Primary Sources 1A.05—One Person Short 少了一個人

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Primary Sources."

One year ago on Round and Square (6 May 2011)—John McPhee's Coming into the Country
Click here to access Round and Square's "Primary Sources" Resource Center 

[a] Corgi to three RF

Over the course of the next year or so, Round and Square will take readers step-by-step through a very particular kind of primary source—the elementary school readers used in the mid-1980s in the Republic of China educational system. Every schoolchild on the island of Taiwan read these texts back then, and they are the foundation for understanding matters of education, acculturation, language acquisition, and translation. They were also the source of a very large chunk of my early anthropological and historical education. 

I encourage readers of Round and Square to follow these posts whether or not they read Chinese. It is clear enough where I begin speaking to language learners (the section called "Language Notes" at the end). Everything else, with the exception of the actual Chinese text, can be understood by anyone who takes the time to think about what an entire education from the ground up might be like. The introduction to this series explains these matters thoroughly, and will be posted soon. In the meantime, take a look at how first-graders (for that is where we begin) started to read their world in Taiwan a generation ago. This is "textbooks from history," and there is much to learn.

Interdisciplinary education starts here. Sort of. We have language arts—not to mention a little basic math—in this text. If you look for it, you will even see a bit of social studies, at least in the sense that a perspectivally-challenged little lad is interacting with his peers. It might be said that he's treating them like numbers, and that he has a little bit of an objectivity problem. Little Boy Blue, come blow your Panopticon, it seems to say. His classmates are in the meadow and he's a child of the corn...maze. He's lost. He's the Count of Mounting Criticism, and the story ends with a tricky little phrase not entirely dissimilar to "wassup?"

5—One Person Short

Teacher told us a story. 
There were five young students who went out together to play and returned together, too. One student did a quick count: "One, two, three, four—we're short one person." Again, he counted. Still four people.         

What is going on?

五   少了一個人

老師說了一個故事。      
有五個小學生， 一起出去玩，一起回來了。
一個學生數了數： 一，二，三，四，少了一個人。
他再數一數。 還是四個人， 這是怎麼一回事。

五     少     個     人     生     出     玩     回     他     是     這

                               老     師     故     事     數     再     怎     麼

Text in Simplified Chinese (简体字)*

五   少了一个人
老师说了一个故事。 有五个小学生， 一起出去玩， 一起回来了。

一个学生数了数：一，二，三，四，少了一个人。

他再数一数。 还是四个人， 这是怎么回事。 

*A simplified text is unthinkable in an ROC worldview. I don't "work" for them, though, and am including it for two reasons. First, an almost disturbingly large number of my students these days can't read traditional characters. This is problematic, but I acknowledge (grudgingly) the reality. Second, it should be an eye-opener for students on either side of the "simplified/traditional" divide. Just look. Finally, if you want to read anything written before 1950, you need to learn traditional forms. Get over it. It's not political. It's literature...and politics and history. If you can only read simplified forms, you can read what (Mao) wrote, but not what he read (unless it has been edited and adapted). Think about it.

[b] 一，二，三，四，狗....RF

History and Culture Notes

This is the first of a series of texts spread out over the span of a mid-1980s elementary school education that deal with social perspective. And basic math. It might be thought that one such text would be enough. How hard is it to include oneself in "the count?" One story should do the trick, right?

Get ready for more. We will see little families of goats and kittens (separate stories) with the same kind of socio-mathematical-relational problem. Indeed, if we really want to push the interpretive envelope, we could say that this first-grade text lays down a challenge noted in their own ways by Zhuangzi, Plato, Wang Yangming, and Kant. And Berkeley—the bishop, not the school.

In our text, the teacher's didacticism (it's his/her story, after all, and it is being told to impressionable first-graders at the beginning of their formal studies) is only part of the story. If you really think about it, the very foundations of our knowledge of the world are embedded in this simple text—a kind of Critique of Pure Reason for the First-Grade Soul.

Translation Notes

[c] 長頸 Times RF

Most of the translation is unproblematic. No amount of adherence to syntactical structures will allow the English reader to "feel" the warm, alliterative regularity of 數一數 and 數了數. I like to think of them as something akin to "give a little count"—a phrase that is just beyond familiarity to an English language audience, or so it seems to me. Here, I tried "made a quick count" in order to establish the spirit of the phrase, but it doesn't work the second time around, when I just use "counted."

The other small translation issue surrounds 少了. The purist in me wants the little boy to exclaim "We have one person too few!" Sure. Even the hardiest little grammar boy in the Republic of China would run from such a phrase, and it is difficult to imagine a first-grader saying it. "One person short" is a little more colloquial than I would like (just a little), but it is the closest I could come to giving a sense of shaole.

Language Notes

Western students of Chinese sometimes have problems in speech and writing with phrases such as 出去. 回來 is less problematic, if only because it is quite routine and appears regularly in common situations—such as returning home. When I was overseeing language and culture workshops for American college students in Shanghai, I was surprised by how often students used just 去 when 出去 was needed. One of the benefits of reading these texts when I was starting my Chinese studies in Taiwan back in 1985 was that I tended to "cement" these sayings in a way that my college textbooks didn't really do. Perhaps that situation has been remedied by today's texts. Perhaps.

[d] What's up? RF

Finally, let's consider a very common phrase in Chinese. It is everywhere, and it depends in almost all cases on context—這是怎麼一回事. I have used the standard translation that most Chinese speakers connect to the phrase ("what is going on?"); I "hear" it as something along the lines of "what's up with that (this)?"

So here's the deal. If you are going to live in Chinese, this is the kind of phrase—much like 誰也比不了 in Lesson Two—that you must begin to feel in your bones. You must be able to work it out literally and grammatically, to be sure, but you need to "sense" how it weaves its webs into various rhetorical contexts. 

So far these are the only two phrases that meet my "feel it in your bones" test. Everything else (such as 數了數) is a matter of a little more interpretation here and a little less there—then finding an English translation that will work. These two phrases are on a different level, it seems to me. They need to be memorized and then noticed. They need to course through the veins of your linguistic and cultural understanding—into the bones and down to the marrow.

What's with that? Everything. Nothing could compare to it.

[e] Panoptics RF