China's Second Language

Fortunately for those of us who use or understand English, it is easier to get around in foreign countries than it used to be. English is becoming the international language. Certainly it is the language of international business. At Xi’an International Studies University in China where I teach, it is the most popular foreign language because students who have any desire for continuing contacts with the West (or to work for an international business) realize that English is essential. English is taught as a required subject in most schools in China at both the elementary and high school levels.

Pinyin

In fact, when mainland Chinese students learn English they actually have to learn two languages. That is because they have to learn an intermediate language called “pinyin.” This language converts Chinese characters into a phonetic version using the Latin or English alphabet. Thus the personal name of 杨晓华 is rendered as Yang Xiaohua in pinyin, which can then be read and understood by English speakers.

The use of computers has probably raised pinyin from being an obscure language system of interest only to linguists. The Chinese have their own software for creating documents in Chinese characters on the computer, but given the fact that they use the same “qwerty” keyboard as Westerns, there has to be an intermediate language. Using a Chinese language plug-in, the Chinese can use Microsoft Word to type in pinyin words and have them converted to a choice of Chinese characters. The writer then only has to select which Chinese characters are closest to his or her meaning and they become part of the text.

Furthermore, the Chinese have adopted the almost exclusive use of Arabic numerals in expressing numbers. I have been in business offices where accountants are working in large MS Exel spreadsheets where the words are in Chinese characters but the numbers are all the recognizable 1, 2, or 3. This is the numeral system used with mobile phones, sticker prices, advertising, and so on. The ancient Chinese numerals are rarely seen.

China’s Second Language

For these reasons, plus government urging, English has become the defacto second language of China. Most street signs in major cities and the directional signs on major highways are in both Chinese and English. This would be the equivalent of seeing all the signage along I-80 or the M-5 appear in English with Chinese subtitles.

English appears along with Chinese on the signs above many shops. In English-speaking countries this would happen only in Chinatown shopping districts.

The labeling in stores of products made by Western companies is usually in Chinese, but there is often enough English on the packaging (albeit in small lettering) to recognize what it is.

Limitations

Nevertheless, the prevalence of English in China is only a thin veneer. Once you get away from the tourist or university environments the number of English-capable Chinese drops off radically. Although most young people have acquired some English proficiency in school, if they do not use it, the words evaporate.

So I have often been stuck when encountering a sea of Chinese writing I do not understand, such as a shelf of Chinese products in the grocery store where not one word is in English.

I have a similar feeling when confronted with a computer (such as in the computer labs where I sometime teach) where you know you are looking at a Windows XP screen because all the icons are recognizable but it is otherwise unreadable because all the words are in Chinese. I can navigate for awhile just using icons, but eventually I get down to screens with Chinese words only, and then I am stuck.

Sign Language

So what is an English-only-speaking person to do? It is amazing how much can be accomplished with sign language. One can think of a whole range of hand gestures and head shakes that can communicate yes or no, bigger or smaller, too much or too little. My wife and I bought a camera the other day where the two lovely young sales girls did not understand any English, and we did not understand any Chinese. We pointed out what camera we were interested in, and they showed it to us. The on-screen menu was all Chinese, but they were able to navigate to the settings in the camera that set English as the standard language.

They had a brochure in English that described the specifications of the camera, and we mutually went over the number of mega pixels, camera speed, zoom capability, etc, exclusively with head nods. They showed us the sticker price. A headshake and hand wave by us indicated that the price was too high. They handed us a small hand-held calculator where we punched in our counter price. A look of agony passed over their faces as if we were driving them to the poor house, and they typed in their counter-counter price. Then we looked pained. They threw in a camera case. We crunched more numbers. They threw in a flash card. Body language indicated they had nearly reached their limit. One final number was entered into the calculator and the deal was done. There were smiles and handshakes all around without a word of English having been spoken.

Calligraphy

Written Chinese characters are beautiful, and they are very economical. You can express thoughts in only a few characters that it would take a sentence to express in English. I see them on signs and shops all around town expressed in multiple forms. Some are in block style, some in what we would call italics, and some in a flowing script. As with English letters, they can be written to evoke a sense of elegance on the one hand or in a comic style on the other.

Some of the characters are downright beautiful, and the Chinese take pains to make them even more so through the delicate art of calligraphy. To them calligraphy is art. The art museum in Shanghai has a gallery dedicated just to calligraphy.

Masters of calligraphy become famous, and books have been written about them and their styles, such as Chu Suiliang, a chancellor in the Tang Dynasty over a thousand years ago.¹

In many of the parks around China, retired people can be seen practicing calligraphy by writing on the pavement with long brushes dipped in water or a stick with water-soaked padding on the end. They write long passages of poetry in water that then evaporates an hour later under the hot sun. To keep themselves alert, they write one passage with their right hand and then another with their left. It becomes a kind of Tai Chi for the mind.

There is much to appreciate about the Chinese language. It is strange and mysterious on the one hand and beautiful and appealing on the other. For an outsider like me, it seems like an only partially-blossomed flower whose true beauty can be revealed in full bloom only if I take the time to learn its secrets.

Twisted History

As interesting as our trip to Vietnam was (see post below), there was an aspect of it that left a bitter taste in my mouth. The Vietnamese have gone out of their way to tell the history of the Vietnam War from their point of view, as is their right. The victors get to determine how events are remembered, and let's face it, they were the victors and we were the losers. But their telling of the story was so blatantly one-sided that it was almost laughable. Following is a tale of a propaganda machine that went overboard.

Hoa Lo Prison
This is the old prison in downtown Hanoi built by the French and later inhabited by captured American fliers during the Vietnam War. The Americans gave it the nickname of the Hanoi Hilton. The part of the prison where they were incarcerated no longer exists; it was torn down to make way for an apartment building. The older part of the prison remains and has been turned into a museum.

During the first part of the last century the prison was used by the French primarily for political prisoners, most notably the early leaders of the Vietnamese Communist Party. After the French were defeated in 1954, the Vietnamese kept their own political prisoners there. The treatment of prisoners by the French, and later by the Vietnamese, was barbaric. Torture was routine. The prison even had its own guillotine. Even without torture, the day-to-day conditions of incarceration can barely be imagined by most in the West. It was not uncommon for prisoners to be shackled to their beds by one foot or two most of the day. The Vietnamese have dramatically shown how the French did this by the use of life-sized wax-type figures in the old single-person or group cells. Untold numbers of "heroic revolutionaries" were imprisoned in this way, and many perished under this harsh treatment.


There are two small rooms devoted to the American prisoners of war. Pictures on the wall show the POWs playing basketball, playing board games, and receiving presents at Christmas time. One glass-cased display shows John McCain's flight suit and helmet, the ones he was wearing when he was shot down over downtown Hanoi. The intent of the displays is to show that the treatment of the POWs was benign, almost a holiday. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, American POWs were housed and treated in the same manner as the French treated the Vietnamese before 1954 and the Vietnamese treated their own after 1954. After the POWs were repatriated in 1973, some of them drew pictures of how they were treated. As shown here, they were shackled in the same manner as in the days of the French.


But that is not all. The treatment was even more barbaric. The Vietnamese were keen on extracting confessions and political statements from the POWs largely to feed the growing anti-war movement in the United States. To do this they used a torture method called the "ropes." The procedure was to tie the wrists together (often cutting off circulation) and then bind the forearms and later the upper arms together until the elbows touched. This often had the effect of pulling the shoulder joints out of their sockets. The pain, as described by those who underwent this torture, was excruciating. But to apply even more pain, the arms were pulled upward bit by bit until the torturers got what they wanted or the prisoner blacked out. No POWs escaped the ropes without telling the Vietnamese anything they wanted to know. The diabolical part of this torture is that it left no marks, no visible signs of torture.


There is no display showing this.

At the tail end of 1972 when peace negotiations were underway in Paris and it appeared the POWs would eventually be released, the Vietnamese let up on the torture and started to prepare them to be turned over to the U.S. Food rations increased to fatten them up, the shackling was abandoned, and the prisoners did indeed play basketball and board games. But this was only in the last few months of the war. Unfortunately, this latter, small piece of the POW experience is the only thing the Vietnamese chose to display.

The War Museum
But the Hanoi Hilton version of twisted history is mild compared to the displays in the War Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. The lead display in the first room shows Robert McNamara's sentence from his book, "In Retrospect," that the war was a mistake. The following displays try to make the point that the main aim of the American bombing campaign in North Vietnam was to kill civilians. They have cherry-picked their quotations and pictures from sources I've never seen before.


In the rest of the museum there is a wall devoted to every bad thing the Americans ever did during the war. There's a wall for My Lai. A wall for napalm. A wall for Agent Orange, as if they were the only victim of this chemical--I also am an Agent Orange survivor. Every famous photograph ever taken showing the horrors of the war are displayed. The one of the naked young girl fleeing a napalm attack. Pictures showing soldiers burning villages that had housed Viet Cong guerrillas. The effects of very errant bomb that may have landed on a village are shown. But there are no pictures of their counter tactics: tiger pits, punji sticks, Viet Cong beheadings, you name it.

I accept the fact that the victors get to tell the story their way, and I never went to the museum expecting a balanced portrayal. But the presentations were so blatantly one-sided it was beyond belief. What I felt bad about was that the museum was mobbed that day with people from about every nationality, most of whom were too young to know much about the war. So for most young Australians, Germans, Americans, Vietnamese, Chinese, etc, the only thing they will know about the war is what they saw in this museum. There is no place they can go for a balanced presentation. In American museums, we are so much into political correctness that who can tell how our curators will tell the story.

Cambodia

There are two themes in this post. The first is about Angkor Wat and the second is the floating villages on the Tonle Sap Lake. In actuality Angkor Wat is only one of the temples in the area around the town of Siem Reap. There are many temples hidden in the jungle over hundreds of square kilometers, each with the name of its own. Angkor Wat (wat means temple) is just the most famous and kind of serves as a general term for the whole area. Following is a photo essay of the three we liked best. There will be few words; the temples speak for themselves.


The Bayon
This temple comes at you suddenly. You go down a small path and are all of a sudden confronted by one of the ancient guard gates with four faces of Buddha, one on each side. All the imagery carved on the walls features both Buddhist and Hindu gods. This temple was built around 1200 AD when Hinduism was the dominant religion but was slowly being replaced by Buddhism. Inside there are doorways and staircases everywhere.


Ta Prohm
This temple is still in the jungle. While most temples are being restored, a decision was made to leave this one much like it was found. Its key features are the trees that are growing out of the walls and foundations. Giant roots from these trees snake across the stones and then plunge into the earth. Most of the temples were like this once, but the jungle has been hacked back and the stones restacked. The temple is where the movie "Laura Croft and the Tomb Raiders" was filmed. Elva is standing at one of the spots where a scene was filmed.


Angkor Wat
And now for the most famous temple. It is the largest in area covered. It has a majestic causeway over a 200 meter-wide moat leading into the outer enclosure and then another from there into the main temple complex. It was thronged the day we were there. There are corridors in every direction. It would be easy to get lost. It was big and grand, but truthfully I liked Ta Prohm better.


Floating Village
The Tonle Sap lake is the most peculiar thing. It is actually an "overflow basin" for the Mekong River. In the spring when the Mekong is in flood, the excess water flows into the Tonle Sap, and during the dry season the water flows back out again. All along the banks of the lake live a large colony of boat people. Either they are too poor to afford land or they are immigrants (mostly Vietnamese) with no legal standing in Cambodia, so they live as landless people on their boats and depend on the lake for their livelihood. They fish the lake (or have fish pens beneath their floating homes) and take the fish to market in trade for vegetables.

Vietnam

It was very surreal for me to visit a country I have flown over several times but never set foot in, and which I spent some portions of two years of my life targeting during the war. As we drove around the country I recognized names of places because I had seen them previously on target maps.


It did not appear to me that much had changed since the war. Hanoi was a shock because it appeared frozen in time. It was dirty and congested with motorbikes. At night it was dark with little street lighting or illumination from neon signs in shops or billboards.


Few buildings in the downtown area were over two or three stories, and electrical wiring was a spider web of hundreds of wires tacked haphazardly to poles or store fronts. In fact, there was no downtown. No area with tall buildings, banks, government buildings, or grassy parks. The downtown consisted of crude shops surrounding the lake in the center of town and looked no different than it had decades ago.

The one thing that did give Hanoi some life was that the beginning of the lunar New Year was only hours way and people were busy preparing, one feature of which was to get an orange tree to decorate their homes. Hundreds were for sale or rent along side the road, and it seemed that every motorcycle had a tree of some size lashed to the back on the way home for the celebration.


Ho Chi Minh City was better. It was cleaner although the treatment of utility wires was no different. There were some high rises, many with hugh neon signs on top. There were some really upscale hotels down near the water front. It appears that Hanoi is a government town and HCMC is the commercial center.


The one bright spot in Hanoi was the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum. All the streets leading to it were clean and transit upscale neighborhoods (actually the embassy housing area). I understand that Ho Chi Minh's embalmed body is inside and available for viewing on some days, but not on the day we were there. But the grounds and surroundings are well groomed and decked out with flowers.


The Ho Chi Minh museum is nearby, and for its size it is really quite remarkable. Of course, all that is in it are tributes to all the martyrs and historical figures of the communist revolution in Vietnam from Ho's time in Paris all the way through the war with America. There are displays of American weaponry from the war and commentary about the heroic efforts of the Vietnamese people in defeating a superior power. No surprise there; they were the victors and victors can usually determine how history is told.


Surprisingly Vietnam has turned into a tourist designation. When we were in Hanoi, there were lots of Caucasians walking around; it turned out most of them were Russians. Compared to the fridgid temperatures of eastern Russia, Vietnam must seem tropical. One of our destinations was Hai Long Bay near the Gulf of Tonkin. It is notable because of the hundreds of karst islands with their small fishing villages. We cruised for hours among them while we ate an on-ship lunch of Vietnamese food. I should note that Vietnamese food is much superior to Chinese food. It was very enjoyable.


While in HCMC we had the most interesting tour of the Mekong delta area. It was a long bus trip, but that was the interesting part. We drove south along the famous Route 1. It was very heavily populated with shops cheek by jowl and vendors along side the road selling everything imaginable.


It was slow going because the road was choked with motorcycles and scooters, the main form of transportation in this part of the world. By boat we cruised around on the Mekong River and ended up on some islands where we sat under a veranda on a 80 degree day and lunched on fish and fruit amid banana palms and breezes. It was hard to believe that 30 years ago the Viet Cong moved clandestinely through these marshy areas and American gunboats cruised these waters looking for them.


In many ways visiting Vietnam was like going back in history. We visited what used to be the Presidential Palace. It was a little haunting right from the first minute our bus drove through the gate. The palace is in prime condition now and a favorite tourist sight, but the minute I looked at it another image flashed through my mind. Compare these two pictures below and you'll see what I mean. If the second one doesn't mean anything to you, then Google it.