What Kate Ate: Home is where your pig is

I haven’t been studying Chinese very long, but I’m slowly falling in love with it, while slowly losing my mind trying to learn it. It has to be one of the most challenging (if not the most challenging) languages on the planet. Props to all of those out there who after years of studying can now read a newspaper. I may never accomplish this feat. And although I am more often than not frustrated at determining the difference between sounds and tones that my ears cannot distinguish and my mouth cannot mimic, or trying desperately to understand how the exact same sound and exact same tone can mean multiple words solely based on context, I am somehow learning! I can even hold riveting conversations with cab drivers about why Taiwanese boys don’t like American women (you know, we’re too big, we’re too tall, etc.).

But as if speaking and hearing were not hard enough, it’s the reading and writing that I find is taking up most of my time. As my roommate put it, “and you wonder why Chinese people all have bad eyes, just look at what we have to read!” He’s correct, there’s no way to really read all the thousands of unique characters without (at least in the beginning) straining your neck and eyes bent over, trying to differentiate all the strokes, dots and lines that make up the Chinese lexicon, all of which need to be memorized in order to determine meaning.

So here I am, bent over my desk like a cripple, reading and scrawling away at something that looks like a 4 year old wrote it, probably worse than a 4 year old, but feeling rather accomplished. And I’ve actually been finding memorizing characters more and more enjoyable as I come to learn why each character looks as complicated as they do. I think there’s something beautiful about a language that expresses ‘be careful’ by saying “small heart” because if you had a small heart, you’d be very careful with it, wouldn’t you? And I love that the character for good, is the image of a woman with a baby. Home is a roof with a pig under it and friend is two hands clasped together. To see is a hand over an eye, to want of course involves the depiction of a woman, to have is a hand holding meat and the character for mother boils down to just a pair of nipples. And my favorite, although it doesn’t look, but sounds the same, is the word for difficult which is ‘nan,’ the same sound that is used for man. How perfectly clear.

At some point, I’m sure the characters will stop being silly depictions and sounds will become unique and distinct to me. But that probably won’t be until I’m much older, married to my difficult man, living under a roof with a pig and tending to my motherly duties with my nipples bared, yelling, “Small heart! Small heart!”

Mother