Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language by Deborah Fallows

Author:Deborah Fallows [Fallows, Deborah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural, Language Arts & Disciplines, Translating & Interpreting
ISBN: 080277914X
Publisher: Walker & Company
Published: 2010-09-07T07:31:27+00:00

15 Yip, Po-Ching, and Rimmington, Don, Chinese: A Comprehensive Grammar, Routledge, 2003.

16 http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/05/todays_chapter_on_chinese_educ.php#more

17 Guo, Xiaolu, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, Doubleday, 2007, p. 213.

Rènao Hot-and-noisy

9. Think like the Chinese think

WALKING HOME ONE drizzly night along Shanghai’s busy Nanjing Lu, I passed a laborer doing roadwork. He was submerged to his ankles in a soggy trench, wearing rubber flip-flops and wielding a heavy, sparking blowtorch. It looked very dangerous. Most mornings as I walked to school along the same road, I watched a restaurant staff hosing down their concrete deck. They padded around puddles in their bare feet, plugging and unplugging radios, fans and electric tools.

There is more: one day I passed a telephone linesman who hooked his homemade ladder over a set of swinging cables, then clambered up, and edged like a tightrope walker along the tension wires 15 feet above the ground. In Shanghai pairs of window cleaners routinely dangle and sway tens of stories high, buckets and squeegies in hand, secured only to each other at opposite ends of a rope that hooks around some invisible rooftop anchor. One day in Beijing, I watched half a dozen workers struggling to right a toppled and leaking gasoline can atop their rickety cart, puffing all the while on their cigarettes. Daily, I wanted to cry out “Xiǎoxīn!” Look out! Be careful! Watch out!

China can be a dangerous place. The papers are filled with reports of mining disasters, bus crashes and construction site collapses. An average of 250 people die every day from accidents of all sorts. A fire in an upper stairwell of Shanghai’s World Financial Center, until recently the tallest building in the world, slowed down work for a while in the summer of 2007. During the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, thousands of the so-called “tofu-dregs schoolhouses” collapsed from shoddy construction.

In Shanghai, taxi drivers routinely work 24-hour shifts. In that city I can count three separate terrifying taxi rides, where I sat peering from the backseat at the rear-view mirror, watching the driver’s eyelids droop as the car started to weave. Desperate to keep the driver awake, my husband and I would engage in loud faux-arguments, or shamelessly poke and prod the driver to rouse him (or, in one case, her) into consciousness.

Xiǎoxīn! (shyao sheen) means “Watch out!” Xiǎo-xīn is literally “small heart.” I envision my own heart closing tightly, becoming very small, when I see these dangerous acts. Sometimes xiǎoxīn is used as an adjective that means “cautious” or “careful,” as in “He is a naturally cautious driver.” Sometimes mothers cry out “Xiǎoxīn!” to their children approaching crosswalks.

My language books tell me that in China “ancient people believed that the heart—xīn—was related to thinking and temperament,” in sentiments like desire, fear, love and respect. Hence, xīn finds its way into many feeling-related compound words:

Kāixīn = kāi (open) + heart = joyous

Fàngxīn = fàng (put in place) + heart = set your mind at ease

Shāngxīn = shāng (wound) + heart = heart- broken

Rèxīn = rè (hot) + heart =

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