Writing English in Chinese

It's entirely possible that I'm losing a bit of my English ability as I make room in my head for all of these Chinese characters. Many people comment on how, every once in a while, the simplest English vocabulary words escape them in the middle of a conversation or, in the case of those I work with, sometimes in the middle of a class. I've found that, especially as I'm furiously writing down notes in both English and Chinese in language class each night, I end up spending about as much time jotting down the English as I do writing the 10-, 12-, 15-stroke characters next to their definition or explanation. In Chinese, if you want to write well (which I can't), you have to concentrate so much on fashioning each individual lines--a slanted hook, a thinning vertical stroke, a rounded-yet-angular swoosh--that, when you switch back to a familiar language like English, the focus on strokes doesn't quickly leave you. If you look at several of the less-complex characters, it might become apparent how, when you're trying to get things down quickly, you tend to do a lot of erasing and scratching out not just of the Chinese on the page, but the English as well: A 会 B 阳 C 忙 F 作 T 行 S 已 e 包.

The above is computer Chinese and lacks the styling of practiced, written Chinese--an art form that many Chinese are apparently beginning to forget as word processors continue to replace horsehair pens and rice paper throughout the country. (I don't know if it's a direct result of the digital revolution, but I've already seen a Chinese friend or two forget how to write a character he/she should have known in the midst of writing down a note, a set of directions to a restaurant, etc.) Of the Chinese art that I've seen so far, I find the calligraphy by far the most compelling. Whereas a great deal of other Chinese studio art (particularly modern art) is frequently based on mimicry of western art forms, it's always refreshing to see the idiosyncrasies and mood that even a single well-crafted character can evoke. After thousands and thousands of times of writing this one word, it may look as if, for instance, late Ming and early Qing dynasty artists were rushing through their scrolls, possessed as they are by white space and a few either too-thickly or too-thinly brushes lines--lines that could have, it looks at first, been written by a child. After thousands of years and thousands of times writing these characters over and over again, the art had become a controlled act of letting go, concentrating while relaxing. The simultaneous intensity in ease is in each one of those characters, sculpted with artistic carelessness, with a type of sprezzatura you really don't see anywhere else in Chinese society.

Maybe it's the long history of these strokes that is trying to express itself as I stumble across my notebook every night in class. My struggling mind can't help but conceive of the strokes that comprise the alphabet as being imbued with the same type of meaning each individual stroke is granted in Mandarin, where even a small dot added to a character can completely change its pronunciation and meaning. If you forget to dot an i (or a lower-case j), no one is going to stumble confusedly through the rest of a note you just quickly wrote to them. I haven't really asked around much about the writing confusion (as opposed to the word-forgetting and speaking mix-ups) but it's funny how, even if it's only in my case, how the brain can mix things up. Tack onto the confusion between English and Chinese the fact that the language is interpreted through a intermediate, illustrative language called pinyin, and it perhaps gets easier to see how things get a bit muddled after a while.

I just saw the word, "mix," and thought of the Chinese character for "dumplings" (jiao, 饺), which contains the same radical as the character for "father"--ba, 爸. 饺子--jiaozi--dumplings--are eaten just after midnight on the first day of the Chinese New Year because, contained within the character for "dumplings," there is a cross, interpreted by Chinese as an intersection of time--of years, the old one and the new. Hence the presence of the same cross in the symbol for "father" (爸), where family generations intersect.

Now look at "mix" again. Imagine being able to look at a word with an "x" and therefore being able to determine that the word has something to do with something overlapping, changing--mixing. That's what Chinese is like. Interestingly, you can of course look at the "x" in "mix" in just that way you look at the cross in 爸 or 饺; a mix is a cross between different things, a mixture. Tricky Romans--creating words that do in fact have a form that follows their function after all.