A society of illiterates

One of the main features of life so far in Chinese is what it feels like to live in a place in which you can't read anything. Humiliating doesn't even begin to describe it, although it would doubtless be more so if all of us Westerners were not all in the same boat around here. We live and work among dozens of college educated professionals who cannot read street signs and package labels. Actually, street names are not so bad, because they are almost always written both in Chinese characters and in pinyin (the Romanized version, but few Chinese can read it, so it doesn't really help all that much with taxis, directions, etc). When it comes to stores, at least we can look in windows and see what they are selling. A lot of product advertising has English as well, although often it is more for decorative purposes than for actual useful information. Verifying and proofreading English is irrelevant to the Chinese. The following is one example, from an ersatz "Western" restaurant. We have seen plenty of others.




I'm not exactly sure what Boston Butt is, but it looks tasty.

My real point here is what it does to your life and your way of thinking to live in an environment in which you cannot read and write. I've spent time in Europe. Not being able to talk to anyone is a pain, but you can always read enough to get by. If you know a bit of Latin, or one of the Latin languages, you can at least read signs in Europe. In China, all bets are off. We can't talk, we can't read, we can't write. We all are reduced to hoarding package labels so that we can buy the same thing in the store next time. We all carry around stacks of "Idiot Cards" listing place names and addresses in Chinese to show to taxi drivers so that we get where we are going, and then have some hope of getting home again.

One of our sets of Idiot Cards, note that one says Pizza Hut. We haven't tried it.

A few days ago, Lee went on our first evening date in China, leaving the kids home alone. I had a recommendation from another teacher on a good place to eat. It was a Chinese Muslim restaurant in downtown Suzhou. His directions on how to find it are a classic illustration of the predicament I am describing: "Go down to Bar Street, find the Shamrock (bar). The restaurant is across the street, look for the ladies wearing the little hats."

There you have it. College educated professionals, and the best we can do is tell each other to look for the ladies with the little hats. Actually, we couldn't even really tell the taxi driver where to take us. First, we had to ask around to even find someone who knew the Chinese name for "Bar Street", which is, of course, only what the Westerners call it for not knowing the real name of that one street that has a lot of bars on it. Then, we found an idiot card for another joint on Bar Street, and got the taxi driver to take us there. We had to walk nearly half a mile after that, looking for the Shamrock. And then for the ladies with the little hats. (Muslim headcoverings, by the way).

Incidentally, the food was excellent. Truly phenomenal. A lamb stew in a deep plate lined with bread. At least the menu was partly in English, although garbled. We are going to go back, but we have no idea what the name of the restaurant was, as it was written in Chinese (there was also something on the sign in Arabic). We took a business card from the register... it is our only hope.