Postmodernism and a Classic of Chinese Literature

Bottom line up front: This is probably going to end up long, longer than it is now.  That might be true no matter when you're reading this. (Update 2022-01-26: I have indeed added more to it, mostly in the last section.)

A couple of years ago, I detailed on this blog a series of Chinese novel reading projects: 西遊記 Journey to the West by 吳承恩 Wú Chéng'ēn, 生死疲勞 Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out by 莫言 Mò Yán, 邊城 Border Town by 沈從文 Shěn Cóngwén, and 圍城 Fortress Besieged by 錢鐘書 Qián Zhōngshū.

After that, I took a bit of a break.  I had intended to continue on to 紅樓夢 A Dream of Red Mansions by 曹雪芹 Cáo Xuěqín, and had even read a couple of pages, but my father warned me against that one, suggesting instead 三體 The Three-Body Problem by 劉慈欣 Liú Cíxīn.  Well, I read a couple of pages of that too, but put it aside, probably because I read the Wikipedia plot summary and I decided I didn't like the conspiracy-theory angle.

Then sometime in the spring of 2018, I restarted Red Mansions once again, this time in (relative) earnest.  I had bought David Hawkes's English translation around the time of my first abortive attempt, and I now followed along in both languages, more or less as I had with my previous projects. It took a year and change, but I did finally finish it. And far from a chore, I enjoyed most every step of the way. (Though I did occasionally lose patience with some of the characters...)

Red Mansions (more commonly translated as The Dream of the Red Chamber, but Hawkes suggests this is misleading, and I tend to agree) is unusual—perhaps even unique—in Chinese literature for persistently and insistently asserting its own fictionality.  Other Chinese novels exhibit an array of the magical and the mystical, more so than Red Mansions, but even with that wink and nod to the reader, the novels themselves typically present the events as though they really happened, usually tying the events to a specific epoch in Chinese history (for example, such-and-such a year in so-and-so's reign).  Historicity is a big deal in Chinese fiction, ironically enough.

Not so Red Mansions.  After Cao motivates his novel with the desire to commemorate the young girls he knew as a well-to-do boy, the rest of the novel is said to be a story engraved on a consciousness-endowed, polymorphic jade stone, whose own story frames the central story, and who is brought down to earth to experience life by a Daoist priest and a Buddhist monk.  Echoes of all three (or perhaps it is they themselves) reverberate throughout the book, pushing the plot—engraved on the stone, remember!—this way and that.  Such adumbrations seem familiar to those of us looking back at the evolution of 20th-century Western literature; see James Joyce's Finnegans Wake for a notable, if rather denser, English analogue.  But for a novel written in 18th-century China (manuscripts were circulating at the time of Cao's death in 1763 or 1764, and the first printed edition arrived in 1791), it was positively revolutionary.

Perhaps because of that, perhaps because of the iconic love triangle in the central story, or perhaps it is supposed to be revered in the annals of Chinese literature, Red Mansions occupies a central position in the Chinese collective literary consciousness.  (My mother started reading it when she was younger, and never finished it.  She found it fairly ordinary, but in addition, she has a tendency to mistrust any hyperbolic criticism, positive or negative, and the mountains of praise heaped on the story, amounting almost to hysteria, turned her off to reading it.)  When I went to Taiwan earlier this year, I stopped in a bookstore, and there were no fewer than a dozen different editions of Red Mansions, along with at least as many critical studies and examinations. 

And Red Mansions is enormous.  I read a version I had found online, cobbling it together and having to fix occasional typos, and in one case, replacing three pages that had strangely gone missing.  At a normal font size, it occupied nearly 1400 pages; this is typical of printed editions too.  The English translation by Hawkes and John Minford (Hawkes's student) runs about 2500 pages, in five volumes.  (This kind of expansion is typical of translations from Chinese to English, and there's plenty of speculation as to why that is.)  This is something you have to commit to.

Speaking of the translation, Hawkes and Minford are meticulous, translating every detail of Cao's versatile prose and poetry.  As is typical, the author makes assumptions of his readership, assumptions that are still reasonable-ish for well-read modern Chinese, but which native English readers have no hope of meeting.  Hawkes and Minford usually meet the reader halfway, finding the corresponding English connotations whenever possible, and also choose the expedient of weaving historical context into the main text, resorting to footnotes and appendices only when absolutely necessary to avoid an abrupt dump of background.  Some appendices also explain some editorial choices in the translation.

Some of the word choices are oddly obscure, opting for 75-cent words (accounting for inflation) when a nickel will do without interrupting the tone.  And when I say 75-cent words, I mean words that I had never heard of in my entire life until now.  I'll try to collect a selected list of them so you know what I mean.  But by and large, the text fits what I read in the original Chinese.  There is another complete English translation, by the husband-and-wife team of 楊憲益 Yáng Xiànyì and 戴乃迭 Gladys Tayler Yang, that is also supposed to be good, and a bit more literally faithful, at the cost of being occasionally more opaque to Western readers.

The Story

At the center of the story that occupies the vast majority of Red Mansions' 120 chapters is the 賈 Jiǎ family.  Attached to the emperor by virtue of the service of past family members, long since dead, they are wealthy and extravagant.  People dress up to have tea, to move from one house to another in the compound, to go to bed.  They live a life of leisure, eating rare delicacies and drinking fine wine.  Even when they fall ill, their medicines (Chinese traditional, naturally) are the most exquisite available.  Their ginseng has to be picked at just the right time, with just the right shape to it.

The young scion of the family is 賈寶玉 Jiǎ Bǎoyù, a precocious and willful boy of about 13 at the start of the novel, who is pressured by his father to study the Confucian classics, but who mostly only has eyes for the girls of the family.  His name means "treasured jade," because he was born with a jade stone in his mouth—the magical stone from the frame story.  (An alternate title for the novel in both Chinese and English is 石頭記 Shítoujì The Story of the Stone.)  The two principal girls in the story are 薛寶釵 Xuē Bǎochāi, the only daughter of Baoyu's mother's sister, and 林黛玉 Lín Dàiyù, the only daughter of his father's sister.

Daiyu and Baochai are complementary yin and yang.  Daiyu is artistic, mercurial, and consumptive; Baochai is sensitive, compassionate, and robust.  A combination of dream sequences and wordplay implies that Baoyu's ideal woman would be a combination of the two: Both Daiyu and Baochai share one character of their given name with Baoyu.

But most of the family's younger generation is girls—a circumstance that exerts multiple forces on the main characters.  Baoyu is the only proper male member of the Jia family in his generation; he has only a half-brother Huan who is miserably jealous of Baoyu and who spends most of the novel plotting against him and otherwise acting like a dog who has been kicked to the curb rather too often.  As a result, tremendous pressure is brought to bear on Baoyu to continue the line and to sustain the emperor's favor.  As the family holdings slowly dwindle as the combined result of extravagance, bad luck, and traitorous servants, the family feels with greater urgency every ebb and flow in the affairs of Baoyu.

It is not only Baoyu who feels the effect of the gender imbalance in the household.  Daiyu comes to the family grounds when her mother dies and her father, who cannot bring her up, sends her to his in-laws.  From the beginning, she feels like an outsider with almost all of her relatives, despite their best efforts—all, that is, except Baoyu, to whom she feels an almost instant connection and affinity (and vice versa).  Otherwise, she is in constant fear of being left out on her own in the cold.

It is their romance, suppressed and sublimated by the strictures of Chinese tradition (in which marriage is a matter of parental prerogative), that forms the backbone of the novel, and which plays against the backdrop of the slowly declining Jia family fortunes.  Daiyu yearns with all of her heart to marry Baoyu, both for survival and because she loves him, but it is not up to her.  And because there are no other eligible Jia boys, any other girl—meaning Baochai, first and foremost—represents potential competition for a prize that only one of them can win.  In the end, the resolution of this emotional struggle also serves to drive the resolution both of Baoyu's psychological development and, at a larger scale, of the Jia family's fate.

The Authorship Question

It almost wouldn't be a classic Chinese novel if there weren't some question about its provenance.  Journey to the West, for instance, is merely attributed to 吳承恩 Wú Chéng'ēn; it is not actually known with certainty that he wrote it.  He is known to have written something by that name, but because there are in fact many writings of various lengths and degrees of historical accuracy by that name (it is rather generic, after all), and it was not found in his possession after his death, the attribution is only probable.

In the case of Red Mansions, there is no such question regarding Cao and the first two-thirds of the novel.  Though there are a dozen or so different manuscripts, the differences are generally minor and betoken no substantial variance on plot or characterization.  Nor is there nowadays any question that Cao is responsible for them.

The problem arises with the remaining 40 chapters.  There seem to be no fair copies that date back to Cao's day that contain anything past Chapter 80, at all.  And the plot moves along with sufficient leisure—the leisure that eventually dissuaded my mother from finishing the book—that by Chapter 80, things only then seem to begin to climb toward a climax.

Nevertheless, in 1791 (when Cao had been dead for nearly three decades), for the first printed edition, 高鶚 Gāo È, along with his friend 程偉元 Chéng Wěiyuán, cobbled together a collection of manuscript drafts that together appeared collectively to comprise the 40-chapter conclusion of the novel.  By this time, the authorship of the novel had been forgotten and would have to await future literary investigation to rediscover.

But there would be other, thornier questions to resolve almost immediately.  The general public had been clamoring for the end of Red Mansions, and Gao's completion served to satisfy their needs. The more dedicated aficionados of the book were another matter. At issue are an array of intimations and premonitions in the first part of the book, notably a series of poems in Chapter 5, which seem to impose quite clear restrictions on the eventual fate of many of the main characters (including the "big three").  These are further reinforced by a series of well-known annotations by anonymous commenters who are nevertheless clearly intimate friends or relations of Cao. But Chapters 81 through 120 in Gao's edition seem to contravene much of this material, some of it quite severely.

For example, in Chapter 5, Baoyu dreams that he sees a book that depicts, in pictorial and textual riddle form, the fates of the girls in the family.  One of them is 香菱 Xiānglíng, which Hawkes renders as Caltrop.  The picture associated with Caltrop makes it clear that she will die at the hands of the jealous stepwife of her master.  But in Gao's ending, it is the stepwife who dies, accidentally poisoned by her own hand when she tries to murder Caltrop.  What's more, it seems likely, in the light of various suggestive passages, that Cao originally had planned a much more harrowing ending for the Jia family than what was eventually presented in Gao's ending.

There are lesser inconsistencies, different manners of death from what seems preordained.  Together, they seemed to indicate to the increasing number of close students of the novel that the completion that Gao edited was not Cao's.  Either Gao edited material that was written by someone else, or (it was suggested increasingly often as decades passed) Gao wrote it himself.  This is still the orthodox position.  In recent years, statistical stylometry has even been employed to show that there is a substantial discontinuity in style between the first 80 chapters and the last 40.

On the other side of the ledger are troubling inconsistencies of the same sort, which already appear in the first 80 chapters that are universally acknowledged to be Cao's.  The root of the problem is that Cao was an inveterate reviser, who by his own admission (in the body of the novel itself, naturally) had already rewritten various parts of the entire story several times.  Over time, he must have changed the fates of many characters across the entire breadth of the book.  He was not, however, the most careful reviser, however, and scattered in the thousand-plus pages are numerous continuity errors.  Chief among these were the various poems.  They could not be rewritten nearly as easily or as transparently as prose, so in many cases, Cao merely left them the way they were (possibly intending to return to rewrite them, should the opportunity arise), preserving the older versions of characters (in Hawkes's words) "like flies in amber."

Such observations have led Hawkes, Minford, and Anthony Yu (who authored the tremendously literate translation of Journey to the West, remember) to conclude that despite the questions raised by some of the unfulfilled prophecies, the last 40 chapters in Gao's edition appear to complete Cao's general intent, if not his exact wording, and that Gao likely did just edit some collected fragments, rather than creating the completion out of whole cloth, as used to be the prevailing opinion. Of course, that editing could have been quite substantial, especially if the parts that Cheng and Gao collected were substantially incomplete in patches. But the debate continues.

Its Place in Chinese Literature

All of these needlesome questions notwithstanding, Red Mansions engrosses more of the Chinese reading public than ever.  What accounts for its endless fascination?

Some of it is surely what my mother complained about: a kind of worship cult that has grown up around it.  Because it is continually written about, readers conclude, there must be something for people to be writing about.  We always want to know what all the fuss is about.

But it seems to me that there is more to it than mere reputation.  There is an air of mystery pervading it, both in the story itself and in the story of its creation.  And despite its occasionally glacial pace and fascination with 18th-century Chinese high-class culture, it confronts questions about the meaning of life and reality more directly than any other prominent piece of Chinese literature.  To read Red Mansions is to expose oneself to contradictions of experience and truth. One can decide that they are merely a matter of perspective, but I think it is hard to argue that they are immaterial—fictional or otherwise.

Remember that Red Mansions itself states baldly that it is fiction. There are parts of it that clearly belong to the realm of magical realism: monks disappear into the mist almost in front of one's eyes, characters somehow discover truths that they should not be able to know, and even some lives are lost by some kind of sympathetic magic. Yet this mysticism runs headlong into the crushingly realistic depiction of the juxtaposition between rich and poor, and the cataclysmic fall of the Jia family.

Cao even alludes to this duality in the names of two families in the novel: the aforementioned 賈 Jiǎ family, central to the story, and another, more peripheral family named 甄 Zhēn. There is even a Baoyu in the Zhen family, who closely resembles Jia Baoyu. Nor are these two names chosen by accident, for they are exactly homophonous with the characters 假 jiǎ "false, not real" and 真 zhēn "real." But aside from this obvious piece of symbolism, what exactly does Cao tell us?

As it happens, Cao was born into the lap of luxury, but when he was about 13—the same age as Jia Baoyu at the start of the novel—the old emperor (who had grown up with Cao's grandfather and always supported the Cao family) died and the new emperor, intending to make a political example and distance himself from his predecessor, had the Cao family's holdings stripped. By all accounts, Cao's own family's decline mirrored the Jia family more closely than the Zhen family, who never make much of a deep impression on the story. Does the Jia family in the story merely represent an exaggerated version of Cao's own family?

There is a suggestion that Cao knew, or was told, that it would be impolitic for him to make the Jia family's decline too obviously an unmitigated disaster, that his family (already poor) might have more miseries visited upon it by the powers that be if he were not to soften the blow. Seen in that light, the use of the Jia name might be a way to deflect additional persecution over what could be seen as overly frank criticism of the emperor.

Even then, however, the mere presence of that kind of symbolism (for there is more of it, usually less obvious, scattered throughout the names in the novel) makes it almost irresistible to treat the novel as a roman a clef, which we could interpret as a kind of biography of Cao, if we could only discover the key. Contributing to that sensation is the fact that the earliest versions of the novel include annotations by some commenters who are clearly closely connected with Cao, and which indicate that many of the characters were closely modeled on real people. I think that certainly accounts for a large part of the novel's appeal to readers, year after year after year.

To be sure, there are plenty of episodes that Cao has clearly put in as comic relief or dramatic color. And yet even the characters that Cao puts forth here, these one-offs, are memorable in their short appearances because Cao endows them with recognizable human weaknesses and biases. They do not serve solely to further the plot—in fact, they frequently don't advance the plot at all—but in addition (or instead) remind us of people we all know, until it almost seems as though Cao knows our friends better than we do.

The bulk of the rest of it, of course, is the love triangle between the three main characters. It is not, plotwise, a very complex story, and flatly described, it would not be very compelling. But though it is occasionally sentimental and overwrought, it is nonetheless told with such richness and verisimilitude that generations of readers have found it memorable. And in this novel, it is tied together with notions of predestination and of former lives, which I think Western and even modern Chinese readers associate with some distant ineffable Eastern mysticism.

But in fact, for all its romantic filigree, that part of the story is remarkable at its heart for its utter ordinariness. The emotions, though they may be expressed in a foreign and unfamiliar way (especially for Western readers), are still clearly recognizable. Seeing themselves in the novel, readers have for centuries envisioned themselves as Lin Daiyu or Jia Baoyu, much as people in the West have envisioned themselves as Romeo or Juliet, or Puck. It is the ease with which the novel transports readers into its milieu—its seductive immersiveness—that truly makes this novel a cornerstone of Chinese culture.

Racing to the End

The last of four Chinese novels on my reading list, 錢鐘書 Qián Zhōngshū's 圍城 Fortress Besieged, is its author's sole piece of long fiction, he having turned his hand to literary history and criticism after the cultural turmoil of China in the 1950s and beyond.  It is also at once the funniest and most tragic of the ones I read, too.

The novel's title shares its second character with another one of the novels I read—邊城 Border Town.  This generally does just mean "town," and the other character, 圍 wéi, generally means "to surround."  So why are the two titles translated so differently?  Because Qian's title is drawn from a Chinese rendering of a French proverb:

Le mariage est une forteresse assiégée, ceux qui sont dehors veulent y entrer, ceux qui sont dedans veulent en sortir.

Roughly translated, that reads, "Marriage is a fortress besieged, which those on the outside want to enter, and those on the inside want to leave."  And that should give you an idea of what the novel is about—but only a little.  Marriage is only one of the themes touched upon in Fortress Besieged, and though it is in the end the dominant one, the first three-quarters of the novel are bursting with other motifs contending for the spotlight.

方鴻漸 Fāng Hóngjiàn is a Chinese-born itinerant international student, spending time at a fair number of schools, but never dedicating himself at any of them.  The start of the novel, in pre-war 1937, finds him at last on his way back to China after his money has run out.  He can hardly return home empty-handed, but with his money mostly spent, he is somewhat at a loss for what to do, until by chance he finds an ad for a correspondence school willing to furnish the necessary credentials—if not the actual education—for a nominal fee.  As it happens, the school is no longer a going concern (even as a for-pay degree mill), the original advertiser having given up after failing to lure any suckers, but an American Irishman living in the same apartment sees an opportunity to make a fast buck.  After a comical exchange in which Fang gets the better of the Irishman in a battle of wits over whose intentions are more insincere, Fang gets his papers and boards a ship for Shanghai.

It is one of the few triumphs for Fang, who spends most of the novel on one end (usually the butt end) of Qian's jokes, whether it's to do with Fang's hunt for a stable university position (on the strength, or lack thereof, of his faked credentials), his talking up of various women on the voyage home or afterward, competitions with other Chinese travellers over whose colloquial English is stronger, or his escape to China's interior from the wartime turmoil in Shanghai.  Ultimately, his tenuous university position as lecturer is not renewed (partly on account of those credentials, partly because of Fang's naiveté), and after rushing into a faute-de-mieux sort of marriage with another lecturer, is forced to return to his hometown with his new bride.  The last chapter is a dazzling depiction of the marriage's dramatic denouement.

Qian's prose is a raucous, rollicking ride with Nabokovian twists and turns, tossing out quick throwaway gags in an offhand measure, as if to show (as Nabokov was wont to do as well) how much cleverer he is than his characters.  And yet it doesn't come off as excessive showboating; indeed, it sustains the novel through to its final conclusion, where he suddenly turns solemn, anguished, and revealing.

The sole translation, executed by Nathan Mao and Jeanne Kelly in 1979—well, that depends on how you like your translations.  This one is copiously researched and endnoted, much like Anthony Yu's translation of Journey to the West, but unlike Yu, Mao and Kelly must contend with a master modern stylist as well, and more often than not, they're simply not up to the task.  There's rarely anything actually wrong with the translation, but Qian's supple prose is alternately rendered sensitively one moment, then woodenly the next.  In my opinion, the uneven tenor of the translation doesn't allow the brilliance of the original to shine through entirely unobscured.  (It's also the only one of the four whose translation is not available in digital format, though that didn't really affect my consideration of it.)

Still, the translation, and its annotations, permit one a rather detailed understanding of the cultural background to Qian's novel, and that's a not inconsiderable benefit, especially for those readers who, like me, didn't grow up in China.  Some people find the incessant endnoting irritating, but not me.  And the translation is essentially always at least competent, giving us a tantalizing hint of the author Qian might have been, if the cultural environment in China had allowed it.

On the Border

Third on my Chinese novel reading list was 邊城 Border Town, by 沈從文 Shěn Cóngwén.  This slender volume, occupying only seventy or so pages at 16 point Chinese type on my tablet, was the shortest of the four I read, by a substantial margin, and by the time I got to it, I had advanced sufficiently in my literacy that I was able to read through this book in about two weeks.

Central to the story are an old boatman, who ferries travellers both ways across a river, where the old pagoda he lives in sits, along with his daughter and his dog.  The action, such as there is, concerns a love triangle between the girl and two brothers of a wealthier businessmen from the nearby city, but even when the foreground is occupied by the youngsters, lurking in the background, everpresent, is the old man, as constant as the river and the boat he directs from bank to bank.  Meanwhile, the old ways—represented by the time-honored fashion in which the boys make their overtures to the boatman's daughter—are fighting their battle against the intrusion of the modern world, with occasionally tragic casualties.

Shen Congwen grew up, I gather, in the sort of village he depicts in Border Town, and his reverence for the town and the people who inhabit it are palpably present in his prose.  He has been called the Chinese Faulkner, and the comparison is apt, though I also see hints of Hemingway in him.  Although in English comparative literature, the two, stylistically, are likely as not to be contrasted rather than paired, they share with Shen Congwen a common appreciation for duty, and perseverence, and quiet endurance.  At the same time, Shen Congwen draws a stark spotlight on the consequences of the quietness of that endurance, for oftentimes things, and people, are gone before we have had time to appreciate what they have gone through.

The frequently somber tone of the Chinese that Shen produces is mirrored, reasonably accurately, by Jeffrey Kinkley's translation.  Like Howard Greenblatt's translation of Mo Yan's Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, Kinkley's translation makes do without commentary, and the very occasional passages that require some understanding of Chinese language or culture are handled through parenthetical asides that don't distract from the often hypnotic rhythm of Shen's prose.  And that prose does not rely for the most part on obscure references anyway.

Border Town is a story of responsibility, and virtue, and the results of their collisions with chance and fate.  Told in its own unobtrusive way, it worms its way into your consciousness and without realizing it, you find yourself wondering how you would act, thrust into a different world, at a different time.

A Turn of the Wheel

The second Chinese novel in my reading program was Mo Yan's 生死疲勞 Life and Death are Wearing Me Out.  This absurd tale of reincarnation and redemption is the author's own choice for the work that best represents his world outlook.  If so, his outlook is sardonic, dark, and cynical indeed, yet still leaving room for optimism for the future—if only the distant, distant future.

莫言 Mo Yan—literally, "don't speak"—is in fact the pen name of 管謨業 Guan Moye, which derives (he says) from his parents' admonition not to be quite so frank and open in public as he was apparently prone to be at home.  He is the only author of the four represented in my novel-reading project to still be alive at the present time, and he is also the only one to have won a Nobel Prize for literature—even more, the only Chinese winner of that prize, ever.  He is perhaps better known for his maiden novel, 紅高粱家族 Red Sorghum Clan (1986), in large part because it was adapted into the screenplay for the award-winning movie, the haunting Red Sorghum, and perhaps in time I will read that in the original Chinese (I do have it in my library), but for now, it was Life and Death that occupied the second slot in my reading program.

The title is drawn from a Buddhist adage: 生死疲勞，從貪慾起，少欲無為，身心自在.  Loosely translated, this reads: The weariness of life and death arises from greed; when one eschews desire and meddling, the body and mind are at ease.  The title translation—chosen by Howard Greenblatt, who has translated a number of Mo Yan's books—obviously takes a different and more irreverent angle, one that reflects the twists and turns of the main character as he? it? they? trace the evolution of Chinese politics and culture over the latter half of the 20th century.

The confusion over the proper pronoun in that last sentence stems from the structure of the novel, which is divided into five parts.  西門鬧 Ximen Nao is a benevolent landowner (or so he believes), wrongly executed by Chinese communists on the opening day of the year 1950 for the crime of owning land and exercising domination over his fellow citizens.  He feels so strongly that he has been wronged that Yama, the lord of the underworld, agrees to send him back to the world of the living to give him a chance to right the wrong—though not as a human, but as a donkey under the care and stewardship of his erstwhile hired hand, 藍臉 Lan Lian (literally, "Blue Face," a reference to the birthmark on one side of his face).  As a donkey, he earns partial redemption, but only at the cost of his life.  Still unrepentant, he compels Yama to send him back again, and again, and again, each time (rather against Ximen Nao's will) as a different animal: an ox, a pig, a dog, and then at last—but that would be telling.

Because I grew up on English literature, of course, I feel a compulsion to draw an analogy between any of the Chinese authors I have read so far and familiar English-language authors.  When I read the short stories of 魯迅 Lu Xun, for instance, I saw a strong similarity to Joyce—in particular, his collection Dubliners.  Both authors have a hankering to expose the decay and inertia at the core of the culture in which they grew up, and both do so via the unremitting disillusionment experienced by some of their characters, and the callous disaffection felt by others.  In the case of Mo Yan and Life and Death, the analogy I draw is to Kurt Vonnegut and works such as Breakfast of Champions; the often impotent outrage of characters, faced with an outrageous, illogical world, is common to both.

Mo Yan has a tendency to the caustic, which works in his favor, but also, at times, to the verbose, which doesn't.  Ximen Nao's life as a pig, in particular, seems to drag on occasionally, to little end it seems beyond the reinforcement of his position as Pig Number One, Chief Porker, the Boar D'Oeuvre.  Howard Greenblatt's capable translation actually helps a little here, because although he translates Ximen Nao's life as a donkey in nearly its entirety, about 20 percent of each of the remaining sections of the novel are left out.  Mo Yan revised his novel somewhat, after Greenblatt completed his translation a year or two after the novel's original publication date, so that may account for some of the discrepancy, but it seems unlikely that those edits represent all of the difference, especially as some of the omitted passages rely on peculiar aspects of Chinese language and history, which are very difficult to translate.  In contrast to Anthony Yu's translation of Journey to the West, which is almost half endnotes, Greenblatt avoids all endnotes and footnotes altogether, instead occasionally interpolating an interpretation as a parenthetical aside, but more generally leaving tangential observations along entirely.

In the end, Mo Yan inserts himself into the story, albeit a distorted image of himself (à la Vonnegut again, I suppose).  Mo Yan the character apologizes for having to relate the pain and sorrow experienced by the characters in the novel (and created by Mo Yan the author).  But the author himself has nothing to apologize for, minor longwindedness aside, for he has created a uniquely Chinese vision of redemption and rebirth in a few hundred pages of unforgiving prose.

Monkeying Around

As I mentioned previously, my first Chinese novel reading project was 西遊記 Journey to the West (1592).  Attributed to 吳承恩 Wú Chéng'ēn, it is considered one of the four great classic novels of Chinese vernacular literature.  Serious Chinese literature was not to be written in Vernacular Chinese, or 白話 báihuà, which literally means clear speech, but in Classical Chinese, or 文言文 wényánwén.  Classical Chinese is to Vernacular Chinese what Classical Latin (e.g., what Virgil wrote in) was to Vulgar Latin, the ancestor of all the modern Romance languages like Spanish, French, and Italian.  That is to say, if you wanted to be taken seriously, you wrote in the Classical form, which was terse and dignified; if you wanted to reach the masses, you wrote in the Vernacular form, which was what the people spoke and could read—the literate people, at any rate.

Journey to the West is so famous, as a result, that there's almost no point in critically assessing it.  No critique takes place in a vacuum; it all relies on some aesthetic basis as a foundation.  In this case, though, Journey to the West is part of that foundation, so firmly that judging it is tantamount to judging Chinese literature as a whole.  I won't even bother.

It will suffice, instead, to give a general sense of the novel.  I don't have a firm handle on its character count, but it's probably in the neighborhood of half a million characters, which puts it firmly in the "lengthy epic" category.  It spans a hundred characters, and is a highly fictionalized account of the exploits of 唐玄奘 Táng Xuánzàng, known in Buddhist lore as Tripitaka, after the Buddhist scriptures that he went from China to India to gather.  In the novel, he is accompanied by three mythical creatures, the homely and sincere 沙悟淨 Shā Wùjìng, a river-dwelling sand demon; the avaricious 豬八戒 Zhū Bājiè, a pig-human; and the star of the show, the trickster hero 孫悟空 Sūn Wùkōng, the monkey king.  Though Tripitaka is the nominal main character, he appears in the novel as so ineffectual and so cowering that he needs his three attendants just to get through each day.  (The real Tripitaka was in contrast well educated, not flighty, and was of course not accompanied by three mythical creatures.)  Sun Wukong is so much the real main character that when Arthur Waley published in 1942 what for a long time was the only substantial English language translation of Journey, he called it simply Monkey.

In fact, Waley's translation covers only about a quarter to a third of the novel.  The first section of the novel, a sort of prologue that covers the background of Sun Wukong, is translated almost in full, but the rest of the novel, which is a long sequence of adventures of mostly supernatural character, is translated only selectively.

In some sense, this is justified, because the episodes (lasting a few chapters each) are self-contained and somewhat repetitive.  Nonetheless, the novel could stand to have a complete, unabridged translation, if only because of its historic place in Chinese literature.  Thus it was that Anthony Yu, born in Hong Kong and eventually to become a professor of Chinese literature (among other things) at the University of Chicago, made it his life project to produce the definitive translation of Journey.

Make no mistake about it; this is a monumental task.  The novel is mostly prose, but contains hundreds of poems in various forms, all of which were elided by Waley (because he was not really that well grounded in Chinese literature); Yu made sure to translate all of them faithfully, which mired him in all of the usual challenges involved in translation, plus the unique obstacles imposed by the brevity of classic Chinese poetry.  The novel is so long that Yu's translation is published in four volumes, each of which is rigorously researched and copiously annotated.  He also includes a lengthy introduction in which he discusses the publication history of the novel, and the specific textual issues he contended with while translating it.

Because this was my first really substantial reading project, I read both the original Chinese novel and Yu's translation on my tablet, with the original in the Pleco app, and the translation in the Kindle app.  I would go back and forth between the two, at first alternating almost sentence by sentence, and then, as I steadily became more proficient, a few sentences at a time, and finally paragraph by paragraph (they're long paragraphs) or even passage by passage.

It took me quite a while to get going, and at first, it took me perhaps a week or two (or three) to get through a single chapter.  By the end, with growing facility at reading Chinese and an increased familiarity with the characters and the flow of the story, I was able to get through a chapter every day or two.  In all, it took me about a year and a half to read through the entire book.

Wu's prose—assuming he really is the author—is puckish, but dated, a feel that I'm sure I have only a partial sense for.  He uses turns of phrase that are evidently out of step with current usage.  Some of that was apparent even to me, but other parts I could only detect because Pleco called them out as dated, or because I asked native speakers.  Still, enough of the playful nature comes through that I could feel it, if a little hesitantly.  I would liken it to Don Quijote (which I haven't read in the original Spanish, so I'm going by a translation).  Yu captures the cavalier style of writing quite well.  From time to time, there are a few stilted turns of English phrase, which I attribute to him not being quite a fully native English speaker, but these are truly few and don't really detract from the overall feel of the translation.  Of the four novels I read, this one probably has the best translation.

A Novel Way to Read Chinese

For me, anyway.

This is, likely, the first in a series of posts, and ironically, one I'm writing as I come to the end, temporarily, of a reading program that has covered a couple of years.  You see, over that time, I've read four Chinese novels of varying era, genre, and style, in the original Chinese: 西遊記 Journey to the West (1592), 生死疲勞 Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2006), 邊城 Border Town (1934), and 圍城 Fortress Besieged (1947).  I'll be discussing those works in later posts.

This program is something that I could not realistically have considered more than a few years ago, because at the start of this reading program, my Chinese reading skills were not to the point where I could have attempted to even begin any of these novels.  To explain that, and the evolution of my literacy since then, I have to explain a little about my own background, as well as a remarkable little application called Pleco.

I call myself, among other things, a first-generation Chinese American, by which I mean that I was born in the United States, but my parents immigrated here.  (Some people call that second generation, but I think it's somewhat more common to call it first generation.)  As is common in children with my background, my parents spoke to me in Chinese, and I spoke to them in Chinese...and English.  Technically, in fact, Chinese is my first language, but it has been a long time since it was my best language, and my parents have stories of me speaking in a kind of pidgin with Chinese vocabulary but English grammar.

As is also common, my parents shuttled me off to Chinese school every Saturday morning (as a matter of fact, they and their friends started the darned thing), which was a real hardship, you had better believe, because (a) cartoons were better then (they reran all the theatrical shorts they used to show before movies in the theatres), and (b) this was before DVRs or even VCRs.  Time shifting was not even a twinkle in any commoner's eye yet.

For two hours every weekend, rather than watching Bugs Bunny, my friends and I learned to read and write Chinese and a smattering of Chinese culture as well (we also got that at home, to be sure).  I don't want to make it seem as though it was some kind of prison camp, for we enjoyed the company and I, at least, always found the idea of being bilingual in English and a totally different language such as Chinese rather interesting.

I went to this Chinese school—which is still a going concern, by the way, forty years later—from age six all the way through high school, and finished with a vocabulary of maybe 1000 to 1500 characters.  To give that some context, a child growing up in China or Taiwan has that kind of written vocabulary probably by the age of about eight or so.  Since Chinese characters have to be more or less memorized one by one, as opposed to spelled with an alphabet of tens of letters, this is no mean achievement, at age eight or eighteen.

I should add, incidentally, that this does not mean that I had the fluency of an eight-year-old.  A native eight-year-old Chinese speaker would have spoken circles around me.  Chinese characters, though perhaps the most outwardly obvious representation of the challenge of Chinese fluency, are only one aspect.  The grammar is another, and plain practice using the language is another.

Then, too, the 1000 to 1500 characters I knew were not necessarily those that a native eight-year-old would know.  There were some interesting gaps that I now attribute to the sometimes inconsistent attention of the Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs (I think?) who issued the teaching materials we worked with.  It's a little as though you learned how to write "chocolate" but not "however"; both are common words, but "however" as a function word is more important than "chocolate" is as a concrete noun.  (And in fact, although I knew how to say it, I didn't learn how to write "however" until later, and partly in consequence, rarely used it in conversation.)  What's more, although Chinese looks like a long sequence of distinct characters, it is actually organized into words of mostly two or more characters, and there are some tens of thousands of those, and I knew a much smaller fraction of them.

The bluntest indication of my limited literacy was that I simply could not read a newspaper, which in Chinese as well as in English requires the vocabulary of about a twelve-year-old—about 2500 or so characters and probably ten to twenty thousand words.  It had taken me (and my teachers) about twelve years of fairly dedicated effort to get me halfway there.  On my own, it would take much longer than another twelve years to get the rest of the way there.  I considered taking Chinese language courses at college, but they met for an hour once a day at eight in the morning, and even I, who found the idea of becoming literate in Chinese more than a little intriguing, was not quite ready to make that level of commitment.

So at the end of college, I still had more or less those same 1000 to 1500 characters in my vocabulary when I went on the Taiwan Study Tour, which is known informally (and rather hoarily) as the Love Boat, for all of the extracurricular activities that go on there.  I don't really know about that, because in line with my rather generally nerdish outlook, I went there to learn Chinese and so I did.  I might have picked up a hundred or two hundred additional characters, but what really changed was my broadened awareness of Chinese literature.

The program spanned six weeks, of which most of the mornings and the early part of the afternoons were spent in language and culture classes.  In the latter part of the afternoons, and the early evenings after dinner, we were pretty much free to do what we liked.  I liked to play basketball, so I tried that once or twice, but Taiwan is in the tropics and the court was outdoors, and it was both hot and humid, so that was a no-go.  I already felt like I had to take a shower every four hours as it was.

So instead, I went out onto the street and browsed in stores, especially bookstores.  I've always loved going into bookstores and just browsing, from the time that my dad would take me to a department store and leave me in the book department while he went to do errands, back when you could do such a thing without having child services pick you up.  It was no different now, even though I couldn't read most of the books.  I just liked the look of the books—the typefaces (much more creative than for English, generally speaking), the arrangement of the text, even the cheap flimsy paper that many books used to save on cost.

It did irk me, though, that I couldn't read most of the books.  I finally found a book, however, that had pronunciation marked in for some of the text—not pinyin, which is used on the mainland, and more recently now in Taiwan as well, but zhuyin fuhao, which was the Taiwan standard at the time.  I still didn't know a lot of the characters, but it still helped that I could sound the characters out.  I didn't recognize it at the time, but this was the first time I really felt the benefit of having grown up hearing a lot of Chinese.

The book looked like it was a compendium of a few hundred mostly short poems (short helped!) with some explication after each one: a glossary and a synopsis, neither of which, notably, came with pronunciation keys.  Anyway, it looked interesting, so I bought it.  Only later, after I brought it home and showed it to my father, did I discover that it was possibly the most famous collection of Chinese poetry, 唐詩三百首 Three Hundred Tang Dynasty Poems.  (There are actually 310 in this edition, perhaps on the same principle as the baker's dozen.)  The poems are from the Tang Dynasty, from the seventh through ninth centuries.  These people were writing over a thousand years ago, and through the accident of my selection in some minor bookstore in Taiwan, I was touched by them.  I still have that same book on my bookcase right now, not ten feet to my left as I write this.

Learning to read through them, however, was still a daunting challenge.  A lot of this has to do with the process of looking up a Chinese character in the dictionary.  Looking up an English word is straightforward once you learn the alphabet; words are assembled in alphabetical order, which is sort of like numerical order for letters.

Chinese, not being an alphabetic language, has no such easy method for looking up characters.  There are dozens of ways to look up characters, some of which require you to know how to pronounce the character, which is useful if you're already literate but just want to know some fine nuance of definition, but useless for a learner like myself.  The rest are based more or less on some notion of how to break the character down into parts and looking the character up by those parts, but since characters are organized every which way, it's still not straightforward.  Someone in my position would take a couple of minutes to look up a single character.

Enter, at this point, Pleco.  At this stage, ten or so years ago, the earliest smartphone were just then making it onto the market, which was still dominated by the personal digital assistant (PDA).  These had touch screens but no phone.  It occurred to Mike Love, Pleco's founder, that that touch screen could make looking Chinese characters up a lot easier for language learners.  The one thing anyone knows who's trying to look up an unfamiliar character, is what that character looks like.  The touch screen made it possible to enter that character in directly into the device.

I downloaded the free app onto my Palm Pilot (remember those?), and bought the handwriting recognizer and a couple of the (inexpensive) dictionary packs, and for the first time, looking up a character took seconds rather than minutes.  I decided to start learning Chinese anew, and within a couple of months had added a couple of dozen more characters to my vocabulary.

But the real sea change happened when Pleco added a reader to their dictionary.  By this time, I had gotten an iPad (Pleco has used iOS as its flagship platform for several years now) and the larger screen made it more comfortable to use Pleco.  The new Pleco reader also made it possible to read online newspapers and books in Chinese, and if one encountered a new character, one simply tapped it on the screen, and Pleco popped up a definition, so that looking characters up was now essentially instantaneous.  What's more I didn't need to read something on one device or book, and look it up in another.  I was not interrupted in the process of reading beyond the minimal step of apprehending the meaning of the new character.

What followed was simply an explosion of new characters added to my vocabulary, at an average rate of dozens of characters per week, to the point that I probably now have a vocabulary of about 3000 characters, and I can (at last!) read a newspaper without needing to look something up more than pretty occasionally—not because I don't recognize a character, but because its use in a word is something I can't figure out on its own.  It's a bit like seeing the word "prevaricate" and knowing the Latin roots pre- "before" and varicari "straddle" and not being able to recognize the meaning "to lie".

At any rate, I got to the stage where I could reasonably attempt to read a novel, and the first one I tried (because it was available for free online) was the sixteenth-century Journey to the West.  Understandably, the language has a dated feel to it (sort of like reading Shakespeare has for English readers), which made it possibly not the best first choice, but it was still an instructive project.  I'll discuss this in my next post in this series.

But before I end this rather long article, I want to make one more plug for Pleco.  It's really an outstanding dictionary.  The app is still free (though the handwriting recognition costs a small fee), and I've spent probably over a hundred dollars on the dozen or so dictionaries and extra features I've added to it over the years, and I don't regret any of that.  The founder, Mike Love, is incredibly responsive and listens to all of the user feedback.  The user base is tremendously loyal and that's returned by the Pleco team.  If you're at all interested in learning Chinese, and you have a supported device, I can't recommend Pleco highly enough.

Daybreak (a Chinese poem)

Another offering for National Poetry Month, but something a bit more unusual this time.

Every now and then, I'll attempt a Chinese poem.  Because I'm not as fluent as I'd like to be, this effort is invariably a little stilted, but (I hope, at least!) progressively less stilted each time.  Before I say any more, here first is my latest attempt in the original Chinese:

朝陽

夜裡星星亮，
朝陽處處光。
青年游外地，
老是想家鄉。

Now, those of you who speak Chinese will probably recognize this as somewhat stilted (which is true), while those of you who don't have no idea what I just said.  I'll explain in a moment, but before I do so, allow me to put on my professor hat and insert a few thoughts on Chinese poetry.

I make no secret of the fact that I find Chinese writing to be the most beautiful.  By that I don't mean that I find Chinese prose better than prose in other languages; I mean the actual written characters.  But because I actually do read Chinese (about 60 to 80 percent as well as I'd like to, but that's a story for another time), I instinctively see the meaning behind most of the characters before I see their form.  I often wonder what it's like to see those characters from the perspective of someone who has no idea what they say.

At any rate, one of the appealing features of Chinese writing is that the characters (which are almost universally monosyllabic) are distinct and individual pieces of art, and a Chinese poem puts that all together in a composite that's a piece of art (when properly conceived) at multiple levels.

Because the monosyllabic characters are all distinct, one can easily tell from the above that this poem consists of four lines of five syllables each.  That may remind some of you of the poem's more famous Japanese relative, the haiku, which is three lines of five, seven, and again five syllables.  In fact, I would say that—in Western minds at least—that is the defining characteristic of the haiku, is that it contains seventeen syllables in that arrangement.

Writing these poems gives me some insight, though, why that conception isn't accurate, even with respect to Asian poetry in general.  (I think it's a remarkably trivial characterization, not the least because it's totally underspecified.  See the postscript, for instance.)

In the first place, there's a difference between Chinese syllables and English syllables.  The majority of Chinese words are polysyllabic—that is, they consist of compounds of two or more characters—but nevertheless, the characters retain a distinct identity that is different from that of English syllables.  The characters are less subordinated to the line, so to speak.  That is more true of older writing than of modern writing, and also more true of poetry than of prose.

From a more technical perspective, Chinese poetry has its constraints that roughly map onto English meter and rhyme.  For instance, the above poem belongs to a form called 五言絕句, which means (broadly translated) five-character quatrain, which it clearly is.  This form prescribes a simple rhyme scheme: the end of the second line must rhyme with the end of the fourth line.  And they do: the characters in question are spelled, in hanyu pinyin, guāng and xiāng, and even if you don't know a darned thing about Chinese spelling, I think you can tell that the two characters rhyme.  (The macrons over the a's indicate that the tones match, too, which they must do.)

In addition, the tones of the characters must follow certain arrangement rules.  Chinese characters generally have one of four different tones, of which the first two might be called "level" tones, and the last two "deflected" tones.  [EDIT: I should add here that originally, there was only one level tone and three deflected ones.  The one level tone evolved, in Mandarin, into the first two tones, while the second and third tones evolved into the last two Mandarin tones.  The fourth original tone, the so-called entering tone, disappeared from Mandarin, and characters with that tone were haphazardly distributed amongst the surviving tones.]

The tones in the first couplet must complement each other, as must the tones in the second couplet.  That is to say, for every level-tone character in the first line, the corresponding character in the second line must have a deflected tone, and vice versa.  The same is true of the third and fourth lines.  For instance, the above poem has the following pattern of tones (if we denote level tones with = and deflected tones with ×):

××==×
==××=
===××
×××==

What's more, the patterns are traditionally restricted.  One does not generally see ===== or ×××××, or =×=×=, or anything like that.  Some variation is permitted (as is true of English poems, too), but is fairly carefully circumscribed.

In addition to all this is the usual transcendant pressure to make the expression of the form "beautiful" in some ill-defined (and probably undefinable) way, so that it isn't just a bunch of syllables, nor a bunch of syllables conforming to some rules, nor even a bunch of sensible syllables conforming to some rules.

I don't know Japanese at all, really, so I have no idea if some of these considerations apply (or if there are others in their place), but I certainly do not expect that haiku are simply seventeen syllables in a particular arrangement.  I have heard, for instance, that some reference to the seasons is expected, and that the syllables are not really syllables, but mora (the Japanese unit of speech timing), and so forth.

Anyway, enough of this palavering.  Here's a rough English translation of the poem:

daybreak

The stars gleam in the nighttime,
but the dawning sun drowns them all out.
We venture into the world in our youth,
but thinking always of our hometown.

No, it's not deep, I never said it was!  I'm working on it!

P.S.  Because I'm unable to let a post go without some nerdery involved: Suppose that one uses a vocabulary of English words that are (with equal probability) one, two, or three syllables long.  What is the probability that an arbitrary sequence of words totalling seventeen syllables can be broken into lines of five, seven, and then five syllables without breaking a word?

Seventh Night

Last night was Seventh Night (七夕), the seventh night of the seventh month in the lunisolar calendar followed traditionally by the Chinese. Because the Chinese calendar usually starts with the second new moon after the winter solstice, Seventh Night usually falls sometime in August in the western calendar.

Seventh Night is associated in Chinese tradition with the story of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl. In one common telling of the story, a young cowherd by the name of Niulang (牛郎) came across a fairy girl bathing in a lake—a girl named Zhinü (織女). Fascinated by her beauty, and emboldened by his companion, an ox, he stole her clothes and waited by the side of the lake. When she came out looking for her clothes, Niulang swept her up and took her back home. In time, they were happily married with two children. But when the Goddess of Heaven found out that a fairy girl had married a mere mortal, she grew furious and sent Zhinü into the sky, where she became the bright star Vega, in the constellation of Lyra the Lyre. (Watercolor by Robin Street-Morris, 2007.)

When Niulang discovered that his wife had disappeared, he searched high and low for her, but was unable to find her. Eventually, the ox told Niulang that if he killed him and wore his hide, he would be able to ascend the heavens to find Zhinü. Niulang did as the ox suggested, and took his two children with him to find his wife, becoming as he did the star Altair. Find her he did, but the Goddess of Heaven, angered once more by Niulang's impertinence, drew a river of stars—the Milky Way—forever separating Niulang (the star Altair) from Zhinü. Their two children became Tarazed and Alshain, the two dimmer (but still bright) stars that flank Altair in the constellation of Aquila the Eagle. But apparently the Goddess of Heaven was not entirely heartless, for once a year, on the seventh night of the seventh month, she sends a bridge of magpies (鵲橋) to connect the two lovers, for just one evening. And so Seventh Night is associated with romance (and also, interestingly, with domestic skills).

The celestial setting for the entire tale can be found in the Summer Triangle, which is bounded by three stars: Altair, Vega, and Deneb (in the constellation of Cygnus the Swan, also known as the Northern Cross). The Summer Triangle can be found in the night sky throughout summer and autumn; at this time of year, it passes nearly overhead at about ten in the evening. (Photograph by Bill Rogers of the Sa-sa-na Loft Astronomical Society, 2009; click to enlarge.)

The Chinese Script Is, or Is Not, Phonetic

A new post to satisfy the likes of the most evil being...in the universe.

My favorite Chinese app (whose continued absence from the iTunes Store is delaying my inevitable purchase of an iPhone) is headlined by a dictionary edited by the recently departed John DeFrancis, who taught Chinese for years at the University of Hawai'i. Aside from his 12-volume Chinese language textbook series, he's probably best known for The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, an accessible deconstruction of several myths regarding the Chinese language: that the Chinese script is ideographic, for instance, or that it is specially tailored to facilitate communication between speakers of mutually unintelligible dialects.

At one point, DeFrancis goes even further and suggests that the Chinese script is not even logographic, with each character signifying a morpheme, but simply phonetic, with each character signifying a phoneme—albeit a tremendously inefficient phonetic script, since in many cases it has dozens of characters representing a single phoneme. He's talking here about what most people would consider homophones: characters like 出 to exit, and 初 the first or opening of a series, both of which are pronounced chū in Mandarin (the most widely spoken dialect). This idea is prelude to a discussion of various proposals to do away with Chinese characters entirely, using in their place a properly designed phonetic script.

DeFrancis's interpretation isn't as crazy as it might sound at first. In at least one limited case—the transliteration of foreign terms—the Chinese script is exactly an inefficient phonetic script. Lacking an official alphabet or syllabary, Chinese represents foreign terms using a sequence of characters, such as 巴巴多斯 bābāduōsī for Barbados. The inefficiency lies in that unless you've previously looked this term up, you'd have no good idea which four characters ought to be used to write out Barbados. There are lots of equally effective ways to write out Barbados using Chinese characters...but only one way that is considered "correct."

More generally, even though the distinction between the written forms 出 and 初 might seem vital to Chinese readers, since they mean different things, the morphemes represented by those characters are used all the time in speech, where there is nothing but context to distinguish them. Apparently, "nothing but context" works pretty darned well. There are written passages that consist of nothing but a long string of homophones—a sort of extended pun—but the fact that these are elaborately conceived literary jokes is actually an indication that the semantic disambiguation the different characters provide isn't strictly speaking necessary.

But I think that last point is an indication of why the Chinese script is not a phonetic script, or at least not only a phonetic script. Because even though the semantic disambiguation isn't necessary, I think it's pretty hard to argue that it doesn't help. One can read a passage in Chinese that is rendered only phonetically, but to someone who's literate, it's a lot faster with ordinary characters. Whether we're talking about an alphabetic language like English or a logographic one like Chinese, people typically read a lot faster than they can speak. To me, that indicates that there's something going on in the reading process other than just reproducing the sounds of speech. Robert Ramsey wrote in his book The Languages of China that there's still a lot we don't understand about the way Chinese people read. Without understanding more about that, it's premature to conclude that Chinese characters are a poor stand-in for a syllabary.