Tag: chinese language

I Am Sorry!

Published on by Zhi-Juan Guo

–So what do you mean when you say you are sorry?

Confucius to Chinese is very much like Christianity to Westerners: It has been there and it has been there for a while. And even you have not read the book of its creeds. It’s so prevalent in culture, in language and in everyday life that you could not pick up a book that has not dyed by its color in one way or another. It’s in the air you breathe. It’s in the words you speak. It’s in your mind in the way you think.

One big concept of Confucius is that everyone has its place in a family: a father has a father’s place and a son a son’s; a husband has his place and a wife hers.

Confucius expressed it so well that everyone knows his duty and right and what to do in his place.

He looks at the family and puts everyone in its proper place. Then he looks at the nation and tells everyone too has his right place in a nation.

That’s one of the reasons that a feudal government has been able to thrive and exist in China for so long and be so successful, and in the end, indeed, it died hard and left China in a desolate situation.

For if each one knows his place and no one steps over the borderline, there is no fear of rebellion or riots.

The control starts from the very beginning. A Chinese man, sadly, is never a free man. From the moment he was born, he is a son and supposed to take up a son’s duty. And all the sons in China, even today, not many could step out of that heavy duty to be a son but at the same time his own person.

So first thing first, in a Chinese society, is to know your place.

But what does it have to do with the topic you bring up today? I hear you say.

Well. It has everything to do with it. “Sorry” in Chinese is “对不起 dui4buqi3.”

Which if literally translated means: to face(you) I will not rise; I bow to you; I put myself lower to you; I feel ashamed.

If the English word “sorry” means “sorrow”, it means that I feel what you feel, and I feel your sorrow.

The Chinese man when he says “I am sorry”, he means ” I put myself lower than you. I am ashamed. It’s my fault. I have done something wrong.”

So now would you imagine a funeral scene? The Western guy says to the Chinese man who has lost a family member: “I am sorry.”

And what would the Chinese man say?

Would he say what I have said so many times to the westerners who would say–with a sympathizing tone–“I am sorry” when I told about some mishaps in my life?

“But it’s not your fault!”

Ambition

Published on by Zhi-Juan Guo

If ambiton is often deemed as something evil in the Christian world, it has, in Chinese, two opposite sides. And I wonder if the ambiguous nature of Chinese philosophy, the Chinese way to see the world, a lack of accurary and absoluteness—the qualities that science and technology requires—one of the reasons that made this at one time the wealthiest countries in the world lagged so pitifully behind in the run since the age of Industrial Revolution.

Ambition for the Chinese could be 雄心, heroic heart, or 野心, savage heart. Much as the Chinese and the West would disagree over the character of Mao, to say that Mao is an ambitious man certainly would win both sides’ confirmation.

It’s said China now is at The Age of Ambition, the whole country is dashing forward, sometimes with the madness of a full-speed train gone off the track, and everyone in the country, under the influence of this energy, rushes on themselves. One hesitates to commend this. Certainly New York itself is a city charged full of a similar energy.

A hero’s heart, a hero aspires to something that’s out of the common run of life. 雄心壮志, is a word stirs the blood and brings in the images of the epics of Homer. No Chinese could hear this word without at once popping up in their minds various characters in the swordsmen novels.

A savage’s heart, a savage (though the word “savage” now, even compared to two decades ago, takes on a different meaning that’s quite different from the long period that the west had, undoubtly still now, in the complacency of their “civilized society”.) a savage with much rage and discontent, wants land, wants power, wants money. 野心勃勃, is a word comes with the image of war and destruction under a tyrannical will.

As no one could sum up French Revolution with one word, and there will be forever dispute as to what a man Napoleon really is, the complex of the world and human nature is thus that it’s no longer easy for us to say “this person is a good guy and that person bad” once we grew out of childhood.

And it might be in a man to be both 雄心壮志 and 野心勃勃, as French Revolution started with heroic ideas for human race and soon turned into horror and blood shed.

If the Chinese is paying heavily for its ambiguousness, for its reluctance to go to absoluteness and extremities and cut off the innate connections in everything—“there is no beauty without ugliness to contrast it; we know goodness because there is evil to contrast it”—there is hope that this way of seeing the world, this philosophy, will finally pay off: For everything by nature is connected, and when science and technology play out, it ultimately is us, human, our mind to grasp the world thoroughly and comprehensively as a whole that wins us the game in the long run.