ZHUANG ZHOU DREAMS HE’S A BUTTERFLY

日月如流

The days and the months flow like water

The two Chinese women in the locker room are talking about me. “Look at this girl here,” says the shorter one, tilting her head towards me. She speaks in quick, fluty Mandarin as she changes into her gym clothes. “Did you see her leg muscles?” In the mirror, I watch her friend glance over, then flick her eyes away. “Wah! She must run a lot.” She pulls a ruffled shirt over her head, then folds it up carefully before donning a tank top decorated with a palm tree in gold sequins.

There’s no reason why these women should suspect that I understand. We’re in Ohio, I’m a white woman, and while Chinese is an increasingly popular language of study in the States, it’s still not exactly pervasive. And so what if I do understand? They’re not saying anything bad about me. I have big calves; I run a lot. All true.

Still, I feel a shift in my mood. A boat is unlatched from the dock and floats from the shore. I am here, but not here, both invisible and on display.

In any case, it’s just a brief bubble in the conversation. Already, the two women have moved on to discussing their chemistry class. There was a test, or else there’s a test coming up—here the vocabulary wheels off beyond my comprehension as they move into the specifics of the science and I stop trying to understand. A conscious switch and the words no longer have meaning. They are merely familiar sounds and cadences, a song I don’t know, but whose key I recognize—and not just the language, but the particular voice. One of the women speaks in waterfalls, accentuating the start of a sentence before letting it spill off into a murmur. It is the same inflection my friend Xinping uses to explain some disappointing truth about the world that she has long accepted: time goes too fast, the work week is too long, government officials will always be corrupt. Two years ago, the last time I was back in Ya’an for a visit, Jiang Hong, her husband, told me enough already, you’ve got to stop calling us by our names, aren’t we family by now? Meiguo meimei, he laughed—little American sister. “We’ve known each other for— what is it? five years now?” he said in Mandarin. “日月如流 (rì yuè rú liú)!” He’d leaned across the table to clink his glass of beer against mine.

“The months and the days flow like water”—a chengyu that needs no explanation. But the language is too formal. After the toast, Jiang Hong switched back to the Sichuan dialect to make a joke, one I only half-understood at the time and can no longer remember now.

伶牙俐齿


Clever molars and witty teeth

Chengyu are idioms, usually made up of four characters, that arose from ancient poems, stories, and philosophical treatises and have been passed down through the generations. There are somewhere between five thousand and twenty thousand, depending on how strictly you define the parameters (there are many suyu—folk adages—as well, and the border between them tends to waver, especially when a suyu is also four characters long). Chengyu and suyu are both forms of shuyu (“familiar language”)[1], a grouping that also includes yanyu (proverbs), xiehouyu (witty, two-part sayings), jingju (aphorisms), guanyongyu (commonly used phrases or idioms), and geyan (maxims).

Essentially, Chinese is a series of history lessons held together with a fistful of verbs, nouns, and prepositions.

Speaking well in Mandarin means having this library at the tip of your tongue. Or at the edge of your teeth—one chengyu to describe someone who is blessed with a silver tongue is 伶牙俐齿 (líng yá lì chĭ): “clever molars and witty teeth.”

My teeth were witless during my first year of Chinese. At that time—over a decade ago —the Asian Languages & Literature department at Carleton College used Practical Chinese Reader, a floppy pea-green textbook with bamboo shooting up one side of the cover and a copyright date of 1981. It featured dialogue with a decidedly Communist slant. “Comrade” appeared in Lesson Nine, and we learned “the Four Modernizations” before we learned how to say “why.” The two main characters were called Gubo and Palanka (transliterations of Western names that remain to this day a mystery), and they had a Chinese friend named Ding Yun who always wore her hair in two low braids and was unerringly kind and helpful.

Our teacher, Mai Laoshi, was an American with a thick gray beard and mustache. He had a Ph.D. in Chinese language and linguistics and had lived in Taiwan for several years back in the eighties. The first day of class, he brought in props. He held up a map and a stuffed bunny. Tu? he asked, flapping the map around in one hand. Tu! he declared, thrusting the bunny up into the air over his head. My classmates and I laughed. Chinese had tones; we all knew that. Mai Laoshi did the map-and-bunny trick again and again, then changed props: a box of spaghetti and a bag of cotton balls. Mian! Mian? Mian! Mian? By the end of class, I was exhausted.

Each lesson’s vocabulary list in PCR contained quaint or otherwise seldom-used words—drawing room, switchboard, military attaché—and others whose English translations I could only guess—almond junket and moxibustion, red orpiment and moon cake. At the end of each lesson was a complicated explanation of pronunciation and intonation that was impossible to put into practice: “If the quadrisyllable is to be uttered in the medium-weak-medium-strong pattern, the distribution of time should be 1.5: 0.5: 1: 3.”

A decade later, and after nearly three years in total living in China, I still can’t make sense of that sentence.

窥豹一斑


Look at a leopard and see only one spot

In August of 2004, I moved to Ya’an, a medium-sized town in Sichuan province that was the center of an eight-county prefecture by the same name. Ya’an was famous locally for its abundance of rain, for a fish that swam only in the shallows of the Qingyi River and had a bone in its head like a long-hilted sword, for the beauty of its women, for the sweet spring water that flowed from Erlang Mountain, and for the pandas that still hid on the bamboo-covered slopes of Baoxing. The old tea route between Tibet and China had passed through the region and so had the Long March. My friend Yao Shuhui’s grandfather, in his nineties when I first met him and sporting a long white beard, had joined up with Mao Zedong and his Red Army when they came through in 1935. He’d fallen sick at Erlang Mountain and had to be left behind, a fate that may have saved his life in the long run.

This is the romantic vision of Ya’an. It’s all true, but it’s only one part. 窥豹一斑 (kuī bào yī bān): “look at a leopard and see only one spot.” Other chengyu make similar comparisons: the frog who sees the sky from the bottom of a well, the person who looks through a length of bamboo or tries to measure the sea with a ladle.

A few years before I arrived, the government completed a highway connecting Ya’an to Chengdu, the largest city in southwest China. It cut down the trip from six or seven hours to a little less than two, and Ya’an grew more cosmopolitan as a result. Supermarkets and hotels dotted the two main streets on either side of the river. Clothing stores blasted pop music onto the sidewalks. Most of the old houses—two-story, ramshackle buildings made from bamboo and clay tiles with drooping black eaves and papered-up windows—were torn down to make room for eight- or ten- or twelve-story apartment blocks. On the east side of the river, the town’s first stoplights appeared over a newly paved road with a separate lane for bikes and rickshaws. Everyone ignored the stoplights. Cars drove in the bike lane, bikes in the car lane, and rickshaws everywhere—still, the new street seemed to represent progress.

入乡随俗

Enter a village and go with the customs

Ya’an had a population of 150,000 and four foreigners in residence: a man from Nigeria named Monday, an Irishman, a Frenchman, and me. We were all English teachers. Lawrence and Pierre taught at the Agricultural University and spent most of their time together. I taught at the middle school with Monday who, though friendly, kept his distance from everyone but his students. Whenever I ran into him, he was either coasting down the street on his bright red bike or else surrounded by a small crowd of eleven- and twelve-year-olds, all of them laughing frantically at his animated arm gestures and constant jokes. Like Monday, I wanted to avoid joining an expatriate community. I had come to China to sink myself in another culture, and—outside of class—in another language. I wanted to be uncomfortable, to feel out of my element.

Common wisdom says that those who go abroad alone for a significant length of time are usually trying to flee an event or a burden back home: a bad break-up, a poor decision, a career path that is the equivalent of a drive through western Kansas—nothing on the horizon but more of the same. The displacement from one’s native environment, according to this understanding, is meant to enable one to escape from the past and become a new person.

Escape may be part of the decision to move abroad. But I suspect that displacement is often the more important factor. Rather than wanting to become a new person altogether, the expat wishes to recognize in her new surroundings a more coherent picture of who she already is. Rather than escape, she is trying to confront. For my part, my father’s sudden departure from our family when I was in high school had hardened into habit a tendency towards reserve, an unwillingness to appear vulnerable in any situation. In moving to China, I thought I was proving to myself that I could handle anything on my own, and in that way, the decision could be seen as growing directly out of my instinct for distance. But because the main challenge I set for myself was to try to fit in there, the decision was actually more complicated than that.

The first several months in Ya’an, I returned to my apartment in the afternoons completely exhausted by my efforts to communicate on the street. The Sichuan dialect was much different from the putonghua (“normal language”) I’d studied in college—a Platonic ideal of Mandarin that, while based on the accent in northeast China, is not truly endemic to any one place. Putonghua is the official Chinese dialect—that of newscasters and government officials and TV—so in the market and at shops and restaurants, people understood when I spoke. But I often couldn’t understand them when they responded.

Much of the noise in Ya’an needed no translation. The music store across the street from my apartment blared the same pop song all day, every day; trucks piled high with bricks or produce blasted air horns as they careened around pedestrians and bicyclists; roosters crowed; dogs erupted in barking fits at 3:00 a.m. that went on unchecked for twenty minutes 
or more. These things annoyed me, but I checked my impatience. After all, I told myself, I was the anomaly. The first time I explained this perspective to my neighbor, Mrs. Zheng, who had showed me the first week how to make rice the correct way—wash it three times and pick out the pebbles, lay your hand flat on top and add water just up to the bend at the wrist—she said, “Oh, yes, 入乡随俗 (rù xiāng suí sú),” which means “enter a village and go with the customs.” When in Rome, do as the Romans do. After a moment, she added, “But that dog makes me crazy.”

Adopting new habits is not the same as fitting in. It was simply not possible for me to blend in in Ya’an. I was a snag in the fabric of any crowd. People stopped midstride to watch me pass by on the street. Conversations ceased; fingers pointed. In the markets, women in short, sturdy heels with bags swinging from their wrists paused to watch me haggle for tomatoes, and men in blue cotton farmers’ jackets gathered to see which piece of pork fat hanging from an iron hook I would choose. “Laowai,” I heard constantly from shop doorways, from passengers in passing rickshaws, from high school students holding hands as they rode their bikes side by side. “Laowai, laowai.” “Foreigner, foreigner.” I was a five-foot seven American who went for morning runs along the river roads, wearing thick-soled sneakers and a bright sheen of sweat. I stood out.


铁杵成针

An iron rod becomes a needle

From the beginning, I loved studying Chinese because it was so different, so difficult. There was no verb conjugation. Every syllable had a tone: earth or spit? belief or heart? to look or to chop? To make something a question, you could add a throwaway syllable, but if you raised your voice at the end, you’d be adding the word “rough,” “prickle,” or possibly “marijuana.” There was no one way to say “yes” or “no.” There were no real tenses either—no past, present, or future.

As it turns out, these differences don’t pose any real challenges to functional fluency. Xíguàn means “habit” and xīguăn means “straw,” and given enough hours in a language lab—with a headphone set and a microphone, with Russian and Japanese and German phrases fluttering around the room like small, bright butterflies—after a while you’ll stop mixing up the two. You will start to understand measure words: a pad of paper, a stack of books—why shouldn’t every noun have its own distinct classifier? It’s poetic, even: no quantifying a thing until you have determined its essential quality. Zhang for tables and other things that are flat. Tiao for objects that are narrow and flexible: a ribbon, a road, a dragon, a river.

Persistence helps. For example: When the great Tang Dynasty poet Li Bai was still a child, he was always running off to play instead of devoting his time to study. He’d skip class to wander along the town streets or along the chicken paths that gridded the fields outside the town walls. One day, kicking along in the sunshine, he came upon an old woman seated on a stool in front of a broken-down thatch cabin. She held a thick iron rod in one hand and was grinding it back and forth against a rock on the ground. “What are you doing, Grandmother?” Little Li asked.

The old woman looked up. “I’m grinding down this rod to make an embroidery needle.”

“Won’t that take a long time?”

“I would imagine,” she said, “but each swipe gets me one step closer.” With that, she went back to her task, and Little Li, of course, understood the lesson—from that day on, he never skipped class. (He also learned how to whittle something down to a sharp point—a useful skill for one who would later write poems only twenty characters long).

铁杵成针 (tiĕ chŭ chéng zhēn): “an iron rod becomes a needle.” Persistence goes a long way in learning a language. It helps with grammar and pronunciation and retaining vocabulary. It makes it easier to open your mouth and speak.

But why persist? The plodding progress of studying a language is at odds with the reasons for doing it—both for starting in the first place, and for continuing after it gets hard. In the first case, there’s usually romance. You fall in love with Dostoevsky and want to learn Russian. You see a photo of a café in Paris and want to learn French. I began studying Chinese because I had a crush on a boy who had lived in Taiwan; I was eighteen and full of longing, and paralyzed by the thought of showing it directly. Rather than expose my heart, I grasped at this filament that would connect the two of us, however weakly.

That is why I began learning Chinese, but it’s not why I continued. And it’s certainly not why I chose to move across the world, or why, when I left the United States, I decided that I couldn’t come back for at least two years, not even to visit. One year wouldn’t suffice; it would take that long, I figured, just to break bad habits. Two uninterrupted years were required to make a real life, one that it would be difficult to give up, whenever the time came.

改弦易辙


Change the instrument’s string, 
change the wagon rut

My status as a foreigner kept some people away and drew others to me. My high school students who sat at the front of the class would fall into stride with me as I crossed campus, eager to practice their English. Eating a bowl of spicy noodles at a cheap place by the university, a college student at the next table would ask, “Do you like China?”, and I would respond that I loved the food and the people were friendly, the easiest answer I could think of for a difficult question. “I think America is a very great country,” the student would say, citing democracy and social freedoms, the Backstreet Boys and Who Moved My Cheese?.

I empathized with these students. We were all trying on another language, trying to make it fit. But I also felt less like myself speaking English in these situations than I did speaking Chinese. I had to choose carefully the words I would use, to speak slowly and repeat myself and use simple grammar. I couldn’t be sarcastic. Adopting the persona of the patient, smiling foreigner, I felt devoid of personality.

I realize now that I must have often placed a similar constraint on many of the people I talked to those first several months when I was still floundering in the local dialect, forcing them to tailor their speech to my ability to understand. For my part, I shuffled around the blank spaces in my vocabulary—“that thing you use when it rains,” I might say, waving my fist in front of me as if clutching an umbrella—knowing what I wanted to express even when I didn’t know how to say it. In Chinese, I found, I was a more eager and animated version of myself. I had always been reserved but now was more outgoing. It was a personality shift: 改弦易辙 (găi xían yì zhé), “change from one string to another on an instrument, change wagon ruts.” “You’re very open and warm,” people would say to me, a description that had never been applied to me while I was speaking my native tongue.

自相矛盾


The spear and the shield against one another

The story goes like this:

During the Spring and Autumn Period long ago, as the state of Chu spread its robes over the surrounding small kingdoms of modern-day China’s abdomen, competition was stiff among the many weaponry merchants who sold their wares in the markets and on the streets. One day, one of these merchants climbed up onto a table and shouted, “See this spear!” as he lifted the weapon in his hand so it glinted in the sun. “This spear can pierce the hardest metal. There is not a shield in the world that will withstand your attack!” He thrust the spear into the air for effect, but no one stepped forward to buy it. “Look at this shield!” he then yelled, holding up a leather shield, lacquered bright red, that he held in his other hand. “This is the strongest shield in the world. Nothing can pierce it!” A man in the crowd called out, “What would happen if your spear was used against your shield?” The merchant climbed down off the table, shamefaced. He had no answer.

“The spear and the shield against one another”: to contradict oneself. Chengyu are already abbreviations, but this one has been truncated even further. The latter two characters of 自相矛盾 (zì xiāng máo dùn) have together made their way into the normal lexicon. Look up “contradiction” in an English-Chinese dictionary and you will find maodun—the spear and the shield.

What made living in China difficult was also what made it easy; I was always conscious of my status as an outsider. Beyond the friendships I made, I could never feel fully a part of the greater community. This outsider status could be frustrating—even exhausting at times—yet it was oddly comforting, too. As a foreigner in China, I never expected to fully belong. But I was able to make a place for myself in spite of it, to feel at home.

In the United States, I have no easy explanation for the feeling I so frequently have of being out of sync. At night, as I wash my face at the bathroom sink, I contemplate the deep vertical line between my eyebrows, a line the width of a matchstick. It is the result of the expression my face seems to fall into naturally: a tightening of the nose and a slight squint of the eyes—the look of an observer, or a skeptic. Stop looking mean, I tell myself sometimes when I catch my reflection in the window of a passing car, and I widen my eyes and feel the skin stretch across my forehead. But a few minutes later, the look has returned.

落叶归根


A falling leaf returns to its roots

The roots of most chengyu are a tangle of Chinese history. In the Daodejing, the ancient philosopher Laozi, also known as Lao Tse or Lao-Tzu, uses the image of a leaf floating down to the roots of the tree to describe a state of harmony with the Dao; each of us, so the philosopher contends, is part of a never-ending cycle to which all things in the universe belong. Later, in the Northern Song dynasty, the writer Shi Daoyuan writes of a Zen Buddhist master bidding farewell to his disciples before returning to his hometown. The disciples, afraid that they will never see their beloved master again, exhort him to stay, but he explains that the universal laws of movement governing all things govern him, too. It is not his decision when to stay and when to go, just as it is not his choice when he will die. It is in this passage that the chengyu appears in its present, four-character form: 落叶归根 (luò yè guī gēn), literally “fall leaf home root,” better understood as “a falling leaf returns to its roots.”

The idiom reappears in other literature, too. At some point along the way, the Daoist meaning slipped from the forefront and the phrase came to signify an expatriate’s longing for home. Thus, in 1958 when Li Zongren (the former Guomindang general who became a Communist sympathizer) wrote a letter from abroad about his desire to return to the mainland, he used the idiom, too.

The implication, of course, is that home is a fixed idea, easy to point to: the place where you began. Perhaps sometimes it is this simple, but what if the analogy is upside down? What if home is less like the roots of a tree than it is like the branches, each new bough splintering off in a distinct direction? We make a new home—pieces of it, anyway—wherever we go, but first we have to find the people to help us make it.

Luo Xinping was thin and petite, with small, gray teeth and skin so white it was almost translucent. Jiang Hong was a heavy-drinking, chain-smoking jokester, stocky and dark-skinned, the life of every party. They were both from the same hometown as my boss at the high school. When I’d gone to his office one afternoon a month after my arrival in Ya’an to ask if he could recommend a Chinese tutor, Teacher Shi picked up his phone and made a call right then. “Okay, you will meet Ms. Luo this afternoon,” he said in English after he’d set his cell phone back down on the desk. “She is a local beauty. Her husband is a very funny man, okay. Everybody loves him very much.”

Monday evenings, I’d bike to their apartment on the other end of Ya’an. Xinping and I would sit on the couch with a copy of the popular Chinese magazine Duzhe, and together read a sentimental article about friendship or homesickness or a strict but loving parent who was dying of cancer. Whenever I encountered vocabulary or idioms I didn’t understand, I’d stop and sip green tea from the flimsy paper cup in my hands, first blowing the floating leaves away from the edge so I didn’t swallow them, as Xinping explained the meaning of the phrases. Jiang Yiling, her six-year-old daughter, often joined in with her own explanations. “Why doesn’t Auntie Molly understand?” she’d ask. “Aiya, because she didn’t grow up here,” Xinping would respond. “If you went to America, there would be a lot you didn’t understand, don’t you think?” and Jiang Yiling would giggle at the idea of going to America.

Wednesdays, I gave English lessons to Jiang Yiling and some of her friends. We played Word Bingo and robots and drew pictures. The number of children grew from week to week as friends of friends joined, until after a few months, Xinping decided that it had gotten too big. “Can’t we just do lessons for Jiang Yiling and a few others?” I asked. Xinping sighed. “We can’t. It’s guanxi, you know?”—guanxi meaning relationships, everyone beholden to one another simply by virtue of connection. I was a foreigner and could get away with escaping obligations to people I barely knew—at least at first—but she and Jiang Hong couldn’t. “It doesn’t matter,” she said with a shrug. “We’ll just stop the English lessons.”

By that point, we’d already stopped the Chinese lessons, too. We were simply friends. We went out to dinner and late-night barbecue with other people from their hometown, sitting at low outdoor tables in our fall and then our winter coats, drinking glasses of hot beer with goji berries. At the teahouses along the Qingyi River, I played Beat the Landlord, the favorite card game, but stayed away from the nightly mahjong games Jiang Hong played. The players were mostly men, though there were a few women, too—brash, funny, and loud, the embodiment of la meizi, “spicy little sisters,” the slang for Sichuanese women. Mahjong was too fast for me—the constant flip and shuffle of tiles, conversation spinning around, smoke filling the teahouse rooms, crumpled-up paper money being tossed back and forth after each round without discussion, everyone but me clear on the rules and bets.

At Chinese New Year, I went with my friends to their hometown, Shimian. I stayed at Xinping’s sister’s house for one week, and then another week with my friend, Dai Ou. Her parents’ apartment was no more than four or five hundred square feet, a tiny three rooms. My arrival meant that her sister had to stay at their grandma’s house for the week. I’d brought gifts—calendars from America and bottles of good baijiu, the Chinese liquor—but it didn’t feel like enough. In Ya’an, I knew better than to try to pay when I was invited out for dinner, but in Shimian, I was not allowed to buy even a bottle of water. “No, it doesn’t matter. You’re a guest,” Dai Ou told me. “It’s Chinese custom.” Jiang Hong and Xinping just laughed. “Even we don’t pay for anything when we’re here,” they told me.

“Well, when do I get to treat?” I asked, and Jiang Hong responded, “Just wait until we go to America. You’ll go into debt when we all show up there together.”

The punch line of the joke is that this will never happen. My Chinese friends can’t afford to travel abroad, and anyway, the US rarely grants travel visas to any but the wealthiest Chinese. When I finally returned to the United States nearly four years ago, I knew I wouldn’t see Xinping, Jiang Hong, Dai Ou, or any of my other friends until I had saved up enough to go back to Ya’an. So having returned to one home, I have left another. And so it is, also, that nothing quite fits.

庄周梦蝶


Zhuang Zhou dreams he’s a butterfly

The famous Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi, also known as Zhuang Zhou, wrote of a dream he once had. He dreamed he was a butterfly flitting through a field of flowers. Grass tips brushed his wings as he floated a lilting path on the breeze. There was wind, sun, field, sky— everything equally large, all of equal importance. When he awoke, he found that he was a man lying flat on his back on a hard bed. Which one was reality and which one was a dream, he wondered? Was he a man dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was a man?

It is an epistemological quandary summed up in four characters: 庄周梦 蝶 (zhuāng zhōu mèng dié) “Zhuang Zhou dreams he’s a butterfly.” The chengyu does not make its way into everyday conversation all that often, though it does occasionally flit into the lyrics of a pop song.

At Chinese New Year this year, I send e-mails to all my friends in Ya’an. A week later, I get a call at five o’clock in the morning from Dai Ou. “Were you sleeping? What time is it there?” she asks. She is horrified at her mistake when I tell her. It’s okay, I say. “I want to get up. In an hour, I want to get up.” My Chinese is sloppy, overly simple. I keep forgetting words. It has been months since I’ve spoken the language, and I am half asleep, besides.

We talk about the holiday, and she tells me she’s just returned to Ya’an from Shimian. She tells me about a new barbecue place that’s opened since the last time I was there. It has even better chou doufu—stinky tofu—than the one at the end of the bridge. And Zhu Yin—do I remember her? Her high school classmate? The one whose father does calligraphy? She’s married now, Dai Ou says, to the policeman who drove us out to the farmhouse restaurant that one time, the one with the zucchini flower soymilk soup that was so good, remember?

It’s been four years since I moved back to the United States. I remember Zhu Yin and the soup, but I’ve forgotten the policeman.

When I hang up the phone, I look around my apartment in Columbus, Ohio. There are bits of Ya’an all over: the painting I bought at the shop down along the river, the scroll my students gave me with the calligraphed phrase: “Peach and plum blossoms everywhere under the sky,” which means, they told me, that my students are everywhere. Photographs on the mantle and the walls, a wood carving, a mint-green jacket hanging in the open closet.

And on the bookshelf: dictionaries in both English and Chinese. Look up a word in any language and you will drown in its history. Language. History. Choose either one. Draw a map of its meaning—a dot near the middle for every current definition, and spreading out in all directions a complex web of lines connecting them, one to the other, and each one to all of its past incarnations. If it is accurate, such a map will have no exact center. Nearly every word inhabits multiple meanings at a single moment in time, and the full definition claims even the gaps between them.

NOTES

1. Shuyu can be defined as “a fixed phrase, used in its entirety and without alteration to any part, whose overall meaning often cannot be deduced from an analysis of the composite words” (Xiandai Hanyu Cidian, Modern Chinese Dictionary, translation my own)