representin'
Beijing is laid out like a chessboard at the center - highways branch out into roads, which branch out into hutongs (alleys), which branch off into square courtyards of residence, houses, buildings, and all in impeccable right-angles. And at the very heart of this: the Forbidden City, and Tiananmen, and me, hunkered down by the road, pushing a pamphlet into the corner of Tiananmen Square just to prove the right-angle.
But time has frayed order at the edges. Around the grid's perimeter are the shreds of metropolitan expansion - the parts of New Beijing tacked onto the edges, where the right-angles meander into irregularity, where the roads shun latitude and longitude and even - heaven forbid - veer off into curves.
And China and her culture are like this: the unerring compulsion for order and symmetry struggles against the organic, the oblique, the chaos. It is the Tao - the unrepresentable - represented nonetheless; it is how to say the unsaid without saying it; it is the attraction of Marxist dialectics to a mind primed for contradiction. The language - based on pictography, with the highest potential for absolute symmetry, yet barely holding together an absolute chaos of phonetics. There are hundreds of words with exactly the same sound, and meaning must be derived from context and tonal inflection. The poetic forms - more rigidly structured than Shakespearean blank verse, and yet engendering the most impenetrable ambiguity. Tang poetry resists translation more than most.
and it's mind-boggling, how this can become commonplace, how one can get used to asking "Which da do you mean: da, da or da?" I prefer where I stand now - one foot in China and one foot on the outside looking in. I prefer that I never fully adjust to the language, so that I can continue to take pleasure in the rendering of a stroke, my thoughts flying back to pictorial etymology, or to wonder at the fiendish cleverness required to convey meaning within the terse and compact constructions Chinese is so famous for. If Wordsworth writes like liquid gold, the Chinese language would be like dropping pearls, one by one, into a perfectly still lake, and the ripples, perfectly concentric, sailing infinitely outwards.
...i want to be inside the language, and outside it, all at once.