Mei Hong arrived, and Cole greeted her in Mandarin. “Ni hao!”
She crouched down and talked to him in Mandarin. He talked back to her excitedly. Mei Hong stood back up and told me he wanted milk. I hadn’t heard him saying “niúni” (sounds like “new-nigh”), but she had caught it. It seemed more and more like his babyish babble contained fragments of Mandarin that I didn’t notice—or maybe it was easy to interpret baby talk however you wanted. I went to go get Cole some milk, but Mei Hong skirted around me and reached the refrigerator first. I was still adjusting to having another pair of hands in the house.
We headed out after that, Drew in his gray jacket, Cole in his oversized yellow one with a scarf and knitted cap. My shoes clicked down the tile hallway to the elevator, and by the time we reached the lobby I could see my breath. Outside we walked a block to the main highway, Cole on my hip, as he had suddenly decided that he was incapable of walking anywhere. We hailed a cab; I pulled out my phone and handed it to the driver, with both the Chinese characters for where we were going and a map. I was sticking with what worked. Hou Hai Lake was a popular destination, so he ushered us in—had it been a more obscure spot it might take four or five tries to find someone willing to take the fare. When I set Cole down on the seat, the driver turned around and yelled at me because his shoes were touching the seat. I put him on my lap. Drew gave me a look. I shrugged.
It wasn’t snowing anymore and miraculously the sky had cleared. There was a hint of blue. The smog had lifted. The driver dropped us off at the entrance. Though we were still in the middle of the city, the skyscrapers had dropped away. The lake was lined with trees in the distance, and little hutong-style buildings dotted the edges. It was bigger than I expected, certainly bigger than what I’d imagined would be in the middle of an industrial city like Beijing. Overhead, large speakers pumped out Chinese pop music. It sounded like REO Speedwagon and Arcade Fire had a Chinese baby. It was sort of sappy, a little catchy, and completely in Mandarin.
Drew’s eyes lit up as he gazed over my shoulder at the frozen lake. “Oh, we are so doing that!” he said, and broke into a big smile.
Ice chairs. His inner Vermonter was completely delighted. The concept behind the ice chair is so brilliant it’s crazy that it hasn’t caught on in the States. It’s a metal chair with a wicker seat, and the whole thing is set on two blades, like a skinny set of skis. You can hold on to the back of the chair and ice skate while pushing the chair to keep your balance. If you don’t have skates, you just have to push the chair around in your sneakers without slipping and sliding. Or if you have a wife and a two-year-old, you put them in the chair and push them around as fast as you can go, laughing uproariously the whole way.
We rented one, and Drew pushed Cole and me around the lake while Beijing’s answer to Damien Rice echoed across the frozen emptiness. I looked over my shoulder at Drew, and his cheeks were red, his lips chapped. He had a big smile across his face. Maybe I should have brought him to Harbin after all, where there is reliable snowfall and endless cold and ice.
Just then, Cole started crying. He was cold and a wet trail of tears clung to his cheeks. I picked him up and we scurried across the ice to the closest restaurant, pushing through the plastic flap hanging over the doorway into a steamy room packed with people. Everyone was eating with their jackets on, a habit we had quickly picked up, as central heating was not common. There was a menu with pictures on it. We pointed at a few items to order. Sweet and sour soup. Some kind of chicken with rice. Dumplings.
The food came out quickly, with steaming bowls of rice served on the side.
“Oh my God, so good,” Drew said, stuffing dumplings into his mouth.
“I know!” I took a huge mouthful and spoke around it. “See, you like Beijing, don’t you?”
“I like Beijing food,” Drew clarified, reaching for another.
“Well, fair enough.” I swallowed. “Your language lesson last night was brutal.”
Drew had been taking a few lessons a week with a tutor from the same agency I used. While he had said originally that he wouldn’t attempt to learn the language, he had reluctantly agreed that he’d need at least some Mandarin to maneuver his way around Beijing—and to be honest, I essentially compelled him to take the lessons. But he never studied in between. When I asked him why, he told me he had trouble focusing on rote memorization because of his ADHD.
The night before, his tutor, Wang (it’s her family name and it means “king,” she confided in us on the first day), came over to work with Drew, and she reintroduced the vocabulary from their last session. To test him, she ran down the list, giving Drew a pop quiz in Mandarin.
“Zuijin?”
“Uh . . .”
“It means ‘recently.’”
“Okay.”
“Shenti?”
“Um . . .”
“It means ‘health’ or ‘body.’”
“Okay.”
She didn’t just let him get them wrong; she switched to English and had him guess the Mandarin word. She made him repeat all the words down the list. She then paused and gave him ten minutes to memorize them as she played on her cell phone. Drew shot me a miserable look as he hunched over the vocabulary list, with Wang’s phone music playing tinnily in the background. Ten minutes later:
“Zuijin.”
“Uh . . .”
It was really hard to not laugh. I knew what he was going through all too well. They spent two hours together, and by the end Drew was only able to tentatively memorize his list of words: zuijin, shenti, bijiao, chengji, nuli, fenchang, tai, li, you, mei, kongtiao, tongwu, li, yuan, jin, xuexiao, duo, ting, zenmeyang, bucuo, toufa, chang, yanjing, gezi, gao, dianshi, and mamahuhu.
The next day Drew seemed in a better mood than he was the night before, and was even able to laugh about the terrible lesson. “Yeah, now I can’t even remember the different words for ‘please’ and ‘you’re welcome.’”
“I noticed that,” I said, laughing, too. “You said bú kèqì to the waiter just now.”
“I did? Crap, what’s the right one?”
“For ‘please’ it’s qng. Bú kèqì means ‘you’re welcome.’ So you basically asked for the chicken and said, ‘You’re welcome.’”
Drew burst out laughing. “Ha! Oh God. ‘I want this, see that chicken there, yeah that. You’re welcome.’”
“You are welcome, sir. I will eat your chicken.”
“Hey, get me some more tea—YOU. ARE. WELCOME.”
“They should be so thankful to serve you.”
“I know, right?”
I took another bite and fed Cole half a dumpling. “Hey, look at us, we left the apartment!”
“We are in the city even. Out and about.” Drew put his hand out for a high five, and I slapped it.
Then Drew became serious for a moment and looked at me over his steaming rice. “Christine, China is the worst.”
He didn’t have to list the reasons why. We were all sick, we spent every day locked inside, and when we did go outside the world seemed overwhelming and foreign and dirty. I sighed. “I know. But what can I do?”
The question hung over us and we continued eating in silence. We had a lovely day, but the reality was that living in Beijing was taking its toll on the whole family. When I envisioned this Big Life Project, I only thought of the positives. I didn’t consider that it would be hard on everyone, and I especially didn’t consider that I’d be caught in the middle of it all, trying to make everyone happy, to maintain balance, to hold everything together. Maybe it was just the cold medicine affecting my judgment, but I didn’t know what else to do except to keep going.
Eight
What’s the word for ‘pollution’?” I asked my tutor, Snow.
She gave me a word and I checked it in my dictionary: fog.
“No, this stuff,” I said, pointing out the windo
w that lined the length of our apartment in the sky.
Outside was indeed what looked like fog, tinged slightly yellow and so thick that the view was obscured except for the faint outline of the building next door.
“The pollution, from the factories, the bad air . . .” I said, sweeping my arm to indicate all of this.
“Oh that, we don’t talk about that. It’s not polite.”
I wasn’t about to argue. Snow, real name Xue, who like many young people in Beijing had adopted an English nickname, was the best tutor I had found so far, but we often failed to connect on cultural issues. She would pause thoughtfully at times, or burst into giggles at my questions. She was exceedingly polite; she wouldn’t even take a seat until I did. If I forgot to offer her a beverage, she might ask, timidly, if it was okay for her to get herself some hot water.
At one point, frustrated at the lack of baking supplies available in any of the grocery stores, I asked her, “What’s the point of an oven? Just to dry your socks?”
She laughed. “Dui.” Yes. And that was it; she wasn’t exactly forthcoming. If I was hoping for a cultural guide to life in China, I was looking in the wrong place.
So I started doing my own research.
The idea of learning Chinese by treating it more like musical studies had set me down a path of trying to delve into the beast that is otherwise known as Chinese Internet. It should be a tourist attraction all its own. Take a handful of intrepid foreign tourists, sit them down in front of a computer, and walk them through the amazing and glorious network of websites that you can only access from within mainland China.
A lot has been written about the Golden Shield Project, often called “the Great Firewall of China”—a program that was started in 1998 and began heavily blocking certain websites and keywords in 2003 under the philosophy of protecting the Chinese public from unsavory content. Deng Xiaoping, the former general secretary of the Communist party in China during the 1980s, was quoted as saying, “If you open the window for fresh air, you have to expect some flies to blow in,” which became the underpinning of the Golden Shield Project: an online flyswatter. Since then, China has blocked popular social media sites like Facebook; search engines like Google; file-sharing programs like Dropbox; blogging software like Wordpress; keywords like dictator, genocide, and oppression; certain news outlets that have been critical of China like the BBC; events like the Tiananmen Square massacre; dissidents like Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo; any news or blogs from Taiwan; and pornography.
It’s not so much that typing in one of these phrases will bring up a big red warning screen: Caution, this page has been blocked by the People’s Republic of China, you know, for your own good. Instead, if you type “Facebook” into Baidu, the most-used search engine in China, you just won’t see facebook.com as a result. The top result instead takes you to a page called “lianpula,” which says facebook at the top of it but is clearly not the social media site that the rest of the world knows and loves. If you type in “Tiananmen Square massacre,” it brings you to dozens of pages that have titles such as “Tiananmen Square Massacre: The Myth” and feature convincing news articles that have, finally, figured out why this myth has persisted for so long.
The unintended consequence of this firewall is that China has created its own version of the most popular websites. Instead of Facebook, there’s Sina Weibo, a sort of Facebook-Twitter fusion that focuses on microblogging. Instead of Google, there’s Baidu, a popular Mandarin-language search engine. Instead of YouTube, there’s Youku, which, because of China’s lack of copyright laws, allows users to upload absolutely anything. It’s like YouTube and Netflix on steroids. There’s no studio control, no Hulu-style selection criteria, and certainly no copyright protection like there is on YouTube. Missed an episode of your favorite TV show? Go to Youku and stream it without guilt.
Of course if you go to Youku.com from outside mainland China, you can search for anything. If you type in “,” it will give you a list of the latest episodes of the adorable Xi Yang Yang cartoon, but try to play one and you receive a message: This video is only available in mainland China. While the Great Firewall keeps Chinese citizens away from foreign websites, they also have access to a vast array of content only available from within China. You can download endless movies, television shows, and music—all for free.
China isn’t the only country to block certain web content. When we traveled in Thailand, we would sometimes stumble upon a website that was blocked, replaced with a message in Thai from the government. However, China is the only place I know of where they’ve re-created all the most popular web destinations and services, plus given users unlimited, free, streaming access to almost anything. When I asked my tutors about the firewall, they didn’t seem too concerned—after all, they can even access Hollywood films that are still in theaters but are already live on Youku, dubbed and subtitled in Mandarin. Perhaps they feigned ignorance out of fear, or maybe they really didn’t notice, since the available options are so robust. Foreigners in China routinely use virtual private networks, or VPNs, to circumvent the firewall, but when I asked my tutors, they didn’t even know what a VPN was.
It took me some time to get comfortable using Youku and not worrying that the Internet police were going to come arrest me for copyright violation. But then I realized that I had access to a virtually unlimited supply of native Mandarin-language content. If I wanted to train my ear, this had to be a good place to start.
• • •
AS SOON AS I’D STARTED thinking of speaking in tones as something similar to music, something shifted in how I approached my vocabulary drills, and I started to get them much more easily. My realization that music and language might be connected in ways that have a practical application for second-language acquisition had started when I came across Diana Deutsch’s work on absolute pitch. She’s a researcher at the University of California, San Diego, in the psychology department and is the editor of a seven-hundred-page textbook on the subject, The Psychology of Music. Deutsch herself has perfect pitch, which occurs in about 1 in 10,000 people in the United States. She has been researching the intersection of memory, music, and tones for over forty years.
I first became acquainted with Deutsch when researching how to best learn Mandarin. In 2009, she performed an experiment that tested two groups of music students—one group from the United States and another from East Asia—to determine how many of them had perfect pitch (the ability to accurately identify a musical note from a sound). The test was simple. She took the students into a room and played a series of individual notes for them, then asked them to identify each note and write down their answers. What she found was astounding. While both groups had a larger-than-average number of students with perfect pitch—after all, they were music students—she found that the students from East Asia had perfect pitch nine times more often than their American counterparts. Deutsch’s hypothesis was that their early exposure to a tone language, such as Mandarin, did something to their brains and conditioned them to be able to hear music more effectively.
Perfect pitch is still rare, but in 2004, Deutsch did a study of speakers of Mandarin and Vietnamese (both tone languages) and recorded them saying the same word over several days. They might come in on a Monday, say the word ma with a flat tone, which is Mandarin for “mother,” then come in a week later and repeat the same word. She did this several times for each participant, recording the results. What they found was that more than half of the speakers repeated the word with the same tone and pitch, within less than half a semitone (a semitone is the difference between, say, C and C sharp). Even outside the phenomenon of perfect pitch, these tone language speakers were producing sounds with stunning accuracy.
Until the middle of the twentieth century, researchers believed that music lay on one side of the brain and language on the other. However, in the 1990s, Seiji Ogawa and Ken Kwong created a new way of looking at the brain calle
d fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). The fMRI was noninvasive and didn’t emit any radiation. It used powerful magnets to map the brain, specifically the brain’s blood flow. Using it, researchers were able to see which areas of the brain were activated in an image that looks like a heat map. Because the technology was so safe, they could use it in ways that they couldn’t with older brain scan methods (it would be unethical to expose people to radiation just to figure out which part of the brain fires up when they think in French versus English).
The fMRI was the springboard from which all the current research into bilingualism arose. For the first time, researchers could ethically peek into our brains whenever they wanted and start figuring out what exactly was going on in there. I looked at PubMed, the online repository for all research studies, and searched for topics related to bilingualism. In 1973, there were just 3 studies. In 2013, there were 278.
I e-mailed Professor Deutsch about her work and asked her a few questions. One interesting thing she said, almost as an aside, caught my attention: “On the whole, it seems to be very difficult for non-tone language speakers to learn, say, Mandarin tones, with the exception of those with perfect pitch” (emphasis added).
If you are one of those rare people born with perfect pitch in the United States, you could potentially learn Mandarin very easily. The only thing—well, maybe not the only thing, but a big thing—holding me back from hearing the sounds in Mandarin accurately was my lack of perfect pitch. As someone who does have perfect pitch, Deutsch described it as being the same as seeing colors. I don’t need to see the color red next to the color blue to recognize red by the contrast—I just see red and know it’s red. It’s the same for her, with sound. For the rest of us, we can be trained in relative pitch—if we know we are hearing a C then we hear a second note, we can learn to detect the second note based on the first (the underlying principle of tuning forks). For Deutsch, it’s like she has a built-in tuning fork. Her perception of the note is accurate, consistent, and effortless—so much so that she could tell you the note a dripping faucet was producing.
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