2002 - Alice Song Weekly 宋 旻 潔 週 記

Issue:609 Date: 04/25/2002

(11) 漢字新看法
Chinese Characters

Monday mornings are always exciting because many of my friends checktheir emails on Monday. Opening the email box that used to have only oneor two emails from my parents, I can always see so many familiar names,and in this moment, I seem to be sitting in the classroom of the NanjingForeign Language School (NFLS) again, among all my friends and all thehappy daily events. All these imaginary scenes are as pure and warm assunshine, as lively as spring trees, so I cannot help myself, but toimagine how I will enter my old classroom when I return to Nanjing in amonth.

Internet used to be only a searching engine for me, but it is anecessary element for my life now. These emails are often full ofinteresting pieces of school life, newly-blossomed flowers in Nanjing, oreven only a line which was popular one year ago I read in the book"Tuesdays With Morrie". It is said that one important way of approachinghappiness is creating one's small culture in the society's big culture.All these Monday emails have created a small NFLS, a small Nanjing in St.Louis University High School's (SLUH) library; there are seasons,festivals, tests and so on. I even found an ancient poem sent by my friendas a bmp file this morning:

"I know you have read this before, but I just want you to see Chinesecharacters!"

Chinese characters! I never felt them special when I was talking andwriting them at home. But now, when I try to explain the history ofcharacters for SUN, MOON, WATER, FIRE to my American friends, hearingtheir admiration and surprise, I look at all these characters in a brandnew way. Learning a language is learning a culture, is learning a way ofthinking. For an old but active language like Chinese, it is so attractiveto study how it made up words, phrases, sentences and the background ofone of the most brilliant cultures.

Perhaps foreign things are always exotic, like Chinese teenagers wearclothes with random English and Americans put Chinese characters on the T-shirts, both think they are really cool patterns. Actually some patterns do look like Chinese and I can even read them, but some others are upside-down, or just like mirror images. "But they are all Chinese to me." said some American friends. Perhaps all these can be left for SLUH students and others who learned Chinese to practice and correct them. The English signs that are being built up everywhere in big Chinese cities can be viewed as a sign of China's opening. Comparing to that, the Chinese characters appear in supermarkets of STL are some kind of decorations.

Many students in the Chinese class told me that Chinese grammar wasvery simple for them, but they were often confused by homonyn wordssharing the same sound and characters having many meanings. Actually itis easy to understand --- 5000 years of civilization has added so manyliteral meanings on the characters, and it is scaring to look up the basiccharacters in the dictionary even for native speakers!

But just because of this, Chinese names have so many variations andwe can make the translation of foreign names very beautiful. Sophia means'waking spring green', Mary means 'beautiful diamonds', Rose means 'dewson silk ribbons'! It must be a nice thing to know the new meaning of one'sname in a different language.

Speaking of names, Mrs. Noblot always has to explain that Alice isonly my English name when she introduces me to her friends. Sometimes herfriends would not be satisfied unless they are taught to pronounce myreal name in Chinese, and it is really interesting to be called with anAmerican accent! But I could be surprised sometimes. Once at dinnertable, Drew was talking about how strong Chinese white liquor was, and Iwas just going to admire his great progress when I heard a word "bai-jiu"in typical Beijing accent. But then I found everyone was waiting for meto give comments on Mr. Noblot's first Chinese sentence! I had never realized so clearly that I am Chinese before coming here. Ifelt the strong connection and deep impact between my culture and myselfonly when these two elements are apart from each other. It is one of themost precious gifts given to me by staying in a foreign country, Now inone point of my life, I discovered a new city, a new country, a group ofnew friends and got a new view of my culture.