“Today, you are finishing the wonderful days at the Awesome Math Summer Program (AMSP). Tomorrow, you will be returning to your country, your family, your community. I hope all of you remember the time when you were challenging yourselves here and making friends…”

These were the words from the director of the AMSP on the closing ceremony on July 16, 2015. The next day was the departure day. All people had a kind of reluctance for leaving the friends they met at the camp. I had most impression in the communications with my Chinese American friends related to Chinese language and the unique cultural characteristics of the language. I even was a little bit regretting that I did not spend more time with them to engage in the talks.

My interactions with Chinese Americans started with a girl named Catherine. One afternoon, after the algebra class, Catherine came and asked me about a difficult problem on the worksheet. The problem was indeed very hard for me and took 15 minutes for me to solve it. To my surprise, she asked me to explain the methods and steps I used – she was the first camper to ask me to do so. After that, she said “xie xie” (Chinese: ??, “thank you”) with smile, and went to dinner with me. So I began to wonder if she was a Chinese American student. With this curiosity, I started the conversation with her at dinner.

“I noticed that you said ‘xie xie’ in Chinese to me. Are you a Chinese American?” I asked with both cheer and doubt, and she replied, “Yes! You guessed it right!”

“So, which city do you come from? And what about your parents?”

She responded, “I was born and am currently live in NYC. My parents are from Shanghai. They came to the U.S. with the desire of successful careers and lives, and better living conditions and education environment for me, and gave birth to me in NYC.” As I listened, I recognized that these are the primary reasons that Chinese people immigrate to the U.S. They come here and contribute to the diversity of languages and linguistic cultures in the U.S. So I asked if she had opportunities to listen, read, and practice Chinese.
She answered with pride. “Yes, definitely. My parents have paid much attention to my Chinese learning. They taught me mandarin when I was young, and give me chance to read a lot of new and magazines written in Chinese over the years. They also let me often practice Chinese at home.” But then she sighed, “I have no Chinese language and culture courses at school, and almost never read Chinese in academic contexts. I can now read most of the Chinese texts, but still have major troubles with writing in Chinese to express coherent and concrete ideas.”

So I smiled, “Hmm… Interesting! You still have much to do, but eventually you can do it!” Then I gave her a humorous article about a Chinese student’s reflection on experience of attending college in the U.S. The article had a mocking tone, with sentences containing words only interrelated in Chinese but not in English. A sentence was “????????????????” (rén sh?ng shì y? gè chá j??shàng miàn fàng m?n le b?i jù?The life is a tea table with cups and utensils place on it.) The key to understand it is to know that “??” has the same pronunciation with “??” (b?i jù), which means “tragedies.” The author intended to say that the life has a great variety of experiences, many of them being unlucky and miserable. In the passage, there were other sentences that also use words with double meanings in Chinese to convey the humor. After she read, I asked she if she could get the main idea and humor.

She loudly laughed. “I like the humor in this article very much! And some of the humor can only be expressed in Chinese because of the uniqueness of the symbolic meanings and pronunciations of the Chinese vocabularies!”

She used English throughout the conversation, and as I asked why not to use Chinese if she would, she explained that she could only say fragmented sentences, not enough to construct complete ideas. For her convenience, I continued to use English, and encouraged her to learn more Chinese, at least to have the basic level of Chinese of a person born in China. She gratefully nodded her head, showing robust determination in her heart. Therefore, I told her that I would talk more about Chinese language to her on Facebook after I went back home.

During the three weeks of the summer program, I also had acquaintances with other Chinese American campers. I often gave them the articles that are related to study and lives in high schools and colleges and have instructive meanings for me, but I was shocked that while some could completely understand the meanings of the article, others even have difficulties with understanding sentence and paragraph structures. When I sometimes attempted to explain the main ideas and the words to these people, I found that the accurate meanings and connotations of many Chinese words could not be easily explained in English without failing to reveal some most important characteristics of Chinese language, such as combining concise single characters to express ideas, or using characters or phrases as symbolism to imply abstract meanings. This phenomenon is seen mostly in Chinese proverbs (chengyu, or “??”). For instance, the proverb “????” (f?ng sh?ng hè lì) describe a person’s extremely panic state because of feeling the dangers existing around, by using the “??” (“sound of wind”) and “??” (“the crying of the crane”) to symbolize the factors to cause the panic; the proverb “????” (“g?o sh?n liú shu?”) is a word used by a person to refer to others who intimately understands himself, instead of a word referring to the high mountains or flowing water. There are too many other Chinese proverbs that have this characteristic for me to list, and I found that my Chinese American friends would not get the actual, symbolic meanings of these words if I merely translate the Chinese vocabularies to English; moreover, as I directly explain the real meanings to them in English, the unique tastes of the Chinese proverbs would be lost.

I suddenly discovered that there is a gap of language and spread between generations within quite a few immigrant families. This gap not only prevents the Chinese American descendants – who are with the Chinese bloods – to understand more about the Chinese language, but also creates obstacles for mutual understanding between the Chinese raised in China and the U.S. I think I have the responsibilities to convey more knowledge about the Chinese things to them and motivate them to learn such things.

When I finished the summer program and returned to China, I watched the 2015 Chinese Character Dictation Competition on CCTV. The competition is for middle school students, and the tested vocabularies are the ones that people most frequently make mistakes in writing and/or pronunciation, and the ones taken from ancient Chinese writings with instructive meanings for people living today. When I watched the TV program, I saw many vocabularies that I had never heard of in my daily lives and readings. I shared my experiences of watching these TV programs with Catherine on Facebook, and tried to persuade her to watch one episode. After that, she messaged to me that she was also shocked not only by the difficulties of writing and understanding these vocabularies, but also by the outstanding performances of the contestants under pressure. We reached an agreement that we still have long ways to go to understand more Chinese characters and vocabularies, and exploring the wisdom in voluminous Chinese writings. We must stay modest.

However, as I attempted to introduce this TV program to most other Chinese American friends I met, I found that they were either not interested in the program, or even does not regard learning Chinese as useful in the English speaking U.S. I do not think this tendency is good at all, because many of the wisdoms are originated in the ancient Chinese writings and have existed for thousands of years and still influence people living today, and because Chinese language has uniquely shaped people’s perspectives on the world, on the surrounding human environment, and on language. As people with the Chinese roots, exploring the wisdom of Chinese language is very worthy of enhancing our humanity qualities.

I finally realized that many of the essence in Chinese language may be forgotten by people in China as the time moves from ancient era to contemporary era, and even more often by the people who immigrated to the U.S. and their descendants. Chinese is the language used by the largest population in the world, and one of the few languages that have undergone thousands of years of development and still keep the lively vitality today. Today, people in China still have much to do to explore the Chinese language and the wisdom in the ancient Chinese writings, let alone the Chinese raised in the U.S. In order to keep the Chinese language alive and pass the ancient Chinese wisdoms to the future generations, I should persuade more Chinese American friends as I interact with them, in order to let us take action together, shouldn’t I?