When we lived first in Hong Kong in the 1990s the South China Morning Post was our Rosetta Stone. It offered a small window through which we were able to catch a tiny glimpse of life in China before we were able to go there ourselves.
We enjoyed reading about the multistory buildings constructed within days, and about banks that were unknown to the Chinese government until they went bust. China was a little like the Wild-West at the time, and it was hard to find insights in English.
We quickly noticed that every story involving a Chinese name, showed the characters alongside the English translation. To newcomers to Asia, we wanted to know why.
In a newspaper aimed primarily at English speakers, what difference did they make?
We soon learnt that including the characters makes a very big difference indeed.
Take the name Ma Guang Ming with the characters: 馬 光 明.
In Chinese it’s also possible to use completely different characters to make exactly the same sound. The name would sound the same to an English speaker, but mean something else entirely to a Chinese speaker. The same name, for example, could be written as 蟆 廣 冥. Instead of meaning bright, wise horse, it then means stupid toad.
Almost all Chinese words can be pronounced in several ways, giving them many different meanings. This is why, for someone to understand what’s being said in Chinese, it’s often necessary to write the characters down.
It also means people should to be careful about what they say and precisely how they say it. On a cold day, someone might go into a restaurant and think they are ordering a bowl of soup to warm them up. Said wrongly however, they’ll get a bowl of sugar. The word for soup – Tang – is exactly the same as the word for sugar. The first has a neutral or flat tone, while the second has rising, questioning tone.
To illustrate this there is a famous tale called “Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den”. It is the story of Mr Shi eating lions.
Although it contains more than 90 words, to English ears every word sounds exactly the same.
It starts like this:
shí shì shī shì shī shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī. (石室诗士施氏, 嗜狮 誓食十狮)
It translates as: “A poet named Shi lived in a stone room. Fond of lions, he swore that he would eat ten lions.”
Understanding someone’s character in Chinese is not the same as understanding their character in English.