Last week, during a short trip with my boss, I went to the hotel lobby to have a beer before bed. I wanted to read, and the lights weren't on, but I found myself at a loss for how to ask the bartender to turn them on."A little dark in here," I said, pointing at the lights.
The young barkeep look confused.
"Too dark in here," said I, pointing now at my magazine and feeling mighty passive-aggressive indeed.
"开灯!" exclaimed the man. Kai deng - literally 'open light' - turn on the lights.
Embarassed as I was, I shall not forget it soon.
And so it goes: in exchange for all the bumblings and embarassments of acquiring a second language, one gets to be witness to a process that we were all too young to notice the first time around - the formation of one's idiolect.
Kai deng is a common enough phrase, (although certainly open for analogical use,) but what of other words and phrases that are more obscure or prone to idiosyncratic inflection? How do they come to be ours?
In one of the dialogues I listened to on a Chinese language website I am using, http://www.chinesepod.com/, a drug user approaches a drug dealer to try and score some goods.
"Don't worry," he says. "Your friend Joe sent me."
"Ah," replies the dealer, "you are ziji ren!"
Dzi jee ren - 自己人, literally 'ourself person.'
"Ah," he says, "you are one of us!"
Not long after hearing this dialogue, I was explaining to my tutor the differences between Judaism and Christianity.
"Christians think Jesus is the son of God," I told her. "But Jews don't agree. We think he is just ziji ren."
He is just one of us. Easy to translate, and yet, ziji ren is not one of us. Not exactly. It is, like any word or phrase, a conceptually discrete particle of an infinitely generative yet entirely self-referential system. For me, ziji ren has come to be inflected with drug users and contested messiahs, and I'm sure it will continue to evolve in idiosyncratic connotation. But no one can know exactly what ziji ren means to me, what associative bells are set off in my mind when I use it. What is interesting to me about studying Chinese is that I am coming to see why this doesn't matter. My tutor didn't have to know my personal etymology of ziji ren anymore than the barkeep had to actually hear me say 'kai deng,' because there is something more basic occurring when we are speaking to each other, and that is the fact of our physical togetherness.
Quite recently, neuroscientists began to study pairs of people instead of isolated individuals. The theory behind such experiments is that studying a brain in isolation to see how it works is a bit like studying someone's face to see what they are thinking, but without taking into account what they are looking at. Not surprisingly, what these scientists are finding is that our minds adjust to each other. If you are angry, I am likely to be defensive. If you are at ease, I am likely to be at ease. Of course that is a simplification, but what it points to, for me, is that in a given interaction, our being with each other is more important than the actual intercourse of linguistic meanings.
Words seem to be something like skiffs in which we ride atop a river more generous and diverse than language on its own ever could be. It is like this for everyone, but the ease of our naturally acquired mother tongues obscures a lot of the rest of what is going into communication. My rickety Chinese skiff does no such thing.
If I may switch metaphors, my Chinese at this point is like some strange puppet which I have pieced together over the past couple years, an accrued weight of the mind which I can animate and use but which cannot yet surmount its own inertia. And often in conversation the puppet lies collapsed, exhausted and limbs entangled, between myself and whomever I'm speaking with. And yet is not the fact of our being together, the reality of our mutual effects on each other, still more basic than the paucity of words?
It certainly doesn't feel that way if I am afraid or embarassed or angry. But if I am calm or happy; if, above all, I can behold an honest-to-God specific, sensitive person in front of me instead of a judge, then there is space to see the deeper communication that is present, that is necessarily present in any relationship.
To end, then, a story not from China but from Nepal, when I was there four years ago.
One evening my friend Ang and I were walking around the city of Pokhara and decided to stop and watch a small dance performance that was going on at a restaurant. We ordered drinks and sat amongst the other diners and watched some Nepalese folk dancing for a while. After half an hour or so, the show proper ended and the dancers and musicians began calling for the small audience to come up on stage and dance. As usual in that type of situation, I was reticent to go, but soon we were swept up onto the floor and had begun dancing with the performers and some of the other folks from the crowd. Among them were a few Japanese tourists, including several older women. Now, American teenagers have their reasons to be reticent to dance in public, but I can't imagine that they surpass those of elderly Japanese women. These women were up, however, and dancing, and soon we were all having a pretty good time. The Nepalese dancers were twirling and bringing drums onto the floor. People jumped and danced with each other and alone, and it was really a wonderful, impromptu thing. The song crescendoed to an ending, and in the energetically pregnant first moment of quiet, I caught eyes with one of the elderly Japanese women.
And there it was - as naturally as if we were basketball teammates celebrating a point, she raised up her hand for a big high-five. High-five we did, clasping hands and laughing for a moment, and then off we went our separate ways.
