Jonathon Delacour is intrigued by my use of Chinese characters on my home page — specifically, the fact that they’re the traditional forms, not the simplified forms that have been in wide use for 50 years. He wonders if I’ve studied classical Chinese or Japanese literature. In fact, I have not. My girlfriend Dora was born and raised in Hong Kong, and she helped me pick out the characters and explained what each of them meant. As much as Dora has tried to teach me, the only character I can consistently recognize is “heart” (which, coincidentally, is the character in the header of Jon’s site), and a few of the characters for which “heart” is the root, like “patience”, “ambition”, and “virtue”. My only other exposure to Chinese is in the margins and illustrations of (English language) Zen books; presumably these would also be the traditional forms, although whenever I show them to Dora and ask for an explanation, her eyes bug out and she emits a low whistle and says “Oh.. hmm.. ooohhhh… that’s very complicated.” So it’s been a slow learning process.
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