character characteristics

The Los Angeles Times is the only paper that I have read which consistently runs the occasional column on Chinese and Chinese-American interest stories, and more remarkably, only about 50% of them are the Communist-demonizing insinuation pieces you usually find in American media. Today’s article was one of the other 50% and speaks of the cultural and political schism that the divide of the Chinese literacy system into Traditional and Simplified script is causing:

…Lee, who came to the U.S. from Taiwan in the 1980s, said she resented Lim’s characterization of traditional script as obsolete. “Chinese characters are so beautiful, why would you give that up?” she said. “How could 5,000 years of history go away that easily?”

Simplified characters were introduced in the 1950s by the Chinese communist regime to improve literacy rates among the country’s mostly rural population.

At the time, anti-communist politicians and refugees fled and settled in Taiwan, where they continued the use of traditional script.

Before diplomatic relations were established between the United States and China in the 1970s, the traditional form was commonly taught here. To switch to the simplified form says something about Taiwan’s place in the world and who speaks on behalf of Chinese culture, said David Lee, past president of the Arcadia Chinese Assn.

“In the heart of Taiwan, it’s a crisis because the Taiwanese feel they are so small, there’s nothing they can compete with China, not militarily, not with population,” Lee said. “But if there’s something they can . . . insist upon, it’s culture and the language. And script is part of the culture.”

Personally I have invested all my time into learning simplified text, and even though I am mostly still illiterate in this country, it is always an ironic relief to see Mainland China’s 简体字。 Only here am I ever able to use what I’ve learned – not in Taiwan, not in Hong Kong, and not even in any Chinese community or establishment anywhere in America. This feeling of linguistic isolation really gets to me when I look at menus and signs written in Traditional script in America, as if even despite my best efforts I never will broach even the slightest bit back into that cultural heritage.

Even when I passed the immigration and customs border from Shenzhen to Hong Kong, I remember breathing in a warm feeling of recognition and belonging when I saw the sign “Welcome to Hong Kong” hanging from the bridge awning – and then breathing it out in a sigh of disappointment when I saw it repeated in Traditional script underneath. Chinese-Americans don’t have a shared sense of community spirit yet – as evidenced by the article – and we are each different in how we relate to our heritage, but for me and the importance I place in language and the written word, this is my Chinese-American dilemma: implicit sensations of belonging and exclusion, always confusingly wrapped into each other in the same current of cross-purposes whenever I see Traditional script.

It sounds like I am a proponent of Simplified for selfish purposes. I won’t deny that, and I won’t deny Traditional its beauty or the implicit meanings and connotations that it richly holds which I won’t ever be able to understand to the same level that I can analyze an English text (sadly). But languages have turning points where they change and evolve – English itself softened its angular Teutonic inflections after the Norman conquest of England, which forced French influences upon it to such an extent that even Middle English is drastically different from Old English. And even after that, major events served to twist it even further into its modern form today, and Modern English is also proving to be very malleable.

I think I know literary scholars who would be on both sides of this argument: those calling for the preservation of the cultural richness of Traditional, and those who would be excited to see the evolution of a new dynamic iteration of language (whether or not Simplified is that, I don’t know, but it’s a change at least).