The Worst Thing You Can Say To a Kazakh

BEIJING - One joy of studying in a Communist country is meeting students from different countries. In my travels, I've met plenty of Brits, Australians and Germans. Now I take classes alongside Georgians, Mongolians, Lebanese and even Kazakhs.

I'm not sure how big the Kazakh contingent is at Tsinghua. I've became chummy with Madi, a short man with frosted blond tips in his black hair and a vague hip-hop sense of style.

I met Madi on the first day of class, wandering in our dorm lobby. He didn't know his class name, Chinese name or a word of the language.

"I just got here from Kazakhstan," he said, explaining missing nearly a week of orientation events.

Madi works for computer company, specializing in Information Control and Management. He's been dispatched to China by his company, which is paying for 18 months of language training, because he's been told that he won't rise out of middle-management without Chinese. Unmarried, Madi was chosen to learn the language of most of the company's suppliers.

That's right. The first person I ever meet from Kazakhstan works in information control, has just been sent to a strange country to learn the culture and the language for a vaguely absurd reason. You might be wondering why I haven't made a joke about the world's most-famous non-Kazakh Kazakh, Borat. Let me tell you about the other Kazakh I know.

Nadam is 18 years old, and studying here for a year before heading back to Kazakhstan for university. He wouldn't be out of place on the streets of Moscow, with a modern, if Russian-influenced dressing style. He's nice but quiet, rarely saying anything unless called on by our Chinese teachers.

Borat is the elephant that is always in the Kazakh's room. I want to ask, or make a joke or at least say "Very Nice!" in their presence, but I'm afraid of the consequences.

One American classmate had less concern. She asked Nadam if he'd heard of Borat.

Nadam was indignant. "Everybody in Kazakhstan hates this man! Why did he make this movie? He has never even been to Kazakhstan."

Embarrassed, the American pretended to look over new vocabulary words before our next class began.

The next day the American changed class. Her nominal reason was that she couldn't understand our level, and wanted to change to an elementary class. While true enough, I wonder if she feared any further Kazakh wrath.

The moral here is even though it may be incredibly tempting, don't ask a Kazakh about Borat. Ever.

To all those "Foreign Friends" out there

WICHITA, Kansas - This is a story from the book of China.

As I have already written, last month in Pingyao a young girl of perhaps 18 approached me as I was trying to make my way from the train station to the old section of town. She was annoying, pursued me and wanted to practice her English, but couldn't really think of anything interesting to say. You might recall that I eventually escaped by hailing a golf cart and telling them the name of a hostel I remembered from a tourist brochure. Everyone lived happily ever, or at least I did.

That's the plot of the story, but I want to revisit today because of something that young woman said. After about 10 minutes of conversation, I asked why she was sitting at the train station, waiting for American gentlemen such as myself to disembark, instead of say sleeping or playing with her childhood companions. "Because I like to meet the foreign friends," she said.

It's a phrase she kept returning to during our 45 minutes together. "Here's where foreign friends like to eat," she said. Then she took me in the direction of a hotel, to which I asked why we were headed that way. Even in China it seemed a little early for "massage." She told me this hotel was very famous, because "it was the first hotel in the city where foreign friends were allowed to visit."



My god, yes I definitely wanted to stay at a place where foreigners were once locked inside, paying $150 for poor service and surly looks from security guards. I was there to see a Ming Dynasty wall, not a garish hotel built in 1974. I declined the chance to hang out in a historical hangout of foreign friends.

That phrase bugs me, more so than the ubquitious 老外. Foreign friends -- a direct translation of 外国朋友 -- carries with me a sense of an exotic resource. These are people from the more advanced world, from which we need to extract services in order to accelerate our growth as a nation. This might be governmental reform, remaking the banking industry, or in the case of Pingyao, learning English. What makes it so troubling is that it reduces the encounters between visitors and residents to just a simple commodity market.

Ma Dawei addressed this in his learned talk back in April. "Always make sure you know what each person wants to get out of a relationship," he said. The Chinese won't want to be friends with you for nothing, you need to offer them something in return.

Maybe I'm naive, but I think the relationships and friendships I'm slowly making here in Kansas are different. I don't think they're based solely on acquiring skills from one person or another. I hope that's true, because I'm not in the mood to be anyone's "foreign friend" right now.

Watch Out for the Language Police

BEIJING - Two white dudes can't help sticking out on the streets of China, but what happens when you're trying to remain undercover?

This was my predicament as I met with a friend from university for a quick dinner yesterday evening. He's not with the CIA or any undercover organization. The reason for our discretion was that being discovered by an even more sinister group: his fellow classmates. Steve is on a language program here, with a language pledge.

Language pledges are a special form of punishment. With these programs, you agree not to speak English for several months at a time. Not to your friends, not while you are at dinner. This particular program had just a couple exceptions: writing e-mails, calling home and reading the Internet. That's it: no English hour or getting trashed clause (this would not be a problem for me, as the amount of Chinese I speak is directly proportional to the amount of drinks I've had). Just a hell of a lot of Chinese.

I've been speaking a fair share of Chinese these past few days; I'd even wager the some days the amount of Chinese spoken has been nearly level with the amount of English, but there was no way that our only meeting in several months was going to be conducted entirely in Chinese.

But there can be serious consequences for breaking this pledge: you get thrown out of the program.Waiting outside the East Gate of Beijing Normal University, I practiced some stock phrases to greet my friend. He appeared, speaking Chinese at the speed of a cheetah (he's in a quite high level) and wandered into a back-alley roast meet restaurant.

When the conversation switched to English, I got to hear more about the program: it was really, really hard. There's hardly any time for socializing, no matter what language. The people here (many from Ivy League schools) are really serious about learning Chinese. By the end of this program, Steve should learn a lot of Chinese, and get really good at spotting white people from miles away.