POLITICS AND TRANSCULTURE...(continuation)

N.B. "Your language is changing" may, in certain settings, actually mean "I am changing your language". In the spirit of this discourse, and based on the little I know of the subject, I took the liberty in picking four settings across the globe that exemplify the power of politics and transculture in affecting somebody's language - in the exercise of sovereignty or not, in the destruction of sovereignty or not, or in the straightforward notion that this act of changing has nothing to do with sovereignty at all.

And so on this note, where in the end I will welcome opinions and corrections for my enlightenment and growth, I hereby begin this final episode.

First: The Chinese Setting

Years before ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and gentrification in America, a massive human displacement occurred in China as part of Mao Zedong and his Communist Party's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. During this period between 1966 through 1976, millions of Chinese intellectuals composed of high school and college students - referred to as the educated youth - were forcibly relocated to remote countrysides and villages across the country in the Party's desire for them to live the life of peasantry the rest of their lives.

While it is difficult enough - even in today's age of advanced emancipation - to be away from the comforts of home, the love of family, and the company of friends while being at the same time an adolescent or a young adult, it is almost incomprehensible to judge the tolerance of the hapless Chinese if, aside from all of those mentioned, he will have zero use of his own language.

China is a land of dialects and each dialect has its own distinctive nuances. If I were to judge the Party's intent in this massive displacement, it is to drown that transient youth into a new dialect and its nuances in order for him to totally leave his identity behind and embrace a new one. Man, after all, thinks and develops ideas in, and based on, his language. He is his language. And if his new language is the language of a peasant, all that needs to be done is to make his new peasant language his one and only.

This educated-youth-displacement is one of the Party's biggest tools in achieving the communist ideal of a classless society, where everyone thinks, acts, and behaves as a peasant - because he thinks and develops his ideas in the language of a peasant.

In his fabulous 1996 book called A Dictionary of Maqiao, Han Shaogong recalls his life as an educated youth relocated to the southern province of Hunan, and in a fictionalized account of his real experiences indexed in the same manner as a dictionary's, we get to learn the good, the bad, the noble, and the sad effects of human displacement - including the eradication of his language.

The translator Julia Lovell's preface, however, makes it clear from the start that the impression I may have given in a previous paragraph is incorrect: many of the educated youth welcomed the displacement "as a way of assuaging the long-standing Chinese intellectual guilt complex toward the People". As it turned out, the Chinese literati of that time had much difficulty in portraying the lives of the masses, and it was only through extreme assimilation that they would be able to "reform their filthy intellectual thoughts by practicing the clean laboring habits of peasants".

First questions: How do peasants think? What is their language?

In Maqiao (or so the book tells us; Maqiao may or may not be a real village although I am convinced that "Maqiao" dialect is a real dialect), everything that tastes good is described as "sweet". If sugar candy tastes good, it is sweet; if fish cooked in sour broth tastes good, it is sweet. This led me to think that vocabulary in Maqiao is so limited it becomes a perfect fit for an educated youth (re-educated youth?) whose only goal from then on is to till the soil, bring in the produce, assure the abundance for the cook to make up something that is, well, sweet.

In Maqiao, anybody's big sister is called "little big brother" - which goes to show that in this village, there is no distinction for female gender except to describe her as something small, diminutive.

Next question - did the educated youth pursue their enthusiasm on embracing the peasant's life?

History tells us that this is not so. Lovell chronicles -

"By the mid-1980s, (Shaogong) was at the forefront of one of the key liberating developments in post Mao-literature: the Root-Searching Movement (xungen pai). The Root-Searchers set about reopening fiction to influences from Chinese traditional culture, aesthetics, and language, rebelling against decades of stifling Communist controls."

Third question - what is the status of today's Chinese literature, or after years of strangulated literary expression? -

Not bad. In 2000, Gao Xingjian - a former Communist who relocated to France and acquired a French citizenship as protest to Tiananmen - became the first Chinese native to be recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.