How the Chinese Language Forced Me to Stop Being Busy
And how rethinking the meaning of a word can lead to new life lessons.
I fell in love with the Chinese language in my twenties, when I arrived in Hong Kong en route to Taiwan and was given a name meant to encompass my personality and character: Peaceful 安 (Ᾱn), Content 欣 (Xīn), and Joy 怡 (Yí).
The fact that my name matched my perceived personality, and the person I hoped to become, fascinated me.
Feeling compelled to understand the people with whom I lived and worked, I devoured everything I could about the language and culture.
I drank hot tea in the sweltering heat of summer, ate any food offered, and soaked in the sights and smells of the daily market. I quickly appreciated the nuanced difference between the American ‘hello’ and the seemingly intrusive greetings, ‘Have you eaten?’ and ‘Where are you going?’ rooted in the traditional hospitality of ancient China.
In my daily language lessons, I learned that characters, which appeared as a random and nonsensical set of lines to my untrained eye, consisted of word parts that often provided meaning and/or phonetic clues. No Romanized alphabet existed for the native speakers, but each word could be identified in a dictionary according to a root, or radical…
