You Lie! You Can Read Characters!

“So would you like to buy a Chinese History movie? Your Chinese is good enough, you can definitely understand it!” Li Ningsheng is the owner of my preferred DVD shop, and this exchange is an old one.

“No, my Chinese is not yet good enough. I will just get lost in the old language. Maybe after I have had a few Chinese classes, then my Chinese will be good enough. I will stay with foreign movies for now.” Currently these consisted of Enchanted, Stardust, and Diehard 4. I’m a complicated person with complex tastes.

“Ah, yes, you may not understand the words or the sentences, but you will understand the meaning. In China, there are so many ways to say things that oftentimes, even I don’t understand a person’s words, but I understand the meaning. You shouldn’t get stuck on trying to understand what a person says. It is enough to know what they mean. You should rent a Chinese History movie.”

Great. Not even Chinese know what each other are saying. Awesome. He is being nice, and I doubt that he is as out of the lingual loop as he makes himself sound. This isn’t the only time I’ve heard something similar, and there is a certain amount of confusion as this “new China” has increased people’s mobility, bringing in different dialects and colloquialisms.

I enjoy talking with Le Ningsheng, mostly because he enjoys talking with me. As he says, “Talking with foreigners is a very enlightening experience!” He talks very quickly, and uses fairly complicated language, but I usually understand the meaning. Sigh. Sometimes, however, I notice a switch, and realize that he’s no longer talking to me, but to who he wants me to be.

It is actually pretty common. Though the city has become more jaded to foreigners over the past few years, I am still an aberration, an oddity. I am a white person with good Chinese skills, but whose skills have a definite and abrupt limit. The Chinese I know, I know well, and can speak fluidly with uncommonly good pronunciation. Unfortunately years of neglect have atrophied my Chinese, and it is not uncommon to quickly get beyond my depth, struggling just to keep my head on top of the conversation. There isn’t really a category to put me in, and so people tend to fall into one of two camps.

Some people, and thankfully an increasingly diminishing number, never get past that I am white. Everyone knows that waiguoren don’t speak Chinese, and so they don’t even bother trying to listen if I try to talk with them. Sometimes they will go so far as to tell me that they don’t speak English, which is not what you want to hear after an urgent inquiry as to the whereabouts of the nearest restroom.

More common are the people like Li Ningsheng, who, impressed by my Chinese, decide that it is near perfect, and any attempts on my part to claim ignorance are only false modesty. I was with a Chinese friend in one of the dorm buildings examining a large map of the campus. Wanting a good laugh, she asked me where her dorm was. Even though the map was in Chinese, I was easily able to trace the route and find her building. She was astonished, and asked about another building, and then another. It wasn’t a big map, and at the end, she came to the conclusion that I knew how to read characters, and had just been lying to her for the past two weeks. I hadn’t realized it until then, but she had still been struggling with how someone who spoke as well as I did could be so ignorant of the written language.

The same thing happened when I went with Shamrock to get assigned to a Chinese class. I hadn’t met these teachers before, and we handed them the slips from our boss that were supposed to get us placed in a class. The man in charge of the foreign students said the placement exam had been that morning, apparently it was our fault that we weren’t there. Even though we didn’t know. His subordinates were much more helpful, though, and were complimented me on my Chinese, then asked where we thought we should be put. I told them I spoke pretty well, but that I didn’t know any characters. They decided that I was being falsely modest, and gave handed me the placement exam to do on my own. It was two large sheets of characters. I couldn’t even read the instructions for what I was supposed to do. I smiled and handed it back to them. They say that I should just do it as best as I could. I told them I just had.