Colorful Instructors

BEIJING - The Chinese don't have very many last names, which means in the short time I've been here I've already met three Lins, two Wangs and a fair number of Lis. And since everyone in the university insists on being called "laoshi" whether they're an instructor or merely an officer worker, confusion has erupted.

 

Is the short older man who works in the Foreign Students Office during afternoon Lin or Liu Laoshi? What was the name of the crazy van driver who couldn't get to Tian'anmen Square last week? I can't remember names in English, so Chinese requires some extra assistance. I've turned to nicknames.

 

My listening teacher -- Zhang Laoshi -- frequently wears a pink sweater. Her nickname is now Pink. When the class discovered that our speaking teacher -- Huang Laoshi -- uses the Huang character that means "Yellow," we had our theme. The third teacher, our reading instructor, had no particularly obvious color traits, so we christened her "Brown," after her most popular outfit.

 

Giving my teachers nicknames allowed me to easily remember their Chinese names. Pink? That's Zhang Laoshi. And if the first class is taught by Pink, Lin Laoshi -- Brown -- must be teaching next.

 

Friday afternoon the bell rang with no sign of our speaking teacher.

 

"Where's Yellow?" I said to a couple classmates.

 

Suddenly he appeared at the back of the class.

 

"不是'Yellow' ，我姓黄," he said. Which means something like, I'm not "Yellow," I'm Yellow.

 

Time for a new nickname.

Meeting Friends Can Pay

Beijing - My speaking teacher dismissed class last Friday with an unusual assignment. He wanted each student to meet two new Chinese friends and one foreign friend. His gave us a short list of questions to ask, including name, age, hometown and profession and said the data would be collected on Monday.

Groans echoed through the classroom. Students don't like additional work five minutes before the week's final bell.

"When you come to China, of course you want to meet Chinese people," our teacher said, and dismissed the class.

My first friend I met at a bar. Wang Winxin is 27, a computer programmer in central Beijing who lives out here in the city's northwest. He hates Zhang Yimou movies and most recent Chinese historical dramas, preferring to watch Tony Jaa action movies from Thailand. I saved his phone number in my address book and wrote down the rest of the information the next morning.

Saturday and Sunday passed, but I made no new friends. I passed thousands of possibilities on the streets of Beijing, but not once asked the necessary questions. "How much is this," slips easily out of my mouth; "What's your profession," less so.

After dinner on Sunday I became desperate. I remembered a couple additional instructions issued by my teacher two days earlier. "Don't meet taxi drivers. Don't meet fuyuans." He meant that the class should try to meet other students, not service workers. But I was low on options; I went downstairs to see the fuyuans.

A fuyuan (服员) is a general category of customer service worker. In my life here, they're the two dozen or so people who clean my room every day, guard the building against theft (not very well - where's my bike??), and constantly converse with the building's 100 or so residents.

Working downstairs on Sunday I found two ladies and a man, each dressed in crisp uniforms, a tan and red pant suit for the women, a dark navy jacket and slacks for the man. The man appeared to be in charge, as he sat confidently behind the desk while the women played cards in front. I approached the desk and soon found myself in conversation with Li Ke (李刻), 23, a native of Beijing. He is an only child, currently single and residing in on-campus service housing.

I asked Li Ke if he had any hobbies. He responded in unfamiliar Chinese words. We fumbled around a little, trying to establish meaning until Li Ke switched to English. "Collect money," he said. His coin collection included American, British, Italian, Australian pieces, and others from more exotic places including the Faroe Islands, Denmark and Iraq. This collection came from friends, Li Ke said.

Then I had an idea. "Wait a second," I said, and hopped on the elevator up to my room. I grabbed a few roubles from my desk. I have dozens of these rouble coins, they continue to fall out of strange corners of my luggage. I went downstairs and gave Li Ke one, two and five rouble coins. He looked thrilled.

The next day Li Ke called me over coming back from a class. "I have a little gift for you," he said, and pulled a small envelope with two bills inside. They were two multicolored bills from Afghanistan. One was 5,000 Afghanis, the other 10,000 Afghanis.

Back in my room, I looked up the current value of 15,000 Afghanis out of curosity. According to XE.com, the current mid-market trading rate is $306.21.

But before I booked a vacation to Afghanistan, I went to eBay where I discovered these multicolored notes were issued by the Taliban and are no longer legal currency and fairly common. Current asking price: $1.50.

Oh well. I finished my homework on time and made a new friend in the process, and my life's a little richer thanks to that.

The Georgian Order

BEIJING - "Here's the one thing you need to know," Shannon said, and then paused for dramatic effect. "Chinese is PTPA: Person, Time, Place and Action."

It's the best instructional advice anyone's ever give me in Chinese. Better than when I found out the second and third tones are not, in fact, the same, better than when I found out I'd been writing the character for I - 我 - incorrectly. No, this constitutes nothing less than a Chinese miracle.

Everyday at Tsinghua I learn new words. Inside the classroom there are endless vocabulary lists, pop quizzes and impromptu 生词 (shengci, new words) thrown up on the board. After class is over I find myself learning more practical words, such as shower, earphones and stolen, for more practical reasons. Many of these encounters have been detailed on this blog, and I am sure more will in the future.

I find myself increasingly reaching for and finding new words, helping me to describe my problem to teachers, salespeople and random onlookers. But pressed to create dialogues on the spot, I find it coming out in an ungrammatical puddle, verbs, nouns and adjectives tripping over each other in unacceptable ways. I'm glad to at least be understood, but also realize that I must make the transition to more proper speech. That's where this little acronym comes in.

At first I thought PTPA was some kind of Golden Rule of Chinese, something most people learn on their first day of instruction. But I looked on Google and the phrase came up with no hits, and a couple classmates from different parts of the world had never heard of it. It might be a creation of Shannon's former university, a small language institute in California where he holed up 12 hours a day for 18 months, practicing his tones.

Like all rules, Shannon's has plenty of exceptions. But as a quick way to construct sentences on the fly, it'll do quite nicely.

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.

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.

Can We Get Back to the Surgery?

ALBANY, N.Y. - After my dentist proclaimed my mouth cavity-free, I had to the courage to ask a question I'd been curious about for months: Do I need to get my wisdom teeth removed?

"I don't know," he said, and looked at me blankly. "Go see these people." He handed me a business card for the Adirondack Oral/Maxillofacial Group.

Three weeks and one canceled appointment later, I turned off an office park cul-de-sac and parked at the oral surgeon's lot. The practice shared an operation with a deli, which I walked into by mistake before rounding the building and finding into the right office.

A woman with a fixed cleft pallet and still evident lisp took an X-ray, and then took me into a small examination room. Five minutes later the doctor walked in, dressed in scrubs and still wearing a face mask. This was 8:30 in the morning. Unless this doctor performs dawn surgeries, he's so much of a germophobe he wears these as a matter of course.

The doctor used my EMS approach to making his job more interesting: changing the subject. He took a print of the X-ray, put it front of a light, and then asked a question.

"So, what do you do with your life?"

I told him that I'm leaving in a few weeks for language school in Beijing.

"Cool," he said, a bit informally for a doctor but he was under 40. "I have a cousin who spent a year in Beijing. He met a Chinese girl and they married."

"So, what dialect do you plan on studying?"

Mandarin, I said. No one studies anything but Mandarin. I didn't say that part.

"That's like the main dialect, right? The Communists forced everyone to speak that after they took over?"

Well, no. I could have told the dentist that standard Mandarin is derived from a standard Beijing accent and the language of the Imperial Court. The Communist government has been more effective in promoting a centuries-old policy that people should learn Mandarin. Chinese isn't unique in having so many dialects. Lots of languages have dialects.

I didn't really want to get into it. I wanted to know if I needed oral surgery in the next two weeks. Would I be setting off on my journey east with a bleeding mouth?

Thankfully, the removal of my wisdom tooth (I've only got one) can wait. The impacted tooth is asymptomatic, and besides, if it became infected, the dentist suggested I could get it removed in China.

"They've got excellent dental care there. We've had some of their dentists come over and speak to us. Where are you going to be studying?"

Amazing. It was all-China, all-the-time with this guy. He went on about studying Chinese was a smart career move, problems I might have with learning the language, and the experience of having a Chinese cousin-in-law.

The dentist is a good example of a group of people I run-into from time to time: the China Crazies. They've got a lot to say about China, and they don't get to talk about it very often. When they hear I'm going there, the floodgates open. It's very flattering that they want to talk my destination, but sometimes inappropriate. Let's save the China chit-chat until after surgery.

Currency Fraud

ALBANY, N.Y. - Mail workers are associated with crime, crimes of passion or frustration that have entered the lexicon as "going postal." The felonies committed when "going postal" can be myriad, but I'm not sure they are assumed to include money laundering.

My life of crime began yesterday at the Albany regional post office, which processes packages in the area. I came here since I needed my parcel to arrive in Beijing as soon as possible. If it doesn’t arrive by Tuesday, I might not get into language school.

I waited in a lengthy line, filled with people breaking up their afternoon commute to send out holiday thank you notes. At the designated “Next!” I went to the open counter and spread out the contents of my shoulder bag: the two-page application for Beijing Normal University, an express mailing envelope, a customs form and 450 Chinese Renminbi. I asked the cashier if I'd completed the form correctly.

"You can't send money to China," he said.

"What do you mean?"

He turned a computer screen to the left so I could see it. It showed a page on the company's internal server, with a list of banned items sent to China. Currency was at the top of the list.

"What I am supposed do to?" I said, voice rising. "I went through considerable machinations to get this money. This is what the university wanted. I need to send it to Beijing."

The man lowered his voice. There’s another way, he said. As a federal employee, he couldn’t accept the package because he saw the money. But if hypothetically someone came into the post office with a package to China already closed, he wouldn't open it. And if they placed "University Documents" on the package, he wouldn't ask what was inside. It would just be sent, fast post.

Why he’d do it? The man offered one possible explanation: he'd been to China. He understood the mindless regulation and confusion in the country.

As I walked away from the counter, the man continued to offer words of advice.

"Take food! It's nothing like what we have here! Completely different!"

I don't want to convict myself in print, but the next day I mailed the package. I took the contents of the envelope up to the cashier sealed.

Please Do Not Click for English

ALBANY, N.Y. - Spring language program deadlines are approaching, and I'm frantically trying to decide where to spend the next year or so of my life. The process is much like undergraduate admissions, with more Chinglish.

At Peking University's page for international students, prospective students are told the "Application Period is from November 1." Does this mean the school accepts applications beginning on the day? Or is that the deadline? What happens to application sent before then; are they thrown in the trash?

I sent an e-mail off to the school three weeks ago. I received my reply earlier this week: Nov. 1 was the deadline. I guess I won't be studying at Peking University.

(Prospective students can access this accurate information only when the site is working. Many parts of the school's English Web site seem to be frequently down.)

Beijing Normal University's Website features slick graphics and interface, but this element of sophistication is just a veneer on an application which must be printed and faxed to China. Yes, faxed.

After the application is received, the login part of the Web site stops working applicants can only "inquiry" their form. The inquiry section is blank.

Tsinghua University is the "M.I.T. of Asia," but their Web site is more the "Hudson Valley Community College of Northwest Beijing." Their incredibly slow Web site wins points for at least having clear information, but accessing the relevant parts for international students requires avoiding the two most obvious choices (both dead ends) and selecting a small menu on the bottom of the screen.

I want to be admitted to these schools, so I can learn about Beijing in-person, not through a Web site. But for now, this site is my portal to these institutions of higher learning. And what a dirty, foggy porthole it is.

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.

Meeting you, I am very happy.

BOSTON - I’ve seen the light, and his name is Ma Dawei.

Ma Dawei is a fictional character with whom my Chinese classmates and I have become intimately familiar the past few months. Today I met him, and it was one of the most fascinating lectures I’ve ever attended.

A little background: I’ve been studying Mandarin for nearly a year now. The textbook my school uses for the first two years of study is the “New Practical Chinese Reader” Beijing Language & Culture University. The text consists of grammar lessons, reading passages, character maps and cultural notes, but the most important part is the dialogues. Here a set of six reoccurring characters who live in China interact in increasing sophisticated ways.

Overall the dialogues are pretty good, but there are some necessary concessions in order to introduce vocabulary and grammar at the right pace. An example, from the lesson we’re studying this week:


Lu Yuping: Where is the kitchen?
Wang Xiaoyun: The kitchen is to the north of the living room. The bedroom is to the east of the living room. There is a big balcony at the outside of bedroom.
Ding Libo: Mr. Reporter, you have already asked so many questions. You must also want to write an article to introduce Ma Dawei’s rented house.
Lu Yuping: Asking questions is a reporter’s professional habit.

Over the course of the year, these six people have almost become fellow classmates. I wanted to know what happened when Lin Na lost her bike, or why Wang Xiaoyun didn’t like the Chinese opera performance, and not just because it was homework.

Imagine my surprise when our teacher informed us two weeks ago that Ma Dawei – one of the main characters from the text - would be coming to our university. As a special bonus, the usually quite stingy-on-the-grades Chinese department would be offering a half-point on our final grade for attending. I was there.

Ma Dawei is really Brian Connors (a cartoon representation is at the top of this entry, which bears no resemble to the actual person), a slightly stocky Irish-American 28-year-old from Michigan. He’s not ugly or goofy or any of the stereotypes that sometimes are attached to foreigners in Asia, but he wouldn’t stand out in a crowd, either. He’s just an ordinary American dude, an ordinary American dude who speaks really, really good Chinese.

How good is Ma Dawei’s Chinese? Until three weeks ago, the entire Chinese department thought his voice was dubbed on our textbook’s audio and video cassette tapes (that’s a bit of misnomer, because all our materials are now online). When informed otherwise, my teachers promptly invited him for a pep talk.

“Chinese people often tell me that I speak better Mandarin than they do,” he said. “And most of the time, it’s true.”

Connors’ standard Mandarin accent is top-notch. In a three minute introduction, Connors managed to get the jaws of the vast majority of the Chinese department on the floor by speaking so quickly and fluently.

He gave tons of advice. I haven’t spent too much time in Mainland China – just two months – but it was just long enough to realize that what he was saying was absolutely true. Avoid hanging out with Americans while on your language program. Even if you’re speaking Chinese, talking with the locals will be much better. He also said to expect your relationships with Chinese people to be almost exclusively business-based at the beginning.

“Understand what you are both bringing to the table,” he said.

I dealt with this last point in Hong Kong. It felt like the locals who wanted to hang out with me only wanted to use me as a fountain of knowledge about the English language. Sometimes in order to make long lasting friendships, at the beginning they might have to be based on the tools and skills that each person brings to the table. For Connors, that was playing music with a local band (which brought in extra cash for having a white person frontman) and valuable conversation experience for him. I’m not sure what the comparable skill would be for me, but I’m certainly going to be thinking hard about it in the months to come.

Ma Dawei is a China success story. He completed the challenging John Hopkins in Nanjing program and is now enrolled at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He co-owns a café in Beijing with an attached English instruction program called Sculpting in Time. He plans to return to China after graduation and run the café full-time. It’s a long way from his upbringing.

“I’m just an ordinary dude from Michigan who likes Phish,” Connors said.

Was it worth it? I’m entirely sure from his talk. There were undercurrents, although mostly unspoken, that he wasn’t completely satisfied with his life in China. It seemed be a question of not if he would come back to America, but when.

As for the café, I hope to gather a little first-hand experience this June when I’m in Beijing. Connors set the bar pretty high in his description, so I am expecting the best.

One more thought from Mr. Connors was notable. “Living is China is incredibly strange experience,” he said. “Everyday there was a crazy event that I could have written a short story about.”

Considering my own planned future, I certainly hope that’s true.


(The title of this post is an overly literal translation from one of the New Practical Chinese Reader’s beginning lessons. I believe it was uttered by or to Ma Dawei, but I’m not really sure. The Chinese is： 认识您，我很高兴)