I was anxious to get started on my studies. I had hired a tutor immediately upon landing in Beijing, an out-of-work engineer named Lido. We spent a full week together, but I made almost no progress. I couldn’t even count from one to ten without him correcting my pronunciation at least once. At the end of the week he sent me a text: “There was a death in my family. I need to return to my village.” I hadn’t even paid him. Was I that terrible a student?
Learning Chinese felt like hitting my head against a brick wall. They say it’s difficult, but I never once considered that I could spend forty hours studying with a tutor, one-on-one, and come out of it without even a single useful phrase I could utter correctly.
I needed a proper tutor, one with experience teaching English natives who found tones difficult. I figured once we found an apartment and put down some roots, it would be easier to devote my full attention to learning the language. Also, it was important that we pick a tutor who lived in whatever city neighborhood we landed in. Considering it could take two hours to drive from one side to the other, this was key. The days ticked by and I doggedly searched for houses, dragging Drew and Cole all over the city to look at apartments.
• • •
BEAUTIFUL PICTURES OF ICE CASTLES be damned, we had yet to see even one snowflake. In fact, I soon learned that winter is the worst time of year to come to Beijing. Beyond the cold, the pollution is higher because there’s no rain to wash it away. There were no kids outside. On bad days, you couldn’t see more than a foot in front of you, and the sickly smell of burned cabbage was undeniable. I checked the pollution levels posted by the U.S. Embassy, and the PM2.5, a pollution level measurement published daily by the Air Quality Index, was 502. The index only goes up to 500. It was literally off the charts.
For me, the pollution and the cold had joined forces and that back-of-the-throat tickle exploded into a massive head cold. And Cole was sick. He stayed up most of the night. Drew started coughing, too. We were miserable. Drew had taken on a large new client, so he was overwhelmed with work, but he seemed overwhelmed by China as well. The majestic snowcapped winter wonderland that I had shown him in photos had failed to materialize. Instead, he was in a city that felt too large to navigate, where it was winter without snow, and that had pollution that kept us housebound.
Finally I found something: a two-bedroom in Beijing’s Koreatown, about an hour’s drive from the university area. The price made Drew suck in air between his teeth, but it was either this place or getting on the next flight home. Plus it had an indoor heated pool.
“Cole would love that,” I said.
We packed up, and an hour later we arrived in Wangjing, where I soon realized, as the driver circled up and down the main strip of road, that we were lost. I gave the driver my phone again, and he studied it, pinching with his fingers on the screen to zoom in and out of the Google Map.
I had tried for a few days to use Mandarin with taxi drivers, but after being literally kicked out of several cabs by surly drivers who did not want to deal with me, I’d resorted to always traveling with my home and destination addresses handwritten on a slip of paper I kept in my wallet. Plus I loaded Google Maps in hanzi (Chinese characters) on my phone with the start and end locations mapped. When I got into a cab, I would just hand the piece of paper to the driver. Then I’d gauge his reaction. He would never just take off and start driving. Never, not once. No one ever knew where we were going, except one glorious day when we got into a cab and announced in Mandarin, “The Summer Palace.” Normally, when I gave the driver the piece of paper, he’d shake his head no. Then I’d show him my phone, he’d sit there studying it for a long time, and then reluctantly, if we were lucky, he’d hand the phone back to me and start driving.
Finally we spotted it—the lonely entrance to our new high-rise condo. There were Chinese New Year posters hung in the lobby windows and a lone red tassel blowing in the wind. It looked just like every other building on the block. Home, identical home.
Still, the apartment was quite nice, with a full bathtub, central heating (rare in Beijing, I’d learned), and a bow-shaped office overlooking the city on the north side. As I unpacked, I told Cole about the pool and how he would get to go swimming every day. He got so excited that we soon went to the front desk to ask about pool access. Between my dictionary and our broken exchange of English and Mandarin, the receptionist gave me the hours.
“Xie xie!” I said, happy that finally, at last, we were getting somewhere.
At the fifteenth floor, I put Cole down and tried to open the pool room door. I could feel the warm humid air, smell the chlorine, and hear the sound of someone swimming laps. But the door was locked. When I pushed on it, it gave just enough to let me see a sliver of blue. Cole gave the door a shove, too, then looked up at me. I sighed. We went back downstairs.
Key. Key. What’s the word for key? Yaoshi? I tried “yaoshi” and she shook her head no. She called her manager and handed me the phone.
I put the phone to my ear and asked, “Is there a key?”
“Yes. There is a key,” said the manager slowly.
“Great!” I gave Cole a thumbs-up. “Can we get the key?”
“Yes, you buy a membership.”
“Uh, wait, it’s not included?”
“Yes, you buy a membership,” repeated the manager.
“Okay.” We’d play his game. “I want to buy a membership. How much?”
“Uh . . . It’s for one-year residents.”
I paused. “So . . . not us.”
“Yes,” said the manager.
“So we can’t buy a membership?”
“No.”
We took the elevator back up to the apartment, defeated. I put Cole on the bed and collapsed next to him. The cool sheets felt good. Drew sat on the edge of the bed.
“Oh, who cares, Drew,” I said, not really addressing anything.
“I like it here,” Drew said tentatively, as if he were willing himself to believe it.
I put on a smile. “I know, this place is nice. And now I can finally get started on the language.”
Drew rubbed my back. “Let’s see what’s on TV,” he said, and pointed the remote at the flat screen bolted to the wall.
“Oh, look, Cole! It’s Xi Yang Yang,” I sang. Xi Yang Yang was a cartoon about a wolf who is trying to eat a family of sheep but is forever thwarted. He’s starving, the sheep are right there, but no matter what he does, no matter what scheme he comes up with, in the end, the sheep win.
I felt like I was the wolf. China was my sheep. It had seemed so simple, really. Move to China, learn the language, have a grand adventure and learn something new. But everything seemed so difficult.
I lay back again, closed my eyes, and listened to Xi Yang Yang playing in the background, the shrill voice of the main character distinguishable to me now. I wanted the Mandarin to get into my brain already, to take root. I listened to each sound with careful attention, trying to understand. It still didn’t mean anything. Total nonsense. But I hoped that would change.
• • •
WITH THE POLLUTION, child-friendly activities like going for walks, playing at the park, or just playing outside had all been eliminated, so swimming seemed like at least one thing we could do beyond watching Mandarin cartoons nonstop while locked up in our twenty-fifth-floor apartment (which so far had mostly been what we’d done). We found a pool down the road from us, on the first floor of a brand-new mall with shiny floors, designer boutiques, and almost no customers. It was a private gym for the adjacent hotel, the kind of place that has high-end art and diamond necklaces for sale in the lobby, but they offered a day pass, so we gave it a go.
After paying an outrageous-for-China $10 each, we took our mandatory swimming caps to the locker room. A half-dozen older Chinese women were standing there already, all completely naked, unselfconsciously bending over or lifting a leg to
dry themselves. When Cole and I found our locker and started to change into our swimwear, they turned to watch me undress. I took off my top and my pants, and then, standing in my bra and panties, I turned to scan the room. They were still watching me. The friendly chatter had stopped and now, I was sure, I was giving these women their first glimpse into what an American woman’s postchild body looks like. Off came the panties, up came the bathing suit, and remembering something from my high school locker room days, I managed to slip my bra off without revealing too much.
Cole was running around completely naked, and they pointed and laughed. I called after him in English and wished I had enough Mandarin—any, really—to make conversation with these women. I said, “Ni hao” (hello) to the women as I scooped Cole up, and when they responded, I had no way of guessing what they said. I felt like a mute without language, resorting to smiling too much and racking my brain for something I could say.
The pool was freezing. There were no kids—just one man swimming laps like he was trying not to disturb the water with each stroke. After five minutes, Cole’s lips were blue and I sheepishly returned to the locker room, where the women were still naked and chatting with one another. This time I didn’t bother to be modest; I stripped down and dressed as quickly as possible.
• • •
A FEW DAYS LATER, I interviewed an ayi (pronounced ahh-yee), which is the Mandarin word for “aunt” but is used to refer to a nanny or housekeeper—a woman who cleans, cooks, and looks after the children. In my case, she would provide some much-needed practice in Mandarin.
When I’d spent those months researching Krashner and Cook while in Thailand, I’d decided that my plan of attack for learning Mandarin would be all immersion, all the time. I’d get a tutor who only spoke with me in Chinese. I’d force myself to speak Chinese all day with shopkeepers, passersby, apartment staff, and anyone else I could snag for a few minutes. This was my grand plan. But two months into our language experiment, it was a nonstarter. Because of my lack of consideration of cold and pollution, plus just how big a megacity like Beijing really was, we had landed in the opposite of an immersion situation: completely cut off from the world. We spent each day totally isolated in our apartment, talking only to one another, breathing filtered air, and huddling under blankets. Our toddler didn’t want to go out, and even when he did, we constantly worried what the air would do to his tender lungs.
So I wasn’t living an immersive experience, to say the least. Since I couldn’t spend my days outside, Marco Poloing through Beijing and striking up conversations with strangers all day, the only solution seemed to be to hire people to come to us. My tutors at first, and now an ayi, even though Drew and I both worked from home. It had to be better than nothing.
Yang Mei Hong arrived promptly, having no problem finding our apartment. I was cognizant that Beijing is extremely difficult, but only for new arrivals. The drama we constantly experienced navigating the city just didn’t exist in the same way for locals. I sent Mei Hong the address and she took the right bus at the right time to our neighborhood and found our building among the row of identical ones without even breaking a sweat.
Meanwhile, I had been preparing for this moment with my Mandarin. I hired another tutor and asked him to translate a set of useful phrases for me, and recorded him saying each one. Then, I spent the entire weekend drilling and memorizing, exactly how Krashner said not to learn a language. It felt like preparing for a play.
When the front desk called to announce Mei Hong’s arrival, I quickly checked my notes, running through them out loud and emphasizing the tones I had marked next to each word. The agency had warned me that she didn’t speak any English, so I had to make this work.
According to the profile the agency provided, Mei Hong was born in Anhui Province, which is south of Beijing, close to Nanjing. In her picture she had side-swept bangs and a pleasant face that looked a little tired. She was just three years older than me, had never had children, didn’t smoke, and lived with her husband. The recommendation letter came from an American family, and the mother raved about Mei Hong. “Yang Mei Hong has worked for our family for six years . . . She has lots of initiative . . . always clever . . . never taken a single day off . . . never asked for an increase in her salary.”
The part that caught my attention was this: “She has been the most wonderful Chinese teacher we had. None of us spoke a word of Mandarin when we arrived here, and now, thanks to her, we are quite fluent. Especially the children! Amazing the way they learned with her not only the language but also some traditional Chinese music!”
She sounded perfect: like a Chinese Mary Poppins. I had visions of her cheerfully singing “A Spoonful of Sugar” in Mandarin. Cole would eat Chinese noodles and steamed dumplings while holding his chopsticks the right way (not like he did now, which looked like he was going to stab someone) and babbling away in Mandarin.
I pounced on the door before she could even pull her finger off the buzzer.
“Ni hao,” I said excitedly.
“Ni hao,” she responded.
“Huanying!” I said, making a sweeping gesture into the apartment. Welcome!
She stood there for a moment and then stepped two paces into the apartment and stopped.
“Leng bu leng?” Cold out?
“Leng.” Cold.
Next came a tricky one. It had a swallowed syllable, something of the Beijing accent that I hadn’t mastered, even when practicing with my tutor.
“Ni xiang he dian’er shenme?” Would you like something to drink?
She opened her eyes wide, not understanding. I tried it again, this time more slowly. I made a gesture of drinking. She declined. Oh no, I thought sadly, now I can’t use my little “presenting her with a beverage” prepared remarks.
“Zuo ba,” I said, and she turned and took a seat. Please sit.
“Wo shi Christine,” but I didn’t say Christine. I said my name in Chinese, Ke Lis Ting Na. Beijingers add a little r sound to the Ke, making it sound a little closer to Kristina. In fact, celebrities with crossover appeal in China all have Chinese names. Avril Lavigne, who is huge in China, is known as Ai Wei Er (it sounds like Avril if you say it quickly).
Drew was sitting in the living room, watching this play out with bemusement.
I continued:
“Ta shi An Der Lu,” I said, pointing at Drew (sounds like “Andrew”). “Ta shi Cole.” I gestured at Cole. “Ta liang sui le.” He is two years old. “Ni xi bu xi huan xiao hai?” Do you like children?
I was talking slowly, with exaggerated pauses between each word, probably confusing this poor woman, and I just asked her a question—as if I could possibly understand what she said in reply.
Despite my lack of confidence, she understood. She started talking in Mandarin at a rapid clip, and I assume she told me how much she loved children and how her whole life she just wanted to play with a little kid as cute as my son. She was probably certified in first aid and had experience teaching children’s swim lessons and once saved a child’s life by accurately diagnosing her peanut allergy. Who knows? I let the syllables roll over me like a wave, smiling fixedly and nodding.
She stopped talking, and I assumed she had asked me a question. Um . . . I jumped up and gestured for her to follow me. To express this, I used the overly complicated phrase “Wo geng ne shou yi xia ne de gong zou,” which I butchered, but it’s okay, she got the point: I was going to show her what I needed done around the apartment. There was cleaning the bathroom, doing laundry, washing the floor, tidying up (a very easy “shou shi” and she responded “dui, dui,” yes, yes), and making the beds. It was a short list because it had been so difficult to memorize.
She started going into my closet, pulling out buckets and mops, and I realized that she was going to start cleaning right now. Midinterview, as if I wanted her to demonstrate her cleaning skills to get the job. Her hair was pulled up in
a ponytail that swung side to side and she bounced around the house, preparing to clean.
“Um . . .” I had not memorized any phrases for this, so I was left to comically mime, Not now, later, and ushered her back to the living room.
“Duo he ta shou hua,” I said, pointing to my son. Speak to him a lot. For a moment I feared she’d think that that, too, was something she should do right now, but Mei Hong wisely chose to not take me literally this time and remained silent. At a loss for other words, I pulled out my laptop and opened up Google Translate, so we could type to each other. It was slow going, because the translation wasn’t quite right; I had to unravel the mash-up of bad grammar and random nonsense words, but eventually I understood that she wanted Chinese New Year off the next year. I typed back that we wouldn’t be here in a year, which only disappointed her more. She agreed to start today, and that was it. I had just hired a Chinese ayi to watch my child, talk to him in Chinese, and clean the house.
“Hen hao,” I announced—very good—and went to my office while she cleaned my already clean apartment. To be honest, I basically ran and hid, because I was somewhat mortified. I tried to imagine the situation reversed: Mei Hong coming to the United States and hiring me to clean her house, using just the English she could pick up over the weekend. What could I have sounded like?
Later, Drew poked his head in and said, “That went great! I was so proud of you! But I have no idea what you said!”
I wanted to burst out laughing. Apparently, I was fantastic at Mandarin; it just depended who you asked.
Six
I started making progress. Finally. In my forty-hour-a-week study schedule, with the collection of books I bought at the Beijing Language and Culture University bookstore, plus my weekly tutoring and time spent chatting with Mei Hong, I was learning Mandarin. I still felt stuck in a pit of despair over the fact that this wasn’t Krashner’s kind of immersion. Because we were trapped inside all day, our lives seemed like some kind of dreary cross between what happens after the zombie apocalypse (you wait it out in your apartment) and one of those feverish nightmares you’d have in college about not having studied for the exam and madly trying to cram a semester’s worth of knowledge into your brain in the five minutes you have until the test.
Mother Tongue Page 6