BEIJING �C I stumbled into class on Wednesday two hours late, looking
and feeling rather yellow. I wanted to catch speaking class and stay
in the good graces of my professors.
Outside my classroom I ran into Brown, whose class I had just missed.
"Su Bin!" she said. "I heard you're sick. Have you taken any medicine?"
I had taken some medicine, and this seemed to disappoint Brown. You
see, Brown is an amateur phramacist.
Our class first discovered this on a windy day in March, when half the
class reguarlly interupted a lesson set at a bank with loud trumpet
noises emenating from their noses. After a particularly loud blow,
Brown went to the blackboard and wrote a few Chinese characters. "If
you have a cold, take some of these Chinese medicines," she said,
totally unsolicited. Then she returned to a discussion of interest and
exchange rates.
Brown comes from an earlier era of teacher-student relations. Students
are to remain quiet as she works through the textbook excercises,
dialogue and grammar in a logical order. Questions are welcomed, but
they must be on target and asked only to the teacher.
This is not our class. We are children of the 1990s, university
graduates with the attention span of a text message and several
thousand comebacks in our brains. This frustrates Brown, who is too
nice to yell to but not flexible enough to yield to our pleas to play
a game instead of recite passages or tendency to chant "加油!加油!加油!"
when someone is having trouble reading. "Quiet, quiet," she will say,
to little success. On my midterm ― which I got an A on ― Brown wrote
the following comment, "Good job, but don't talk so much during
class."
I think Brown's affinity for hierarchry drives her toward dispensing
medical advice. The pharmacist recommends a medicine and the patient
takes it. What do I know about Chinese medicine? I take Brown's word
that she's not suggesting I ingest rabbit pellets to cure a sore
throat, or that if she is, it's a traditional Chinese remedy.
Since her motives are pure and this appears to be something she's been
doing for a while, I'm inclined to take the medical advice of my
reading teacher. So when I told her this week that I'd already taking
some medicine for my upset stomach, I was telling the truth.
"Well, if you're still sick later, give me a call," she said. "I'll
tell you some medicine to take."
"I will," I said. And I meant it.
