Why Trump’s tweets and TV ads were antisemitic and why Jared Kushner was an apologist. We learned the word for ‘stereotype.’ Later in class, my teacher wanted me to learn how to say ‘stoplight,’ and I joked that it was a useless word I’d never use because Chinese people never look at them. “But that’s a stereotype!” she said.I had a hard time explaining Hillary’s campaign ideas partly because I didn’t know the vocab but mostly because it was hard to come up with stuff. The “Stronger Together” concept didn’t make alot of sense.
Chinese Things
The Chinese tennis coach offered me $3/hr to teach. I said it was too low for me (I pay my badminton coach $15). He then said he could set up a class for me to teach the parents how to get their kids into American colleges playing tennis. Mind you this is the head coach of the gym, and he was asking me for tips on his forehand. I politely declined, saying I had no guanxi in the US.
When buying a new MacBook charger the store owner was shocked I didn’t try before I bought it and insisted that I do so.
How in American shows about medieval times all the clothes are dirty, but in ancient Chinese dramas their clothes are always clean.
My new game with my tutors is to start a conversation on TanTan (Chinese tinder) and every sentence I have to use a different grammar.
Trump Update
I’ll have to record for you all the way my tutor pronounces “Smooch”. Her take after I translated the New Yorker article about the leaks: “小题大做” from a small problem you make a big one rise.
And thank god she knew what a “cockblock” was.
China as a Prison
Last week my dad asked me to describe my life. I said that there wasn’t much to it: every day, I see the same people, eat the same meals, and work out all the time. His response: “sounds like prison!”
Living in a gorgeous Chinese tourist town on fifteen dollars a day obviously isn’t like a jail. Most importantly, I’ve constructed my own linguistic cell walls. I’ve chosen not to make friends with the other Americans in my program, speak to my tutors only in Chinese, and cut myself off almost entirely from English-language media.
But as a result of swearing off English, my world has shrunk pretty dramatically. Take restaurants, for instance. In New York, I’d rarely go to the same place twice. But here, since so little food is familiar and the effort required to explore new menus is so high, I’ve been drawn more and more towards proven entities (my jianbing breakfast, kung pao chicken dinner, mango smoothie dessert and spicy peanut snacks).
New neighborhoods are equally challenging. Even with Baidu Maps (which has next to no English), I still get lost or stuck on the wrong side of a highway. Further, since Guilin doesn’t have as many Mobikes as Beijing, I can bike somewhere, lock my bike up, and an hour later find that I have to walk thirty minutes to find a new one. So I just stay around my house.
But engaging in conversation is the most imposing wall. People on the street constantly start random conversations with me. I say my short spiel (“I’m American, 27 years old, in Guilin to study Chinese…”) but once they get past the most obvious five questions, my face invariably goes blank. While I’m not easily discouraged, I’m no longer excited when people start talking to me. I know I only have about thirty seconds before we hit the moment when they realize that the second sentence Chinese always say to foreigners (“your Chinese is so good!”) isn’t the case.
I’ve also developed a little Stockholm Syndrome. Last weekend I met up with a friend of a friend for lunch. She’s from Guilin but has been studying at Syracuse and speaks fluent English. We had a fascinating conversation that would’ve been impossible in Chinese, but the whole time I had a stomach knot as if I was cheating on an exam.
I have two windows into the wider world. First, the English language content I’ve let myself consume. I’m still listening to podcasts and audiobooks, but since they’re exclusively about China, they don’t quite feel like breaks in the wall. However, The news I read each morning and your replies to this newsletter (which I really appreciate!) feel like messages you get a few light years after the fact like on the Wall-E ship.
Initially, I tried to replace American music but gave that up pretty quickly. Mainland mainstream Chinese music is wack–the charts are full of slow ballads that aren’t worth the effort to translate because they’re universally corny. Hip hop is just getting its footing here–soon I’ll write about the biggest new show of the summer “China Has Hip Hop”–but the production is uniformly iffy. The bros at the gym who I asked to recommend Chinese music to lift to thought the question itself ridiculous as their own playlists are full of Future and Migos. Also, my whole life I’ve been using music to change my mood and giving that up in an unfamiliar situation wouldn’t be the smartest call.
My second window is the Chinese I learn. I get a ton of satisfaction from hearing some word I’ve learned out in real life. But surprisingly, new grammar has proven even more liberating. Even if I don’t know what someone’s actually saying, it’s much easier to get the jist of what they’re saying if you hear “not only…but also…” or the particle that means you’re making a suggestion.
With so little Mandarin, life is lonely and infantilizing. But I’ve got just one more month till Beijing, and it’s fascinating to feel like you’re on the moon.
