Oracle Bones (76 page)
Authors: Peter Hessler
After we walked away, Polat’s eyes were bright. “Twenty years ago, I said that I wanted to visit Kennedy’s tomb, and today I did,” he said proudly. “When I was in Xinjiang, I saw movies about him and read books; I remember reading all those theories about his death. Some people said it was the KGB or the CIA that killed him. But those weren’t the things I cared about. I always felt that Kennedy was a man who believed in freedom. He was a man who shouldn’t have died.”
I asked if he wanted to see anything else at Arlington. He told me that he had always wanted to have his photograph taken next to the tomb of General George S. Patton.
“The Patton movie was translated into Uighur in the early 1990s,” he explained. “It had a big influence on us. There’s one part where Patton talks about how much he hates Communism. He says something about how he wants to destroy every Communist place. That meant a lot to the Uighur intellectuals, because we’d been dealing with it for fifty years. My friends and I used to talk about that part of the movie.”
I found a cemetery employee and asked him for directions to Patton’s tomb. The man stared at us.
“It’s not here,” he said.
“Where is it?”
“Patton is buried in Luxembourg.”
Polat had been following the exchange and now he looked confused. I tried to explain, but I didn’t know how to say Luxembourg in Chinese.
“It’s a small country in Europe,” I said. “It’s near Belgium. Maybe Patton died there—to be honest, I’m not sure.”
Polat shrugged, and we spent the next half hour wandering through the cemetery. The rows of tombstones shone as white as bones in the afternoon sun. We found the Honda in the parking lot and then, as the shadows began to lengthen, we drove back to Chinatown.
AS A CHILD, IMRE GALAMBOS LIVED FOR FIVE YEARS IN MOSCOW, WHERE
he enjoyed a series of Soviet Westerns. “They were called ‘The Uncatchable Avengers,’” he remembers. “There were three or four of them. They have all the elements of good Western movies: the same cowboys, and they all ride horses. But it’s all about the civil war in Russia, the period from 1918 to 1922. There was shooting, and the good guys always managed to get away. They were kids—teenagers who were sabotaging the White Army’s movement. There was a Gypsy, a girl, an intellectual. They were these archetypes of politically correct people in Russia.”
Galambos was nobody’s archetype: half Hungarian, quarter Kazak, quarter Tatar. He spent most of his childhood in his native Hungary, which was Communist at the time. In college, he went to China to study, and then he attended graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley, where he wrote a Ph.D. dissertation about the development of ancient Chinese writing. He now works at the British Library, curating the Dunhuang manuscripts, a collection of thousand-year-old Buddhist texts that were rediscovered in the west of China during the early 1900s.
For the Chinese, it’s a point of great sensitivity that these documents reside in the British Library. People often describe them as “looted,” but Galambos believes that this word is used too loosely. During the Kuomintang years, when the government was weak and corrupt, officials approved the sale and export
of the artifacts to foreigners. Regardless of how one feels about the morality of these acts, they were legal: fully documented exchanges of manuscripts for money. Nowadays, Galambos works in conjunction with the National Library in Beijing, creating a “virtual library” of Dunhuang manuscripts on Web pages. The real artifacts remain in London, but their images can be accessed by a computer anywhere in the world.
Galambos’s interests are not limited to antiquity. He studies texts of all kinds: past and present, formal and informal. He is skilled in computer languages, and he is studying Tangut, a dead language that survives in inscriptions found in the west of China. He is learning Uighur. During his visits to Beijing, he collects restaurant menus, to analyze the ways in which average people write characters. He is particularly interested in departures from the norm—mistakes and miswritings. Sometimes he buys bootleg DVDs and watches the Chinese-made English subtitles, which often create an entirely different narrative from the movie. Galambos once transcribed a Beijing bootleg of
Simone
, comparing the audio English to the written English:
[audio] “I was the keynote speaker, you must remember my speech: ‘Who Needs Humans?’”
[subtitle] “I was the king of speed, you must my speed means humans.”
[audio] “Simone has the voice of the young Jane Fonda, the body of Sophia Loren, the grace of, well, Grace Kelly, and the face of Audrey Hepburn combined with an angel.”
[subtitle] “Simone has the voice of a young clone flouter, the body of safa-laring, the grace of well grace Kelly, and the face of Artyphapen combined with in angle.”
It’s all connected: menus and bootlegs, history and movies, language and archaeology. Texts create meaning, regardless of how arbitrary the process may seem. “What is reality?” Galambos asks, during one of our conversations in Beijing. “It’s this huge amount of data. There’s this philosopher who had a lot of influence on me, Ernst Cassirer. He wrote this book called
Language and Myth
. Basically, his idea is that language itself creates reality. For example, in order to have words like nouns, you have to have concepts. When you form concepts, that’s when you’re creating stuff—it’s a creative process. You pick out certain things from the environment, and you give them labels, and you create this reality around you. When you’re a kid, you’re not just learning how to speak; you’re learning how to perceive a reality. It’s almost like a computer language, an internal code that makes you able to think.
“From a linguistic point of view, this is a very old concept, and a lot of people nowadays don’t believe it. But I think it’s probably to some degree true. Perhaps if you don’t have a word for a certain feeling, or a certain color of the sky, then you don’t notice it. It doesn’t stick out from the background. That’s what words do: they make things stick out. Otherwise, it might just be a big haze of data. In a computer language, you’d call it uninterpreted data. So a language is your browser.”
GALAMBOS SPEAKS FIVE
languages fluently: Hungarian, English, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. His motivation for new tongues has rarely been academic. He studied Chinese in order to escape the Hungarian army; he learned Japanese when he had a Japanese girlfriend. His English became fluent after he moved to the United States to be with a Chinese wife. Today, those women are gone from his life, but the languages remain.
In his twenties and thirties, Galambos moved around the world, picking up new languages and new skills, and in the meantime the countries of his childhood changed. Russian children no longer watch Soviet Westerns; Hungary isn’t Communist anymore; there is no mandatory military service. In recent years, Galambos began keeping a home in Budapest, where he spends time whenever his job allows him to leave London. In Budapest, he lives with a woman who, twenty years ago, was a high-school classmate. When I ask him why he returned, he says simply, “I haven’t been home for my entire adult life, so I decided to stay home.”
After all the years abroad, he is good at comparing different cultures. He taught both Chinese and American students, and he tells me that Americans don’t have the same relationship to the written word that he noticed among the Chinese. For the Chinese, writing seemed to be the root of their cultural identity, but many of his American students were unfamiliar with their nation’s literary classics. I ask him if anything in American culture might be the rough equivalent of writing in China.
“Maybe it’s movies,” he says. “I think the movies are incredibly important in America. That’s how people acquire information about the world. If you ask an American about a subject—say, Buddha—the answer is always through the movies. They’ll talk about ‘The Little Buddha’ or some movie they saw.”
He continues: “I think the movies create this web that texts traditionally created in China. Within the Chinese texts, there was a view of reality, which was a view of other texts. The scholars who lived in this world, they saw their culture as a web. They didn’t live in this physical world; they didn’t talk about the physical world. It was all about history and writing. And America is the
same way about movies. People in the movies talk about other movies all the time. There’s an enormous reality, like ‘movie space’ or something, in America. By this time, it’s really built up, and it’s a world that exists on its own. A lot of people experience reality through that. It’s true for me when I’m in America. I watch a lot of movies when I’m there, and I feel like reality is American movies. You might say something and then I’ll say, oh, that reminds me of something in a movie. It’s like dreams and realities, all blending together. You have this feeling, this déjà vu feeling about everything.
“The movies are writing. They serve the same purpose; it’s just a different language. In China, they wrote the most in the times when they most needed to redefine themselves. It’s not passivity; it’s creativity. It’s not taking notes. It’s about rethinking the past and creating the present. It’s about justifying the present, creating the ideology. So in America they have these movies that make people feel American. Like
Pearl Harbor
. It’s similar to writing, to books. But the movies stay in the mind longer, maybe because it’s a more visual language. And it becomes a way that people determine their values. You have these models and patterns that are ready to use. They give you a language, just like books do. They give you a language to parse out your personality, to understand it, or display it, or express it.”
I ORIGINALLY MET
Galambos on the Internet. One afternoon, a Google search turned up a Chen Mengjia quote that had been posted at www.logoi. com, and I contacted the editor: Imre Galambos. It turned out that we knew people in common—at Berkeley, he had studied under David N. Keightley, the oracle bone scholar.
Galambos established his Web site in order to sell language-learning software, and he also posted information about the Chinese writing system (thus the Chen Mengjia quote). Soon, though, he began to receive e-mails from young Americans, often with a certain request:
HI! IM DOING A REPORT AND I NEED THE CHINESE ALPHABETE FROM A-Z. IF YOU COULD HELP ME IT WOULD BE GREAT.
THANK YOU.
im lookin 4 an alphibet of chinese writing or fonts which seems extremely hidden on the web to me if u can point me in the right direction it would b much obliged
thank you
I am getting a tattoo in memory of a friend who was recently murdered. I would like to know the characters, symbols, or letters to get the tattoo. DeAndra, Love and Angel. I want these in Chinese writing or symbols for me tattoo. can you please help me?
Galambos responded by e-mail, and he also posted additional information on his Web site. He explained that Chinese does not have an alphabet; it’s a logographic system with thousands of characters. But that turned out to be a mistake. By combining the words “Chinese” and “alphabet”—even in the context of denying that there was such a thing—he was guaranteed to get Googled by anybody searching for it. Now the requests appeared in a flood:
could some one send me either the chinese alphabet or at least three of the letters…. I need a (C) a (D) and a (G) thank you my daughter wants these letters so she can have them tattooed on her back.
I really need the letter R in chinese. it would be great if you could let me know where i can find it. thank you very much!
Can you give me happy birthday in chinese by 12:00 today? Thanks
My cat smokey has just recently past away. i would like to have the chinese symbol for smoke or smokey put on the box with his ashes can you help me
please send me info on the Chinese Army
Hello i’ve been looking Hi and Low for some chinese lettering for a tattoo. if you can please help me. “Fear no Man”, “Only the strong Survive” please write back.
I think you should have something about hte people in China. Like who the first emporier was, and important people like that. I went to this site to look for the first emporier. But, I can’t find it. And I don’t think this stuff is “anceint”.
The symbol for “House Music” is what??
Galambos tried to be patient—Chinese does not have an alphabet; it’s a logographic system with thousands of characters—but people refused to take no for an answer. They became angry: