Last week, I continued read the book of “East eats West” by Andrew Lam. From this week’s reading, I realized that are many differences between east hemispheres and west hemispheres. It depends the difference languages, cultures and histories. When I came to the United States, language problem is really a hard problem for me.

       When I came to the United States in 2007, my English was so poor and hard to explain a Chinese word to my American roommates. When they ask me what does a Chinese word mean, I just can simply or direct translate to them. But some Chinese words have their own meaning and different as English. From the essay of “Stress, Vietnamese-Style” from the book of “East eats west”, I have the deeply same feeling as Nam Kha. “Stress is probably the biggest trend to hit Vietnam from America since MTV”. “But stress is a phenomenon not of simple hard work. It is a kind of symptom associated with young, upwardly mobile urban professionals in peacetime.” There are a lot of Vietnamese in the U.S. I think, Vietnamese can learn from other languages’ words to recover Vietnamese’s own defects, Like Chinese. Our ancestors foundedChinese language, and we can describe everything by our own languages. But sometimes, it’s not enough. When Coffee came into China, there were no coffees in China. People don’t know how to call it. Some people invented some strange names about coffee, but none of them were germane. So, some people called coffee by its native name and direct translate to Chinese. They Called coffee as “KAFEI” in Chinese pinyin. Also, like sofa, we called it “SHAFA”, is also a direct translate. But we don’t translate every imported goods; we also translate by its own meaning sometimes, like airplanes. In English airplane means a flying machine. In Chinese, we called airplane as “FEIJI”, this means a machine that can fly. And sometime, we can translate by its pronunciation, and also give the name a good meaning. For example, Mercedes Benz. This is a Germany automobile brand, when this brand gets into China; people gave this brand a nice name, called “BENCHI”. This is the direct pronunciation translatefrom Benz, and also, means the car can run quickly. Also, English has some words were direct translate from its own language’s pronunciation, like Tofu and Sushi.

       In the essay of “From Mao to Yaoming”, it talked about the event of June 4, 1989. This is called “Tiananmen Square Protest of 1989”. This is also shows another difference between Chinese and the United States. The U.S is a democratic country, and everyone is equal and can have their own rights, like the freedom of speech and the procession. But in China, it is another world. We can’t procession, and we don’t have the freedom of speech. In China, the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989 was a big incident, and the government was blocking the news. In mainland of China, most of people born after 1989 have no or less information about the Tiananmen Square Protest of 1989. I started to know this after I came to the United States. In mainland of China, people even can’t visit all the websites around the world. We can’tvisit YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia and Twitter. This is not just the difference between the cultures and democratic, this is the difference between the human rights, and a nation’s character. In the 62 years of Communist Party’s regnant, people even didn’t resist, most of people who want to freedom have run away to other countries. This is a point we should deeply introspective. 

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