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Tomorrow belongs to China”, and “Chinese is the language of the future.” These are statements we hear from people returning after business visits to China. Be ready for tomorrow; don’t get left behind. Heeding these recommendations, I decided to go in for lessons in Chinese.
My first shock came when I heard that Chinese is a tonal language. The same word spoken in different tones can have different meanings. The classic example is the common word “ma”, which has four meanings when uttered with a high tone, a rising tone, a falling-rising tone and a falling tone. The pitfalls are many. I intend to say, “Your mother is a wonderful lady,” and end up saying “Your horse is a wonderful lady.”
In course of time, however, I found that my fears were misplaced. In continuous speech, the tone variations get merged in the flow of speech. When uttering single words, the tones become prominent.
The several names given to the country and to the language were confusing. In English literature, the country was known as Cathay, a name that survives in Cathay-Pacific. The Chinese name for the country is Zhongguo (sounds like Chung Kuo), and means “middle...
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On this occasion of celebrating Martin Luther King's life and mission, it's interesting to note that there is a Chinese connection to a memorial currently being planned for the slain civil rights leader on the National Mall in Washington D.C.
The project coordinators selected Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin in 2007 to be the Sculptor of Record for the memorial that would stand between the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials on the Mall. The groundbreaking for the MLK Memorial is expected in early 2009 and it is expected to be completed by 2010.
But almost immediately after he was selected, Lei caught heat for not being African-American, or even American. The U.S. Commission on the Arts later criticized models of the sculpture, which show Dr. King with his arms folded, for looking too Socialist. To read more about this check out my article on this issue.
In response to this, the sculpture of King was softened and the Commission gave its go-ahead last fall. But to the project organizers' credit, they defended the choice of Lei, who was picked for his expertise in working with large-scale sculptures around the world.
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As a symbol of Chinese food, Jiaozi, Chinese dumpling is a must at a lot of Chinese festivals, especially on the occasion of Chinese New Year’s eve. A story says Jiaozi was invented by doctor Zhang Zhongjing, a famous Chinese doctor in ancient China, to save poor people from frostbite as filling dough with meat and traditional Chinese medicine.
The pronunciation of Jiaozi came from the tradition of eating dumplings on Chinese New Year’s Eve, which became a tradition later after Zhang Zhongjing, the famous doctor, invented it. In Chinese ancient timing system, the time named Zi is twelve o’clock in the midnight. When this moment comes on the eve of the last day of a year the New Year is coming in time. And in Chinese, the whole process is called Geng Sui Jiao Zi that means the change of years and Jiao Zi means that the change happens at the very moment of Zi.
The shape of Jiaozi is like that of Yuanbao, a Chinese ancient silver currency, Chinese think that the shape is quite auspicious. Northern Chinese eat Jiaozi more while Southern Chinese eat less and don’t call it Huntun in stead of Jiaozi. And there were other names for Jiaozi in Chinese history,...
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