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.)

Wait, this is Chinese class?

BEIJING - Maybe I don't have the worst Chinese in China after all.

 

Yesterday I walked into my listening class to find a Korean student sitting in my usual seat. I knew he was Korean by his bowl haircut and big, square glasses, and also because Koreans make up more than 60% of students at my level. I took the seat next to him -- it's still the first week of classes and seats are still quite flexible.

 

At exactly 1:00 p.m., the teacher strolled through the door and started the lesson. She played an incomprehensible tape a couple times, asked questions about the short sentences played, as if it was possible to understand between the tape fuzz and strange southern accents on the cassette tape. We students looked on puzzled for the next hour and a half, randomly shouting words that seemed related to the dialogue. Sometimes these were correct, and our teacher seemed satisfied.

 

The next class was reading. Here at Tsinghua, the teachers change between subjects, but the student's don't. This is the same setup we had in the sixth grade, complete with an electric bell that marks the exact end of class. Our reading teacher arrived right on time and dived into a lesson on banking. We talked about depositing money, withdrawal forms and remittances, about which I know rather little. Then our teacher announced it was time for a "对话" or dialogue. She told us to make a few phrases on the topic we our neighbor.

 

I turned to my Korean desk mate, who had said very little the past three hours.

 

"Do you want to be the teller or the person withdrawing the money," I said, in Chinese.

 

No response.

 

"So we have to make a dialogue. You can be person A or B. What do you like better?"

 

Again, no response.

 

"Right now we are at a bank. You have some money. You want to give it to me. What do you say?"

 

The student continued to just stare at me. Finally, he said, in English, "Chinese, no. Use English."

 

I was dumbfounded. This student didn't know any Chinese. Why wasn't he in this level, and how was I supposed to write a dialogue? I waved my hand and got the attention of our teacher.

 

"Laoshi," I said in Chinese, "I don't think this person knows how to speak Chinese."

 

The teacher looked surprised. "Who?" she said.

 

"This guy right here," I said, referring to the Korean, who seemed oblivious to us talking about him.

 

"Oh," she said, and then used English to encourage our new friend to switch to the introductory class.