Mr. China Read online

  ‘Chineseness’ is innate, something that you are born with. It can’t be changed by something as ephemeral as a passport or a mere lifetime spent abroad. Once, as I sat chatting under an old wisteria in the Beijing spring sunshine with Old Liuzi, the conversation turned to adoption. I’d known Liuzi for several years and I told her that I had just come back from Changsha in the south where I had seen a group of about thirty foreigners all carrying tiny Chinese babies. Every year in China, thousands of unwanted babies are abandoned so the Government set up an adoption service to cope with the problem. We talked a bit about the ‘one-child’ policy – most of the unwanted babies are girls – and Liuzi told me that she thought that it was probably a good thing that so many were being adopted abroad. But when I mentioned that Chinese babies adopted by parents in America or Europe would not necessarily grow up just naturally speaking Chinese, she didn’t believe it. She would have none of my theory that language depended on environment. She was convinced that speaking Chinese was hardwired into the genes. This almost physical connection with their culture that Chinese people feel was something that was slowly dawning on me.

  Language is central to this sense of ‘Chineseness’ and the written Chinese characters are central to the language. They provide a link with the past quite unlike that provided by European languages. The characters represent complete ideas rather than sounds so they are different to an alphabet in that they resist changes over the years or between regions. Pronunciation of Chinese words might change over the centuries, but the written character remains constant. The character may be pronounced xiang, heung, or hong, but it always means ‘fragrant’. Separate from the sound and recognizable across thousands of years, the characters keep history alive. When China’s earliest philosophers recorded their ideas on bamboo spills as far back as the sixth century BC they used characters, many of which are still in daily use. It’s as if, with a little effort from the reader, the words of Plato or Aristotle leapt from the page in the original.

  The link in China between daily language and the past is strengthened further by a lack of tenses. In Chinese, there is no verb change depending on time. ‘Mao Zedong is a good leader’ and ‘Mao Zedong was a good leader’ are not distinguished in Chinese. Things that in our language are extinct remain alive in Chinese. Without the separation in language or thought between what ‘was’ and what ‘is’, China’s past seems to merge into its present.

  Until the last century, this connection was strengthened by a traditional dating system that provided no simple way to gauge relative historical periods. Dates were defined by the Emperor’s reign: AD 1817 was Jiaqing 18; AD 965 was Taizu 5; there was nothing to indicate that one of the dates precedes the other by 852 years. The past seemed to merge into cycles that lacked a clear timeline mapping stages in development or an origin where t = 0.

  The heightened awareness of history inhibited change and created a great tension. The language provided a permanent rigid connection to a past that looked backwards but at the same time there was a realization that China was in a struggle for its survival where success depends on the ability to change. The Chinese seemed caught between a great reverence for the past and the need to move on.

  * * *

  My own journey through the language had taken many wrong turnings and, as hard as I searched, I found no alternative to rote learning. Chinese children have to do the same thing; hours and hours and hours spent writing the same character again and again until it sticks. Repetition is the only way in. For an English-speaker learning French, there are prompts. Police becomes police, garden becomes jardin. But a foreigner has no such guide into Chinese: police is jingcha; garden becomes huayuan. And not only jingcha and huayuan. For every word, you have to learn three components: the sound, the character and the tone.

  In Chinese, the pitch of each word affects its meaning. Mai, for instance, with a falling tone, means ‘to sell’. But mai with first a low falling and then a rising tone means precisely the opposite, ‘to buy’. Even Chinese people find it confusing. At the Shanghai Stock Exchange the brokers used slang to make sure that they don’t mix up buy and sell orders.

  Many words sound exactly the same or confusingly similar. Often Chinese people have to go to great lengths to define a character taken out of context. For example, it would be perfectly normal for someone to introduce themselves with ‘Hello, I am Deputy Section Chief Li, that’s the Li with the sign for tree on the top and a seed underneath,’ or ‘Hello, I am Madame Wang, that’s the wang used in “boundless oceans” not the one that means “king”.’ Without further explanation, a character lacking a clear context is often impossible to identify with certainty if one relies merely on its sound.

  As a result, Chinese people often have to give lengthy explanations to convey accurately meanings that would be quite obvious in English. Once, as I waited at Nanjing airport with Ai Jian, we went into a small restaurant. I ordered a beer but when Ai asked for some boiled water the waitress hesitated. Remember, there is no tense in Chinese. ‘Does this man mean “boiling water” or “boiled water”?’ So he expanded: ‘Cold boiled water!’ But that made it worse. She looked completely blank. I could see the concept of cold boiling water slowly developing in her mind. So he gave the full explanation. ‘Please can I have some water that was once cold and then was brought to the boil and has been left so that it has become cold again, so that I can be sure that the water is clean.’

  ‘OK,’ the waitness said flatly and without the remotest change in expression.

  Then there were further complications. Ai Jian had used the expression liangde kaishui, meaning ‘cold boiled water’. But it sounds almost the same as liangge kaishui, meaning ‘two cups of hot water’. So it took another round of negotiations to sort out that he only wanted one cup. No wonder bottled mineral water is so popular in China. The alternative is just too exhausting.

  I loved to eavesdrop when large groups of people became embroiled in these states of confusion, especially when there was a chance that a foreigner, exasperated beyond endurance by endless unintelligible discussions over simple questions, might finally lose his temper.

  Top of my collection of ‘Chinese cross purposes’ occurred in a Chinese medicine shop close to Qianmen, the front gate of the ancient city of Beijing just south of Tiananmen Square. I’d heard that some of the old Chinese remedies there contained a high concentration of cannabis and, although the particular remedy that I had discovered appeared to be a laxative, I was willing to have a go. So I went down to the old Chinese medicine shop, Tong Ren Tang, which was founded in 1669 and still resides in a three-storey building with enormous red columns, rickety staircases and dusty Chinese lanterns.

  Inside, I found row upon row of ancient wooden shop counters containing every conceivable vegetable and animal part, all neatly ordered and packaged and categorized by function; there was the ‘thinning blood’ section, several counters for ‘revitalizing the qi’ and the ‘department of wind control’. It was bemusing, so I asked for the medicine, huo ma ren, at the front desk. They directed me past display cases stuffed with dried sea horses, anti-obesity tea and ‘slices of multi-flowered knotweed tubers’. I climbed the stairs towards a dispensary at the back of the shop. There I found one of the illest-looking shop assistants I had ever seen. Thin almost to the point of translucence, she was deathly pale with papery skin stretched over a face anchored down by a set of outlandish dentures and crowned with a great knot of dried-up hair. She looked as though she was about to fall over. She wore a badge which read ‘Shop Assistant Number 14’ pinned on to her white overalls. I asked for my medicine and, as she fussed about with a pair of ancient weighing scales, I was distracted by a disturbance down at the other end of the long wooden counter. A large woman with a headscarf and thick glasses and wearing blue factory overalls tucked into a pair of enormous boots had clumped in. She was loudly demanding senna. I had obviously stumbled on Constipation City.

  Once the woman had stomped off with h
er bags of senna, the second shop assistant (Number 8) turned to the next customer. He enquired politely whether they sold ants. Number 14 called across from the weighing room and asked, ‘How much d’you want, then?’

  ‘Well, how do you sell ‘em?’ the customer replied.

  Ants: I wondered. Maybe by the ounce? By the litre? By the hill?

  The discussion on ants fast became the focus of attention, and another customer barged into the conversation with the question, ‘So what do ants cure, then?’ Shop Assistant 8 was immediately highly indignant. She flounced off back to the weighing counter, complaining loudly to Shop Assistant Number 14 about customers asking such idiotic questions and announcing hotly that she really had no idea. The customers appeared taken aback by this response. They were, after all, in a medicine shop. But I was sensitized to the confusion and twigged immediately. When the customer had said, ‘Ma yi zhi shenme, ne?’ – ‘What do ants cure?’ – Number 8 had misheard it for ‘Ma yi chi shenme, ne?’, which sounds almost identical but means ‘What do ants eat?’

  So everything comes back to the ideographic character. Written down, ‘cure’ – – and ‘eat’ – – are immediately distinguishable. It’s the sounds zhi and chi that confuse. Without seeing a character, or having it laboriously described by context or shape, it is not possible to be absolutely sure which one is meant.

  About a hundred years ago, there was a move to abolish characters. There was a brief reform movement and the government was trying to modernize the country. The writing system was seen as archaic, something that was holding China back, so they proposed the idea of replacing characters with a phonetic representation. The characters for China, would be replaced by a spelling of its sound: ‘chung kuo’. Beijing, or , would become ‘pei ching’; the underlying characters would be done away with.

  A professor at Beijing University wrote a short, nonsensical but intelligible story in response. It told of a poet, called Gentleman Shi, who lived in a stone house and became addicted to eating lions. He went in search of them and found ten in a market, but realized that they were all dead when he got home. The professor published his story without any comment.

  Transcribed into the phonetics that the government had suggested,

  became:

  Shih shih shih shih shih

  Shih shih shih shih shih shih, shih shih shih, shih shih shih shih. Shih shih shih shih shih shih shih. Shih shih, shih shih shih, shih shih shih shih shih. Shih shih, shih shih shih shih shih, shih shih shih shih shih, shih shih shih shih shih shih. Shih shih shih shih shih shih shih shih shih. Shih shih shih, shih shih shih shih shih shih, shih shih shih, shih shih shih shih shih shih shih shih, shih shih, shih shih shih shih shih shih shih

  Shih shih shih shih!

  Every character in the professor’s story is pronounced shih. The last four mean something like ‘Go on, check that it’s true!’ The professor’s point was clear; like it or not, Chinese can’t be reduced to an alphabet. The characters are here to stay.

  Modern Chinese characters are highly developed pictograms. Sometimes it is possible to make out the root, but for most it is not. ‘Horse’, for example, still looks vaguely like the animal. With a bit of imagination, the mane, the back, the four legs and the tail in the hook on the right hand side are still visible.

  But then tiger,

  or snake,

  give no obvious clue to their meaning. Rain can be seen in the picture of a cloud and cascading water droplets,

  and umbrella – well, it’s an umbrella.

  In other characters, vague hints can be given to the meaning and sometimes the sound, but never enough to be sure. For instance, three droplets at the left-hand side of a character imply water, thus:

  river,

  lake,

  waterfall,

  the wistful sound of the rain pattering through the leaves,

  and snot.

  To make matters even worse, Mao tried to simplify the language by modifying the characters. The idea was to make them easier to learn, but his changes can add to the confusion. For instance, the character

  has an alternative form

  but has a completely different meaning from

  which looks almost the same.

  So this was my third reason to go back. With all its comic imprecision, the mesmerizing poise of its characters and its mysterious capacity to reach back into the depths of history and bring thoughts resonating across thousands of years, I had unwittingly fallen for the language.

  As I started to think about what to do next, I felt that the core problem was that we had somehow completely failed to get the Chinese on our side. We had invested vast sums of money into China; that was unusual in itself. There were some global giants who had invested more, but not many. We were the only foreign investor to have put such huge amounts into the inner provinces where money was most needed but where few investors were willing to go. Su’s gearwheel factory, for instance, was in a tiny village in Sichuan. When I went there in late 1993, I was the first Westerner ever to visit. When we wired in our investment of fifteen million, it was held in escrow by the Prefectural Bank for four days while they confirmed the amount with the remitting bank. It was the largest transaction that they had ever handled and they assumed that there had been a clerical error with the amount.

  Later we invested in a Third Line factory in Shanxi near where Ai Jian had lived with the peasants. When we arrived, the factory had nothing. It was a huge iron foundry originally built to supply parts for tanks, but they had never had enough money to get it up and running. Some of the buildings, which had been started in the 1970s, were still not complete. There was hardly an unbroken window in the whole factory. In winter, it was freezing inside; at dinner, they couldn’t afford beer and in the surrounding fields people still lived in caves. But when we eventually invested twenty-five million in the factory, we still didn’t seem to get them on our side.

  There seemed to be an almost total mutual incomprehension. According to our world-view, we thought that we had something enormously valuable to bring to China, which would enable the factories to prosper and develop. But the factory directors had seemed to be quite uninterested in building something together with us once the money had arrived. It was as if some things hadn’t changed in the two hundred years since George III first tried to open up China for business.

  In 1793, the British king had sent an emissary to the Chinese Court to negotiate trade relations. The mission lasted two years and involved seven hundred people – doctors, musicians, painters and soldiers among them – all loaded up with telescopes, porcelain, fabrics and chronometers, models of gunships and a planetarium as gifts for the Emperor. The emissary arrived in Beijing but was only granted an audience with the Qian Long Emperor after months of bickering over whether he would kow-tow by banging his forehead on the ground nine times before addressing the Emperor. Britain, at the time, was an advanced mercantile nation, on the brink of industrialization and with the most powerful navy on earth so George III, understandably, considered himself an equal when dealing with the Emperor. But that was utterly removed from the Chinese picture of the world. It never occurred to them that George III would consider himself anything other than the petty administrator of some distant vassal state and prostrate himself before the Emperor. After months of haggling, a formula was eventually agreed where, according to the emissary, as representative of the King, he went down on one knee. But after he had been finally ushered into the imperial presence, he was handed an edict by Court officials that had been prepared weeks beforehand. It read:

  Although your country, O King, lies in the far oceans, yet, inclining your heart towards civilization, you have specially sent an envoy respectfully to present a message. We have perused the text of your message and the wording expresses your earnestness. From it your sincere humility and obedience can clearly be seen. It is admirable and we fully approve.

  It went on to deal with the King’s key request – that permission be granted
for trade representatives to reside in China – as follows:

  The Celestial Empire, ruling all within the four seas, simply concentrates on carrying out the affairs of government properly . . . we have never valued ingenious articles, nor do we have the slightest need of your country’s manufactures. Therefore, O King, as regards your request to send someone to remain at the capital, whilst it is not in harmony with the regulations of the Celestial Empire, we also feel very much that it is of no advantage to your country. Hence we have commanded your tribute envoys to return safely home. You, O King, should simply act in conformity with our wishes by strengthening your loyalty and swearing perpetual obedience so as to ensure that your country may share the blessings of peace . . . this is a special edict.

  The British eventually responded by blowing up Nanjing. But at the time, the emissary returned to England, completely mystified as to why the Chinese didn’t want the benefits of trade and technology that he could bring from Europe. The Chinese probably never gave it another thought. To be sure, almost two centuries later Deng had ripped open the doors and let in the outside, but there were still times when I felt traces of this traditional thinking, the sense that China had endured temporary invasions for centuries but had eventually absorbed the invaders; that it didn’t need to accommodate a better relationship with foreigners but just take what might be useful at the time and continue on its own chosen path.