beijing, I practiced the few phrases of Mandarin I had memorized. Yes, the Chinese language, every variant of it, would be unfathomable to me, but that didn’t mean I had to arrive completely unprepared. “Qingwen. Wo buhui dun zhege cesuo. Youmeiyou biede cesuo keyi yong?”
“What does that mean, Daddy?” asked my four-year-old son, Lukas.
“It’s Chinese for Excuse me. I am not proficient at squatting. Is there another toilet option?”
Lukas reflected. “So do people in China use different potties?”
“Apparently, from what I’ve read. I’ll call to let you know.”
Four-year-olds are inquisitive, and I do nothing to crush it. “Zhege zhende shi jirou ma?” I offered.
“What does that mean?” Lukas asked again. My one-year-old son, Samuel, repeated what I’d said with a baby accent. Zhe ge zhe ge.
“It means Are you sure that’s chicken?”
I said a difficult good-bye to the boys, kissed my wife, pledged my eternal