Lion, ten, market, stone: What do these words have in common? Give up? In Mandarin, they are all pronounced the same, shi (sounds like sure in English). In "Dreaming in Chinese," Deborah Fallows acquaints us with a poem by Chao Yuen Ren (also spelled Zhao Yuanren), "The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den," which consists of 92 repetitions of the syllable shi. The poem is, Fallows assures us, "perfectly understandable if you read the characters silently, by sight. But if you read those characters out loud, there are 92 'sures' in a row."
It's difficult for English speakers to fathom a language with only about 400 sound syllables (compared with 4,000 in English) but four different tones, a language with a written form that is not phonetic, a language with no verb tenses. What does it all mean? For Fallows, studying the language became a "telescope into the country," suggesting illuminating connections between points of language and the "Chineseness" she encountered in everyday life in Shanghai.
Although Fallows has a doctorate in linguistics, "Dreaming in Chinese" is not a scholarly book of linguistic analysis; it is a memoir detailing an outsider's continual skirmishes with the language and occasional victories of understanding.
Each of the 14 chapters centers on a phrase, given in Chinese characters and Pinyin (phonetic) forms, and the implications Fallows teases out of it. "The Lion-Eating Poet," for example, comes from a chapter subtitled "Language play as a national sport," which points out that the scarcity of syllables makes Mandarin "a heyday for punsters, jokesters, storytellers, bloggers, twitterers and other language mavens"; it also explains why Chinese consider the number four unlucky (it is pronounced like the word for die), why a clock is an inappropriate wedding gift and why banners are hung upside down at Chinese New Year.
"Bu yao: When rude is polite" points out that in China, speaking politely is a matter of shortening the social distance between people; "Give me salt" therefore seems more polite than "Please give me salt" because the word "please" inserts a sort of buffer between speaker and listener. The chapter devoted to "eastnorth" describes the dissonance Westerners encounter when the language melds place and time into a single entity, and the chapter on compound words is a particular treat: What to make of such compounds as "east-west," "left-right" and "big-small"?
It's a tricky language indeed, one of the most difficult for English speakers to learn, and Fallows never claims mastery or anything even close, but that's not the point. Reading "Dreaming in Chinese," we follow an intelligent, analytical, sympathetic -- and humorous -- guide who knows it's the journey, not the destination, that counts.
Patricia Hagen teaches English at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth.
