Mr. China (20 page)

But ours was a much more familiar story; it was just another fight between two groups of people over power and money. And Pang, when he tried to stoke up ethnic differences, was using every
weapon he had and it hadn’t really worked. No, I felt that the Chinese were too practical, too self-confident and too curious about what was going on in the world outside to fall into any
negative racist trap. They wanted to catch up.

I hoped that this might give me a chance of reaching across the cultural divide, a chance of appealling to common values. If it came to a struggle with the factory directors, I had to convince
them that I was fighting them not as a foreigner but as a businessman. That way, I might have a chance.

Chinese people have a deep sense of ‘Chineseness’, which I felt I had to break through. This ‘Chineseness’ extends well beyond patriotism, nationality,
citizenship and loyalty but includes all of those ideas. I wrote that when I first came to China almost ten years earlier, I had found something so vast and so old that it took me right out of
myself. Over time, I tried to clarify those hesitant first impressions into something more distinct. I had developed a sense of some special bond between the people now living in the country we
call China and the immense and ancient culture of their ancestors; ancestors who lived on that land for five thousand years and wrote down their history in an unbroken chain. ‘Bond’ is
the right word: a binding, restraining force that includes the concept of owing as well as receiving. I think that being part of that exclusive five-thousand-year-old club gives the Chinese a sense
of separateness and self-esteem. It can occasionally develop into a sense of superiority, but no more than anywhere else. And the legacy has its costs. The price that China paid came from the
burden of history. Until recently, China couldn’t change.

‘Chineseness’ is innate, something that you are born with. It can’t be changed by something as ephemeral as a passport or a mere lifetime spent abroad. Once, as I sat chatting
under an old wisteria in the Beijing spring sunshine with Old Liuzi, the conversation turned to adoption. I’d known Liuzi for several years and I told her that I had just come back from
Changsha in the south where I had seen a group of about thirty foreigners all carrying tiny Chinese babies. Every year in China, thousands of unwanted babies are abandoned so the Government set up
an adoption service to cope with the problem. We talked a bit about the ‘one-child’ policy – most of the unwanted babies are girls – and Liuzi told me that she thought that
it was probably a good thing that so many were being adopted abroad. But when I mentioned that Chinese babies adopted by parents in America or Europe would not necessarily grow up just naturally
speaking Chinese, she didn’t believe it. She would have none of my theory that language depended on environment. She was convinced that speaking Chinese was hardwired into the genes. This
almost physical connection with their culture that Chinese people feel was something that was slowly dawning on me.

Language is central to this sense of ‘Chineseness’ and the written Chinese characters are central to the language. They provide a link with the past quite unlike that provided by
European languages. The characters represent complete ideas rather than sounds so they are different to an alphabet in that they resist changes over the years or between regions. Pronunciation of
Chinese words might change over the centuries, but the written character remains constant. The character
may be pronounced
xiang,
heung,
or
hong,
but it always means ‘fragrant’. Separate from the sound and recognizable across thousands of years, the characters keep history alive. When China’s
earliest philosophers recorded their ideas on bamboo spills as far back as the sixth century
BC
they used characters, many of which are still in daily use. It’s as if,
with a little effort from the reader, the words of Plato or Aristotle leapt from the page in the original.

The link in China between daily language and the past is strengthened further by a lack of tenses. In Chinese, there is no verb change depending on time. ‘Mao Zedong is a good
leader’ and ‘Mao Zedong was a good leader’ are not distinguished in Chinese. Things that in our language are extinct remain alive in Chinese. Without the separation in language or
thought between what ‘was’ and what ‘is’, China’s past seems to merge into its present.

Until the last century, this connection was strengthened by a traditional dating system that provided no simple way to gauge relative historical periods. Dates were defined by the
Emperor’s reign:
AD
1817 was Jiaqing 18;
AD
965 was Taizu 5; there was nothing to indicate that one of the dates precedes the other by 852
years. The past seemed to merge into cycles that lacked a clear timeline mapping stages in development or an origin where t = 0.

The heightened awareness of history inhibited change and created a great tension. The language provided a permanent rigid connection to a past that looked backwards but at the same time there
was a realization that China was in a struggle for its survival where success depends on the ability to change. The Chinese seemed caught between a great reverence for the past and the need to move
on.

*   *   *

My own journey through the language had taken many wrong turnings and, as hard as I searched, I found no alternative to rote learning. Chinese children have to do the same
thing; hours and hours and hours spent writing the same character again and again until it sticks. Repetition is the only way in. For an English-speaker learning French, there are prompts. Police
becomes
police,
garden becomes
jardin.
But a foreigner has no such guide into Chinese: police is
jingcha;
garden becomes
huayuan.
And not only
jingcha
and
huayuan.
For every word, you have to learn three components: the sound, the character and the tone.

In Chinese, the pitch of each word affects its meaning.
Mai,
for instance, with a falling tone, means ‘to sell’. But
mai
with first a low falling and then a rising tone
means precisely the opposite, ‘to buy’. Even Chinese people find it confusing. At the Shanghai Stock Exchange the brokers used slang to make sure that they don’t mix up buy and
sell orders.

Many words sound exactly the same or confusingly similar. Often Chinese people have to go to great lengths to define a character taken out of context. For example, it would be perfectly normal
for someone to introduce themselves with ‘Hello, I am Deputy Section Chief Li, that’s the
Li
with the sign for tree on the top and a seed underneath,’ or ‘Hello, I am
Madame Wang, that’s the
wang
used in “boundless oceans” not the one that means “king”.’ Without further explanation, a character lacking a clear context
is often impossible to identify with certainty if one relies merely on its sound.

As a result, Chinese people often have to give lengthy explanations to convey accurately meanings that would be quite obvious in English. Once, as I waited at Nanjing airport with Ai Jian, we
went into a small restaurant. I ordered a beer but when Ai asked for some boiled water the waitress hesitated. Remember, there is no tense in Chinese. ‘Does this man mean “boiling
water” or “boiled water”?’ So he expanded: ‘Cold boiled water!’ But that made it worse. She looked completely blank. I could see the concept of cold boiling
water slowly developing in her mind. So he gave the full explanation. ‘Please can I have some water that was once cold and then was brought to the boil and has been left so that it has become
cold again, so that I can be sure that the water is clean.’

‘OK,’ the waitness said flatly and without the remotest change in expression.

Then there were further complications. Ai Jian had used the expression
liangde kaishui,
meaning ‘cold boiled water’. But it sounds almost the same as
liangge kaishui,
meaning ‘two cups of hot water’. So it took another round of negotiations to sort out that he only wanted one cup. No wonder bottled mineral water is so popular in China. The
alternative is just too exhausting.

I loved to eavesdrop when large groups of people became embroiled in these states of confusion, especially when there was a chance that a foreigner, exasperated beyond
endurance by endless unintelligible discussions over simple questions, might finally lose his temper.

Top of my collection of ‘Chinese cross purposes’ occurred in a Chinese medicine shop close to Qianmen, the front gate of the ancient city of Beijing just south of Tiananmen Square.
I’d heard that some of the old Chinese remedies there contained a high concentration of cannabis and, although the particular remedy that I had discovered appeared to be a laxative, I was
willing to have a go. So I went down to the old Chinese medicine shop,
Tong Ren Tang,
which was founded in 1669 and still resides in a three-storey building with enormous red columns,
rickety staircases and dusty Chinese lanterns.

Inside, I found row upon row of ancient wooden shop counters containing every conceivable vegetable and animal part, all neatly ordered and packaged and categorized by function; there was the
‘thinning blood’ section, several counters for ‘revitalizing the
qi
’ and the ‘department of wind control’. It was bemusing, so I asked for the medicine,
huo ma ren,
at the front desk. They directed me past display cases stuffed with dried sea horses, anti-obesity tea and ‘slices of multi-flowered knotweed tubers’. I climbed the
stairs towards a dispensary at the back of the shop. There I found one of the illest-looking shop assistants I had ever seen. Thin almost to the point of translucence, she was deathly pale with
papery skin stretched over a face anchored down by a set of outlandish dentures and crowned with a great knot of dried-up hair. She looked as though she was about to fall over. She wore a badge
which read ‘Shop Assistant Number 14’ pinned on to her white overalls. I asked for my medicine and, as she fussed about with a pair of ancient weighing scales, I was distracted by a
disturbance down at the other end of the long wooden counter. A large woman with a headscarf and thick glasses and wearing blue factory overalls tucked into a pair of enormous boots had clumped in.
She was loudly demanding senna. I had obviously stumbled on Constipation City.

Once the woman had stomped off with her bags of senna, the second shop assistant (Number 8) turned to the next customer. He enquired politely whether they sold ants. Number 14 called across from
the weighing room and asked, ‘How much d’you want, then?’

‘Well, how do you sell ‘em?’ the customer replied.

Ants: I wondered. Maybe by the ounce? By the litre? By the hill?

The discussion on ants fast became the focus of attention, and another customer barged into the conversation with the question, ‘So what do ants cure, then?’ Shop Assistant 8 was
immediately highly indignant. She flounced off back to the weighing counter, complaining loudly to Shop Assistant Number 14 about customers asking such idiotic questions and announcing hotly that
she really had no idea. The customers appeared taken aback by this response. They were, after all, in a medicine shop. But I was sensitized to the confusion and twigged immediately. When the
customer had said, ‘
Ma yi zhi shenme, ne?’
– ‘What do ants cure?’ – Number 8 had misheard it for ‘
Ma yi chi shenme, ne?’,
which sounds
almost identical but means ‘What do ants eat?’

So everything comes back to the ideographic character. Written down, ‘cure’ –
– and
‘eat’ –
– are immediately distinguishable. It’s the sounds
zhi
and
chi
that confuse. Without
seeing a character, or having it laboriously described by context or shape, it is not possible to be absolutely sure which one is meant.