字感 (chop suey)

Cay Marchal once wrote how he feels about the Chinese characters. He claims that only when reading Chinese books can he feel the pleasure of reading. "Reading those alphabetic languages is like drinking plain water," so he said, “no ‘字感’ (zhi4 gan3)at all”. He goes further to say that he’d like to change French writer La Rochefoucauld’s sentence “Humans wouldn’t have felt love had they not invented reading” into “Humans wouldn’t read had God not invented Chinese, let alone love.”*

Here I think what Marchal refers to as字感can be translated into a sense of words, or how you feel about words when you are reading. As a native speaker and reader of Chinese, I can no doubt share this “bias” of his. I’d even like to go further by pointing out another personal “bias” of mine. That is, only when reading Chinese characters that are printed vertically will I feel the pleasure of reading, or feel the 字感.

Unlike alphabetic languages, Chinese characters can be arranged either vertically or horizontally. But traditionally they were arranged vertically, from up to down, right to left. Ever since I started to read, almost every Chinese book I read had been arranged that way until the arrival of the computer era.

Long ago I read an article about how it’s easier for our eyes to read horizontally printed words based on the way the muscles of our eyes are arranged. I’m not sure about the scientific facts, but I definitely have something else to say about this.

I wonder if it’s just me or it’s true for most Chinese readers who were raised up prior to the computer age. I can’t remember any of my favorite Chinese books that are printed horizontally like English ones. I don’t know if I can really enjoy a novel or a poem if it has to be read from left to right. I’m not sure I’ll get my 字感from such a work. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons that stop me from reading any long literary work online. (Another important reason is that I have to “touch” the book, the paper to enjoy it.)

I’ve never asked anybody else to see if they have the same feeling as mine. But I just can’t imagine my favorite Chinese poems or novels arranged from left to right. 

A few weeks ago I asked a student why he had to check out his cell phone for time since we had a clock on the wall. “I can’t read a clock.” answered him. Then I found out that I myself have to picture a clock in my mind when reading a digital clock. I still remember how my father had used an old clock to teach me to read time before I went to school.

I wonder if this habit is similar to my clinging to the up-to-down, right-to-left pattern of reading Chinese. Gee, I’m really old-fashioned and getting stale. I’d better get used to the pattern of this era to survive and finish my thesis in two years.  

* note: from我的異國靈魂指南, by莫夏凱;  published by寶瓶文化;  2005年09月01日