by Alan Tien
The Chinese idioms, called chengyu, were the worst. These are four word phrases from Classical Chinese, little pearls of wisdom, packed with tons of meaning. Kind of like English idioms, such as “a chip on your shoulder,” which are meaningless when directly translated. There are like 5000 of the more “common” chengyu’s, which the Chinese use as a sign of their education, a proxy for intelligence in the Chinese culture. The smart kids in my new school liked to bandy them around to show off.
Here’s an example of a chengyu (I had to look this one up recently):
司空见惯
(If you’re old school and can’t read Chinese characters yet, it’s “sī kōng jiàn guan”).
Explanation (解释): Long story short –司空 comes from the title of “the Minister of Construction” in ancient China who commented on “sing-song girls” during a feast as见惯 (“a common sight”).
Translation (翻译): To be an everyday occurrence; nothing unusual.
Similar English Expression (类似英文成语): None that I can think of.
Example (例子):在中国，闯红灯是司空见惯的事。Zài Zhōngguó, chuǎnghóngdēng shì sīkōngjiànguàn de shì. — In China, people running red lights is a common sight.
Needless to say, most of the chengyu flew over my head. I didn’t know if they were saying someone’s name (which were all nonsensical to me, not like English’s simple “John” or “Mary”) or dropping a well-placed chengyu, not until the appreciative audience remarked at its appropriateness.
So I went from what my teachers described as showing “quiet humor” in the US to being a dumb mute in China. I could get the gist of what was being taught, or what the kids were saying around me, but if you asked me to translate verbatim, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I would often look like a deer caught in headlights when someone actually asked me a question. I started all my sentences with “uhhhh.”
The funny thing was that I would sprinkle my Chinese with small English words, like “like.” I found conjunctions like “and,” “but,” and “so” sorely missing in Chinese, or somehow I hadn’t learned how to use them correctly, so I would use these tiny bit of English in the middle of my Chinese sentences. Everyone in school was fluent in English – about the same level as my Chinese – so I’m sure it didn’t faze them; nevertheless, I felt very self-conscious every time I dropped in one of these connectors that I didn’t notice in the US but I found I couldn’t live without in China.
Ironically, English class was one of my harder subjects. Even though I was a native speaker, I spoke with an “American” accent and spelled words the “American” way, which was different from Imperial English, or IE. IE borrowed heavily from British English, probably as a minor concession to the Brits for leaving their erstwhile allies, the US, and joining the Chinese hegemony, or more probably as spite to the US for being the last major country to hold out from joining China’s “protection” until it became inevitable. I had to relearn how to spell by sticking “u’s” in random words, like “colour” and “behaviour.” The English teacher, who was Chinese, was very strict, and did not make any exceptions for American spelling. I was shocked an “F” on my first paper, since the teacher had a policy of automatically failing any paper that had any “basic” spelling and grammatical errors. My paper was returned with precise little red circles all over it, as if it had suffered a bout of smallpox.
Thank god math is a universal language so I was able to function (pun intended), as long as I could translate the instructions clearly. I struggled on all the math terminology in Chinese, which I had not learned in my Chinese class in the US. How do you say “radius,” or “mean,” or “logarithm?” I didn’t know. However, the math teacher was a little gentler with me than my English teacher. She would quietly whisper the English translation for a math problem when I seemed hopelessly stuck.
History class was the most interesting. It was like living in an alternate universe. Things I had learned, and taken for the Truth, were now turned upside down. Instead of us questioning whether China had the right to control Tibet, we debated how evil America was for annexing Texas from the Mexicans. Huh? Wasn’t Texas always part of the US? I guess next we’ll be studying how the Louisiana Purchase wasn’t a valid contract!
Though it wasn’t a class, lunch was the most challenging. My mom had cooked Chinese food when we were in the US, and our domestic helper now cooked for us at home in China. But the school cafeteria would introduce brand new things that I had never eaten before. Things I didn’t know you could or should eat. Whereas my classmates would “ooh” in delight at some of these supposed delicacies that the school provided as treats, I “ugh’ed” in disgust. Durian fruit? Smelled like something rotting, or in real ripe situations, like crap, literally. And that stink would infiltrate the entire school. They say it tastes good once you get past the smell. I think God put in that smell to warn you off not to taste it! Stinky tofu? China’s answer to French cheese like Camembert. Pig ears. Duck’s tongue. Geoduck clams were so obscene, Freud would have had a field day with those who desired to eat them. And Chinese desserts? That was an oxymoron.
The class I missed the most was gym. In the US, I would grumble like everyone else that it was gym time, pretending we were too cool to enjoy dodge ball or kick ball. But in China, we didn’t have gym class at all. There weren’t any fields to run around in. The specialized courts for sports like tennis and soccer (sorry, football, keep forgetting) were only available if you were on the team, and you had to be invited to join the team. So if you didn’t want to do any physical exercise, you could easily avoid it. Even if you wanted to, it was difficult. I found my muscles itching to do something. Luckily I came in with basketball skills so I could play with the team.
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After a few more weeks, when it seemed like the wild animal was slightly domesticated, a few of the braver students - who were eccentric enough to want to study English further because of their desire to exile themselves to the US - screwed up the courage to come talk to me. I was very polite to all of them, being acutely aware of the challenges they faced speaking my native tongue, but one person in particular caught my attention.
An elfish girl, with a jaunty cropped hair cut – very unorthodox, came up behind me and said, “Hello, this is Chang Lin.” Scared the bejesus out of me, but I turned my start into a sneeze.
“Excuse me?” I said, wiping my nose. It was half a question, half an apology for my faux sneeze.
“Hello, this is Chang Lin,” she repeated, in the exact same style as she had said it the first time. It’s the standard English opening line that they teach. I don’t know why they use the third person; it sounds so stilted.
“Uh, hi. Um, this is Austin. Austin Longwhite. Or um, Longwhite Austin.” I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to use first name then last name because I’m American, or use last name then first name because I’m in China.
“Yes, I know,” she said shyly. I caught a whiff of her, what?, shampoo? Girls were not allowed to wear makeup or perfume in school. The smell was intoxicating. I almost stumbled backwards from the vertigo. “Are you ok?” she asked in concern.
I recovered and tried to look a bit more manly. I leaned back on my locker, shooting for a nonchalant look. She gave me a quick appraisal, and I guess I had failed. It took her a lot of nerve to come over and talk to me, and here I was acting like a typical US male jerk, too cool for skool.
“Wait!” She paused but didn’t turn around. She looked over her shoulder, somewhat chillily. “Umm, are you busy after school?” I boldly went where no teenager boy had gone before. At least not this boy. “I, umm, was thinking, umm, we could, you know, do a language exchange. You know, I teach you English. You teach me Chinese.” I purposely slowed down my speech rate and enunciated clearly. Even so, I couldn’t eradicate the “umm’s” and “you know’s” from my sentence.
She hesitated. I held my breath. Was I too forward? Was I acting like a barbarian, like Fran
kenstein scaring off the natives? Should I have asked in a more circular fashion, allowing her to save face and say “yes” even if she meant no? I pushed off the locker and turned up the palms of my hands like a supplicant, trying to convey, “Only if you want…” I wasn’t sure if this gesture translated.
She just looked at me for a moment, during which I swear time slowed down. She finally snapped the time warp with a simple “Ok” and skipped off. I realized I was still holding my breath; I blew it out, but it was too late for me to say anything else.
I had my first friend.
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Chang Lin and I ended up doing our language exchange every other day, when I wasn’t playing basketball. I was the star on the basketball team. Basketball, even in my academic magnet school in the US, was played at much a higher level than my Shanghai school, which had the best basketball team in the district, evidenced by the many championship trophies displayed in the dusty case hidden at the back corner of the gym. I was definitely mediocre on my US team, a bench warmer, but here, I was the star. In the US, being the star athlete would’ve put me in the popular crowd, and I would’ve been batting away cheerleaders throwing themselves at me. Here in China, they couldn’t care less. It was the equivalent of being the top chess player in a US school’s chess club, which ironically would’ve gotten me a lot further with girls in China. I frankly was ok with my anonymity, but I was amused by what was important to my new Chinese classmates. Sports meant nothing; academics everything.
Chang Lin was different than not just the girls but almost all the other kids in school. She didn’t aspire to ace the tests and go to the top university and get a base level job in the government bureaucracy. “I want to go to the America!”
“Just America. We don’t say ‘the America.’ In fact, just say US.”
“I want to go to US!” she enthused.
“Umm, you need to put in the ‘the’ in front of US. The US.”
Undaunted, she beamed, “I want to go to the US.”
“Why?” Why would a student in the best school in the best city in the best country want to leave the one place everyone else in the world wanted to get into, and to go to the US of all places! “Why not Nigeria or Mexico or Brazil?” These countries had a young, vibrant population driving their economies, not like the old, sick Western countries that were clinging to vestiges of past glories. More importantly, these countries early on read the global super-power tea leaves and sided with China over the US. Even though they were tiny compared to China, China gave them preferential treatment as a reward for their early support, before everyone else piled in.
“This place is too close.”
I gently whispered “closed,” even though I knew what she meant was “too restrictive, confining, dull.”
“Too closed,” she continued, accepting my correction and interruption without losing track of her thread. “I want to be free! I want to be me.”
I was impressed how she summarized the American culture so succinctly.
Playing the devil’s advocate, I countered, “But the quality of living is nowhere compared to things here in MK.” “MK” stood for “Middle Kingdom,” the literal translation of what the Chinese called their own country, “Zhong Guo.” The English net abbreviated it to “MK.” “Quality of living,” that was a phrase I had learned from my mom’s expat package discussions. Since Shanghai was so much more expensive than where we had lived in the US, we were given a monthly bonus to equalize the increased “cost of living.”
“Who cares? I don’t need very much. I will only want what I have.”
Again, I admired her wisdom in quoting Buddha. Want what you have and the corollary, not want what you don’t have. I didn’t tell her that was a very un-American way of thinking.
“But what will you do there?”
She now quoted my other favorite master, Yoda. “Do? We are not human doings. Be. We are human beings.”
I felt that my objections were going nowhere, like fighting water. I decided to join her instead of continuing to spar. I remembered a quote from our Classics class from the quixotic master Lao Tzu. I intoned in Chinese, accentuating the rise and falls in the tones:
When I let go of what I am,
I become what I might be.
I’m not sure if this was contextually correct, but it sounded good, and I was rewarded with a raised eyebrow from Chang Lin. It would be an understatement to say that the Chinese prefer subtlety. I felt like a puppy given a dog treat. If I had a tail, it would’ve been wagging.
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Mr. Smith, my MakerSpace teacher, was my favorite. It helped that he was also a “foreign devil,” the affectionate term Chinese people call white people. But I really liked him because he was funny.
He was humorous in the way I was used to. Though most of his jokes and puns went over the heads of the other students, I smiled appreciatively, which in turn, made Mr. Smith like me back.
I learned early on that humor (or “humour” as my English teacher would correct) was not transferable across cultures. Only the barest, most superficial jokes made it through the otherwise impermeable humor wall between cultures. All my “quiet wit” was useless here, except for in Mr. Smith’s class. We basically had our own little secret language of inside jokes.
I also learned to my detriment that sarcasm, a poor-man’s form of humor, also didn’t work. My sarcastic “Oh really?” when someone said something patently obvious was often replied with a straight, “Yes, really.” Even worse, the person would look at me as if I were the idiot. I didn’t bother trying, “No shit Sherlock.” I tried to purge sarcasm out of my language, which is like asking a sailor to stop swearing. I had to change my whole way of thinking. I basically had to play it straight all the time. It was so boring.
Mr. Smith was a Brit. I’m not sure what made him so important to gain him entry into China, and he never explained it. At first, I didn’t know he was a Brit, just that his English accent was different from my American one. Frankly, the Aussie’s, Kiwi’s, and South African’s accents all were variations of British English, but woe be the fool who guesses the wrong one. So I didn’t bother guessing, and sure enough, Mr. Smith eventually slipped he was a Brit. One thing for sure though, the British accent makes a man sound smart to my American ears. Whenever Mr. Smith spoke, it sounded learned to me, maybe because all the shows on the extinct animals were hosted by Brits.
Mr. Smith had traveled the world before coming to MK and had done innumerable jobs on location to fund his travels. He was constantly sharing stories from his various adventures, often seemingly to be talking to himself, as the students generally ignored him for being a foreigner. Their respect for teachers I guess only went so far as Chinese teachers.
But I loved his stories and found the lessons easier to digest sugar-coated in a parable. One time, he inexplicable started on a story of when he was a whitewater rafting tour guide. We were learning about structural engineering, and we had a side project of building a bridge out of balsa wood. The other kids hated it because it wasn’t directly related to the MakerSpace objective and it required them to use their hands, but I loved it. I think the thought of the river rushing under the bridges brought up his story.
“When you are in whitewater rapids, you have to row as a team. You can mess around in the calm waters and it won’t really matter, but when you’re coming up to the rapids, everyone’s got to listen to the guide.” Ironically, nobody was listening to him, except me. “The guide will tell you the direction to row in so you enter the rapids at the right place, in the right angle, at the right speed. We all have to row hard and in synch up to that point. And then, do you know what we do when we enter the rapids?” he asked rhetorically.
I hazarded a guess, “You row really, really hard?”
He looked up, surprised somebody answered him. He smiled, “No, you pull in your oars.”
“Why?” I spluttered at this ridiculous idea.
Mr. Smith bask
ed in my confusion. He finally had an audience. “For 3 reasons. First, you may lose your oar in the rapids because of the power of the water or from catching a rock. Second, even worse, your oar may get stuck under a rock and fling you out of the raft. Third, the worst case, your stuck oar could flip the entire raft, risking not just your own safety but everyone else’s wellbeing.”
I nodded, satisfied with the reasoning.
“This is kind of like life,” he pontificated, now that he had a keen student. “When things are calm, you should work hard to get to where you want to go. But when things get crazy, and trust me they will, fight your natural instinct to work even harder. Pull in your oars, have faith that you’ve done your best to get there, and ride out the rapids.” He then tied it back to our Classics class with a quote from Lao Tzu:
Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them - that only creates sorrow.
Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.
That’s what I love about Mr. Smith. He helps me understand the master Lao Tzu’s paradoxical quotes, which totally don’t make any sense in Classics class.
Since my last Lao Tzu quote worked so well with Chang Lin, I tried again.
Anticipate the difficult
by managing the easy.
Mr. Smith looked at me appraisingly. “Wise beyond your years, young Jedi.” I think this compliment would’ve gone over the heads of my classmates, even if they were listening, but it made me feel all warm and squishy inside.
So, I loved Mr. Smith’s class because I could exercise my shriveling “funny muscle” and because he wrapped life’s lessons in easy to understand stories. But the best part of his class was that I could use my hands and move around. All the other classes required us to sit like stones, recite back what the teacher said, accepting the lecture as gospel. I remembered in the US, if the teacher made a mistake, the class would burst out laughing and the teacher would gamely continue on. I actually reddened in shame at the thought of this happening in my new school.
