by Deborah Fallows
The village of Xizhou is nestled in a verdant strip of land in China’s southwestern Yunnan Province. To the east lies Erhai Lake, where cormorants play. To the west, hills rise to the Tibetan Plateau, where herders graze their yaks. During World War II, Xizhou offered a first radio contact point for the Flying Tigers as they flew over the Hump of the Himalayas.
Xizhou, which means something like “happy land,” is blessed with many gifts of nature—rice paddies, elegant hills, a temperate climate and some of the clearest skies in China. My husband, an American journalist, and I went to Xizhou about halfway through our recent three years of living, working and traveling throughout China. We were visiting American friends of ours, who opened a small cultural center and inn in the village.
On one Saturday evening, we decided to have a look at the “English-corner,” which our friends set up for informal conversation, in one of the village play yards. Since languages and linguistics have been my lifelong profession and passion, I was interested to see how the Chinese kids were doing with their English, especially as I was in the midst of my own struggles to learn Mandarin. About a dozen kids showed up the evening we were there to play a few games and practice their English with any English speakers, like us, who might show up.
In between singing and dancing the Hokey Pokey, we enticed the kids with a circle game into a bit of an English pronoun lesson. Each one had to tell the age of the kid sitting next to him: “This is Ming. She is 12 years old.” Or “This is Liang. He is 11 years old.” The kids caught on right away but when one would confuse he and she, the rest, like vultures, would home in screaming mercilessly HE! HE!! or SHE! SHE!!
Mixing up he and she in English is a classic error among the Chinese, and it regularly shows up in everyday conversation. I came to expect even the most fluent Chinese speakers of English would eventually say something like, “Your son looks just like your husband; she is tall and handsome!”
What is going on here, I wondered? The simplest answer—that “he” and “she” are both said as “tā” in Mandarin—is tempting, but it is not enough. The concept of gender is simple, and the Chinese commonly master much worse sticklers in English, like verb tenses. Certainly, I thought, they could master this, especially considering tā “he” and tā “she” are represented in their written forms by two different characters: tā “he” is 他 and “she” is 她.
I was chatting about tā with a calligrapher in Xizhou one day, and he told me that the character for “she” 她 is a new arrival, created not even 100 years ago in the 1920s, during one of the many periods when the Chinese were debating about their writing systems. Should they create a new character for “she” to distinguish it from “he”? Arguments raged, and eventually the character 她 was accepted, although a brief flirtation with introducing a new way of pronouncing 她 as “yī” got no traction. (The left-hand part of the character 女 is the character for “woman”.)
There are a few other linguistic explanations besides the single “ta” that might lead to the he/she mix-ups. One is about the scarce use of pronouns in general. It seems the Chinese aren’t as smitten with using pronouns at all, including tā, as are speakers of most western languages. Pronouns just aren’t that important to the Chinese, and they omit them frequently. The pronoun for “I” fell even further out of favor during the Cultural Revolution, when it was unseemly to focus attention on me-me-me, instead of thinking about the collective good.
I heard other explanations of what was going on with he and she.
The Chinese education system excels in teaching to tests, particularly to the gāokǎo (high test), the country’s uniquely-important college entrance exam. The tests focus on difficult vocabulary and grammar, while colloquial use of the language easily falls through the cracks. Since pronouns are not heavily tested, the teachers just don’t drill them, one Chinese friend told me, and getting no practice means you are always performing “an alien mental calculation” to come up with a choice of he or she.
One of my most reliable language resources, Miranda, a young Chinese woman works in an American office in Beijing, thought that the source of vagueness about he and she occurred well before going to school. It’s all about cognition and development, she ventured. English speakers have to run into the concept of pronoun gender in language from the get-go because they have to distinguish he and she. But for the Chinese, it isn’t an important concept. “Cognitively, everything is “tā”. Only later, once children begin to read and write the characters 他 and 她 are they even introduced to the concept of gender in language.
Jessie, a Chinese woman who spent a year in graduate school in New York recently, said the Chinese sound system is to blame for the problems of keeping he and she straight. “He and She sound a lot the same to Chinese speakers. It’s easy to get mixed up,” she said. Much like our trouble with tones, I thought, many Chinese just don’t hear the difference. In English, the “h” and “sh” sounds, which begin “he” and “she”, are produced very differently. The tongue is in different positions, and the air passes around the tongue in different ways. So, to English speakers, “he” and “she” are easily distinguishable words; no native speaker would confuse the two. It’s not the same for Chinese speakers. The sound system of their language does not include either “he” or “she” as we pronounce them in English, so Chinese speakers do not easily recognize or know how to say them. Instead they know the syllable xi—which English speakers don’t recognize or find easy to say and which sounds to us like a blend of “he” and “she” or else like “see.”
Linguistics can explain part of the story, but society and culture often fill in the rest. When I was in the locker rooms of the gym in our Beijing apartment building, I was often surprised by the male service attendants who would burst through the door, shouting “Yǒu rén ma?”—Is anybody here? I would quickly answer “Yǒu rén!” “There is someone!”, hoping that would back them out the door. I later heard that back in the day, when someone came knocking on the door of a house and shouted the same, the woman of the house would routinely answer “Méiyǒu rén!!” or “There’s no one!”, if only she—and not her husband—was home. What a reflection of self, I thought, in that small expression!
But in this modern day, when so much is in flux in China, I witnessed a very different story. In one of my language classes in Shanghai, our young teacher, who went by the English name of Sandy, asked us one day to talk about “What I believe in.” All of us students started with the predictable western concepts of democracy, or free speech or pursuit of happiness. Then we asked Sandy to tell us what she believed in. Sandy, who was normally shy, paused for a moment, and then declared almost defiantly: I BELIEVE IN MYSELF.
Her defiance was remarkable to me in two ways: one for what she said (the outright declaration) and one for how she said it (her use of pronouns). The two were connected. Sandy was declaring that her destiny was entirely up to her, a giant step forward in self-esteem from the women who answered “There is no one”! When Sandy said, I believe in myself, there was nothing wishy-washy about how she said it. She knew precisely that using those pronouns beamed the attention right on herself. She was of a generation where at least some of the women, some of the time, no longer felt the residual impact of the Cultural Revolution to avoid the first person singular pronoun “I”!
Deborah Fallows, the author of Dreaming in Chinese, from which this post is adapted, has lived in Shanghai and Beijing and traveled throughout China for three years with her husband, writer James Fallows. She most recently worked in research and polling for the Pew Internet Project and in data architecture for Oxygen Media.
