VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 11, SECTION 1
Language and Food
The last chapter set down that culture is the hard bedrock, hard to the point of being invisible. But it said invisible without yet saying, in concrete terms, what the thing actually is. This chapter takes that bedrock apart, layer by layer, and looks at where exactly it is hard. Across three sections, from the most everyday down to the deepest. This first one takes the two most everyday and nearest-to-hand layers. Language, and food. Do not take these two most ordinary things lightly. They are culture's first hardness.
Start with language. Language looks like nothing more than a tool for getting a message across, and it is far more than that. Language is the house that thought lives in. Ask yourself, when you think, what do you think with? You think with language. A person raised in Chinese thinks in Chinese, a person raised in English thinks in English. Your language is the very stuff your thinking is made of. So language governs, at a depth, not only how you speak, but how you think. Two examples. In Chinese, the words for kin are extremely fine. Your father's older brother, your father's younger brother, your mother's brother, your father's sister's husband, your mother's sister's husband, each has its own separate word. English gathers the whole lot of them under one word, uncle. This is not just a matter of a language having more words or fewer. Behind it is that Chinese culture cares intensely about a person's exact position, distance, and seniority within the web of family, and so it needs that many fine words to mark each one out. A Chinese child, learning to talk, learns along with it a whole set of relational coordinates, dividing kin into fine layers. An English child, with the single word uncle, does not grow that same fine sense of relation. See how, without a sound, language shapes the way you see the world.
The second example. In Chinese you write things from the big down to the small. The country first, then the province, then the city, then the street, then at last the person's name. The year first, then the month, then the day. In English you write from the small up to the big. The name and the street first, and the country last. And behind that difference are two ways of seeing the whole and the part. Chinese habit takes the whole first and the part after. English habit takes the part first and the whole after. That difference soaks into the language, and from the language into the thinking, and almost no one feels it happening. So language is culture's deepest and most invisible hardness. It is not a tool you pick up and set down. It is the very material and shape of your thought. You cannot think outside of a language, and which language it is, is the culture that shaped you. Here is a telling proof. Dreams. You dream in your mother tongue. Even a person fluent in a second language, in his deepest dreams, is still in the mother tongue. Because the mother tongue soaked into the underside of the mind, down into the deepest layer of the body, the highest dimension of culture from the fifth chapter, the body. Language is a hardness that deep, deep enough to reach into dreams.
Now, from language, the most spiritual thing, to food, the most bodily. Food looks like a plain physical need, and in truth one table is a whole culture. It is not only what you eat, but how you eat, and the whole set of ways of eating carries a deep culture. Chinese eat around a round table, the dishes shared, one dish that everyone reaches into with chopsticks. Behind that is a culture of together, where food is a shared thing and the stress falls on enjoying it as one, on the mingling. Westerners more often eat off separate plates, each with his own portion. Behind that is a sense of the individual and the independent, each person his own. And the seating, who sits where at a Chinese table, the elder and the honored in one place, the junior in another, carries deep rules, a culture of ordering by age and rank. Chopsticks against knife and fork is not only a difference of tools. It is two whole attitudes toward food, and toward the world. The public serving chopsticks that have come into wider use lately are the old culture of together meeting a new idea of hygiene, and slowly working out an adjustment. And food soaks into the body the deepest of all. From the three meals a day of early childhood, across decades, this culture eats its way into the deepest layer of the body. A person may forget a great deal, but the taste he grew up on, the way of eating he grew up with, is carved onto the body for life. Many who have been abroad a long time, whose language has grown nearly foreign to them, still have a stomach that longs for the taste of childhood. Because the culture of food ate into the body even deeper than language did. So what you eat, and how you eat, is another of the most everyday and hardest layers of culture.
These two, language and food, the two most everyday things, the ones most easily passed over, are culture's first and hardest layer. Why the first and hardest? Because a person meets these two from the day he is born, and soaks in them the longest, and the deepest. Before you understand anything at all, the mother tongue is already soaking you and the family's flavors are already feeding you. By the time you can think, these two have long since grown into you and become a part of you. So they are the base color of a culture, the first coat of dye. And this ties back to the fish and the water of the last chapter. Language and food are exactly the water you feel the least, because they are too familiar. You never feel I am using Chinese to think, or I am eating a culture. You only feel that it is naturally so. And that naturally so is exactly culture's deepest hardness. Set it on the plainest picture. A wanderer decades overseas may speak the foreign tongue fluently and live a foreign life, and yet two things do not change. His dreams are still in the mother tongue, and his stomach still wants the taste of childhood. Those two things are his bedrock of culture, and no distance and no length of years can wash them out. Language and food, the hardness that follows a person a whole life, are the first and hardest bedrock of culture.
So here is where this section leaves us. It has taken apart the first two, the most everyday layers. Language, the house of thought, which governs not only speech but thinking, and reaches down into dreams. Food, a whole culture on one table, together against individual, the ordering of rank, which eats into the body the deepest and becomes a taste that lasts a lifetime. These two, the most everyday and the most overlooked, are culture's first and hardest layer, the water you feel the least. That is the start of the eleventh stake this chapter drives. Culture's hardness begins in the most everyday things, language and food. But these two, hard as they are, can still be perceived at the surface. Deeper lie two layers harder to detect, how you react to other people, and how you feel time. The next section keeps taking the bedrock apart, and brings in Confucius, without learning ritual you have no way to stand. See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.