Loose Cans

So I suppose at this point I'm supposed to post how "nothing" has been going. Very well: "nothing" is turning out to be really something. After staring down two $100 textbooks on environmental change etc, which implied that this was going to be a little different than I'd expected, and not what I wanted at the moment, I switched out Jeffrey Sachs' class in favor of Thomas Pogge's Just Rules for a Global Economy, which is by all appearances a much better class. Also, with just 12 people, it has about 10% of the class size. The guy is apparently a pretty big name, too, whose bailiwick this days is setting up a second method of patenting pharmaceuticals which will at last provide Big Pharma with an incentive to provide drugs to third-world countries. He comes in and basically says, I need your ideas. Obviously virtually none of us are qualified (though the class is all seniors and grad students), but it's nice that he's coming in predisposed not to peddle ideology, but to really listen.

Contemporary Chinese Culture is pleasant enough. Any day I get to see footage of Deng Xiaoping at a Texas rodeo wearing a cowboy hat that threatens to engulf his tiny head (and no-neck) is a good day.

Music Hum is just a little bit of joy at 9am Tuesday and Thursday mornings. First class leads off with the Magic Flute, second class with Take Five. And the speakers are phenomenal. Professor Frisch does an excellent job navigating the treacherous variegation of familiarity-levels in the class, which is to say, he manages to keep his instruction interesting to those in the class who know every piece of music he plays, while simultaneously making sure those who have never seen a quarter note in their lives neither fall behind nor zone out. It's good, too, to have to retrain myself to listen in a whole new way to these pieces of music which I know so well. The formalists would be proud.

But then there's Chinese.

Ah, Intermediate Chinese. The teacher led off by saying, in effect, Most of you should leave now, while you still can. And most did. We have one less class period per week than Elementary because the workload is so intense. We are talking two hours plus per night. Nick, who has undertaken to be both my Virgil and my Malebranche, refers to this year of Chinese at Columbia as "the Passion." I, of course, have an added cross to bear--I have to make the switch to traditional characters all at once, instead of gradually, as all the other students have done already. I should describe the difference. In the 1950's--as now--one of the most pressing concerns in China was widespread illiteracy, and a plague of dialects. The majority of Chinese people did not speak Mandarin as we know it today, with the result being that people from villages located not two miles apart could not understand each others' dialect. Even today, 43% of Chinese people cannot speak Putonghua, or Mandarin, the offical state dialect. Thanks to television and education, most can understand at least a little, but many do not speak it at all. This makes travel to rural areas complicated. Isaac, for instance, went to rural Hunan this summer, and despite the fluency of his Chinese, understood nothing that was said to him. The dialects are not accents; they're usually entirely different languages. In Mandarin, the word for "I" is "wo." In Shanghainese, for instance, it's "ala." No relation. The most famous dialect is, of course, Cantonese--which is fully incomprehensible. These dialects, however, all use the same characters. So in the late 1950's, in tandem with the inception of Putonghua (based around the Beijing dialect, which is basically Chinese with a Sean Connery accent), the CCP undertook to simplify the characters, in order to combat illiteracy. Most of the simpler characters were left alone; I would estimate that what, a sixth or a seventh of characters were simplified. Because the simple fact is that traditional characters are, at times, obscenely complicated. In short order, traditional characters were exiled to Taiwan and Hong Kong, the only places where they're still in use. The mainland is entirely simplified. The processes by which they simplified followed a calculus I am not even close to understanding, meaning that there is no simple way, beyond rote memorization, to learn them. Often the simplified versions bear no relation whatsoever to their traditional counterparts, as in this example:

頭 头

Both of these characters say "tou3," or head. This one 頭 is traditional, this one 头 is simplified. These are very simple characters, but the difference is clear. It also illustrates how traditional characters, ultimately, make more sense (but always after the fact): 頭 has the bean radical 豆 on the left. Head, Bean, not so different. Furthermore, 豆 is pronounced Dou4. Sounds like Tou. From 豆 we get 豆腐: "Doufu"--"tofu." I swear it all make some kind of warped sense.

So if these twisty little fuckers are only used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and furthermore, I go back to simplified next year, what's the point in learning them? Well, to begin with, virtually every Chinatown in America uses traditional, because you have so many people who came over before the late 50's, and many still stream in from Hong Kong. Makes reading menus much easier. Second, if I ever want to read stuff from before 1950, simplified doesn't help. Third, Nick will mock me.

So Wednesday night he sat me down, gave me a pep talk which made use of the word "suffer" at least sixty times, and left me to copy the new vocabulary characters out for two hours. But I'm pretty sure I aced my quiz yesterday. A quiz on the second day of class, you say? Lieblings, we have quizzes every day. There is a wonderful and graphic Chinese expression (courtesy of Michael), Ou3 Xin1 Li4 Xue4, which the Chengyu dictionary translates as "to vomit one's own heart and drip blood with effort." It's going to be quite a year.

Here goes nothing.

This is the way real men used to speak to power.