As I’ve written on a number of occasions, my language woes here are many. I have trouble articulating myself properly, speaking to my students, making small talk with teachers, etc. Just last week my banzhuren (the woman in charge of my class) came over to me saying something about a book and 25 kuai and I, to this day, do not understand what that was about. Apparently, however, I was not supposed to pay the 25 kuai (that much I could ask and understand the answer to), but two days later she showed up with a copy of a review book for me and the news that my students would be receiving theirs over the weekend. Why, and who’s paying for them? Mysteries both.
So that’s a classic case of language barrier in action. Another comes pretty much daily, when I stand in front of my class and say something in Chinese (like “last name”) that results in fits of giggles from my students. At first, I ignored these outbursts, but now I’ve started to question them with: “我说什么错了？”(What did I say wrong?) Sometimes the kids will tell me, and other times they won’t. I suspect that when they won’t it’s because I’ve said something inappropriate, but, again, mystery reigns.
Every Monday, I am obligated to attend two meetings: a full faculty meeting at 3 PM, and an English department meeting at 10:25 AM. The full faculty meetings are usually long (although not painfully so) and dull, as much for the local teachers as for us CEI fellows. I sorta try to pay attention, but my language skills do not allow me to glean full comprehension of anything and do not even let me catch the gist of some topics. I always bring my little vocab notebook and scribble away; sometimes this allows me to acquire such useful words as “lawn” and “bonus;” at other moments, my listening skills and the speakers’ accents combine in such horrifyingly inaccurate ways that my dictionary spits out engineering and computer science terminology. I keep trying though.
The English meetings are both nicer and scarier, because they are smaller. There are perhaps ten English teachers at our school, all of whom speak English with varying degrees of success. A few try to engage Mark and me in English conversation, while others will utter a word of English only under extreme duress. These meetings are casual, with teachers throwing around various questions and ideas for the classroom. Mark and I have been mostly quiet so far, except when practicing English with those teachers who have shown interest. We try to follow along as best we can, and when conversation moves slowly enough we sometimes can at least get the main ideas. However, the English teachers truly like to talk, and sometimes a particular topic gets them fired up, and everybody starts to talk at once. When this happens, I’m screwed. It’s a cacophonous mess, the universe’s sense of order ripped into spheres of utter chaos. If I can ever come to understand those moments, I will feel as though I am the best non-native Chinese speaker in existence. For now, Mark and I just wait for passions to cool.
So those are all distinctly language-based examples of communication difficulty, but there’s other sorts of communication too. I have two excellent stories for you that nicely illustrate this point: The Wuzixi (Noon Study) that Wasn’t, and The Bank Account Debacle
The Wuzixi (Noon Study) that Wasn’t
So, last Thursday I was to teach my usual noon study. It’s only a 35-minute class and quite casual. I normally just let the kids have a study hall, and that was my plan for Thursday too. However, when I arrived at my classroom, I saw that it was already quite occupied, and not with my students but with my banzhuren and what looked to be my students’ parents. I remembered YiMing saying something about there being a parents’ meeting on Thursday during lunch, but this description had not included the idea of there being fifty adults in my classroom when I expected to be able to use it. Lunch ends, after all, at 1:20, which is the time my class was to begin.
At first, I assumed the meeting was just running late, and I tried to keep my kids (congregated in the hallway just outside the door) on the quiet side. However, with 1:30 quickly approaching and my kids growing ever-more-antsy, it was clear I needed to take more drastic action. There was nowhere to go but outside, so that’s where I took them. I lost a few of my boys along the way, but it couldn’t be helped. After all, my class was one of two or three without access to their rooms, and I had an assortment of not-my-students tagging along, bringing my count of 49 up to at least 60. So I led the kids out and we made a circle, and I improved like mad. We did chants and songs and name games. I shouted myself hoarse and then some. All the while, I kept an eye on our room, in the hopes that at any moment the door would open, the parents would leave, and we could return to normal. No such luck. At 1:55, the time my wuzixi was scheduled to end, I let the kids go and I went back to drink some tea and soothe my poor throat. My banzhuren never said anything to me, so I guess that’s what I was expected to do?
The Bank Account Debacle
Last Sunday (I know, banks are open on Sunday! What a concept), Ma LiJun, Mark, and I went to the Agricultural Bank of China to open accounts. Our school does direct deposit, and because we hadn’t yet opened bank accounts we hadn’t been paid for September. Ma LiJun’s account should have been pretty straightforward to set-up. She would just need her government ID card and a couple of other easily-acquirable things. Mark and I, being Americans, required our passports and an official note from our school stating that we were employees there.
Once we arrived at the bank, we discovered that Ma LiJun could not, in fact, open an account, because her old credit card number was from a different province and thus they couldn’t find a record of it. Why this makes any sense at all I really don’t know.
Then it was Mark’s turn, and mine. Nervously, we handed over our passports and the note. At first they were confused as to how to use a passport rather than a Chinese ID card as a proof of ID. Once they figured that out, the real problems began. American passports, you see, list one’s surname on one line and follow it up on the second with one’s first and middle names. Our note from the school had our first names first and last names last and included no middle names at all. We tried to explain that middle names were not important in America and that only the first and last names mattered, but they wouldn’t budge. Much more important than the lack of middle name, however, and even the fact that the names were written in different orders, was the fact that while our passports had our names written in all caps, our school note had only the first letter of each name capitalized. MAJOR issue! Big, big problem! As Mark and I spent our first weeks here teaching the alphabet, we were able to explain, using proper terminology, that in English there’s (in this situation) no difference in meaning between big and small letters, but according to our teller that was absolutely not true, and having all caps versus just the first letter in caps meant that our names were entirely different on one form of ID than on the other. BIG problem.
So, in short, none of us opened accounts that day (don’t worry—we got a new note and opened them two days later).
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