Book Review: Dreaming in Chinese

I LOVE Deb Fallows' upcoming book Dreaming in Chinese - it's a must-read for people who just started to interact with this country and often times found themselves wondering "I'm saying the right thing! Why just can't they (the Chinese) understand me?" or the other way around - "I know what they are saying literally, but it doesn't make any sense to me. What do they mean?" Or, if you've had a lot of experience dealing with Chinese or have lived in China for a while, the familiar "cultural clash" moments in this book will surely bring a smile on your face and bring back a segment of memory with your own version of the story. Either way, it is a great read and I recommend it most enthusiastically.

Don't just take my words for it, I might be biased in this because I was eating a delicious birthday cake Deb baked for me while reading it and I love both Deb and Jim very much; New Yorker's Evan Osnos also wrote a nice review about it. Or you can check it out at bookstores yourself. It's coming out in U.S. in September! In the meantime, you can read Danwei's interview with Deb, and Beijinger's interview.

As a native Chinese with English training, the book brought to surface many interesting aspects of my mother language that I didn't really take notice before: our deliberate "impoliteness" with close friends, our inability to separate characters with their tones; and it reminded me of some unique difficulties Chinese face when learning English, for instance, differentiating "he" and "she". Speaking for myself, despite four years of studying of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Whitman, despite the amount of reading I do as a Harvard grad student, I quite often mix up "he" and "she" in informal conversations. And with my knowledge in Japanese and limited exposure to Korean, it is equally hard for them to differentiate "he" and "she" too. Is the de-genderization of third-person pronounce unique to Asian languages?

Deb may not have all the scientific answers to all the questions, yet the wonderful thing about her book is that she makes the readers conscious of the cultural differences revealed by the linguistic differences, and invites readers to come up their own interpretations.