Author: Zhi-Juan Guo

One of the pleasures of learning Chinese is that, for certain characters and words, you could, without being at all a linguist, easily trace to its origin. It’s a kind of magic: you would feel, looking at the character, as if you had a conversation of some sort with the very first Chinese who scratched it, with a sharp flint, on the bone. And a delight, an echo across thousands of years, would rise in your heart as you think to yourself: Ah~~~, this is how you interpret the world!

You would, perhaps, draw this very image yourself if you were asked to draw a picture of rain:

The explanation of this character, 雨yǔ, is: the water falls from the cloud in the sky. The horizontal line on the top “一” means the sky, and the unclosed square around the drops “冂” means the cloud.

Though it’s almost always only used as a noun now(when you want to express “it rains”, you say, literally, down(fall) rain: 下雨xiàyǔ), but in the beginning, the character itself, 雨, meant the motion of the water falling from the cloud and it’s also used as a verb.

And there are two in the twenty-four solar terms(二十四节气 èrshísì jiéqì)–the twenty-four periods in traditional Chinese lunisolar calendar that matches a particular astronomical events or signifies some natural phenomenon–have “雨” in it: 雨水yǔshuǐ and 谷雨gǔyǔ.

The period 雨水 yǔshuǐ （literally Rain Water) “Spring Showers”–follows right after “Spring Commences”–is in the beginning of the spring.

The period 谷雨gǔyǔ (Wheat Rain or Grain Rain, indeed, the name itself comes from the ‘natural phenomenon’ that at the falling of rain and the heat of the sun, all grains grow) is at the end of spring, right before “Summer Commences”.

And 雨 is not at all thought a bad thing: ‘it moistens and waters the grains and plants’, the agriculture-rooted Chinese says.

泽雨无偏，心田受润 zé yǔ wú piān, xīntián shòu rùn : ‘rain is not partial, it not only moisturizes the field but also moisturize (comfort) the heart’, the Chinese philosopher says.

So I say, let it rain, let it stay, let it moisturize, comfort, both the plants and your heart, before the hot heat of summer starts.

It’s interesting that the English word ‘anger’ comes from grief and vex which, in old times, both meant ‘to cause great distress to someone’.

It’s only in late Middle English (from about 1400 to about 1500) it acquired the current sense: a strong feeling of annoyance, displeasure or hostility.

And ‘grief’, ‘grieve’ is Middle English (also in the sense ‘harm, oppress’) which is from Old French grever ‘burden, encumber’, based on Latin gravare, from gravis ‘heavy, grave’.

And ‘vex’ comes from Old French vexer, from Latin vexare ‘shake, disturb’. (It sounds very learned, but it’s not: it’s all straight from the dictionary.)

So when you anger someone, you ‘harm, oppress’ someone, you ‘burden, encumber’ someone, and you ‘shake, disturb’ someone.

And there are indeed quite a few phrases to describe it: ruffle someone’s feathers, make someone’s hackles rise, make someone’s blood boil……

All of these, as you could imagine, would cause the someone great ‘distress’: the word ‘distress’ comes from Old French destresce, destrecier, based on Latin distringere ‘stretch apart’.

So the angry one also feels “stretched apart”.

In Chinese, it too takes it in a physical sense, though it also has a completely different understanding from the Western world of this universal emotion “anger”.

“生气 shēng qì” literally means ‘give birth to (grow) air’

And the original sense of the word actually means ‘vitality’ : the state of growth of all things; the spirit and aura of living beings; a lively and energetic state.

Then it also means “get angry’.

“生shēng（give birth, grow, life, living) is easy enough, it vividly paints a picture of the grass comes out of the earth:

“气qì” （breath, air, steam, vapor) originally means cloud: the vapor that steams from the earth, rises to the sky, and falls down as rain.

So when you get angry, your body generates some sort of air, and it comes out in the shape of shorter and faster breath.

And, like in English, in Chinese language there are many different ways to express anger, some of them mean “frustrated in the heart, depressed” (愤怒fènnù), some of them mean “flame and ache in the head” (烦fán).

So the “air” is there and it needs venting, it would come out in one way or another regardlessly.

The thing is not about the “air”, for indeed, the “air” could be a good thing–energy of life, vitality–the thing is how to let it out in a constructive, instead of destructive, way; how, when you let it out, to use it positively in a way to “enlighten” the other that you feel “harmed, burdened and disturbed”, and you would like them to stop “ruffling your feathers”.

Well, well, but what am I saying? The whole Iliad wouldn’t be if it’s not for Achilles’s rage–a higher degree of anger. And from a person’s private life to a nation’s public affair, aren’t we all witness, and sometimes doers, of the destructive way of anger?

Then we do dream and we do hope that if only each one of us could learn to let it out in the right way……