| Travelling in China through language |
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| Culture | |
| Monday, 21 June 2010 | |
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Dreaming in Chinese By Deborah Fallows
Illustrated. 200 pages. Short Books. £12.99
Although foreign visitors in China have increased dramatically in the last decade, they still remain a mystery to many Chinese. Deborah fallows’ Dreaming in Chinese is a first person travel narrative that deconstructs this myth by documenting the thoughts, emotions and everyday experience of such a foreigner in China.
As a linguistics graduate, Mrs Fallows ventured into the challenge of learning Chinese by travelling for three years in Shanghai and Beijing. Using her understanding and frustration with the Chinese language as a mirror, she paints a detailed picture of the contemporary China.
Her journey started from searching for the meaning of love. “Why did one of my Chinese friends, upon learning that I have two sons, ask me which one I love more, as if love were some kind of a zero-sum calculation?” Such detail would make a Chinese reader smile, because despite the frequent appearance of this type of questions in Chinese conversations, no one has ever considered it odd. But asked by a foreigner, it does make one pause and think: after all, why do we quantify love?
Although her constant attempts to apply newly learnt vocabulary to her daily activities often end in moments of frustration, these moments become powerful in assisting her to explain grammatical rules. When explaining the importance pronouncing a word with the right tones, she shared with her readers her embarrassing failure to do so when buying takeaway food. “I tried all sorts of tones on the two syllables of Dabao: high tones, rising tones, falling tones, falling-then-rising tones and various combinations thereof”, thinking “C’mon guy! Work with me here! How hard can this be?”
She asks many questions and finds answers to some that even Chinese would scratch their heads about - apparently, foreigners adopt Chinese name because they make it easier for them to be accepted as “real” people by the Chinese. Not all Chinese would agree with this, but knowing a foreigner’s perspective is nonetheless a useful insight.
Sometimes her description of the Chinese way of life can be sidetracked by her preoccupation with linguistics, making her enthusiastically praise the “simplicity of Chinese grammar”, or stumble upon a “delightful discovery”.
But at other times, one would be compelled to ask if Mrs Fallows really has grasped the essence of a language she desperately tries to decipher. Upon discovering the convention of doubling Chinese verbs in speech, she committed herself to doing it “at every opportunity, partly because it is fun, and partly because I feel gentler and more polite when I do it.” She may have not realised that doubling words in the complex and arbitrary system of Chinese language would increase and reduce the verb’s impact in different contexts.
Expanding from the linguistic issues that Mrs Fallows examined in detail are larger issues facing the relationship between China and the West. Her attempt at imposing rules on a language that has evolved through history to breach many linguistic formulae has ended in confusion when using colours to code tones - “I gave red a falling tone, because I think of a stop sign. Unfortunately, hong (red) actually has a rising tone.” But she also points out that red is a multi-meaning colour, being the colour of fortune and happiness, brides’ clothes, China’s flag, as well as the symbol of China and the East. Her mistake of letting one meaning override the others subconsciously epitomises a failed method of generalising the east using a western way of thinking, often critiqued in post-colonial literature.
Central to her adventure is the concept of the common people, “laobaixing”, as she tries to both understand them and become one herself. Her bottom-up approach to understand the Chinese power structure takes the Chinese readers through a process of rethinking about a term that has developed indefinable meaning through exhaustive usage. The paradox “that laobaixing themselves would not consider a movie star to be a laobaixing, but a movie star would probably consider herself to be one” is one that even the Chinese cannot easily find an explanation for. Having tried to use birth, political power, and material wealth as criteria to distinguish laobaixing, she finally concluded that the most obvious characteristics of laobaixing is their love for good deals. This is probably the most accurate way of identifying them – China’s recent history has imposed a unique mindset observable in all common people, even though some of whom have become extremely rich in recent years.
Much of the West’s misunderstanding about China can be attributed to their misunderstanding of the lowest of the low within the Chinese society. although not revealing her opinion, she accurately documented a powerful instance demonstrating this clash of values - at a conference about the internet, censorship, technology and commerce in Beijing, “one exasperated Chinese participant finally blurted out that people, the laobaixing, aren’t as preoccupied as Westerners about free speech and an uncensored internet”, instead, they want “a flush toilet, a refrigerator and a colour TV.” But unlike many foreign visitors who make grand generalizations about the Chinese society, Mrs Fallows has developed her understanding of laobaixing by being one – her inability to afford cheese actually gives her writing more authority.
 She never criticises, because her curiosity has made her accept the good, the bad and the strange with delight – such as believing it a “great gratification” to receive the reply “your Chinese is very good” when asking “where is the bookstore”. But sometimes her sincerity reflects a laughable naivety – the cliche Chairman Mao’s phrase “Good good study, day day up” is embraced by her without the slightest irony.
Author: Deborah Fallows
Mrs Fallows has provided an approachable window to understand the Chinese language and culture. Dreaming in Chinese is an invaluable guide especially for visitors of China, as well as for Chinese who are curious about how their country is perceived through a Westerner’s eyes.
Cecily Liu
About Deborah Fallows:
Deborah Fallows has lived in Shanghai and Beijing and travelled throughout China with her husband, the writer and journalist James Fallows. She is a Harvard graduate and has a PhD in Linguistics, and is author of A Mother's Work (Houghton Mifflin). When in the US, she and her husband live in Washington DC. They have two sons.
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