你 你 你 你 你
This was how I first began learning Chinese in America as a primary school student in New York City. I went to Chinese school in the summer with many other American-born Chinese (ABCs), toting my plastic lunchbox and a few Chinese grammar and poetry books. A big van picked me up in the morning, and I sat in the back because bumpy rides were fun. I then sat down in a classroom full of American-born Chinese students like me, listening to a young teacher lecture about the four tones, the difference between "yin" and "ying," and the correct order of strokes for each character. We opened our notebooks to pages of blank squares waiting to be filled with identical characters. For example...
我 我 我 我 我
I was reminded of kindergarten, when we practiced the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet in a similar fashion. A A A A A. a a a a a. Then, when our letter-shaping abilities became more advanced, we learned the cursive forms of each letter. But the alphabet was a cakewalk compared to Chinese characters. The letter A has three strokes with no real enforced order to writing them. The character "我," on the other hand, has a whopping seven strokes with a meticulous order that the teacher enforced strictly. No, you cannot write the middle "heng" first. It is simply not done.
So is the rule to go from left to right at all times?
No.
他 他 他 他 他
In order to write the right half of this character, you have to go from right to left. Luckily, little kids learn fast without questioning. I never thought to ask why we had to follow all these rules. No one else did either. Like diligent students of Chinese heritage, with academic discipline drilled into our heads by strict parents, we scrawled character after character with our No. 2 pencils into our notebooks. We were graded according to neatness and form.
We read and memorized poems and children's songs, half of which didn't make sense to me. I vaguely recall verses about jumping frogs, a light breeze, and the archetypal little boy and girl named "大卫" and "白雪," kind of like Johnny and Mary in English education. We sometimes held performances with other Chinese classes, where our whole class would recite a poem or a song together on a stage.
During lunch break, everyone spoke English.
We gathered in a cafeteria, some of us buying food, some of us having brought our own. We chattered about the inane things that fill the minds of young children, perhaps about our annoying siblings, or about the next family vacation coming up, or about the new Disney movie we had just seen in the theater. Chinese stayed within the classroom. We were there to study it, but studying wasn't fun. Lunchtime was fun time.
I didn't go to Chinese school for very long. In third grade, I moved from New York City to suburban New Jersey, where there seemed to be more trees than people or cars. We had a new ranch house with a big backyard, friendly neighbors whose houses were generously spaced apart from each other, and a school with hardly any Asian students. There were no Chinese schools in the area.
My Chinese notebooks full of messy handwritten characters collected dust on my bookshelf. The poems and songs slipped from my mind; I had never really understood them anyway. Mandarin Chinese dissipated from my memory, scattered by my continuous use of English in school and Shanghai dialect at home with my family. After going through the rest of primary school, middle school, and high school in suburban New Jersey, I hardly remembered any Chinese at all, except for the precious Hanyu pinyin system and several random words. Human memory is forever a puzzle in how it keeps some things and lets others fade.
I have since then worked hard to catch up on my Chinese in college, and that's how I can actually be somewhat useful as a translator at the People's Daily Online. In my first day of Chinese class in college, though, there were at least three words I didn't have to relearn.
你
我
他。
By Ann Chao, a Chinese-American university student who is studying and working in Beijing from 2007 to 2008.
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