The Opposite of Fate (30 page)

This notion was further bolstered by the famous Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which states roughly that one’s perception of the world and how one functions in it depends a great deal on the language used. As Sapir, Benjamin Whorf, and new carriers of the banner would have us believe, language shapes our thinking, channels us along certain patterns embedded in words, syntactic structures, and intonation patterns. Language has become the peg and the shelf that enable us to sort out and categorize the world. In English, we see “cats” and “dogs”; what if the language had also specified
glatz,
meaning “animals that leave fur on the sofa,” and
glotz,
meaning “animals that leave fur and
drool on the sofa”? How would language, the enabler, have changed our perceptions with slight vocabulary variations?

And if this were the case—if language were the master of destined thought—think of the opportunities lost from failure to evolve two little words, “yes” and “no,” the simplest of opposites! Genghis Khan could have been sent back to Mongolia. Opium wars might have been averted. The Cultural Revolution could have been sidestepped.

There are still many, from serious linguists to pop psychology cultists, who view language and reality as inextricably tied, one being the consequence of the other. We have traversed the range from Sapir–Whorf to est to neurolinguistic programming, which tell us that “you are what you say.”

I too have been intrigued by the theories. I can summarize, albeit badly, ages-old empirical evidence: of Eskimos and their infinite ways to say “snow,” their ability to
see
differences in snowflake configurations, thanks to the richness of their vocabulary, while non-Eskimos like me founder in “snow,” “more snow,” and “lots more where that came from.”

I too have experienced dramatic cognitive awakenings via the word. Once I added “mauve” to my vocabulary, I began to see it everywhere. When I learned how to pronounce “prix fixe,” I ate French food at prices better than the easier-to-say “à la carte” choices.

But just how seriously are we supposed to take this?

Sapir said something else about language and reality. It is the part that often gets left behind in the dot-dot-dots of quotations: “No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which
different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.”

When I first read this, I thought, Here at last is validity for the dilemmas I felt growing up in a bicultural, bilingual family! As any child of immigrant parents knows, there’s a special kind of double bind attached to knowing two languages. My parents, for example, spoke to me in both Chinese and English; I spoke back to them in English.

“Amy-ah!” they’d call to me.

“What?” I’d mumble back.

“Do not question us when we call,” they’d scold in Chinese. “It is not respectful.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ai! Didn’t we just tell you not to question?”

To this day, I wonder which parts of my behavior were shaped by Chinese, which by English. I am tempted to think that if I am of two minds on some matter, it is due to the richness of my linguistic experiences, not to any personal tendencies toward wishy-washiness. But which mind says what?

Was it perhaps patience—developed through years of deciphering my mother’s fractured English—that had me listening politely while a woman announced over the phone that I had won one of five valuable prizes? Was it respect—pounded in by the Chinese imperative to accept convoluted explanations—that had me agreeing that I might find it worthwhile to drive seventy-five miles to view a time-share resort? Could I have been at a loss for words when asked, “Wouldn’t you like to win a Hawaiian cruise or perhaps a fabulous Star of India designed exclusively by Carter and Van Arpels?”

And when this same woman called back a week later, this time complaining that I had missed my appointment, obviously it was my type A language that kicked into gear and interrupted her. Certainly, my blunt denial—“Frankly I’m not interested”—was as American as apple pie. And when she said, “But it’s in Morgan Hill,” and I shouted back, “Read my lips. I don’t care if it’s Timbuktu,” you can be sure I said it with the precise intonation expressing both cynicism and disgust.

It’s dangerous business, this sorting out of language and behavior. Which one is English? Which is Chinese? The categories manifest themselves: passive or aggressive, tentative or assertive, indirect or direct. And I realize they are just variations of the same theme: that Chinese people are discreet and modest.

Reject them all!

If my reaction seems overly strident, it is because I cannot come across as too emphatic. I grew up listening to the same lines over and over, like so many rote expressions repeated in an English phrasebook. And I too almost came to believe them.

Yet if I consider my upbringing more carefully, I find there was nothing discreet about the Chinese language I grew up with. My parents made everything abundantly clear. Nothing wishy-washy in their demands, no compromises accepted: “Of course you will become a famous neurosurgeon,” they told me. “And yes, a concert pianist on the side.”

In fact, now that I remember, it seems that the more emphatic outbursts always spilled over into Chinese: “Not that way! You must wash rice so not a single grain is lost.”

I do not believe that my parents—both immigrants from
mainland China—are the sole exceptions to the discreet-and-modest rule. I have only to look at the number of Chinese engineering students skewing minority ratios at Berkeley, MIT, and Yale. Certainly they were not raised by passive mothers and fathers who said, “It’s up to you, my daughter. Writer, welfare recipient, masseuse, or molecular engineer—you decide.”

And my American mind says, See, those engineering students weren’t able to say no to their parents’ demands. But then my Chinese mind remembers: Ah, but those parents all wanted their sons and daughters to be
pre-med.

Having listened to both Chinese and English, I tend to be suspicious of any comparisons made between the two languages. Typically, one language—that of the person who is doing the comparing—is used as the standard, the benchmark for a logical form of expression. And so the other language is in danger of being judged by comparison deficient or superfluous, simplistic or unnecessarily complex, melodious or cacophonous. English speakers point out that Chinese is extremely difficult because it relies on variations in tone barely discernible to the human ear. By the same token, Chinese speakers tell me English is extremely difficult because it is inconsistent, a language of too many broken rules, of Mickey Mice and Donald Ducks.

Even more dangerous, in my view, is the temptation to compare both language and behavior
in translation.
To listen to my mother speak English, one might think she has no concept of past or future, that she doesn’t see the difference between singular and plural, that she is gender blind because she refers to my husband as “she.” If one were not careful, one might also generalize, from how my mother talks, that all Chinese people take
a circumlocutory route to get to the point. It is, rather, my mother’s idiosyncratic behavior to ramble a bit.

I worry that the dominant society may see Chinese people from a limited—and limiting—perspective. I worry that seemingly benign stereotypes may be part of the reason there are few Chinese in top management positions, in mainstream political roles. I worry about the power of language: that if one says anything enough times—in
any
language—it might come true.

Could this be why Chinese friends of my parents’ generation are willing to accept the generalizations?

“Why are you complaining?” one of them said to me. “If people think we are modest and polite, let them think that. Wouldn’t Americans be pleased to be thought of as polite?”

And I do believe that anyone would take the description as a compliment—at first. But after a while, it annoys, as if the only things that people heard one say were phatic remarks: I’m so pleased to meet you. I’ve heard many wonderful things about you. For me? You shouldn’t have!

These remarks are not representative of new ideas, honest emotions, or considered thought. They are what is said from the polite distance of social contexts: greetings, farewells, wedding thank-you notes, convenient excuses, and the like.

I wonder, though. How many anthropologists, how many sociologists, how many travel journalists have documented so-called natural interactions in foreign lands, all observed with spiral notebook in hand? How many cases are there of long-lost “primitive” tribes, people who turned out to be sophisticated enough to put on the stone-age show that ethnologists had come to see?

And how many tourists fresh off the bus have wandered into Chinatown expecting the self-effacing shopkeeper to admit under duress that the goods are not worth the price asked? I have witnessed it:

“I don’t know,” a tourist told the shopkeeper, a Cantonese woman perhaps in her fifties. “It doesn’t look genuine to me. I’ll give you three dollars.”

“You don’t like my price, go somewhere else,” answered the shopkeeper.

“You are not a nice person,” cried the shocked tourist, “not a nice person at all!”

“Who say I have to be nice,” snapped the shopkeeper.

S
o how does one say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in Chinese?” my friends ask a bit warily.

And here I do agree in part with the
New York Times Magazine
article. There is no one word for “yes” or “no”—but not out of necessity to be discreet. If anything, I would say the Chinese equivalent of answering “yes” or “no” is dis
crete,
that is, specific to what is asked.

Ask a Chinese person if he or she has eaten, and he or she might say
chrle
(eaten already) or
meiyou
(have not).

Ask, “So you had insurance at the time of the accident?” and the response would be
dwei
(correct) or
meiyou
(did not have).

Ask, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” and the answer refers directly to the proposition being asserted or denied: stopped already, still have not, never beat, have no wife.

What could be clearer?

A
s for people who are still wondering how to translate the language of discretion, I offer this personal example.

My aunt and uncle were about to return to Beijing after a three-month visit to the United States. On their last night I announced I wanted to take them out to dinner.

“Are you hungry?” I asked in Chinese.

“Not hungry,” my uncle said promptly—the same response he once gave me ten minutes before suffering a low-blood-sugar attack.

“Not too hungry,” said my aunt. “Perhaps you’re hungry?”

“A little,” I admitted.

“We can eat, we can eat, then,” they both consented.

“What kind of food?” I asked.

“Oh, doesn’t matter. Anything will do. Nothing fancy, just some simple food is fine.”

“Do you like Japanese food?” I suggested. “We haven’t had that yet.”

They looked at each other.

“We can eat it,” said my uncle bravely, this survivor of the Long March.

“We have eaten it before,” added my aunt. “Raw fish.”

“Oh, you don’t like it?” I said. “Don’t be polite. We can go somewhere else.”

“We are not being polite. We can eat it,” my aunt insisted.

So I drove them to Japantown and we walked past several restaurants featuring colorful displays of plastic sushi in the windows.

“Not this one, not this one either,” I continued to say, as if
searching for a certain Japanese restaurant. “Here it is,” I finally said, in front of a Chinese restaurant famous for its fish dishes from Shandong Province.

“Oh, Chinese food!” cried my aunt, obviously relieved.

My uncle patted my arm. “You think like a Chinese.”

“It’s your last night here in America,” I said. “So don’t be polite. Act like an American.”

And that night we ate a banquet.

• five writing tips •

This is an edited version of a speech given as a commencement address at Simmons College, in Boston, in 2003.

M
embers of the Board of Trustees, President Cheever and faculty, distinguished honorees, graduating students, and their family and loved ones who helped make today possible with their patience, hope, good faith, and low-interest loans, thank you for your kind welcome. What a delight that we meet on this glorious day at the historic and beautiful Simmons College parking lot.

Soon you, the Class of 2003, will have your degrees conferred upon you, your names called, President Cheever’s hand sweeping over your anointed heads, and in elation and near-loss of consciousness from joy you will toss those mortarboards in the air. And when that moment comes, I want you to remember one of the truly great and moving moments in the history of the conferring of degrees: it is when the Scarecrow receives his honorary doctorate in thinkology from the Wizard of Oz. The Scarecrow instantly possesses his long-cherished brain. He points to his head and recites: “The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side.” Well, guess what? He got it
wrong,
and
everybody else did too, because they clapped and were very impressed. Oh, for years I got it wrong too, because I never really thought about what he said, that what he should have said was: “The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is . . .” Of course, it didn’t really matter what gibberish the Scarecrow spoke, because what he was demonstrating was that he had the credentials and the confidence, and he could now BS his way through life and stay on in Oz as a politician.

But you folks won’t need to rely on BS, I know that, because you are graduating from Simmons College, not Wizard School, and you not only are well educated but also possess certain principles that have been a large part of your immersion in this school’s fine tradition of higher education. I am honored that you wish to give me a doctorate from Simmons, a doctorate in letters. I have been promised by President Cheever that I will have rights, privileges, and dignities that I did not previously hold, which include a free parking space in this glorious lot before me, that is, when it is not otherwise occupied for more important matters, such as ceremonies like today’s. I believe that with my doctorate I will also enjoy the investiture of prodigious powers, including the ability to envision your future.