Essays on Writing and Language in Honor - Sino-Platonic Papers

Sirw-Pkrunic Papers, 27 (August 3 1, 199 1)
"feelers" from prospective employers from a rival university at the offices of the
very university being raided. In America, "All's fair in love and war." That much
is true. But what is outrageous is that someone who professes an intimate
knowledge of Chinese culture should be so ignorant of the mindset of his coveted
recruit, whose cultural underpinnings are, after all, Chinese. Whatever the interest ,
of the recruit in the proffered opportunity, he will be embarrassed to discuss it on
the very telephone lines of the institution that he might be in the process of
"betraying." The interesting thing is that an American would consider an approach *
to the office open and above board; an approach to the recruit at his home, on the
other hand, an American would regard as sneaky and underhanded. A Chinese, on
the other hand, would consider the contact at home appropriately disaeet and
reassuring, whereas the contact at the office he would find compromising and
morally incriminating.
The Englishman in the third story is, of course, right in a sense. There are
some ways in which a native cannot understand what a non-native understands.
Unless we are trained linguists, we often cannot explain why certain oddities exist in
our native language (try explaining to a student of English why it is - as Richard
Lederer, in his amusing book, Cr English, points out -- that we "park in the
driveway and drive in the parkway"; why is it that we don't park in the parkway
and drive in the driveway? Why is it that a person who has "hair" [singular] on his
head has more hair than-someone who has 'hairs" [plural] on his headj. When
confronted with such conundrums, we resort to the useful generic non-explanation:
"I don't know why, but that's just the way it is." It is by now a truism that natives
become so accustomed to a culture's conventions that they can no longer see its
peculiarities. But what is outrageous about the Englishman's claim, that only the
English can understand China (and I can assure you that he is not the only
Englishman who believes this), is the inference that the Chinese are preternaturally
ignorant and incapable of understanding their own native culture. To be sure,
natives who do not reflect on their own culture systematically, who are not trained
analytically in anthropology, cross-cultural psyd;ology, or linguistics, don't have
the foggiest idea about their own culture as subject matter. But this would be as
true of English natives as Chinese natives. If what the Englishman said is true -
that only the English can understand the Chinese, one might entertain the equally
outrageous yet plausible daim that "only the Chinese can understand England"!
What is outrageous about the Englishman's daim is his insistence that a native, by
virtue of her being native, is incapable of understanding his own culture. I trust I
don't need to comment on the implied superiority of Englishmen.
These anecdotes highlight some conflicts and problems that I would like to
examine reflectively in what is to follow. I want to understand what these
encounters mean: why they are so upsetting, and what solutions - what insights --
one can find to the questions they pose.
In times past, to find someone to teach a foreign language, the obvious thing
to do was to hire a foreigner, if you were fortunate enough to find one. If it was to
teach French, one hired a Frenchman or Frenchwoman, and what one got was a
native, someone #who knew the language to be taught. His or her authority lay
-