Conquer the Chinese Language, Conquer the World

Almost exactly a year ago, a crazy old man told me (in Chinese, of course) that I will be phenomenally successful, “not just regular successful”. That before this can happen, I had to unlock the secret to my success. Apparently the key to success is different for everybody, but I had the good luck to be stuck with the hardest of them all: “conquer the Chinese language, my girl, and you will conquer the world.” That scared the hell out of me. Why couldn’t I have something… simpler?

It’s a fine language, a beautiful language, that much I’ll grant you—there is no other language quite like it. Four words in the Chinese language come together to say so much more, so much more eloquently and spectacularly and succinctly, than what I could say in four sentences in English. It’s my native language, and, contrary to popular opinion, I speak it everyday, along with one other Chinese dialect. I’m not entirely Chinese illiterate. While I can’t read classical Chinese texts (who can, other than the Chinese literature students?), I do fine with reading history books, newspapers and novels in either simplified or traditional Chinese. But reading and writing Chinese is hard; being a master of it takes years. If you want to know how hard the Chinese language is, read this article. When I say it’s hard, I don’t mean it’s hard to speak it well. I mean it’s hard, in my opinion at least, to read and write Chinese at the same level of sophistication that most people, myself included, are able to attain with written English or most other languages in a relatively short while. That’s what I’m struggling with at the moment—I want to write better in Chinese. My brain just doesn’t work that way yet, apparently. Maybe it’s because I never read as widely or as obsessively in this language, as I did in English.

The writing system is beautiful, I can’t stress that enough. Any writing system that works without alphabets is, to my easily impressionable mind, a work of art and an utter mystery. It’s like painting, sometimes, like when three dots on the left hand side mean that word has to do with water (representing water droplets). My Chinese teacher in primary school liked emphasizing: if you look at the old Chinese character for love, it’s quite literally the various components depicting “warmth over a roof over a heart over a friend” (this sounds so much better in Chinese). Which she then extrapolated into—love is a friend you love with a roof over your heads, which creates great warmth! I think our ancestors got that right. Then there’s the problem challenge of the four sounds. Remember how the Chinese language doesn’t have an alphabet? As it turns out, it not only doesn’t have an alphabet, it gets better: the word, cong, would sound to the untrained ear, almost exactly the same as chong, and I’d wager you’d have trouble telling those apart from zong and zhong too. It doesn’t help that those are all distinct syllables, and that in each of those syllables there are then four possible sounds. So cong1, cong2, cong3 and cong4 are entirely different beasts—and! It gets better, because in each of the sounds of each syllable, like cong1, there are hundreds of different possibilities, entirely distinct words.

I never hated the language. I hated the way the Chinese language was being taught here in Singapore, how it made whole generations of people perceive this to be a dead, and deadly boring language whose rewards were never quite worth the effort. And it took effort, a lot of it. Like many people here I think I hadn’t used it in a few years ever since passing my last major Chinese examination, but a variety of things have led to a recent, relentless pursuit of improving my reading and writing skills. That strange old man’s proclamation may have something to do with it. My pet research topic—my current academic writing and freelance journalism efforts focus mostly on post-world war Chinese and Southeast Asian military history; think the Communists, Kuomintang, the transnational themes of the time, the Malayan Communist Party, the Emergency, etc—have the majority of sources, references and texts in Chinese books and essays. And at this point it appears my full time photojournalism career will take place mostly in and around China. I wish I was just slightly better at this. It’s one thing to read a Chinese newspaper or romantic novel, and quite another to find yourself wading at the deep end of the pool, dictionary in hand, reading academic, literary Chinese.

The strides have been tremendous. I think I started getting serious about wanting to improve my Chinese about two months ago. I started by exploring the Chinese web, reading Baidu news instead of Google news. That progressed to Chinese articles I find myself enjoying more than I thought I would. These days I find myself standing in the peak hour trains, scanning the back and front pages of the Chinese news in several seconds, something I was never able to do before (I used to read slowly and deliberately, with a habit of pondering upon every character I saw). Just yesterday, in the middle of dinner with an amazing scholar and his Chinese writer friend, it hit me—I’m not too bad! I’ve managed several hours of talking about the Malayan Communist party, the transnational guerilla war, and sociological themes… in Chinese (with a Chinese scholar who speaks the way he writes—in highly literary Chinese), without even realizing it! I find that in the span of two short months, I have made tremendous progress. Reading comes very easily to me now. It wasn’t so much a struggle in the past as it was a mental ‘dragging of the feet’, but it (my brain) now flies along. Next step: writing natively.

For some reason, all this has suddenly become important to me. A major project I’ve recently undertaken involves the Malayan Communist Party and that fascinating period in our part of the world. The English accounts are by and large staid, academic, and clinical. The Chinese transcripts, oral histories, books, memoirs, outnumber the English version by several times, and also seem to tell the story of this history that I love, so much more vividly, comprehensively, being the untranslated voice of the ‘losers’ of this history, after all. It’s a struggle, no doubt, but I feel lucky that I’m coming from the middle and trying to do this starting from somewhere (i.e. slightly literate), rather than from scratch. So this might take 10 years, instead of 20. And then when I get there, wherever it is (being published in Chinese?), given the way this language works, I’ll probably realize: oh my God, there’s another lifetime ahead of me, in learning this crazy language of mine.

That’s why Chinese people work so hard. We’re used to it, everything else seems easy.

P.S. Having nciku the amazing web dictionary open in another tab makes this process a whole lot easier!