Dreaming in Chinese (13 page)

There were good reasons for this compass orientation, at least in early times: south was auspicious, being the source of comforting warm breezes and the best sunshine. North was feared for the biting, brittle winds and invading barbarians. Beijing’s Forbidden City was designed to be mindful of this
fēngshuǐ
—literally “wind-water” sense. The main gates of the Forbidden City open to the sunny south, and the back walls guard against the angry, invading Mongols to the north.

The Forbidden City was the scene of my one and only experience as a time-traveler. I was visiting Beijing briefly during the spring of 2003, just as China was emerging from its lockdown during the SARS epidemic. Schools had been closed and businesses quieted. It was later determined that this marked the moment when Chinese youth became hooked on video games, as kids spent long days at home with little else to do. Street-cleaning trucks sprayed disinfectant along all the curbs with manic ferocity; the subways were just starting up again and still eerily, blessedly empty; and a few tourist spots were opening their gates.

I went one day to the Forbidden City, the lone visitor in all the courtyards and alleyways. With every step, I heard only my own sandals clacking against the stones and the wind through the trees in the back gardens. I sat in the gardens studying my maps and discovered that sure enough, in the vestige of the original city plan, the top of the city, at the top of the map, was south, while the so-called “right” gate of the city was in the direction of west.

Maps have been my lifeline as I have traveled around China. I have collected maps to help navigate all the big, sprawling cities—Shenzhen, Shenyang, Chengdu, Urumqi, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Kunming; the list goes on.

My collection has grown into towering stacks, and I hoard them as protectively as a pensioner who harbors stray cats. My maps are invaluable, but they are also problematic, drawn with little consistency and less reliability, like those in the subway stations.

Each time I head out to a first-time destination, even in my home cities of Shanghai and Beijing, I follow a sacred ritual of preparation. I choose my best three or four maps for the city, spread them out on the dining-room table, and cross-check against a variety of Web sources. This isn’t obsession; it is survival. After three years in China, my success rate for first-time direct hits reached about 60 percent.

In fairness, Chinese mapmakers face a big task just keeping pace with change. Within weeks, roads disappear or appear, names change, buildings pop up where others have been razed. In Shanghai, I learned to wait patiently beside the cobbler repairing my shoes or risk them vanishing overnight along with the shop, sacrifices to progress. I developed a keen sensitivity about shops that looked like they could have short lifespans and was always diligent about collecting left laundry promptly. One of my most disappointing losses was several coupons on my prepaid discount card at the local massage parlor. I returned after Chinese New Year holidays one year to find its doors shuttered and a few abandoned, sorry-looking beds. No note, no map, nothing.

When my maps fail me, I ask people on the street for help. The dialogue always goes something like this:

Me:
Bówùguǎn zài nǎr
?
(“
Can you tell me where the museum is
?”)

Good-natured Chinese pedestrian:
Zài nàr!
(
“
Over there
”—this accompanied by a broad sweep, arcing 90 degrees or more, of two widespread arms, and ending with a delicate upward flair of the wrist, all of which points toward nothing in particular)
.

Me:
Xìe xie
.(
“
Thanks
,” while thinking, I haven’t a clue where this person is gesturing me to go; shall I go straight ahead, or shall I cross to the right?)

Good-natured Chinese pedestrian:
(Silence, with a look that says, “Another crazy foreigner, asking for directions and then disregarding them”)
.

What is it about this dysfunctional business of maps and directions? One long-time China hand told me he thinks the vagueness is connected to the deep-seated sense of face: the Chinese find it very personally difficult to say boldly and simply “I don’t know” when they don’t know an answer. They are more comfortable—and can save face—by demurring and offering some vague noncommittal response. This explanation made sense to me, although I would have much preferred to hear a straightforward “I don’t know” than be sent off frequently on a wild-goose chase.

Another explanation came from a young Chinese woman named Miranda, who described the problem in terms of practical, functional training and experience.

Miranda works in an English-speaking office and uses a giant exercise ball as her desk chair. She drifted onto my wavelength easily and was always patient about answering my questions.

This time, she was surprised by my map-reading query, “Why don’t the Chinese use maps?” And I was surprised by her answer. “Map reading,” Miranda almost scoffed. “Why would you need it? If you live in a village you know where you’re going. We don’t study map reading in school.”

“Now,” she continued, “if you’re in the army, then you study maps. But if you’re not in the army, you don’t need them.”

Mostly fair enough, I thought (although you would think that taxi drivers, who always make calls on their cell phones but never turn to maps when they need directions, might be an exception), but what if you’re off in another part of the country besides your home village? Miranda agreed that the Chinese did seem to have trouble finding their way around in new places. She said, “If you ask someone where their home town is, they’ll say it is seven hours by bus. Or four hours by train. They won’t tell you
where
it is.”

Hearing a question of
where
and giving an answer of
how long
; walking
backward
to get somewhere
in front of
you; reading maps
upside down
; absorbing that
up
in space
also means
behind in time
and
down in space
also means
ahead in time
—these are some of the points where East meets West.

Wǒ, Nǐ, Tā, Tā, Tā
I, you, he, she, it

8.
Disappearing pronouns and the sense of self

T
HE VILLAGE OF
Xizhou is nestled in a verdant strip of land in China’s southwestern Yunnan Province. To the east lies Erhai Lake, where cormorants play. To the west, hills rise to the Tibetan Plateau, where herders graze their yaks. During World War II, Xizhou offered a first contact point for the Flying Tigers as they flew over the Hump of the Himalayas, laden with supplies for Chiang Kai-shek’s army in Chungking (now Chongqing, by some measures China’s most populous metropolitan area). The American military set up a radar and radio station for the fliers in the attic room of a Xizhou village elder’s farmhouse.

That farmer’s son still lives in the same small house. His dog yapped when he heard us knocking at the gate, and his daughter invited us to look around, and later for tea. There were few signs of events in what we considered the historic past, but the old man, who witnessed the excitement as a little boy, conjured up images for us of soldiers pacing and smoking in the yard, and parking their shiny automobiles behind the outbuildings where empty fields now stand. We looked around the attic and peeked into some old storage barrels, hoping to find a cast-off bit of hardware or a little writing scratched on the wall somewhere. But there was nothing, not a remnant left.

Xizhou, which means something like “happy land,” is blessed with many gifts of nature—rice paddies, elegant hills, a temperate climate and the clearest skies we saw in all our years in China. Xizhou saved itself by its own charms during the Cultural Revolution. Troops from the People’s Liberation Army decided to quarter there. Their presence protected the buildings from the predations of the Red Guards, who roamed the country and wreaked havoc with abandon. Townspeople buried their treasures and heirlooms for safekeeping in the fields around their houses; now they will sell some of what they have unearthed to visitors and tourists. I bought a small teapot and a few mirrors from someone’s attic.

The town looks prosperous compared with many we saw in China. Farmers are busy in their lush paddies. The forward-minded town authorities are helping restore old houses. Xizhou kids ride bikes and wear nice shoes. When school was letting out one afternoon, we saw three or four kids pause their bikes at the snack shop by the main square, furtively buy two cans of the weak local beer, zip them quickly into their backpacks and ride off.

On Saturday evenings in Xizhou, there is an “English corner” for informal conversation, in one of the village play yards. It was started by some American friends of ours, who opened a small cultural center and inn in the village. About a dozen kids showed up the evening we were there, to play games and practice their English with any English speakers who might show up. A few curious parents hovered around the edges of the group, and a few more sat in the circle among the children to absorb what they could.

In between singing and dancing the hokey-pokey and some other favorites we dredged up from our own school days, we enticed the kids with a circle game into a bit of an English pronoun lesson. Each one had to tell the age of the kid sitting next to him: “This is Ming. She is twelve years old.” Or “This is Liang. He is eleven years old.” The kids caught on right away, but when one would confuse “he” and “she,” the rest, like vultures, would home in screaming mercilessly “HE! HE!!” or “SHE! SHE!!”

Mixing up he and she in English is a classic error among the Chinese. I came to expect that even the most fluent Chinese speakers of English would eventually say something like “Your son looks just like your husband; she is tall and handsome!”

This confusion never occurs on formal occasions, like speeches or presentations. I never see it in print. But the he/she mix-ups regularly show up in everyday conversation. “Oh yeah, my wife does that,” two different Americans with very fluent English-speaking Chinese spouses told me. A Chinese woman who spent time abroad and speaks with an easy American accent told me, “I hear myself talking and the wrong word just pops out before I know it!”

What is going on here? The simplest answer—that he and she are both said as
tā
in Chinese—is tempting, but it is not enough. The concept of gender is simple, and the Chinese commonly master much worse sticklers in English, like verb tenses. Certainly they could master this, especially considering
tā
he and
tā
she are represented in their written forms by two different characters:
tā
he is
and she is
.