Today I'm Thinking

On the shape of things

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

It is with profound sadness that we have to inform you that this will be Karen’s last post. She died Sunday March 16, surrounded by her loved ones. This particular posting was put in her publication schedule some time before her death. It is very much in character for Karen to plan, even beyond her time with us.

Chinese knows two characters for life. The first is shengming (shēngmìng 生命) which means life in the biological sense. The second is shenghuo (shēnghuó 生活）which translates something like daily life, livelihood, or craft.

Karen’s shengming has come to an end, way too early, cruelly cutting off the promise for more of her wonderful writing. She will be sorely missed by all who knew her. However, Karen’s shenghuo will live on through her written work. That is where she expressed herself, worked through her feelings on everything, and it is where her humor, intelligence, and amazing writing skills found their natural outlet.

We, her partner and her sons, trust Karen’s readers can find some comfort and closure in this, her last written contribution. Frans, Paul, and Mark Verhagen

Today I am admiring the character-word tiao (tiáo 条) which is not something I am prone to do. First of all because, while I am ethnically Chinese, I am as good as illiterate in Mandarin. Secondly, because of all the words in Chinese to consider, tiao is one that cannot be translated. It is a so-called measure word, a way to categorize things – not by gender as the French and German do – but by their long or narrow or thin shape.

Think of cigarettes, trousers, a bar of soap. Avenues and rivers. Fish, ships, bed sheets, and dragons. An opinion is called “long-shaped news.” In Mandarin as in real life, one’s spirit should be straight and true.

Today I realized that I do not know the shape of my life.

From my bed, I can see the hall where one long cat’s tail candy-striped in grey and black waves aloft a sea of tiao-shaped things: pillowcases and sheets to be washed. From my bed, I cannot see the street because our window faces the backyard. Instead, I see rain gutters and condensation pipes and a thin stream of steam that rises from our neighbor’s backside apartment into a surprisingly blue Amsterdam sky.

Today I realized that I am surrounded by long and narrow objects and never knew it. What else has my eye failed to see?

When I was a child, my maternal grandmother liked to read my palm. I suspect it was a scam. My grandmother was a charming, exotically beautiful in her heavy eyeliner, a long-lacquered manipulative woman. For reasons that did not seem to be grandmotherly, she was intensely interested in the number of children I would have. She convinced me that I, too, could know by making a fist out of my right hand and counting the number of folds beneath my pinky. My grandmother also liked to palpate the fleshy part of my hand to foretell how hard I would have to work for my money. The thicker the better, she said. Even very fat people can have thin-feeling palms just as emaciated ones can feel full.

Today I realized that, while I have lost much weight, my palms are as thick as ever. Tiao is the measure word for matchstick arms and flabby legs but zhang (zhāng 张) is the correct measure word for flat objects like hands, feet and faces. Is it better to have lived the straight and narrow life of a dragon or one as wide and flat as the Yangtze Delta?

For reasons too deep for me to grasp, all languages have words to measure time. In Western — capitalized or colonized — cultures, the measurement of time is a science. Time is money, is it not? For older civilizations and among people who live closer to the earth, however, time is a way of life. Do they have a measure word for a lifetime? Can such a thing with any exactitude be measured?

There are more than one hundred measure words in Mandarin and yet when Mandarin is translated into English, the measure words are left out. Surely there must be more than that.