Oracle Bones (69 page)

Of course, writing was hard. To achieve literacy, a Chinese student had to memorize thousands of characters. Without alphabetic order, categorization
was complicated. (Even today, file cabinets are an adventure, and few Chinese books have indexes.) The first Chinese dictionary organized words by shape. Over time, many characters had acquired secondary elements—now known as “radicals”—that helped distinguish and classify words. But even radicals were complicated: the first Chinese dictionary identified 540 radicals, and more than 9,000 characters.

But motivation was high in a culture that identified itself so strongly with the written word. By the seventeenth century, China already had a well-established commercial press, and literacy seems to have ranged more widely across class groups than it did in many parts of Europe. Foreign travelers noted that even in the countryside, it was common to find books—often manuals that showed peasants how to write simple contracts. Evelyn S. Rawski, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh, has estimated basic literacy rates for Chinese males in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at between 30 and 45 percent—comparable to those for males in preindustrial Japan and England. Rawski concludes that, although China failed to industrialize as rapidly as those nations, the disparity shouldn’t be blamed on literacy problems.

TO OUTSIDERS, THOUGH,
the Chinese writing system seemed badly in need of reform. One sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary described learning to write Chinese as “semi-martyrdom,” and it wasn’t surprising that the Jesuits were the first to develop systems that used Latin letters for Chinese. Over the centuries, as more foreigners arrived, they often believed that alphabetization would benefit the people. Of course, it would also benefit the foreigners and their churches. In the nineteenth century, as the Opium War treaties allowed more foreigners to proselytize in China, Christians published Bibles in the native dialects. Alphabetization became a key part of missionary work, and by the end of that century, foreigners and Chinese converts had developed alphabetic systems for all major dialects.

Meanwhile, Chinese intellectuals were undergoing their crisis of cultural faith. Having been defeated repeatedly by the foreigners, they began to question everything traditional, including the cherished script. At the same time that scholars were rediscovering the oracle bones, many Chinese were thinking about doing away with the characters entirely. In the 1910s, Qian Xuantong, a prominent philologist, proposed that China switch, in both spoken and written language, to Esperanto.

Most solutions were less radical. A number of intellectuals proposed using the same characters but shifting from classical Chinese to the vernacular. This proposal gained support in the late 1910s, eventually becoming incorporated
into the May Fourth Movement of 1919, which called for the reform and modernization of many aspects of Chinese politics and education.

Eventually, reformers successfully did away with the tradition of writing in classical Chinese. Schools, government bureaus, and books and newspapers began using a writing system that followed Mandarin, the vernacular of the Beijing region. This was different from what had happened in Europe, where Latin was replaced by multiple vernaculars: French, Italian, Spanish, and other languages. In China, largely because there was no alphabet, the shift to the vernacular was made without sacrificing literary unity. All educated Chinese still learned to write the same way.

Reformers believed that another step was still necessary. They pointed out that most southerners wrote in what was essentially a second language. For a native of Wenzhou to become literate, for example, he first had to learn Mandarin. It was the equivalent of an English-speaker being forced to use Dutch in order to read and write. In southern China, there was one major exception: Hong Kong writers had developed a system that allowed them to write their native Cantonese using Chinese characters. Even so, the traditional characters were so badly suited to Cantonese sounds that the Hong Kong system required more than a thousand additional symbols, many of them specially designed for the language. Such systems had not been developed for the other major Chinese languages, which remained unwritable, and it would have been an immense project to adapt characters to each spoken tongue.

With an alphabet, though, it would be far simpler—foreign missionaries had already proved this with their dialect Bibles. Across China, many intellectuals called for alphabetization, believing that the characters were an impediment both to literacy and to democracy. Lu Xun, who lived from 1881 to 1936, and was perhaps China’s greatest modern author, advocated a shift to the Latin alphabet. He wrote (in characters, as he did until his death): “If we are to go on living, Chinese characters cannot…. The characters are a precious legacy handed down by our ancestors, I know. But we can sacrifice our inheritance or ourselves: which is it to be?”

In 1930, Chinese Communists living in the Soviet Union developed a system that used the Latin alphabet for Chinese. Writing reform became a key Communist project; in 1936, as the revolutionaries were gaining power, Mao Zedong told the American journalist Edgar Snow that alphabetization was inevitable. “Sooner or later,” Mao said, “we believe, we will have to abandon characters altogether if we are to create a new social culture in which the masses fully participate.” The Communists described the characters as “a Great Wall” that “has been erected between the masses and the new culture.”
They even blamed writing for the post-Opium War decline, claiming that the characters had “facilitated the imperialist invasion of the Chinese nation.”

In the Communist-controlled regions of the north, the new alphabetic script was granted legal status in 1941. Contracts and government documents could be written in the Latin alphabet as well as in characters. By the time the Communists gained control of the country, writing reform seemed imminent. In 1950, an American linguist named John DeFrancis published a book in which he predicted that the end was near for Chinese characters.

JOHN DEFRANCIS IS
still bitter about that prediction. When I interview the scholar at his home, he becomes visibly agitated every time we touch on the subject. He was wrong, but he wasn’t—in his heart, he knows that the Chinese
should
have gotten rid of the characters, and they
should
have done it immediately after the Communists came to power. Unexpected events are always frustrating, and sometimes the memory burns for more than half a century.

The professor is ninety-one years old and in good health. He still researches his Chinese dictionary projects, although he is formally retired from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He lives and works in a beautiful Japanese-style house set into a hillside of the Manoa Valley. There’s a rock garden in the back, centered around a tiny pagoda, and the sweet smell of bougainvillea drifts into the open house. To the south, the brown-green peak of Diamondhead is visible. For a scholar who wants to spend his final years halfway between the two mainlands, this is the ideal place to do it.

DeFrancis first went to China in 1933, after graduating from Yale. His original plan was to pursue business opportunities, but everything changed after he arrived in Beijing. “I lost all interest in the American business community starting from my first day,” he tells me. “We were at a restaurant, and at the end of the dinner, an American businessman tipped the Chinese waiter by taking a banknote, tearing it in half, and throwing it at his feet. I didn’t want to become part of that.”

The poverty in China disturbed the young man, who believed that the country badly needed reform. Like many foreigners at that time, he thought that the Kuomintang were hopelessly corrupt. He studied Chinese, and in Beijing he became friends with another idealistic young scholar named George A. Kennedy. The Rockefeller Foundation gave Kennedy a grant to establish a Chinese language program at Yale, and his prize purchase in Shanghai was a Chinese printer’s font. Kennedy planned to ship the pieces to New Haven, reassemble them, and publish textbooks for American students. He asked John DeFrancis to help.

“I became in effect his right-hand man and his assistant,” DeFrancis remembers. “We set it up in the basement of Harkness Hall at Yale. Imagine a room of this size, if not larger, filled with V-shaped wooden trestles. If I’m standing up, they come to my chin. The trestles are divided to hold trays that are ten inches by twelve inches, which are further divided into little squares of two inches by two inches. Each square contains individual characters, arranged by radical. It was my job to set up the printer. I would take a composing stick, go pick up a character under the ‘person’ radical,
, and then go get another character under the ‘field’ radical,
. I’d walk back and forth, back and forth. I’d put a few sentences together and take them to the printer, who made a metal cast. Our characters were so limited that I had to continually compose and then break it down, compose and break it down. We were taking stories from classical Chinese and putting them into modern colloquial Chinese.”

Every foreigner who studies Chinese has a formative experience involving characters—the “semi-martyrdom”—and John DeFrancis’s was particularly scarring. After years of searching wooden trestles for tiny pieces of metal organized by shapes such as
and
, he became a passionate advocate of Chinese writing reform. (His colleague, George A. Kennedy, became the main designer of the Yale romanization system for Chinese.) In 1950, after predicting the characters’ demise, DeFrancis waited in America, eager to hear news of change. That summer, Mao finally issued a command:

The writing system must be reformed; it should take the phonetic direction common to the languages of the world; it should be national in form; the alphabet and system should be elaborated on the basis of the existing Chinese characters.

The directive took everybody by surprise. DeFrancis and other scholars had expected that the Communists would simply adopt the Latin script, but the 1950 command sent the movement in a completely new direction. Mao Zedong wanted a Chinese alphabet.