We love the image of these young people laboriously but lovingly writing their personal diaries as a way to preserve culture:
Like every Chinese child, Li Hanwei spent her schooldays memorizing thousands of the intricate characters that make up the Chinese writing system.
Yet aged just 21 and now a university student in Hong Kong, Li already finds that when she picks up a pen to write, the characters for words as simple as “embarrassed” have slipped from her mind. “I can remember the shape, but I can’t remember the strokes that you need to write it,” she says. “It’s a bit of a problem.”
Surveys indicate the phenomenon, dubbed “character amnesia,” is widespread across China, causing young Chinese to fear for the future of their ancient writing system. Young Japanese people also report the problem, which is caused by the constant use of computers and mobile phones with alphabet-based input systems… A poll commissioned by the China Youth Daily in April found that 83 percent of the 2,072 respondents admitted having problems writing characters. …
“The idea that China is a country full of people who write beautiful, fluid literature in characters without a second thought is a romantic fantasy,” wrote the blogger and translator C. Custer on his Chinageeks blog. “Given the social and financial pressures that exist for most people in China… (and) given that nearly everyone has a cellphone, it really isn’t a problem at all.”
Still, both Li Hanwei and Zeng Ming have become so concerned about character amnesia that they keep handwritten diaries partly to ensure they don’t forget how to write.
There’s a whole “Fahrenheit 451”-type novel in a nutshell. The populace becomes dependent on a technology to perform a basic communication function; that technology is somehow taken away; only a remnant, who used an archaic form of the technology not dependent on high tech, is able to communicate anymore. Maybe a new “slow” movement, Slow Writing, will join the Slow Food and Slow Travel movements.
