jethrien

Title: Swallowing Clouds: A Playful Journey Through Chinese Culture, Language, and Cuisine
Author: A. Zee
Genre: Linguistics
Thingummies: 4

Synopsis: Chinese culture as explored through the characters used on restaurant menus.

Thoughts: I'm regrettably unlikely to remember most of what I learned from this book, but I quite enjoyed learning it anyway.

Zee is a physicist who reads Chinese and likes food, and seems to have written this book on a lark. The tone is feather-light and rather fun. He walks you through a bunch of basic Chinese characters, explaining etymologies in a way that makes a lot of them fairly memorable. He's mostly focused on food terminology, with the assumptions that a) most Westerners are most likely to encounter Chinese characters on restaurant menus and b) food is fun and he likes it. So you learn the character for pig, enabling you to identify pork dishes, but also the character for roof and the fact that when you combine them, you get home, because apparently keeping a pig under a roof makes for a good home. Along the way, you get sprinklings of anecdotes from Chinese history and mythology, mini-treatises on bits of Chinese culture, and anecdotes about the author's own family that are usually endearing.

He attempted to teach me probably a hundred or more characters over the course of the book (fully admitting he didn't expect most of them to stick on a first read). I think I've got about twenty down. How many I'll still have in a couple months, I cannot say, but I enjoyed the attempt and I can see how it might be a good stepping stone into a more serious study of the subject.