MeiHua/notes

Romanizing, and Why Pinyin

The "Cultural Revolution" under the Mao regime had many bad points (at least from the perspective of this decadent Westerner), but one genuinely good and useful thing which it tried to do - and achieved, to a degree - was improving the literacy rate in China. The bravery of this scheme can't be underestimated, because the Mao government didn't just try to teach people to read - they tried to reform the language itself. One of the two big changes to the language was the creation and promotion of Pinyin, the official romanization system of the PRC. (The other was simplified characters, which I'll come to in a bit.)

Throughout these pages I have used the word "putonghua," the "common speech," interchangeably with "Pinyin," the system used to write it in Western letters. "Putonghua" is the politically correct way to say what, until comparatively recently, was referred to by the Western press as "Mandarin." If you connect the dots, you'll see the problem: Putonghua, the PRC-endorsed dialect, is basically Northern Chinese - the language of Beijing and Shanghai. Meanwhile, the people in Western and Southern China - particularly the commercial nerve centers of Canton and Hong Kong - never enthusiastically adopted putonghua, and, to some extent, resent being forced to be familiar with it.

While the Canton area is not so much of a problem, putonghua and particularly Pinyin are still political minefields in places which have reason to dislike the PRC ... like Taiwan, where using Pinyin spellings can actually become a political statement.

In terms of American usefulness, Cantonese is the clear winner, for the same reasons that the food most Americans think of when they think "Italian" is Neapolitan: Most of the initial immigrants to America from China came from its southern parts, just as most early Italian immigrants were from the southern parts of Italy. Cantonese is still overwhelmingly the dominant Chinese dialect in America.

Despite all this, I have made putonghua the clear default throughout these pages. Why? Because it makes sense. Yale spellings use extra H's to show the more complex tone system in Cantonese, double A's in strange places, and in general don't seem to spell words as consistently as Pinyin does. On the other hand, they may have a harder job to do because - forgive me if you speak it - from my perspective, Cantonese is simply a complex mess. With putonghua the sound cues in characters seem to make more sense, there are fewer pitfalls and surprises, and so on. I'm sure if I'd grown up with Cantonese, I'd feel differently - but from the perspective of a non-native beginner, putonghua wins.

About Those Tones

Putonghua has five tones, but one of them doesn't count. It's a neutral tone, generally only used in place of the normal tone when the sound ends a sentence - sort of the natural trailing-off effect at work. Barring that, there are four tones: a high level tone, a rising tone from medium pitch to high, a falling tone from high pitch to low, and a tone that sort of dips below medium and then rises to high (or sometimes just goes from low to high).

I may never actually speak Chinese because of these damned tones. They scare me. (And Cantonese has six or seven of them, depending on how you count!) But they do make a difference in the MEANING of the sound sometimes, which means - if you decide to be serious about the characters you've seen here - sometimes your ability to HEAR the difference in tone is important.

In case you become curious about this, I've used a relatively common system on computers where the usual accent-like tone marks might be difficult to print. On the review pages, there is a number following the Pinyin spelling:

1 - level high tone
2 - rising high tone (medium to high)
3 - rising low tone (low to high)
4 - falling tone

This Is Simple?

As mentioned above, the other half of the language reform from the Mao government was the promotion of "simplified characters." Pinyin makes me happy; simplified characters make me sad. The idea was to make some characters less intimidating to draw, but in my humble opinion, they were a bad idea.

We're not just talking about something along the lines of saying, for example, "We will no longer draw the crossbar of the letter A in order to save time" - there are some small changes like that among the simplified characters, and those are fine. What bothers me is cases where they say, "From now on, all B's will be drawn as P's in order to save a loop," or, worse, "From now on, B will be drawn as #." Really. That's the level some simplified characters are at: They replace a character with another which already has a meaning of its own, or replace a character with something which is a complete non-sequitur in that system.

You've seen how the simplified form of GARDEN replaces the inside of the bounding box with the "yuan" money symbol. If you weren't told they were the same character, you wouldn't have any way to know. You've also seen how the DRY character officially gets simplified to the SHIELD character - never mind that a whole lot of people were using this abbreviation already, it's still confusing. (In fact many of the simplifications were just enshrining what was already in informal public use.)

Fortunately, with a couple of exceptions that have always been so popular that they're everywhere (SHIELD for DRY is one), simplified characters have not left mainland China ... so I don't have to show them to you, and you don't have to learn them, and we can be happy.

But if you ever plan to go to China, especially Northern China, please do bring a guide to simplified characters with you, or read up on them, because otherwise they will bite you. Hard.

Looking Things Up (A Bibliography)

Finding characters in Chinese the old-fashioned way is sort of a pain. First, you have to know how the characters are drawn - intimately - or you won't be able to properly count the strokes in the character. Then you have to know your radicals, and which radical your mystery character belongs to. (And do bear in mind that apparently no two dictionaries list or name the radicals exactly the same way.) Then and only then you can look it up - slowly - by paging through the various characters under that radical which have the correct stroke count.

Of course, if you know how the character is spelled in your chosen romanization system, and that system is consistent, you might be able to find it under its romanized spelling, which is often a lot faster - IF you don't have to go back and check a different listing for each character with that sound.

This is one reason that once I got used to the zhongwen.com dictionary, by Rick Harbaugh, it became my clear winner - my daily, constant, all-purpose dictionary. It has a listing by Pinyin spelling that shows the characters by the spellings, so you can quickly breeze through, say, all the "shu" characters until you find the one you want. It also has a (unfortunately limited) list of English meanings, and the usual radical/stroke index "as a last resort." But the main listings - wow! These are structured around a tree that breaks characters into their component parts without much regard for the radicals. And it's cross-referenced. So if you remember that a character has "fish," say, SOMEWHERE in it, even if it's not under the "fish" radical, you can probably look under the fish section and be pointed to where the character REALLY lives.

It's also very good at showing compounds and phrases - things where two characters together take on a rather different meaning from either of them singly. Its disadvantages: That poor English index, and microscopic type. Use under a strong light source only.

Even with this dictionary a clear winner, though, I found to my frustration that I would have to use several sources a lot of the time. Harbaugh has no Cantonese, for example, and doesn't really care or indicate which radical a character falls under.

Here are some other dictionaries and books I found useful in the course of the project. It's far from a comprehensive list, but these are the books I went to most often.

Read and Write Chinese
and Understanding Chinese
Rita Mei-Wah Choy

Read and Write Chinese was my first Chinese dictionary. It has lost a lot of its luster since then as I become more aware of Choy's quirks, but until I got familiar with the Harbaugh way, which is to say, for most of the life of this project, it was almost always the first book I went to before looking up the character in more detail elsewhere.

One of the reasons for this book's quirks - to be fair - is that it is not intended to be a dictionary per se, and indeed the reason Choy created it in the first place was because normal dictionaries offered way too much information to be useful to the beginning student. Choy offers the most common 3200 characters (of Chinese's ten thousand-plus). It's worth noting the stats she quotes:

In a study done by Chen Hegin, it was found that if you were to learn the 800 characters that appear the most frequently in Chinese publications, you would know about 86% of all the characters you see. Doubling your vocabulary to 1600 would take you to 95% recognition. Doubling again to 3200 gives about 99%.

And, indeed, only three or four times have I had to go outside this book to find a character. But finding a character is not the same as knowing about it. Choy lists the following information for each character: A small stroke-order sequence (showing how to draw the character), a meaning or meanings, a Cantonese (Yale) romanization, a putonghua (Pinyin) romanization, and a code of one, two or three stars to show how common the character is in normal usage. The main body is organized by radical and stroke. Characters are numbered sequentially for reference purposes.

Choy's real strength is the book's indices: an absolute index (by stroke count/order, radical not taken separately) of the characters in the three, two, and one-star categories; an absolute index of every character in the book; a Cantonese/Yale sound index; a putonghua/Pinyin sound index; and an index by English meaning.

Choy's weaknesses: Her names for the radicals are a little quirky (but then, so are everybody's); her how-to-draw charts are tiny and in a completely different style from her main character images, and led to my early character drawings being fairly useless; some of her indices use the character number and some the page number, with no cue which is which; but mainly, her English definitions should only be regarded as a starting point. Choy lists a lot of meanings for a given character, but then doesn't tell you (for example) that the character only takes on one of those meanings when combined with certain other characters, is never used by itself but only as part of a phrase, or other little hitches like that.

Some of the weaknesses above are alleviated by Understanding Chinese, which is more of a usage guide. Each entry shows the character, those same useless how-to-draw sequences, the same spartan definitions - but then has a series of phrases or other common multi-character sequences involving the character, with pronunciations as usual in Cantonese and putonghua. This is excellent as a companion to the book above; it is less useful by itself. Biggest weakness: The increased space requirements of each listing limits this book to only 801 characters. Added bonus: tables in the back of common phrases for certain venues (types of shop, types of transportation, types of food, body parts), and a table in the front of common short conversational phrases.

However: In the edition I have, the page numbers in her radical index are wrong; they are always off by two or three pages. And in Read and Write, she always lists Cantonese first and then putonghua; in Understanding it's the other way around. (But you'd be amazed how quickly you can learn to tell the difference on sight.)

Reading & Writing Chinese
William McNaughton and Li Ying

This book is part of the Tuttle language library, which is why I refer to it as "Tuttle" in other pages - if I refer to it at all. It is not very useful to our food-focused exercises ... but it's great for the English speaker who wants to, say, read a Chinese newspaper. Its definitions are better than Choy's and its how-to-draw diagrams are MUCH better. It lists simplified characters, which Choy ignores. The characters cross-reference internally (it's typical to see something like "the left half of this is the "silk" radical; see #405" or some such). And it gives phrases and other usage examples, though not as many as the Choy usage book.

That said, I'm glad I saw the Choy book first. This one is very weird in some respects. The main listing of 1062 characters (there's also a supplemental listing of several hundred more, without the how-to-draw) is not in radical/stroke order, pronunciation order, or any other order I can discern; it is apparently in the order McNaughton and Li feel you should learn the characters, which is great for a textbook but lousy as a dictionary.

They believe strongly in a "modern radical" list, which among other things lists the radical forms and solo-character forms of various characters separately; I believe the traditional list should be as written in stone as the Western alphabet because I depend on it always being in the same order to find things. (Fortunately they provide it as well.)

And they don't give Cantonese pronunciations. (Actually, Choy's are the only books in this list which routinely do.)

But - the Tuttle book has an index by Pinyin, with pictures of the characters. Until I found the Harbaugh book, this was my sole source for such a tool, and I can't overstate its usefulness.

The Dimsum Dumpling Book
Eileen Yin-Fei Lo

What's this? A cookbook on the reference list? Well, actually there are several cookbooks which could have been on the list - I consulted five or six of them - but unless you have a source for the Wei-Chuan series put out by the Taiwanese food giant (I own four), you'll never see those. This one you might actually find in a mainstream bookstore.

Mostly it's recipes, of course, and good ones - but it also lists the name of each kind of dumpling/pastry in calligraphic characters, and usually in romanized Cantonese as well. There are also characters for some of the raw ingredients, which can occasionally help when shopping (assuming you manage to decipher the calligraphy).

This book was irreplaceable for the dim sum page.

I Can READ That!
(A Traveler's Introduction to Chinese Characters)
Julie Sussman

This book is aimed purely at the tourist. Its Chinese is focused on things like doors, traffic signs, money, maps, directions, toilets, et cetera. But what it does, it does well, and it's refreshing in its don't-panic attitude. It's also fun to read for its own sake, and has quizzes so you can check yourself along the way. It's on this list because, if you decide to start learning some actual working Chinese, this is a great place to start. (It will also help you cope, initially, with simplified characters, though it is not a comprehensive source for that by any means.)

A Chinese-English Dictionary
(Second Edition, 1912, reprint)
Herbert Giles

I do not recommend that you try to find this dictionary or use it, but it is nonetheless the dictionary that I go to when all other sources are exhausted. Its print is tiny and murky (esp. in my 1978 reprint), its romanization tricky, its primary organization (by sound/romanization) usually unsuitable, and I still haven't managed to figure out its method of indicating tone marks. But it has two virtues: It is comprehensive, and it is a historical milestone.

You see, Herbert Giles is one half of "Wade-Giles," probably the most prevalent system of putonghua transliteration in the West (and for English speakers in China!) until Pinyin came along. In fact, this may be the first modern-era dictionary of Chinese compiled by a Westerner. (The first edition was in 1892.) And a monumental work it is: nearly fourteen thousand characters, with notes on all the various dialects and full usage examples for each character.

"Modern" is of course relative, but when using this thing I find that the meanings have evolved less than I might imagine since 1912. Were it not for its relatively Byzantine indexing, I would use the book a lot more.

Anyway, when I refer to the 1912 book, this is the book I mean.

How To Cook and Eat In Chinese
Buwei Yang Chao

Speaking of historical interest, this book is the motherlode. I'm really happy to have found this one. In a just world, it would still be in print.

It's difficult to explain to a modern-day reader the effect this book had when it came out in 1945. Suffice to say that before that, no American had a clue how Chinese food was actually cooked, approached, and eaten in China ... nor even by immigrant Chinese. For most of the population, their only exposure to Chinese food was in extremely "touristy" American Chinese restaurants, such as there were, and they did not necessarily serve or prepare food the Chinese way - they gave the tourists what they thought the tourists would want.

This began to change as Americans went overseas for the war and for other reasons, and Dr. Chao's book is one of the keystones of that change. How significant is this book? It INVENTED the term "stir-frying" for a concept which, prior to that, had been thought of as inexpressible Chinese. Enough said.

It's also hilarious, has a complete list of recipes with beautiful hand-printed characters at the end, and everything in it still works in a kitchen today. The only problem is that you may never be able to actually find it, and when you do, you may pay so much for it that you don't want to cook food anywhere near it.

The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters
James McCawley

And the last shall be first: The book that indirectly inspired me to write this whole thing, ever since Calvin Trillin referred to it by name in an essay.

This book would be higher on the list if it were findable. I have several standing orders with book search services for it; I used a borrowed copy to work on these pages. It was apparently put out in a small edition by the University of Chicago Press, snapped up by the few people who really wanted such a thing, and has never been reissued. To date it is the only project I know of - besides this modest effort, of course - which takes on Chinese with a specific view towards restaurants and menus.

News flash! As of June 2004 it is apparently back in print, at least for now. Amazon.com has it - and will also sell you A.Zee's book Swallowing Clouds, another semi-famous work on Chinese food language which I completely forgot about when I wrote the paragraph above. (Of course, if you've read these pages closely, you already know what "swallowing clouds" is all about.)

That said, when I finally did get a chance to really look at it, I discovered that the book was less useful than I hoped it would be. It is primarily of interest for its translations of weird menu phrases that have a specific meaning to the Chinese but not to us ("mother and child," for example), or for grocery items with the same problem ("cai guo," VEGETABLE FRUIT = kohlrabi). Such things are not generally listed in dictionaries.

On the bad side, his definitions of some characters are weird by the standards of any other dictionary on the block (which is saying a lot), and his listing of characters and meanings is organized by a completely bizarre system which is supposed to be easy for the novice to use, but is mind-boggling to anyone with even slight experience at using more customary sorting methods like radical/stroke.

Perhaps the ultimate book on Chinese food language for non-Chinese hasn't been written yet. I don't think I'm the person to write it, though; that should be a task for someone who actually speaks Chinese. Like McCawley.

Of the books on this list which are in print, you may need to order the Harbaugh book via zhongwen.com, which is essentially the same information in web form, and also has excellent links to other Chinese resources.

The second place you should try is China Books. They can also be found here:
China Books & Periodicals
2929 24th St
San Francisco, CA 94110

The two Choy books are probably available from China Books, but if not, you could go directly to the source:
China West Books
P.O. Box 2804
San Francisco, CA 94126

Without Whom

There are many people who have encouraged me by being interested in this project; many people who have provided me with information useful to this project; and many, many people who have nagged and cajoled me to finish this project. Special thanks to Rose for all three of the above.

I also need to single out Kat, whose Japanese approach to a Chinese text might have been idiosyncratic by definition, but who walked me through a number of minefields I might otherwise have lost a limb in.

For other significant contributions above and beyond the call of duty: Syl, Bobby, Marko, Kristina, and Francis. Thank you all very kindly.

And of course Nonelvis, as ever, gets full credit for being willing to put up with me. Not too many others will.