Kingdom of Characters

 
 

Kingdom of Characters

The Language Revolution that Made China Modern

by Jing Tsu

Riverhead Books

2022

 

 

Kingdom of Characters tells the history of seven different innovations of the 20th century that Tsu narrates as a single century-long effort to 'modernize' the Chinese language, to allow China script to be reproduced mechanically, and later electronically.

 
Throughout, the challenge is that Chinese script consists of characters that represent whole words (or that pair or triple up to make compound words, like 'boardgame.') Because of this, there are thousands of characters in very regular use, and tens of thousands in an expanded vocabulary. And these characters are not phonetic - there's no relationship between how the character looks and how the word sounds when spoken. These features can make Chinese challenging to learn to read, and means that it's not easily retrofitted into technologies designed for alphabetic languages.

 
Tsu tells this story in seven chapters, each focusing on a key technology, and proceeding chronologically from 1900 to the 1990s. The events he describes parallels, and sometimes intersects with, China's political history. I knew a bit of this, but more familiarity would've helped me. She describes what's most necessary at each point, but doesn't say much more than that. At points I would've liked more of an overview or more context. Other times, it seemed strange to me that something like the Cultural Revolution or the Tienanmen Square Massacre gets mentioned only in passing, and solely to help timestamp another event. I'll readily acknowledge that my reactions say as much about me as they do about her.

 
Tsu doesn't glamorize - several language reformers are imprisoned or tortured, by leaders spanning from the Qing dowager Empress to Mao Zedong, and Tsu's sympathies are for the people, not the leaders. However, it also becomes increasingly clear that he is most concerned with Chinese as it's written in the mainland People's Republic of China. At several points he'll briefly note that something is different in Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Macau, but it seemed to me he found those developments to be of lesser importance. And in the couple places where Taiwan and the PRC make different linguistic choices, or come into direct competition, he picks the side of the PRC.

 
One thing Tsu does well throughout is to explain the features of written Chinese to the unfamiliar reader, and to make analogies to the Latin alphabet. I'll make an analogy of my own that's based partially on what I learned from Kingdom of Characters and partly on my looking up various concepts on Wikipedia as I went. Written Chinese is a bit like written Latin, the official script used to communicate publicly, while Mandarin and Cantonese are only the best-known versions of whole families of dialects that are at least as different from each other as Spanish is from Italian. Chinese isn't vernacular, but does enable communication between members of an enormous population who would otherwise find each other mutually unintelligible.

 
Tsu's story starts around 1900. China is still suffering from the aftermath of the two Opium Wars and the ongoing Western occupation of close to a hundred of its port cities. Only about 10% of the population is literate, mostly scholars, civil servants, and members of the royal Qing court. It's clear that Western countries have technology that China doesn't, and civic-minded people wonder how their country can 'catch-up' and participate in international society as an equal. Some blame the complexity and difficulty of learning Chinese script, and suggest abandoning it in favor of alphabetical writing.

 
The first innovation is a set of phonetic symbols drawn from written Chinese rather than the Latin alphabet. The innovator here develops the symbols as part of a new system for teaching Chinese writing, which did sound much easier to me than the Reverse Cut system used up until that point. The same guy is also partially responsible for Mandarin beating out Cantonese as the official pronunciation of the characters. He was a staunch advocate during the convention where it was debated, but arguably won due to his procedural tricks to influence how the delegates' votes were counted. A later phonetic syllabary known as Bopomofo (like 'the ABCs,' it's named for its first few sounds) lingers in the background of Tsu's narrative at least into the 50s. Bopomofo also uses calligraphy-derived symbols, but each is also explicitly paired with a Latin letter.

 
The second innovation is a Chinese language typewriter. Tsu discusses several prototypes, but I don't know if any made it into mass production. Most tried to use whole characters. One, developed by Chinese students studying in the US and Chinese American professors, builds the characters out of strokes the way a calligrapher would. That one caught the eye of the CIA, and rather than allow it to help members of the public communicate more easily, they reserved it for translating intercepted documents.

 
Third is a code for sending Chinese-language telegrams. In addition to resisting transliteration into the Latin alphabet, the Chinese inventors have to figure out how to order the four-digit numerical codes in a way that's sensible and allows quick look-ups, and they have to argue about pricing, since Morse Code numbers are all longer than letters, making Chinese telegrams much more expensive to send.

 
Fourth, and related to the above, was figuring out a way to put the words in a meaningful order to allow them to be looked up easily. The Kangxi Dictionary had provided an order since the 1700s, but it still required checking the dictionary first. The system that seemed most interesting and intuitive to me was Lin Yutang's idea to create an indexing order based on the strokes used to draw the characters as calligraphy, with the first stroke serving the same function as the first letter in an alphabetical word. The Four Corner system that became most widely used didn't seem particularly intuitive to me, but it was developed by a bigshot in the publishing industry, so he could sell the books explaining his method cheaper than his competitors, and ensure that his method was used in the index of every book he published.

 
In the background of these chapters, China is in political turmoil. In 1911, the Qing empire collapsed and was replaced by a nascent democratic government. This progressively collapsed as regional governors and opportunistic warlords ruled over their own little fiefdoms. Japan invaded and claimed territory. The Nationalists and Communists cooperated to defeat the smaller local governments to reunify China, then went to war with each other.

 
In the 1950s, the CCP launches twin initiatives to create an official Latin alphabet transliteration of the language, and to simply written Chinese by reducing the number of strokes needed to write each character. The transliteration is called Pinyin, and it replaces the missionary-developed system Westerners had been using until then. This is when 'Peking' becomes 'Beijing' - not because the city was renamed, but because the way Westerners wrote and pronounced it changed. I think Pinyin also fully supplants Bopomofo, or maybe Tsu just stops mentioning it. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau all continue using the traditional, non-simplified version of the characters.

 
The sixth innovation is a computerized version of Chinese. Initially, instead of the four-number codes of the telegraph system, someone invents a four-letter code corresponding to each character, based on the first letter of the Pinyin name for the first four calligraphy strokes used to write it. He came up with the idea for this system while he was imprisoned for intellectualism during the Cultural Revolution.

 
The seventh innovation in a unified international coding scheme so that when you write a Chinese character on a computer, no matter which country you're in or who manufactured the computer, someone else can open the file and see the same character. Unicode accomplished this initially in 1992, and Taiwan moved first to ensure that the traditional versions of the characters were the official Unicode versions, with the simplified versions used in the PRC considered 'variants' (like how the yellow-skinned emojis are official and default, with all the human skin tones treated as variants.) Conferences to debate, add to, and amend Unicode continue to the present day, and Tsu has attended several to observe the process.

A Small Miracle

 
 

A Small Miracle

by Peter Collington 

Knopf

1997

 

 

I'm visiting relatives for the holidays, and my little niece has a current favorite book. At her request, someone has read it to her several times a day for the past few days, and I've taken a turn as well!

 

A Small Miracle is made like, and employs the painted art style of, other children's picture books, but Collington also put several frames on each page to tell a sequential story - so secretly, it's also a comic. This is a wordless book, so the entire story is told through the art.

 

On a cold winter morning, an old woman wakes up in her small wooden house. There's frost on the windows and holes in the floor. She checks her stove, but she's out of fuel. There's no food either, and no money to buy more. She wraps up in a coat and shawl, and takes her accordion, and goes outside. We see that her house is a wagon at the edge of a field by the woods. Based on the visual cues, I think the old woman is Roma.

 

She walks across several snow-covered fields and passes a church before she gets to town. It looks like she's somewhere in Europe, or maybe Britain, in something like the present day. She sees someone unloading a nativity display from the back of their car. Despite the snow, the town is bustling with people out shopping. She sets up between two shops and plays her accordion, but everyone passes her by. She falls asleep, and when she wakes up, it's nearing the end of the day. She has no money from playing, so she sells her accordion at the pawn shop.

 

As she leaves the shop, a thief on a motorbike drives by and snatches her purse. She follows the trail of his bike through the snow, and sees that he's gone into the church. He bursts out the front door on his bike holding a donation bucket, but the old woman grabs it and wrestles it from him, then rushes into the church and locks the door. She sees that he's knocked over the nativity display. She puts the bucket back and sets the nativity scene back up. She checks outside and the thief has left, so she starts her long walk home.

 

Along the way, she collapses in a field. The colors go from afternoon, to evening, to night. The woman's body is progressively covered by a blanket of snow. It's at this point that the titular small miracle occurs. (I think? You could also read this as the moment of the old woman's death, and what happens next as her symbolic welcome into the afterlife. But for the purposes of reading aloud to kid, it's definitely a miracle!)

 

The figures from the nativity scene - Mary and Joseph, baby Jesus, and the three Wise Men - come to life and rush from the church to the field. They lift the old woman and carry her to her wagon. They put her to bed. Mary and the baby Jesus sit by her bedside to comfort her. Joseph sets to work chopping wood for her stove. 

 

The three Wise Men take their gifts to the pawn shop, where the shopkeeper is thrilled by the gold and gives them a big handful of money. They buy back the accordion and then head to the grocery store. The other shoppers are like, very lightly surprised, but like the pawn shop owner, accept the little walking statues with remarkable aplomb.

 

Back at the wagon, there's fire in the stove, and Joseph is busy repairing the hole in the floor and any other flaws in the woodwork. The Wise Men cook the woman some dinner, and set out the accordion and remaining cash where she can find them. All the nativity figures leave to return to the church. The old woman wakes up, and is hugely surprised to see that she has warmth, and food, and money, and even her accordion back!

 

Contained in this story, I think, is a message from Collington about the worth and dignity of ethnic minorities, and about the proper use of the church's resources.

The Storm of Echoes

 
 

The Storm of Echoes

by Christelle Dabos

translated by Hildegarde Serle

Europa Editions

2021

 

 

The Storm of Echoes is the last book in Christelle Dabos's Mirror Visitor quartet. When I started the series, I expected it to be a supernatural romance, and the first two books made it seem that perhaps we were watching Ophelia's long, arranged engagement to Thorn either because we were going to watch them fall in love despite themselves, or because she was going to reject him in favor of a real romance of her own choosing. Instead, what happens is that the pair, and Ophelia especially get caught up in events related to the fate of their world, and that is what the latter half of the series is about. By the time they realize they love and trust each other, it's clear that the stakes are so much higher than that by now.
 
Ophelia's world is a New World made of of 'arks,' islands of land amidst a sea of fog, that remain in position relative to each other just as they were in the Old World, when the Earth was still a whole intact planet. Each ark is ruled by a giant, supernatural Family Spirit, and is home to great extended human families who all posses Family Powers that derive from the spirit.
 
Ophelia is from Anima, where everyone has powers that animate or interact with objects. Ophelia can 'read' the history of anything she touches with her bare hands, and pass through any mirror to arrive at another nearby. Thorn is from the Pole, where everyone is some kind of psychic. Thorn can inflict pain, others create illusions, others are telepathic. The first two books take place at the Pole, in the frozen cold, amidst the courtly intrigue.
 
But by the end of the second book, we've learned that God, who sundered the Earth an turned it into the New World, who created the family spirits and gave everyone their powers, God is on a mission to take away everyone's free will, while God's mysterious counterpart, the Other, is loose in the world, causing it to fracture even more. And somehow Thorn is on a personal mission to stop them, so Ophelia, who as I said, has finally, voluntarily become Thorn's wife and ally is on a mission to help him. So books 3 and 4 take place on the ark of Babel, where the locals have supernaturally powerful senses.
 
The pacing of all this is strange! Things that seem like foreshadowing don't always foretell much, other developments arrive unexpectedly. But I'll say this for Dabos, she never ceased to surprise me, never gave me expected plots or cliche characters. The familiar names create a sense that you might know these people or understand what they'll do, but that's belied by the winding and dream-like nature of the plots.
 
In each volume, Ophelia ends up trapped, in disguise, undercover, in sort of perilous situation. This time around, she's in a sort of mental asylum for 'inverts.' At the end of the previous book, Ophelia learned that the mysterious God is really children's author Eulalia Gonde, who described the New World and Family Spirits in a book that was written before the Rupture. Ophelia somehow has access to some of Eulalia's memories, and enters the asylum, where Eulalia once stayed, to try to learn more about the past.
 
At the start of this book, the whole world is being shaken by echoes and by more and bits of the arks vanishing into the misty void. Babel responds by preparing to expel all its immigrants. Staying in the asylum is the only way for her to stay on the ark. Ophelia's inversion dates back to the time when, as a child, she got stuck in the space between while traveling between mirrors. Ophelia has begun to suspect that she somehow released God's Other when she got free, and hopes that experiencing more of Eulalia's memories will help her understand. And Thorn is there, in disguise as an inspector evaluating the care given in the asylum. But while she's trying to use the asylum, it's using her too, and the treatments are making her clumsiness and inversion worse.
 
What happens next would be hard to explain, but by the end, Ophelia has learned even more secrets about God and the Other, about the Rupture and the nature of the world, and she even gets to see a glimpse of what her life would've been like if she'd never got stuck in the mirror. She and Thorn both have visited the strange, languageless, color-reversed world on the Wrong Side of the mirror. And there's a climactic confrontation with the author of all the world's miseries, and some painful sacrifices needed to save what can still be saved.
 
This is not a Harry Potter pastiche; not a Twilight retelling, supernatural romance, or romantasy; and any early resemblances to other stories mostly serve to lull you into a false sense of familiarity that will only make the strange, fever-sleep qualities of the story seem all the more surprising. In both plot and mood, Dabos has created something really new.

Berlin Girls 1923 & Berlin Girls 1925

 
Berlin Girls 1923

Flirty Magazine Illustrations from the Weimar Republic

edited by Thomas Negovan

Century Guild

2019

 

 

Berlin Girls 1925

Flirty Magazine Illustrations from the Weimar Republic

edited by Thomas Negovan

Century Guild 

2022

 

 

I read Berlin Girls 1923 and Berlin Girls 1925 in such close succession that I'm going to treat them as a single entry. They are certainly not a single work spread across two volumes, but they are easier to talk about in direct comparison than they would be individually.

 

Both are art books put together from the Century Guild's excellent collection of 1920s and 30s German illustrations, and both consist almost entirely of images except for brief introductory essays by editor and museum curator Thomas Negovan. The images here come from a handful of Berlin magazines that I think were about bars, restaurants, theater, goings on, the night life, etc.

 

In 1923, Germany was experiencing hyper-inflation, money was essentially worthless, and the future seemed grim. The pictures from this era employ thicker line work, and have an almost pencil sketch quality. The colors are muted and spare and remind me of pastels. 

 

A lot of the images show women alone, often in their slips or other states of undress. There's something candid and un-self-conscious about these solo images, as though the artist actually caught someone getting ready to go out on the town for the night, or unwinding before bed afterward. When the girls are shown with men, half the time they're still in just a slip, while the men are inevitably decked out in tuxedos. I think those images are supposed to look sexy and fun, but there's an undercurrent to them that I find unsettling, like the men know they have the money and power, and the women can't quite hide their desperation.

 

By 1925, Germany's economy had improved. Hitler and his Brown Shirts had made a first attempt at a coup and been imprisoned for it. Prospects for the future seemed brighter. The changes in the visual style are dramatic. The lines are thin, often invisible. The images are in full color, and to me, it looks like watercolor. Instead of realistic proportions, a lot of the figures are boxier, more like statues than living people. They're also larger, or maybe zoomed in, filling the page instead of being surrounded by negative space. The two covers actually do a great job of showing the difference. As a matter of personal taste, I like the 1923 art style much better.

While many of the earlier illustrations showed 'behind the scenes' activities, most of what we see here takes place in public. There are more groups, fewer women alone. In general, the women are dressed nicer, in clothes that look new and maybe expensive. There's a recurring motif of a woman trying on clothes, and being outraged to notice that a man is spying on her. There are also a lot of beach scenes and women in bathing suits. 

 

Aside from the images of a man invading someone's privacy, these images are both less risque and less sinister than the ones from 1923, but on the down side, a lot of them are also more boring. The larger-than-life figures, the artificial poses, the fact that so many of the scenes are of people displaying themselves in public, all contribute to a sense that we're being shown how rich Berliners like to think of themselves, how they would like to be seen. In contrast, the more intimate and relaxed setting of most of the 1923 images appear to show more of what life was actually like for women in the night life.

Sea of Stars 1

 
 

Sea of Stars 1

Lost in the Wild Heavens

by Jason Aaron and Dennis Hallum

art by Stephen Green

Image Comics

2020

 

 

My first book of December is Sea of Stars 1. This is a scifi comic that treats space, or at least a particular region, as analogous to the ocean, and brimming with life. That much I knew going in.  

 

It's also about a space trucker father trying to reunite with his lost son when they're separated by disaster when a space whale eats his space truck. Initially this means he's in survival mode, trying to repair a derelict ship so he can get flying again, cobbling together a new space suit to incorporate a tiny cop-bot navigator and a man-eating piranha plant as a source of oxygen. Later it means getting captured by a band of Zzaztec hunters, who take him to their holy moon, where his son is for some reason...  

 

All this alternates with the son, who's maybe 6 or 7, having his own adventures with talking animal sidekicks. The truck was hauling the contents of a defunct space museum back to earth. When the space whale attacked, the boy accidentally grabbed an artifact, a war club that belongs to the Zzaztecs' living god. The weapon merges with the little kid and grants him godlike powers - he can survive in space with no suit, eat anything he wants, and understand the space monkey and space fish he meets.  

 

A disgraced Zzaztec woman meets the boy and brings him and his sidekicks back to the holy moon, hoping to remove her dishonor by bringing the god's power home. The high priest plans to retrieve the war club with a human sacrifice, but the dad, the animal sidekicks, and even the disgraced woman all try to stop the priest from killing the boy. And then the giant space whale shows back up...  

 

The pieces of this one never really came together for me. The juxtaposition of the dad's brutal, almost horrific survival tale paired with his son's light-hearted discovery of his new powers (which reminded me of Simba meeting Timon and Pumba in The Lion King) was jarring. And the 'barely even trying to disguise the source of inspiration' nature of the Zzaztecs felt uncomfortable to me, especially since they were cast in the roles of cannibalistic hunters in the dad's story, and child sacrificing religious fanatics in the son's.