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Harry Potter
Ms. Stam
English 10 A / 10B
August 19th 2015
Current Event #1: China Worries About Losing Its Characters
Summary
Reporter Barbara Demick, in the 2010 Los Angeles Times article “China Worries About
Losing Its Characters,” explains that due to the proliferation of texting and typing, Chinese
citizens are forgetting how to create the strokes that make up the letters of the Chinese alphabet.
Demick supports her thesis through numerous stories of Chinese people who have partially
forgotten how to write characters because they rarely write anything down anymore because of
the emergence of texting and typing. She illustrates these stories with concrete details to
connect the ubiquity of texting and other technology to the loss of cultural heritage.
[rhetorical precis for first paragraph]
The loss of traditional literacy in China is best exemplified in the examples of younger, more
affluent Chinese who have been texting and typing for the past several years. [topic sentence]
Ma Silang, a 30 year-old fashion photographer realized he couldn’t remember all the characters
for the word “shampoo” in Chinese when he was making a shopping list. [details put in own
words] However, the problem is not just limited to younger, more upwardly mobile Chinese.
Many Chinese citizens forget some characters because they rarely write anymore.
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When technology replaces memory, traditions that are thousands of years old can be lost.
What makes this instance of cultural loss so tragic is that Chinese is the “oldest, continuously
used writing system in the world,” dating back to 1200 B.C. Chinese students spend about four
hours a day learning to write as as many as 3000 characters. Chinese is not just an alphabet but
part of China’s artistic and spiritual heritage. This raises an important question: How will
China’s identity be affected when a tradition dating back thousands of years is replaced by
modern technology?
Reaction
A glimpse of the destruction of language [theme] and its negative effect on culture can be
demonstrated in the satirical, dystopian novel Feed, by M.T. Anderson (2002). In this case, the
destruction of language takes place in a future America with adults talking like teenagers and
even well-educated doctors referring to surgical instruments as “thingies.” (page # here) The
character of Violet who does use advanced language is looked at as abnormal by other characters
in the book who use short, slangy words like “meg” and “null” to describe things or ideas.
School is trademarked and provided by corporations and geared toward consumerism rather than
enlightenment. The destruction of language is a symptom of the shift in the purpose of
schooling from participating in a democratic society to a virtual, consumer society in which
spelling and writing are not needed.
In the article, many Chinese are concerned about the loss
of literacy and embarrassed by their inability to remember written characters while in Feed, most
of the characters are oblivious that the destruction of their language is a foreshadowing of the
destruction of their society.
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Works Cited
Anderson, M.T. Feed. Virginia: Candlewick Press, 2002. Print.
Demick, Barbara. “China Worries About Losing its Character (s).” Los Angeles Times 12 July
2010. Web.