写汉字 - Writing Chinese characters as a meditation practice
A personal essay/diary entry (?) that I wrote because I have so much free time during Spring Break
I can’t say that writing Chinese characters is my favorite past time hobby. In fact, when I first started, saying that I abhor it might be a bit of an understatement.
One stroke...
Spending up to 5 hours on writing only 30 characters, repeating each character 20 times doesn’t seem to make any pedagogical sense, since your mind will shut off after approximately 30-minutes. Although it is a very inefficient way of memorizing the characters, it is the only way.
Two strokes….
As a language learner, you envy every other students who does not have to even deal with this superfluous burden of practicing writing every word because their language uses the latin alphabet. And so they seem to progress rapidly in their proficiency.
Three strokes…
For example, my friend, who’s learning Spanish at the same 200 level, is writing 5-page textual analysis essays, or short fiction stories about a man who played the role of a dog for fun at first but then trapped in this role voluntarily, and how this tragedy
reflects the socially constructed and predetermined expectations for each human being.
Meanwhile, our class’ essay prompts are something along the line of: “Write 300 words about what exercises you should do to keep your body healthy,” far more inferior in terms of length, depth and creativity. This is a direct result from learning much less vocabulary and grammar, since we spend so much time on writing the characters while other language learners don’t even have to worry about it.
Four strokes….
Being a mildly competitive person myself, things like this often make me feel like I was behind compared to my language peers. It made me think that either I have not dedicated enough time and effort to learning Chinese, or that I have chosen the wrong language to fall in love with, neither of which I truly believe in.
Five strokes….
But like a moth drawn to the very ember that scorches it, I continue to be fascinated and engrossed in the act of writing chinese characters. I think besides the obvious benefit of help you learn a language, I gradually realize how marvelous a
meditation practice it is. Yes, there are studies that suggest practicing chinese calligraphy is a good way to relieve stress and improve both mental and physical health.
Here, however, I’m taking a more intrinsic and personal perspective.
For me, writing chinese characters is an art. Literally, you are drawing the character from the head to toe, from left to right, with all the decorative “hats,” “tails,” “curves,” dot, hook, bent, slant. It’s like a mini, graceful drawing, and for someone who can barely draw like me, Chinese calligraphy grants me a cheat access to another art form that I have been deprived of since childhood.
I view my science inner nerd as a wilting plant and each form of art as a source of nutrient. Whenever I have free time, I actively seek to do art and enjoy art, whether it’s watching a movie, reading a book, playing harp or piano. I believe that my body and mind needs it to avoid becoming a lopsided human being.
It’s all about balance.
For me, Chinese calligraphy is sophisticated and paradoxical. Writing characters just to communicate is relatively doable, while calligraphy as an art requires much higher attention to details. Take one of the most complex chinese characters,
nàng, which means “having a stuffy nose” or “speaking with a nasal twang.”
The character "nàng", which means “having a stuffy nose” or “speaking with a nasal twang.”
To outsiders, that looks intimidating. I mean how and where do you start writing?
Well, Chinese learners will tell you that there is a rule to how you should write the stroke. You have to write from left to right, head to toe. The underlying reason for this is to make both the process graceful, with the fewest hand movements to write the
most strokes possible.
Well, that’s the general principle anyway. There are numerous exceptions that does not make sense at all, and you still have the relative size of the strokes, how the strokes are connected to one another and the relative size of the
word compared to other words.
If you’re reckless about these details, you run the risk of illegibility, or writing a completely different word since lots of Chinese characters
But if you have written lots of characters before, you can break the character “nàng” into the smaller characters it consists of.
There is always serenity amidst chaos.That’s how I view the process of writing Chinese characters.
The intimidation and difficulty is still there, like a pitch-black alley that you have to walk through to get home, but you have this light, small but everlasting, that leads the way and makes you feel safe, you just have to go for it.
I try to make it my outlook on life too.
It’s all about balance.
For me, writing chinese characters is a way for me to reflect upon, connect to and reconcile with my Vietnamese identity. I think the French developed the alphabet and Vietnamese language phonetics is heavily influenced by Chinese, but it has since evolved into a distinctive language with remnants of both colonizers.
Between Chinese and Vietnamese, not only do some synonymous words sound extremely similar, but the combining patterns are quite identical too. Take a very simple example. “地” in Chinese and “địa” in Vietnamese sounds the same, and they both means “ground” or “land.” In a similar fashion, “球” and “cầu” means ball. When combined the two words in their respective languages, “地球” and “địa cầu” both means “planet earth”!!!
I trembled with fascination when I first discovered this. Drawing parallels between Chinese and Vietnamese both makes learning Chinese easier for me and maintains my love for the subject.
On the other hand, contrasting the two very similar but distinct culture and languages reveals precious nuggets of subtle, intriguing points about my own country that I haven’t discovered yet, because of ignorance or simply because I was too immersed in it to have a bird-eye view.
Things get even more interesting when you bring American culture and the English language into play. When I write Chinese characters, it is as if I’m constantly drawing Venn diagrams, examining where they intersect. I feel like a linguist, historian, anthropologist and sociologist all at once, and the experience is nothing short of breathtaking.
As an international, I feel like constantly being required to communicate in my non-native language right from the moment I wake up is a bit emotionally taxing. Being able to “go back to the roots” feels rejuvenating for me.
It’s all about balance.
Most importantly, for me, Chinese calligraphy is a way to both foster my inner perfectionist and reprimand it, restricting its control over my life. When I write chinese characters, I motivate myself to write more by thinking “this next character will be the
most beautiful one that I have written yet.” Silly I know, but it gets me excited every time it’s midnight and I still have 5 hours of character writing to turn in the next day.
“If I just curve it at a bigger angle, if I can make this box neater, if i can make this dot rounder, it will be perfect,” I would think to myself.
By writing Chinese characters, I become a better self-critic and self-analyst. I look at what I just wrote, identify what I can fix or improve for the next character. Throughout the process I become more truthful to myself, and that has helped me grow a lot in other aspects of my life.
But then again… my characters can come close, but can never be as impeccable as the one printed by a computer. So, I also learn to accept the imperfections that I have, and move on just to get it done with, feigning indifference to the shrieking and turmoil caused by my inner perfectionist.
This is actually more important for me, since more often than not, I feel too stifled and crippled by the judgement of my inner self. It has made me become a sad chronic procrastinator, excuse-giver and life-floater in general.
Writing Chinese characters has helped me defeat my inner perfectionist, not letting it control my life but instead forcing it to succumb to a mutual compromise with me. It can focus on quality as much as it wants as long as I get things done.
It’s all about, you guessed it,
balance.
The practice of writing Chinese characters not only helps me learn a very interesting and useful language. It actually helps me - and I can confidently say that I’m not over-romanticizing this - come to enlightenment of a personal philosophy on how I approach life and grow as a person. I actually get more than I have ever bargained for.
Not bad, not bad at all.
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