The Chinese Language: Technology As Friend Of Tradition

My father was a child of two worlds, he was born in China and moved to Taiwan when he was 8 years old. He left relatives behind in mainland China, yet still had much of his family in Taiwan. With good reason, he kept a foot in both worlds, and made it his goal to make it back to mainland China. He was able to do so in 1980 by creating a study-abroad program at Hofstra University where he taught for most of his life.

While my dad approved of many of the advances that China has made in the last half century, there was one that always bothered him, and that was the use of simplified characters. While he understood its necessity, he also thought it was travesty to the art form that Chinese call the written word.

James Fallows, a writer for The Atlantic, published a piece this week on Chinese characters and the recommendation this year at the CPPCC to change the simplified written form back to the traditional form. There are a few reasons outlined in the article for this move back, but the one I found most interesting was that technology was making it easier to use traditional characters. Simplified characters were introduced to make learning and writing Chinese easy, but advances in computers and cell phones have made writing complex characters effortless. The argument is that with these new tools, China should be able to easily go back to traditional characters.

My dad would have applauded this recommendation. He loved the history behind Chinese characters, and when he taught Chinese and Chinese Literature, he always explained the history behind the character. He would draw each character on the chalkboard and make them look like the pictograph they represented, much like the scroll pictured above. The moon would appear as a moon, and he’d explain how it transformed over time to be the character we have today. He’d talk about how characters would be added to together to form new pictures; new meanings; and new words. He’d just get that spark in his eye and you’d know this meant a lot to him. I just wish he had lived long enough to hear that China was considering going back to his beloved Chinese characters.