Why Chinese?

Doing the impossible 

 

            My Chinese friends often asked me, "Why are you studying Chinese?" Or perhaps "Why do you like China?" I've answered these questions by referring my friends to my website, http://www.sedgehead.com/why_chinese.html, but the answer there needs to be expanded and really does not provide a lot of details.  I want to include the story in my autobiography Windsong.  So, this blog does three things.  It answers the above questions, allows me to write a chapter for my book, and gives you a new blog to read on this web site.

 

            First, learning Chinese is part of my character because I like to do things that I've been told are impossible to do.  I'm not satisfied with normal or usual accomplishments.  When I studied birds, others told me, "It is nearly impossible to identify the warblers in fall.  This large group of North American birds is quite difficult to work with. Naturally, I took that as a challenge when I was still in high school. Before long, I could identify these birds in fall quite easily in the 1960s.

 

            As I started studying plants around 1990, my professor told me sedges, especially those in the genus Carex, were nearly impossible to identify correctly.  For one thing, several undescribed, new-to-science species occurred in Arkansas, complicating the process of identification.  Naturally, I became what other botanists call a sedgehead and a Carex expert.  In the early 1990s, I claimed the name Sedgehead on the internet.  In the next 20 years I would help describe several new species.

 

The impossible language

 

            The comedian, Jay Leno, once called the Chinese language "China secret code." So it was with Chinese.  "Don't bother trying to learn Chinese," I've heard all my life.  As a Chinese woman told a friend of mine, "It is impossible for a non-native person to learn." I studied German in college and in 1983 I decided to teach myself Spanish.  But after the turn of the century, a phrase I applied to the year 1900 and not the year 2000, usually, I was ready for new challenges.  I had thought a little about studying Chinese says the time I was in college in the early 1970s but rarely considered it seriously.  A seed had been planted but it had not germinated.  I had not get accepted the challenge of learning Chinese.

 

            Then, something happened.  The dormancy of the seed was broken.  In June of 2002, I have helped organize a meeting about sedges which was attended by botanist from five continents.  I was driving home from that trip to Delaware and headed towards Washington, D. C.  A National Public Radio program played on my car radio.  The guest speaker was discussing global languages.  I had always heard most people on the planet speak English.  I was quite surprised to learn that was a lie.

 

            Two people speak Chinese as their native language for everyone who uses English as their native language.  In fact, depending upon who is doing the measuring English comes in third or fourth in the number of native speakers on the planet.  Spanish and Portuguese ranked very high.  But by far Chinese has the most native speakers.  I thought, "If I learn Chinese I will be able to speak to more than 50% of the people on the planet." I already knew English and I could speak Spanish with difficulty.  So the idea of seriously studying and learning Chinese crossed my mind.

 

Prejudice

 

            In the United States some people are extremely prejudiced. They disguise their prejudice by claiming everyone here should learn English.  They claim, falsely, that English is the only language that should be spoken in the United States, taught in schools here, used in businesses here, and that no other language should be given equal footing in the United States.  They make me sick.  In reality, they see people, specifically minorities, as a threat to their well being.  But prejudice is not acceptable in American society.  Instead of saying they don't like Chinese, Japanese, Africans, they try to make life as difficult as possible for people who are not white enough for their tastes.

 

            One Star Trek program showed very well how prejudiced Americans can be.  A group of aliens were being transported on the starship Enterprise.  One side of their body was completely black and the other side was completely white.  One of the alien characters in humanoid form claim to be superior to some of the other aliens riding on the starship.  He told Captain Kirk, "Can't you see the difference between me and them?" Captain Kirk as well as people like me viewing the show saw only half black and half white people.  He expressed ignorance of any difference between the supposedly superior alien and the others who appeared identical.  "But it's so obvious," the alien complained.  I am black on the right side and they are black on the left side.

 

            As a young American college student I was deeply impressed by this comparison.  I had my white friends but wasn't comfortable associating with black skinned people.  Chinese and Japanese, Koreans and Vietnamese all looked the same to me and I wasn't particularly prejudiced against them despite some in the previous American generation who hated the Japanese, and Germans for that matter, deeply because they had fought them during World War II.  Had no such experience and went to college in 1970 for the primary purpose of avoiding future memories of killing Vietnamese people in the so-called War in Vietnam.  In short, part of the reason I began to study Chinese was so that I could learn more about these people who were considered enemies of my country in the 1960s.

 

Taking the next step

 

            Despite listening to that National Public Radio program, I did not start learning Chinese in 2002.  Something else was needed to make the seed grow, the seed, the idea, of learning Chinese.  In 2003, my wife and I moved to the city of Atlanta, Georgia.  I experimented using Atlanta's pathetic public transit system.  Prejudice had prevented the Atlanta metropolitan area from building a reasonable public transit system.  People living in the outlying suburbs tended to be richer and whiter than the dark skinned minorities who lived in older black neighborhoods in what was to become the downtown Atlanta area. They refuse to support a public transit system that might bring poor people of darker skins close to their homes.

 

            As I rode the commuter train I noticed Chinese lettering on many buildings near the end of the railroad track.  One day, having extra time on my hand and not wanting to fight the rush hour traffic on the way home I delayed the rest of my commute and decided to drive around what I quickly discovered was the Atlanta Chinatown.  In the United States we often use the word Chinatown to describe local ethnic Chinese communities.  I walked into a bookstore and was delighted to find not only Chinese books and magazines but Chinese newspapers, a Chinese grocery store, and several Chinese restaurants.

 

            But even that visit did not make me cross the threshold into learning Chinese.  We had lived in Atlanta for eight months when I walked across the street from the office building where I worked during my lunch hour.  Out of curiosity I walked into a bookstore and began to browse the shelves.  I was drawn to the foreign language section.  I saw not one or two books related to foreign language but an entire set of shelves.  More than half of one shelf held a wide variety of books on the Chinese language.  "Well, if I'm ever going to learn Chinese now is probably the best time to do it," I thought to myself.  There is a Chinatown here and I can actually talk to Chinese people. 

 

            I picked up a Berlitz phrase book with Chinese and English, designed for American tourists who might visit China.  "This ought to help me get started," I thought.  "I can use it to learn a few simple words and phrases and dive into learning Chinese."  On the spur of the moment, I bought it.

 

            That's the end of this chapter.  Sometime in the near future, I'll write a blog and tell you what happened next.