After two weeks in China, what I’m most homesick for, besides our friends and our dog, is the ease of communication in my own language, the ability to make offhand remarks and casual observations.
Our housekeeper, cook, and Chinese tutor Ms. H. speaks a little English. Combine that with my sparse and fairly useless Chinese phrases, and we know just enough of each other’s language to generate a lot of confusion. Add in some good will and a genuine desire to communicate, and we can spend two hours on one simple sentence.
For instance, I might say, “My, what a beautiful tree.” Ms. H. nods and repeats back to me, in Chinese, what she thought I just said. If I don’t smile and nod enthusiastically, despite the fact that I don’t understand Chinese, the conversation is bound to continue.
She’ll do a pantomime of a tree, and then I’ll do a pantomime of a tree, and pretty soon this will evolve into a full-scale interpretive dance where we’ll both re-enact the beauty of the tree, and if I don’t smile and nod and put on my shoes to go out, she’ll whip out her electronic translator, and then I’ll open the translator on my computer, and I’ll type away while she traces characters on her screen. Our devices take our words, filter them through the others’ idioms, and spit back total nonsense.
She reads my words converted to characters on her device and then writes what she thought I said, and it comes out, “Upside down your pleasing roots?” She looks understandably confused.
I try again on my computer: “My, what a beautiful tree.” The words are converted to pinyin. She reads them and types something: “Belonging to you the lovely vegetation?” her screen says.
I type, “Oh, my, that tree is beautiful” and she types something else: “Branches and leaves oh glorious possessions?”
Finally I realize that the word “My” is getting in the way, and so I type, “That tree is beautiful” and she looks puzzled, because apparently now the pinyin words say, “You like botanic study in the everywhere?”
Finally, exhausted, we both smile and nod and repeat our beautiful tree interpretive dance and end things on a friendly note, still feeling a bit puzzled.
Some afternoons, Sophie and I take Chinese lessons. Slowly we are learning to say things like, “I want to go shopping,” “He is my big brother,” and “I like to watch TV,” which we don’t, actually, because it’s all in Chinese. And anyway, you can learn all the words and sentence constructions in the world, and if you get the tones wrong, no one will understand what you’re saying. Deborah Fallows writes about a story by a writer named Chao Yuan Ren that demonstrates the difficulty of the Chinese language. The story is made up of 92 characters, each, she says, “pronounced the same way, shi—the story of a poet (shi) named Shi who loves to eat lions (shi shi), goes to the market (shi) to buy ten (shi) of them, takes them home to eat (shi) and discovers they are made (shi) of stone (shi).”
So even though I can now say, “Today is Friday, yesterday was Thursday, tomorrow is Saturday, the day after tomorrow is Sunday,” this was no help whatsoever the first time we went to a Bank of China, the branch near our apartment, to exchange money.
At Chinese banks, each teller has a little machine that displays his or her customer satisfaction rating. But customers can’t choose the teller with the highest rating. It’s the luck of the draw, the first teller who posts your number. This is how we got stuck with the teller who had two stars out of five. She said something to me, and I said, “I don’t speak Chinese.” So she said something to Sophie. Sophie also shook her head and said, “I don’t speak Chinese.” The woman looked irritated and went on, faster and louder, staring forcefully at Sophie, who kept shaking her head.
With a disgusted grunt, the woman started fingering my twenty dollar bills with evident displeasure. They were relatively crisp and clean, but she examined a slightly bent corner and flipped the money over to trace a fold in the middle of one bill. She said something else to Sophie.
Sophie shook her head. She still didn’t speak Chinese.
Finally, the woman called to a supervisor who spoke some English. “We cannot exchange this money,” he said. “It is dirty.”
The problem was not, after all, slight bends or folds, but something no American would have ever noticed, a tiny bit of red dye that had bled onto the edge of the bills, probably from a thin strip of paper that some business or bank had once used to secure them together.
On our way out of the bank, I pushed the “dissatisfied” button.
Two days later at a Bank of China branch in Yangshuo, where Western tourists are much more common, a cheerful teller with three stars barely glanced at the “dirt” on my bills, and I successfully exchanged them.
At first I thought maybe if we’d spoken fluent Mandarin at the first bank, I would have had the language to marshal some great argument for why they should accept my money. But later I understood that if we’d spoken fluent Mandarin at the first bank, the two-star teller probably never would have gotten irritated with us in the first place.
Nevertheless, we’re making progress, if somewhat slow. After Sophie practiced reading a pinyin book with Ms. H. one day, Ms. H. wrote on her translator, “You are very strong.” She meant that Sophie had done a good job, and we knew that, even if her device’s interpretation sounded slightly sinister: “Your blood is worth bottling,” it said.