Undead Language

"How could the person who promises a secret to a ghost still dare say he is a historian?"

—Derrida, "Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression"

On her first work trip to Shenzhen, Candace finds herself talking Chinese poetry with a polo-shirted manager, a man who transacts business with Anglophone clients under the Shakespearean name of Balthasar. After explaining the literary origins of this onomastic uniform — "I choose from the best," he notes — Balthasar asks Candace about a name that she, too, wears only in certain contexts:

What is your Chinese name?

I told him.

Ah, very poetic, he said. It reminds me of the poem by Li Bai. It's very famous. All the students in China study it.

I didn't know it. I couldn't bear to ask him the name of the poem. I had no idea what my Chinese name meant, or that I was even named after a poem.1

I've had this conversation myself, again and again, playing Candace's role opposite shopkeepers in Harbin, language instructors in Taipei, and visiting scholars in Berkeley. Like Candace, whose Chinese name we never actually learn, I was also named from a scrap of verse in classical Chinese. It's a language as distinct, in its grammar, from the kitchen-table Mandarin of my childhood as Ciceronian Latin from the Italian spoken today.

Morphologically, though, the differences are finer — more like the semantic slippages between Shakespeare's English and Ling Ma's. When Mercutio exhorts "gentle Romeo" to dance, for instance, he's teasing his friend for the dignity of his birth more than the placidity of his temperament.2 As contemporary English speakers, we wouldn't deem all aristocrats "gentle" as a matter of course. But Shakespeare's usage still seems transparent enough: it's embedded in words like "gentleman," like an insect caught in etymological amber.

When it comes to meaning, the drift between classical and modern Chinese feels like this to me. Pry an individual logogram out of its native context, and the range of associations won't often vary much between the living lexicon and the dead. Where they do diverge, the links between the antique and modern senses feel tangible, the semantics jimmied loose by time but never severed altogether.

I think of the character 世 shi, which in classical Chinese means "generation": not the act of creation, but the conceptual circle drawn around you and your contemporaries, the people inhabiting a shared disk of time. In modern Mandarin, it appears most often in the compound 世界 shi jie, which means: the world. When someone dies, they're said to have 去世 qu shi: departed the world or, we might even say, quit their generation.

When I started learning classical Chinese as a sophomore East Asian Studies major, my instructor warned me not to think this way. Rely on the phantom familiarity of the characters before you, and your translational instincts will be warped. Even when your translation itself lands on something like accuracy, you'll still be practicing flimsy free-association instead of building philological rigor.

I know they're right, but the habit of recognition is hard to break. Before your training can move you toward the proper mode of reading, you'll find yourself layering your own experiential past in Mandarin over an ancient history you have no sensory purchase on at all. At least, that's the way it still happens with me, even after a decade of habituation to classical grammar.

*

My mother named me after the Book of Songs, a collection of ancient, canonical verses compiled, according to its origin myth, by Confucius himself:

巧笑倩兮 Qiao xiao qian xi

美目盼兮. Mei mu pan xi

This is how the Victorian Sinologist James Legge translates it:

What dimples, as she artfully smiled!

How lovely her eyes, with black and white so well-defined.3

The embedded components of my name, 巧盼 Qiaopan, were familiar enough. But the foreignness of Legge's English still makes me furrow my brow. I recognize nothing of myself in those lines.

These last few paragraphs were taken, nearly verbatim, from my grad school application to Berkeley, where I've worked toward a PhD in early Chinese history for the past seven years. When I wrote those lines in their original form, I thought of my Chinese name — worn loosely and occasionally like costume jewelry — as a piece of serendipity. That's one of the basic meanings of the 巧 qiao character, which opens both my name itself and the couplet that is its source. I've never felt myself to command the effortless beauty implied by these characters. But when I was applying to grad school, my name felt suddenly apt, in the manner of a useful spell. Semantically, it had nothing to do with me. It's antiquity and canonicity, though, felt like a marker of philological destiny.

Like my name and like my body, which glosses it poorly like ill-fitting paratext, the textual objects of my inquiry originated in China. As I request-renew-return the same books again and again, my continuous reaching for them seems not only to follow the circulatory logics of Shen Fever, but also another kind of fever: archive fever, a ruinous habit of the backward glance. I want to follow Derrida, for whom "to be en mal d'archive can mean something else than to suffer from a sickness," pointing to "an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement."4 But the burn of archontic "passion" can be a sickness unto itself.

In the fevered people Ma describes through Candace's ever-attentive eyes, Derrida's "irrepressible desire to return to the origin" seems to be the very mechanism behind their destruction. Though the efficient cause of the disease is a Chinese fungal spore, Candace observes that nostalgia actually "triggers" the fever, activating the chain of repetitious gestures that constitute its primary symptom.5 Characters fall ill after encounters with artifacts from their own histories — a closet of satiny dresses, the familiar terrain of a neighborhood mall. When the fungus hijacks their bodies, it does so through their yearning for vanished past.

In the grip of Shen Fever, the victim's interiority winks out. Then their exterior deteriorates, until there's nothing more than habit conveyed through rot — even when that habit is a pantomime of thought. On a "stalk," casing the home of a prosperous suburban family whom the fever has trapped in a substanceless domestic tableau, Candace sees this process of degeneration at work. She encounters a tween girl, still moving through the ruin of late-stage sickness:

She was reading, or assuming the act of reading. She turned a page, looked at it for a few seconds, and then turned the page again. It was upside down. I craned my neck. A Wrinkle in Time, a vintage pink edition. As she read, she chewed her hair, a strand in her mouth.6

This is the fleshly afterimage of Page Marie Gower, her name gleaned from the novelty Bible Candace finds in her room. Even fevered, Paige remembers the gestures associated with reading, how to manipulate the physical book — in fact, her remembrance is the fever. Disjointed from the act of interpretation, the muscular contractions of her eyes and hands no longer carry meaning.

Sometimes — so often now it scares me when I stop to think about it — this is what research feels like: my gaze passing, unseeing, over rows of text. In general, they're texts I've read before. I started studying Chinese history, from its archaic grammars on outward, to get back to something I thought I'd lost. Now the shape of that loss, and the interpretive gestures I make to map it, feel hollowed out of meaning. Somehow I'm still here, practicing a zombie philology that roots me to my desk.

*

Hours after her conversation with Balthasar, Candace receives an unexpected email from him. It contains a PDF attachment of a translation of her namesake poem — the one she didn't know and "couldn't bear to ask the name of":

It was a scan of a page from an unidentified book that featured a short poem. It was the English translation of "Thoughts in Night Quiet" by Li Bai. He must've been trying to send me both versions of the poem, in Chinese and English. I read it aloud to myself.

Seeing moonlight here at my bed

And thinking it's frost on the ground,

I look up, gaze at the mountain moon,

Then back, dreaming of my old home.7

Like the schoolchildren Balthasar mentions, who all studied Li Bai, I know this poem. When I read the translation attached to his email, the Chinese also comes back to me all at once: more syllable than meaning, a rush of aural instinct, like a crude melody. I'd learned it as a kid at Chinese school on some Sunday — still half-literate at best in Mandarin, each syllable spoon-fed into my waiting mouth. Somehow the intervening years, and the accumulation of Sinological sophistications, haven't dislodged that childish quatrain from my head.

I suspect every diasporic Chinese kid who's ever been to language school has had a similar experience — learning "Jing ye si" is our rite of passage. Recite the first few characters, and any one of us could finish it out, even with the "shaky" second-gen Chinese described by Amy Wong. Through Li Bai's familiar words, epistemic uncertainty dissolves into a compulsory nostalgia, a memory held in the mouth and throat. The vocal cords contract and expand through unthinking automism, like the repetitive gestures of the fevered.

But there remains a slight difference between the translation in Candace's email and the version my memory compels me to produce. Mine matches the lines I see quoted on Twitter when I search for the first line in pinyin romanization. Like my memory, every Tweet puts forth "bright moon," not "mountain moon." I couldn't think where Balthasar's translation came from.

When I read this part of Severance for the first time, scrolling through my Kindle app, I handed the phone to my partner. He'd studied Li Bai as an undergrad, in the same program that took my Chinese from otic intuition to critical apparatus.

"This is that poem, right? 床前明月光 Chuang qian ming yue guang."

He nodded, and we said the next three lines together:

"疑是地上霜 Yi shi di shang shuang

举头望明月 Ju tou wang ming yue

低头思故乡 Di tou si gu xiang"8

I jabbed a hand at Balthasar's translation, at the penultimate line and its challenge to our shared memory. "Why do you think it says 'mountain moon'?" I asked.

"That's right, it's 明月 ming yue." We studied the phone together. "I'm not sure."

*

Diasporic Chinese schoolkids, even decades out from their Sundays in language class, still picture Li Bai craning his neck at a luminous moon. When the sound of the poem resolves itself into characters and then into scenes in my head, I always envision a bright full moon — a fat disk with its edges blurred by its own uncontainable radiance.

For China scholars, though, the scene looks different. When I searched for the line as it appears in Balthasar's translation, entering characters that refer to a mountain moon Google brings me to a collection of Tang poetry put out by the primary academic press in Beijing, compiled by the Tsinghua cultural historian Ge Zhaoguang. In the text itself, Ge enshrines the version of the poem I know. But a footnote points to the existence of another version, "evidently from an old, reliable edition," which shows the speaker gazing on the mountain moon instead.9

In response to this new knowledge, I adjust my mental image of Li Bai's poem to show a crescent, with the zigzag shape of mountains visible beneath its pale light. I do this while thinking of the professor who taught my second-year classical Chinese class in undergrad. She stressed that the shan 山 character, "mountain," once denoted a whole range of mountains, not a single point emerging from the earth like a caret.

Ge goes on to editorialize, deeming the authoritative line inferior, in beauty, to the one "in common circulation."10 His words make me feel both shamed and soothed. Even now, it seems, I'm still as much diasporic schoolkid as China scholar. When my fevered dance with my sources comes to a close — when my knowledge of the literature degrades — I'll be left with the wrong, the common, the demotic version of Li Bai's poem. Say the first few characters, and my throat will open to finish the quatrain for you, declaiming its beautiful, bright, interpolated moon.

In my head at least, that's the version Candace was named for. I picture her mother, Ruifang, holding all twenty characters in her mind, just to extract the pair that will identify her daughter. We never get to learn what those characters are. But maybe one of them is 明ming, "bright."

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Lucia Tang is a PhD candidate in History at UC Berkeley. Outside of the academy, she works in digital marketing.

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