Last Saturday, my grandson celebrated his fifth birthday at an amusement center with all his friends and their parents. Among his buddies was pre-school classmate Terrance, a Chinese American. Terrance’s father was there, and we chatted a bit. He had an accent so I asked what country he came from. It was Malaysia but he was ethnic Chinese (Han).
From my own childhood, I’ve had a fascination for Oriental cuisines. One of my neighborhood friends growing up in Amityville, Long Island was Angelo Wong – son of a Puerto Rican mother and Chinese father, hence the name. Mr. Wong owned the only Chinese restaurant in Amityville and was well respected. My family didn’t dine out much in those days but Chinese cuisine was a favorite – the standard Cantonese version of Egg-drop soup, barbecued ribs, fried rice, egg roll. As an adult working in mid-town Manhattan in the 1970s I discovered a Sichuan restaurant owned by brothers Michael and Soochow Chen, from Taiwan. They served the often spicy cuisine that eventually overtook Cantonese – Hot & Sour soup, General Tso’s Chicken, Mu Shu Pork, and Beef & Broccoli. Michael once invited us to his home where we dined at a table with a Lazy Susan feasting on dishes more exotic like Pigs’ Ears, squid, and stir-fried unshelled shrimp (too crunchy!)
I taught myself to cook Chinese to replicate Michael Chen’s dishes – they aren’t bad. Before the pandemic I journeyed to Manhattan’s Chinatown every other week for a good lunch and to immerse myself in Chinese culture, watching Chinese elders in Christopher Columbus Park mostly playing card games and often listening to Chinese musicians. There is no statue of our Great Navigator in that park named for him, rather there’s one of Sun Yat-sen, the Republic of China’s first president in 1911. No one seems to mind that the park has an Italian name. Now that a diversity of Asian nationalities populates the area, the Columbus name may keep intra-Asian tensions at bay.
Back to the party. I asked Terrance’s father about Chinese characters. I’ve read that a student needs to memorize at least 3,000 of them to be literate. A scholar may have to know 10,000! For all their ingenuity, the Chinese never invented an alphabet like ours with 26 letters. So, I asked him what a Chinese typewriter looks like. He whipped out his iPhone and showed me how they type.
In Chinese, to say “Hello” is Ni Hao (knee-how), which is 你好 in calligraphy. Clearly, a typewriter cannot accommodate hundreds or thousands of characters, so the Chinese use the Latin or Roman alphabet to spell out sounds like ni hao. Terrance’s father typed in ni hao and on the screen magically appeared the Chinese characters noted above. In short, the Chinese must learn to use the letters invented in Italy to type their own language.
The Romans didn’t invent the alphabet but they made a wonderful version of it that they passed on to our modern world. They adopted the Greek version from southern Italy and the Etruscans but added some Italic curves. The Greek letter Γ became C; Δ became D; Π became P; Σ became S, etc. Curvy letters lent themselves to beautiful italic calligraphy – often called “the fine Italian hand” – that was developed in the Middle Ages and was used by Thomas Jefferson to pen the Declaration of Independence and our own cursive script.
Meanwhile, throughout their history the Chinese have struggled to reduce their character inventory. Mao Tse-tung, according to one scholar, wished to junk pictographs and teach everyone the Roman alphabet. It was he who standardized the “Pinyin” Roman transcriptions, mentioned above, to make newspapers and typewriters possible.
But pictographs have an advantage over our system. With lots of different alphabets (Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, etc) we can’t always look at a word and know what it means. Pictographs can be understood without translation. Regardless of the Chinese dialect, the pictograph for “rice” 大米, and so many other words, is the same and can be understood without translation.
But when all is said and done, the world including China, is better for the Roman alphabet. That city on the Seven Hills was not only a cornerstone of Western Civilization but a global intellectual force that continues to this day.
And China needn’t consider Italy a young upstart. It was unified by Rome one year before China, in 222 B.C. -JLM
Approaching 70 years now and still working strong as a piano instructor and involved in many teacher organizations, my bird’s eye view affords me to say without hyperbole that the Chinese and other Asians are carrying the torch for the Italian invented pianoforte and string family. Amy Chua in her NY Times bestseller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother goes as far to say that the violin and piano represent in the Chinese culture a hallmark of Western Civilization and that their children should immerse themselves, given that European music and composition have no parallel in their history. It is plainly evident today that Chinese and Italian commerce and cultural exchange are at a zenith. Even on a tragic “note”, we only have to see the Wuhan-Milan outbreak in the early period of this pandemic. On the cultural front, we see on PBS how accomplished Chinese artists travel and sample artisan-made violins. The Fazioli factory near Venice is turning out pianos many feel rival Steinway. My fellow Institute associates might be interested to know that my many Chinese clients use an app called WeChat to stay in touch about affairs germane to their community. There is an actual “Mr. Joe” (me!) WeChat group that covers all agendas and accomplishments in the Joe world. When my mother passed in 2019 they all contributed to a bouquet of flowers for the wake. I still hope the musical bar will be raised in the “American” home, but it’s not currently on that trajectory.
The recent documentary on Pavarotti devoted a segment to his bringing opera to China in the mid-1980s. Clearly, Italian/Chinese goodwill can be a force for good.
Don’t forget that Marco Polo (traveler) and Matteo Ricci (missionary) are held in very high esteem in China. Those good vibes allowed the late filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci access to the Forbidden City to make his 1987 epic, The Last Emperor.
He was, I believe, the first Westerner given such an opportunity in nearly a century.
And it is poignant to note that a Chinese doctor, Dr. Li Wenliang, gave his life trying to warn the world about COVID–just as, in 2003, an Italian doctor (Carlo Urbani) did the same via fighting another virulent Asian virus (SARS). And let us not forget the slew of heroic Italian doctors who gave their lives during the early stages of COVID.