Zhōngguó

Note: the following is a short reflection on language, translation, and my study abroad experience in Beijing, China in July of 2016.

“Zhōngguó…”

“Zhooonnnggghuó…”

I, and my classmates around me, test this new word gingerly in our unacquainted mouths, a cacophony of mumbling, unflattering dictations filling the room as our Chinese teacher listens closely. This word, about one step up the simplicity ladder from nĭ hăo (hello), literally translates to “Middle Kingdom” but is used to say “China”. One might rightfully expect this word to be taught on the very first day of Chinese class, and so to assume that this scene is transpiring in a high school classroom among a group of disoriented fourteen-year-olds is entirely reasonable.

In fact, this setting is anything but. Holed-up in a small, but comfortable classroom halfway around the world from my own home, I gaze around the brightly-lit nook, characteristically hazy sunshine framing the compact campus of Beijing’s Minzu University in greyish-sepia tones. Today is the first day of language and culture class, after arriving the prior afternoon for the start of a three-week study abroad trip with seventeen other high schoolers from around the United States, a program to study and promote environmental education and sustainable action in China. Soon, I find that my attention wanders from the lesson at hand, mind already processing and reflecting on the two days since the wheels of my United Flight 851 left the ground in Chicago. 

Before I left, I found that nearly everyone I talked to regarding my summer plans expressed some mixture of shock, curiosity, admiration, or worry upon hearing, “Well, I’ll be in China…” As a whole, there seems to be a great disconnect between America and China, only perpetuated by Trumpish figures in politics, and the Chinese language is a microcosm of the divide. Unlike the Romance languages of Europe, Mandarin doesn’t translate well at all to English, one of the reasons many find it to be so hard to learn, as words like Zhōngguó and Běijīng (“Northern Capital”) have nonsensically general  meanings. The words “Middle Kingdom” could apply to any number of things, a referral ranging from the Holy Roman Empire in the 1200s, to the centrally-located Frankish Empire, to King Arthur’s Camelot. Many things likely come to mind when one thinks of China, but the translation “Middle Kingdom” cannot adequately convey a sense of both the reality of the nation, and the perspective-altering experiences I had within it.

Almost three weeks later, as I sit on the windowsill of my Beijing hotel room, newly-made friends crowded around inside, I take a moment to look at the night falling quickly on this city, and this country, that I’ve come to love. I would have no way of knowing that, upon being asked, “So, how was China?” following my return, I’d be left speechless, mouth agape, thousands of images, sounds, feelings, and emotions flitting through my mind as fast as China’s famed bullet trains, unable to sum up the experience in a sentence, a conversation, or even the blank canvas of this page — just as the country cannot be confined to its monotonous, dual-syllabic translation.

Zhōngguó means a living, vibrant, transitioning, post-communist superpower. It means one of the greatest combinations, and juxtapositions, of storied history and modern innovation in the world, a country of 1.35 billion and growing. And it means a place where a seventeen-year-old Wisconsinite with no prior knowledge of Mandarin and limited ability with chopsticks can have the time of his life, and be rest assured that he will never again define a person, place, word, or thing simply by its perceived translation (I’m looking at you, Virgin Islands).