Thoughts on A Loyal Character Dancer and some alphabet trivia

The title of the book refers to a woman named Wen who is married to a guy that is generally a shit. He is 15 years older than her. She probably married him because he knocked her up when she was an Educated Youth working at his factory in Fujian during the Cultural Revolution. The only type of dancing allowed during the cultural revolution was character dancing. There were pictures of her dancing with the Chinese character for loyalty (which also I presume is the character on the book's cover and at the top of each page.)

BTW, according to the Senor Google, the character is loyalty. Behold:

The Chinese "alphabet" is really made up of logograms, where a character indicates a word or a morpheme rather than a phoneme (the Latin alphabet, in contrast, is made up of phonograms.) To refer to the Chinese alphabet, you say Hanzi (the name of the alphabet changes with the language, e.g. Kanji for Japanese.) Wikipedia says Chinese characters are the longest continually used writing system in the world. Really? And not Hebrew? I followed one of the links cited in the article which said the same thing but didn't give dates. It did say there is now a museum of Chinese writing in Henan Province. On a website called Kwintessential (some British translation company), I found this:

According to the Kangxi dictionary the total number of Chinese characters is a staggering 47,035. The bulk of these writing symbols are not used today but nonetheless they make up the historical collection of Chinese writing symbols that exist as an extensive library.

Still no dates.

Also, the book mentions the concept of guanxi which also was mentioned extensively in Spider Eaters in reference to the author trying to get a passport to get out of China. Guanxi is a personalized network of influence and mutual favors. It literally means "relationships."