Chapter XII: The Chinese Language and Schools

We should always be interested in the language of any country we travel in. If we take the trouble to learn a little of it we shall get much more pleasure as well as more learning out of our travels. Interpreters often fool us even when they have no intention of doing so, for it is not easy to translate so strange a language as Chinese. It is not simply that the words are different from ours, but the Chinese mind often works differently. For instance, if you ask a Chinese waiter, “Is there no bread?” he will answer “Yes” if there is _none_ and “No” if there is _some_. What he means is “Yes, you are right; there is no bread,” or “No, you are wrong, there is bread.” This is really just as sensible as our way, isn’t it?

It is not very hard to learn enough of a language, even as strange a language as Chinese, to get around alone. If you study it a little and listen to the people all the time, you will be surprised to find how soon you can talk to them on simple matters. It is a good idea to take along a few picture books when you travel in China, or in any other foreign country. The pictures interest the boys who gather around you, and you will learn the names of the things in the pictures by hearing the boys pronounce them.

Magazine advertising pages will do almost as well. The trouble there is that many Chinese do not know the difference between photographs and fanciful drawings. Several times in out-of-the-way parts of China boys asked me if we really had such funny-looking people in our country as the dwarfs and trolls and fat little men carrying cans of soup shown in some of our advertisements.

A Picture Language

The Chinese do not write with letters. Each word is a kind of picture, and there are tens of thousands of them. There is no way of telling from the characters or pictures how the word should be pronounced. So instead of only twenty-six letters, all the thousands of characters have to be learned separately. The Chinese typesetter in a printing-shop does not sit down at his work. He has to walk from one end of a long room to the other to get the characters he needs. These characters are the same not only all over China but in Japan, Korea, Formosa, and French Annam. But they are pronounced differently in each country, and in different parts of China also.

A Korean can talk to an Annamese, or a Japanese to a Formosan, or a man of northern China to one from the south. But he has to do it the way deaf and dumb people talk to us—by writing, sometimes by merely pretending to write, the character with a forefinger in the palm of the hand. I have had Chinese or Japanese servants, who could not make me understand by talking, draw invisible pictures for me in their hands. Because a Korean or an Annamese would have understood them they thought any foreigner should.

Although the language spoken by the Chinese is really primitive in its make-up, like the language of our Indians and many uncivilized tribes, they have made it a very civilized language, and can talk as easily about literature or philosophy as we can. Each word or character has one syllable. Sometimes several characters are combined, as in “point-south pin,” but those are really separate words.

Now if you will try to invent a language with only one-syllable words in it you will find there are not enough sounds to make many words. The Chinese got around this difficulty in a very clever way. If they drawl a word it means one thing; if they say it sharply it means something else; if they say it in a high voice it means quite a different thing from what it means when said in a bass voice. A boy whose voice is changing has a hard time talking Chinese.

Foreigners call these different ways of saying the same words “tones,” though they are rather intonations. The language of Peking has four “tones”; down in Canton there are nine, that is, the same syllable means nine different things, depending on the “tone” in which it is pronounced.

An Easy Yet a Difficult Language

My little boy, who was just beginning to talk when we reached Peking, learned Chinese more quickly than he did English. That was natural, for words of one syllable are easier to learn than long ones. In fact, in a way Chinese is a child’s language. It has almost no grammar, no genders, no tenses, no singular and plural, no articles, and very few of the other troubles that we have in our own language lessons.

A Chinese school of the old sort. It has no front wall, though a main
road goes past it and there is no “front yard” at all! How would you
like to try to get lessons sitting out on the curbstone or on the
edge of the highway? The old style of study consists in shouting
Chinese classics, so as to memorize them, while the teacher sleeps
or smokes.
]

If a Chinese wishes to ask whether a thing is good or bad he simply says, “Good not good?” For “A man riding a horse came down the lane,” he says, “Man horse come lane.” But that does not mean that Chinese is an easy language to learn well. The “tones” alone are harder than all our grammar, and most boys take from six to eight years to learn to read and write. So we should find it hard work to learn Chinese properly.

Modern Schools

China now has many schools much like our own. The pupils study about the same subjects that you do, though of course they take Chinese history instead of American or European. They sit at desks like yours, have teachers paid by the government or the city, and use books similar to your schoolbooks, except that they begin at the back and read down columns from right to left.

Some American schoolbooks have been translated into Chinese. There are gymnasiums and physical training in some schools, though many Chinese boys seem to like to play checkers or ping-pong or croquet rather than baseball and football. There are manual-training schools and all kinds of technical high schools and several large Chinese universities. Boys and girls usually go to different schools, or at least to different classes, for the Chinese think that this is the best arrangement.

Out in the villages and in the far-away parts of the country there are still many of the old-fashioned schools which China had before the revolution. There the pupils usually sit on narrow sawhorses and shout all day long at the top of their lungs. The old style of teaching was to have the pupils memorize as many of the old Chinese classics as possible, and to write essays just like those that were written hundreds of years ago. If we had that system in our schools, you would have a book of Shakespeare or of some old philosopher before you, and each pupil would be reading in a different place and shouting different words at the same time. The teacher pays very little attention, unless the shouting dies down. Then he jumps up, perhaps with a switch or ruler, and sets everyone to shouting again.

Very few girls go to these old-fashioned schools. In fact most Chinese still think girls do not need an education. Millions of boys and even more girls, especially the sons and daughters of peasants and coolies and other poor people, never get to school at all. There are not yet places enough for them, and only in a few cities are children required to go to school if they or their parents do not wish it. In olden times, not so long ago, students were shut up in cells in great examination-halls when the time came to take their examinations. They were left there sometimes for two or three days, during which they had to write essays as much as possible like those in the old Chinese classics. No one was expected, or even allowed, to have any ideas of his own.

The Chinese Are Very Intelligent

You would be very much mistaken if you thought that because millions of them cannot read or write, the Chinese are not intelligent. Even those who still have many of the ridiculous old superstitions are very bright and have a great deal of hard common sense. In fact I have seen many an “ignorant” Chinese coolie whose mind was much sharper than the minds of some Americans who go through high school and then read nothing much for the rest of their lives but a daily newspaper and now and then a cheap novel.

Compared to the number in our country, there are very few newspapers in China. Most of those are miserable little sheets that look like the handbills scattered about by our stores and theaters. But the Chinese get the news, for all that. They hear much of it at the tea shops where all the men gather. The women do not often go to such places, but many of them exchange gossip on the river-bank or pond-edge where they do their washing. Whenever I traveled through the country away from railroads and steamers I heard my mule-drivers or boatmen or carrier-coolies exchanging the news with those they met from the other direction everywhere along the way.

Tea shop gossip is, of course, hardly equal to a good daily newspaper, or to the better class of weekly and monthly magazines. There are no movies in most parts of China, either, and very few of our many other ways of telling people what they ought to know. That is one of the reasons why China cannot yet be a real republic, just as it is the reason why there is so much uncleanliness and unhygienic living and disease. If you have no way of showing people the truth you cannot teach them why they should brush their teeth every day and take frequent baths.

Some Chinese men and women, as well as foreign missionaries, are doing all they can to teach the poor people who have never had time to go to school or could not find room in one. In Taiyuanfu, the capital of Shansi Province, the “model governor” put up big billboards with one thousand of the most important Chinese characters painted on them. Rickshaw-coolies waiting for customers and women going to market can study these and perhaps in time learn them. Of course knowing only one thousand of the many Chinese characters is much like knowing only the words in one of our readers for first grade. But with that start many a coolie who has never been inside a school has learned to read at least the newspapers. Now the thousand-character idea is being used in many parts of the country.

My Chinese name, Fei Lan-kuh.
]

Every foreigner who goes to China, by the way, should take a Chinese name. The Chinese cannot pronounce or even write our names in their characters. Besides, there are only about a hundred Chinese family names, and they are the only ones the Chinese recognize. My own Chinese name is Fei Lan-kuh. Fei is as nearly as the Chinese who have not studied English can pronounce my last name. They could no more read my real name on a visiting-card than you can read the one on my Chinese card. To the Chinese I was Mr. Fei. The character with that sound means extravagance, and Lan-kuh means orchid and self-control. But I do not believe the Chinese thought me either extravagant or flower-like!

Work on a New Alphabet

Some Chinese and many foreigners have tried to make an alphabet that could be used instead of the thousands of picture-words it takes so many years to learn. But that is not easy, because even if you can invent letters to represent all the queer Chinese sounds you still have to find ways to show whether the word should be pronounced high or low, fast or slow, or in any other of the various “tones.” Besides, the Chinese say that if they stop using the old characters they will no longer be able to read their famous classics. They remind us that the boys and girls of Korea and Annam, where the Japanese and the French have introduced simplified books, can no longer read Confucius or any of the old philosophers. We should not like it if the English language were so changed that our children would be unable to read the great classics of our literature.

In olden times education was held in great honor in China. Those who stood highest in the old-fashioned examinations had the best chance of becoming high government officials. Coolies still consider a boy who goes to high school very far above them. Some students have taken advantage of this to start trouble against foreigners or against the government, but most of them are learning to take a really intelligent interest in the problems of their country.

We must not forget that the Chinese invented gunpowder, the compass, printing, porcelain, and many other important things. They have thought out some of the greatest proverbs, some of the wisest philosophy that the world possesses. They are the most ingenious people on earth. If they have never become really inventive as well as ingenious, it is because there were always so many men ready to work for almost nothing that it was cheaper to get along, for example, with a windlass than to invent a windmill.