An Amateur Hanzi Expert Lives For His Unchained Passion

By Manling, China Plus Host

Episode 1

After reading piles of media coverage about Richard Sears, nicknamed Uncle Hanzi (汉字, Chinese characters) by Chinese netizens, we invited him to come to our studio to talk about himself and how he would come to obsess about Chinese characters.

Richard Sears takes an interview from China Plus. [Photo: China Plus]

Two things made me prepare excessively for this interview. The first is my curiosity about this man whose passion for Chinese characters has become his life's work at great expense. And the second is my self-consciousness about my proficiency with my native tongue: Since going into university when I was 16 years old, I have focused my time and energy on improving my English, and Chinese became just a tool of day-to-day communication and for writing letters home. Because of this, although I can write creatively in Chinese and my rhetoric is good, my grammar and knowledge about Chinese characters can let me down. So I went into the interview feeling a bit inferior in the face of Richard’s knowledge about the written language of my homeland.

Episode 2

Richard says that he now writes for three kinds of people: those who understand Chinese culture but not American, those who understand American but not Chinese culture, and the people who will be alive 100 years after his death who seek to better understand society today through his website and the books he leaves behind.

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The United States

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His website, chineseetymology.org, has displays of more than 96,000 Chinese characters. Their origin and evolution can be traced back to the oracle bone, bronze, and seal characters of ancient times. It's free to use, but not free for Richard to run.

Richard has been quietly working away at this mammoth project, with the assistance of a Chinese woman he hired in the United States for the meager fee he can afford. Without her, Richard says, he wouldn't have his website. In the eyes of many netizens, it should be the work of an institution with a team of researchers financed by government or private funds, rather than the work largely of one man who pays for it almost entirely from his own pocket.

I am reluctant to hazard a guess about how much he's spent on his Hanzi project as it wouldn't be accurate, but the amount of 300,000 U.S. dollars has been bandied about in the media. He's tipped into the project his earnings as a scientist in the fields of physics and computer programming, as well as donations received from time to time from his fans. One of my colleagues, after learning that Uncle Hanzi was going to be on my show, shared my concern as to how he could continue to fund his project, and admitted that she'd once donated several thousand yuan to him.

It seems clear to me that Richard has culminated a degree of obsession for this hobby project. It has cost him love, family, employment, and material well-being. Most of us have our own dreams. And we envy, to a greater or lesser degree, the people willing to give up everything to follow their burning passion. But we'd rather be wistful than inspired to follow in their wake. But in this regard, Richard is not like the rest of us.

At the age of 70, he has the air of an innocent and curious child in the armor of an aging body. Born in the 1950s into a rather ordinary Christian household, he grew up in the 60s and 70s, an era of youthful rebellion. Richard still labels himself as a hippie, an identity he's proud to own. In his eyes, being a hippie is not about appearance, but about being free spirited. Judging from his appearance, people wouldn't get the impression that he's a wild free thinker, and I'm curious to meet someone who has succeeded in acting according to social norms but at the same time has kept his hippie ego intact, allowing his interests to run wild.

Richard Sears takes an interview from China Plus. [Photo: China Plus]

Richard attributed his craziness, to a certain degree, to his controlling father, who went out of his way to guard his son from the bad influences of the hippie world. This reminded me of a revolutionary quotation by China's former leader Chairman Mao Zedong I learnt when I was a little girl: Where there is oppression, there is resistance. Without knowing it, Richard's father pushed his son to embrace an alternative view on the world. Another thing he would not have realized is that his influence on his son's interest in sports contributed more to building up his son's resilience to endure and withstand hardships and difficulties.

Richard's love for Hanzi is also the result of youthful mischief. Drug use was very popular in the rebellious hippie culture of the time. He tried LSD, and had an epiphany of learning Chinese. His destination up till then had been Africa, a place he had some knowledge about and that was far enough away to be totally different from his small white churchgoing hometown in Oregon. So, in 1972 with his hard-earned dishwashing pocket money, Richard bought a one-way ticket to Taiwan, a transit station on his way to Africa. He didn't leave with the consent of his parents. Realizing that his son was on the journey of no return, Richard's father, suffering from cancer, transferred him some money when he asked for help buying a television so he could learn Chinese. His mother, until her dying day, never spent a day free of worry about her roving son. I asked Richard if he felt guilty for the stress he put his mother through, but he told me he didn't. I must have looked surprised, because he went on to say that it is because it's a mother's job to worry for her children. I realized that Chinese people can be easily burdened with filial piety. I didn't see this heaviness weighing on Richard.

Richard also gives some credit to his high school. He happened to attend one of the best public school systems in the country, where he was exposed to a diversity of knowledge, culture, and lifestyles, and he met a teacher who helped to guide him towards exploring the mysteries of our unlimited universe. After their first class, Richard had kept coming back to his fifth grade science teacher with loads of questions, virtually keeping his mentor hostage for two hours every day.

The jungles of Taiwan became the first part of the unknown universe that Richard chose to explore, despite the fact that it almost killed him. He had a close call with a poisonous snake, and was saved from the bite only by the thick clothes he was wearing. Falling in love with a local helped his ship to anchor in Taiwan. He fell into a life that would suit most people wanting an ordinary existence. After two years, he went back to the United States, bringing a battalion of in-law immigrants with him.

Given his broad interests and distant travels, it was no wonder that it took Richard 10 years to get his bachelor's degree in physics at the Portland State University. Driven by a personal interest, he later studied computer programing for a master's degree at the University of Tennessee. I told Richard that I didn't want to waste my brain cells trying to remember how many hobbies he has developed through his life, because there simply are too many. What I did want to know, however, is why most of the others faded in and out of his life, but his curiosity for Hanzi has remained a constant, and grown into the enormity that it is in his life today.

When I asked him to use one word to define himself, Richard called himself a scientist. In the early 1980s, computer science started to bud and Richard was one of the earliest minds devoted to it. According to Richard, the pioneering scientists were all self-motivated and self-taught amateurs, since the profession was still in its infancy and no one was too far ahead in this new field. It was at that time when Richard was hired by a company to input Chinese characters to a computer. Later in his career, when he felt he needed professional training, he signed up for a computer science major and got a master's degree in 1985, which secured him a nice job in Silicon Valley – a job he held onto until he lost it during the financial crisis in 2008.

Through the years, Richard didn't forget his dream (or, more precisely, his obsession) about going to Africa. When he eventually made his way there, found that the continent was too rough a place for him to settle down. He ended up divorcing his first wife, and married another Chinese woman as he further entwined himself with Chinese society in Taiwan. When it came to the Chinese language, he could listen and speak, but after four decades of learning, he remained illiterate, which deeply bothered him. As someone who would go back to study math all over again at the age of 30 and physics at the age of 40, simply because he wanted to find out the logic behind them, it's perhaps no surprise that Richard could focus an intense concentration on Hanzi when he put his mind to it. There must be logic, he thought, behind this complicated language, which has the longest links to ancient origins of any language in use today.

An unexpected heart attack prompted him to change his life's priorities. If he only had one year left, what's the first thing he'd want to accomplish? Richard thought that year should be spent digitizing The Shuowen (说文解字, shuowen jiezi) , China's oldest dictionary. Despite four heart surgeries since then, he launched his Chinese etymology website, and shuttled between the United States, Taiwan, and the Chinese mainland collecting materials to perfect it. The year was 1994, and since then he has never digressed from this task, even at the cost of another marriage.

Common sense tells people that understanding the logic of a language is only useful to people learning the language. But after venturing into the realm of Chinese characters, Richard is convinced that preserving the pictographic origins of Chinese characters has a greater value. He believes it is the key to a better understanding of our history and to gaining a deeper understanding of ourselves. When Richard patches broken oracle bones together and tries to figure out the meaning of the characters carved on them, he is engaging in a dialogue between the past and the present and, says Richard, every single character has a story to tell. The roots of the modern written Chinese language can be traced back to the pictographs carved in the oracle bone era about three and a half thousand years ago. Searching for the origins of Hanzi allows Richard to grab a thread that links him with that past. It's a world of languages that Richard feels comfortable in.

No ink should be wasted on describing how he has pulled through days and months of thriftiness and frugality, when even food and shelter was an unexpected bill away from becoming a problem. At one time, he could not even find 50 U.S. dollars to renew the contract for the hosting of his website. Today, you can still find a plea for donations on the front page of his website.

His project has not been entirely without backers: In 2011, Richard shot to fame after a Chinese netizen posted a few lines of an introduction about him on Weibo. He found himself in the media spotlight and donations started to pour in. He was even offered a three-year teaching job at Beijing Normal University. But it wasn't long before donations returned to being sporadic and unpredictable.

Richard's website is an unfillable hole sucking in nearly every penny he has and, what's worse, in his own words, "at the age of 70, without a PhD, and being a foreigner" he has little hope of landing a well-paying job in the Chinese mainland. To add to his problems, Richard is yet to find a successor to continue his work. That someone needs to be bilingual in Chinese and English, have a passion for Hanzi, be able to code, and be willing to make the project a labor of love rather than money. I asked Richard, "What if you can't find such a person?" Then that's the end of my website, he said. He didn't seem downtrodden about this, and seemingly for my own comfort added, "But my book will live on, and through it, perhaps 100 years after I pass away, people will be able to know what I am doing now."

Some people have criticized Richard's research for not being academic and authoritative enough. His response to this criticism is to say that 80 percent of his results are correct, 10 to 15 percent are disputable, and five percent are pure speculation on his part, and he welcomes challenges from both academics and non-professionals to improve on the work that he has done. Richard said many people don't understand his craziness for Hanzi not because they're not interested in Chinese, but rather because they don't live for their interests. For Chinese people especially, two things have stood in the way of them pursuing their interests: in the past, it was poverty; nowadays, it's the gaokao, the ruthlessly difficult national college entrance exam. The implication is that for teenagers in high school, hobbies and interests that detract from their preparations for this exam are often frowned upon, leaving a narrow window for intellectual pursuits.

Although I don't completely agree with Richard's conclusion, I have to agree that to a certain extent, too much focus on exams can block people's vision for a life as free as his. Richard is perhaps too extreme an example of self-actualization for many Chinese people. They account for about two-thirds of the users of his website, and they respect him for following his passion in a way that most of them wouldn't have the courage to do. They also admire him for his decision as someone who isn't Chinese or an academic who, against all the odds, has tried to promote an interest in Hanzi and Chinese culture as his life's mission. Richard gets a sense of contentment knowing that his fans in China have this respect and admiration for his work, and for him, this makes it a life's work worth doing.