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.)

Lessons from the Home by the Airport

TROY, N.Y. - First day at a job. Awkwardness abounds.

For reasons I can't get into I was telling two younger workers a story about my travels in Iceland. Every night at the Reykjavik Youth Hostel, I would gather with six or seven other young backpackers in the living room. Every half an hour, we would put on our hats, scarves, mittens and coats and walk around to the back of the one-story building, where there was no outside light. Then we would look up.

About 15 seconds later someone would inevitably say, "It's still cloudy," and we would head back around front and back into the living. In six days, I saw no lights.

Just then, a woman of about 65, eating a cup of yogurt at the next table spoke up. "Excuse me," she said, her wrinkled lips softly speaking the words, "Did you just say you use to live in Iceland?"

"No, sorry," I said, "I just went there on a vacation."

She didn't look sad. "I used to teach there," she said.

"I worked in Keflavik," she said, pronouncing it with deep Scandinavian guttural sounds, not the warm grandmotherly voice she uses in English.

It was the early 1960's and she was right out of teaching school. An agency that provided English teachers in Europe said if she'd go to Iceland for a year, she could have her pick of assignments the year after.

"And that didn't sound like a bad idea," she said. "I thought, 'why not.'"

She lived in a tin-roofed apartment building. She spent half her time teaching blonde Icelandic children, the other half teaching American military children. Both spoke English at the same level. Icelandic is not a very useful language, so the natives spoke several other languages.

She found the Icelanders a proud but secretive people. Her window into the culture was a young university student she met, who would take her out to parties in Reykjavik on weekends. The city was small then, but the parties were legendary.

"They can outdrink anyone," she said.

There were other perks to the job. She flew free on military planes to England and Ireland during school breaks. She got to hang out on base, eating missed American foods and hearing a familiar accent. Soon enough her "hardship post" was over, and she flew to sunny Spain, where she taught for several more years.

"I'd love to go back," she said. "You don't hear too much about it. You're the first person I met that actually decided to go on a vacation there. That's very interesting."