Chinese is red . . . English is blue
Physics room 202 in the Lycee International of Saint Germain en Laye is a nightmare. Every blazing Friday in June, I sit on the edge of a disorderbly bank of tables, staring out onto the courtyard below. Younger kids are playing football, their mirthful screeches compressed by the hot summer air.
The teacher is rooted in front of the chalkboard, his lines of thinning hair like plow tracks in a neat French field (he always keeps a comb in the front pocket of his chemistry robe and unobstructedly passes it through his sparse spouts. . . without a mirror). He is a civil servant and stands as erect as a totem to the third republic should.
To be truthful, this was a long time ago. My high school physics classes are a mirage today. But I remember one of those hot Friday afternoon classes, there was a course on colors. Aren’t there two color systems: one additive and one subtractive?
It doesn’t really matter. I’m thinking about the subtractive one now. Say you take all the colors of the rainbow and paste them one on top of the other. You get black: colors subtract from one another.
The same with languages. The Chinese I am learning subtracts from my English and French. Similarly, the French I am trying to catch up on (through perversely enjoyable readings of Michel Houillebecq) cauterizes my English. Even now as I am writing, I suddenly stop, there is a gap hanging right off the tip of my tongue, a missing word.
I can feel its invisible presence though. I can reach and touch its outlines with my thoughts, I can remember how my tongue curled around it in the past and gently let it slide off of my lips. I used to paste these missing words in the center of sentences, and then read over the result satiated with the wholeness, the easyness with which they fell in, like the last piece of a puzzle.
I don’t think anything else of language has slipped away from me. I synthesize wordless thoughts, associate disparate concepts, everything is prepared inside for sentence format. It is the formatting that stalls.
Maybe because only the formatting changes from one language to the next. My job requires me to write short texts in Chinese, either in the context of translation or script analysis. My workmates read over my attempts. They probably sigh (not right in front of me, that would be impolite) and then patiently comb through the tangled phrases.
Yes the formatting–the order of the words, the sentence’s fulcrum–is off. But beyond that a lot of mistakes are easily avoidable.
The rythm of a Chinese sentence for example; even I can hear when its rythm is off. It is the same as in English or in French. In those languages, I read over my sentences to gage the flow. I know when it is broken by staccatos, by periods and short sentences, and when its contours shrink back into fluidity with adjectives and multi-syllabic nouns. I avoid repeating words because that creates an island of beat in the paragraph that will inevitably be cut off or inconstant and therefore unpleasant.
These rules do not change in Chinese. Therefore I have not lost my sense of rythm, but the ease with which I can construct rythm in a grammatically correct and linguistically coherent fashion.
