Beyond the Myth of Chinese Ideograms

Published in The New Yorker in May 2016, Ted Chiang’s short piece “Bad Character” has raised fervent debates on the linguistic properties of the Chinese writing system, as well as on the peculiar, if not perplexing, nature of the language itself. The mixed responses among scholars, from both the East and the West, towards Ted Chiang’s position against Chinese characters reflect the underlying entanglement of disparate discourses, including the universal language, orientalization/self-orientalization, language reform, Asian-American struggles, Chinese exceptionalism, and most importantly, the entrenched myth of Chinese ideograms. By situating Ted Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life” (1998) in the midst of the debate, this paper explores not only how Chiang broaches Chinese’s linguistic otherness through the science-fictional trope of alien communication, but also how the author dismantles the discursive baggage of Chinese ideograms by shifting toward technical description of linguistic details. Reading “Story” in joint with Liu Cixin’s seminal Three Body trilogy (2008–10) and a more recent work “Curse” (2015) by Chen Zijun, this paper further contends that a new trend can be discerned that seeks to depart from previous exploitations of Chinese’s otherness through orientalizing gestures and essentialist representations. Unlike their predecessors who either valorize or degrade the non-phonetic alien language allusive to allegedly ideographic Chinese, these authors refrain from setting up a hierarchy between human languages and their alien counterparts, channeling the utopian impulse of sf into treating language as a technical object that is perfectible through constant refinement of its linguistic configurations. The end product of these discursive efforts is a notion of linguistic utopianism, which not only harkens back to the generic affinity of sf to utopia as well as to the long-lived, ubiquitous quest for a perfect language, but also envisions a new ethics of alien communication through explicating the distinct technicality of each language for a non-hierarchical paradigm.