Dogs and Cats: Lessons from Learning Chinese

by Julie Lee Wei

[...]I spoke Chinese up to the age of seven, when we moved to India, after which my Chinese was gradually replaced by English. Although neither my father nor my mother spoke English, they put us in English schools and discouraged us from speaking Chinese at home, because they were eager for us to learn English. (I have an American sister-in-law who had a similar experience. To her regret she never learned more than a few phrases of Yiddish, because her parents, Jews from the Ukraine, forbade her to speak Yiddish at home.) But when we got to Taiwan, my mother intensified her efforts to teach me Chinese.

What had happened was that, in my parents' youth, China had become a veritable informal colony of the Western powers, especially of Great Britain. They had lived in great cities like Hankou, Nanjing, Beijing, and Shanghai, and everywhere they saw the mighty tentacles of the West. They felt that English was the wave of the future and that if we children didn't know English we'd be trampled underfoot by those who did. They felt that we could in addition learn Chinese easily at home at any time.

The problem was, we didn't learn Chinese at home. My parents' assumption that we could pick it up easily didn't prove correct at all, especially because for a number of years we sisters were not allowed to speak Chinese among ourselves at home. My sisters and I had the vocabulary of a six- or seven-year-old, and not a precocious seven-year-old at that. I think we were not only not advanced in Chinese, but actually backward, because our parents were such remote figures. They hardly talked to us. The servants, who mostly functioned as babysitters, were not motivated to teach us. Even our governess, as I recall, didn't talk much to us. She never read storybooks to us. She mostly supervised us in such activities as threading beads or shaping plasticine, or reading very simple primers, which said things like "The sun rises, the cock crows," "Brush our teeth, wash our face." I have observed after having children of my own and from watching other mothers with small children, that there is a big difference between a baby sitter and a mother who is highly motivated to teach her very young child. Now let me describe the method in which my mother taught me Chinese. Then I will give a few thoughts on why I think it didn't work with me and what I think does work. I cannot say the problem was all my mother's fault-it was certainly partly my own youthful arrogance. My mother, of course, had the best of intentions, and she wanted me to have the highest education. She was a person of great personal discipline, of conviction and commitment. She believed in pain and suffering-as do some of the great religions. One of her favorite maxims was:

Da shi qing
Ma shi ai

"Beating is affection, scolding is love," said with reference to raising a child. This is about the same as saying, "Spare the rod and spoil the child." Another favorite maxim was:

Chi de ku zhong ku
Fang wei ren shang ren

Which can be translated as:

Only he who can eat the bitter of the bitter
Can become the man above men.

Which is to say that you can't become a superior person unless you can endure pain and suffering.

My mother decided to teach me Chinese the way she herself had learned Chinese, which was also the way my father had learned Chinese, and the way Chinese had been taught and learned for centuries if not millennia. She started with the Three Character Classic (San Zi ling), a long poem containing philosophy, moral teaching, history, geography, and general knowledge, intended as a primer for a child, and often taught to a three-year-old. She would explain it line by line, a number of lines a day, and then I would have to memorize what she taught. I was not allowed to take notes, not allowed to put down the pronunciation or meanings of characters -- and almost every character was then new to me.. The whole poem, many pages long, was really in classical Chinese. The first lines, as I then understood it, went:

Man's beginning
Ren zhi chu

Nature originally good
Xing ben shan

Nature (xiang) similar
Xing xiang jin

Habits (xiang) different
Xi xiang yuan

Perchance not instruct
Gou bu jiao

Nature then deflect
Xing nai qian

Way of instruction
Jiao zhi dao

Expensive (yi) specialized
Guei yi zhuan

This is a literal translation, which I give to illustrate the elliptical nature of classical Chinese. The last line is a mistranslation, but that was the best I could do at the time. The words in parenthesis are Chinese connecting words I memorized without understanding. The poem is not conversational Chinese, therefore not the Chinese I had some familiarity with. There were archaic words and archaic grammatical constructions. I recited the whole long poem by sheer rote memory, since I was not allowed to take notes on sound or meaning. What made Chinese particularly strange to me was that I didn't understand the grammar. For instance, the xiang in the third line means "to each other," which I didn't know then. I misunderstood the last line because I didn't understand that guei meant "to have value, to be important" here -- all I knew was that guei meant expensive. To me zhuan meant "specialized," whereas it actually means "dedicated," in this context. The last line actually means "Dedication is of the highest importance." I also didn't understand yi in the last line. I just memorized the line with a vague notion of what it meant. I managed to memorize the whole poem, however, because there were lines I did understand, and there were rhymes to help.

My mother could not always make things clear to me because she didn't speak English. Not understanding the English language, she also didn't recognize the nature of my difficulties, because to her everything seemed very easy, and when I kept asking her questions she thought I was being intransigent. She couldn't explain the grammar because she had never learned any Chinese grammar in school. For a long time it was widely believed that only European languages just memorized the line with a vague notion of what it meant. I had grammar, that Chinese had no grammar. So my mother couldn't tell me that yi was a preposition here. She'd just say it was a xu zi, an "empty word," a word with no meaning, and that I was not to worry about it - it just comes with practice. Xu zi is the traditional Chinese term for grammatical particles. Of course, now I know that although words such as yi, like English with, to, or, than, respective, and so forth, don't denote or represent anything, they do have functions: they are words indicating relationships. But my mother was not able to explain, and at that time I did not have the concept of relational words....