The Chinese Typewriter
Page 6
To begin our exploration of Chinese technolinguistic modernity, in fact, we first head to San Francisco, where we will examine the invention of a Chinese typewriter that will enjoy worldwide fame and transform popular ideas about modern Chinese information technology—all despite the fact that this particular Chinese typewriter will never actually exist.
Notes
1 This figure is ten times that of the 2004 games in Athens.
2 In competing estimates, a new milestone in torch relay duration was set in 2010 as part of the Vancouver Olympics. See Yvonne Zacharias, “Longest Olympic Torch Relay Ends in Vancouver,” Vancouver Sun (February 12, 2010); Thomas K. Grose, “London Admits It Can’t Top Lavish Beijing Olympics When It Hosts 2012 Games,” U.S. News (August 22, 2008).
3 Eric A. Havelock, Origins of Western Literacy (Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1976), 28, 44.
4 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (New York: Routledge, 2002 [1982]), 89.
5 Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image (New York: Penguin, 1999).
6 The Parade of Nations itself dates back to 1906, although I have been unable to locate any evidence of written regulations before 1921. Now considered “intercalated” games, the 1906 games are no longer regarded as one of the official Olympic games.
7 “Chaque contingent en tenue de sport doit être précédé, par une enseigne portant le nom du pays correspondant et accompagné de son drapeau national (les pays figurent par ordre alphabétique).” See “Cérémonie d’ouverture des jeux olympiques” in “Règlements et Protocole de la Célébration des Olympiades Modernes et des Jeux Olympiques Quadriennaux,” 1921, 10.
8 “Les nations défilent dans l’ordre alphabétique de la langue du pays qui organise les Jeux” (rule 33, “Ceremonie d’ouverture des Jeux Olympiques,” CIO, Régles Olympiques [Lausanne: Comité International Olympique, 1949]), 14. “Les délégations défilent dans l’ordre alphabétique de la langue du pays hôte, sauf celle de la Grèce, qui ouvre la marche, et celle du pays hôte qui la clôt” (rule 69, “Cérémonies d’ouverture et de clôture,” Charte Olympique [1991], n.p.).
9 When Germany hosted in 1972, the Greek national team was followed by Egypt (Ägypten) and Ethiopia (Äthiopien) in an order that would have been altogether familiar to anyone in the Latin alphabetic world. The Moscow Olympics of 1980 introduced the curious wrinkle of Cyrillic, wherein the sequence of Greece, Australia, and Afghanistan perhaps sparked curiosity as to how Au should precede Af. Explanation was readily available, however, by the simple fact that the 3rd letter of the Russian alphabet “в” (in “Австралия”) precedes its 22nd letter “ф” (in “Афганистан”).
10 On the topic of Chinese ethnic diversity, and the PRC state’s role in shaping contemporary understandings thereof, see Thomas S. Mullaney, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
11 “Did NBC Alter the Olympics Opening Ceremony?,” Slashdot (August 9, 2008), http://news.slashdot.org/story/08/08/09/2231231/did-nbc-alter-the-olympics-opening-ceremony (accessed March 1, 2012).
12 Had Chinese organizers selected pinyin as the basis for the parade, the evening would have unfolded very differently. Sailor Ciara Peelo would have enjoyed the honor of leading Aìěrlán (Ireland) on the field directly after Greece, instead of waiting for what must have felt like an eternity in position 159. Following Ireland would have come Aījí (Egypt) and Aīsāiébǐyà (Ethiopia), whose athletes instead were required to wait until positions 146 and 147. Pinyin was far from the only alternative, moreover. As we will see later in this book, there have existed many dozens of organizational schemes by which to arrange Chinese characters.
13 Zhou Houkun and Chen Tingrui, “A Newly Invented Typewriter for China (Xin faming Zhongguo zhi daziji) [新發明中國之打字機],” Zhonghua xuesheng jie 1, no. 9 (September 25, 1915): 6.
14 “On Literary Revolution (Wenxue geming lun) [文學革命論],” Xin qingnian [新青年] 2, no. 6 (February 1917).
15 Qian Xuantong, “China’s Script Problem from Now On (Zhongguo jinhou zhi wenzi wenti) [中國今後之文字問題],” Xin qingnian 4, no. 4 (1918): 70–77.
16 Lu Xun, “Reply to an Interview from My Sickbed (Bingzhong da jiumang qingbao fangyuan) [病中答救亡情報訪員]” (1938), in Complete Works of Lu Xun (Lu Xun Quanji) [鲁迅全集], vol. 6 (Beijing: Renmin Wenxue, 1981), 160.
17 Statement by Chen Duxiu quoted in Qian Xuantong, “China’s Script Problem from Now On (Zhongguo jinhou zhi wenzi wenti) [中國今後之文字問題],” Xin qingnian 4, no. 4 (1918): 76.
18 “A Few Methods for the Creation of Indexes for Chinese Books (Bianzhi Zhongwen shuji mulu de ji ge fangfa) [編織中文書籍目錄的幾個方法],” Eastern Miscellany (Dongfang zazhi) [東方雜誌] 20, no. 23 (1923): 86–103.
19 Simon Leung, Janet A. Kaplan, Wenda Gu, Xu Bing, and Jonathan Hay. “Pseudo-Languages: A Conversation with Wenda Gu, Xu Bing, and Jonathan Hay,” Art Journal 58, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 86–99.
20 Michael Lackner, Iwo Amelung, and Joachim Kurtz, eds., New Terms for New Ideas: Western Knowledge and Lexical Change in Late Imperial China (Leiden: Brill, 2001).
21 Harry Carter, A View of Early Typography up to About 1600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002 [1969]), 5. Harry Carter (1901–1982) was a typographer and type historian who read law at Oxford, worked in the drawing office at the Monotype Corporation, and who served as Archivist at Oxford University Press.
22 Xu Bing [徐冰], “From ‘Book from the Sky’ to ‘Book from the Ground’ (Cong Tianshu dao Dishu) [从天书到地书],” manuscript provided by Xu Bing to author via email, May 15, 2013. For our discussion of the technolinguistic, the most compelling passage is as follows, in the original: 我决定造四千多个假字,因为出现在日常读物上的字是四千左右,也就是说,谁掌握四千以上的字,就可以阅读,就是知识分子。我要求这些字最大限度地像汉字而又不是汉字,这就必须在构字内在规律上符合汉字的规律。为了让这些字在笔画疏密、出现频率上更像一页真的文字,我依照《康熙字典》笔画从少到多的序例关系,平行对位地编造我的字。…字体,我考虑用宋体。宋体也叫”官体,”通常用于重要文件和严肃的事情,是最没有个人情绪指向的、最正派的字体。
23 Carter, A View of Early Typography, 5. As I venture into questions of Chinese technolinguistic modernity, I draw inspiration from the scholarship of Bernard Siegert, Delphine Gardey, Markus Krajewski, Ben Kafka, Miyako Inoue, Mara Mills, Matthew Hull, and others who, as Kafka has phrased it, work “to put the bureau back in bureaucracy.” As Hull reminds us, documents “are not simply instruments of bureaucratic organizations, but rather are constitutive of bureaucratic rules, ideologies, knowledge, practices, subjectivities, objects, outcomes, even the organizations themselves.” Meanwhile, Kafka insists, even at the extremes of historical experience—such as in Nazi-controlled Europe—it was the quotidian and even tedious processes like indexing that “made possible the ‘banality’ of the banality of evil” of which Hannah Arendt wrote. See Ben Kafka, “The State of the Discipline,” Book History 12 (2009): 340–353, 341; Delphine Gardey, “Mécaniser l’écriture et photographier la parole: Utopies, monde du bureau et histoires de genre et de techniques,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 3, no. 54 (May–June 1999): 587–614; Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Markus Krajewski, Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548–1929 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); Matthew S. Hull, “Documents and Bureaucracy,” Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012): 251–267; Hull, “Documents and Bureaucracy,” 251; Kafka, “The State of the Discipline,” 341.
24 There are, of course, important and noteworthy exceptions to this observation, drawn primarily from work on technical communication in premodern China. See, in particul
ar, Francesca Bray et al., eds., Graphics and Text in the Production of Technical Knowledge in China: The Warp and the Weft (Leiden: Brill, 2007). Comparable work on the modern period is limited, among the most compelling being that of Christopher Reed, Michael Hill, Elizabeth Kaske, Robert Culp, and Milena Dolezelová-Velingerová.
25 Christopher Rea and Nicolai Volland, eds., The Business of Culture: Cultural Entrepreneurs in China and Southeast Asia, 1900–65 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2015).
26 JoAnne Yates, Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993 [1989]), 41.
27 Bruce Robbins, “Commodity Histories,” PMLA 120, no. 2 (2005): 456.
28 José Goldemberg, “Technological Leapfrogging in the Developing World,” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 12, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2011): 135–141.
29 Havelock, Origins of Western Literacy, 15.
30 Li Gui [李圭], New Records of My Travels Around the World (Huanyou diqiu xinlu) [環游地球新錄]. Citation from Charles Desnoyers, A Journey to the East: Li Gui's A New Account of a Trip Around the Globe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 121. My heartfelt thanks to Tobie Meyer-Fong for bringing this terrific source to my attention.
31 Daniel Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (New York: Free Press, 2003 [1962]).
32 Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wautz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 190–191. For a more recent introduction to the central importance of aurality within the history of Western typewriting, see “The History of the Typewriter Recited by Michael Winslow,” http://www.filmjunk.com/2010/06/20/the-history-of-the-typewriter-recited-by-michael-winslow/ (accessed September 5, 2010).
33 Sequence from Merchant Ivory’s film Bombay Talkie (1970), music by Shankar Jaikishan, lyrics by Hasrat Jaipuri, “Typewriter tip tip tip/Tip tip tip karata hai/Zindagi ki har kahaani likhata hai.” My thanks to Andrew Elmore for alerting me to this film.
34 For “China-centered history,” the locus classicus is Paul Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
1
Incompatible with Modernity
It makes the mind dizzy to think what a Chinese typewriter must be.
—The Far Eastern Republic, 1920
To handle a Chinese typewriter is no joke, meaning it is.
—Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, 1991
If a standard Western typewriter keyboard were expanded to take in every Chinese ideograph it would have to be about fifteen feet long and five feet wide—about the size of two Ping-Pong tables pushed together.
—Bill Bryson, 1999
The first mass-produced Chinese typewriter was a figment of popular imagination. It was first sighted in January 1900, when the San Francisco Examiner spread word of a strange new contraption housed in the city’s Chinatown neighborhood, in the back room of a newspaper office on Dupont Street. The machine boasted a twelve-foot keyboard complete with 5,000 keys. “Two rooms knocked into one apartment afford shelter for this remarkable contrivance,” the author explained, describing a machine so large that the “typist” was something akin to a general commanding forces over a vast terrain (figure 1.1). The piece was accompanied by a cartoon in which the caricatured inventor sat atop a stool and shouted Cantonese-esque gibberish at “four muscular key-thumpers through a large tin megaphone.”1 Lock shat hoo-la ma sho gong um hom tak ti-wak yet gee sam see baa gow!!2
1.1 Cartoon in the San Francisco Examiner (1900)
One year later, some 1,700 miles to the east, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat featured strikingly similar imagery. In form, the Chinese machine bore a resemblance to Remington typewriters growing in popularity at the time, but in size it was monumental—complete with two stairways patterned after those one might find in the Forbidden City in Beijing (figure 1.2).3 Here, the Chinese “typist” literally climbed up and down stairways of keys, haplessly searching for his desired character.
1.2 Cartoon in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat (1901)
In 1903, a name was at last given to the imaginary inventor of this apocryphal machine. Photographer and columnist Louis John Stellman christened the inventor Tap-Key, a deft pun that played upon faux Cantonese and onomatopoeia.4 “I see by one of the papers that a Chinaman has invented a typewriter which writes in the Celestial language,” Stellman wrote, his description augmented by a drawing of yet another absurdly large contrivance (figure 1.3). No fewer than five Chinese operators clacked away simultaneously at this immense keyboard, while five more fed immense sheets of paper through a platen of industrial proportions. Evidently, the number of personnel needed to operate a Chinese typewriter had doubled since the machine first debuted three years earlier.
1.3 Cartoon of Chinese typewriting (1903)
Tap-Key and his monstrous machine never existed in the flesh—only in the imagination of foreigners. In another sense, however, this imaginary machine constituted the first “mass-produced” Chinese typewriter in history, one that circulated across space and time more widely than many of the real machines we will encounter. From its first appearance in 1900, this colossal Chinese contraption would make regular cameos in popular culture, whether in print, music, film, or television, demonstrating with each appearance the technological absurdity of character-based Chinese writing. These fantasies and their discomfiting portrayals of both the Chinese language and Chinese people are not vestiges of an unsavory past, moreover, but have lived on well into the present day. One of the more peculiar appearances of this imagined object took place in 1979, in the made-for-television movie The Chinese Typewriter, featuring Tom Selleck as a womanizing weapons-expert-turned-private-detective.5 The plot centered around Selleck’s attempt, in the role of Tom Boston, to recapture a passenger jet stolen by one Donald Devlin (played by William Daniels), a high-powered executive discovered to have embezzled millions of dollars from his company and fled to South America. Knowing of Devlin’s avaricious tendencies, Boston and his partner Jim Kilbride (played by James Whitmore, Jr.) develop a plan to lure this well-connected and cautious criminal out of hiding with the prospect of a wild new business venture: a functioning Chinese typewriter.
Kilbride:
Donald Devlin, his game is Money, right? So if you could figure out a way to make him richer, he’d probably shimmy up a cactus plant to get to it, right? But it would have to be something … something so big, so exotic, something that appeals to the imagination. Something that hasn’t been invented yet, I mean a real industrial bonanza of some kind. Like a … a product for foreign export.
Camera cuts to the QWERTY typewriter on his desk, then back to Kilbride, who has begun to laugh.
Kilbride:
Chinese typewriter.
Boston:
Chinese typewriter?
Kilbride:
Yes, yes. Yes, a Chinese typewriter.
The scene cuts to Kilbride’s office, a think tank something along the lines of the Silicon Valley IDEO corporation avant la lettre in which free-range geniuses are seen tinkering on all manner of complex models, blueprints, and equations. Kilbride continues his explanation:
Kilbride:
You see in China there’s no such thing as a typewriter. They got a hundred different dialects, three thousand characters in the Chinese alphabet. So when a guy wants to type a letter he has to go to another guy, stand in front of this huge rack taking out each character one by one. It takes half a day to type a paragraph.
Boston:
So what?
Kilbride:
Well, so for years they’ve been trying to come up with a cheap computerized Chinese typewriter, one that can be sold and manufactured for 50 to 1
00 dollars per unit. The damn computer gotta be so large, the cheapest version they can come up with costs several thousand dollars. Too expensive to mass-produce. [Kilbride finds what he is looking for: the blueprints to a Chinese typewriter.] And these plans are useless ’cause they don’t work.
Credit for the most memorable and impressive invocation of the Chinese typewriter, though, goes to Oakland-born rapper Stanley Burrell, better known by his stage name MC Hammer. In the music video to his 1990 multiplatinum hit “U Can’t Touch This,” Hammer debuted a bit of footwork that would go on to become one of the most well-known dances of the decade. Known as the “Chinese Typewriter”—a name that appears to have been coined not by the artist himself, but popularly and emergently—the dance featured Hammer side-stepping in rapid, frenetic movements. This step, someone apparently decided, mimicked the alien virtuosity of a Chinese typist as he navigated an absurdly massive keyboard crowded with tens of thousands of characters. Not unlike Tap-Key racing up and down stairways, Hammer’s imaginary Chinese typist traversed great distances at breakneck speeds, and yet was the very embodiment of hopeless inefficiency, one whose very life force was gulped down by a lumbering behemoth that produced hardly anything in return.
If Hammer and Selleck have invoked the imagined Chinese typewriter in the arena of popular culture, still others have brought it into the arena of popular and academic scholarship. In 1999, celebrated writer Bill Bryson assured readers of his popular study of the English language that “Chinese typewriters are enormous, and most trained typists cannot manage more than about ten words a minute.”6 Drawing upon a vibrant imagination, an alphabet-centered understanding of information processing, and a total lack of familiarity with the technology of which he spoke, Bryson invoked the image of a hulking piece of equipment measuring some seventy-five square feet—“two Ping-Pong tables pushed together”—on which even a trained operator could not help but limp along at a comically slow pace. Walter Ong agreed. “There can be no doubt,” he emphasized in his landmark Orality and Literacy, “that the characters will be replaced by the Roman alphabet as soon as all the people in the People’s Republic of China master the same Chinese language (‘dialect’), the Mandarin now being taught everywhere.” “The loss to literature will be enormous,” Ong continued, “but not so enormous as a Chinese typewriter using over 40,000 characters.”7