I spent some time today reading ‘Oracle Bones,’ one of the books on China that Alex read, enjoyed, respected, and handed to me. The author was first a Peace Corps Volunteer, teaching English in a province, and then slowly clawed his way into a successful journalism career. (I say ‘clawed’ because both of my parents were journalists at one time, and I have no romantic illusions about the lucrative or steady qualities of the work.) Starting out in a province and being the main source of English language for those around you, I think must be an awfully good way to learn a lot of language in a hurry. It’s pretty much how I learned Finnish — by being in the middle of it all the time.
I will have to try harder to learn Mandarin, though, as my daily life is easily removed from the surroundings. I am working through the same English-language channels, on the internet, as I would be at home in Seattle. I am listening to my usual mish-mash of English, Russian, and occasionally Spanish, music while I work.
Today I looked out the window, from my position on the tenth floor (which is really the ninth — floors four and fourteen are skipped in the numbering, because the word for ‘four’ also sounds like the word for ‘death’) and saw the image of a crane at a nearby construction site reflected in the windows of the high rise building across the street. There is another building between me and the construction; the only way I could see it was in the reflection. The crane-image moved liquidly across the glass, surrounded by blue sky, the China Mobile offices behind the windows tinted and obscured. A bundle of something was let down, the cables swaying, rippling on the glass like a heat mirage. The body of the crane swiveled and glided through the reflected the sky.
Several stories down, on the street level, the wind whipped back and forth a few flags in front of the China Mobile building, a blue one with the company logo, a white one I could only see part of, and the gold-spangled, red flag of the People’s Republic of China. The red silk crumpled sinuously, now hugging the flag pole tightly, now leaping away with a visible snap, displaying its stars.
That’s what I saw, watching from my English-language bubble, floating along the surface of this great sea of Chinese language and culture. I have quite a bit of Mandarin to learn before I can stick my head completely underwater.
Yesterday I took the subway towards the center city, and got off at the northeastern corner, near the embassy district. I saw the Russian embassy, and several stores with Russian signs. I wound my way south and east and eventually got to one of the big shopping streets, Wangfujing, quite close to Tian’anmen Square and the Forbidden City. The only thing I bought was some street food — fried dough balls so sticky on the inside that at first I thought they had banana inside.
In an offshoot of the alley with food, I also walked through an alley full of stalls hawking things for tourists — chopsticks, fans, bronze figurines, opera masks, geisha dolls, teacups, saddam husein playing cards. In Russia, the same places sold matryoshka dolls painted with everything from traditional female faces to US presidents, to Simpsons characters, fur hats, lacquer boxes, and any amount of chachki emblazoned with Soviet insignia. There I could bargain with the sellers, chat them up; here the hawkers plucked at my sleeve and addressed me in rudimentary English: “Lay-dee! Looka looka!”
In Chinese, there are no syllables ending in hard consonants – k, p, t, d. Thus the sellers implore you to looka and buy a mapa, a booka, a postacard, which are invariably gooda. When I visited last year, one the phrases Alex taught me on my first day, when we visited Tian’anmen Square, was ‘bu yao’ — don’t want. It’s a useful one in that part of town, where foreign and domestic tourists alike are lured by the promise of spectacular cultural relics.
My strategy is the same here as it would be at home in Seattle, or anywhere. I keep walking, I act as if I didn’t hear, as if they were talking to someone else. More as an exercise than anything, I wandered through a store selling chopsticks and studiously ignored the salesgirl who stood attentively at my shoulder the whole time, waiting for me to show particular interest in anything. A couple times I nearly laughed out loud, as she literally followed me step for step. I kept waiting for her to say something, to try to sell me on a set, so I could use one of the phrases I do know — “wo kan-kan.” I’m looking with the connotation of ‘I’m thinking about it, but have not decided.’
I did get to use it later, in a bookstore, where I was approached by a salesgirl while looking through the ‘Chinese learning texts for foreign devils’ section. When I didn’t respond to her Mandarin queries, she held up a book and asked in English, ‘You want to learn Chinese?’ ‘Wo kan-kan,’ didn’t make her go away, though, it set off another round of Mandarin address, forcing me to come up with an additional phrase: ‘Bu mai, kan-kan.’ Not buying, just looking. On a different floor, though, I did buy an exercise book to practice writing characters in, and a thing of note paper to make flashcards with. I have plenty of studying to do!
