Verge: Studies in Global Asias

66 A & Q Chinese Whispers Yunte Huang Finally the rumors grew more fabulous than the real thing. —John Ashbery, “Chinese Whispers” Questioning the credibility of Marco Polo, a skeptical historian once described the famous travelogue of the medieval Merchant of Venice as something that “sounds like a Chinese whisper translated from Persian.” To Marco Polo’s debunkers who try to prove that he actually never went to China, what gives him away is not his forgetting to mention the Great Wall or the Chinese custom of tea drinking—neither would be something that a keen observer traveling in the Middle Kingdom could have missed. Instead, they argue that the clue lies in the strangeness of his language. For instance, the names of places, persons, and objects in the book are often heard in their Persian, Mongol, or Turkish sounds, but not in Chinese. The foreignness of proper names seems to suggest that Marco Polo was a forger who got his tales of wonder by hearsay, hence a “Chinese whisper.” In a game of Chinese Whispers, also known as the telephone game, players line up in a circle and whisper to their immediate neighbors, not hearing any players farther away. The player at the beginning of the line thinks of a phrase and whispers it as quietly as possible to her neighbor . The neighbor then passes on the message to the next player to the best of his ability. The passing continues in this fashion until it reaches the player at the end of the line, who calls out the message. If the game has been “successful,” the final message will, because of the cumulative effect of mistakes along the line, bear little or no resemblance to the original. What lies at the heart of the game of Chinese Whispers, as John Ashbery puts it in the epigraph, is the notion of the unreliability of hearsay. But why “Chinese”? What’s so Chinese in the “Chinese Whispers”? It was said that the expression became popular in the English language in the mid-twentieth century, and its connection in the popular imagination to the Cold War is evident in the term’s variations: Russian Scandal, Russian Gossip, or Russian Telephone. Indicating inaccurately transmitted information, the expression “Chinese Whispers” carries with it a sense of paranoia caused by espionage, counterespionage, Red Scare, and other war games, real or imaginary, cold or hot. While not trying to uncover the cultural history of the game or track the etymological progress of the A & Q 67 term, I would like to revisit two seemingly anecdotal and yet crucial “Chinese whisper” moments in contemporary Western culture. In his famous 1947 letter to MIT’s Norbert Wiener, a personal note that has been enshrined as the founding treatise of the digital revolution , Warren Weaver wrote, “A most serious problem . . . for the constructive and peaceful future of the planet, is the problem of translation, as it unavoidably affects the communication between peoples. . . . It is very tempting to say that a book written in Chinese is simply a book written in English which was coded into the ‘Chinese code.’” A few decades later, when ubiquitous computing had already become a reality, philosopher JohnSearleusedtheexampleofanimaginary“Chineseroom”tochallenge the notion that a machine can think. Suppose, Searle said, that a person who knows not a word of Chinese is stuck inside a room. Texts written in Chinese are slid through a slot in the door, and the room is equipped with baskets of Chinese characters and a rulebook correlating the symbols written on the texts with other symbols in the basket. Using the rulebook, he assembles strings of characters and pushes them out the door. Although his Chinese interlocutors outside the room consider these strings to be clever responses to their inquiries, the prisoner actually has no idea of the meaning of the texts he has produced. The scenario proves, Searle argued, that a machine cannot think, just as the prisoner does not know the meaning of the Chinese texts. What these two Chinese tropes reveal are the entangled roots of Orientalism and exoticism lying at the heart of the search for universal intelligibility . Such a search, as we know, dates back to the dawn of...