Today marks our one-year anniversary of moving to China. One year of fantastic adventures--both good and character building; epicurean discoveries--both tasty and traumatic; and linguistic development--both brain damaging and, well, brain damaging.
With this important milestone crossed some friends have asked "Have you given up on Chinese yet?" Given up? Well, no. Has anyone ever noticed how stubborn I am? Frankly, I plan to keep struggling through the world's most ancient of languages until I learn it. Which may be in 10 years. Or never. Why the pessimism? Because the Fragrance Fries the Cowboy Bone.
The Fragrance Fries the Cowboy Bone is the menu description of a homely soup served up at a restaurant near Austin's work. The soup turned out to be a vile grey pile of shredded mystery animal stomach steeped in a sour juice that is a byproduct from making tofu; a soup that was a desperate invention born out of great famine and somehow still a laobeijing (old Beijing) staple.
The point is not the nose-hair curling nastiness of the soup, but rather the poetry of the description. How could my harsh Germanic oral renderings compete with such delicacy? I'm not even to Mary Had a Little Lamb and this humble restaurant hums the Rach 3.
The problem is there are just too many words and too many subtleties in Chinese. Every time I ask my dear friend and teacher Xiao Ran how to say a phrase like "take the dog for a walk" she immediately answers with 15 different choices, each more complicated and poetic than that last. I just want to walk the fucking dog. I don't need to whisk through the weeping willows with my glorious heavenly lion lapping at my heels. I don't need to prance through the peonies with my princely pal protecting me. Really I don't.
Besides, I have bigger fish to fry. I've got tone deafness in a world of tones. After one year I am just starting to hear the second tone, not that I will remember when and how to use it. (One down, three to go!) Turns out, tones are pretty important in a tonal language. My friends leap tall mountains to try to understand me but the rest of Beijing shoots me the familiar "what the hell" look while shouting "SHENME?????" (What??????) for all the world to witness my shame.
My favorite story of misunderstanding occurred last month when I walked into Jenny Lou's, a popular grocery store carrying foreign foods at extortionate prices. When I crossed the threshold I heard a loud popping and sizzling sound. I followed the noise to a corner where I saw a thick electrical cable burst into flames. A few inches from the flames was a cardboard stand carrying newspapers (think highly combustible) and fresh flowers. I quickly surveyed the area for a fire extinguisher and, not finding one, began to jump and shout "FIRE!!!!!!!" Only I was off a vowel (A and O sound very similar) and used the wrong tone so I was actually jumping up and down shouting "FLOWERS!!!!!" in front of the fresh flower stand. The cashiers and shoppers looked at me in total bewilderment: the foreigners probably noting that they should really lobby for better mental health care in China and the Chinese silently confirming what they already know to be true: those laowai (foreign people) are CRAZY.
I was clearly not getting the intended reaction and grew increasingly nervous because you do not **DO NOT** want to be in any burning building, especially one that was obviously not built-to-code and with highly noxious drywall. I figured I was using the wrong tone and launched into a second tirade in second tone. This hardly advanced my Samaritan cause as I ended up shouting "MAGNIFICENT!!!!!" instead of FIRE!!!!. I mean, the flowers were just okay, nothing special. On my third try I used the third tone: H--OO--AAH!!!! and an employee recognized it as H--OO-UUH: FIRE!!!!!! By then it was obvious because the smoke began to pour out from behind the newspaper stand. A cashier grabbed an extinguisher and doused the flames, after which I stood there for a moment, perhaps ticking off another of my nine lives or perhaps waiting for a thank you that never came, and then went on my merry way to find tortillas.
So what's there left to do besides study my arse off only to be constantly misunderstood? Well, laugh and cry a bit. And travel. I have one trip planned every month until we fly home. Now that's MAGNIFICENT!!!!!!
