Chinese characters charm US students

The top Beijing envoy in Washington became a teacher of Chinese when he gave a "crash course" on the characters, idioms and proverbs of the ancient language to an enthusiastic US audience at the Chinese embassy.

Speaking at the premiere on Tuesday night of Chinese Puzzle, a documentary on Chinese-language education in the United States, Ambassador Xie Feng shared what he called "the taste of the unique charm" of one of the world's most spoken languages.

Enshrined in the language is the Chinese people's wisdom, philosophy and humor which are also inspirational to China-US relations, which have found "the strongest impetus" in the friendship between the peoples, partly facilitated by language learning, according to Xie.

Each Chinese character is like a friend telling its unique story, Xie told 400 guests, including the professors and students featured in the documentary, and representatives of US elementary and high school teachers and students.

For instance, the character for human, ren, is made of two strokes backing up each other, symbolizing that only through mutual support can one stand firm and upright.

"This is exactly the way we Chinese get along with each other," he said.

Two students raised their hands to read two other characters that Xie was about to explain. The first one, xin, consists of two parts: The left part means human while the right one means word. Together, they mean keeping one's own word brings credibility.

Another character, wu, for weapon, martial arts or military, is structured in such a way that it includes two components, one means stop and the other fighting.

For that character, Xie said that military forces should never be abused, and maintaining a certain degree of strength is for ultimately bidding farewell to arms.

There were more interactions between Xie and his audience. For each Chinese idiom and proverb, US students would come up with an English equivalent.

For example, for the Chinese idiom that means "we are in the same boat", people in the US say "We are in this together". While the Chinese brand a person unwise for "picking up a sesame seed but dropping off a watermelon", a US student says that is "penny wise, pound foolish".

Striking similarities

"All these have proven again that both Chinese and American people are talented peoples, and for all our differences in culture, there are striking similarities between us," Xie said.

Xie expressed thanks to all the teachers, volunteers and advocates of Chinese teaching in the US.

Two panel discussions followed the premiere.

James B. Heimowitz, who led the New York-headquartered China Institute in America since 2014 until early this year, underscored the necessity of working "really hard not to weaponize or politicize" Chinese-language learning.

Heimowitz, who was one of the first US students to study in China in the 1980s, said the numbers of US students going to China to learn Chinese and Chinese students coming to the US have dropped drastically.

"We need to rekindle, restart, send more students, establish more exchanges," he said.

Howard Stephenson, a former Utah senator who sponsored a bill for dual-language immersion programs, said the state now has 20,000 students learning Mandarin.

"We have so many children now learning it in Utah, and I would like to expand that to the rest of the nation because America's biggest danger is being a monolingual nation," Stephenson said.

Both Heimowitz and Stephenson were featured in the documentary.

The Chinese Puzzle was produced by the Shanghai Media Group.