The Woman Who Collects Chinese Typewriters
For 100 years, Chinese typewriters have been objects of curiosity, confusion and even ridicule. A Stanford professor and collector is trying to change that.
These baroque metal monsters are both writing machines and incarnations of philosophies about how to organize a language. The machines had massive trays of characters that typists could move around with a selector lever.
Shen Yunfen
The Chinese typewriter was a brilliant technological feat. The machines could accommodate tens of thousands of characters, and the invention of the chinese character keyboard allowed writers to create words quickly and efficiently. However, it is often seen as a symbol of China’s backwardness in the West. This stereotype is fueled by a number of cultural representations, including the short-lived mystery series “The Chinese Typewriter” starring eighties hearththrob Tom Selleck and the carnivalesque ditty “Her Chinese Typewriter.” But the Chinese typewriter’s legacy goes much deeper than that of a bumbling, technologically backward country. The machine was a tool for a new kind of writing that reframed the traditional concept of the nation.
The chinese typewriter was a revolutionary machine that challenged the old traditions of writing in China. It used different sized letters and symbols and required a complex keyboard to operate. Typists had to remember the positions of the keys and how they would fit together to form words. This required a lot of practice, and many of the young women who worked as typists were not well educated. This led to a perception of females as inferior workers in the office, and contributed to global gendered political narratives.
Despite the fact that Shen Yun is not allowed to perform in China, the show has sparked a renaissance of classical Chinese culture around the world. Its powerful performances have inspired audiences of all backgrounds and faiths. The show’s dazzling dance pieces, live orchestral music, and authentic costumes have brought ancient legends and dynasties to life.
Shen Yun is a New York-based company that attracts top artists from around the globe. They train all year to bring the richness of Chinese culture to stages across the world. They perform to sold-out houses everywhere they go. Many audience members even drive hundreds of miles to see a performance.
Shen Yun is a breathtaking performance that showcases China’s 5,000 years of rich and divine culture. This captivating show features stunning classical Chinese dance, enchanting live orchestral music, authentic costumes, and patented interactive backdrops. It transports you to a bygone era when scholars and artists sought harmony with the Tao, or the Way of the Universe.
Lin Yutang
Lin Yutang (1895-1976) is one of China’s most celebrated modern writers. He was an urbane essayist, a witty champion of free speech in an era of emerging totalitarian regimes, and an accomplished translator of English into Chinese. But he was also an inventor, working for decades on a typewriter for Chinese, a language that relies not on alphabetic letters but on thousands of picturelike characters.
Lin’s scribal machine resembled a conventional typewriter but was smaller and had a special keyboard. When the user pressed a series of keys, according to a parsing system he devised for his dictionary of the Chinese language, a character would appear on a screen in the center of the device. A so-called “magic eye” mounted on the device detected each keystroke and determined whether it represented a character or an empty space. The typist could then select the character by pressing a master key. The same basic technology is used today in the typing software for computers and cellphones that produce pinyin, a system for transcribing Chinese into Latin script.
The story of Lin’s typewriter is a fascinating window into the ways in which Asian culture and writing were perceived by Westerners at a critical turning point in the history of writing. It highlights a moment when ideographic Chinese was formally revised in light of alphabetic writing and paved the way for future developments in machine-aided translation.
While some scholars have argued that Lin simply internalized the basic tenets of Euro-American Orientalism, this chapter argues that his typewriter demonstrates an aggressive attempt to modify and subvert those discursive practices for Asia’s benefit. In doing so, the book offers a new perspective on Lin’s role as a cross-cultural ambassador and intellectual.
Lin Yutang was born in Zhangzhou, Fujian Province. He was a prolific writer who contributed articles to Literary Thread Weekly, a magazine that advocated the New Culture Movement in China. Despite his light style of anecdote, bon mots, and tales, he also forcefully communicated China’s plight in the mid-1930s as its political situation worsened with Japan and the Nationalist government threatened to become authoritarian. Lin’s candid criticism of the warlord government put him in danger of being hunted and he fled the country for Xiamen University.
Wu Xiaoyan
Xiaoyan Wu is an engineer who has studied at Stanford University. She is also interested in typewriters, and she has a small collection of them. She has been able to use these typewriters to create documents that are easier to read. Her research has shown that these machines were important in the development of Chinese.
The first typewriters that could handle Chinese characters were invented in the 1920s. This was a much more complicated task than developing a machine that could handle the Latin alphabet, since written Chinese is logographic and has thousands of characters. The first systems were prototypes, and many of them failed.
But eventually, a system was developed that allowed typists to select symbols from an array and type them into the machine. This was an important step in the evolution of Chinese writing technology, and it was a precursor to modern computer keyboards. The Chinese typewriters were not cheap, and they were forbidden under the Communist era, so they never became common objects in China.
They were also incredibly heavy and bulky, so they were not practical to carry around. These devices were used mainly in offices and educational institutions. Today, there are only a few of these typewriters in existence. They are very expensive to buy and can be quite difficult to find.
The book is not simply about the history of the Chinese typewriter, but also discusses broader questions of technology and change. Mullaney is not only a scholar, but an enthusiast for these amazing machines, and he has made the book accessible to anyone who is interested in learning about them.
Dr. Helen Xiaoyan Wu teaches courses in the area of Chinese language, literature, and society at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her areas of expertise include corruption in officialdom, satire, old and new sayings, and a wide variety of aspects of Chinese culture. She is a member of the editorial board of several academic journals and has published extensively in her field. Her work has received numerous awards and recognition. In addition to her teaching and scholarly activities, she has held a number of administrative positions in the department of East Asian Studies at UTS.
Zhang Jiying
When the Chinese typewriter was invented, typists were forced to learn how to accommodate its requirements and work around its limitations. They learned to lunge across the tray-bed, pressing firmly on complex characters and leaning with a lighter touch on simpler ones – a practice that demanded an unusual mix of dexterity and endurance. They became specialised, becoming expert at navigating its idiosyncratic layout and the complex ecology of relations it cultivated. In doing so, they forged a new mode of participation based on a different cosmology.
In the 1920s, when typewriters first appeared in China, typing schools opened up across cities. Young men and women enrolled at the typing schools, learning to meet the machine’s demands, work around its limitations and utilise its capabilities. Companies promoted the idea of modern offices staffed with young women typists (Mullaney, 2012), primordial echoes of Haraway Laoshi’s cyborg (1991).
Lin Yutang was at the forefront of this effort to adapt the Western typewriter for Chinese use. He rejigged keyboards and designed a Chinese version of the machine, the MingKwai, in the 1940s. It was a compact machine that held 43 rotating cylinders, each with a different character. Users selected characters by pressing keys marked with character components – radicals, strokes and bold and intuitive groupings of his own devising.
The MingKwai paved the way for future machines that used the same system, such as Zhang Jiying’s lianchuan, which broke speed records and was widely adopted in 1951. The lianchuan arrangement organised characters into associative chains, which meant that the typist would be more likely to hit the correct key on the right side of the keyboard for a given word. This reduced the number of clicks required and doubled typing speed.
The MingKwai, the Shu style typewriter and others like it were a response to the challenge of fitting an entire non-alphabetic language onto a single keyboard. By the 1950s, these machines were common in Chinese offices and a new generation of typists had grown up with them. But the advent of Pinyin threatened to render them obsolete, and the Chinese Communist Party’s policies did not bode well for patent rights.
