I. Qin

弧 Hu

Arc

          The English word breaks off with a brittle crack. But in Chinese, “hu” slips soft and gentle; you might picture a rainbow, the deep heaving ribcage of mountains, or an eyebrow, like bird wings. A fraction of a circle.

          You can probably guess, in geometry it is the arc of a circle, though the pronunciation under a different character could be a fox, a weeping lake, or burnt soup.

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弦 Xian

Chord

          Xian—push the first syllable between your teeth. Glide your fingers across it, feel the glossy rush of air to your tongue. They won’t stick to your fingers, like spider webs; instead like violin strings they rebel with a round tang. The best phonetic translation would be “silky”; they start with the same thinness and fatten just-so, like figs.

          The xian is the name of strings on a Chinese guzheng, stretched thin and plucked into music. In the Chinese legend of the “tall mountains, flowing water,” the poet Bo Ya smashes the instrument when he learns of the death of his companion; the strings strum their final note as they snap. You can see here how “xian” also means heartstrings.

          In geometry it is the hypotenuse of a right triangle, the chords of a circle. The chord is a thin line of ink of my textbook, and my fingers itch to pluck it.

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弓 Gong

Bow

          A word with some distant relative in English—the English “gong” is an onomatopoeia pressing downwards to describe the round echo of a marching drum, a grandfather clock. But the Chinese word, meaning bow, doesn’t slide; the small intonation mark above the “o” keeps it steady on your lip. From there it is born like Athena, into the full-fledged red bronze of war.

          In geometry gong xing or “bow shape” is the shape formed by the arc of a circle and its corresponding chord. A fan, or the half-palm of ginkgo leaves. An orange slice.

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圆 Yuan

Circle

          Why is the word “circle” so thin? From the pronunciation you would imagine needles instead of the innocence of the button, or the squished smile of a bagel.

          “Yuan,” my math teacher declared as we began the chapter, “They are everywhere. For instance, turn around.” And as forty-fair pairs of eyes whipped around to glimpse the round sullen clock draped on the wall, a laugh ripped through the classroom. The math teacher’s head. Or an egg yolk, a silver quarter, a vinyl record.

          Yuan is also reunion. In my grandparents’ house in Shandong, for Chinese New Year’s, we bring out the circle table, robin-egg blue, while the moon glistens from the window. But in Chinese culture reunion just as quickly becomes heartache, to the poet strayed far from home, staring wistfully up at the round, round moon.

          Maybe you are waiting for some description of its pronunciation—I grant your wish; yuan is round. It sounds round, it is round, it bounces round and round the tongue. Or I could abandon phonetics entirely and pontificate here. The yuan represents a modern world more and more indifferent to the concept of family, as apartment sizes shrink to squeeze the leisurely round table into a square one. And light pollution clogging the city atmosphere still can’t eclipse the full moon, to remind us our planet is worth saving.

          Or maybe, as this is a personal essay, you are wondering how on earth this has anything to do with me. I’ll tell you, then—this is mine, mine, all mine. I could write about the first time I was asked my full Chinese name after coming to China—how I forced it through my teeth, broken carcasses of Chinese characters. Or the iron-cold way Mandarin spoke to me as I slowly treaded pages and pages of dense text, while the egg-yolk face of my Chinese teacher smiled in my brain, You’ll get better. You’ll get better.

          But I don’t care for it. The cold has thawed and I am glorious, reveling in the spring sun of my language. This is mine—my ears and my eyes that have heard and seen and breathed my culture. From something microscopic like a Chinese character—but I can say now, hark, and look, I love it, I love it.

          The legends tell me my birth; the goddess Nuwa tossed her rope and I flew from it, a clump of clay into a person. Growing up I stretched my limbs on foreign lands and learned a different language, but I am back now, and I hold both pieces like both of my lungs, to the land I came from. What would you call that? —Full-circle. Or, in Mandarin, “yuan man”; I am complete.