In Between

a combination of sorts
As someone who spent the last three years of my life learning Mandarin Chinese, I found it easy to relate to the struggle between the English and Chinese languages in A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. After three years taking Chinese I know how to say quite a few things, but perhaps the ability to say, “my dog wants a sandwich and likes to play cricket” won’t come in too handy down the road. Learning a new language is always a difficult process, heck it took me three years to learn how to ask, “where is the hospital?” That said, I found it impressive that Z could learn a great deal of English in a year. The difficulty going back and forth between these languages can be attributed to two main things. One, as Z mentions on page 12, there are fifty thousand characters that make up the Chinese language. Two, in English we change words to reflect tense while in Chinese you simply add words like yesterday to imply tense and the verbs do not change.

Z comes to England ready to learn a new language and ready to see the world in a new way, she is ready to change her verbs to fit her new situations. Unlike other characters we have read about, Zhang travels with the express purpose of learning something specific. In most of the stories we have read the characters travel to a foreign place to experience the culture, but aren’t searching for anything incredibly specific. They happen upon information about these foreign cultures while searching for authentic experiences. Z on the other hand happens upon authentic experiences while studying one of the most important aspects of English culture. She essentially stumbles into a complicated love affair with a native through a loose grasp of the language, and through this relationship she learns more about English culture and the intricacies of romance.

Before I learned Chinese I had taken French for nine years, I had learned enough to be nearly fluent. Now, trying to speak French is unbelievably difficult and unless I really focus on what I’m saying everything comes out an odd mixture of Mandarin and French that nobody can understand. After living away from home for a year, learning the subtleties of the English language and culture, Z returns to China and finds that she no longer fits into the mold of Chinese culture like she once did. She notes “Beijing has changed as if ten years passed. It has become unrecognizable.” (281) People tell her that because she can speak English she has a unique opportunity to make money, but her experiences living in a foreign place have changed her values. She has fifty thousand characters at her disposal for self-expression, the comforting familiarity of Chinese, and yet the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet hold new opportunities for self-expression that Chinese cannot touch. She doesn’t fit perfectly in England or China and because of her experiences in both places, she is destined to always speak a language that falls somewhere between English and Chinese.