Gotham Diary:
Indoctrination
9 August 2013
Grey and damply cool, this is no day for the beach, but here we are, and here we shall gather with Megan, Ryan, and Will for a third Fire Island stay. Even though they’re off to San Francisco at the end of next week, we look forward to many happy returns.
It is lovely just to hear the wind soughing in the reeds.
***
For forty years or so, I’ve never let a certain compact yellow paperback get too far out of sight. It is one of my aspirational touchstones, promising swift self-improvement if given a minimum of attention. I have never managed to give it that minimum, at least until now, but, as I say, it has always, this little book, been near to hand. It is called 1200 Chinese Basic Characters, edited by W Simon, then of the University of London, and first published in 1944. My copy dates to 1975.
It happens also be an orphan of history, a remnant of violent upheaval. 1200 Characters is the adaptation, for English speakers, of a Chinese primer, People’s Ten-Thousand Character Lessons, published by China’s Commercial Press in pamphlet form and distributed in bulk as part of a literacy campaign. The original Chinese text, divided into four books of twenty-four lessons each, has been supplied with English translations, of both the lessons and the individual characters. The idea, according to the foreword, is that, by learning ten characters a day, one might become proficient in Chinese in three or four months. Rather, I should say, proficient in reading and writing Chinese. The lessons are explicitly aimed at people who have spoken Chinese from birth.
This is not the kind of book that you would expect to find in a contemporary modern-language course. It is on the contrary a vehicle of indoctrination for the Republic of China. Not the People’s Republic of China, but its predecessor, so to speak, and currently the government of Taiwan. Nevertheless, the lessons are sufficiently charged with collective spirit to sound Communist, at least to Western ears. What would be different about the PRC version of this book (and I’m sure that at least one exists) is that the characters would be “simplified.” Many of them would look quite different, and it would require a new orientation to be able to look them up in a dictionary. To this day, the two character systems thrive, the simplified within China and the traditional everywhere else — Singapore, Taiwan, and in Chinese-language publications in the United States.
Another odd thing about 1200 Characters is its devotion to an ill-fated romanization scheme. Older readers will recall the Wade-Giles way of representing Chinese sounds in English — Ch’ing Dynasty, Mao Tze-Tung — while younger readers will have bumped into pinyin, currently the standard romanization — Qing Dynasty, Mao Zedong. Only Chinese language specialists and a handful of elderly readers would have any call to remember Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the romanization scheme employed by Professor Simon. We need not say much about Gwoyeu Romatzyh, except that it looks very odd, replete as it is with extra-looking letters.
Back to the text, though. The first lesson teaches the student how write “My name is…” “I am N years old,” “I come from X.” There is no dialogue, no simulation of real-life exchanges. There would be no need for that, as the student is presumed to be a fluent speaker of Chinese. Rather, the student is facing the daunting challenge of learning how to write Chinese characters — and to write the Chinese characters that the rulers want to be sure that she knows, the better to read banners and proclamations.
The second lesson puts us firmly on the path to propaganda. Entitled “The Blind,” it consists of four lines: “People who cannot see are blind, And people who cannot read may also be considered to be blind. The blind suffer; Those who cannot read suffer also.” Jumping ahead to the seventeenth lesson, “Community,” we see that the order in which the characters are to be introduced to the student is not governed by considerations of everyday frequency. Two new characters in the lesson denote management or control, as does a third, introduced in an earlier lesson. In the following transcription, these words are italicized. “While as men we value independence [“self-reliance” would be more literal], We also value living in a community. Each private individual should look after his private affairs, While the community should handle communal affairs. The power of the community is unlimited, While the power of the individual is limited. If only there is the spirit of cooperation in the community, Anything can be achieved.” The beginning student may not know how to write about the weather or what he had for dinner, but he is already capable of grasping the public agenda.
My immediate goal is to master the 305 characters introduced in the first of the four books. So far, the indoctrination has made me feel very Chinese. My favorite line so far comes from the fifth lesson, “Working and Studying”: “Study and work: joy without end.” Yes, it sounds funny; how could anybody make such a statement with a straight face? Except that I pretty much can, these days.
***
1200 Characters omits a vital aspect of learning to write Chinese, which concerns the very fixed order in which the strokes of a character are to be written. It would be up to the teacher to impart that knowledge during the lessons.
I was drawn to the study of Chinese by an exhibition, mounted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the spring of 1972, of Chinese calligraphy. I spent the following summer buried in books from which I learned how to write characters and how to look them up in a dictionary. I did not learn anything very useful. I lacked even then the steady hand required for calligraphy of any kind, and I still can’t say anything intelligent in Chinese. The characters have remained the draw. And I really do know how to write them, even when I don’t know what they mean.
So it was extremely encouraging to read, the other day, something that I must have unwittingly suspected all along. Simon Leys, in a 1996 essay, “One More Art: Chinese Calligraphy,” writes of the “frenzied” cursive script that forms one of the principal calligraphic styles,
Only practitioners and specialists can decipher it — and yet, even for the common viewer, it is one of the most spectacular and appealing styles. Its illegibility poses no obstacle to the enjoyment of the ordinary public, since — as we have just said — this enjoyment does not reside in a literary appreciation of the contents but in an imaginative communion with the dynamics of the brushwork. What the viewer needs is not to read a text but to retrace in his mind the original dance of the brush and to relive its rhythmic progress.
Thus accredited with a skill that I already possess, I shall be making my way to the galleries surrounding the Astor Court at the Museum, to enjoy some imaginative communion with the brushwork — without feeling guilty about having no idea what the damn thing says!