So when I was young, I took weekend Mandarin classes at the local Catholic elementary school with all the other young Chinese kids. We used a textbook written in Simplified Chinese where in the appendices some small mentions of Pinyin and simplified systems approved in the 1950s and 1960s. Lovely. I’m sure everyone knows how Chinese was simplified.
Kingdom of Characters is a book about the Chinese script. It doesn’t just talk about the simplification process in the 20th-century — it also talks about typewriters, romanisation schemes, and the Chinese language’s integration into modern encoding schemes between the 19th-century to the present-day. This is mostly the gist of the book. The author is pretty comprehensive in her coverage of developments and gaps between each event are no more than a few years. The coverage of typewriters in particular is really nice, because it’s mostly a review of engineering history, and kinda shows how much engineering one little thing can have impacts on language and writing.
The author, Jing Tsu, is a tenured professor at Yale. As she grew up speaking Mandarin, native names and terms are pronounced well (very welcome). Being in the West does shape some of the writing here. There’s a slight gleam of anti-communism each time something involving the PRC to the point of annoyance (the usual gist of it is that “something something Chairman Mao the people can’t say anything about it”). What she cannot do is deny the achievements of the CPC’s simplification and Pinyin adoption and its impact on literacy rates and convenience. This much is clear, even if she’s a little anti-communist about it. There’s also a very sensationalised editorialised tone throughout the book. This is a popular history book so there’s probably not much I can do about it.
Maybe I just hate audiobooks.
2/5
Written 13 March 2023
Adapted from my review on Goodreads.