So here I am China, where I’ll be living for the next two
years as a Yale-China Teaching Fellow. I’m in Beijing just for the next eight
weeks, on an intensive Mandarin Chinese language program, and then in August
I’ll head off to Changsha, in the Hunan province in southeastern China to teach
English at Yali Middle School.
I’ve been in Beijing for more than a week now,
unbelievably. My program, made up of about seventy mostly-college students, is
housed in a tiny campus in northwestern Beijing, and things are starting to
feel familiar, at least on a logistical level: I know which bank won’t charge
me ATM fees, how to do laundry, where to jog (when air quality allows, which
lately it doesn’t), when the shops on my street close down for the night. Our
schedule here is pretty set, too: my Yi
Bai Ban (beginner level) class starts at 8:30 AM and continues, with
intermittent breaks, until lunch at 12:30. Lunch is followed by a one-on-one
practice session with one of the language teachers, and then the rest of the afternoon
and evening are free. We study and run errands and explore and find food and go
to bed early so we can get up in time to eat breakfast and start everything
over again.
On Monday morning at 8:15am, we signed our language pledge,
in which we vowed only to speak Chinese for the duration of the program. The
pledge is a 24-hour, 7-days-a-week kind of deal, though, thankfully, writing is
ok (hence the existence of this blog), so on campus and off, it is all Chinese
all the time. I mentioned that I am in the beginner-level class; in fact, all
four of the Yale-China fellows are. Which means that, by signing this pledge we
were in effect signing away our ability to communicate, for the immediate
future at least: Monday was a quiet, quiet day. That afternoon Hayley, my
fellow fellow in Changsha, and I walked in near silence to the grocery store
and back, grunting and pointing and laughing and squeaking and miming and
occasionally managing a sentence (“We can’t talk!”) in Chinese.
Things have improved from there—just over the past week,
we’ve learned enough survival vocab to have little conversations. But living
under the language pledge has meant a real shift in how I experience the world.
For one thing, talking about things has become suddenly way harder than doing them.
This morning, for example, the Y-C fellows had to miss our first Chinese test
to go get the prerequisite medical exam for our employment visas, only to find,
after over an hour of travel on multiple forms of public transport, that the
clinic was closed for the Dragon Boat Festival this weekend. The three-hour journey
was not nearly as frustrating as my attempts to recount the tale every time
someone asked, “So, how was your first Chinese test?” since I’ve yet to master
the Mandarin for “miss,” “employment visa,” “clinic,” “closed,” “dragon,” “boat,” or “festival.” Or the past tense. The version I’ve been eking
out — “We don’t take test because we go to doctor. Doctor not there. Bad.” — doesn’t quite capture all the
subtleties of the experience. Plus now everyone thinks we’re sick.
On the upside, the yogurt here is to die for. It’s a little thinner than American yogurt,
so you can, and are expected to, drink it with a straw jabbed through the top
of the container. I was put off by this at first (the drinking, the jabbing),
but it really is delicious, and I now eat /drink as many little cups of it as
possible. Also, since we all actually
know the word for yogurt—suannai—it’s
quickly become a conversational as well as a culinary staple. An additional plus
is that we live about seven minutes from the Beijing Zoo, where you can feed a
giraffe out of your hand for less than a dollar!! Obviously I did, and
obviously it was really, really, really
awesome. I plan to make giraffe-feeding a weekly activity, maybe to celebrate
the completion of our weekly exam.
And, ok, while this language business (ie. not knowing any)
is a pretty enormous hassle, it’s also really exciting—starting from nothing, we
can make huge strides from one hour
to the next. Every day we become better equipped to handle our everyday lives,
and every trip to the supermarket, every voyage on the subway, every
conversation with a waiter is a hilarious little adventure. And I’ve picked up
a few essential phrases to help me express at least my incompetence, phrases
like bu dong (I don’t understand), wo
bu zhidao (I don’t know), and my personal favorite wo wang le (I forget). Wo
wang le is so fun to say, and so inexplicably hilarious to me, that I’ve
started throwing it into conversations where it doesn’t belong, just for the
joy of it. This tendency added to my lack of proper tones (TONES?!) makes me,
I’d imagine, nearly impossible to make sense of.
But there’s a certain joy in the freedom that comes with
having no idea what’s going on. Last night I wandered into an unknown
restaurant with the three other Y-C fellows, and we sat down before realizing
that 1) the menu was all in Chinese and 2) it was a hot pot restaurant, the
kind where you get a big vat of boiling water in the center of your table and
then you boil your own noodles and veggies and meat right there in front of
you. Equipped with either of these facts, we probably would have avoided the
place altogether (we have enough trouble communicating in restaurants without
extra procedures and complications), but since we were already sitting, we
decided to brave it. Lo and behold, an English menu was produced, and we
fumbled our way to a truly delicious adventure of a meal, with the four of us
us diving our chopsticks blindly into the boiling broth for each new bite.
HERE WE ARE! IN
CHINA! DRINKING YOGURT AND LEARNING
CHINESE! WO WANG LE!
