Tom’s family was poor, far poorer than most people in the world: China’s average annual income per capita was then about $375, less than in Burkina Faso, Rwanda, and Lesotho; just a touch more than that in India, and a far cry from America’s nearly $23,000. The two Asian giants, China and India, one Communist, the other democratic, are often compared within China. During that tree-planting trip to Shenzhen, Deng Xiaoping proclaimed, “Poverty is not socialism. To be rich is glorious.”6 This was a signal to Tom’s parents and grandparents that private industry had been decriminalized. Deng’s words sounded like a directive, and Tom’s family pushed to attain upward mobility. His grandparents and teachers tried hard to learn Mandarin in addition to their local dialect. His older cousin tested among the top five students in the city in English, so she moved to Shanghai to look for a job with a foreign company. She was the talk of the neighborhood.
Views of the outside world were scarce. Home televisions were few. There was no access to the Internet (twenty million American adults had Internet access by 1996).7 Tom vaguely remembers how, when he was three, everyone gathered in a public hall to watch China win sixteen gold medals at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. It was the first live broadcast from America he’d ever seen. His parents watched in awe and told him, “Look, son, that is the greatest country on Earth.” When Tom was young, he didn’t know anyone who had one of the 5.5 million cars in the country. Bicycles of nearly identical make and model, the ubiquitous Flying Pigeon, swarmed city streets. Almost everyone was skinny. Getting visas to travel abroad was nearly impossible. Most embassies, including China’s, assumed Chinese families would try to emigrate illegally if they could. Tom’s family simply couldn’t afford to travel. Once, when Tom was five years old, he waited in line for three hours to eat fried chicken at the first KFC in a neighboring city. It was the first Western food he had ever tasted. The mashed potatoes were a marvelous texture—not quite tofu, not quite rice porridge, but buttery and smooth. It was also the first time he’d ever tasted butter, and it gave him the runs for days.
Tom learned that other countries used to call China “the sick man of Asia.” In his history books he read about the Century of Humiliation (1839–1949) and how China, once the strongest, wealthiest empire in the world, grew weak at the hands of its own Qing government (1644–1911). In China’s weakened state, Western colonial powers divided China’s major cities among themselves, using them as trade ports for tea and silk, crippled the populace with the illegal trade of opium, and made the Chinese second-class citizens in their own land. He read that the small island nation of Japan had occupied China and held it hostage from 1937 to 1945. The Japanese raped Chinese women and tested biological weapons on Chinese peasants. Tom’s country was too weak to stop them.8
Fast-forward to Tom’s high school years. China’s GDP per capita had swelled to ten times what it was when he was a child. By then Chinese individuals’ wealth was triple that of their counterparts in India, China’s old economic rival. Tom’s family could afford to eat out all the time—and they did. Now, young Chinese eat three times as much pork as they did when they were small children. Caloric intake had fully doubled since Tom’s grandparents were teens, which explains why they’re so short—their growth had been stunted by malnutrition—and also why Tom’s school now cautioned him and his younger classmates about obesity in gym class.9 When he was fifteen, Tom cheered as he watched the Beijing Olympics and his country racked up fifty-one gold medals, fifteen more than the United States. His parents couldn’t believe it. Tom thought, Why not?
A decade later, China was at the center of every global conversation. Tom and his friends saw that when China’s economy creaks, the world’s groans. As empowering as the global narrative was, national competition kept them preoccupied. Tom was studying for a graduate degree. He was one of 7.5 million students to graduate from college when he did—China now graduates the most college students of any country in the world—and if Tom wanted to have a chance to get a good job, he had to pursue an advanced degree.
In his twenty-odd years of life, Tom has watched his country’s economic reality transform from poverty to global power. Chinese travelers constitute the biggest outbound tourism market in the world, and all nations vie for the business of Chinese tourists.10 When South Africa changed its visa laws to make it difficult for Chinese to enter, the South African tourism community protested. They wanted the business.11 China sends students abroad in droves, and they are being welcomed by universities with open arms. Tom’s friends send him pictures from their classrooms in England. One picture showed a professor’s presentation: “China: The Economic Miracle.” However, his friends still believe that Westerners regard China with suspicion. China has become the biggest car market in the world and has enough rich people that it is on the brink of becoming the largest luxury car market in the world.12 The Flying Pigeon bicycle is now fashionable—some sell for thousands of dollars. China is poised to become the largest movie market in the world, so Chinese no longer have to put up with films that depict them as coolies with queues or actors in leading roles who speak broken English.13 Many movies made in Hollywood are suddenly setting scenes in Shanghai or hiring Chinese actors. The way Tom and his generation view themselves, and are viewed by the world, is evolving.
Older Chinese, who still view themselves and their country as inferior to the United States and many Western powers, find it simply inconceivable that China is a member of the Group of Twenty, the international forum of government leaders and central bankers from the twenty biggest economies. Now, the world is focused on the great power relationship between the United States and China, a notion that is simply not believable to older Chinese. But to Tom, China’s inclusion is simply logical. In 2014, Alibaba, China’s tech and e-commerce giant, reaped the richest initial public offering (IPO) in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. By then China’s GDP per capita was twenty times more than when Tom was a child and six times more than India’s.
Young Chinese see their country as the underdog of the modern era, a narrative heavily reinforced by China’s education system. From many people’s perspective, it is one of the greatest comeback stories in the history of storytelling, the great, true story of the fighter that everyone said couldn’t make it—too weak, too overpopulated, too old, too slow, too outdated, too sickly, too far behind. They were bullied, beat up, sabotaged. And now, against the odds and opposition, China has risen to power.
* * *
Every Chinese student learns this saying early in life: “Diligence is the path up the mountain of knowledge; hard work is the boat on the endless sea of learning.”*
The line is also apt for those trying to approach China, its people, and its language. To hear someone speak Chinese is to recognize their diligence, how far they have trudged up the mountain of knowledge. Outsiders can learn about a country’s economics and politics in translation. They cannot know a person and a people without also knowing their language.
Tom’s generation grew up studying English for about ten years—China has three hundred million English speakers, whereas the United States has only one million Chinese speakers. He and his generation grew up watching Western movies and TV shows, reading Western books, paying attention to Western celebrities, and cheering the West’s sports stars. His favorite movie is The Matrix, and he can quote Barney from the TV show How I Met Your Mother. He doesn’t have access to Facebook, but more people in China use the Chinese social app WeChat than there are people in the European Union. Despite the great firewall, the Chinese Internet regulations that censor the content Chinese may see, Tom believes he still has a much better view of the world than the world has of China.
Language lies at the core of that discrepancy. The world’s lack of understanding of China is in large part the result of its decision to build literal and figurative walls around the country and its culture. When China began to trade with other nations, it was illegal for Chinese citizens to teach foreigners their language.
To do so was punishable by death.*
The DNA of Chinese culture is baked into the language. In the 1910s and 1920s, a faction within China who wanted to do away with the pillars of Chinese culture, specifically Confucianism, which they saw as hindering China’s ascension into modernity, advocated for the abolishment of the Chinese language. Qian Xuantong, a professor of literature at what was then National Peking University, advised a contemporary in 1918: “If you want to abolish Confucianism, you must first abolish the Chinese [written] language.”14 Because they could not disentangle the language and the culture, Qian and other academics advocated elimination of the language. Some advocated the adoption of Esperanto. They failed. Today China’s national language is Mandarin, which the FBI classifies as one of the five most difficult languages for native English speakers to learn.
When I moved to China in 2012, my first goal was to learn the language. I am far from a linguist. I had unsuccessfully attempted to learn Latin and French at different points in my life, so I spent time researching the best ways to “acquire,” as I learned the pros term it, a language. When I got to China, anything I had to do, I did in Chinese, from changing the language settings of my phone and computer systems to awkward, unsuccessful dates. I downloaded Anki, a spaced repetition system of flashcards,* then Pleco, an invaluable phone app that I still use daily, and got to work making flashcards of complete sentences.
I progressed in phases. One day my landlord, a thirty-year-old woman, applauded my progress and told me, “You speak so cute!” That afternoon I was in a coffee shop and asked the server, a university student, about her day. Her response? “Wow! Your Chinese is so cute!” A few days later a Chinese coworker patted me on the back after I had used the word for lifetime instead of the word for cup. She said, “Your Chinese is really coming along! You speak so cute!”
The last time someone had described me as cute, I had not yet hit puberty. I mentioned this to my neighbor. He laughed and told me, “Oh, it is because you talk like a baby.”
Studying then took on more urgency as I worked to reduce the distance between my Chinese personality and my American one. My neighbor’s comment also reminded me that when my Chinese friends spoke English with me, they, too, were having difficulty representing their true selves.
My victories came in tiny increments. At the beginning my goal was only to distinguish exactly where my landlord’s sentences stopped and started. Then I wanted to be able to explain the measurements of my bed to a saleswoman so I could buy sheets of the correct size. A month later my goal was to describe the rent I was willing to pay for an apartment and where I wanted to live: inexpensive, and near Suzhou’s famous canals. Then I started to travel, and that’s when I learned from a young Chinese man, Guo, and his friends that China’s walls had not only kept people out but also kept people in.
Guo and I met on an overnight train headed south. He was nineteen and headed back to his university after vacationing in Suzhou. China’s sleeper cars have cubbies of six beds. Guo and his friends had the three bunks opposite my row. They stared at me with curiosity. No other foreigners were in our train car. Finally, Guo asked in halting English, “Can you speak Chinese?”
China’s matrix of railroads spreads across the country, more than forty-six thousand miles of steel track. Of those, more than twelve thousand miles are suitable for bullet trains, which means China has more high-speed rail than the rest of the world combined.15 You can get almost anywhere in the country by train, and during that first year I did. I had realized that I could learn the language anywhere, so I would work for a month or two teaching English at a night school or tutoring prospective Chinese study-abroad students for the SATs, then take a break from my assignments to travel the vast country for weeks until my money ran low. Then I’d come back and start the cycle again. That first year I spent more than two hundred hours on buses and trains.
As the days flew by, I would talk mostly with other young people. We were drawn to one another. It was like peering through a hole in China’s wall and finding someone on the other side staring back.
Like the train rumbling through the night, my conversation with Guo bumped along in fits and starts. People walking to the hot water spigot at the end of the car to boil instant noodles or refill tea thermoses lingered and listened. Parents and children poked their heads out of their bunks to see what the commotion was all about. Little Li, the fifteen-year-old high school student who had the bunk below mine, said in Chinese, “They think it is funny to hear a foreigner speak our language.”
Everyone had questions about America. Guo asked, “Does everyone eat just bread and hamburgers?” A dozen pairs of eyes zeroed in on my reaction.
My first thought was a firm no: American food is extremely complex! We are a melting pot of cultures, and our diverse cuisine reflects that.
After mulling it over, I replied, “I mean, sort of.” It was difficult to deny entirely, but it also was impossible to respond in full with my broken Chinese. “Pizza, too,” I added.
Turning to one another, they laughed and nodded. Just as they’d suspected.
“In California do you see lots of movie stars?”
“No,” I replied, “there are no movie stars where I am from.”
Guo’s friend on the top bunk jumped in. “Actually, yes, there are. Most movie stars live in Hollywood, which is in California.” He said Hollywood in English for added flare.
I explained that I am from Northern California, not Southern California. “It takes six hours to drive from my home to Hollywood,” I managed to say. They looked disappointed.
The person in the middle bunk quickly brightened and asked, “Do you live close to Hotel California?”
The crowd waited in silence as I stalled. How to explain that the Eagles’ 1976 pop hit is not about a hotel at all but the spiritual emptiness of the glitz and glam of LA?
“Maybe? I’m not sure. I don’t know that hotel from the song. Maybe it doesn’t exist.”
Guo looked skeptical. “Hotel California” had become a massive karaoke hit in China. How could I not know where the hotel is located?
“Does every home have a shǒuqiāng?” The question came from someone standing behind Guo. All eyes widened. The crowd leaned in expectantly. I swallowed hard.
“Sorry, what?”
Little Li laughed and rolled his eyes.
“Shǒuqiāng,” Guo repeated, encouraging me with a nod. Then he took my hand and, spreading out my fingers, started to trace the first character on my palm: 手, shǒu. The first character I recognized. It means “hand.” I held up my hand and Guo nodded enthusiastically. He continued to trace. The next character was more complex, 枪, qiāng. I had no clue.
A child sitting on his mother’s lap held up his little fist, index finger extended. “Pew, pew, pew!” he said, as his hand recoiled with each sound.
Shǒuqiāng means “handgun.” Only hunters are allowed to have guns in China. Until recently police could not carry guns. The idea that just anyone could have a gun was too far-fetched for my friend to imagine, but they had seen our action movies. To Chinese news outlets, stories about American gun violence are as perverse and exotic as stories about Chinese dog-eating festivals are to Western news outlets.
“We see it in the news. People kill each other all the time!” Guo said, shaking his head. “You Americans are really crazy.” The crowd shook their heads in agreement and slowly dispersed to their bunks.
Nearly all Chinese learn about the United States through media, which everyone consumes in bulk. And so the vast majority of people in China perceive Americans as burger-eating fat folks with guns and groovy tunes.
* * *
Chinese tones are particularly difficult for Westerners to learn. The concept of pitching your voice to change the fundamental meaning of a word—not from a statement to a question but from horse to mother—is unknown in the romance languages. A well-known Chinese poem, “The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den,” by Yuen Ren Chao (1892�
��1982), illustrates the difficulty. Here is an excerpt:
Shishi shishi Shi Shi, shi shi, shi shi shi shi.
Shi shishi shi shi shi shi.
Shi shi, shi shi shi shi shi.
Shi shi, shi Shi Shi shi shi.
Shi shi shi shi shi, shi shi shi, shi shi shi shi shishi.
This masterpiece is aptly titled “Shi Shi shi shi shi.” The entire poem consists of ninety-two characters, each and every one of which is pronounced shi. By using different tones to say “shi,” the indistinguishable Shi Shi shi shi shi becomes Shī Shì shí shī shǐ, which can then be understood as 施氏食狮史, “The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den.” The challenge for Westerners studying spoken Mandarin really boils down to making a lion-eating poet emerge from a chain of shis.
Mistakes with tones can make Mandarin indecipherable. A friend of mine from Costa Rica, Jon, was living in China and once walked into a convenience store to buy a gauze face mask. It was a bad-air day in the freezing city of Harbin, and the temperature—thirty degrees below freezing—only made the air worse. Jon’s Chinese was, by his own admission, bad. He thought he was asking the storeowner for a mask but did so in toneless Chinese. The storeowner’s face grew pale and his eyes widened as he searched Jonathan’s face for some hidden meaning. My friend nodded his head eagerly and pointed to his mouth, repeating the request.
That was enough. The shop owner rushed from behind the counter and shooed Jonathan out of his store, slamming the door behind him. The shop owner’s reaction was understandable. Instead of asking for a face mask, Jonathan had just asked for a specific sexual favor.
Spoken Chinese is difficult, but the written language is even more complex. The Asia Society estimates that full Chinese literacy requires knowledge of three to four thousand characters. Native literacy requires familiarity with more than ten thousand characters.16 Those distinct symbols can then be arranged and rearranged to form thousands of words.
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