Ohio, Japan. Chapter 5. China

Chapter 5.  China

In 2004, I went to China with a group of other teachers and students from the National Defense Academy.  The Chinese guides spoke Japanese.

During seven days, we were to tour a southern inland area of China.  We landed at the new Guangzhou (English: Canton) international airport in the southern seaport.

I asked Ms Sugino about the time schedule for the morning.

"I don't know,” Sugino told me.  “The guide explained twice, but I didn't understand, and I'm embarrassed to ask him."

At Guilin we walked into a limestone cave with a lake inside. We cruised upriver along a geologically unusual canyon, and pilgrimmed hours up a crowded narrow trail to a mountain shrine along stone steps cut into cliffs.

"The guide's Japanese was good, wasn’t it?" I wondered aloud in Japanese after we said goodbye to him at Guilin Airport.

"No, not at all," Mrs. Maeshima grimaced.  She was usually as kind and generous as her Japanese/Chinese bilingual husband.  Chinese by birth, she was one of three members of our group fluent in Chinese.  She understood no English.

The third fluent Chinese speaker was a student from China. 

He studied at a Japanese university because he said it was very difficult to get into the USA to study.  He was our ace in the hole at the Canton Airport, its new terminal only open for three days, when a snag occurred in transit. 

The junior high school daughter of a professor spoke English to me occasionally in long, perfect sentences.  We waited for our bags at the airport.    She asked, "Hasn't your bag been found?"

Her father would speak to me in Japanese. But if I asked for repetition, he switched to English. 

The 16 people in our group listened to the next tour guide.

"I speak easy Japanese," the soft-spoken young woman guide introduced herself.  "Complex Japanese is difficult for me.  Please teach and correct me." 

Kunming City was bigger than Guilin, but bicycles still predominated.  There were a lot of cars and some donkey drawn carts. 

“Lots of bicycles,” I said.

"It's a bicycle country," said Mr. Lu, the student from China.

Coincidentally, the guide was saying, "There are a lot of bicycles." 

The student men in our group went to a karaoke bar after dinner. We teachers and the two young women—Cadet Yayoi Sugiyama and high-school student Yuri Hamamura--walked along the streets. Food booth vendors aggressively sold fruit, nuts, and roasted meat on sticks.  Yayoi could read the Arabic above the kanji.  She translated loudly into English, "This is Islam food."  The food vendor smiled widely as Sugiyama spoke. She coughed on a spicy lamb kabob. 

In the morning in our hotel room, Yayoi and I drank tea.  She wrote the Chinese expression for “karaoke.”

"Chinese has no phonetic script," Yayoi said.  “Can you write ‘karaoke?’”

I muttered, “Karaoke means ‘without orchestra.’  I guess the kanji expresses that."

"Can you write it in katakana?" she insisted.

I wrote the symbols for the sounds “ka,” “ra,” and “o” but did not remember how to write the "ke" sound.

She helped me.  "But the Chinese write karaoke like this.”  She wrote two kanji followed by OK.  “Why do they write the letter ‘O’ when there are plenty of words they could appropriate for that sound?”

"It's because 'kara' is 'ok,'" I joked.  "Isn't karaoke from Japan?”

"Yes," she replied.

"So, Chinese think it is okay.  Kara, okay."

Two cadets who had gone to the karaoke bar joined Yayoi and I for breakfast in the hotel dining room.

“Did you sing?” I asked.

“We didn’t sing.  All the songs were in Chinese.”

"If you didn't sing what did you do?" I asked.

"We talked and talked," a cadet said in totally natural, complete, appropriate English.  He dressed in jeans and t- shirt. 

After breakfast, we boarded the bus.

The tour guide spoke by hand-held microphone, facing us in the front of the bus, telling about local gods. In China there were eight gods.  On the trip to Japan, the god of drink drunkenly fell into the sea.  Only seven gods arrived in Japan.        

There was some murmuring among our group, and the guide wrote something on a piece of paper that was passed around the bus.  I asked what it meant.

My colleagues explained.  The Chinese name for the eight gods included a kanji for which there is no Japanese counterpart.  There is no group of “eight gods” in Japan.  Therefore, to express the term "eight gods" the guide resorted to written kanji. 

Our group distributed itself throughout the crowded airplane of Southern China Air for the two-hour flight back to Canton.

I was in the window seat next to two Chinese guys sat. I grumbled and lowered the window shade.  A guy tapped my hand and gestured.

They wanted to look out the window.  I opened the window shade and smiled and cleaned my writing brush.  The guys eagerly looked through my sketchbook.  By pointing, they asked if I had drawn the not-too-difficult kanji for "train".

They spoke not a word of English or Japanese.  The guy next to me corrected the kanji written by a guy in my group that meant raising the body’s vital energy.  A “Kikoshi,” a practitioner of this mysterious energy, had demonstrated at Guilin Traditional Chinese Medical (TCM) Hospital.  No photos had been allowed. 

The Chinese guys taught me new kanji. "Clean air bag."  "Southern China Air."  The kanji were difficult.

But I knew that three strokes on the left part of a kanji indicated water.  Was this kanji the port city of Canton?

We switched roles.  The guy attempted to copy the English words "clean bag." He paused before each line segment in "E" and "A" and "N."

It was like watching someone do a maze. 

I pointed as the drink car approached.  On my sketchpad, I drew a can.

"Coffee?" the guy asked, evidently a universal word.

I shook my head no.  He reached into the cart for the can of beer.

He poured.  We toasted.  We ate.

I wanted to ask if they were going home to Canton.  I couldn’t recall the kanji for “return home,” although I knew how to say it in Japanese. 

We passed the sketchbook back and forth, trading elements of our languages. At the end of the flight, he wrote, "HAPPY LIFE." 

Many people in our grroup could frequently be seen consulting small notebooks.  I was not the only person writing down observations and answers to questions about language. Mrs. Maeshima, the native Chinese, was sought after.  A small crowd gathered around her at the hand-written sign in the Canton airport.  The sign showed two directions, with arrows pointing towards the destinations written in kanji for "here" and "the Netherlands."  She explained the finer points of the kanji to a fascinated audience.

The explanation was too recondite for me to understand, and the airport not the right venue for my usual "What'd she say?"