The Chinese class that I’ve been attending has an interesting diversity of people. Nearly everyone is here for six months or a year. People are mostly Thai and South Korean, with a few Westerners, one Vietnamese and one (I think) Japanese. Many of those from Thailand and Korea are young university students, often majoring in Chinese in their own university, and taking a sandwhich year here. Of the Westerners, two are already working or have been working in China (setting up an Irish pub, opening fitness centres), one is going to teach English for an NGO in the north-west of Yunnan province, and one is likely to work in China after the course.

There are also lots of other foreigners studying here, who you pass in the street or meet in bars. I think many of them are studying other aspects of Chinese culture; the language section seems to be part of a university Centre for Chinese studies. There are a few older people who have been hanging out here on and off for several years, mastering Chinese in their retirement.

It’s quite easy to make friends. Partly this is because everyone wants to practice English, so everyone from some of the Koreans in my class, to some girls studying law who were sitting near me at lunch have given me contact details. Also white people are much easier to talk to than in England, because there are few of them. It’s possible to strike up a conversation with a stranger in the street, and easy to meet more in bars, or be introduced. I’ve been too busy studying, and feeling that my presence here is ephemeral to take full advantage of these opportunities.

I finally found some more useful SARS information from the UK government other than the FCO’s China travel advice. Two places to go are Department of Health emerging travel advice and Public Health Laboratory Service (they handily protects the population from infection). These sources are all reassuringly calm, basically saying travel anywhere, but watch for symptoms even when you get back.

Of course, the World Health Organisation is the place for the latest news. With today’s press briefing you even get to practice a foreign language – one of the questions asks in French about regions of China other than Guangdong province. The reply is that the healthcare system is decentralised, that regions have been asked to report on SARS centrally, but that there are no results from that yet. They’re working on getting results. I’d feel safer in Vietnam…

Finally, Bene Diction Blogs On seems to be the main mover and shaker in the Canada SARS world. Although she is perhaps a bit too on top of the news if you are looking to avoid hysteria, she does link to lots of general interest SARS stuff.

I love Chinese characters. They’re great fun, so much more interesting than rather dull alphabets. I know at first they seem like a really stupid idea – surely it is better to have a phonetic representation in writing, rather than arbitary and innumerable pictures? One way to look at it is that they are at a granularity inbetween the letter and the word. By this I mean that one character has slightly more meaning than one letter of the alphabet, but slightly less meaning than an English word. Similarly, there are very few letters (only 26), slightly more characters (about 3000 are needed to read a newspaper), and many more words. So you spend the effort to learn characters in the first place, but that makes learning words easier than in an alphabetic language.

What’s a “word” in Chinese? They are composed usually of two or more characters. For example, 汉字 (Hanzi) is a word composed of two characters which means “Chinese character”. Another good example is 中国 (Zhongguo, Centre Country or Middle Kingdom) which means “China”. I’m typing this blog and you’re reading it on a 电脑 (Diannao, Electric Brain), which is ever so slightly creepy. But that first character, it really looks like electricity, doesn’t it? In English we have words made up of smaller words in a similar way – just look at “telephone”, “television”, and so on. It is much rarer that long words make sense like this in English than in Chinese.

I’ve probably learnt about 100 Chinese characters, but that’s enough that I recognise the major elements in nearly all of them. Walking down the street I don’t have any more understanding of what the signs mean, but now they all look like good friends. There are parts of the characters that indicate they have a certain meaning, for example to do with water, people, language or food. There are also phonetic parts, which show another character that that one sounds roughly like. Most importantly, you soon get familiar with the basic sets of two or three strokes, so every character looks like it is made up of parts from other characters that you already know.

The disadvantage of all this for a language student is that it is much harder to learn. For every word you have to learn three bits of information – the meaning, the pronunciation and the characters. This is partly why Chinese has a reputation for being difficult. One of the first things the new Communist government did in the 1950s is introduce simplified versions of many of the characters, so the rural poor could more easily learn to read and write. Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong still use the old, complicated, traditional characters.

The picture is of some Chinese calligraphy in a gallery at a temple outside of Kunming. There’s a whole art form of painting characters with a brush. An eerily primitive beauty, reminding you of the underlying concepts which our words represent, much nearer to the language that we’re all really made of. I wonder, do Chinese people think in characters, instead of pronunciation?

To go completely against my non-linking byline, and to fuel the misinformation fire, here’s some stuff about SARS. Here’s an article in a Japanese newspaper, describing how irresponsible the Chinese government has been in their handling of the case. This certainly fits with my suspicions the other day based on how WHO is having to tiptoe round them.

And then an interesting blog which has comments saying that local doctors say the disease has spread to other cities, which the Chinese government hasn’t admitted to yet. This could either be true, or it could be fear and hype based on some ordinary pneumonia cases.

Of course there’s no way of knowing, so I’m going to get back to meditating on impermanence…