On Not Standing Still

We’re now heading into September, and summer’s officially over. In a month, we’ll be back in Singapore, away from the rhythm of the change of seasons that gives shape to our lives here. In July, the days begin to shorten, but imperceptibly, a minute or less each day. By the end of August the change is noticeable, darkness galloping forward, with the sun now setting before eight in the evening. There’s been a change in the weather, too, with welcome rain, cooler temperatures and wind. And the foliage has begun to turn. You can’t quite believe it at first: the leaves of the sycamore maples in our street are rimmed with brown, but that of course is an effect of drought. But then you notice the yellowing of leaves in the linden tree, often a whole branch turning together while the rest of the tree stays green, like the strands of grey you notice in the hair of a random passer-by on Denman. And then the sugar maple a block away from us has begun to change from its crown downwards, the bottom leaves still darkly green but the top branches now bursting into flaming red. Look up into the horse chestnut trees and you see the nuts, the size of golf balls, still covered in lime green spiky sheaths. You find that your body changes with the seasons. You feel cold. You put on more clothes and reluctantly begin to pack your rain jacket when you go out. And yet it’s also a season of plenty. The farmers’ market stalls are heavy with peaches, plums, tomatoes, and corn. At the fishmongers, fresh salmon swim up from a bed of ice, scales glistening, mouths open. When we cook in the evening everything tastes so much sweeter. And if you walk in the forest the vine maples are as green as ever under the canopy, their tiny leaves a constellation of stars.

Rituals, too, and weekly routines are winding down. I still have few more sessions with my remaining peer counselling client, but my weekly visits to UBC library have more or less finished: I now have the draft of an article on Rajaratnam’s London years which I’ll let lie for a few weeks, and then look at again in Singapore. A week ago, we had our last conversational Chinese class. This is something I haven’t written about before, but which has been a constant over the last two months. Each Saturday we’d get up early, cycle around False Creek, and then to Pure Bread on Fifth Avenue. Fortified with coffee and breakfast, we’d climb the hill up Ontario Street, pass Broadway, King Edward, the Farmer’s Market, Queen Elizabeth Park. The city would begin to thin out as we passed through Little Mountain: the houses smaller, with Vancouver specials proliferating, the trees shorter. Look back, and you’d still see the North Shore mountains loom large. There are views like this in some places In Vancouver:  at the junctions on the Alexandra Street cycleway, or looking north on a lane in Kits. With downtown invisible, Grouse and Seymour seem so much higher and nearer. It’s almost as if you were looking through a telephoto lens that foreshortens distance, as if you were in a much smaller town way up in the BC interior. And then we’d crest the hill and cycle downtown to Langara College, not to the bright glass buildings at the front of the campus but to the brutalist concrete bunkers at the back. We’d lock up the bikes, find the classroom door tightly closed but not, as we initially thought, locked. We’d enter, settle in among the rows of desks. Our teacher and classmates would arrive, and then we’d begin.

There was something very comfortable about the class. The majority of us were what are called heritage learners in Canada, mostly from Cantonese-speaking backgrounds: three of us weren’t ethnically Chinese. Yet heritage itself is complicated: one Japanese Canadian classmate knew a huge number of characters, but struggled with pronunciation; our classmate of Eastern European heritage had taken Mandarin as a child in a North Vancouver classroom. Others had had different levels of exposure to Cantonese and other Sinitic languages, and to writing. We’d simply begin talking, report on what we’d been doing during the week. And then our teacher would pull it phrases from what we’d said, write them on the whiteboard in Hanyu Pinyin with tones, and then in Simplified and Complex characters. If one of our classmates struggled a little, others could join in: each of us had very different strengths to contribute. I often find myself tongue-tied after a few sentences of Mandarin, but I can dredge up a surprising amount of obscure vocabulary, especially from the 1990s and before: this was my contribution. Most satisfying in the class was the recognition of learning as a process to be relished itself, not as a series of steps to be climbed towards a destination. 

The class also made me think back over my lifelong struggle to learn Chinese. I went to Changsha in Hunan Province in 1986 teach English and American Literature to graduate students at Hunan Normal University. At that time, with China opening up, everyone wanted to speak English to me. I and an American lecturer did hire a teacher, but Mrs Ding had never had the experience of teaching non-Chinese students before. I learnt Hanyu pinyin, the romanization system for Mandarin, the tones, and some conversational phrases, but little else. When I first came to Canada in 1989 to study for my doctorate at UBC I resolved to get serious. I audited Chinese language classes from first to third year level, and then took a year out of my doctorate to study Mandarin in Taiwan. In a month’s time, on our way back to Singapore, we’ll stop in Taiwan, and spend a night in Tainan, in the south of the island, where I studied because it was cheaper than Taipei. It was during that year, reading Chinese newspapers for class and painfully working my way through the short stories of Bai Xianyong’s collection 台北人（Taibei People）, that I reached my highest level of proficiency in written Chinese. Since then, with the distractions of career and so many other things in my life, I’ve slipped periodically, then returned to the classroom or self-study. My writing ability, in particular, has declined, especially with the advent of information technology, and the possibility of inputting Chinese characters via a keyboard. I periodically dream of new plans for language-learning, devise schedules for myself for reviewing flashcards, or reading, which I embark on with great enthusiasm, but then let slide after a few weeks. Last year in Singapore I bought a series of Chinese readers that I’d look at religiously during MRT or bus trips, only to stop reading them when I returned to Vancouver. Most of the vocabulary I learned then has vanished again. But I retain, curiously, most of the characters for different types of food: in Taipei, before we arrive, I’ll have no problem in the street or in the night market. I can talk to my mother-in-law, too, and have genuinely moving conversations even with few words. And there are always those unexpected possibilities of meetings: taxi drivers in Singapore, or the proprietor of a 饺子 stall here in Vancouver who speaks Mandarin with a strong Beijing accent, rolling his “ r”s as if his mouth is full of pebbles.

So I’m wondering if in fact it was the class that was so welcoming, or whether something in me has changed, that I’m happier now with process and less worried about a final goal. In my first-year class at UBC over thirty years ago our teaching assistant was Mrs Pi, a sixty-year old woman, the same age as I am now. Her life mirrored twentieth-century history. She’d been born into an affluent family in Beijing, grown up in a traditional courtyard house, and then fled to Taiwan in 1948 with her family as a young woman. Later she’d come to Canada, and to teach Mandarin at UBC. She had natural charisma, loved her students, and was also perhaps rather puzzled by us, and our lack of historical knowledge. She gave me my Chinese name, 候仁敦, which all my successive teachers have admired. To encourage us, she’d always resort to a saying in Chinese, 不怕慢就怕站, don’t be frightened of going slowly, but do be frightened of standing still. When I first heard this phrase I thought it described movement towards a destination, that we had to keep on accumulating knowledge or it would atrophy. Now, in later life, I have a different interpretation. It doesn’t matter if you slip back, or you take a detour, but the trick is to keep moving, keep learning, keep relishing life.