in flushing, queens, not far from where I grew up & very near where I go to school, there long stood a restaurant aptly named The Palace Diner. I went there a lot with my family as a kid, & for most of school it's proved a valuable recharge depot, where we've often meandered after particular depletions (often of the multiple-choice variety) for mediocre, hyper-greezy consolation lunches. the palace was a reasonably staunch exemplar of the high style in queens greek diners: inexplicably vaulting architecture, insouciant staff, jukeboxes at every table, neon-&-faux-everything décor. in its crummy exaltatedness, it's long been a particular favorite of mine.
recently, tho, I was taking the long walk up main street, northward, from the area of my school (which is comparatively suburban, heavily jewish) to flushing's downtown, far more asian (especially chinese and indian), & I saw the old palace diner looking like this:
(sorry for the lousy picture quality -- snapped this with my phone.) as you can see, the palace diner is being reinscribed as a chinese restaurant. there's nothing surprising about this: more & more businesses with chinese names have been appearing further south on main street, increasingly appearing on blocks whose businesses cater primarily to orthodox jews. but what really got me thinking was how unsurprising it is on a bigger historic scale, too: how many buildings over the centuries have been rededicated under arches bearing the script of china, that hegemon di tutti hegemones?
for all the annoyingness of the Eastern-Wisdom-Ooh-La-La style in which people who cannot read chinese characters often describe them, I, a person who cannot read chinese characters, am really really interested in talking about them. navigating around the shoals of Fenollosa-Pound-overfacile-adoption & of lame-motivational-powerpoint-sacrality, I still think it's spellbinding how prestigious the chinese script has become and remained, and how radically (no pun intended) it differs from the alphabetic systems of writing that are more familiar to me.
even tho I chafe when people talk about how chinese is "written in pictures" (as opposed to... anything?), there really are times when sinograms really are bracingly direct pictorial representations of what they refer to. examples of this include characters like 女, for nǚ, woman, & 子, for zǐ, child. famously these two combine, one semantic orbit out, in the character 好, for hǎo, 'good' (& also hào, 'like' or 'be partial to'), which apparently really does represent the concept of goodness thru the adjacency of a woman & baby. 女 + 子 = 好, so to speak.
another character that looks like what it talks about is 串, chuàn, which means skewer or kebab. (in my mind's ear, the word is cued up in that glorious, super-rhotic beijing accent, closer to chwàrrr.) the word is cognate with 穿, chuān, 'to pierce, penetrate, or drill thru', & 贯, guān, 'to go thru'. (so in beijing, 贯吗?) so just imagine my delight, in flushing this afternoon, when I stopped to get a kebab from a halal truck, on a narrow street with chinese characters in every direction, & saw this:
there does indeed seem to be some correlation between rising & convergence. as tho the sheer imperial charisma of the chinese script had begun to magnetically colonize all the ambient language on the street.
recently, tho, I was taking the long walk up main street, northward, from the area of my school (which is comparatively suburban, heavily jewish) to flushing's downtown, far more asian (especially chinese and indian), & I saw the old palace diner looking like this:
(sorry for the lousy picture quality -- snapped this with my phone.) as you can see, the palace diner is being reinscribed as a chinese restaurant. there's nothing surprising about this: more & more businesses with chinese names have been appearing further south on main street, increasingly appearing on blocks whose businesses cater primarily to orthodox jews. but what really got me thinking was how unsurprising it is on a bigger historic scale, too: how many buildings over the centuries have been rededicated under arches bearing the script of china, that hegemon di tutti hegemones?
for all the annoyingness of the Eastern-Wisdom-Ooh-La-La style in which people who cannot read chinese characters often describe them, I, a person who cannot read chinese characters, am really really interested in talking about them. navigating around the shoals of Fenollosa-Pound-overfacile-adoption & of lame-motivational-powerpoint-sacrality, I still think it's spellbinding how prestigious the chinese script has become and remained, and how radically (no pun intended) it differs from the alphabetic systems of writing that are more familiar to me.
even tho I chafe when people talk about how chinese is "written in pictures" (as opposed to... anything?), there really are times when sinograms really are bracingly direct pictorial representations of what they refer to. examples of this include characters like 女, for nǚ, woman, & 子, for zǐ, child. famously these two combine, one semantic orbit out, in the character 好, for hǎo, 'good' (& also hào, 'like' or 'be partial to'), which apparently really does represent the concept of goodness thru the adjacency of a woman & baby. 女 + 子 = 好, so to speak.
another character that looks like what it talks about is 串, chuàn, which means skewer or kebab. (in my mind's ear, the word is cued up in that glorious, super-rhotic beijing accent, closer to chwàrrr.) the word is cognate with 穿, chuān, 'to pierce, penetrate, or drill thru', & 贯, guān, 'to go thru'. (so in beijing, 贯吗?) so just imagine my delight, in flushing this afternoon, when I stopped to get a kebab from a halal truck, on a narrow street with chinese characters in every direction, & saw this:
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