Having Fun All The Time

Today I was teaching class and had a realization when a student read a sentence from a dialogue we were working on.

The sentence was: “I’ve got two potential applicants for the position in your company.”

A single student read the sentence, because recently whenever I’ve introduced new material to the class I’ve been asking them to read it one-by-one, rather than in the group, so that I would have a chance to listen to the students’ tone and word emphasis carefully.

In this case, when the student read the sentence, she had no pronunciation problems in terms of the individual words. She produced the sounds of each word perfectly, as if the rules of pronunciation of the International Phonetic Alphabet (the IPA) had been hard-coded into her brain (which they pretty much have, by this point).

But I noticed a problem. It was that she wasn’t using tone and emphasis to indicate that the word “two” was in fact the number two, not the word “to”.

For example, take a look at two sentences:

“I know to dance.”

“I know two dances.”

Do me the favor of ignoring for a moment that “I know to dance” is kind of a nonsense sentence, and think about this question: What is the pronunciation difference between these two sentences? Of course, as a native speaker of English, you know that the word “to” is pronounced more like “tuh” in the first sentence, whereas the pronunciation of “two” in sentence two is louder, clearer, and longer, with a long “ooh” sound at the end.

But what is the pronunciation difference between “to” and “two”? Can you explain it?

After teaching English as a second language for a year and a half to age groups from college to primary school and everything in between, I don’t remember anymore if I could have succinctly answered that question before I came to China. But I doubt it.

I certainly had zero familiarity with the IPA, and didn’t even know, at the time, that my soon-to-be students would have been relying on the IPA to learn the pronunciation of words since their childhoods when they first started studying English.

For most of my first year of teaching, in fact, I still had no idea how to write or read the IPA, much less, for that matter, how to teach the individual sounds of English other than standing in front of my students and saying, “It’s thhhhhhh. THHHHHH! Put your tongue between your teeth! Watch me! THHHHHHH!”

But that’s because I hadn’t taken the time to learn the IPA. Every time I looked at it I got a headache. The IPA is that pronunciation coding that you find in some dictionaries when you look up English words. It’s the one that virtually all native English speakers ignore, because they never had to learn it.

I still hate looking at the IPA, but I’ve learned its value. Just to give you a peek at what it looks like, here’s the sentence above that my student read, rendered in the International Phonetic Alphabet:

aiv gat tu: strɔ:ŋ kændədəts fɔ:r ðə markətiŋ pəzɪʃən jʊr lʊkiŋ tu: fɪl

If you put this string of funny looking characters in front of a Chinese student in middle school or above, she can read it. I learned it because last semester I grudgingly taught a course in English pronunciation. I started teaching the class  only knowing a few of the several dozen characters, and by the end I knew all of them, just by bloody in-class repetition of use and by having to teach the students the letters one-by-one.

The necessity of the IPA for language learners is pretty obvious. If you have no inborn knowledge of English, and you reference the dictionary, and it tells you that “pretentious” is pronounced pri-ten-shuhs, how are you supposed to know how to read that any better? Is the i in pri the same as the i in prize? Or is it the i in ship? The IPA solves that kind of problem by giving a character whose pronunciation is always the same.

But the funny thing about it, and the reason I say that your (meaning native English speakers in general) understanding of language is too simple, is that Chinese people are generally shocked and confounded when I tell them that we never learn the IPA in school in the United States, and that most native speakers don’t even know what the IPA is.

How, then, could you learn to read? How could you see a five syllable word on a page and produce it flawlessly, without ever learning a system to explain English’s idiosyncratic, deeply flawed spelling system? (For reference on the “deeply flawed” part see approximately half of the comedian George Carlin’s stand-up material.) The answer is just that when you are born in a language, and are then surrounded by it every day during the formative period of your life, the first 8 to 15 years, you are exposed to so much of that language that you learn it naturally.

But that concept is difficult to understand for someone who grew up in a differently language. Thusly for me and Chinese. When I first started studying Chinese, the fact that every Chinese word has a tone (flat, rising, dipping, or falling) was overwhelmingly frustrating to me. It seemed impossible that anyone could ever speak that way truly comfortably, truly fluently.

Of course, I was wrong, and over the past six months I have been at times surprised to see myself finally expressing Chinese sentences with minimal thought applied to tones but the tones actually coming out right. All it took was constant exposure and a kind of unhealthy obsession.

Even uttering the most basic word in the beginning, “hello” 你好 or nǐ hǎo, was nearly impossible. I could produce the correct tones when sitting alone in my apartment, but I would walk out the door, go to the convenience store outside, open my mouth, and an aberration would come out. Something not even close to the proper tones.

Because foreigners across the board have sucked at Chinese tones since the beginning of time, when I meet people they often greet me with intentionally mangled tones, as though they think it will be easier for me to understand that way. Cab drivers do this the most. I open the cab door and deliver the accurately pronounced “hello” that I’ve worked on for nearly two years, and they give me a very weird sounding hello in response.

My landlord does this, too. At this point I’ve lived in the little apartment that’s adjoined to his and his family’s for eight months, and I’ve had numerous lengthy conversations with everyone in the family throughout which I’m confident nearly all my tones were correct, but every time I see him he still gives me a “hello” with crazy tones, as if he thinks all laowai (foreigners), even ones who can speak Chinese, still can’t tell a wrong tone when they hear it.

Every time he does this, I can’t help thinking of what it would be like if a Chinese person lived in the U.S. for two years, learned OK English, and then every time he ran into his landlord, he received a loud “HERRO!” in greeting.

My Chinese teacher in my first year was a young Psychology teacher in my department named Ms. Li. The reason I got her as a teacher was (as I learned later) because she could speak pretty good English. Ms. Li is just a few months older than me and thin and attractive, with light freckles on her nose and cheeks and a wide, slightly tan face.

One experience I will never forget is her trying to teach me how to pronounce the word “umbrella” 雨伞 or yǔ sǎn. Those little up-side-down triangles over yu and san indicate that each of the characters should be pronounced with the third tone, a slow, low, dipping tone.

But the thing I didn’t know, and Ms. Li didn’t know to tell me, was that when there are two third tones in a row in Chinese, the first one becomes a second tone.

Ms. Li didn’t know that. Of course she knew it, in that she produced beautiful spoken Chinese every day, by dint of a native speaker’s effortless, masterful control of a language. But she didn’t know it consciously in that she could teach it to me. She couldn’t explain it to me. She could only sit there, and say: “Two third tones. Yǔ sǎn. Yǔ sǎn. Yǔ sǎn!”

There are things we don’t know. And there are things we don’t know we don’t know. And then there are things we know, but we don’t know that we know. Those things, maybe more than anything else, consist in language. And that is one of the major things I have learned in my time here.

If you want to learn a language, you must do so in chunks. You must find audio recordings of native speakers conversing at natural or near-natural speeds (forget all of those useless Rosetta Stone tapes. They are all bullshit) and you must push yourself to copy their pronunciation as perfectly as possible.

You must remain flexible. You must remember that there are rules, but every rules has an exception. You must focus on memorizing words, and then stop memorizing words for a while and practice listening, and then practice pronunciation, and then do tongue twisters, and then walk around town talking to anyone who will talk to you, and then go home and memorize more words, and then do the cycle all over again.

You must alter your strategy every month or so and focus on something new, but then you must also have consistency. You must do the same thing every day. You must do things to get yourself in the company of strangers who can’t speak English, you must go on boring trips, go to dinner with people you don’t like, sit for hundreds of hours listening to people talk and not understanding them.

You must slowly, gradually, allow yourself to expand. You must never wonder if it’s worth it. You must understand that you will never speak the language as beautifully as the clumsiest native speaker. You must accept that painful truth. You must keep going anyway. You must gain confidence gradually, and then lose the majority of it in one disastrous encounter in which communication fails completely. You must gradually regather confidence.

You must forget the you who couldn’t communicate at all in the tongue you can now speak. You must realize, now, that you are worse than a child, even in the language that you now speak. You must accept that your skills in your native language have actually become slightly weaker, that there are new words, new concepts, that have actually emerged since you left your native country that you now know nothing about.

You must do all these things to learn, but why? I don’t know why. Because it’s interesting. Because in the beginning every week you realize that you have taken a step forward, and you said something. And then a few weeks later you said something even better and longer, and then a few months later you sort of had a conversation, and then several months later you understood everything she said to you, and then a year later you spent a whole day with someone without uttering a single English word, and then you come to know someone in that language, and then you laugh in that language.

It’s not about thinking in Chinese. It’s not about dreaming in Chinese. Anyone who has studied Chinese seriously for more than a few months has done both, I think. It’s about becoming a person in the language you want to speak. Building yourself up in a new language, a new person, of sorts, but the same person. It’s about all those things. And along the way, you learn that language is a hell of a thing.

I suppose everybody, even people in the U.S., know that the Internet in China is censored. Here in the mainland, foreigners tend to refer to the block that is imposed on their Internet use as the “Great F!rew@ll of China” (you can take out the exclamation point and at sign yourself), also known by its abbreviation, the G – F  _ W, or sometimes called the “Net N@nny” (again remove at sign).

If you think I’m going overboard with my use of euphemistic @s and !s, then you haven’t been trying to use the Internet in China the last couple of weeks.

Gmail: I can't live if living is without you.

Starting about two weeks ago, the V.P.N. (virtual private network) that I previously used to access blocked sites in China went dead. There was no warning, no explanation — just a dot that had been green on my MacBook’s menu bar went to orange, and I couldn’t open Facebook anymore.

For those not in the know, a V P N is a service that allows you to connect to an offshore ISP, which encodes the transfer of information between you and the I.S.P. and allows you to circumvent any blockage that might be going on in the place you’re in. V.P.N.s are also used by businesses to encode Internet use within the company, so that information can’t be stolen by “hackers” (the Chinese word for hacker, interestingly, is hei1ke4, 黑客, or “black guest”).

The service I use costs about $60 U.S. per year, not a huge dent in the fender, and allowed me to continue to communicate with friends and family back home via Facebook, also to post pictures of my life here and generally remain connected. (Facebook seems to have taken the place of email over the past few years. For some reason it just now seems more comfortable, and more personal, to send messages by Facebook rather than by email.)

The service also allowed me to keep posted about the real goings on within China. One of the most noticeable victims of the Net N@nny has been China bloggers, who sometimes find cause to write blog posts that are either critical of big papi here or that simply say things big papi would not rather have out there. I follow about 20 blogs that cover China, most of which are blocked here. The news is interesting and, more than informing me about political events, also give me a lot of non-sensitive news about what’s happening here that I can’t find in Western news sources.

The New York Times isn’t blocked. (Maybe big papi isn’t so worried about a big, unwieldy English news source?) Most university sites aren’t blocked. General harmless information that has nothing to do with China isn’t blocked, naturally. And Wikipedia generally isn’t blocked, but if you try to look up anything controversial you’re going to come up with a big “This webpage is not available” error message.

But Facebook, Youtube, blogger.com sites, many Wikipedia pages, countless non-blogger.com blogs, all sites that reveal more skin than a woman or man in a bathing suit, and countless other news and information sources are blocked by the Great F!rew@ll of China. The only reason that this blog is not blocked in China is because I have never written the names of certain places, and I have never written anything remotely critical of big papi, or if I have I have done so carefully (as evidence see this post).

This was all fine and acceptable to me, as long as I could use my trusty V.P.N. And I think most laowai (“old outside”, i.e. foreigner in Chinese) felt the same way. We went about our business, keeping ourselves informed and connected and I think, for the most part, keeping our traps shut about controversial issues when talking with Chinese people on a daily basis.

But soon after my V.P.N. went haywire, I started to experience an even worse problem: Gmail was suddenly acting very strange, sometimes not loading at all, loading very slowly, taking forever to load emails or perform searches, moving like a snail when I wanted to send a message and sometimes never getting there at all.

I think I read somewhere, back in my high school Psychology class, that if you feed a rat every five minutes, it gets used to the predictability of its food and slowly saunters over when snacks arrive. If you feed the rat every ten hours, you get about the same reaction. But if you mess with the rat’s head — if you give it food now, then five minutes later, then an hour later, then twenty seconds later, then a day later, the rat goes completely nuts every time the food arrives. It thinks the food will never come again after this one time. To anthropomorphize, the rat is driven completely insane with the unpredictability of things.

This is, it turns out, what China is trying to do to its Gmail users. The country’s censors decided not to completely block Gmail, but instead to mess with Gmail, so that its users never know when it’s going to work or not work, so that we’re constantly on edge, so that every time we try to check our email we sweat a little.

I wish I were making this shit up. But I’m not. A few days after Gmail started acting really weird, first bloggers started to complain (see John Pasden’s helpful post and his links for more), then headlines started popping up about Gmail not working for other users, and then finally, just two days ago, Google officially accused China of interfering with Gmail’s services.

“There is no technical issue on our side — we have checked extensively. This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail,” Google said in a statement.

Google finally threw down the gauntlet and accused big papi of what those of us on this side of the wall knew all along. Somehow papi had found a way to seriously screw with Gmail services in the country without totally blocking them. There’s a lot of mumbo jumbo on the net about how technically difficult this is to do, but what it came down to was that Gmail was just barely usable.

There were other people saying that Google docs and other services had become unusable as well, and that, again, papi had found a way to make it look like everything was fine on this end, but that something was screwy with Google.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case. It was just big papi interfering with our internal affairs. And for this laowai, this issue suddenly became very personal. I use Google Video to chat with my family. Of course I use it to email everyone I know. I use it for document backup for my writing. I use it for chat. I check it ten times a day. More than six years of conversations, long-winded emails, and contact information of people I barely hear from anymore, are stored there. It’s very much in my blood, a part of my life.

Perhaps its sad, but this development was the first that really made me question whether I want to be here in China, or at least, it made me question my being here more than any other thing I’ve encountered in my 15-ish months here has. I started trying to think of using a Chinese email client, switching my email and informing everyone I know, no longer being able to be informed about what is really going on in the place where I live, and I thought, is it worth it?

I don’t know if it’s worth it. Certainly the lack of Gmail is not the greatest tragedy of the Great F!rew@ll. The fact that hundreds of millions of people can’t read about what’s happening in their country is clearly more relevant. Or the fact that including the English word “sex” in an email can make it impossible to send without use of a V.P.N. here. But that doesn’t affect me as much. For laowai, I suppose it’s more about what our situation is — if we can find a way to make life here worth it, especially those of us who are just here to live and learn, and have only personal reasons for wanting to get around the Wall.

The vinegar in the wound is that Baidu, the Chinese response to Google.com, is such a shameless ripoff it’s not funny. Google.com, for instance, recently added a feature that allows search results to roll down as you scroll down the page, so that you don’t have to thumb-forward to see the next page of search results. As far as I could tell, within two weeks of Google.com adding the feature, Baidu had added it as well (hm, that feature seems to have disappeared now…maybe my observation was wrong). Renrenwang, likewise, is the China mainland response to Facebook. It, too, is a shameless ripoff of Facebook, featuring the same designs, same features, same theme color.

The same sites that are blocked in mainland China are copied by mainland companies, down to the most basic design elements. Of course, this is the smart move for China. It shelters domestic companies and protects papi from the dissemination of potentially dangerous information. But it’s nearly the definition of frustration for laowai. It is not infuriating. There are much more infuriating things that happen here every day. It is merely frustrating.

To cap off the post, I’ll say that as of today, about a day after the Google announcement that China was interfering with Gmail (accusations that big papi denied), all of the issues with Gmail seem to have mysteriously disappeared. This is the “feint” that, I hope, has concluded papi’s interference in our Gmail usage. The poor drunk went too far, and hopefully all the people who use Gmail all over the country helped to put him in line. But who knows, really. He could turn it all off, the whole Internet, for all I know, tomorrow, and it’s impossible to say what the people here would do.

Maybe they would just shrug their shoulders, and say oh well, and turn back to whatever it was they were doing. Except for one little problem that (I guess) might come up: That thing they were doing? It was probably using the Internet!

I was in my apartment studying Chinese last Friday when the earthquake struck and the tsunami hit Japan. One of my high school students sent me a text message that said simply:

“News Alert: Tsunami Hits Japan After 8.8 Magnitude Earthquake Off Coast”

After learning that the tsunami wouldn’t at all affect the province I’m in, my first thought was about my friend Mami, a Japanese teacher who lives on the coastal capital city of this province. I see her every week or so. I met her last summer while I was traveling in Fujian. I was worried that the tsunami might have been near her home, because she’s from a beach town. But Mami is from Okinawa, the far South of Japan, and after a quick scan of the news it was obvious that Okinawa hadn’t been damaged by the tsunami. I called her an hour or so later (I figured her students would be jamming her phone with messages, so I didn’t call right away) and she said everybody in her family was fine, but she wasn’t sure about some friends who were living in northern Japan.

A photo of a whirlpool off the coast of Japan from the Sendai quake - pulled from ChinaSmack.com

Actually, the first day the news didn’t sound so bad. The New York Times reported that only a hundred or more people had died. This sounds strange now, since the headlines are saying that more than 10,000 have died, but the first day it didn’t seem so bad.

The thing I dreaded the most that first day was hearing what Chinese people were going to say about it. I assumed, since Chinese are  generally very open and unabashed about their negative feelings toward Japanese (and vice versa, from what I’ve heard, although I’ve never been to Japan so I don’t know), that people would gloat and be happy about the horrible disaster. I braced myself for what I assumed would be a few days of jarring, insensitive comments.

It turned out that I underestimated people, at least the people I know. I first asked my close Chinese friend Mike what he thought about the disaster, since that evening I was in his family’s house and the news was on the TV.

“It’s a terrible tragedy,” he said in English. “Of course there is some negative history between the two countries, but this kind of natural disaster is no one’s fault.”

Since I know that Mike is generally more open-minded than the average Chinese, I asked him if he thought other people would be happy about the disaster.

“Zhege wo bu dong,” he said. I don’t know about that.

So I decided, in my Sunday speech classes with the high school students, to use the Japan earthquake as a discussion prompt. All of my students were interested in talking about the event, but their faces all grew a little austere when I asked them if people would be happy about it. One student of mine, Anthony, whose English is pretty good, saw it coming and addressed it before I even asked her.

“Of course, there is some bad history between the two countries. But if anyone thinks that the earthquake is a good thing, that is wrong. This has happened to innocent people,” she said (after asking me in Chinese how to say “innocent”).

One of my students, Rachel, said that she had already donated money to a rescue organization in Japan. She added, looking a bit shy, that she had donated much more money when an earthquake struck Sichuan Province in western China in 2008, killing more than 68,000 people. “Because I should give more to my country,” she said.

Among all the people I’ve talked to, everyone has seemed gravely sympathetic to the Japanese over the disaster, perhaps because the memory of the Sichuan earthquake is not too distant. And it has been pleasantly surprising to me to see people be sympathetic, especially since in recent months the Chinese have been pretty vocal about their disregard for the Japanese. Last fall there were protests all over China, even in this small city, after the Japanese Coast Guard detained a Chinese fishing vessel captain after his boat crashed into a Japanese vessel in contested waters.

Another photo from the earthquake - pulled from ChinaSmack

Last semester I even got into an argument with a student from the English department when he told me, with no prompting from myself, that Chinese hate Japanese. I confronted him on the opinion and tried to make it clear that it was offensive to me, which ultimately seemed to offend him. Eventually, the student actually got up from the lunch table and walked away from me, a sign of disrespect no one had ever shown me here. I tried to resolve it by getting up, stopping him, and explaining that as a foreigner I didn’t understand some things about Chinese culture, and that my intent was not to disagree but to learn. That seemed to calm him down, but it was still an awkward encounter, and after that I decided not to talk to Chinese about Japanese if I could avoid it.

But a levy seems to have broken: I sense little animus from Chinese towards Japanese now. The Chinese government sent a team of rescuers to try to help out in the country, and even on ChinaSmack (where the Internet hate-speak that all Internet users spew out is translated from Chinese into English) comments were supportive of Japan, and in the cases where people decided to say something offensive (“Because it’s Japan, I’m so happy”) there were other commenters who kept them in check (“The entire world will look at the reaction of Chinese people, can you please not make us lose face? Don’t forget that only yesterday Yunnan had an earthquake, do you want to completely lose face for Chinese people?”).

Of course, all this is in the face of a complete nightmare going on in the country next door. I just read in the Times that 400,000 people are homeless, well over 10,000 dead, and a nuclear power plant is fomenting the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Mami, my friend in Fuzhou, has gotten in touch with her friends in northern Japan and said that they’re all OK, but none of them can get back to their homes. They don’t even know if they still have homes. And my other Japanese friend, who is still in New York, may have friends or family in the same situation or worse.

It’s reason to be grateful to know that I, and the people I’m closest to, are all in safe places. And I guess comforting that even though the country next door has been crippled by a very sad natural disaster, at least people on this side of the map care enough to put the past aside.

Before I came to China, my former professor, who helped get me the job here, recommended that I read a book by Peter Hessler about two years the author spent living in rural Sichuan as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Hessler came to China in the late 90s to teach English at a lower-level university. He was one of the first foreigners to live in the city since the communist takeover in 1949, and the book was basically a straight-up account of his time as an English teacher. He supplemented the narrative about his experience with several vignettes about people he met while living in the small city of Fuling, but mostly the book was about what it was like to be an English teacher at a university in small-city China.

On the first page of that book (the book is called River Town), Hessler writes,

When we arrived, there was one other foreigner, a German who was spending a semester teaching at a local high school. But we met him only once, and he left not long after we settled in. After that we were the only foreigners in town. The population was about 200,000, which made it a small city by Chinese standards.

Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler

When I read the book, I didn’t know it, but it would be basically a guidebook to my entire first year in China. The town that I moved to, Sanming, has a population of about 200,000. I’m an English teacher at a lower-tier university. My students, like his, are largely from the countryside. I am one of only a few foreigners in town. I rarely see anyone who isn’t native Chinese. The environment is isolating at times, inspiring at the same time, very different from the world I knew before socially, historically, economically, linguistically.

That book was a completely indispensable guide to me in the beginning. Especially with regard to preparing me, mentally, for the discipline it would take to make progress learning Chinese. One of the best things about Hessler’s book is how he patiently describes the process of learning Chinese, from the high-level, like realizing, from month to month, that he could read and understand more than what he could before, to the very specific, like describing his method for studying Chinese characters:

And so Soddy’s question remained: How do you spend your spare time? When I finished teaching I would sit at my desk, which looked out across the Wu River to the city, and I would write:

学   学   学   学   学   学   学   学

While I wrote, I pronounced the word over and over, as carefully as I drew it:

“Xue xue xue xue xue xue xue xue.”

I would write the same character about a hundred times total, and then I would think of ways in which it was used: xuexi, xuesheng, xuexiao. And I would write it on a flash card and put it on a stack that grew steadily on my desk–between five and ten a day, usually.

After I had been in China for about three months, I re-read his book, and seeing how quickly his Chinese had progressed, I became extremely jealous and copied his method precisely.

That was for writing. I had different tools available for learning speaking and listening — better tools, most likely, since I had the Internet at my fingertips, something he didn’t have. I still struggled to keep up with the pace that he made in the book, feeling myself slowly slipping behind as one year became one and thensome (Hessler was practicing reading newspapers at the end of year one, and I’m just getting to that point now after a year and a half). But it was to a large extent his book that pushed me, gave me a goal to shoot for when there was nobody else around me who was trying as hard to learn Chinese (except Chinese school kids, but a foreigner could never compete with them). It was that way with so many things about China — I had read Hessler’s book, and saw the astonishing things he learned and the things he had to do to learn them, and to a large extent I just copied. I learned some of my own tricks along the way, improvising and also reading blogs of other China expats. But his book was the bible. It was the Alpha and the Omega for me in the first months. I am eternally grateful for it.

But, after finishing his second book, Oracle Bones, a few days ago, I think I have found a book about China that I can be more grateful for. I am about to slip from reviewing to fawning, but this is a blog: Oracle Bones has changed everything in subtle ways; after I got through the second half of the book my whole idea of China and Chinese people was changed, and I read the second half just in awe, the book two inches from my face. It seemed like every few pages I was either tearing up or laughing. It was one of the most intense reading experiences I’ve had since Henry Roth tore my heart to pieces in Call It Sleep when I read that novel four or five years ago.

That is, of course, largely because China has become so huge in my world over the past year and a half. Certainly if I had never left the shores of the U.S. and hadn’t struggled for almost 18 months to find a life that seemed sane here, I would not have been so gripped by Hessler’s account of his time in China from 1999 to 2002. But I think there is something transcendent about this particular book (it goes far beyond his third book, Country Driving, which came out last year and which I read last spring) — something that portrayed Chinese people, and how their lives have been driven, torn, shaped, annihilated, by history, that has made this book special to me. Like beautiful fiction, which I wouldn’t have thought a book that is essentially a piece of long-form journalism could ever approach.

To start, Hessler sprinkles the book with fascinating facts that remain imminent for the average expat: Chinese is “logographic”, meaning that each character represents one spoken syllable; a linguist named Zhou Youguang was the main architect of pinyin, the system by which Chinese is romanized (417); the ubiquitous Chinese dish in America called General Tao’s Chicken is named after General Zuo Tongtang who expanded the Chinese empire in the Qing Dynasty (377); and that, after Chinese writing was invented 3000 years ago, “the heavens rained millet and the ghosts wept all night long” (289). Also that the word “oracular” exists.

These are snippets, random notations that were significant to me as a reader, giving sense to things that formerly made no sense. But the true beauty of Oracle Bones is Hessler’s narrative achievement, how he takes a string of unrelated stories and binds them. And, by doing that, how he demonstrates the subjectivity of history. Hessler’s book is not a history book, and it’s not merely a work of reportage: it’s a book about the Chinese world and how mercurial our interpretation of that world is, how it is always changing, how its story is malleable to the point of almost falling apart at any moment, like pizza dough, except in the hands of an experienced teller.

At one point, he breaks away from his whole narrative about China to explain his feelings about journalism as a craft, field and profession:

When I had first arrived in Beijing, the translation from teacher to writer hadn’t seemed so difficult. The basic role was similar: I was the outsider who sifted information between worlds. But over the years, as I thought about what Emily had written, I realized that there would always be something unnatural about being a foreign correspondent. As a teacher, I had taken information from far away–American culture, English literature–and introduced it to a classroom of living Chinese students.

But a writer’s work moved in the opposite direction. I started with living people and then created stories that were published in a distant country. Often, the human subjects of my articles couldn’t even understand the language in which they were written. From my perspective, the publishing world was so remote that it seemed half real. Once a year, I visited editors in New York, and I rarely heard anything from readers of the magazine. Usually, I wrote only two or three articles a year, which was adequate to live simply in a country like China. The fee for a single published word in the New Yorker–more than two dollars–was enough to buy lunch in Beijing. With one long sentence, I could eat for a week. Those were the exchanges of a freelance foreign correspondent: people and places were distilled into words, and the words were sold.

Whenever I received copies of my New Yorker articles, I found myself flipping through the pages, thinking about the gap between the world where I lived and the world where I published. I traded on that gap–that was my margin, and the advertisements reflected the breadth of the divide. In one published story, anecdotes about Fuling students were interspersed with ads for Orb Silversmiths, the Tribeca Grand Hotel, and Wildflower Log Homes (“lots starting at 49k”). The article about Polat was entitled “The Middleman”, and it began with the sentence, “You can buy anything in Yabaolu.”

These paragraphs attest to someone who has done some serious thinking about his role in a country where the majority of people are still scrambling to eat, yet where an American can also conduct interviews, write stories, and make a six-figure salary in U.S. dollars. This is an idea that has been prominent in my mind for over a year. Since I arrived in China I have been diligently taking notes, studying Chinese, trying my best to make sure that I am observing everything completely. I do it not necessarily with the idea that I will write a book, as Hessler did, but simply to record. I want to know what I have been thinking and seeing and experiencing, whether or not I ever write a book about it. But there is something strange, something tarnished about that act. It’s the same problem that all journalism has. You watch, you observe, you note, you write. But what if somebody doesn’t want to be observed? What if somebody doesn’t want to be written about? Your job, your work, is to take a living person and reduce them to words. What happens if they don’t like what they see? How are you supposed to reconcile your work with that fact? This question involves all of journalism, eventually. I imagine, sometimes, a Chinese person going to America and writing a book about his or her experience. How much of what he or she saw, and then noted, and then wrote, would be true? Perhaps it is all about experience. What is relevant to the viewer, the subjectivity about it. I suppose what I appreciate about Hessler’s writing is that he doesn’t deign to be authoritative: he is always there, or at least usually there, admitting that what he sees is limited by his perspective.

The book, as I mentioned earlier, is also about the malleability of history. This is one reason why I hate history books. They are Swiss cheese in my eyes. A history book’s flaws are always at the fore of my mind when I read one. It’s so obvious that history is limited by the perspective of the time in which it is written, but that is so rarely made clear in the writing. Hessler makes an effort to do that. The most powerful story that Hessler follows in his book is one that he admits he knew from the start he would fail to ever learn the facts about: the story of Chen Mengjia, a Chinese scholar who was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution (the period under Mao Zedong’s reign in which China turned in on itself and destroyed many of its cultural relics) and later committed suicide. Hessler splices the story of Chen Mengjia (his given name means “dreaming of home” — Meng4jia1) through the whole book, introducing it briefly and then moving on to other things, touching on it again 50 pages later. We slowly discover that Mengjia was a great scholar who studied the famous oracle bones, the 3000 year-old fossils on which the first Chinese characters appear, who criticized Mao and the party in the 50s for simplifying Chinese characters, and we hear different stories about his death: he committed suicide out of pride after being labeled a rightist, he was killed by Red Guards, he had a racy love life, he was faithful to his wife, until finally, toward the end of the book, Hessler writes about his encounter with Chen Mengjia’s younger brother, Mengxiong (dream of bear). The interview is tense, and becomes moreso when Hessler shows Mengxiong a photocopy of one of the last letters his brother ever wrote — a letter Mengxiong has never seen:

In China, people often speak circuitously when confronted with an uncomfortable memory. The narrative emerges loosely, like string falling slack onto the floor; the listener has to imagine how everything connects. Sometimes the most important details are omitted entirely. But when the Chinese do decide to speak openly, their directness can be overpowering. Often, there is no visible emotion: just the simple straight words. And something about seeing his brother’s letter causes Mengxiong to pick up the story and pull it taught. For the next hour he speaks without fatigue.

He tells about how his older brother had been persecuted, and why, and how he eventually tried to kill himself by taking sleeping pills, but failed. So Mengxiong went to his home, and there encountered Red Guards (the activists who, with Mao Zedong’s support, worked to destroy artifacts, ideas and people who were perceived as “traditional” during the Cultural Revolution) who detained Mengxiong and Mengjia’s wife, shaved off half their hair as a form of punishment, and proceeded to beat them:

“…they took off their leather belts and started beating us. First they used this part–”

The old man touches the leather tip of his belt. Then he slides his hand to the buckle. “After a while, they used this part, the metal. That’s when I started bleeding. They were beating me on the head, and I was wearing a white shirt — it was summertime. It turned entirely red with blood. They weren’t beating Lucy on the head like that. After a while, I was getting seriously hurt, and I asked them to let me get some bandages at the local clinic. I explained that otherwise I was going to bleed too much, and I promised to return immediately. Finally, they agreed. But while I was at the clinic, I made a phone call to my work unit, and they immediately sent some people over. They explained that I was a good person, and the Red Guards let me go. On my way home I saw my wife–not the same wife you’ve met, but my wife at the time. I told her to hurry home. That was a terribly dangerous time. That evening you could hear them all night long, knocking on doors and beating people.”

Mengxiong explains that he couldn’t visit his brother again, and shortly after that his brother killed himself. The sad thing about it, the most immediately sad thing after you read about the brutality, is simply that the people being beaten were often scholars, people who had invested themselves in knowledge and the past, and in many cases in understanding the outside world–Mengjia and his wife had both lived in America for a time. And that is precisely what they were beaten and humiliated for–they had ideas that seemed dangerous. China was working to destroy its past, in a period of self-immolation, and also was working to destroy anything that hinted of the outside world. In that case, anyone who has pursued knowledge is suspect. When the past and the outside world are the enemies, what else is there? There isn’t anything left. That’s what these interviews make clear. That’s what’s so tragic about the whole thing.

And what’s so beautiful about this book. Hessler sees things, meets people, that you can hardly hold in your mind without feeling that it will burst, and yet he writes so stunningly clearly. China is his onion. And as he showed in River Town, he has such a capacity for understanding it, such a gift for learning about things so quickly and absorbing them so deeply, and yet holding on to himself, the reader can only stand and watch in awe. Hessler took a great leap of faith when he wrote this book that his reader would understand the perspective that he was looking through. That’s what lends the book such clarity, such greatness.

Early on in the book, Hessler visits the North Korean border and finds himself in a field in the middle of nowhere, looking at a border marker with no one around. This is the true feeling of the book: wherever Hessler goes, he has the clarity of someone who has been hiking for days without seeing a soul:

I dropped my pack and took a few steps into North Korea, where I balanced my camera on a rock and set the timer. In the photograph, the sky is a deep blue and white clouds hand low on the horizon. I am kneeling and my shadow falls across the stone marker. There is a dirty white bandage on my left hand. The mountains could be the mountains of any country.

When I read this book, I get the feeling that Hessler could be writing about any place, and it would still be this good.

Well, I’m back at my desk in China, studying Chinese, reading books, and scrambling, somewhat, to prepare for classes that I completely neglected to prepare for while I was home. Which was just as well, because it gave me time to hang out with people, get caught up as much as possible on what had been happening in my friends’ and families’ lives for the past year or so and just enjoy being there.

It was definitely a huge recharger, seeing friends especially and being around people who I relate to instinctively; at first it was unfamiliar and a little scary, I think because I was worried that we wouldn’t be able to relate or connect anymore for whatever reason. But when we did it felt good, as you’d expect, and made me question all over again whether I really wanted to go back to China.

Of course, not having anything else lined up, I had to come back. And now have been back for about three days. But the hard things about coming back are not the ones I expected. I’ve found that it’s basically just a horrible bitch to get over the time difference and the germs that you’re exposed to during long-distance travel, that moving from China to America and America to China is basically the same in that your first couple of days in either place is challenging physically and mentally, just because you have to confront a life that you haven’t confronted in a while, and do it on a severely mangled sleep schedule. Apart from that, and from a nasty cold that set in after my first day here, it’s been smooth — I was surprised at how natural and normal it felt to walk into my apartment building and put down my bags in the apartment I hadn’t seen for 5 weeks. Similar to how it used to feel to arrive back in Oregon after having been on the East Coast for a week or so, except in this case I was a hell of a lot farther from home.

Even that seems pretty remarkable to me. On the way to the airport I asked my father how long he thought it would have taken to get to China 100 years ago, and although I don’t know I assume it would be at least weeks and probably months. Now you can do it in a day and a half and feel like you never left.

Some observations from being home:

American food consists mainly of cheese and fried beef. That’s OK, but it becomes a problem because I love those foods. Particularly cheese. The fact that cheese is hard to come by in small-town China is extremely good for my waistline.

After a year in China, it takes about three weeks not to be stunned every time you see a person of non-Asian ethnicity.

After a year in China, even if you hate everything about Fox News, it is for some reason just intrinsically interesting to watch on TV. I have no idea why about this one. I can’t even begin to explain it. Maybe it has to do with how Fox News presents a simplified, uglier version of Americanism that is pretty close to the Chinese idea of what Americans are. I don’t know. That’s just a theory and I don’t think it’s true. It’s just fascinating, is all. The English voices, the big loud Americans, the bright colors, the extravagance, the extreme theories and unadorned Americanism. It’s weird. I couldn’t get enough of it, like picking at an itchy scab, so satisfying. I’d never even watched Fox News before this trip back to the U.S., but every time I saw it this time I was transfixed.

China quickly becomes a weird almost inaccessible washed-out memory. After a week home I found it difficult to recall lots of things, but now that I’m back that doesn’t make any sense because I don’t seem to have forgotten any of the language.

People in the U.S. are interested in China. I ended up having a lot more conversations about China than I expected with people who seemed genuinely interested. I kind of expected people to be pretty indifferent, because it’s such a far-away, weird, obscurely unknown kind of place. But people were pretty interested across the board, not too judgy, just asked questions and listened, which was really cool.

Now that I’ve woken up after a 15-hour night’s sleep and am feeling much better than I did the last two days, I think I’m getting used to things again and not feeling completely destroyed by the time change, I’m getting a bit more glad to be back. Not completely there yet, but getting there.

In October 2009 I left the U.S. to fly to China, to some city that I probably couldn’t have pointed to on a map if you asked me. I left by car; actually my mom drove me from my parents’ house in New Hampshire the five hours down to JFK in the middle of the night; we arrived after midnight and waited outside a brightly lit airport restaurant for the check-in counter to open. After I checked in we moved to the second floor, because it seemed a little quieter, and sat by a big wall of windows –it was still night so the windows were black — and waited for the time when my plane would board.

When it came time to go board I didn’t feel like I was consciously walking and moving and talking anymore; I was swimming in a mixture of emotions, just fighting to keep moving. And then, of course, saying goodbye to my mom felt like saying goodbye to the last person I knew in the world; the idea that I was going someplace where no one knew me or was likely to know anything about people like me was not just in my brain but enveloping my whole brain with fog. I guess I’m a creature who generally shies away from change, even though I have managed to find it pretty consistently in life for the past ten years.

Hugging my mom and saying bye was the first time that I felt like maybe bagging the whole thing, the whole idea, and just saying nope, take me home: Not goin’. Can’t do it.

Of course I didn’t do that. I recently returned home for the first time after about 15 months in China teaching English and studying Chinese. At a certain point I decided to go, and, knowing that it would be a disaster to let fear or anxiety get in the way of that plan, and wanting very much to stay there and have an immersive experience, I stayed.

I think a lot of people would not have such a hard time leaving home to go live in another country like China for so long — some people are better at it than others. But that saying-goodbye moment was very difficult for me — maybe the toughest thing that I’ve done.

The good news was, as I discovered, that was also the hardest thing I would have to do. Before I left, a friend who knew somebody who had also taught in China recalled a quote about the initial going-away experience: “It’s like jumping off the end of a pier into dark water, and when you land realizing that the water is only a foot deep.” I wouldn’t say that arriving in China, adjusting to the culture, making friends and learning the language, was as easy as wading around in knee-deep water, but it was a lot easier than I imagined it to be when I was waiting in the U.S. to leave.

I spent 15 months there. I learned, more or less, how to be a decent ESL teacher (although I know I still have a lot to learn about being a teacher). I made Chinese friends who I’ll definitely remember forever and had experiences that have totally changed my worldview. I managed to become fairly conversant in Chinese, although I also have many more years’ work ahead of me on that front. But I made it through, and none of the bad stuff I imagined before I left happened, or if some of my fears turned out to be true (getting sick from the water or street food, for instance), they weren’t nearly as bad as I imagined they could be (getting sick from water or food was never a major inconvenience — it happens, but I certainly never had to go to the hospital for it, for example).

So in the end I would say that the maxim about going to China was half-true. Or maybe I would offer this modification: “It’s like jumping off the end of a pier into dark water and remembering, oh yeah, I can swim.” Life in China isn’t necessarily harder than life in the U.S. : it’s just different, in a thousand fascinating ways.

So I’m going back in a month to continue teaching, with the hopes of reaching a level with my Chinese so that I can be certified as proficient, which hopefully will help me go in new directions that I maybe haven’t even thought of yet. And I’m looking forward to going back. When I was in NYC last week and walked by a Chinese man playing an erhu and all the memories came flooding back to me, I knew I wanted to go back. So I’m gonna. Hopefully I can find some people who want to go to Sanming to teach, too, because that school needs good teachers.

This article in the New York Times about the state of climate change as a political priority in the world was a good reminder of the issue. Interesting facts:

China has surpassed the United States in overall energy consumption; there is actually an MIT climatologist who claims that climate change isn’t a big problem (doesn’t that look bad for MIT?); and the parts-per-million measure of CO2 in the atmosphere will soon surpass 400 (it had been below 300 for about 800,000 years before the Industrial Revolution).

And then one haunting quote from the son, now himself a famous atomospheric scientist, of Charles David Keeling, the scientist who discovered in the 1950s or 60s that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere was rising. The son (Ralph Keeling) said:

“When I go see things with my children, I let them know they might not be around when they’re older,” he said. ” ‘Go enjoy these beautiful forests before they disappear. Go enjoy the glaciers in these parks because they won’t be around.’ It’s basically taking note of what we have, and appreciating it, and saying goodbye to it.”

Pretty fucking startling words…I hadn’t been startled on this issue in a while.

This article in the New York Times helped confirm something that I have been casually observing in the past 14 months in China: that prices for consumer goods, from eggs to jeans to cars, are totally chaotic and in some cases are either way too high or way too low, with no apparent explanation for the insane prices.

This article specifically quotes milk prices as an example of how inflation in China has begun to carry the prices of common goods way beyond the reach of the ordinary person:

“The money supply is too large,” said Andy Xie, an economist based in Shanghai who formerly worked at Morgan Stanley. “They increased the money supply to stimulate the economy. Now land prices have jumped 20 times in some places, 100 times in others. Inflation is broad-based. Go into a supermarket. Milk is more expensive in China than it is in the U.S.”

In Shanghai, where the average monthly wage is about $350, a gallon of milk now costs about $5.50.

I see this kind of thing everyday, and it wouldn’t be so crazy if there weren’t also products that were incredibly cheap, and also if there weren’t consumers so consistently making choices that to my eye seem absurd.

A little anecdote: I recently went “guang4jie1″ (sort of like window shopping) with a female Chinese friend of mine, who has maybe a bit of a problem with spending money. Although her monthly salary is lower than mine (my salary is about 4,000 yuan, or around $600), she compulsively buys things, mostly clothes but also other stuff like expensive meals and spa treatments, that I would never even dream of buying on a salary like hers.

A couple of weeks ago when I met up with her she casually bought a pair of 1,000 yuan boots and a 500 yuan dress in preparation for a holiday trip she was about to go on.

There’s a double-mystery here. The first part of the mystery is: whose money is she spending? Is it her parents’? Is it really hers and she spends no money most of the time and splurges on big things? Or is she just now, at the tender age of 24, beginning to burrow into a hole of debt that will one day haunt her like debt is haunting so many Americans now? I have no idea. I’ve never asked her where she gets her money from; although I have mentioned that it seems like she spends a lot of money.

The second part of the mystery becomes clear when you take a look at the 1,000 yuan boots she bought. We were in a department store in the middle of town and the boots were these kind of rhinestone-studded suede numbers that would sell for $40 in the U.S., I think. But she paid almost $150 for them.

As she was shoe-shopping I found a pair of classically ugly, cheap men’s  pleather shoes in the men’s footwear section. I don’t have a picture at the moment…I’ll try to go back and take one later, but these shoes were clearly pleather (fake leather), had cheap white soles with barely any traction, and were labeled with the brand name “FASHION” (this is a common brand name in China). The price tag was over 500 yuan, more than $80.

This makes no sense. You can buy a pair of Adidas just down the road for the same price, and the quality is far better, the shoes are made of much more durable and attractive material, and everyone knows that the shoes are expensive and nice. (Yeah, Adidas is considered “nice” here, and Puma is like super nice.)

On top of that, you can find these same shoes on the Internet for less than 100 yuan. Or in a seedier store in a crappier part of town. The reason for the high price seemed to be the location. You’re in department store, so some of the items will be double what they are elsewhere.

I have no idea how the retailers get away with this. It seems similar to the fruit phenomenon, which is that an apple costs 1 yuan when bought in the village next to the university, but 5 yuan when bought at a convenience store in the city.

Or the fact that a towel can cost 150 yuan in the city’s biggest mall, but 20 yuan at a smaller store outside the city center.

Crazier still is the fact that foreign-produced brand-name goods are often far more expensive than in the U.S. Levi’s jeans are the first thing that comes to mind. At home you can usually get a pair of Levi’s at Sears or some department store for around $30 or $40. But I’ve never seen a pair of Levi’s here for less than 400 yuan, about $60, and prices can go as high as 600 yuan, $90.

The higher you go, the more expensive stuff gets. There’s a Lacoste outlet store in this town (most of whose goods appear to be knockoffs) where the jeans cost a couple thousand yuan.

Cars are also often more expensive, and there’s a slightly hilarious and insane theory that a few Chinese people have told me that foreign car companies intentionally sell their cars for a higher price here because they think that Chinese people find prestige in more expensive things. Who knows where this theory comes from, but the only logical explanation I can see would be shipping costs and import taxes. The idea that a car company would raise its prices to attract customers, especially in a market like China where everybody just buys the nicest car they can afford, is ridiculous.

But with all that said, there is still one thing that seems to hold this world together like glue: you can still buy noodles and eggs for lunch for about 4 yuan, which is around 60 cents. If you live economically, which most people do, you can eat for only about 20 yuan per day ($3), which is almost exactly what my daily food budget is. That doesn’t include the yogurt I occasionally eat in the morning (5 yuan peanut noodles and hun dun dumpling soup is better anyway, just not as convenient), the Starbucks instant coffee I buy online, or my occasional pizza dinner, but it’s pretty consistent. In a good week I probably spend less than $50 on meals, and I always eat out.

Of course, if food prices caught up with the price of almost everything else here excluding rent (which they could do in the coming years — the CPI for food in China rose over 9 percent over the last 12 months as of October) even my life would be completely impossible here, even though my salary is higher than the average by about 2,000 yuan (around $300).

The reason: the rent for my tiny apartment is 1,300 yuan per month ($191), my student loans are still about 800 yuan per month ($112), and the various expenses of life invariably quickly eat up the remaining $300-odd of that $600-ish-a-month salary.

Luckily I have been able to find private students over the past six months or so to increase that income so that I don’t have to spend my savings to stay here, but it comes at the price of losing most of my days off in order to teach privately.

The whole money problem, however, is basically due to the fact that I can’t lower my living standards to that of most of the people here. In order to survive with prices like this and income like that, there’s certain food you have to eat every day, certain places you have to live, certain clothes you have to buy. Last year living at the college I more or less lived in those conditions and ate that food. But I don’t think I would want to do it again.

Anyway, I still have enough time to study and to write, and teaching English here is for the most part enjoyable and rewarding. But sometimes it’s a shock to think about the income gap between here and the U.S., and then see how much stuff still costs here.

I think I’m making progress on the front of being not so sensitive to questions and comments that make huge generalizations about Americans, foreigners, white people on a regular basis here, especially from people who don’t have any experience with foreigners.

But it can be a challenge. In a recent Chinesepod lesson, John Pasden, the foreigner host of the show (it’s a daily podcast for learning Chinese) mentioned that China is a post-industrial, pre-PC culture — meaning that, for example, in China it’s still OK to call someone fat if they’re fat, if they’re deaf-mute to call them dumb, or, to distinguish blind from seeing people by call seeing people “normal”.

This spills over into a million different things. I can’t profess to really get it. I think to some extent, to deal with non-PC-ness you just have to be a very easy-going person with an unshakable sense of humor. Which I have the capacity for, but sometimes am not really good at.

For example, yesterday, one of my Chinese teachers asked me if foreigners are all fat, if foreign women all look 60 when they’re 30; an acquaintance of mine recently used the derogatory word for black people at the dinner table (in Chinese and then, when I questioned him on it, in English); and pretty much every time I eat something that resembles junk food (which I do on occasion) some Chinese person in my vicinity turns to whomever is standing next to them and explains to them, in Chinese, that the only thing we foreigners eat is McDonald’s and KFC, so that’s why I’m eating that.

People also occasionally ask me why the United States is performing military drills in the Yellow Sea, up by Korea and Northern China, and then tell me, with barely masked emotion, that Chinese people are worried about it and think it is very dangerous. As if the white person before them can easily represent the views of basically the entire democratized world.

This stuff is stupid to get worked up over. Virtually all of these people have no contact with the outside world except through the government-run education system, the government-run media, and Hollywood movies.

(At the same time, however, they all learn English in school and learn about Western culture as part of their language study — which, I am coming to think, makes the majority of people rather confused about what exactly the outside world is, and makes it tougher for them to learn the language because half of learning a language is cultural.)

The result is a confusing mix of ideas that basically seem offensive to me whenever I run into them. But then I think about how foreigners and minorities deal with the myriad offensive conceptions that mainstream culture has of them in America (Indians, Chinese, Japanese, African Americans, Hispanics, hell, even people from Texas), and then I think about how different people from those groups deal with those misconceptions. Some of them choose to spend their lives being offended and pissed off, and some of them choose to find humor in how stupid it is. I’m trying to fall into the latter category in my life here.

And to be a little self-aware. After all, I’ve only met one or two people from Texas in my life, but I know that I have, on many occasions, uttered the words “I never met a Texan I liked.” (That was pre-Jamie’s girlfriend, if you read this, Jamie.)

Most of that is George Bush’s fault, and stereotypes, and of course I have long since let go of that idea (which I sort of just thought was funny). But I know that I had it at the time because it seemed entertaining, and I naively thought that as long as I never met any Texans, there was no way that my little bias against Texans could affect them.

Turns out I was probably wrong.

Before I thought about coming to China seriously I think that I was faintly aware that Chinese is a “tonal language”, but I didn’t have the faintest idea what that meant.

It took me a solid couple of months to figure out the precise meaning, another three or four months to be able to reliably produce the tones with considerable forethought, and just up until the last couple of months (I’ve been studying Chinese for about 13 months now) to be able to carry a Chinese conversation with reasonable confidence that most of the tones I am uttering are correct.

But what is a tone? And why does it take more than a year of blood, sweat, and tears to be able to use them correctly in speech?

The answer to the first question is simple (of course, there are a thousand complications hiding behind the simplicity, but I’m going to avoid those here). Chinese is made up of five tones (or four, depending on how you count) which combine with the movements within the mouth that make up most English speech, which two components together comprise the bulk of how meaning is conveyed in spoken Chinese.

Take, for example, the Chinese word zhi (pronounced a lot like “jur” in juror). Zhi has dozens of different meanings, depending on the tone and the written character that is used to represent the spoken word.

So depending on the tone with which it is said, zhi has different meanings.

But what the hell is a tone?

We actually have and use pretty close approximations of each of the four main tones of Chinese in English; we just don’t happen to be aware of their use because the tones are not necessarily integral to the meaning of the word.

This is similar to how most native speakers are generally not aware of how important stress is in every English word. For example, do you know which are the stressed syllables in the words economy, economics, economist, and economical? Are you aware of how important it is to stress the correct syllable in each of these words every time you say them? Moreover, are you aware of the rules that govern why the stress syllable is indeed stressed in each of these words?

Of course you’re not familiar with the rules, but you know how to correctly pronounce each of these words. Economy is eCONomy, economics is ecoNOmics, economist is eCONomist and economical is ecoNOmical.

Non-native speakers, of course, don’t know any of this off the bat. And so they have to study the rules and practice. Which is, of course, incredibly difficult. About as difficult as it is for us English speakers to wrap our heads around and master the Chinese tones.

Let me explain the four main tones of Chinese. My explanation will focus on our varying pronunciation of the English word “Yeah”.

Of course, we say “yeah” all the time and, although we are unaware of it, the tone of our voice often indicates the meaning of the word.

For instance, when we are responding to someone and want to express polite disagreement or reserved agreement, we will often say the word “yeah” in what I consider to be a flat tone, as in: “Yeeaah, I guess sooo, but…”

This is the Chinese first tone. The voice is high, flat, inflectionless, like a musical note. “Yeah”. We say it without our voice dropping or rising, as it does sometimes in questions and commands. “Yeah, I guess so, but….” That is the Chinese first tone, also known as the flat tone, the high tone or the singing tone.

The second tone is the rising tone and it is embodied in the English question yeah. As in “yeah, so what?” The voice rises when we say it in English in a way very similar to how it rises in Chinese.

The third tone is the low tone or the dipping tone. The voice goes lower and dips just a little bit, like a downward-dipping parabola. We have a rough approximation of this tone when we say a doubtful, skeptical, almost condescending yeah, as in “yeah, but I don’t think you really understand what I’m saying”. This sound is low and longer in duration than the other tones.

The fourth tone is the falling tone. This is what I think of as the agreement tone in English. It’s friendly, happy, giddy. We use it when we use yeah to express definite agreement, as in, “yeah, I think so too!”

So those are the Chinese tones. And my point in writing this point was originally not actually to explain the tones but to say what I think about the statement “don’t worry about the tones”, which something I have heard from foreigners pretty consistently in China.

Not surprisingly, most of the people who said this to me were not very good at speaking Chinese and were painful to listen to and to understand. And I’m sure that it would be even worse for a Chinese person to listen to. And I draw a parallel between them and many of the English learners out there who we native English speakers won’t even give the time of day to. Because their pronunciation just sounds wrong.

Learning pronunciation in Chinese is mostly about learning tones. Foreigners let themselves off the hook with this “don’t worry about it” statement too often, and I know from experience that it leads to pronunciation problems down the road. And it makes those foreigners more isolated in China, unable to actually talk to Chinese people, only able to practice Chinese with other foreigners, which is not why they started learning Chinese in the first place (I don’t think).

So, if you’re learning Chinese and another foreigner throws this comforting statement your way, don’t grab onto it, don’t buy it. It will be tempting, believe me, because the tones will keep you up at night they’re so damn hard to learn. You will see yourself in your dreams opening your mouth, the tones perfectly clear in your head, but coming out in a disastrous mess as soon as your vocal chords start humming.

But don’t believe what they tell you about the tones. You’ve got to worry about them. Or they’ll never stop being your enemy.