Brown Bagging It

BEIJING — Oh, 差不多！

This phrase — in letters "chabuduo" —  "means almost the same as," and it's used liberally here in Beijing. Five minutes late to class? 差不多. Screw up someone's name? 差不多. Get drunk and pass out in your neighbor's dorm room?差不多.

This week I discovered what can happen when what you is say is 差不多 from what you mean.

It was Tuesday, and I was hanging out in the hallway with Brown and a couple friends after class, aimlessly talking after four hours in the classroom.

"I'm so hungry."

"Me too."

"We should get some food now."

"Yeah."

"Like right now."

At least that what I thought we were saying. We spoke in Chinese, more out of habit than wanting to practice the language. Brown entered the conversation.

"Sure," she said. "I'd love to eat. Let me go get my bag out of the office and then I'll be right back."

I turned to my friends, and they turned to me. We'd accidentally invited Brown, our squarest teacher, out to lunch.

We decided to take Brown to Qing Qing Ecstasy, the best of Tsinghua's three "western" eateries. Qing Qing actually serves mostly Taiwanese and Thai dishes, but the food is a notch up from the greasy cafeteria fare served elsewhere. We took a table for four near the back corner of the restaurant, next to a two-foot plastic version of Michelangelo's David.

I handled most of the conversation with Brown, treating our forced lunch as an interview. I'd been seeing Brown two hours a day, three days a week for three weeks now, and I knew next to nothing about her. It seem appropriate to found out the basics.

Brown, actual name Lin is from Tianjin, a large city a couple hour's east of Beijing. She's 25, with a master's degree in teaching Chinese at a foreign language from Beijing Language and Culture University. She lives well to the east of Tsinghua, and she commutes 25 minutes every day by electric bicycle. In the winter it's pretty cold, but this time of year things are pretty good. Someday she wants to own a car.

She surprised me with her knowledge of our lives out of class. She knew that a couple of Korean students were now dating, and claimed that she thought they'd been admirers for some time. She wanted to know if my college was near Cornell (no) and Boston University (yes).

The lunch humanized Brown. She became more of a person, less of a robot who dictated when to use 就 or what medication I should take during my next bout of diarrhea. I'd consider doing it again sometime.

(This is going to be the last entry to mention Brown for a while. I don't want this to turn into a blog chronicling every move of my reading teacher, no matter how interesting she may be.)