My Chinese Tutor

My blog has recently taken a bit of, how should I say, "flack" for not being updated in a while and being too similar to Ow's in content of posts. I will remedy one problem here while further exacerbating the other.

Let me tell you about my experience learning Mandarin. It has been quite different than Ow's especially given that I am white and really have no expectation by others that I will speak even a tiny bit. This luckily gets me lots of praise and smiles when I'm able to utter just the smallest phrases. A few "hen hao's" and "ni hen piao liang" have gotten me very far.

My Chinese instruction has come largely from a tutor that my company has been generous enough to hire for 5 hours a week. Growing up, French was always my least favorite subject and I expected to dislike my Chinese classes but I've actually enjoyed them so far as a nice break in the middle of the day from work - and largely due to my entertaining, and somewhat flirty, tutor. These are the engineers at my table at my office.

I first knew something was up with my tutor when we started to learn how to ask "where did you go." In our questions, sometimes we will role play asking about each other's sisters and brothers even though she has none and I only have sisters. But other times we give real answers to questions, so there is always this strange blurry line when we're not quite sure whether we're being serious.  For example, I asked my tutor where she went on Friday night. She replied "to the gym." Serious? Just helping me with vocabulary? Her response was accompanied with the famous "asian crying eyes" pose:

I believe this was trying to imply that she wished she had someone to go out with on Friday, but I wasn't sure. However, the next tutoring session took things further.

"Where did you go" was somewhere around chapter 3 in our book. I flipped ahead to Chapter 4 and noticed that the words for "friends", "wife/husband", and "boyfriend/girlfriend" were coming up. Oh boy.

This next lesson she said "Time to practice, suppose." and then in Chinese "Where are you from?"

"America." My real answer, obviously.

"Where is your girlfriend from?"

Having none, I said, "My girlfriend is from France."

"Where is your wife from?"

Trying to practice the name of the country that I am in, I said "My wife is from China." Lots of laugher by my tutor.

"Now we switch." She said.

I asked, "Where is your sister from?" knowing she had none. One child policy in China.

"I have no sisters. But suppose, my sister is from China."

"Where is your brother from?"

"My brother is from Germany." Mutual laughter.

"Where is your boyfriend from?" Upon this question, silence. My tutor gets out her pen and starts drawing on a sheet of paper. The drawing appears to be a picture of the planet Saturn. She then proceeds to teach me the word for Saturn in Chinese. Finally, she draws an alien complete with antennas and says that her boyfriend is an alien from Saturn. Then again, this pose (thanks asianposes.com):

It gets worse.

Normally, she writes down words on the fly onto a sheet of paper as we are learning, as if writing on a chalk board. But I came into my following Wednesday lesson with a particular sentence already written on paper. It was the sentence for "My phone number is XXX-XXXX-XXXX." It contained her real phone number. We practiced the usual Q & A routine and strangely didn't reference the usual textbook during this lesson. I thought that was a bit strange so afterwards I looked at the book.

The good news: the book does indeed go over how to ask for someone's phone number in Chapter 11. The bad news: we hadn't yet passed Chapter 5.

And then finally today, things started to get very blatant. Somewhere around Chapter 7 in talking about what to eat and drink I excitedly learned how to say "beef noodles", "niu rou mian", one of my favorite Chinese dishes. I tell her how much I like beef noodles and that's really the only food vocabulary word I need to learn how to say. Laughter. Then, the usual Q & A exchange.

She says, "Time to practice, suppose. What do you eat?"

"I eat beef noodles."

"What does your wife drink?"

"My wife drinks beer." Ha ha ha.

"What does your girlfriend drink?"

"My girlfriend drinks bei jiu." Bei jiu is an extremely strong Chinese liquor. More mutual laughter.

"OK, now we switch."

"What does your sister eat?"

"My sister eats carrots." She replied.

"What does your boyfriend eat?"

She replies, first in English "Oh, you are getting back at me." Then in Chinese, "My boyfriend eats... niu rou mian."

Funny Chinglish of the Day

My friend Peng said it'ssupposed to refer to recycling.

20 million people small

A comment a friend made last night at dinner that really holds true about Beijing. She said, "In Beijing among expats it's easy to meet people because no one really has 'their group.' No one wants to be alone in Beijing." She remembered later that she had started to quote part of this song. 

This past Saturday I went on an all day hike at the Great Wall with Ow and friends from my office, Xiao Dai (QQ), Henry, and QQ's friend JiJi. The hike involved getting up at 7:30am and finding food and water which we were supposed to have purchased the day before while making everyone on the bus wait. Whoops! We then boarded a bus that wound through the mountains up to the wall so quickly that multiple people vomited in the aisle. Yikes. Luckily things got better when we had a beautiful view from the wall with no tourists since we took a completely "hiking trail way" up.

Despite this all day intensive hike, however, we still decided to go out to a club called Latte. The club has a cool 1920s + steam punk decor to it. When you come in, you see a small hotel-like lobby with tiny decorations on the walls and red couches. Then, as you enter the club there is a giant boiler-room machine complete with spinning propellors and pipes. The dance floor itself is tiny and entirely up on a 4 foot high platform so everyone sitting around at tables can watch you dance. It gives you a bit of that "stage fright" experience that adds to the fun.

Sure enough though at the club we ran into a native Chinese friend we had made earlier in the trip. He was the best friend of another native Chinese girl I had met at my apartment the first night when I couldn't figure out how to open the door to my studio and we had all had dinner together earlier in the week.

This trend of running into people I knew only continued for the next few days. On the way to work Monday I saw someone we had met for the first time at the club on Saturday and briefly said hello because I was running late. And finally at dinner that night, Mo and Hanna introduced us to some of their friends and it turned out they knew the girlfriend of the founder of the company I'm working at.

Anyways - amazing how after being here for only 3 weeks and I'm already running into folks on the street I know.

Live from the Great Wall

Amazingly Ow and I woke up at 7am today for a Great Wall hike. We are
now literally ON the wall with Internet access and eating lunch. Too
bad this email will go through a second Great "Firewall" on it's way
to my blog.

Propoganda with Fu Fei

Tonight I am live blogging from Propoganda with Jean's cousin Fu Fei!

Arrival in Beijing - It's the Small Things

I've been in Beijing now for 2 weeks and am obviously a bit behind in my blogging. It's been a great time so far and I've started to adjust and feel at home. In the past weeks I've celebrated the end of Chinese New Year, gotten two massages, visited the Bird's Nest, walked by the "Harvard and MIT of Beijing" in Haidian, and ofcourse started work.

I'd like to share though a few notes about some of the small things that have taken a bit of getting used you that you might not come across in your travel book or even vacation trip in China:

1. Google is the new Napster
Remember Napster? Well it's now called Google. It turns out Google offers a popular free music streaming service on google.cn that is blocked to non-Chinese IPs. This is apparently to compete with Baidu and I'm not sure exactly how legal it is. But given that piracy is so rampant over here - no one rents DVDs when they're less than a dollar to buy - I'm not too surprised. Eat your heart out RIAA.

2. Going Which Way?
In my first 24 hours, I found it interesting observing myself and learning what a person's most basic needs are in a place completely foreign to them - above the classic food, shelter, clothes sort of stuff. It turns out that communication (phone, language, internet) and a map come pretty high on the top of the list.

I learned the hard way on the first day though that the street signs here hang on a different side of an intersection than the US. So if you're approaching an intersection in the US there are signs facing you marking the perpendicular street. But here the signs facing you mark the street you are already on. Watch out for this when navigating on the first day!

3. The Toothpaste Tastes Different
My studio was supposed to be "fully furnished" and sure enough it came with all the bare essentials. Including Chinese toothpaste, still made by Proctor and Gamble under the Crest brand. It, however, was "Chinese flavor." And strangest of all, this flavor to me tasted like the tapioca pearls in pearl milk tea. I plan to buy new toothpaste soon because I don't like the taste much but haven't gotten around to it yet, so every morning I leave my studio tasting pearl milk tea.

4. Cell Phone Messages from Mao
I signed up for a cell phone plan the second day I arrived. It turns out to be a whopping $8/month (hear the sarcasm). Unfortunately, it also comes with CONSTANT spam. Every time I send a txt message, which turns out to be extremely common here as since there's no voicemail (a much better system than the US in my opinion), I get a piece of spam sent right back to my phone 10 seconds later. In Chinese.

I've occasionally asked those around me to translate and some of them are news announcements, scores about a popular sporting match, and other random bits of info. One time though, I showed my phone to my co-worker and he burst out laughing. Apparently I got a piece of spam that said, "Mao says you should live a long and healthy life." Or something like that. Yes, Mao is sending me txts from the grave.

That's all for now but I've setup e-mail posting to my blog so hopefully I'll get in a habit of putting more up.