The Writing On The Wall

Last night while using the bathroom in a Chinese restaurant, I saw three characters scribbled on the wall that made me laugh. While those three Chinese characters made no sense semantically, they are pronounced like, "Fa Ke U." I wish I had thought of that in fifth grade when I was the only Chinese kid in my elementary school and was constantly bombarded with requests from classmates to write their names in Chinese. I could have just mixed and matched different homonyms so that when put together they still sounded like "Fa Ke U." It would have been more challenging than just fooling them with "you are a stupid pig" in Chinese. I never understood why they wanted to see and hear their names in a different language. I myself never had the desire to see my name in Arabic or Greek or Latin or German.

I have also been stumped whenever I try to count the number of syllables in English words. Chinese characters are so much simpler. Each character is only one syllable. You can string characters together to form compound words, but the number of syllables is always equal to the number of characters. English on the other hand just doesn't make any sense to me in this respect. Take the word "small." I think it should be counted as two syllables, since it's pronounced "si-mal," and I can think of one Chinese character to replace each sound. But it only counts as one syllable. All this syllabic business really tripped me up in AP English when we had to write in iambic pentameters. I just didn't get it. I had to pull out a dictionary to make sure that I was putting in the right number of syllables.