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.
2 responses
Great reflection on the potential of losing not just knowledge base but a visual representation of one’s culture and history.
I recently read about a Hawaiian man who passed away with knowledge of how to navigate the ocean using ancient methods. Fortunately, he realized this knowledge could be lost and for many years he has been teaching young people the same techniques. Thanks to his generosity, that knowledge didn’t go to the grave with his passing. The story has me thinking about lots of things that could be lost–“old-timer” farming knowledge, for example.
Sometimes, especially sitting at this computer typing so much, I wonder if Americans should make a practice of hand-writing in journals, just to maintain the ability to write in legible cursive (or print, for that matter). Remember what it felt like to move a pen across paper? Our American handwriting may not be as artistic and flowing as Japanese characters, but we are at risk of raising a generation of kids who only know the feel of keyboards under fingertips. And culturally as a whole, we don’t even seem too concerned about it.
This is slowly happening in US culture. School children are no longer taught how to write or read in cursive, many simply refering to it as “curly writing”. The logic behind this makes sense, they need to know how to type and handwritten communication with pen and paper has become outdated. What we have, however, is an eventuality that documents handwritten in cursive will no longer be legible to anyone, and that historical information recorded in that way will become lost. I have started writing in print in my personal journal so that if it is found 200 years from now it will be understandable. I can forsee a future when we middle age adults of today will be able to use a ‘secret type of communication’ (handwriting in cursive) to pass notes to each other in the nursing home which our doctors, nurses and care takers will be unable to decipher.
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