Dreaming in Chinese (4 page)

The aisles with Chinese shoppers were crammed with jade of all sorts—bracelets, amulets and beads. There were piles of petrified-looking walnuts, rubbed to a gleaming, lacquered shine. Men squatted down to examine the patterns of the shells and tried rolling them around in their hands like giant worry beads. There were strange horns of animals, polished gems of agate or lapis and simple river stones in varying shapes.

Always on the lookout for occasional one-off items, a piece of jewelry or a jar that I like to imagine came from someone’s farmhouse in the countryside, I stopped at a stall with a collection of pretty blue stones. Maybe they were lapis, but maybe they were just lovely glass. The vendor had made some pieces into pendants and others into rings with silver bands. “
Zuò zuò
,” she said to me, pulling out a miniature stool when I lingered.

There it was:
zuò zuò
. I understood immediately. She was not just saying “sit,” but something more polite like “Just have a seat for a few minutes.” I had stumbled upon the double verb and was instantly smitten. Linguists can split hairs about the real effect of doubling the verb: that the action will be short, e.g.,
xiū xiū
= take a little rest; or is minimal in importance, e.g.,
máfan máfan nǐ
= bother you just a little; or makes a statement tentative, e.g.,
xiū xiū shì shì
, literally, fix fix try try, which would mean something like “have a try at fixing” something. The point is that in all these cases, doubling the verb (or the variant form, breaking up the doubled words with
yi
, as in
kàn yi kàn
) softens its impact.

I now double my verbs at every opportunity, partly because it is fun, and partly because I feel gentler and more polite when I do it. I discovered that if I say
kàn kàn
or
kàn yi kàn
to shop girls, “I’m just looking; I’ll just have a look; I’m looking around,” they back off instantly, and let me look in peace. It works like magic.

I’ve expanded to a host of other double verbs:

Shì shì ma
(try try + question): “Can I just try it on?” I say this when I want to try on the goods, but make no commitments.

Zǒu zǒu
(walk walk): “I’m out for a little walk.” I say this to aggressive pedicab drivers looking for a fare.

Wánr wánr
(play play): “We’re just having a little fun and relaxation!” I say this when I’m telling people we’re just going out for no particular reason.

It was a perfect day at the dirt market. When I left, the shop girl who let me
zuò zuò
on her small stool said gently, “
Màn zǒu
.”

3
Zhan, Kaidi,
The Strategies of Politeness in the Chinese Language
, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1992.

Shī, Shí, Shǐ, Shì
Lion, ten, to make, to be

3.
Language play as a national sport

I
F I COULD
time travel, I would go back about a century and look for a man named Chao Yuen Ren
.
⁴
I first heard of Chao, a writer and scholar, from an old China hand and language buff. “If you ever find anything by Chao Yuen Ren,” he told me, “buy it. His books are hard to find, but well worth the search.”

Pictures of Chao in his early twenties capture a baby-faced young man, with round spectacles and a shock of suave combed-back hair, looking very dapper in a Western suit and tie. His clothes look a tad large for him, as if they might have been rented for the photo session, which is the practice of brides and grooms in today’s China. Chao was something of a Renaissance man, shuttling back and forth between the great universities of America and China throughout his life, which spanned nearly the whole twentieth century, as a mathematician, philosopher, musician, and linguist. He composed pop Chinese music,
⁵
and wrote grammars and dictionaries; his wife, a physician named Yang Buwei, wrote about Chinese cuisine.

Chao designed an early version of a way to render the Chinese language in the Roman alphabet so that it could be read phonetically. He also made up a system for writing tones, and—showing a window into his very playful soul—he translated Lewis Carroll’s
Jabberwocky
and
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
into Chinese. Yet after all this, he is probably best known in China for a story about a lion-eating poet, which is composed of 92 characters, each one pronounced the same way:
shi
(sounds like “sure” in English).
⁶

Discovering his story was vindication for me: I always had the impression that Chinese “all sounds the same,” and here was proof! Chao’s story is 92 repetitions of the syllable
shi
. It is perfectly understandable if you read the characters silently, by sight. But if you read those characters out loud, there are 92 “sures” in a row.

Chao Yuen Ren

“The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den” is the story of a poet (
shī
) named Shi who loves to eat lions (
shí shī
), goes to the market (
shì
) to buy ten (
shí
) of them, takes them home to eat (
shí
) and discovers they are made (
shǐ
) of stone (
shí
).

“The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den”

Such language play works because the Chinese sound system uses only about 400 syllables, compared to 4,000 in English. So, there are lots of syllables, like
shi
, that have multiple meanings.

The syllables of Chinese are really simple, just a consonant and a vowel, like
nǐ
,
hǎo
,
ma
,
kuài
,
chī
,
fàn
. A few syllables end in what linguists consider a part vowel/part consonant of
n
,
r
or
ng
. These are simple when compared with more complex syllables in English with its strings of consonants, as in
streets
,
cramp
,
blast
,
crafts
. Words in Chinese are mostly either one syllable long, like
shi
, or two, like
mǐfàn
. The latter are usually compound words, two little ones put together, comparable to
breakwall
,
upstart
, or
firefly
. English, by contrast, is laden with complicated multi-syllable words like
fortitude
,
reasoning
, on up to
antidisestablishmentarianism
.

When I described this Chinese word structure to my sister, she commented, quite rightly, “So, Chinese is not so great for playing Scrabble.”

The Chinese may not play Scrabble, but they do play with their language a lot, handling their small inventory of syllables quite preciously, like Fabergé eggs, to see how much curious potential they can discover in each one.

The more I picked up of the Chinese language going on around me, the more it seemed to me that the typical Chinese person was keenly invested in his own language, whether for fun or as a serious pursuit. The Chinese revere their language for its history, which has often been political and is reflected even in varying names for the Chinese language. It is called
Pǔtōnghuà
, or “common speech,” and
Hànyǔ
, or “the Han people’s language,” or
Zhōngwén
, or “the Chinese language,” and other names as well. And everyone has to make a lifelong effort to learn the characters and then maintain a working command of them, so the language and its complications are always on their minds. They both goof around with the language and fear it for its superstitious power.

Because of its spare syllable structure, Chinese offers a heyday for punsters, jokesters, storytellers, bloggers, twitterers and other language mavens. One form of rapid-fire comedy dialogue, much like Abbott and Costello or maybe the old radio talk show comedians, George Burns and Gracie Allen, is called
xiàngsheng
or “crosstalk.” I can’t follow a word of any crosstalk I hear, but I love watching the Chinese react to it. At my neighborhood laundry in Beijing, the skinny man who ironed shirts with a massive, heavy, industrial-strength iron that looked like a pre-war relic, always had a TV playing in the background. He usually cocked one ear to the dour daily soaps, which favor hospital scenes, a family figure fading away, and others weeping quietly in the background. But when
xiàngsheng
aired, as it always does during the long Chinese New Year holidays, the laundry man was at attention, laughing uproariously, forgetting about his iron. I never left anything for ironing during that season, for risk of burn marks.