Kingdom of Characters
by Jing Tsu
Ok. So.
I do a lot of reading about computer history: books about the telegraph and the advent of word processing have informed my tastes and shifted my perspective. English-language-as-technology books like A is for Ox and Alpha Beta were hugely influential to me, and WordSlut, Fall of Language in the Age of English, and Because Internet continue to remind me that language shifts like sand, even as we build our whole society upon it. Additionally, I had a big Chinese culture kick a while back: China in Ten Words; Factory Girls; Restless Empire; The Banished Immortal. I came to Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern expecting it to be written just for me.
Overall, it does pretty well! There is a ton of information and a lot of specific details for neophytes of written Chinese—both Simplified and Traditional—to understand the basics (including what “simplified” and “traditional” mean!): radicals, stroke counts, the massive amount of unique ideographs. But as I said, I really like the intersection of computer history and language. I am consistently wowed by the foundational processes that get a computer up and running. Kingdom of Characters made me think about how I’ve only read about computing history from the direction of the English language—and much of that is constantly and increasingly obscured through reams of UX, UI, and terms of art that I simply can’t grok. The very idea of running a non-Romanized non-alphabet through a machine—or, moreso, running a machine on a non-Romanized non-alphabet—is so fascinating that I knew I had to read this book just to get to “Chapter 6: Entering the Computer (1979)”.
But let this be a reminder to myself and to you that expectations are poison for reality. The book was really good, as a whole, up until the chapter about computers, which disappointed me greatly. There is a chance it was a personal issue and not the book—I’ll admit that sometimes things just don’t stick—but even after reading and re-reading, the explanations and stories about computing felt tenuous and vague. Everything was extremely unlike the detailed and highly comprehensible chapters on, say, the typewriter, or the telegraph. If you’ve ever played a long video game and the final dungeon feels like the developers ran out of time and just plopped a bunch of enemies in a bland maze, well, this had the same vibe. It’s only there because it is supposed to be there. To me, it felt like computer chapter didn’t get the polish the rest of the book received.
The depth found when discussing the collision of Chinese characters with older technologies was really great, though. For example, I listened, fascinated, as the book told me about English-language shortcuts in telegraphy:
After pricing by word count was introduced in the late 1860s, users began to combine words—“smorning” for this morning,” “frinstance” for “for instance.” They also caught on quickly to the idea that they could pay less by packing more content into each message, this time by manipulating words into representing something that had nothing at all to dow with their original meaning. There were even how-to books about cutting corners. An 1884 manual on how to cheapen the rate of telegraphy recommended “CELESTIFY” for “I think it will be now cheaper” and “DANDELION” for “if it is damaged.” …[A] foundational distinction between plain text and secret text gradually emerged.
This was important context, because when telegraph companies cracked down on this cost-saving measure (“cheat”?), it negatively impacted Chinese, which had to be sent through “secret text” rather than “plain text” because there was no other way to send Chinese characters through a system built for the English alphabet without first “translating” them to a four-number code. Numbers were, of course (and by “of course” I mean “decided upon by the people that created the telegraph system), more expensive to send over telegraph—they were made up of more dots and dashes than English letters—representing yet another obstacle to full integration in international trade for Chinese-language businesspeople. These are important details and really interesting in the grand scope of written Chinese!
But I can’t get away from the thoughts about how the details surrounding the computer were no so…detailed:
Wang Xuan’s first step was to separate character strokes into two types: regular and irregular. Regular strokes contained straight-edged segments like vertical, horizontal, and folded lines. Irregular strokes were made up of curved lines. He then assigned each line a numerical code, essentially compiling a collection of instructions for describing the physical contours of the character. He represented the curved lines as a series of mathematical quantities called vectors, which indicate the starting point, length, and direction of each line in a shape. Importantly, vector images scale—they can be made larger or smaller without changing the amount of memory required simply by adjusting the values in the formulas. Finally, through a reverse process of decompression, Wang converted the vector images back to bitmaps of dots for digital output.
Why gloss over the compression of characters into vector? I respect that the key breakthrough was the ability to scale a particular stroke without being a completely different symbol (which would need to be held in unique memory). How big a deal this is is made more clear only through context in other chapters, though—after a few hundred pages, information about how radicals are visually similar “indexes” that shift size and position to make other characters mean related yet different things has sunk in. They are a big deal in written Chinese—not needing to code a unique icon for every derivative use of mouth (‘口’) would be a huge deal! Can you see the “mouth” in 吸, or 喝, or 吃, or 唱? If you can just shift the size and location of ‘口’ to the left side in my examples (which are the mouth-adjacent words “inhale,” “drink,” “eat,” and “sing”) then each individual character doesn’t need to be held in memory! But this not even get its own line! When we spent pages learning similar breakthroughs in the typewriting era!
There was even a refresher course on how Morse Code worked, like I was back in Cub Scouts. Truly basic level—dashes and dots tapped out as electric signals over copper wires—but not about how the computer was actually interacting with written Chinese at a functional level. There is no computing equivalent in Kingdom of Characters to “International telegraphy recognized only the Roman alphabet letters and Arabic numerals used by the majority of its members, which meant that Chinese, too, had to be mediated via letters and numbers. Whereas English could be English, and Italian mostly Italian, Chinese had to be something other than itself.”
I’m upset, and I think fairly so, because the book itself proved it could detail the clash of Western-centric technological entrenchment with a functionally distinct ideographic system of writing in minute and fascinating detail. But this misalignment of my expectations—which were raised after so many detailed sections about older tech—and the book’s offering about computers presses heavily on my mind and keyboard as I type this out.
However, let it not overshadow the absolute wonder of being able to type out Chinese characters on a Western keyboard and not have it show up as □ or �. Thanks, Unicode Consortium! And I never would have thought about the political maneuvering, particularly the cultural weight of deciding what is a “variant” character (which has heavy implications on which “ideographic characters [are] the “correct” status, or base character”) that went on between China, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea.
And there are so many other cool bits of modern detail, too: I loved hearing about how 555—literally typing the Arabic numerals “555”—is onomatopoetic in Chinese, as it “simply mimics the sound of crying.” After the book whet my hunger for more, I hit Wikipedia: 555 is “wǔwǔwǔ, the sound of tearful crying, but it is not towards the feeling of sadness, but more of pitiful.” I love it so much. Without Kingdom of Characters it would not have crossed my path.
Non-English online slang is so fun to tease apart. The only ideographic example I had come across before was the Japanese “草” for “hahaha,” which is my favorite Rube Goldberg of slanguage. The short version is that the English-letter sound that starts the Japanese word “laugh” is “w”, so when it started being used as a shortcut for “hahaha” it jumped to “w” and then “wwwww”. Which, if you look at it, sort of looks like grass in a field. Which is, of course, what “草” means—“grass”. Online language is awesome, and ideographs can really add a lot! Definitely spend some time on reading about Chinese Internet Slang!
Kingdom of Characters does come recommended to anyone interested in international history. It gives so much cultural context for written Chinese, even basic stuff that I probably should have known already—I learned more about Taiwan from linguistic implications in this book than I have previously in my life—that reading it is a must. And while I spent an inordinate amount of time complaining that the computer bits (and bytes) didn’t live up to the rest of the book, you can understand that to mean the rest of the book surpassed my expectations.
Writing had always been equated with authority, a symbol of reverence for the past and a talisman of legitimacy. Hence, the line between authorized and unauthorized writing was always clear.
Between authorized and unauthorized, I know where Kingdom of Characters falls.