Characters for the world Fang Aiqing
Growing interest in Chinese sees the language cross borders and enhance a sense of common purpose, reports.
Luminary author Lu Xun (1881-1936) once wrote that the beauty of Chinese characters is present in three aspects: their meaning enlightens the mind, their sound touches the ear, and their appearance appeals to the eye.
From inscriptions on oracle bones and bronze ware dating back more than 3,000 years, Chinese characters originated as a pictographic writing system, borrowing the shape of the sun, the moon, birds and beasts, among others.
To improve aesthetics and efficiency of use, multiple scripts were developed over the passage of time, such as zhuanshu (seal script), lishu (clerical script), caoshu (cursive script) and kaishu (regular script). Their beauty is especially visible in calligraphy to this day.
Many characters not only bear meanings and cultural connotations inherited for millennia but also indicate their pronunciation. As a whole, characters are a symbol of Chinese civilization, bridging the past, present and future.
According to the Ministry of Education’s Center for Language Education and Cooperation, more than 30 million people around the globe are learning Chinese.
The language is taught in more than 190 countries and regions, among which 85 have incorporated Chinese lessons into their national education systems.
With a growing number of people toggling between their mother tongue and Chinese, the genes of Chinese culture embedded in the latter are likely to be better and more widely recognized.
Around the 15th United Nations Chinese Language Day, which fell on April 20, foreign Chinese speakers and overseas Chinese teachers shared their passion, understanding and benefits of this language in their daily life.
A poetic tie
It’s the third year Liao Shiqin has been teaching Chinese in Vienna, Austria. Her students range from sophomores majoring in Sinology at the University of Vienna and retirees learning Chinese for fun, and “preventing Alzheimer’s disease”, to those learning as a personal challenge, to facilitate work, find better job opportunities, or simply because they have a Chinese partner.
The 32-year-old has taught in Indonesia, South Africa and the United States over the past decade. Throughout this period, she has worked on the premise that raising her students’ interest in Chinese language and culture involves maintaining a respect for their culture.
So, Liao is keen on sharing in her classes what she sees in her new environment and the culture shock she experiences, comparing between the differences, and listening to her students’ stories of China, as well as explaining to them what China is like nowadays in her eyes.
These stories provide a window for both her students and herself to rediscover the life they have taken for granted, she adds.
Apart from routine courses, Liao has been reading Chinese poems with 48-year-old Seattle-based poetry lover Sarah Bitter, via video calls once a week for more than two years.
With different cultural and educational backgrounds, life experiences and an age gap of 16 years, their dialogues often stir up shared feelings and fresh inspiration, both say.
Liao says reading poems aloud
Seattle-based poetry lover
German Volker Mueller has spent decades in China. Chinese poetry enthusiast Sarah Bitter experiences street food in the country.
— both ancient and modern — with Bitter is an escape from the real world and a dive into the life of different historical periods.
Bitter believes that poetry makes people feel the essence of humanity. She has noticed that in many ancient Chinese poems, the experiences of the poets themselves aren’t foregrounded, as exemplified in Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279) poet Dai Fugu’s Huai Cun Bing Hou (River Village after the Turmoil), which makes her think of war and people displaced by conflict.
She translates this “poem of witness” as: “A small, lonely peach blooms in pale rose, fog blurs the grass and the evening’s crows. Ruined walls surround the old well, in house after house live only shadows.”
Having recognized the different preferences for the use of metaphor in Chinese and English poetry, Bitter has also discovered the visual and musical aspects of Chinese poetry.
From her perspective, Chinese poetry, especially ancient verses, look well-organized, often having a rectangular shape, condensed in meaning and economic in the selection of words, whereas poems in English look like “caterpillars crawling along the page”. Despite that, she still loves English-language poetry.
Additionally, the rhymes and tones often make Chinese poems sound amazing, she says.
Bitter’s first encounter with a Chinese poem was in high school. It was Tang Dynasty (618-907) poet Li Bai’s Chang Gan Xing, translated by US poet and critic Ezra Pound with the title The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.
She was impressed then by the beautiful translation that mostly deals with childhood sweethearts, a shy bride and the mounting intimacy of the newlyweds.
However, it was not until she learned Chinese and was able to read the original text many years later, that she was better able to understand the wife’s resolution of pent-up love, which is conveyed at the end of the poem, as the result of her hopeless wait for her longsince departed husband.
“Looking at the translation and the original side by side reminds me of how glad I am that I can read the original text myself and develop my own understanding of it.”
Since Bitter received her master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Washington several years ago, she has continued to learn Chinese out of interest, using poetry as her study material instead of practical textbooks.
She writes poems herself. Looking back, she discovered that the repetition of lines in one of them, Luohua Shijie (Season of Fallen Petals) — imagery typical of ancient Chinese poems — was subconsciously influenced by Song Dynasty (960-1279) female poet Li Qingzhao, one of her favorite classical Chinese poets.
Li Qingzhao’s poetry tracks the ups and downs of her life. Bitter particularly reads childhood fun and a teenage girl’s secret thoughts in her words.
She really likes that her passion for rowing and regattas is echoed by Tang and Song poets, who were also passionate for this practice.
She adds that her rowing teammates love her amateur translations of these poems from ancient China, such as one that describes rowing as “embroidering the water”, and Li Qingzhao’s line: “A stroke, a stroke, a shoal of plovers rise in surprise.”
“There’s probably a lot of influence from Chinese poetry and the Chinese language in my work, and I’m certain my work is more interesting because of it,” she says.
A writing challenge
Li Hongfei has spent almost five years in Thailand teaching Chinese first to Thai-Chinese pupils and later to college students.
According to a Guangming Daily report from 2021, more than 1 million Thai students were learning Chinese at school, and China has sent in excess of 20,000 volunteers to teach in over 1,000 Thai schools since 2003.
Li Hongfei became one of those volunteers in 2019 and is now a lecturer of China studies at the Pridi Banomyong International College of Thammasat University in Bangkok.
Both in and out of class, he seizes the growing interest of young Thais in Chinese celebrities, costume dramas, traditional clothing like hanfu and the country’s cuisine, hotpot in particular, to encourage students to speak more.
As a foreign language teacher in Thailand, his work centers on creating an immersive environment for his students, many of whom will come to China as exchange students in the third year of college, to study Chinese, while minimizing the use of Thai or English.
Li Hongfei says that he has observed a growth in students consulting him and his colleagues about potential opportunities to study in China, and the college he works for has been making more effort to train local Chinese language teachers.
However, both Liao and Li Hongfei find written language a major challenge for their students. As an alternative, some prefer typing or using pinyin instead of learning to write the characters themselves, which coincides with the universal debate on whether it’s still necessary to master handwriting in the digital era.
German engineer Volker Mueller started to work in Chongqing in the late 1980s.
The first time he set foot in this mountainous city in 1987, a bowl of spicy noodles for breakfast, the subtropical greenery and blooms, the historical buildings on the campus of Chongqing University, as well as the vertical landscape of buildings on steep hillsides, all tempted him to plunge into taking up long-term residence in China.
However, the city of soft mist, the rattle of mahjong tiles, hotpot, and friendly residents didn’t help him with his challenge of learning Mandarin, especially as he was surrounded by people speaking in dialect all the time, which to him sounded like a different language.
At a time when not so many Chinese could speak foreign languages, Mueller had to study Chinese very hard after work in order to prevent his students at the university from taking a nap in class because they couldn’t understand him.
Mueller’s projects in Chongqing and later in Shanghai in the 1990s included an AI-based handwritten character recognition system for the fourth national census in 1990 and a license plate recognition system to grant vehicles automatic access to parking lots.
There are tens of thousands of Chinese characters, among which thousands are commonly used. Compared to Latin characters, the thin strokes of Chinese characters required scanners of higher resolution; and because some characters look very similar and are difficult to identify at first glance, even for humans, Mueller and his colleagues developed a system to contextualize them to raise accuracy.
He took business trips to different parts of China — some quite rural — to promote the business and teach residents how to use their systems.
Unlike many foreign Chinese learners who find it much more
Looking at the translation and the original (of Chinese poetry) side by side reminds me of how glad I am that I can read the original text myself and develop my own understanding of it.”
Sarah Bitter,
difficult to write the characters, as a result of his projects, Mueller was able to read Chinese more smoothly than he could speak it.
Retired last year from the position as senior government affairs desk manager for the medical equipment industry at the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, Mueller’s career has been intertwined with China’s rapid economic and technological development over the past four decades.
This has resulted in him feeling an obligation to act as a bridge between people from China and Germany and clear up misunderstandings his countrymen have toward China. He is writing down his experiences and his witness of the changes brought by reform and opening-up.
He’s also been writing an introduction to the history, preservation and revitalization of the Central Axis of Beijing, a city he’s settled in for more than two decades, and he’s also translating Chinese literature into German.
Mueller says he has discovered in China diverse cuisines and landscapes, as well as people’s solidarity and spirit of helping each other in dealing with life’s challenges.
He recognizes one major difference in the way of thinking between the Chinese and Germans. In facing new technologies, the Chinese prioritize opportunities, while his countrymen are more prudent about potential risks.
Despite more and more Chinese being able to speak other languages, Mueller still encourages foreign managers working in China to learn Chinese, particularly because speaking the language brings them closer to those they employ, as well as to customers and government officials, and helps improve work efficiency, enhance trust, and makes life here richer.
He also suggests that Chinese people learn more languages, such as his mother tongue.
Without learning Chinese, foreigners risk isolating themselves from Chinese culture and it will be difficult for them to gain insight into the technological and social development that China is willing to share with the world, Mueller says.
He expresses the hope that more German schools will teach Chinese as a foreign language.