Last May I wrote my thing on my experiences in China. Today I decided to follow up on that by writing on them some more. Honestly, time makes fools of us all by flying by so fast that I’d better write these memories down before they are but extinguished neurons.

Last time I told about my encounters with some locals. What I did not write about, however, were the events that preceded my trip to China. Not explaining the reasons that led me there was a bit of an oversight, to be fair. During my university studies I had to take a mandatory course on technical writing in English. As I stepped into the classroom for the first time I found an available seat next to another student who happened to be from Vietnam. We got talking and we developed an academic bond that over time evolved into proper friendship. Anyway, eventually she told me about Tet, the Vietnamese New Year celebration that was held in February. I already knew that in the Far East people celebrated Lunar New Year but I had never experienced it myself. She invited me to her place and we had a great meal there. That was the spark that turned my emerging interest in East Asia into a real wildfire.

Fortunately, at my university it was possible to take up a minor in East Asian studies. I enrolled on the program, and as was required by the program, I had to choose one between three possible languages to study; Chinese, Korean and Japanese. At that point they all seemed equally difficult to me. However, there were a lot of people enrolling for Japanese classes, so they had a pre-requirement that all participants should have a preliminary understanding of the language. That, plus me associating people studying Japanese with such an enthusiasm with general weebyness, anime body pillows and such, I ruled Japanese out. I had to choose between Chinese and Korean. At that point I didn’t know much about Korea, except that they treat their young pop idols like cattle. China I knew to be a big player in international politics and economy, so the weights were lifting in their favor.

So, I enrolled on the Chinese course. Our teacher was lovely old Chinese lady, Mrs. Zhu, or as we called her, Zhu Laoshi, who had emigrated from China decades ago. Our classes were taught mainly in English with some Mandarin Chinese sprinkled in there as we progressed. Mrs. Zhu was a really sweet woman, and in a way a sad testament of how it was to live in China during the Mao reign. Get this: she told us that when she was a kid, for one of her birthdays she got an egg as a present, since in the 1950s China an egg was the equivalent of a modern iPhone.

Anyway, Mrs. Zhu was a really demanding teacher, as you can imagine an old Chinese mother to be. I used to spend about an hour per assignment drawing my Chinese characters, because I wanted to get the strokes just right. And for my efforts, Mrs. Zhu gave me praise for my beautiful writing style. Not much praise for my pronunciation, though. She also had a thick Chinese accent and didn’t speak the best English, which is understandable. She did enough for us students to understand her well. One time she told us a fairly important contextual difference that we had to look out for when talking to a native speaker, and that was the case of the word xiaojie. Xiaojie under regular circumstances is the Mandarin equivalent of the English miss, as in the pronoun one uses to refer to a young lady. For example, when trying to catch the attention of a young waitress, you would call her by xiaojie. However, that word has a secondary meaning, as it can also be used to refer to a prostitute. If you go to a shady street corner motel and ask the receptionist if they have any xiaojie, it is very apparent what you are after. So, she taught us an important lesson. However, bless her sweet old heart, she didn’t explain it in the most correct grammatical sense. She explained that xiaojie can refer to a prostitute, a person who, and I quote, “sells the sex”. A small grammatical mistake that in no way shrouds the meaning of the phrase, but the unnecessary article made me laugh in class.

I did not continue my Chinese studies under Mrs. Zhu after I got back from China. I went on and completed my minor and got involved in the East Asian studies student club instead. That can be a story for another time. What I do want to expand on is that if you want to study Mandarin Chinese, you should not do it in mainland China. I did study Mandarin Chinese there for a year, under several teachers, all natives, and not one grasped how difficult learning Mandarin Chinese as a second language is. I did actually meet a guy on the airport on my way there who was from Hong Kong and spoke Cantonese as his native language. He said that, yes, native Mandarin speakers do not always get that their native language is hard to learn for some, and they don’t understand it because they only speak that one language and have spoken that specific language their whole lives. Your best bet is either abroad or in Hong Kong, if you want a teacher who understands the struggle.

Hopefully I can make this an annual thing to air out my recollections. These paragraphs may bore the socks off of some people, but these memories are very special to me and I enjoy writing them down. I still have some in store and maybe I’ll get back to them on a later date.