Dreaming in Chinese (14 page)

I was chatting about
tā
and the characters for writing it with a calligrapher in Xizhou one day. (Chinese chat about things like this!) He told me that the character for she
is a new arrival, created not even 100 years ago, in the 1920s, during one of the many periods when the Chinese were debating about their writing systems. Should they simplify some characters? (Mao did this later.) Should they use a phonetic writing system? (There have been several; Pinyin is now taught in schools.) Should they create a new character for she to distinguish it from he? Arguments raged, and eventually the character
was accepted, although a brief flirtation with introducing a new way of pronouncing
as
yī
got no traction. The new character for she/
tā
would seem logical to Chinese speakers, since the left-hand part of the character
is the character for woman.

A further explanation about the confusions with
tā
is that the Chinese aren’t as smitten with using pronouns at all, including
tā
, as are speakers of most Western languages. Pronouns just aren’t that important to the Chinese, and they omit them frequently. A good rule of thumb for Chinese would be: unless you really need to use the pronoun to clarify the context, or highlight the antecedent of the pronouns, or otherwise draw attention in some way, just leave it out. From the Chinese point of view, I suppose they might say that the rest of the world litters its speech with unnecessary pronouns.

An example in one of my grammar books illustrates how frequently “I” and all the other pronouns can easily be omitted in Chinese. Try to read the following (translated) passage without saying any of the words that appear in parentheses:

That day I went to see an old friend. (I) knocked on the door (but) nobody answered. (I) thought that he must have gone out, (and) so (I) left a note (and) pushed (it) through the letter box in the door indicating that (I) would come back another day. (I) also said that as soon as (he) comes back, it would be nice if (he) could drop me a note. (I) never expected that a few days later (I) would receive an anonymous letter saying that he had already moved out.
¹⁵

During my early days of trying to speak Chinese, when I still fell back on word-for-word translations from English, I grew to be self-conscious about saying
wǒ, wǒ, wǒ
(I, I, I) all the time. “I’m afraid I’m late.” “I’m hungry.” “I’m terribly lost.” I knew this wasn’t quite right, but it felt vague and unresolved to simply say, “Late” or “Hungry” or “Terribly lost.”

But if I was guilty of using far too many pronouns in Chinese, I would argue back that the Chinese go way too soft on their pronoun use in English, particularly their lack of attention to he and she. Some English-speaking Chinese offered their own explanations of what was going on with he and she, explanations ranging from China’s educational system to children’s cognitive development to the Mandarin sound system.

The Chinese education system excels in teaching to tests, particularly to the
gāokǎo
, China’s uniquely important college entrance exam. “The tests,” an American English teacher in China writes, “focus on recognizing esoteric vocabulary and grammar rather than being able to use the basics in flexible and expressive ways.”
¹⁶
By this prescription, colloquial use of he and she falls through the cracks; it’s not going to come up on the exam. So while my Chinese teachers could talk me under the table about the most arcane grammatical concepts in English or Chinese, even they faltered on he and she in conversation.

The teachers just don’t drill pronouns, one Chinese friend told me, and getting no practice means you are always performing “an alien mental calculation” to come up with a choice of he or she. “Alien mental calculation,” I scoffed to myself, reflecting on my struggles with word order in Mandarin sentences, which (at least to my mind) requires a much more complicated formula to master than a simple choice between he and she. But to be perfectly fair, I would concede that the choice of he or she is made harder for the Chinese to master by all the variants of him/her, his/hers, and his/her in English. All these are reduced to
tā
in Chinese.

One of my most reliable language resources, Miranda, a young Chinese woman, said she thought that the source of vagueness occurred well before going to school. It’s all about cognition and development, she ventured. English speakers have to run into the concept of pronoun gender in language from the get-go, because they have to distinguish he and she. But for the Chinese, it isn’t an important concept. Cognitively, everything is
tā
. Only later, once children begin to read and write the characters
and
, are they even introduced to the concept of gender in language.

This explanation makes for a kind of reality check on what we consider the givens of language. We think the distinction between he and she is so important, but wait—the Chinese can do very well without it, thank you very much! This “given” is actually a reflection of the structure of English, just as the “givens” of gender assigned to every French noun (
la maison
[f.],
le travail
[m.]) are a reflection of the structure of French.

Jessie, a Chinese woman who spent a year in college in New York recently, said the Chinese sound system is to blame for the problems of keeping he and she straight. “He and she sound a lot the same to Chinese speakers. It’s easy to get mixed up,” she said. Much like our trouble with tones, I thought. Many Chinese just don’t
hear
the difference.

In English, the “h” and “sh” sounds, as in he and she, are produced very differently. The tongue is in different positions, and the air passes around the tongue in different ways. So to English speakers, he and she are easily distinguishable words; no native speaker would confuse the two. It’s not the same for Chinese speakers. The sound system of their language does not include either he or she as we pronounce them in English. These are not sounds that Chinese speakers recognize easily or know how to say. Instead they know the syllable
xi
—which English speakers don’t recognize or find easy to say, and which sounds to us like a blend of “he” and “she,” or else like “see.” So, apart from other reasons for forgetting whether he or she is correct in a given sentence, Chinese speakers may sometimes say she when meaning he, since it is so hard for them to hear the difference.

Back home in smoggy Beijing, I was thinking about English corner in Xizhou and wondering if the pronoun lesson would stick with any of the kids. Perhaps there would be a clutch of Chinese kids who would grow up using he and she flawlessly. But probably not; if even my Chinese teachers don’t use them correctly, the odds are stacked against the kids from Xizhou.

I was also thinking about an experience with the “I” pronoun that really caught my ear during one of my early lessons at the Miracle Mandarin language school in Shanghai. Our teacher used to have us students give little impromptu presentations whenever class became too dull. That certainly woke us up. The topics were normally the mundane “What I did over the weekend” variety. But one day, she asked us to talk about “What I believe in.” All of us students started with the predictable Western concepts of democracy, or free speech, or pursuit of happiness. It was hard, especially given our limited vocabulary in Mandarin.

When my turn came, I stalled for time by asking our teacher, Sandy, to tell us what she believed in. Sandy, who was very earnest and a diligent teacher, paused for a moment, and then declared almost defiantly:
“
I BELIEVE IN MYSELF.
”