doing math like the Asians do

What do the words 'Chinese arithmetic' refer to?

A. A hit song by the band Faith No More
B. A slang term indicating the degree of an erection's tumescence
C. A little-used idiomatic expression of exceeding difficulty (i.e. "as hard as Chinese arithmetic")
D. An actual arithmetic, practiced in China, noted for its challenging execution and substantial differences from traditional arithmetic

If you guessed A, B, or C (or even all three of these), congratulations! You are correct!

If you guessed D, boo on you. As solace I leave you with the tale of my bus trip this afternoon on the way to Bao and Juliana's baby shower. I had all my usual habits: nice clothes, handbag going on five years of use, cell phone, bus card, and a sudoku. Full disclosure: sudokus and similar puzzles have been a staple of mine for many years now and are one of the few surefire obsessions I still possess. Previous attempts to ween myself off of the stuff have failed miserably. It's evolved over time--the jumbles and scrambles of my my youth shifted to the crossword puzzles (I was doing the Friday and Saturday ones before I turned 18), then cryptograms, sudokus, and the real doozy of them all, cryptic crosswords. Aside from the latter of these, all the rest have ceased to be challenging, and I suppose the reason I continue to resolutely tackle them is to keep my brain practicing and in high gear. (Bear in mind, you are hearing this from a boy who was so bored out of his mind staying at his parents' house in 2007 that he taught himself how to solve a Rubik's cube, and then continued to solve it in less than five minutes hundreds of times just because it was something to do.)

At my transfer point on 36th and Lake, an older white man sat next to me at the bus stop. Talky kind of guy, social that way, although it was apparent right off the bat that his relative world was quite small--he had never flown a plane and had never lived anywhere other than Minnesota. After watching me working on the sudoku, he asked, "Is that some Chinese arithmetic you're doing?"

On several levels this was an amazing question for me. Namely, 1) weren't sudokus the big American craze not so long ago, and doesn't everyone recognize them by now? 2) how small a leap is it to go from observing that I'm part Chinese to asserting that the activities I engage in must also be Chinese, as though my computing is Chinese arithmetic, my futon is a Chinese bed, my hair is sculpted by a Chinese shaping clay and Chinese blow dryer, and when I doodle I absentmindedly scratch out hanzi characters? 3) is there even such a thing as Chinese arithmetic?

Thankfully, I've developed over time a calm, cool reaction to such things, on the assumption that my interrogators are relatively well-intentioned and poorly informed. So I politely dismantled whatever stereotypes may have existed by explaining to him that no, this was a sudoku, they came out of Japan and are published every day in the local papers because Americans really enjoyed them and encouraged their popularity, that they're fairly straightforward logic puzzles that have very little to do with arithmetic or the numbers themselves, and as I talked I got the reaction that always results: the man, his piqued hunger for exoticism instantly dashed, nodded a little, grew bored, and finally relinquished his attention upon deciding that I am not very fun or interesting at all. Which is just fine by me.

He did manage to pique my interest, as I had never heard the phrase 'Chinese arithmetic' before. And subsequent research shows that it's mostly a ghost term. If anything it comes from Americans' fascination with the earliest Chinese immigrants and their use of abacuses, which, truth be told, do look kind of freaky and appear to make no sense, which in some circles equals 'difficult' or at least 'different.'

But arithmetic is arithmetic is arithmetic. It's just fucken adding and subtracting and multiplying and dividing. (Unless you're talking 'higher' arithmetic and number theory, which is very difficult from what I can tell.) All the elementary stuff was developed by the Sumerians and they developed the abacus to cement it. But it got a lot of play with the Egyptians, Russians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Mayans, and Native Americans before it made its way to China. In fact, abacuses were so effective and easy to use that all these exceedingly advanced civilizations waited a long time before developing a written numerical system that formed the basis of what we call 'traditional arithmetic.'

Of course, I didn't find this out until later. In hindsight, I wish I had told the man, "No, it's not Chinese arithmetic. It's just regular numbers and letters. Much more annoying."