Tom Glenn's Blog, page 83

The Chinese Language (3)

Despite the difficulty of learning to write and read Chinese, one of the reasons I love the language is its use of characters. All characters consist of two parts, the radical and the phonetic. The radical gives an indication of the meaning, the phonetic at least a hint of the pronunciation. But the language has developed over so many centuries that neither element is much help in understanding the modern written language. One has to simply memorize the character, its meaning, and its pronunciation and tone. According to the internet, altogether there are over 50,000 characters, though a comprehensive modern dictionary will rarely list over 20,000 in use. An educated Chinese person will know about 8,000 characters, but you will only need about 2-3,000 to be able to read a newspaper. I never mastered that many. I have several Chinese-English dictionaries, but the one I use most often is The Five Thousand Dictionary – Revised American Edition (Harvard University Press, 1960).

I spent many hours practicing writing characters when I was studying Chinese, but I never approached the facility of an average Chinese. To the educated traditional Chinese, drawing characters is an art that takes a lifetime to perfect. First of all, the characters are drawn with a paint brush, not with a pen. The strokes for each character must be done in the proper order, and a character of more than twenty strokes is not uncommon.

The Chinese Communist government long ago introduced simplified characters and a romanization system called Pin Yin. I can understand the need for dumbing down the writing system so that ordinary people can use it, but my love for the traditional characters and their history is as strong as ever.

As I age and my opportunities for physical recreation fade, I am more and more drawn to intellectual and artistic pursuits. The study of Chinese characters is both. Blessed with a fine collection of Chinese language books and dictionaries, I am free to investigate to my heart’s content and to enjoy the mental challenge and incredible beauty of the Chinese language.

New Book Review

The Washington Independent Review of Books has published my review of Alexander Wolff’s Endpapers. You can read it at http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/endpapers-a-family-story-of-books-war-escape-and-home?fbclid=IwAR1XcRyP6Uot16Y6q2SMlJICT1o0o7fTPkj917s6phaNVogLBO1zamAdPBo

Let me know your thoughts.

The Chinese Language (2)

I spent the entire year of 1959 in rigorous study of Vietnamese. When I graduated, top of my class of ten, at the end of the year, I expected the army to post me to Vietnam. But the army had little interest and almost no activities in Vietnam at the time, so I was assigned to the National Security Agency (NSA) at Fort Meade, Maryland, not far from Washington, D.C. Once I was in place and had a car, I fulfilled my dream of learning Chinese by enrolling in classes at Georgetown University in the District of Columbia. By the end of 1961, when I completed my army enlistment, I was comfortable speaking Vietnamese, Chinese, and French, the three languages of Vietnam. NSA hired me as a civilian employee and sent me to Vietnam for the first time in 1962. For the next thirteen years, I spent more time in Vietnam than I did in the states, then escaped under fire when Saigon fell in April 1975.

During those years, I spoke Vietnamese constantly, sometimes all day every day. I seized every opportunity to speak Chinese, but the large Chinese population of Vietnam didn’t speak the dialect I had learned, called Mandarin or Gwo Yu ( 國語—“national language”). And Chinese dialects are not mutually intelligible. So, as reported earlier in this blog, I visited Hong Kong every chance I got, only to discover that Gwo Yu is the Beijing dialect of Chinese. The native dialects of the Chinese living in Hong Kong varied—Cantonese was the most common, as far as I could tell—but I found no native speakers of Mandarin. They could understand my dialect, but their Mandarin was so heavily accented that I couldn’t understand them.

My failure to find a speaker of Gwo Yu did nothing to quell my enthusiasm for Chinese. It shares with Vietnamese monosyllabic structure, dependance on compounds, and lack of a grammar. Mandarin only uses four tones (other dialects have more—Cantonese has six or nine tones, depending on what one considers to be a tone), and I found it easier to learn as a spoken language than I did Vietnamese. But as a written language, it is by far the most difficult I have ever tried to learn. It uses characters.

More tomorrow.

The Chinese Language

From my earliest years as a child, when I first discovered that people spoke languages other than English, the different languages of the earth have fascinated me. As a child I taught myself Italian and French; in high school I had four years of Latin; in college I studied German, then enlisted in the army to go to language school to study Chinese, the language that intrigued me the most. Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, I had been surrounded by speakers  of Chinese. I knew that the language, because of its writing system, was too difficult for me to teach myself. I looked forward to a full year of intensive study, six hours a day in the classroom, two hours a day of private study, five days a week.

But when I got to the school, the army told me I was not to learn Chinese but Vietnamese, a language I had never heard of—back in those days (1958), we didn’t call that part of the world Vietnam, we called it French Indochina. I had no choice in the matter. I was a soldier and followed orders.

The study of Vietnamese turned out to be a revelation. Here was a language that had no grammar like that of western tongues—no verbs, nouns, declensions, or conjugations. All words were a single syllable that could be combined with other words to create what was called a “compound” to allow for the expression of more complex ideas. Any word could be used as the equivalent of any part of speech in western languages. Function and meaning depended on context and word order.

Most challenging for westerners were the tones used in monosyllabic Vietnamese. Words with a soft ending, that is, no hard consonant, changed their meaning entirely depending on which tone was applied to them. There were six tones: level (no tone), rising, falling, rising-broken, falling rounded, and low with a glottal stop. Words with a hard ending—a hard consonant like a t or p—could have either the rising tone or the low glottal stop tone.

More tomorrow.

Ducks and Geese

Behind and to the north of my house is what I call a pond, a small circular body of water perhaps a hundred feet in diameter about half filled with water reeds. It attracts water fowl on and off throughout the year. Neither temperature nor season seems to affect the arrival and departure of the birds. More often than not, they are absent. Then every once in a while for no obvious reason, they fly in and stay for a couple of days.

The numbers are usually a half dozen or so birds. They fly in from the north, quacking loudly. Until recently, all were mallard ducks, an equal number of males (with green heads and pale tan bodies) and females (pale brown). Then, last week, they were joined by geese, honking loudly.

When they first arrive, the birds seem to be squabbling, chasing and pecking at each other. As far as I can tell, only the males clash. Then, after an hour or so, they settle down and spend their time eating or, apparently, loafing.

The ducks only occasionally go ashore, but the geese regularly wander in pairs into the yards of neighbors all around the pond. They look like they’re enjoying the exploration.

I have no clue as to why the ducks and geese come and go, but I thoroughly enjoy their visits. I only wish some would stay permanently.

Hong Kong

I read in the daily press that China is squeezing the last drop of freedom from Hong Kong, a city I have always loved. I first visited Hong Kong in 1962 as a respite from working in South Vietnam, trying to find a way to save the Vietnamese from the communists commanded by North Vietnam. Over the next thirteen years, as I struggled without letup in my efforts along with other Americans to thwart the North Vietnamese conquest—and ultimately failed—I sought rest and recuperation as often as I could in Hong Kong, the gracious city whose name, 香港, pronounced Syang Gang in Mandarin and rendered as Hương Cảnh in Vietnamese, means “Perfumed Harbor.”

The people of island city of Hong Kong were gracious and welcoming. They were charmed by my efforts to speak their language which ultimately failed because I spoke the Mandarin dialect, now called gwo yu ( 國語—“national language”) by the Chinese Communist Party, whereas the local dialect was Cantonese. They could understand me, but they spoke a heavily accented version of gwo yu which I couldn’t decipher.

In those days, Hong Kong was an international commercial center renowned for its lack of barriers to outsiders. It has its own government, distinct and free from the communist dictatorship of the mainland. It was a place to shop for duty-free bargains. I still own and listen to daily the two huge Wharfdale stereo speakers—nearly three feet high, more than a foot deep, and over two feet wide, so heavy that I can’t lift them—that were designed and engineered in Britain but manufactured in China. Among the many other bargains I got there is the green and white marble chess set and playing board I’ve blogged about here.

The old Hong Kong is no more. The Chinese Communist Party has arrested dozens of local politicians. Free speech is a thing of the past. I’m sure the marvels of the city—among them the Tian Tan Buddha Statue, Victoria Peak, the elaborate temples, Repulse Bay—remain. But the open cordial demeanor of the residents has undoubtedly been replaced with the enforced and rigid courtesy so typical of tyrannies.

The congenial island city is gone forever.

Wine (2)

I’m enjoying food more than I ever did in my life. Before I retired, particularly when I was on the battlefield, meals were often a nuisance necessity, crammed in wherever I could find time for them. But now I linger over my food, always reading while I eat, and savor every bite. The taste I relish the most is the wine that accompanies my meals, my beloved cabernet sauvignon.

The outcome is wine every day. That means that several times a year, I have to go shopping at a wine warehouse not far away. I specialize in cheap cabernet, and over the years I have come up with a list of about fifteen inexpensive wines that I can depend on to be delicious every time. But I always keep an eye out for low-priced cabernets I haven’t tried before. I come home with two or three large cartons filled with bottles of wine and find myself several hundred dollars poorer.

The cabernets I drink come from all over the world. I can’t say that I favor the wine of any one nation over that of another. I have favorites from South America, Australia, California, and the U.S. east coast. I suspect that the French wines are still the best, but their price puts them out of reach for me.

Having wine with every meal, for everyone, including children, is standard procedure throughout Europe and in much of the rest of the world. I’m told that the practice got started because too often available water was polluted. But in the U.S., most people have wine at one meal a day, sometimes one meal a week. In this respect, like several others I’ve blogged about, our country is behind the times.

Wine

I’ve been a wine enthusiast since I was old enough to drink alcoholic beverages. I grew up in the San Francisco bay area, and California wines were plentiful and cheap. During my early years in Vietnam, when French wine was readily available, I developed a taste for it. Later, as I traveled broadly in my work, I sampled wine for all over the planet. I ended up preferring the French, but my budget usually wouldn’t allow it.

More years ago than I can remember, I paid a cabinetmaker to build a maple-wood wine chest for me. It’s more than four feet wide, several feet deep, and over three feet high. Fronted by two sliding doors, its interior is divided into three sections. On the left side are seven drawers, each of which holds three regular-sized bottles of wine. On the right are six drawers sized for two magnums each. In the middle are shelves for three tiers of stemmed crystal wine glasses hanging upside down.

I try to keep the chest full. That way I have plenty of choices for a beverage to accompany my meals. But except for a couple of bottles of French champagne, these days I fill the chest with cabernet sauvignon, far and away my favorite wine.

I don’t drink wine with breakfast, but I enjoy a glass of cabernet with all other meals. Most often my food consists of beans and rice, split pea soup, or clear soup with a salad. I eat little meat. My choice of food is based on nutrition and low calorie count, and I’m strict about how much food I allow myself. As a result of my diet and regular weight lifting, I’ve now got my body weight down to an all-time low. But I have worked on the recipes for the dishes I enjoy so that they are perfected for my taste. And all of them are enhanced by the flavor of cabernet sauvignon.

More tomorrow.

Growing Anti-Asian Bias

I see a more and more press reports these days about burgeoning sentiment against Asians in the U.S. My sense is that some Americans are blaming our Asian-American population for the covid-19 pandemic in our country. They censure Americans of Asian origin because the covid-19 virus originated in China. By a logic that escapes me, they hold our Asian-American population responsible for the pandemic because it started in the Far East.

President Donald Trump encouraged the bias and maybe was the original accuser who denounced our Asian-Americans as the source of what he called the “Chinese virus.” He failed to explain how people born in this country who had never visited the orient were somehow to blame for the infestation. The Asians, like the Blacks and the Latinos, were, in his book, the cause of myriad problems.

Like all prejudice, anti-Asian bias can prosper only in ignorance. When judgments are based on fact, racial hatred fades to nothing. Let’s hope that as we grow as a nation and we learn all over again in the post-Trump era to rely on truth rather than lies, we can erase the fabrications that have divided us.

Incarceration in the U.S.

The United States has one of the highest documented incarceration rates in the world. It represents about 4.4 percent of the world’s population but houses around 22 percent of the world’s prisoners. It has 655 inmates per 100,000 of population. Roughly 2.12 million people were incarcerated in the United States in 2020. That makes the U.S. by far the incarceration leader among large, industrialized nations.

And it’s getting worse. Since 1970, our incarcerated population has increased by 700 percent. Since 1991 the rate of violent crime in the United States has fallen by about 20 percent, while the number of people in prison or jail has risen by 50 percent.

It’s no surprise that racial prejudice in the U.S. results in incarceration rates far worse for minorities. Black people are imprisoned at six times the rate of White people in the United States; Latinos are imprisoned at three times the rate. In the U.S., one out of every ten Black men in his thirties is in prison or jail on any given day. One in three Black men born today can expect to be incarcerated in his lifetime.

Why are we as a people hell-bent on putting people, especially minority people, in jail? The best evidence I’ve been able to garner is that we have overstressed law and order. That certainly was one pf President Donald Trump’s priorities. And we are determined to punish rather than rehabilitate. We have few alternatives to prison for those found guilty, even of a non-violent crime.

Other advanced nations of the world have long since moved away from massive incarceration. It is well past time for us the grow up as a country and join other responsible western democracies in reducing our prison populations and curbing our willingness to put people in jail. As a first step, we should immediately ban for-profit privately owned prisons. Making money from depriving people of their freedom is revolting. We are better than that.

Let’s agree to mature. Just as we need to join the advanced nations of the world in ridding ourselves of firearms—we have more guns than people—so also do we need to reduce incarceration to a civilized level.

What will it take for us to learn? Let’s do it.