IT'S A TRAP

To begin, a short play in one act.

Hypothetical friend: Yo, Liz, do you like it when people watch you do things at which you are inept?

Liz: No. I very much do not like that.

Hypothetical friend: In your current life, at which activity do you feel most inept?

Liz: That’s easy. Speaking Chinese.

Hypothetical friend: Hm, ok. Now, at what time of day would you be least interested in participating in any kind of activity?

Liz: Let’s see… probably a weekend morning any time before noon.

[CURTAIN]

So I am pretty freaking displeased that THIS SUNDAY at SEVEN-THIRTY AM I am going to a contest at which I will be asked to SPEAK CHINESE in front of what could potentially be a LARGE GROUP OF PEOPLE. In fact, it is sort of my worst nightmare.

How did I get here? Simple. I was bamboozled.

 A few weeks ago, my Chinese teacher announced that if we entered a program-wide speech contest just within our little school, we would get out of that week’s speaking test. And the speaking tests aren’t all that bad, but the thing is, if you don’t have a speaking test, then on Friday, as soon as you’re done with the written test (at like 9:30 am) YOU ARE DONE FOR THE DAY AND CAN GO BACK TO SLEEP. No sane person turns down an offer like that. There was another thing she said about how if you did well you’d go on to some further competition, but that seemed irrelevant.

And the preliminary contest itself was no big deal—I gave a five-minute speech about my family (there were five topics, all of which I “prepared in advance,” and then I drew one randomly) in front of four teachers in a classroom. It went ok, I guess, except I mixed up my family words and accidentally said that my dad was starting college in the fall and then ran out of material four minutes in. Instead of enacting my emergency time-killing plan of listing the birthday and favorite beverage of everyone I know, I panicked and ended up muttering, “I…really…like…my…family…” and a bunch of other things so ungrammatical I won’t attempt to translate them here.  BUT in a truly horrifying and baffling sequence of events the judges (moved no doubt by my father’s bravery and commitment to his education) gave me third place out of the 100- and 150- level students. And the top three from each bracket have to go to this BEIJING-WIDE SPEECH CONTEST FOR FOREIGN STUDENTS EARLY IN THE MORNING ON THE WEEKEND. It’s some kind of sick joke.

To make matters worse, I have a sneaking suspicion some of the other students can actually speak Chinese. And oh my god, we have 16 topics to prepare!! The only one I feel confident about speaking on is “Is learning Chinese hard?” because I have a lot of feelings. If it is any of the other ones—“The gift Beijing has given me” or “My American university” or “My weekend activities”—I am screwed.

Yeah, the topics are pretty easy. But that just makes my impending incompetence all the more humiliating.

All I have to do is learn Chinese between now and Sunday morning, which would be easy, given that I’ve mastered tones and characters (I have mastered neither). Except that Chinese has these horrors called, wait for it, MEASURE WORDS.

Measure words are sneaky little trolls that lurk between numbers and nouns. So like you can’t just say “five eggplants”; you have to say “five measure word eggplants.” And you can’t say “this eggplant”; you have to say “this measure word eggplant” (for reasons unfathomable to me, however, “My measure word eggplant” is wrong wrong wrong).  And there are a million different measure words!!! You have to learn them and remember which one goes with which noun!!! An imperfect parallel with English are those cute little words we use to talk about groups of animals—a gaggle of geese, a pride of lions, a murder of crows, and so on. Now imagine that you have to memorize one of those words for every noun you learn. NOT SO CUTE ANYMORE.

At least the measure word-noun pairings make sense. OH WAIT THEY DON’T. So like you use zhang for flat things like maps and paper and photographs. But also beds and tables. But not letters or envelopes. And there’s a measure word for items of clothing: jian. Yi jian chenshan is one shirt. But do not even think about using jian for skirts. No, the measure word for skirt, as for other “long, thin objects” is tiao. Other tiao nouns are pants and fish. Ba is used only with chairs, rulers, and umbrellas. I am not making this up.

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Nightmare-inducing competitions and grammar patterns aside, things are progressing well here. For one thing, we have discovered that breakfast is secretly the most delicious Chinese meal. It turns out, right across the street, literally a twenty second walk from our dorm, we can buy jidan guan bing, which are fresh eggy crepes brushed with spicy garlic sauce and wrapped around a few leaves of fresh lettuce. They are, without exaggeration, one of the most delicious foods I have ever eaten. Plus, the lady who makes them totally recognizes me now! I AM A LOCAL.

And we’ve been traveling, both around Beijing and to other tourist destinations. A few weeks ago, we went hiking for the weekend in Anyang! In gorges! On my birthday! What is this life??

This past weekend Gabe, Alex, and I went to the Forbidden City, which is one of the main tourist attractions of Beijing. I am terrible at tourist attractions though, because unless I know a lot about the history of a place (which I still do not but SOON I WILL READ ALL), I can do little more than wander around and express approval for the nice turtle dragon statues. They really are nice. The picture at the bottom is from the Forbidden City—we posed normally and then the Chinese tourist taking the picture yelled something about how we were too close together (we think), so we jumped apart into the unawkward positioning you see below. He seemed much happier.

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This Sunday morning around 9am my time (that’s 9pm Saturday night if you’re on the east coast of the US—I am serious enough about the following request to do the supercomplicated time zone math), if you can spare any good thoughts please, PLEASE send them my way. In return, I will proclaim to the assembled masses your birthday and your favorite beverage.