Zhou Youguang, inventor of the Pinyin form of Romanization employed by Mainland China since 1958, passed away yesterday at Beijing Union Medical College at the age of 111. He was trained as an economist and was working on Wall Street in the late 1940s, when Communist victory over the Nationalists in 1949 convinced him to return to China.
Prior to that, Zhou Youguang had been living with his wife and children in Chongqing (Pinyin spelling of "Chungking," which is described by Britka in my novel, "Lovers & Comrades") and working for a bank. After he returned to China from New York, he moved to Shanghai to teach economics. Communist Party Vice Chairman Zhou Enlai knew Zhou Youguang (no relation), and knew he had an interest in linguistics. Zhou Enlai convinced Zhou Youguang to lead a committee working on increasing Mandarin literacy by creating a new alphabetic system for Mandarin that was easier to use than traditional Wade-Giles.
Even the last name, "Zhou," is Pinyin for "Chou" in Wade-Giles. The sound is very close to the English name, "Joe." A thoughtful obituary in the New York Times today digs into the background of Pinyin and how the decision to use Roman characters was not immediate. The committee had also considered using Cyrillic, which was popular because of the alliance with the Soviet Union, and also possibly using a purpose-built alphabet, like the Taiwanese bopomofo.
The main character in Lovers & Comrades, Quentin Liege, refers to the Wade-Giles / Pinyin split during a hallucination and riffs on how the switch-over to Pinyin played out in the library system on the campus at U.C. Berkeley. Unlike me, he prefers Wade-Giles over Pinyin:
I knew it was time to retire from the Library when Madame Sun Yat-sen and Jiang Qing finally called me into their tribunal to talk to me about my utterances. Their mismanagement and complete lack of regard for process was putting the entire collection in peril. Exhibit one: their much-heralded compromise to accommodate both forms of romanization in the card catalog. Wade-Giles for pre-Revolution material, and Pinyin for post-Revolution.
We know that Wade-Giles does a better job of capturing the real Mandarin pronunciation. Also, it's intuitive. Exhibit forty-three: "Chungking Chow Mein." Any child who can read knows what that is. Now, try it in Pinyin, "Chongqing Chao Mien." You get my point. Nobody can read that.
The insidious pact between those two estimable leaders of pulchritude and luminosity, Madames Sun and Jiang, wreaked havoc on library operations. Books go un-shelved. I have to make special trips down to the offsite storage site and manually write down book titles on scrap paper before I can figure out where they belong.
The splitting of libraries into two was even more egregious. Sure, Durant Hall was buckling under the weight of the growing collection. Sure, there was a split between the Taiwanese faculty and those from the Mainland. Sure, there were different ideas about how to migrate the card catalog online. We could have seized the opportunity and made a bold decision -- one of unification, not division.
Why replicate the schism that played out decades ago? A new, single Chinese Studies Library would have been visionary. Instead, we were cowards.
(pp. 63-64)
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