A Cultural History of the Chinese Language more

A Cultural History Forward and Introduction This is an introductory essay of Chinese cultural history, and it is written for people whose first language is not Chinese. Chinese, as used here, refers to cultural rather than ethnical characteristics. By this definition, the shape and capacity of the Chinese mind do not include a biological inheritance. To understand the Chinese mind, one has to speak, read, and to understand the tone, rhythm, imagery, and gestures of the language and see the world through the Chinese imagination which is expressed in a diverse multi-media spectrum, crowded with images and connotations that have accumulated and refined for over five thousand years. Cultural identity is not determined by the origin of one’s ancestors although this factor can provide easy entrance to a culture. It is, rather, a way of life that is defined and cultivated by a unique world of idioms, rhythms, gestures, attitudes, and wisdom. It is reflected in the way that one sees, feels, listens and speaks, and how one sings, dances, laughs, cries, and dreams. It also includes the ways that one communicates and relates to others and how one thinks of oneself and the world. Language often sets the horizon of vision. As it ages, it provides more and varied images, expends the scope of imagination, and stimulates deeper thoughts. Cultural history tells the story of a community as it constantly reaches for its horizons, shifts perspectives and sets sail into the unknown and foreign. As they accumulate new expression and connotation, speakers and readers fined a higher level of consciousness and a deeper awareness of their potential as well as their limitations. This book illustrates the evolution of the Chinese repertoire of expression as it accumulated, and transformed. It depicts how Chinese, as a language and Chinese 1 culture, acquired its unique characteristics as it continuously transformed and reinvented itself. * * * * The initial inspiration for this book is my son. He was born in North America and considers Chinese, my first language, to be jibberish. Like many Chinese parents in North America, I failed to keep him in a language school to read Chinese literature. It seemed irrelevant, and had little to do with his life here. He thought and still thinks that learning Chinese is very difficult and extremely boring. He has become one of those people, whom everyone thinks is Chinese, yet he knows practically nothing about his heritage. He is Chinese in appearance only. Even after three trips to China, his impressions remain a collection of scattered images: exotic food, the babble of a foreign tongue, and busy streets with an ocean of people on bicycles. The first time that I encountered a person like my son was thirty years ago, shortly after I arrived in America to study in a graduate school. I had no family in Philadelphia and I spent most of my weekends at the home of my friend, Dr. Yang, a math-professor-turned businessman. To become a successful American, he gave up university teaching and opened a restaurant. He made a fortune and bought a huge house in an exclusive suburban neighborhood. He was very proud to be a member of the affluent middle class. In order to emulate the American lifestyle (which he believed would open doors for his three children), he became a Christian and a loyal churchgoer. He was also spending a fortune on schooling for his children. Yang had an American born, sixteen-year-old daughter. Grace spoke, gestured, thought, and behaved like any American teenager. Before long, I realized that she had no consciousness of her own face. One Sunday in 1981, Yang was hosting a house party. I arrived at his elegantly decorated mansion just as Grace was returning from the church. Grace loved Sundays because she got to wear her designer dresses and hats, and sing in the choir. She greeted me at 2 the door with American hugs and kisses, a warm and emotional expression that a native Chinese rarely displays. She seemed very happy, and why not? She possessed everything that her imagination could conceive. Yes, this was America. With her father's money she could have everything including the dream that she was someone else. My conversation with her on that day concerned one of her teachers, whom she greatly adored. "He told me that I am the best and brightest student that he has ever taught in his twenty- year career." This flattering comment obviously had a great impact on Grace. She was so excited that her eyes were sparkling and her voice began to tremble. "Guess what?" She whispered in my ear: "I did not tell him I am a Chinese! He has yet to see my parents…. To tell you the truth, I did not tell him because I was afraid that he would change his mind about me." As she averted her beautiful brown eyes, and looked down, I could see her long lashes trembling as they struggled to hold back her tears. Her Chinese roots seemed to be a burden that was too heavy for her fragile soul to carry. Looking at her pretty, yet mindful face, I could feel her pain. I really wanted to cry for her. O, God! She had no idea that her face had already revealed all of her secrets! She really wished that she was someone else. On that day I promised myself that if I had a child, I would let him know what it meant to be Chinese. I probably would not mind if he decided to ignore his heritage, but he must at least hear the story of the real China from a real Chinese. From my son’s sixteenth birthday, I began to search for a book about Chinese cultural history written for English readers. After years of research in my field (cultural history), and checking all the books published on the subject, I have yet to find a single one that portrays the essence of Chinese culture. This was, perhaps, the same reason that I chose to stay away from Chinese studies in my graduate school. I studied the history of the America, Germany, Italy, England, and Egypt. English publications about China at the time definitely did not present the China that I know. Later on in my life, I married a Canadian poet and literary writer. As a boy he spent hours and hours in his backyard 3 digging holes and dreaming that he could reach China. As we were planning our first China trip together, I searched for a book of cultural history of China to prepare him for the journey. Once again, disappointed. Most books about China are too superficial for my husband's taste. The academic books, mainly written by Chinese scholars, are written in such poor prose, that educated English readers hardly have the patience to follow them. A few American Sinologists write well, but their knowledge and comprehension of China are fragmentary. The high degree of difficulty of the Chinese language and the monumental size of its literature forced them into increasingly narrow fields. In a rigidly structured academic system, they spend their entire lives researching textual details and footnotes rather than dealing with more general and more interesting issues. They are representation of the fundamental difference between Chinese culture and those of the West, and clearly exhibit the reasons that Chinese language, and the social and political institutions that it has spawned have acquired unprecedented sustaining power. The limitation of Sinologists, Chinese or otherwise, is a language and methodology that is derived from Western theories of social science and humanities. Most of these theories were originally formulated by German philosophers. German is the most competent language in philosophy among the modern European languages; but it is the least sensitive, refined and poetic. To apply German philosophy to Chinese literature is an attempt to measure the volume of the ocean with a soup bowl, an impossible task. Chinese experience and reasoning as cultivated by its ancient literary language is many times more rich, subtle, and more diverse than the expressive capacity of contemporary cultural theories. Compared to German, English and Spanish have a higher degree of poetic fluidity and suggestiveness; however, they lack the German logical clarity that can elevate poetic ambiguity to philosophical precision. Weary of my search, I have decided to write the book myself. * * * * 4 I was born in Beijing and spent my formative years (during the nineteen fifties, sixties and a part of seventies) in China. I am part of a multi-generational family of intellectuals who have held prominent positions in Chinese politics, military, law, media and education. My great grandparents, grandparents and parents were members of the high societies of the Manchu Imperial, Nationalist and Communist regimes. Chinese history, especially, that of the modern period, is also the history of my family. I was among the youngest of the educated generation of the Cultural Revolution. I witnessed both the madness and profoundness of social change and understood the impact of Chinese language and culture upon its ideology, social and political institutions. To enhance the intellectual portfolio of many generations of my family, I experienced, first hand, life at the bottom of Chinese society. During my teens, I lived as a peasant in a remote village at the cradle of Mao's revolution where he built his military base. As I toiled, starved, and suffered, I developed not only empathy for the peasants who had sacrificed everything for the Revolution (yet were left in the same poverty afterwards) but also a deeper understanding of how and why the Chinese system has survived for thousands of years. I left China in the 1970s and since then have traveled the world extensively and been away long enough to acquire a non-Chinese perspective of the world. It took me almost ten years to learn how to think (not just speak) in English, and about twenty years to feel and express emotions in the English sense. During the past thirty years, I have been to four continents, thirty countries, and learned many nonChinese languages. I have written several books on legal philosophy, and global cultural history. Each time that I read and write in a different language, I compared it with my native tongue and my Chinese frame of mind, seeking similarities and differences. I find a slice of Chinese in each and every language, English, Latin, Greek, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, and Arabic. But, there are always some things missing. This book is about the things that are uniquely Chinese. * * * * 5 Long and uninterrupted literary tradition sets Chinese culture apart from the rest of the world. Like English today (the youngest international language) the written language of China, however pronounced regionally, has been one of the great unifying and stabilizing factors in Chinese civilization. Chinese is not the only civilization whose history goes back five thousand years, but it is the longest surviving and continuing literary tradition in the world. Writing was used in Greece and Crete during the Bronze Age, but the written material surviving from that period appears to consist of inventories and other administrative records, rather than literature. Greek was a rich oral language (more precisely a collection of regional dialects) until the eighth century BC when it successfully adopted the Phoenician alphabet. At that time, written Chinese was nearly a thousand years old and possessed a large vocabulary. All other ancient languages that had developed their own scripts and phonic systems and were contemporary to ancient Chinese either died or were replaced, completely or partially, by other languages. Sumerian, ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, and Latin now exist only as referent material to solve scholarly puzzles. Ancient Semitic languages were reoriented many times and replaced by several modern languages. Sanskrit, Latin, and ancient Hebrew became so abstract that they uprooted from their original oral form and adopted various vernaculars. The continuing literary tradition channeled Chinese history along a unique path: a unified empire (with periodic political instability and war), sustained by a combination of a secular morality and legal institution, administrated by a lasting monarchy (including Mao’s Communist kingdom). China would have died (as did ancient Egypt and Rome) as an empire of God and/or law if its written language had not been revitalized by its poetry, rooted in songs and oral expression. China might have turned into a Christian or Buddhist country if its worship of high God and elaborate religious rites had not been transformed into secular philosophies and complex ethics through centuries of literary cultivation. China would have turned to a diverse and fragmented India if its increasingly refined literary language completely uprooted from its everyday speech as Sanskrit had. Chinese civilization survived because its literary tradition lived and was nourished by a rich soil of oral, regional, and artistic idioms. 6 Chinese literature absorbed and assimilated expression of music, visual imagery, and dramatic gestures. This historical accumulation of idioms substantially expanded the horizon of Chinese imagination and elevated its reasoning. Chinese mind became able to see and hear; it could imagine and suggest sound and imageries that other languages were unable to do in words alone until the twentieth century. Chinese evolved into a language that as abstract and analytic as German, as fluid as Arabic, and as suggestive and flexible as English and Spanish. Most important of all, Chinese had become a language of all of these capacities at the same time. This book is a comprehensive history of Chinese imagination narrated in the familiar terms of English speakers. It attempts to show that the way in which Chinese literature grew and reacted to its music and visual expression is essentially the same, as contemporary English and other western languages. The only difference is timing. The longer a language lives, the richer, more diverse and refined it becomes. What happened to Chinese will take place in younger languages in their unique and native forms. An understanding of the history of Chinese language and its impact upon Chinese mind can be helpful for the students of Western culture because they present an experience beyond the horizon of contemporary speakers of western languages whose literatures have evolved for only few hundred years. One might see a future of a mature literary language that is overly inflated with law, and a political system that is maintained by increasingly sophisticated media rhetoric. Western scholars of social science and humanities might also benefit from this study. Within Chinese cultural history, they can find explanation for many major issues that have been haunting historians and cultural theorists for decades. How does language relate to worldview? What would happen to law after its language loses absolute boundary and binding power? How do music, visual, and theatrical images influence literature, especially a mature literature? How does an established language and ideology penetrate and cultivate the collective consciousness and unconsciousness by creating endless repetition of seemingly varied images and tones? This work provides an alternative to the established 7 cultural theories and bypasses linguistic jargons such as linguistic system, universal grammar, original meaning, truth and emotion. These theories ignore or deny the restrictions of their own language. To play God in the field of cultural studies is an attempt to counteract gravity by pulling one’s hair or fly as a bird soaring, swooping, and changing direction instinctively. Contemporary cultural theories have produced less a penetrating or valid worldview than the bold claim of a teenager who announces that he knows everything about life before he has lived it. The only way to fly beyond the limitation of one’s own language is to study the history of other (preferably older) cultures. This book traces the emergence of Chinese language from its concrete interaction with various sub-verbal idioms, music, theatre, and visual imageries, and investigates how these idioms contributed to particular literary repertoire at given time. It sees no fixed boundaries and barriers between variety of cultural expressions that interacted with literature differently according to the maturity of literary language. Without a universal/or psychological shape, the meanings and connotations of literary language always fluctuate and transform with the flow of communication in various idioms at various times. Focusing on diversity and non-linear development, this history sees the interaction and exchange among various forms of expression (tones, images, words, and gestures) as the main dynamic of Chinese cultural development. Its language grew and transformed through an accumulation of sub-literary, literary, and post-literary expression. Chinese imagination and reasoning were constantly inspired by and evolved through the expansion of its literary repertoire. PART ONE MUSIC, PICTURE, AND POETRY This part describes how Chinese language emerged with music, dance, and visual images. 8 Chapter I: Music, Dance, and Words is a history of formative Chinese poetry. Like ancient Greek, Ancient Chinese was born and grew up intact with its music and dance. The oldest musical instrument dated back to 8000 BC and the earliest depiction of dance is dated about 3500 BC. The legends about the pre-history life of music and dance were handed down by word of mouth, recorded on oracle bones and isolated pictographs, and accompanied by musical instruments that have been unearthed by archaeologists. The formal connection between words, music, and dance was rhythm. Percussion instruments, which had remained in the background of the Western music composition until the twentieth century, were the most important music instrument in the early Chinese antiquity. Like the ancient Greek epic, the tone and rhythm of Chinese poetry was fundamentally shaped, transformed, and refined by music through singing, chanting, and recitation. Chapter II: From pictures, graphs, to words illustrates the birth of the Chinese writing system. Although the exact date of the beginning of the Chinese written language remains uncertain, scholars have agreed that the Shang oracle bones inscription (1766-1122 BC) exhibit a welldeveloped system of writing. This system is compared here with Egyptian, Sumerian/Akkadian, and Mayan writings. It focuses on when and how these systems emerged from graphic signs and visual arts and gradually distilled into symbols of meanings and ideas. By the beginning of the first millennium BC, Chinese words, although pictographic in appearance, were no longer pictographs in function. They were words representing concepts rather than symbols representing things or objects. Chapter III: Song and Sound of Poetry is a history of the formation of Chinese literary poetry. Unlike the Medieval Latin text that dominated the sound of church music and produced an increasingly perfected unison between words and melody, Chinese poetry allowed music, both native and foreign, to provide original and innovative rhythm and tone for its poetic form. Every type of Chinese poetry originated from song which provided the basic rhythmic and verbal structure of the poetic composition. Since Han dynasty (202 BC–220 AD), the grammatical structure of Chinese has not changed; yet its poetry has accumulated increasingly sophisticated forms. Initially, music that 9 carried poetic rhyme with four, five, and seven character lines established as the predominant poetic form until the Tang dynasty (618–907). Ci (literally meant lyrics of a song) in the Song dynasty (960–1279) inspired new forms of poetry. This broke the monopoly of quantitative poetic structure and led to the emergence of poetry of uneven lines. This innovation allowed poets more creative freedom while maintaining a highly complex form. PART TWO PAINTING, THEATRE, AND IMAGERY OF POETRY This part depicts the development of literary poetry in the context of the evolution of artistic imagery of Chinese painting and theatre. Chapter IV: History of Painting is a brief history of Chinese painting. It began with ornamental design, such as Stone Age pottery painted with spirals, zigzags, dots, or animals. The artists from Han to Tang dynasties mainly painted human figures. Many examples have been found in burial sites, where paintings were preserved on silk banners, lacquered objects, and tomb walls. However, landscape is considered the highest form of Chinese visual art. The Five Dynasties period (907-960) and the Northern Song period (907-1127) is known as the great age of Chinese landscape. Chapter V: Rhythm and Imagery of Nature focuses on the poetic nature of Chinese landscape and its contribution to literary refinement. Chinese landscape painting projects a personal vision of nature on the canvas rather than its imitation. On this canvas, the painter expresses particular emotion and momentary mood in various shapes, colors, and shades, and in distinct degrees of contrast, movement, and harmony. Painting does not intend only to be seen, but also to be felt. It is poetry for one’s eyes. This visual poetry contributed a great deal to refocus and refine verbal imagery, which gradually became as sharp and precise as painting. It inspired poets to use words as line and color to paint mental pictures into the minds of readers. 10 Chapter VI: Rhythm and Imagery of Feelings Chinese lyric poetry could be called romantic, but only in the sense of the English poetry of the twentieth century. The natural images in Chinese poetry were much more enriched compared to those in English Romantic poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Chinese poetry never had to make a general choice between nature and man. Chinese believed that nature was neither divine in origin nor universal in its structure. Mountains, rivers, trees, and flowers, as isolated objects described a specific vision of a single literary mind and portrayed the pulse of his emotion. Chapter VII: Poetry on Stage describes the influence of theatrical performance upon Chinese literature. Unlike Greek, Roman and English Renaissance theatre, Chinese theatre, which emerged and flourished from the 8th to 17th century, was a post-literary theatre, comparable to Italian opera and the modern theatres of Europe and North America during the twentieth century. It was concerned less with story (plot), and concentrated on the theatrical display and performance as words were heard, seen and acted out. It equipped words with music and dramatic affect that was not possible to be perceived by silent reading alone. After being saturated in theatre for centuries, Chinese words now, like modern English, provoke various sound (music), imagery (scenery and gesture), and meaning. Chapter VIII: Conclusions The most distinct character of Chinese culture is its exceptional diversity and fluidity. The boundaries between words, literary genres, literature and philosophy, reality and fiction, have leveled out and intermingled by timeless literary evolution. A literary mind that is trained in its entire repertoire acquires a much larger and multidimensional vision compared to one that emerges from younger culture. The Chinese mind can simultaneously reach for the most analytical and the most sensual expression without losing its literary and logical coherence. However, only a small minority of Chinese speakers is adequately educated in its literature because everyday spoken Chinese only includes a small fraction (perhaps one or two percent) of its known written vocabulary, and a functional literacy requires knowledge of only about up to five percent of Chinese words. 11