Jottings from the Granite Studio

I love to complain about France, but the truth is…I kind of like it here. True, I rarely have to DO anything while I’m here. The times when I’ve worked in the archives or watched as YJ tried to find an apartment or negotiate the bureaucracy of the local university makes me really glad that my usual purpose is here is ‘vacation.’ But such is.

YJ’s apartment is on a quiet street near Place Gambetta and—this is shocking—adjacent to Bordeaux’s main shopping district. The streets are all cobblestones and are lined with stores, both small shops and international chains, interpolated nicely with the occasional café or restaurant. As is usual in France, we’ve stopped trying to find “French” cuisine and instead take advantage of the cosmopolitan nature of French cities to enjoy cuisine d’outre-mer. Yesterday it was Indian food. Today we walked about 15 minutes to a vegetable market tucked into a narrow street and surrounded by African markets. And if all else fails, the local Mickey-D’s is three blocks away and we can order a “Royal avec Cheese.” (No metric system, you know.)

I’ve spent the day working, but not really: mostly reviewing Chinese. Fifty years ago, Fairbanks and his students moved the field of Chinese history forward with their insistence on fluency in Classical Chinese a prerequisite of study. His students and their students also demanded a fluency of a sort in modern Chinese sufficient to read and decipher the occasional Chinese journal article or monograph. It was IUP Chinese. Great for discussing 封建社会制度 but not so much for buying toothpaste or hanging out after hours with your Chinese colleagues. Fluency in the spoken language, for the Western historian, was a parlor trick—useful for presentations but to aspire to native fluency was a low priority and some even considered such a devotion to pure language study a waste of time.

Now I can’t imagine a member of my generation of China researchers, whatever the field, who does not aspire to near native fluency in spoken and written Chinese. No longer a luxury, it is a necessity and the number of foreigners whose Chinese is near native level has increased exponentially in the past few years. It’s not just Da Shan anymore. A whole new generation of young China hands has realized that it’s not enough to simply jump off the plane in China and exclaim, “I come from the West. Behold me.” In this century, China and Chinese are starting to request that we, the Westerners, deal with them on their own terms and those terms are frequently written in hanzi. Whether in business or academia, the Westerner who proclaims his relative ignorance of the language as irrelevant to his endeavors is increasingly an anachronism.

I would say more, but I need to study. And by study, I mean bring a textbook to the closest café and watch the Bordelais rush by. Au revoir and zaijian.