Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Deborah Fallows on Dreaming in Chinese

I'm Lily-Ann and on behalf of Harvard bookstore I would like to welcome you to this evening's event with Deborah Fallows. She joins us tonight to discuss her new book Dreaming in Chinese. But before we get started I want to take a moment to tell you all about some of our upcoming events upcoming events include Broadway legend Patti LaBelle on October 11th the First Parish Church will she be. We'll be discussing her new memoir. And on Tuesday October 19th we have author Nicole Krauss recently featured in The New Yorker's 20 under 40 fiction issue as she reads from her new novel great house. Also please visit us the bossom Book Festival in Copley Square on October 19th. It's going to be exciting 16th scuse me. You can find information about these and other events on our calendars up at the store and events are also listed online at Harvard dot com where you can sign up for our weekly e-mail newsletter. You can also find us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter if you so decide to talk Miss foules will take questions from the audience. Then we'll have a book signing at this table. You'll find copies of dreaming in Chinese the registers up front and you have my personal thanks for writing your books from Harvard bookstore. Your attendance supports a local independent business and also ensures the

continuation of great events like these for your community. I like to remind you now to please take a moment to turn off or silence your cell phones as this event is being recorded. You don't want to be that guy. A moment of silence. All right. And so tonight I'm pleased to welcome linguist and author Deborah Fallows who is with us to discuss streaming and Chinese Mandarin lessons in life love and language of dreaming in Chinese. George of The National Geographic Traveler writes that while it isn't necessary to know the language of a foreign country when you live abroad studying that language can infinitely ease and illuminate your entree there. Deborah Fallows underscores this lesson again and again in this compelling account of her own trials and triumphs while studying Mandarin or resigning residing in Shanghai and Beijing a linguist by training fellow shows how even small advancements such as mastering a single word or phrase can unlock grammatical and cultural secrets over the course of a three

year immersion her ever deepening insights and immeasurably enrich her engagement with China and ours as well. Misspells lived has lived in Shanghai and Beijing and traveled throughout China for three years with her husband writer James Fallows. She's a Harvard graduate and has a Ph.D. in language linguistics and worked at Georgetown University as assistant dean for the school of languages and linguistics. Ms vowels have been featured in many publications including The L.A. Times magazine Newsweek The Atlantic Monthly and The Washington Post. Previous works include the book a mother's work she most recently worked in research and polling for the Pew Internet and American Life Project and a data architecture for Oxygen Media. We are thrilled to have her with us this evening. So please join me in welcoming Deborah Fallows. Thank you. OK. First can you hear me. Is this good. Can you hear me. I feel like any day. Yes. No. Can you hear me. Yes. Great. OK thanks to the Harvard bookstore for having me here and

I'm delighted to be back and in many ways there's a lot that's come full circle tonight. I was thinking it was 42 years ago that I took my first linguistics course at Harvard. It was it was puzzling baffling overwhelming and it was a year before I took another linguistics course but then went on to study it for a very long time. I think my freshman expository writing teacher may be here tonight. He's a wonderful man named Tom Roper and his memorable because he was the one teacher I had who took each of us young students out to lunch individually we went next door to Mr. Bartley's for a burger which was wonderful to see. And I also met Jim here at Harvard in the spring of my freshman year which is again you know so many years ago I can hardly even say it. Jim was about three hours late for our first blind date but I didn't have too much to do that night anyway so I hung around and waited for him.

And you know it was actually good training for the rest of our life. He is coming tonight but he is not here yet so please be gentle. I know he will arrive. No worries it'll all be fine. So. So here we are back here again. And and I'm thrilled to be here. I'd like to talk about three different things tonight. Concert. OK. I want to talk a little bit about how we got to China in the first place how. I studied Mandarin the Chinese language. And then what the process of studying that language taught me about the people and the culture and just some of the dreams of China. It's been the pattern of our life that we've lived about half the time in Washington D.C. and half the time in other countries. Well Jim was primarily writing and researching long articles for The Atlantic Monthly and I had different iterations for I was raising kids in these different countries for a long period of time and trying to do my work. So about various things it's best

to know me where. Sorry. So about four years ago we decided it was time to head off again and that there could not be any place more interesting in our life to go to than to China. So we we planned and kind of did everything we could to prepare. We read books. We went to movies Mission Impossible 3. Tom Cruise Do you remember that. That was set in Shanghai and coming out about that time I took some night courses at Georgetown University to learn Mandarin for about a year a couple of times a week. It was we were a stalwart little group and did manage a lot. But finally you know this was adding up to something that felt kind of inadequate. We felt completely unprepared to go to China but just hopped on that plane and and went and landed in Shanghai to a kind of rocky start. I would say for any of you

or many of you who have traveled in China you would know that just just getting started was a real challenge. Where would we live. How would we get food how do we do public transportation. We didn't have any assistants helping us we were just on the street ourselves so we had a lot to learn even how to cross the street which is a major challenge in in a country with so many cars now and we're all going so fast and not observing any of the rules and regulations. But but we did we we did all that and then had a few other I'd say more major snags Jim got miserably sick for about two weeks. When we first landed there having drunk some water we wondered if if who was watching us since he was a journalist. Where was our apartment being bugged. It actually was much less subtle than this. The authorities would call us up from time to time and invite us out to lunch just to kind of keep track of us and see what we were up to and not so much to watch what we were doing but

to let us know that. So we knew that they knew that they were watching us just kind of a comfortable little arrangement. My my my own first experience with the language was nothing less than overwhelming. You know I by this point I had studied a lot of linguistics and studied a lot of languages and I thought OK I'm ready for this. And landed in Shanghai and it was hard for me to even open my mouth. I could not get a single word out and I couldn't understand anything that was being spoken around me which wasn't entirely my fault because I later quickly actually came to learn that that in Shanghai at least most of the older people would speak Shanghainese which is the dialect there and it is a a woo'd language that there's very little resemblance to Mandarin. It's about German to English as Mandarin is to woo. So I was that far off base. The accent in Shanghai is a very

southern accent and mung Laotian. My teacher at Georgetown you know at first when I got there I was ready to blame him because I thought he was teaching us Cantonese this whole time and not Mandarin but actually he just had a very strong Beijing accent. All those kind of pirate are sounds that you hear are everywhere and in Shanghai it's a very southern accent. Like in Atlanta or Houston. So Meyer was trained for you know this equivalent of a Boston accent and suddenly I landed in the equivalent of southern Alabama and was trying to manage the two it didn't work too well. But bit by bit step by step we got our bearings and I found that not only was this language a real necessity for our life it was our survival there but I was actually starting to have a lot of fun with it because so much of it was was so different and so enlightening. So I said upon this mission to just learn as much as I could as quickly as

I could. The first the first task was to find a language school and fortunately there are lots and lots of commercial language schools in China. So in Shanghai I had many choices and chose one partly for because it was close to where we lived and partly because it had this wonderful name that I knew would set me right. It was called Myracle Mandarin so miracle Mandarin is the school you want to go to. So I went to this school. I you know talked with taxi drivers every day went to the markets every day watched a lot of TV. My favorites were the soap operas much like American soap operas always the same setting hospital scene someone dying family coming in lots of slow conversation about who's sick. And I learned a lot about being sick in that in the first time there. I went out to invent errands to do you know fix things that are broken spent a lot of time around little children because

they speak so clearly and so nicely and so simply. So I'd hang out next to them on the subways and so forth. And I finally had a few milestones. The best is that day when you discover that whatever it was you learned in language class actually works when you're on the street. So I will just read you a couple little things of a couple of paragraphs about my first experience that way each morning I would trace the same path to and from my school. This Miracle Mandarin just before 10:00 in the morning I crossed a dozen lanes of traffic under the busy Chengdu road and continued up Nanjing Road past the buildings of the Shanghai TV station. Every day just after 1:00 o'clock I retraced my steps home day after day and week after week my route took me past the same group of young guys who were selling knockoff goods on the sidewalk. Lady lady you by my bed. Come look my warehouse I have Gucci I have Prada. Each time I dutifully slowed down engaged for a moment and then declined the offers

with the string of Bougival. Yeah. Yeah. Don't want don't need don't want. I knew after so many passages I knew each Hocker well enough to tell who had gotten a new haircut but they never seemed to recognize me. I was just another mark. Finally one day I had enough. I snapped and I dug for my new vocabulary. So yeah. Yeah. Mean TMB Yeah. I shouted back yesterday. Don't want today don't want tomorrow don't want they stopped cold stunned. Then one irrepressible souls quickly recovered and with a plaintive look whispered earnestly hoti in meaning. Day after tomorrow. So slowly I there were things about the language that caught my attention and popped out. Sometimes it was just a word or a little phrase or a bit of the grammar that just seemed quite remarkable and my first impulse was to try to

track this through linguistics to find out what was this that caught my attention in the first place and figure out how to explain a little bit and demystify some of this. And along the way of doing that I came to this realization that not only was I learning a lot about the language but it was helping explain a lot of puzzling things that I saw on the street or misconceptions that I had about about what I was seeing or or what I was participating in. And those those realizations really became Windows to me of some larger things that helped explain some things about life in China. Like romance or relationships or behavior or or dreams of the Chinese people. So I like to just give you a couple of quick examples of just what I mean here and the first place I would have to start with the tones which are the nemesis of of every Mandarin learners experience. Think why can't I hear these tones. Why can't I say these tones.

Why do the Chinese never understand my tone when I think I've really nailed it. And you know why would a language have tones in the first place it. It's confounding. So the linguistic explanation to this is actually really interesting because the whole sound structure of Mandarin is made up of very short little sailboats a consonant and a vowel like ta sure wat. Ni hao. And. And that's all just content involved there are only 400 of them and a word is one or maybe two slapped together as opposed to English for example where we have 4000 roughly kinds of syllables like stretched or trust where you have a vowel and consonants all over the place on each side of it. A lot to say and so what happens in in Chinese when you've got so little to work with is that you end up with hominems run rampant.

You know we've got homonyms like C C and C I see the ocean. I see something see the letter whatever 1:58 a lot of these but in Chinese it's like everywhere. If you open a dictionary randomly I tried this a lot my my own realization opened to a page and you get a word like you know. And there may be three pages of entries of that syllable ma. So what's great about the tones is that it really helps you get a lot of mileage out of this sound structure every time you put a different tone on that little syllable ma. You get a different word with a different meaning like ma with a high tone means mam ma with falling rising is is horse ma falling tone means swear or curse. So you can get not just 400 syllables but and words but at least you know four times four tones times for 16:00

plus kind of extra tone that's no tone bonus tone you know. So you've got 2000 so at least you've got a little bit to work with an explanation for why tones in the first place. But the thing about it that is is so hard for us I think is that yes they are hard to hear but they shouldn't really be so hard to hear because in English we have some version of tones. If you're asking a question you or talking like a teenager actually and I just did that I realized going to the store now your voice goes up at the end making a question as opposed to going to the store now you know you're off to go to the store. So we have that difference in tone that we should be able to hear but in English it actually follows a rule and it makes a whole lot of sense you know raise the tone and the last word and you've got to question that in Chinese Why should MA and a high tone mean mother as opposed to ma

meaning horse. It's just this arbitrary assignment of a tone to a word that changes its whole meaning so it's just a lot of stuff that you have to memorize. Not only are you trying to hear it now don't they are trying to say it or remember it but there's no reason behind it it's it just is. So of course you know of course it's hard for for us to do that. What the sad part of this I think is that what it means for us as foreigners is that you and you always end up in a humiliating situation with your tones as you're trying to learn. Every foreigner has a really awful tone story. And so I will read you my tone story. You know all about how how hard this is for me. After several months in China I developed a bad craving for cheese which is a precious and hard to find luxury in this highly lactose intolerant nation desperate. I stopped in a

Taco Bell at the fringe of swanky downtown Shanghai fixed and the idea of a gooey sloppy cheesy burrito. A tall Chinese youth proudly wearing a black sombrero in a sequined vest greeted me at the entrance. He barked a hearty whining growling which means welcome come on in everybody in still quite new to China. I had rehearsed my lines to ask for the menu and inquire about take out your dabao ma. Do you have takeout when the greeter in the sombrero looked puzzled. I asked again pointing to the menu pointing to the door. Pretending like I was walking out the door. Still no response. So I cut out the grammar and simply said dabao take away nothing. Then I tried all sorts of tones and the two syllables of double high tones rising tones falling tones rising and falling rising tones any combination of tones all the time I'm thinking. C'mon guy work with me here. How hard can this be. He called for reinforcements from the kitchen several more young boys in sombreros emerged and

listened intently as I repeated dabao over and over again. Finally one erupted in triumph. Ah dabao this uttered with a very emphatic high tone and about which I promise you was exactly what I was saying. The greter answer yo we have it. And then they all laughed and went back into the kitchen. So it's you know why don't they understand me. I have thought about this so much and just tried to ask my Chinese friends and so forth. I think it's it's really when a word in Chinese is not just the sounds it's the sounds and that tone locked together and impossible to separate and impossible to really make the leap of imagination. If I wasn't saying dabao meaning take out you know maybe he heard dabao meaning give me a big hug which is a very close meaning of what that could also mean and he couldn't get it from place to place B when it just didn't register so it it

is. It was a really it was an impasse. You know what my system of of for the tones for me were all this arbitrary learning the tones for the Chinese are such an integral part of the words that they're impossible to rip apart and and that was a good learning experience because I realized they weren't just frustrating me intentionally. They couldn't hear it. I wasn't just you know another foreigner who was coming by I was trying my best but I just couldn't do it. It was too hard. So at least I felt better about it. And then here's another example. I often felt as I got a little bit better in Chinese that when I was talking I felt a sense of being very abrupt about I was what I was saying and even to the point of being rude here. If you go to Mr. Bartley's and you're asking for and the waiter comes over and said Would you like away to a glass of water.

You might say in English. Oh no thanks. You know I'm not really thirsty right yet I'll have something later. I don't want anything now. Thanks very much thanks but no thanks. You know a lot of this stuff in China if you're in a restaurant same thing would you like some water Brujo don't want that's it. Just like those guys on the street. The hawkers don't want or need there are no softeners. There's. You're not going to say that pleases and you're not going to say the thank you's are the woods in that could and should everything that kind of fills out an plumps up how we feel like we're being polite in our language and in English just aren't there in Chinese. So I was you know you'd curiously you'd see this situation playing out. We'll go back to the restaurant maybe the table next to you is filled with a bunch of close friends. So you're watching this behavior and everything looks great. Looks very polite in our sense of how we would think polite is maybe the host at the table is pouring beer for everybody around the table.

And then eventually parse for himself maybe the hostess is choosing the nicest morsels of vegetables or tofu out of the main dish serving everyone else's plate and then serves herself. Think this is very polite. Then suddenly in the midst of this you hear something which is like gamewell yen the equivalent of give me the salt. And this contrasts to mean as as a mom who has raised kids trying to teach them polite language and polite speech. Believe me it's all you can do to help but you can't resist to run over the table say say please you know to whoever's asking for this. But I knew that this was right. I knew that that's the way you you. That is kind of the kind of language that you use in in that situation you don't say please please or thank you. You just you say the straight forward thing. So again I was looking for my my linguistic explanations and for my

explanations of people from people hear of what was going on. So I found this this really interesting explanation in my language books and also from my friends my Chinese friends say that they noticed that Westerners use lots of pleases and thank yous when speaking Chinese and actually they say we do we use way too many of them for Chinese taste. Then I found this arcane linguistic monograph bilingual named Kai Dejan and he said using a please as in please pass the salt actually has the opposite effect of politeness here in China. The Chinese way of being polite to each other with words is to shorten the social distance between you and saying please serves to insert a kind of buffer space that says in effect we need some formality here between us. One of my tutors was this great young guy from Beijing his name was Danny and he had this combination of being a real Chinese Nationalist.

And a lot of the young students are and also very edgy global guy he had what was in fashion then was a folk hawk so he you know he really had the swagger. Anyway I was asking him about this interpretation and he nodded his head enthusiastically and said Good friends are so close. They're like part of you. Why would you say please or thank you to yourself. It just doesn't make sense. So you know the lesson that I took away from this is that that my sensibility of this complex nature and set of cultural and linguistic rules about politeness were one thing in my American ways and in China it was really something different. And it just it wasn't the same and it didn't make sense and I couldn't understand it. So you kind of had to learn these cultural rules and linguistic rules in an entirely new format. So one other quick explanation or example here for you this is about a single word which is fraught in any language the word I which

means love to love. It's I with a falling tone. Jim and I first went to China with our kids about 25 years ago and they were then little little blond kids. We were on our way from living in Japan to living in Malaysia and stopped for about a month in China. We had an entree. Believe it or not with a the world Esperanto Congress it was kind of hard to get to China in those days and somehow we we ended up with this group of Esperanto speakers and were going around China with them which was interesting experience but we were down in southern China and I was speaking with this Chinese woman and they had my two little boys and she kind of scrutinizing me and looking at the boys and said to me which one do you love more. And I was taken aback and said What would any mom here would say which was I love them both the same you know it just kind of offended. And she she stopped and said but really which one do you love more.

And so we went back and forth on this a number of times and got nowhere. I insisting that my line and she kept pressing me on her line. And I you know I never forgot that. And when we went back to China 20 years later four years ago I started hearing other things about the word love that make me think there was something funny going on with that word. Here we had a number of friends who were couples Chinese Western couples and as we got to know them better and better. Inevitably we'd have this kind of conversation that would get around to you know complaining about each other a little bit. So the western half of the couple would say maybe a guy would say my Chinese wife she just can't say I love you she just can't come out with I love you in Mandarin or in English and it's so sad. And then the Chinese wife perhaps would say my

Western husband he's always saying I love you I love you I love you. It's just so gratuitous it's so hollow it's so meaningless why is he saying this all the time so you get this. You know even in a happily married couple this this funny business of love going on one can't say it when one can say it all the time and doesn't appreciate it and so forth. So then the third thing happened. We were in Beijing and I was spending a number of days with a young Chinese woman. She was in her 30s. She had one little child of course and a good job and for grandparents taking care of the kids and I'm thinking she's got you know everything. Young women are striving for. This was great. So we were talking about family and so forth. And then she said to me knowing that I was a lot older than she was and had been married you know a long time she said yeah I said I'd been married for a long time. She said You must love your husband very much and said Well yes. True. And what do you

say. So I said back to her. And I'm sure you must love your husband a lot too. And she said I love him for now. And I was taken off guard by by that expression First of all thinking why does her husband know she's saying this to me right now. You know I really don't know this woman very well what are those grandparents saying killed a little kid thinking of her saying this to me. And so it was a bit disturbing and a just thinking linguistically OK maybe some things at play here. Mandarin is a very Spera language in a lot of ways. You know inflexions you know conjugations no declensions no gender no agreement no tense and the verbs just do what you see is what you get which is terrific because while a lot of things are hard like those tones and syllables you don't have all this brute force memorization like in Latin or romance languages or you name a

language it's just all very straightforward. So I thought OK maybe she's having trouble when she's saying this in English to me with the tense somehow and her way when she's said for now maybe she didn't really mean I love him for now maybe she meant something really existential and romantic like I am in love with him. I do not know what she meant but I gave her the benefit of the doubt and thought OK maybe she meant that. So looking into the history of love and marriage in China was a little bit more revealing I think in the in the back in the Confucian times when everyone was a Confucian scholar and believed in it. Love was was a more strict kind of formal thing going on especially for marriages arranged marriages about obedience about harmony you know not so much about personal relationships. So fast forward to the era of Chairman Mao and got a different kind of love It was there was a political overlay of love.

This was you know two good party members getting married it was good for the party it was good for the state maybe a little romance coming in. But still an overlay of something that was prescribed in a sense or are approved and now in China. It's amazing because you see a bit of everything going on you have a little Confucian revival of arrangements of some sort and you have young people in China who are of course you know have had more exposure to other possible ideas and are looking for romantic love. So here is a final little segment of what I saw what we saw in China. And a single day. This is in the spring of 2009 and we saw different kinds of love things going on with that word which was really interesting. This was a spring day in 2009 in Beijing. The cherry blossom Spring Flower Festival this year happened to coincide with the first gloriously warm and

clear weekend days of the season all of Beijing was out of doors after the dank and dreary winter on Sunday. In town park on the west side of the city boys but there are girls sprigs of bright pink and white plastic cherry blossoms which the girls round into wreaths and wore in their hair. The lake was crowded with paddle boats and farmers sold baby chicks and bunnies from their cardboard boxes. Everyone was paired off or so it seemed. Young couples filled the subways in parks that day all locked in embrace. They held hands. They hugged they kissed they spooned all mindless or careless of their public display. I would say that these are the youth four of them marry for love generation on that same day had we been in Shanghai's People's Park rending Guangcheng Instead we would no doubt have again seen the serious matchmaking meetings that we observed there every weekend. We lived in Shanghai parents in their 50s worried about their unmarried offspring in their late 20s would gather in the northwest corner of the park with homemade signs describing their

children. This son was born in the year of the monkey. He was 1.8 meters tall had a job in a small private company was type A blood. That daughter was a graduate of the East China Normal University 1.6 meters tall type A blood ethnic group the parents would circle around tentatively reading each other's posters huddling with their spouses and perhaps sidling up toward another couple to strike up a conversation and see where things would go from there. The grown children were never in evidence. Who knows they may have been locked in an embrace and then number two subway line at that very moment. These were adults of another era and were trying to arrange marriages for their very modern children. So you know this this whole sense about about love and marriage really was to me a metaphor of a lot that's going on in China right now just the rapid change. The combination of the old and the new and the kind of changing situation of of your

perception of things like relationships or love or romance or whatever it is. And and it it is I think very a very telling example of how China seemed as a whole that whole experience. So. So that's that's it. I mean this is this started out as my learning experience of Mandarin. It was you know functional It was survival it was all about how I could get stuff at the market and. And it turned into something really different. It turned into explanations of the puzzling things that I'd see on the streets every day or or you know bigger glimpses of of important things about about the Chinese situation whether it was romance or relationships or or dreams about the Chinese people. So that is it. And I'm happy to take some questions if you have. Thank you

sir. This is about Barack Obama's brother half brother who lives who lives in China. Yes that is a true story. I've heard that too. I think he lives in the south near Guang show and does speak Mandarin. And it is I don't know what his profession is but there was I don't think you also asked about levels of Mandarin high Mandarin or low Mandarin that he speaks. I think he probably speaks Mandarin well. The funny thing about Mandarin in China is that it's relatively new as a lingua franca in China as the language that everybody speaks. There are

so many languages going on in China. Six or eight major language differences geographically mostly you know 50 different dialects and if you're from one home town you speak this but you also studied Mandarin in school which became compulsory about in the 1950s or so. So everybody generally speaks the same kind of school Mandarin. And it is that the the essentially the dialect of Beijing as well of Northern China and in many other parts of China. So he would have just spoken the same Mandarin that everybody speaks and the interest in him. There was a little interest I mean when it first became known that Barack Obama's brother was in China a new Chinese and so that was kind of interesting but you know there's a big country there. There's a lot of news so it didn't really dominate the news it was. But it was interesting curious. I don't know. I don't know if he wrote a book. OK.

Maybe they'll get it from Nairobi to Shenzhen. OK we'll ask for it. We'll ask him to order it. OK. Thank you. I don't know but we'll ask. OK. Yes sir. Yes. I talk about this in my book. Yes. It's all it's kind of chapter by chapter. I'm focusing on a language point but then going into what role this takes in the culture and why it's there both. Oh. Well. Yeah. The next book you know. I suppose you'd have to. Why did it start that way there. Ella can you help me out here.

We have a wonderful native speaker of Chinese who probably knows much more of ancient Chinese and the evolution of those words. About the sound level you know there's just not that much to work with in the sound system of Chinese and and things do change over time. But there we are. Isn't it great to have a smart audience. And you. Yes. Yes sir.

Oh body language was my savior. Yes I totally believe in body language. And the interesting thing is that well the great thing about body language I think is that it's kind of universal pretty much universal. I mean there are little subtleties that are not that the basics are there. So here's how I used it often. You know there are so many rules and regulations of what you can and can't and should and shouldn't do in China. And we were Jim who has arrived. I told you he would think you were always breaking these rules either intentionally or unintentionally and sometimes intentionally. And we began to you couldn't keep track of them but what you began to notice is that if there was something that you wanted to do and suddenly it was OK we can't do it no forbidden. You know if you don't do this you'd see the authorities say we can't and then kind of shuffle a little bit you know wait for a minute for you to proceed and ask

again. Here's an example of how it worked. We went to the culture palace of the minorities in Beijing to see an exhibit on on Tibet in Tibetan history and knew that this would be a really interesting exhibit because there's so much tension around Tibet. We got to this museum and found that there were huge long lines lots of security which was kind of unusual. And each person had to go through the line and show an identity card. In our case passports which was really too bad because we never carried our passports in China even though that was the law you were supposed to. But too much risk. We've never been asked before. So we get up to the front of the line and the guys asking for our identification to get into the museum. So I had nothing Jim managed to find his driver's license with a photo I.D.. That was great. And the guy says you know to me and shrugging my shoulders and he says Buki can't.

Then he was waiting like he he wanted something else so. So I pulled out I pulled out my credit card. No didn't work. And he's still waiting just kind of shuffling back and forth so I pulled out my subway card thinking this will show I live here you know this is good. Nothing. And then he was still shuffling and so at that point I started saying little things like that. I lived in Beijing and I pulled out the key card for our apartment and I said what I should be doing. This is my Beijing house key. And and he just nodded and said OK you know and let me in. So I knew he was saying no but he was indicating Well maybe if he could just find a way out. So yeah it worked all the times in that kind of case. Yes. OK. Great question and. Yes.

OK the question is about characters in Japan and in China and we did live in Japan for a few years. So here's the answer that the Chinese characters are basically the same in. And it actually it's wonderful to have characters if you can study them because if you speak Cantonese and speak Mandarin we don't understand each other we can write it down and read the same thing. And it largely is true with Japanese too. The bad part of this story is my kind of follows my crackpot theory of you're either more visual or you're more aural. Jim is the much more visual person when we when we were in in Japan he learned those characters. And to my utter amazement 20 years later when we went to China he could still remember those characters and they pretty much applied in China. I I am not that person. I will study a character Monday Tuesday Wednesday skip Thursday and Friday it's all gone and I have to start over again so I'm the awful

person which is convenient in that when we're together we're a great team and we get a lot done when we're separate. We each flounder a bit. So glad you came tonight. Thank you. So yes the characters are wonderful and. And in Chinese TV everything is subtitled so that no matter what dialect you speak where you are in China if you don't understand what's being said you can read what's being said on TV and we will never give them up and someday I will. Well thank you. Yes. OK well the tone.

OK this is about I guess indicating mood or or sensibility or no. Yeah. OK. All right. So the question is about how you get the mood of something across and how that interferes or not was tones. And yes. So there is tones that we're talking about in this Chinese language is just reduced to a single word that's attached to the meaning of the word like Ma or sure or sure. But it does if you're putting this in a sentence that that tone doesn't talk about the whole mood of the sentence and like rising becoming softer or a whole lot of emphasis on a word or slowing down or things that indicate a mood of a sentences. It's just this tone that's kind of hidden in the word. So you can have both tone and intonation that explains about the mood of a sentence or the

mood of the of whatever you're trying to get across. But there are two different very different things. OK. Thank you. Yes sir. Honestly no I never did find out what that meant. I think the worst interpretation is that she wasn't in a good marriage and this marriage would not last. The best interpretation was that that and you know there's there's a very kind of hard core sense of efficiency about getting things done in China too. And so if her marriage wasn't working out she was one tough woman. And if things weren't going well maybe she just didn't want to be in that marriage anymore. But but maybe it was just the language too. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. OK. Right. So how did the Chinese want to help me with my poor Chinese. And they want. Did they want to practice their English with me is a question. Yes and yes I mean everything is yes there. So we were amazed to find how how really fluent and easy most Chinese Chinese English is is a compulsory course in high school education as part of the test you take to go to college. So kids are learning it all over the place and they're really surprisingly good. So of course they want to stop you on the street and talk with you and it becomes you know part of your obligation as a good guest in their country to slow down and talk to all these kids on the sidewalk all the time meanwhile trying to decide which ones are really sincere and which ones are just

trying to sell you at inflated prices. And it is it is hard it's it's but it's part of the duty and you try to do that. We found that the Chinese were just as patient and wonderful as possible in helping us with our Mandarin and trying to learn the language. I learned so much from people on the street you know correcting me or trying to help me along. Sometimes all those guys when I was trying to get takeout and that in the Taco Bell there were you know eight of them kind of working with me trying to understand what I was saying were they could have just been sweeping me out the door. And so it is really the larger point I think of this question is how well Americans are fixed to get along with the Chinese. It was easy to feel a kinship with them open gregarious personalities outgoing kind of easy to be around.

Unlike some other nationalities where you think you know you go to that country and try to learn use the language. It's a little harder to get along with the people but much of China was difficult in our life there. But getting along with the people was not difficult. It was actually fun and a pleasure. So I don't yes. There a. Perfect example. OK hearing all the time in this country I'm sorry oh I'm sorry

oh I'm sorry asking are you really sorry. You know what are you sorry for that you don't hear this well. Yes there I've heard this the term in Chinese devotee. I'm sorry I didn't hear it very often. I used it all the time and and I know that that wasn't right but you know when you're just in the groove of saying thank you please I'm sorry oh I'm really sorry. You just go ahead and use it because it makes you feel better and you know you realize you're not doing it appropriately. It's interesting that you brought up the I'm sorry I forgot about that. Yeah we do apologize for nothing all the time. Right right. Yes. Yes. Where did the bookstores like in China. Gosh the Chinese buy books

all the time there. The bookstores are huge. They're full of Chinese books. One or two of them have had English books kind of random and haphazard. But in in Beijing and Shanghai certainly in the big in the big cities there are there are bookstores like this with with foreign language books and they have book events like this the Beijing bookworm is is our favorite one in Beijing and you know now has other stores in other places around China. The Chinese love books. I think Jim once had the experience of having one of his English books English books. Of course he writes in English. One of his books when we were in China presented to him as a gift in Chinese translation of course Hindhead never heard about it before. He didn't know that his book had been translated in Chinese and so here's your book. Isn't this great. Well yeah but you know where did this come from. How did how did this get done so there's a lot going on

with this. Yes. Yes. Well our little boys were were all grown up by the time we went to China and this time they're you know older and married and everything else. When we were in Japan we were we were in a similar kind of situation where we made them and we made them go to a Japanese school for a year which was pretty tough. It was a quote international school. There were 698 Japanese kids and our two boys. And and it was probably a mean thing to do. And in some ways one of them it was very interesting experience one of them took off and actually studied Japanese at Harvard and is fluent in and the other one once said not me. I'm outta here and became a Francophile and went to France and turned in. So you know you can't control your kids. So our kids

were not with us in China. They visited but they let us do our thing at that point. So I don't when I don't know how long to keep you a couple of more questions. OK. Yes. OK so it's how much monitoring we had in China how many who is watching us and did it didn't matter and so forth kind of in interesting answers to that as I said before we knew they knew they knew we knew they knew we knew were there and all of this when we were aware of each other but we were in a different kind of situation because since Jim was a journalist that was there a particular

interest in us. Jim could not get a journalist's visa which was for it's a long complicated story but so we were there under kind of funny slightly funny circumstances of being teachers and so forth. And that was fine. And it worked out and it actually worked out very well in a reporting sense because official journalists in China do have to register with authorities every time they go to a new city to do official reporting. So it was a major chore for reporters from The Times or The Wall Street Journal or whatever to get on a plane get off a plane go to the police station have permissions to do all of their interviewing. And for for Jim that wasn't the case. Kind of did it in a much looser fashion. So it made our life very simple and there was the only place we we we went everywhere all over China just on our own. No asking anybody no trouble ever

except to go to Tibet and we tried to go to Tibet three different times. It's hard for people. It's hard when you're inside China to get all of these special visas to go to Tibet from being inside China. And a lot of we were in China I guess. It's always a kind of turbulent time in China but there was the 60th anniversary there were the Olympics coming up. There were just you know various things. There was the earthquake. There were big snows there. There are all kinds of drama always in China but a lot of drama. Yeah even a little drama can become an excuse to make it hard to go to Tibet. So we tried three times and we failed three times to get the visas and then just finally gave up and thought we'll come back here we'll go to Tibet another route another time. That was the only stopper. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

OK. So the whole question is about the evolution and change of of the Chinese language and also how Mandarin is different in Taiwan and it has a different history even in Taiwan. It's a really interesting question because you know in in when you study linguistics you hear about linguistics you have this sense that language is time of change organically they change with need they change when when different groups of people come up upon each other and have influence on each other. But it's kind of slow gradual changing the sound systems or the way people say things or the influx of words and things. What I found in Chinese's is it was completely different. There was so much engineering explicit engineering about language change of Mandarin in China about 100 years ago you know when the dynasties ended and the Republic of China was being born. One of the major things they did was say we got to get this language in order a little bit here because there were dialects all over the place and actually even interesting as an aside

people say and I think it's true that when Chairman Mao was was in power many of the Chinese could not understand his Mandarin because he spoke with such a heavy hand and exit. But anyway so a hundred years ago they started making a lot of changes in the language saying we've got to make this more efficient for our country because we've got so many dialects. Nobody can understand each other so let's choose one. What are we going to speak. And there is you know a lot of back and forth and political decision making and they finally ended up in Shanghai. People in the Beijing people always fight and they were fighting about it. I hate seeing people i hate Beijing people. Which one are we going into. So they pretty much came up with the Beijing dialect. Not only was this an issue of engineering the language with with the spoken language but also with the written language that up until about 100 years ago everything that was written in the Chinese literature was for a very well educated minority of people

and the general men on the street the loud bashing had nothing to read because the language that was being written was as though it were Latin. You know they wrote in Latin but none of us speak Latin We all speak English so they decided they would have to shift the literature to be to be more reflective of how people actually talked. And so suddenly there were newspapers suddenly there was more than just signs to read for the ordinary people on the street. And and there was a big springing up of literature it was all very controversial and rough and everything. And it was this has been carried out in controversy and in argument in deliberate decision making for for a hundred years and even with the characters like during the time of Chairman Mao he thought still we need more people literate in this country. So let's simplify a lot of these characters just cut out a bunch of the strokes and the characters and present them in an easier way for so more people can learn them and let's use maybe fewer

vocabulary let's concentrate on you know a couple of thousand characters and write a lot in that so that we can bring the language to the masses of people. Also very controversial but the really interesting thing is that overall sense of how hard the Chinese have been working on their language over over time but especially over the last hundred years to try to bring it into a manageable place for 1.3 billion people of all these different kinds of backgrounds and languages. I would say that I would say they've been successful. I mean you can print pretty much get around the country with your Mandarin. Everybody you know more or less speaks it. There are a few older people who haven't had the chance. The the the wiggers out in Xinjiang they have need more deliberate schooling on it. But yeah for what it did it's been pretty successful. So that about it. OK thank you very much.