Bob Lucky
4: Let me Say
a Few Things, but not in Chinese
I would like to
apologize to the Chinese people and to all those politically
correct people who believe, and rightly so, that one should
learn the language of the place he is living. But I am giving up
on Chinese. Quitting. Throwing in the towel. Calling it a day.
I’ve resigned myself to living as an illiterate, almost mute,
and, for all intents and purposes, deaf ex-pat in China. It may
be age, for I can get by in a couple of other languages. It may
be Chinese, or the Chinese. At any rate, I’m done paying my
Chinese teacher for her English lessons with me.
A colleague who grew up in Nepal recently went back for a visit.
Upon his return to China, he and his jet-lagged wife crawled
into a taxi. No matter how they said the name of their
destination, no matter how many combinations of tones they
enunciated, no matter how loud they shouted it, the taxi driver
could not understand them. They crawled out of that taxi and
into another. That’s a true story, because if the driver just
didn’t want to take them, he would have said so, or said he
didn’t want to go or that his shift was about to end or that his
car couldn’t make it that far.
As my colleague later said, it was nice to be in Nepal and
understand what people were saying, even if it was unflattering
about him, and to be understood when he asked directions or
commented on the weather.
Communication is an obstacle to understanding China. Not only do
I not have more than a slippery grasp on a smattering of
essential phrases, but also the Chinese seem to have little
experience with foreign languages, unless it’s another variety
of Chinese. Even so, ask a Chinese person about Chinese language
and the first thing he is likely to tell you is that every
dialect but the one he speaks is ugly beyond description and
impossible to understand. When I lived in Thailand, I butchered
the language, spewed tones with all the grace of a tone-deaf
songbird, and the Thais loved me for trying and somehow managed
to understand me. For example, and this is true too, you can
tell the waitress in a Thai coffee shop that you want hot coffee
with sugar and a “shake of breasts” and she won’t bat an eyelid,
knowing instinctively that you want milk in your coffee. In
other words, she won’t misconstrue your tone. In China, there
will soon be an army of interpreters, none of whom knows what
you’re saying. Eventually the manager comes out and makes sense
of it and then regrets to inform you that in his coffee shop
there is no shaking of breasts. That last part isn’t true, but
that’s how it feels.
The other day at the grocery store, my wife said something to
the cashier. “What did you say?” I asked. “You don’t know?” “If
I knew, I wouldn’t ask.” The conversation went on like that for
a bit. We sounded like the old married couple we are. Finally,
exasperated, my wife says rhetorically, “How long have you lived
in China?” I wanted to say “too long,” but that’s really not how
I feel. I know one thing: the next time I go to the store, I’m
going to show her. I’m going to ask for something in Chinese.
It’ll be interesting to see what I get.
Bob Lucky
