Lost in Translation

"By the North American free and novel wind, ACA is coming to China."

So proclaims the appliance guide to the small, Appliance Company of America coffee maker I recently purchased at the Carrefour (the French equivalent to Walmart) located near my apartment.

I'm not sure why ACA didn't have their Chinese department translate the American product guide, but they had the Chinese write a new one, and write it they did. At first I figured the writer believed that a little political flattery would earn him a promotion, or perhaps he's just a big fan of capitalism. The other day, however, my boss explained to me that there is a deeper cultural reason for this type of writing. In a civilization which has so long prized 'wen' - that is: literature, cultural sophistication, or more basically pattern, the patterning of material - it is an enormous embarassment to be seen as a poor writer.

"They don't want to write like a farmer," was how my boss put it.

And thus, whether in letters, ads or appliance guides, the Chinese want to show some literary flair. No matter if it's not their first language - they'd like to put a little oomph in their English as well. The result is some of the most florid, bombastic, over-eager or just plain nonsensical English you've ever heard. Reading the signs of Chengdu is about as amusing a pastime as one could hope for.


"Natural pie," asserts my bag of cashews. "How delicious. Make you taste back."

There was the example of the corner police station at a temple I was visiting. "Welcome Wenshu Fun Police - Police are Off Ice."

And of course the above pictured 'Wicket' office.

More common than the completely nonsensical signs, however, are the aforementioned high-falutin ones - something like a drunken Thomas Hardy writing ad copy.

"Follow the trend," instructs a package of sweet potato flavored granola bars. "The quintessence of the five cereals is rich in the meal fibre, urge to digest, help and arrange the poison, making people relaxed all over, vigor doubles all over."

"It would be impossible for me not to want you as a friend," says my whole bean coffee package. Like a good, classical Chinese poem, the coffee package draws one in by refusing to identify its speaker. If, on the one hand, I am being prompted to praise the coffee as an irresistible friend, then it is just a cheap ploy, a bully play for my affection. But if the coffee really feels so strongly about me, I must say I am quite flattered.


"Children are forbidden to enter a mansion," says a sign at the entrance to my gym, complete with a prohibitory halved circle with the line going right through the clasped hands of a mother and daughter. The sign at the other end of the counter urges clients to register their concerns by "leaving a massage to the clerk." Yet a third advises, "If you have health problems, before joining the workout class please consult a coctor."

These are but a few examples of the many English neologisms, malapropisms and just plain absurd usages which I get to enjoy every day. Sure enough though, what goes around comes around, and I have not been free of linguistic mishaps myself.

A few days after my arrival, I took a cab to meet my roommate, Tom, for dinner. The cabbie understood my intended destination right away, and, pleased about that, I proceeded to engage him in a light conversation. We talked about the weather, about the traffic, about where I'm from and why I'm in Chengdu. By the time I got out at the restaurant, I was flush with linguistic confidence from what had been my most successful exchange yet in Chinese.

As at most of the restaurants we've been to in chronically over-staffed Chengdu, Tom and I were surrounded by several waiters as we sat down. They hovered over us as we perused the menu. "Jiachang doufu," - homestyle tofu - said I, and again I was happy to be understood right away. But the waiters, instead of rushing away to register the order, began pointing excitedly at an item at the top of the menu. It had a spot of its own and appeared to be some sort of restaurant special. Tom and I debated what it could be. The waiters kept describing it, but neither of us could make it out. I figured it was probably some kind of special liquor or something and, thinking 'how bad could it be?', I ordered one. Not two minutes later a steaming bowl of something was headed our way. The smiling waiter set it down on the table, and Tom, having been in China before, filled me in on the grayish-pink mass that loomed ominously in the middle of the bowl.

"Pig's foot soup."

Fresh off eight years of vegetarianism and a stint in Israel, I didn't quite have it in me.

"Bu yao," I said. "Don't want it. Sorry sorry."

(I have since been informed by a pair of very pretty and dainty Chinese women, however, that there is simply nothing better for the skin than the occasional pig's foot.)

The waiters looked a little deflated, but they took the soup away and soon brought us our meals. After a minute my confidence returned, and I decided to try my Chinese once more. I waved over the waiter to ask for some soy sauce for my rice.

"Black water," I said. "Salty black water."

He looked confused.

I mimicked pouring it over my rice.

"From Japan. Salty black water from Japan."

After a minute or so of this, the waiter seemed to get an idea. He said something which I did not understand, and I nodded. It wasn't clear to me if I had been understood, but I remained hopeful. Tom and I sat and chatted for a minute, and then the waiter reemerged from the kitchen with a small bowl and set it down on the table.

It was pig's foot soup broth.

"Thanks," I said. "Thanks. Great."

Dufu's Thatched Cottage

On a recent afternoon, my roommate Tom (a nice guy from Minneapolis and my fellow intern) and I took a trip to what is Chengdu's second most famous tourist spot after the panda breeding and research center - Dufu's Thatched Cottage Park. The park is filled with lovely flora which, with the bugs, provide shelter from Chengdu's nearly ubiquitous traffic noise. Couples, mothers with young children, and the occasional Waiguoren (outside-country-person) like myself wander through the greenery and along the wooden walkways that criss-cross the lotus-filled marshes. One is surprised from time to time by the life-size, iron statues of a sturdy man in contemplation that are sprinkled throughout the park. The depicted man is Dufu, a Tang Dynasty poet regarded as one of the finest figures in the history of Chinese characters. He made his home in Chengdu, on land that is now part of the park, for about five years in the middle of the 8th century CE. His original thatched cottage is of course long rotted and gone, but in recent years the government has built a model of his home and surrounded it with an impressive array of artistic exhibits, excavation sites, traditional buildings and shops. It is a nice place to visit - quiet and full of interesting examples and reminders of China's cultural history. And for this reason it is also a melancholy place, even a tragic one.

Forty years ago there began in China a time of self-loathing more severe than anything in the country's long history. It was not the burning of books that marked the Cultural Revolution as unique - there have been numerous examples of Chinese rulers enforcing intellectual closure to buffer their authority. Even beyond the autocratic use of power, there are long traditions of disgrace, shame and self-reproach in China. Importantly, however, even shame had always been couched within a framework of tradition. The shame of an official who had failed his emporer, or of a wife who had been disloyal to her dead husband, for instance, was, if not rational by our standards, still in some important ways meaningful. With the Cultural Revolution, the shame of the Chinese turned inward upon itself, upon the posts and joints of Chinese identity, and what resulted was a period of cannibalization (or, more precisely, the culmination of a much longer period of cannibalization) that all but killed one of the most gracious, sensitive and beautiful cultures in the world.

Most of China's literary antiquities were burned. Buildings were demolished and cultural relics destroyed. Intellectuals of all stripes, including most of the leadership of the Communist Party, were humiliated, beaten and sent to the countryside for reeducation through manual labor. In a country which had for more than two thousand years prized the orderly structure of Confucian philosophy, students beat their teachers, children turned on their parents and ignorance was openly praised as a characteristic higher than knowledge. The only traditional virtue which went unquestioned was loyalty to the emporer. It was a time of absurdity, of the nihilism bred of unchecked ego, and in ten years it touched almost every life in China. (I did read about a Buddhist mountain hermit in central China who, as of 1989, still had not heard of Mao Zedong.)

Where are the echoes of the Cultural Revolution? Where does all of that suffering reverberate? I look for it in the faces of the grandparents, the postures of the parents and the behavior of the children. How will China's 20th century karma come due, for itself and for the world?

When Dufu left his home land and came south some 1300 years ago, he did so to try and find peace. Like many other Chinese before and after him, he came to mountain-ringed Sichuan in the hope of escaping the interminable wars of northern China. He did find a few years of peace in his thatched cottage here in Chengdu, and he used the time to write. Below is one of his poems.

Looking around today at the endless malls of Chengdu, the seeming totality of Chinese consumerism, I believe that the echoes of the Cultural Revolution and of all the traumas undergone by 20th century China are almost too visible to see. In asking the 'whys' of China's postmodern vacuity, its seemingly complete transformation into a westernizing economic juggernaut with little care for its own environment or traditional culture, it is perhaps instructive first to inquire what this new state of mind, this new national psychology, is not. The answer to that is quite simple - it is not war.

"The Chariots Go Forth to War"

The chariots go forth to war,
Rumbling, roaring as they go;
The horses neigh and whinny loud,
Tugging at the bit.
The dust swirls up in great dense clouds,
And hides the Han Yang bridge.
In serried ranks the archers march,
A bow and quiver at each waist;
Fathers, mothers, children, wives
All crowd around to say farewell.
Pulling at clothes and stamping feet,
They force the soldiers' ranks apart,
And all the while their sobs and cries
Reach to the skies above.

"Where do you go to-day ?" a passer-by
Calls to the marching men.
A grizzled old veteran answers him,
Halting his swinging stride:
"At fifteen I was sent to the north
To guard the river against the Hun;
At forty I was sent to camp,
To farm in the west, far, far from home.
When I left, my hair was long and black;
When I came home, it was white and thin.
Today they send me again to the wars,
Back to the north frontier,
By whose gray towers our blood has flowed
In a red tide, like the sea--
And will flow again, for Wu Huang Ti
Is resolved to rule the world.

"Have you not heard how in far Shantung
Two hundred districts lie
With a thousand towns and ten thousand homes
Deserted, neglected, weed-grown?
Husbands fighting or dead, wives drag the plow,
And the grain grows wild in the fields.
The soldiers recruited in Shansi towns
Still fight; but, with spirit gone,
Like chickens and dogs they are driven about,
And have not the heart to complain."

"I am greatly honored by your speech with me.
Dare I speak of my hatreds and grief ?
All this long winter, conscription goes on
Through the whole country, from the east to the west,
And taxes grow heavy. But how can we pay,
Who have nothing to give from our land ?
A son is a curse at a time like this,
And daughters more welcome far;
For, when daughters grow up, they can marry, at least,
And go to live on a neighbor's land.
But our sons? We bury them after the fight,
And they rot where the grass grows long.

"Have you not seen at far Ching Hai,
By the waters of Kokonor,
How the heaped skulls and bones of slaughtered men
Lie bleaching in the sun?
Their ancient ghosts hear our own ghosts weep,
And cry and lament in turn;
The heavens grow dark with great storm-clouds,
And the specters wail in the rain."

http://www.humanistictexts.org/dufu.htm

Adapted from The Hundred Names: A Short Introduction to the Study of Chinese Poetry with Illustrative Translations by Henry H. Hart. University of California Press, Berkeley, California, 1933. Copyright © 1933 The Regents of the University of California.

Entry the First

There are many, many people in China. The city in which I am living, Chengdu, recently topped 13 million, and Sichuan Province, of which Chengdu is the capital, is home to more people than Germany. Of course, the brobdingnagian character of the Chinese population is not a new development. Around 1800, when the fledgling United States of America was home to a mere five million people, China breached the 300 million mark. (The introduction of western crops to China in the 16th and 17th centuries broke a natural cap on growth, and the population doubled in about two centuries.) Even as far back as the time of Christ, there were some 60 million folks here in Zhongguo, the Middle Country.
With so many people to manage, China has long considered governance something of an art. Well before the unification of the six 'central states' into the first Chinese Empire in the third century BCE, (the heavily mythologized subject of Zhang Yimou's "Hero"), the Chinese have prized skillful governance as among the highest of human endeavors. Confucianism is nothing if not a comprehensive philosophy of government, and even Daoism, with all of its emphasis on quixoticism and spontenaiety, has had plenty to say about the nature of ideal rulership. Thus, whether by Confucian propriety or, perhaps more often, brute authority, Chinese governments have long been known to effectively manage their massive populations, and harness their power as well. The Great Wall, China's astonishing networks of irrigation canals, successful taxation of far-flung precincts, efficient trade networks across thousands of miles - all bear witness to the longstanding tradition of efficiency in China.
This, however, was not my experience of the Beijing Airport.
As with many of the flights which land at Beijing, my Turkish Air flight from Istanbul did not pull up to the gate, but rather parked in a sort of huge airplane parking lot, thence to disgorge its restless cargo into the day. Many times in my life I have referred to one place or another as being 'like a sauna,' but I take them all back now. The air above that concrete field was heavy with heat and domed as if by a thick but infirm bowl of gray smoke. We, the recently deplaned, scurried onto the waiting shuttle. "Rather more curves," read a sign at the rear, "hold the rail." That we did, holding and swaying together, as the bus wound its way toward the terminal.
Inside the terminal we found relief from the swelter, but the density of people far surpassed anything I have ever seen at an airport.
"Ren shan ren hai," goes the Chinese phrase describing massive crowds. "People in the mountains, people on the sea."
I retrieved my bag and made my way into the domestic flights section to try and obtain my ticket for the flight from Beijing to Chengdu, whereupon I was confronted by, well, ren shan ren hai. People lined the walls with their children and their luggage; they surrounded the pillars and slogged through the walkways, halting from time to time at the huge groups which formed in front of the departure information signs like clogged cells in an artery.
Happy to have made it to the desk well in advance of my scheduled flight, I approached the ticket clerk and showed him the number of the flight I was to board. After a bit of back and forth, he conveyed to me that it was too early to check in, and I should return in an hour. I thought that was a bit odd, as it was only two and a half hours till my departure time, but - my crucial error - I trusted that the young man knew what he was talking about.
After an hour of perusing the magazine shops and hunkering down against the wall with the other tired travelers, I returned to the ticket desk. "Xiayu," said the clerk. "It's raining. Your flight is delayed."
I returned again half an hour later, this time choosing a different desk so as to double check what the first clerk had told me. This conversation took place mostly in Chinese, and, flush with excitement at having used my language skills, I headed away from the desk to wait out the rain. The clerk had told me in no uncertain terms that my flight would be long delayed.
I returned about an hour later to check if there had been any developments.
"Here is my flight number," said I to the clerk.
The musculature of his face tipped me off before he said anything, and my stomach sank.
"This flight is closed," he said.
As it turned out, my 5:30 flight took off around 5:45, and then the real rain set in. I spent a cool 22 hours in the Beijing airport, shooting back and forth between help desks with the velocity of a well-struck shuttlecock. Quickly, that is, at first, then slowing to a tiny fraction of my speed as I entered one or another very long line, and shooting quickly away again once I was privy to whatever new help desk had been named as my potential savior. I would perhaps have been more frustrated had I not seen that many Chinese people were similarly in the dark about their flights. At one point, late in the evening, a group of them in front of one of the help desks coordinated an energetic chant to try and get someone's attention. People huffed and puffed and banged on desks. They complained and shouted, slept on the long rows of bucket seats, then rose to inquire and complain some more. To their credit, the airline employees who seemingly did their damndest to keep information about flights to themselves did feed us several free meals. I had my first taste of Chinese spicy pickled cabbage, a staple of Sichuan cuisine, and also my first breakfast baozi, a type of sweet, steamed bun popular here in Chengdu.
A little over 400 years ago, a Jesuit priest with whom I share a name, Matteo, landed on the southern coast of China after a long and dangerous sea journey from Italy. He was among the first Europeans to make it to China. Suffice it to say that when I finally put my boarding pass into the hand of a flight attendant and walked back into the Beijing heat to board another shuttle, I felt some kinship with my distant namesake. As perhaps he did so long ago in Canton, I felt that entry into China was some kind of victory in itself.