The Stories behind Chinese Characters

Swallowing Clouds

A. Zee in his book, Swallowing Clouds, Two Millennia of Chinese Tradition, Folklore, and History Hidden in the Language of Food, deconstructed Chinese characters to suggest what the Chinese of old thought were basic values of the culture. Home, for instance, is a a roof over the character for pig. In China as it was in the Philippines of my childhood, families often raised pigs under their houses built on bamboo stilts as precaution against the seasonal floods. Raising a pig was part and parcel of the construct for home, like the TV and computer might be for the modern American home.

The character for good comprises a left part signifying woman and a right signifying child (or probably more correctly, son). A son is what the Chinese of old considered the good in life. It can also represent one's wife and children, that is, one's loved ones, and therefore everything that is good, what matters to us. Extending the exploration, we might also see the character signify that having lots of children was good. In an agrarian society where hands were needed to tend the fields, having many children was having many hands to sow, weed, water, reap, process and store what the farm produces. In words is imbedded the cultural history of a nation, of human civilization.

The character for contentment is a woman under a roof. I am reminded of my friend, Arron, who when I was videotaping him for his cage-fighting video, declared that while he lusted after fame and fortune, at the end of the day you could not snuggle to your hard-won trophy as you could with a girl. He and Brittany are back together again but back then they had broken up on Arron's decision to move to the big city to improve his fortune.

My friend, Larry, told me on the phone just now that the character for conflict was two women under a roof. Zee wrote that the character for union was a triangle over a mouth, suggesting what happens when three persons are speaking in accord with each other.

Words in English probably provide the same insight into the English and English-speaking peoples but Chinese characters because they are pictographs and only phonetic in a minor way provide evocative images of what individual peoples have had in their minds. I feel connected with people in remote times and places for the community of images we share. Each character is in effect a pocketbook, an SMS linking us to an organism much larger and therefore more powerful than I am.

The character for won ton comprises a mouth and clouds. A. Zee wrote that looking at a hot bowl of wonton he saw billowing clouds. If neurologists are right that smell and taste are the most powerful vehicles for memory, the smell of this soup can be our magic carpet to our mythologic past. To write or create photographs one must be connected with our communal mythology. In the ordinary course of our day we are reasonable beings. Those of us who aspire to be artists must in addition be able to dive deeper into the psyche to come back up from the depths with pearls.

Posted via email from Duende Arts