2 posts tagged “chinese”

Damn you, unknown Chinese character.

I see you sitting there.  Complacent.  Smug.  You think you’re all that because you’ve got 18 strokes.

Want to hear a secret?

I think you suck big doody.

You weren’t at my fifth birthday party, when I was getting to know basic buddies like 王, 大, and 中.

You weren’t there for me for me in my Chinese school reader when I was 12.  You know who was?  香蕉 was.  So were 葡萄 and 草莓.

My first day of college.  Did you think to say hello then?  No, but communist propaganda did.  Lesson 1: 毛主席，祝你万岁! (Mao Zedong, may you live 10,000 years!)

You weren’t there for me then, you weren’t there for me ever.  And I don’t want you here now.

What’s that?  Are you calling me illiterate?!

*sob*

Fine.  I will look you up.  Just this once.  But then you’re out of here.  What happens tonight stays just between you and me.  王大中 does not need to know.

*flip flip flip*

Now you've made me angry.  Where is the heck is your radical?  You've got so many extra bits, I can’t tell your 横 from your 竖.  Hìjole... you don't need a definition, you need a shave.

I bet you’re one of those kinky characters.  I’m going to tear out all my hair, and at the end of the day, I’m going to find you in bed under some one-stroke radical.

You know what?  I’m not going to give you the pleasure.  I don’t care what you mean or how you used to be pronounced.  Your new meaning is “enormous mole with straggly, two-inch hairs trying to escape from it”.  I see it all the time here, so there might as well be a character for it.  Your new pronunciation is “aaaaaaah”, since I'm looking at you now and that's the sound coming out of my mouth.

I can't wait to butcher you the next time I sing karaoke.

I always wondered how I landed this job opportunity.  My experience is in mathematics and web design, and my Mandarin is a duck half-baked.  The last few days have clued me in to what the Professor sees in me.  She gathers me and my Chinese cohorts and asks us business questions.  My answers are so ridiculously American, so rooted in the occupational liberties of the American tech industry, that everything I say ends up being original.  Originality is a mixed bag.  Sometimes I shed new light, and my peers bask in the golden flakes of my creativity.  Sometimes I shed cat hairs.  It’s a new species of cat to them, but they’re allergic to it all the same and they wheeze politely.

There are also times when they paraphrase me, and when I confirm that they heard right they stare silently at the floor.  This is the absolute worst.  It makes me wonder if I crossed my wires.  Maybe I thought I asked why deodorant doesn’t sell well in China, but I actually asked when we were going to delouse the prime minister’s chest hair.

If only they held up placards after each of my comments, like diving judges, rating my stupidity on a scale of 1-10.  I’d learn to swim so much quicker.

Today Dr. Rose is giving me the stage for a full twenty minutes.  That stage is Chester’s Grill and my audience will be slurping up spaghetti through puckered lips and bubble tea through twizzled straws.  I stutter and stumble my way through a description of how American companies harness their employee’s creative potential.  I’m shocked that I can manage it in such fluid Chinese, and my audience seems completely receptive towards my ideas.  Chester Chicken looks at me reassuringly from my placemat with a hearty thumbs-up.

Ten minutes in, the Professor stops me short.

“That last sentence?  Try again.”

Maybe fluid Chinese and coherent Chinese aren’t quite the same thing.

Still I have to give myself credit for getting down a difficult slope.  At times I skied, at times I rolled down gracelessly in an inflatable plastic ball, but here I am at the bottom, alive and well.