Life on "Easy Mode"

I came across an interesting essay which makes the analogy between being a straight white male and playing a video game on the "Easy" setting. The metaphor is a good one, but I'm skeptical about the assumption that in life, playing on the "Easy" setting is necessarily the most desirable.

According to John Scalzi, the author of the essay,

In The Real World, you don’t unlock any rewards or receive any benefit for playing on higher difficulty settings. The game is just harder, and potentially a lot less fun.

But in a video game, playing on a harder setting is frequently more fun than playing on the easiest one. Why? Often, not because doing so unlocks any rewards, but because it's more of a challenge, and many of us like challenges. Is "The Real World" any different?

This gets boring fast

Scalzi writes,

Well, here’s the other thing about The Real World: You only get to play it once. So why make it more difficult than it has to be? Your goal is to win the game, not make it difficult.

Again, I think this isn't quite true, either for video games or for real life. People don't play video games for the sake of winning them; they play to have fun. Achieving the goals of the game is only a means to that end. The goals in The Real World are probably even less important, since we don't even know what they are! How do you win the game of life? By achieving wealth? Sex? Power? Love? Wisdom? People have been arguing about that question for a long time, and don't seem likely to reach a consensus any time soon.

Perhaps the only thing most of us can agree on is that we want something called "happiness", which ISN'T any particular objective in the game, but is rather a BYPRODUCT of playing the game. Just as video game players don't really care about "beating the game" so much as they do about enjoying playing it, people playing The Real World aren't really looking for wealth, sexual satisfaction, power, love, or wisdom, but for the happiness they believe will come as a byproduct of achieving those things.

So what difficulty setting is most conducive to producing enjoyment/happiness? In the case of video games, I'd say that playing on a medium difficulty setting is the most fun. Too easy, and the game is boring. Too hard, and the game is no fun at all.

Frustrating

The latter part of the metaphor definitely applies in the case of life: There's nothing fun about playing on the "impossible" setting, whether you're starving, clinically depressed, or living with abusive parents. But what about the other extreme? Is it possible to play The Real World on too easy of a setting? In a video game, when you're playing on easy, just beating the objectives soon becomes boring. You start asking yourself what the point of playing the game is, and looking for other reasons to keep on playing. And if you don't find any, you stop playing the game.

In the game of life, some very smart and very gifted people have gone through the same process and ended up running out of reasons. For them, playing the game on easy was no fun. Are the rest of us privileged people in fact better players? Have we actually succeeded in figuring out how to obtain happiness from this minimally challenging game? Or are we just better at distracting ourselves?

Are they the lucky ones?

---

Some questions for discussion [thanks to Ruth Feldman] (2012/11/21):
1) Are video games more or less fun if you realize that you don't care about the game itself? Is life?
2) Are philosophical questions about happiness relevant to persons experiencing racism or other real-world deprivations? [thanks to Aleph, below]
3) Is it possible to completely achieve the superficial goals of life? If so, would attaining them make one happy?

The strange and wonderful Chinese language

The Most Interesting Language

Chinese is by far the most interesting language I've ever studied. I learned a bit of biblical Hebrew as a kid; got pretty good at Spanish in middle and high school; studied Ancient Greek and French in college; and picked up a bit of Arabic and Latin along the way. But nothing has captivated my attention to nearly the same degree as Chinese has.

Indeed, picking up the language is a large part of my reason for coming to China in the first place.¹ I speak and study Chinese every day, and I continue to find it fascinating. Here are a few examples of why.

"Do You Like It?"

The idea that language and culture are intertwined is one that I've always been skeptical of. I mean, do you really need to read up on French history or cuisine to get fluent in French? However, today I was surprised to find myself agreeing with the sentiment of that expression, after my mom asked me at lunch how to translate the expression "好吃吗？" into English. Literally, this is a simple statement: "[Is it] good to eat?"

Today's dinner: 好吃吗？非常好吃！(Hell yeah!) I ate three of those plates by myself.

But I realized that "is it good to eat?", or "is the food good?", or any such variation, aren't something we say very often in English – particularly when we're eating at home. The reason, it seems to me, is one of politeness. If you don't like something that your mom (or better yet, your friend's mom) made, it's much less awkward to say that "I don't like it", than it is to say that the food itself is bad, and perhaps, by extension, that your host is a bad cook.

So as I told my host mom, I think the best way to translate "好吃吗？" is, "do you like it?" The choice of translation is informed by knowledge of the culture. Maybe there's something to that saying after all.²

Stating the Obvious

Another cultural-linguistic difference between English and Chinese is that Chinese people seem to really like stating the obvious.³ For example, when I come home, the housekeeper, 小王 (Xiao Wang⁴ ), is usually the one to let me in. Every time she lets me in the door, she says to me, "You're back" (回来了). Now, from the fact that I just walked in the door, it's quite obvious that yes, I'm back. So why does she say it?

Sure, we sometimes say "you're back“ in English. But it's always with some further meaning in mind, which is conveyed through tone of voice. For example:

• "You're back!" [happily] = "I'm glad to see you"
• "You're back?" [question mark] = "How come you're back so early?"
• "You're back." [flatly] = "what took you so long?".

When 小王 says it, it's just a simple statement of fact. I'd venture to say that the idea of "why say it" is something that doesn't occur to Chinese people nearly as much as it does to Americans. I find Chinese people to be much less cynical than we are. Everything we Americans say has to have some necessity behind it, as if we've exhausted everything there is to say and need a reason to talk. The Chinese seem to often just say what they're thinking, or ask questions about whatever is on their mind. To me, it's quite refreshing. As Wallace Stevens said, "Disillusion is the last illusion", and I'm disillusioned with disillusionment.

I'm Not a Blonde!

A cool minor thing about Chinese is that there are two different words for "blonde hair". One is 金头发, "gold hair"; the other is 黄头发, "yellow hair". I've always thought my own hair was brown, but some people keep insisting that it's blonde (especially in the summer time). I think "yellow" is a nice compromise.

Another really cool color-related word is “青”, which I think is best translated as "nature's color". It can mean green, if used to describe a plant or a mountain; blue, if the object is a sky or a stone; or even black, when referring to hair or cloth! Here's a song by an artist I like, Grace Chang/葛蘭 (she has better songs, but this one is apropos), called 我要飞上青天, "I want to fly through blue skies." （The transliteration, which you should be able to hear her say even if you don't speak Chinese, is "Wo yao fei shang qing tian.")

Linguistic Elitism

The Chinese language's written and spoken forms are probably more different than any other language's. One thought I had that illustrates the difference: As a written language, I'd say Chinese is very elitist⁵ . I heard someone say yesterday that Chinese is the only living language without a written alphabet, and I couldn't think of any counterexamples. Chinese characters, 汉字, are the reason that it takes twice as long to learn Chinese as is does to learn Spanish or French. And they're the reason that so many Chinese people, even those who have been through the school system, are semi-illiterate.

The Chinese equivalent of "antidisestablishmentarianism"

For example: 小王, the housekeeper, is at about the same level of reading ability as myself and as my 8-year-old host brother: able to read about 1000-2000 characters. Those thousand characters are enough to read something like a text message, where the context is known and the vocabulary familiar, but reading a newspaper or a novel would be quite impossible for any of us.

I haven't asked, but I assume 小王 learned significantly more characters in school, but forgot most of them in the meanwhile. Can you imagine someone forgetting how to read English? The possibility of forgetting in Chinese testifies to the tenuousness of the link between the written and spoken languages. English is not great at representing speech, but Chinese is way worse. Show an English reader a new word (say a proper noun he's never seen before), and he can make a decent guess at the pronunciation. Show a Chinese reader a new character, and he'll be able to get maybe the right vowel sound, if he's lucky. Chinese is just plain hard to read, which makes the gap between literacy and illiteracy in Chinese a large one.

Yet, Chinese is very anti-elitist as a spoken language! For example I haven't heard my host mother once correct my 8-year-old host brother on his Chinese grammar. Most English-speaking 8-year-olds still have problems with their subject/object usage, not to mention their irregular verbs.⁶ Whereas English is characterized by a Germanic/Latinate-root divide between simple everyday words and complex scientific ones, Chinese words are almost universally constructed with perfect logicality. For example, if you want to say "halitosis", you just say 口臭, "mouth-stink". Imagine how less imposing medicine would be if your doctor could just tell you you have "mouth-stink". Similarly, a portait is a "head-likeness" (头像), planes are "flying machines" (飞机), and a clause is a "short-language" (短语). What brilliant simplicity!

Learn Chinese

For me, Chinese is definitely going to be a lifelong language, one that I keep working at to fluency and maybe beyond. For anyone who's never studied an Eastern language, I seriously encourage you to give it a try. You might find yourself getting addicted. Hell, you might even end up in China yourself.

^{1. If this sounds like it has a chicken/egg issue, the explanation is that I had already taken 1 year of Chinese in high school – enough to remember the basics and to know that I wanted to learn more.)↩}

<sup>2. A question for my Chinese-speaking friends: when you say “不好吃”, are you saying "the food is bad", or "I don't like it"? Also, am I right that the direct translation of "do you like it?", “你喜欢吗？", would sound asked about the food that you're already eating?↩

3. This observation isn't original to me; Albert Wolfe talks about it in Chinese 24/7. He relates one incident where he passed two strangers while running, one of whom said to him, "You're jogging." (跑步啊), and the other of whom just said, "Foreigner." (老外)↩

4. Literally "Little [Ms.] Wang", but that would sounds terribly patronizing in America, whereas I think "小" is a pretty common form of address in China. Another example of how culture shapes language.↩

5. This should not be taken as necessarily derogatory, despite John Defrancis's arguments that characters should be done away with. For me, if Chinese wasn't the way it is, it wouldn't be nearly as much fun to learn – or to talk about.↩

6. And so do most adults. Did he "lie down" or "lay down"? I, at least, learned a lot from reading an English grammar.↩</sup>

Summer Palace (颐和园)

I went to the Summer Palace yesterday and liked it a lot. It's my kind of park: lots of twisty trails, trees, and water. Unlike the Forbidden City (故宫), it's a good place to wander around in. Here are a few photos:

A really steep bridge

The view from that bridge

The sky through the willow trees

If only they allowed bicycles.

A really excellent joke

Also an unusual one, in that it is better told in writing than in speech. As follows:

Donald Rumsfeld is giving the president his daily briefing. He concludes by saying: "Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed."

"OH NO!" the President exclaims. "That's terrible!"

His staff sits stunned at this display of emotion, nervously watching as the President sits, head in hands.

Finally, the President looks up and asks, "How many is a brazillion?"

(source)

On the use (and abuse) of chopsticks

The bane of my existence during my first two weeks in China was the CHOPSTICKS. Anyone who thinks that because they managed to follow the directions on the red wrapper and eat some food with the wooden chopsticks at the Chinese restaurant, they are qualified to go to China and dine with the Chinese, is dead wrong. First because those cheap wooden chopsticks are much easier to use than the metal or porcelain ones that homes and good restaurants in China use, the equivalent of kiddie spoons in America: less risky but a pain in the ass if you were to use them all the time (who wants to get splinters from their eating utensils?).

But more importantly, there's a world of difference between using chopsticks to eat from your own plate and using them to eat from communal dishes. Everything in China, or at least in Beijing (with the exception of food at fast-food places), is served on communal plates. When I drop food here – as I still frequently do – it's generally not into my own bowl (communal plates, personal bowls for rice or noodles, is how my host family does it) but onto the table, where, often after splattering me with sauce, it lies as a testament to my inexpertise. Trying to pick it back up just makes things worse: it's almost impossible to pick up something that's lying flat on the table in one try, so I can only succeed in doing so after several seconds of pushing it around on the table, during which everyone else is watching me with dismay.

It's not that I haven't improved with using chopsticks. After two months here, I've pretty much gotten used to using them, and the muscles in my right hand have stopped aching after every meal. Indeed, after my host dad gave me several lessons to correct my improper grip (rather than using the index finger alone to move the top one, as I was taught by the chopstick wrapper, you should use both index and middle fingers for maximum traction), I've gotten a lot of compliments on my technique. Indeed, just as most Chinese people's English handwriting is better than that of American native speakers, so my own chopstick technique is better than that of many Chinese people. Interestingly, there are quite a few Chinese people, in my experience mostly women, who hold their chopsticks in what they themselves acknowledge is an entirely wrong way， with the chopsticks crossed in the palm of the hand rather than parallel. The two people I asked about this both said that their parents just put the chopsticks in their hands when they were little and left them to figure out how to use them, and that they've been doing it wrong ever since.

But despite the orthodoxy of my technique, the use of chopsticks remains an effort to me, something which I have to constantly concentrate on or else fail spectacularly at. (Eating in public sometimes feels like running the gauntlet.) With a fork and a knife in my hand I feel comfortable and stable; I trust their solidity and stability. I still don't feel that way about chopsticks, and perhaps never will.

That said, I must admit that Chinese food is fantastic, generally both pretty healthy and very tasty. In particular, Chinese dumplings and meat pies (of the vegetarian variety) are one of the most consistently delicious foods I've ever had. So if the cuisine came about in conjunction with the utensils, there's something to be thankful for.

The real thing

On my way to China (republished)

Thursday 2/16/12 6:30PM EST

I arrive at JFK's terminal 5 with 3 hours to spare before my flight leaves. Though I had planned to get some last-minute things done before leaving the US, I find myself caught up in the melting-pot atmosphere of the terminal and decide to wander around for a while.

The people at this international terminal are a fascinating mix of 1) American travelers about to depart, 2) foreigners returning home, and 3) airline personnel. In the first category are some young people standing around in a circle. I decide I'm gonna infiltrate them. I walk up to them and stand there as if I belong; nobody says anything. However, their purpose remains obscure until an older woman arrives and starts talking to them in French about their passports. As it turns out, they are New York high school students taking a trip to France for their French class. Despite taking French, they don't seem to understand the woman, but I think most of them are just pretending to be stupid to avoid the embarrassment of seeming intelligent. Par for the course for high-schoolers.

Continuing on in my wanderings, I encounter a group of Asian women in matching blue dresses, all wearing heavy lipstick. I later find out that these are the stewardesses on my flight. I also talk to a hostess for Air France, curious to determine the truth of the stereotype that French natives don't like speaking to people who aren't fluent in French (which I am not). The stewardess, unexpectedly, is not from France: she's an American, and as a foreigner herself, is able to confirm the stereotype from her own experience. However, I have yet to ask a French native to get their perspective on the matter. Perhaps the perceived slights that have led to the stereotype are merely impersonal Gallic arrogance.

I don't get a chance to talk to any of the people in the third category, foreigners returning home. Perhaps I avoid bothering them because they are neither culturally familiar nor paid to talk to me. Nevertheless, walking around among these three groups of world travelers makes me very happy. I feel blessed to enjoy not only new experiences, but also foreign languages, which I see as the key to understanding foreign cultures.

I would like to spend longer in the terminal but need to attend to my procrastinated pre-departure duties. Once through security I make a brief stop at the duty-free store and consider buying some Jamaican rum which they have samples of (it is very flavorful) but decide not to risk the alcoholic associations. I arrive at my gate and make some last-minute phone calls before suspending my phone service*. I then debate for a ridiculously long time about whether or not to spend $13.99 on a neck pillow. I finally decide against it but the decision is agonizingly marginal. I've noticed that I have a hard time deciding how highly to value my own short-term comfort against such goods as money and knowledge (the paradigm of the latter case being, should I watch TV or force myself to do Chinese flashcards?). It's hard to come up with a good weigh to way such disparate goods against each other.

I notice something strange while at the gate, but don't really think about until I'm aboard the plane. Almost everybody on my flight is Asian. Why is this? Do Chinese people travel to the United States much more than vice versa? Or was there something about this particular flight that made it better for those returning than for those starting a trip? I remain puzzled.

My neighbor on the plane is a Chinese man, late 30s, returning from a business trip in NYC. I watch him texting using a handwriting IME and am struck by the beauty of his writing. I wonder whether Chinese penmanship is as much a skill pertaining to the older generations as English penmanship is? The ability to write an elegant cursive hand is something I particularly envy people like the Founding Fathers. By contrast, the cursive I was taught in school is lame and wimpy-looking. I renew my resolve to someday learn a manly cursive script.

On the plane, the stewardesses and the captain speak in both Chinese and English, but the former is the default. One of the stewardesses even greets me with "Ni hao!", despite the fact that I'm not only white but have facial hair. (Beards, from what I've seen, are essentially nonexistent among Chinese men.) Moreover, all the talk from the passengers around me is in Mandarin. Though I understand very little, simply listening to the language is awesome and I look forward to spending time in an environment where the pressure is on me to speak and understand the language.

China awaits, and with it Chinese. I couldn't tell you which one I'm more excited about.