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The Only American In The Classroom
Nov. 13th, 2002 09:45 amLast night's Bio-Informatics class was amazingly short. My professor had been in the presence of someone with the flu earlier in the day, for about three hours. Shortly afterwards he started feeling unwell, and by the time class started (8 PM) he was just flat-out miserable. He spent around an hour talking about one of our possible semester projects. It wasn't the one I'm doing - I've got to write a paper comparing and contrasting XML standards in bio-informatics research - but it was one that a lot of folks were interested in, so he managed to give us some ideas on what to do before finally saying he couldn't continue. A bunch of us hung around anyway. Some people were talking to the prof about the paper material, and some were doing experimental forays into the files their projects would be dealing with. And some people were just chatting.
I fell into that last category, because I'd brought my Mandarin textbook and wanted to ask some of my Chinese speaking classmates if they could help me practice at some point. It's a little unnerving to suddenly be confronted by the need to come up with a sentence. Everything went flying out of my head when Della (I can't remember her Chinese name, my apologies) asked me what I could say. . . I got lucky. She laughed, patted me on the head, and flipped the book open to a page I recognized. At least I could pronounce the stuff there, and read a few of the characters, but it's pathetically obvious that I need someone to practice with. As it stands I instinctively cringe when people other than Huang Laoshi ask me to say something - anything. I've had *squints at calendar* five lessons and we spent the first week or two entirely on pronunciation. I can make the sounds right - Della was very pleased with my pronunciation and tones - but I can't say a damn thing yet. . .
I have so got to memorize that line from the I Can Eat Glass project. Once you can look at someone and cheerfully inform them "Wo ke yi chi bo li, wo bu huei sho shang", you're well on your way, I think. This will be the equivalent of "Olen pahoillanen, mutta olen amerikkalainen" - Finnish for "I am very sorry, I am only an American". (I was using a Finnish name on a MUSH and got paged in Finnish, so I asked a Finn to teach me how to say that - it made other Finns happy to hear I was at least trying.)
On another note, Della asked me if I ever watched any Chinese movies. Have y'all ever seen Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure? I was sorely tempted to give her the Beethoven Look. Instead I just smiled and said yes, I did, and pulled up a few of them in the Internet Movie Database so she could see which ones. She asked what kind I liked to watch and I honestly told her, "The kind where people beat each other up." I think she thought I was joking. I ran a few things past her - The Emperor and the Assassin, Farewell My Concubine (at which point she got excited about Leslie Cheung being one of the leads, but seemed surprised I could understand him as his native dialect is Cantonese), and Rumble in the Bronx. She asked who my favourite Chinese actor was and I told her instantly that I was gonna have to go with Jet Li; she laughed and said "the little guy? Not Jackie Chan?"
I did give her the Beethoven Look at that, since Della is about five feet tall herself, but nodded. Told her Jackie would always have a special place in my heart as the first Chinese actor I ever really saw in a movie (Rumble in the Bronx came out while I was in college and is the first beat-people-up movie I ever went to see - might even have been the first I ever really saw, as I never watched Kung Fu Theatre on TV as a kid), but Jet took first prize. She and some of the other Chinese students seemed to approve, and we wound up talking about other stuff.
It's very odd. I know a lot more than I'm really supposed to, but it's all in English. So often dealing with Chinese stuff I feel as if I'm completely out of my depth, and other times I feel as if I've found submerged rocks so close to the surface that if I stand on them the water only comes up to my ankles. And nobody expects me to be able to find the rocks, so the fact that I can find them at all is astonishing. (Della patted me on the head because I could remember the Five Relationships from Confucius but couldn't remember the names of his four major books, f'rex.)
She and one of my other Chinese classmates asked me why I was so interested in this kind of thing, which is a valid question considering how most of my countrybeings are... I told them that when I was born a Chinese nurse brought me to my mother and Mom said 'that's not my baby, that's your baby', and they laughed and accepted that. A joke's as good as anything else, I guess, but I expect in the end it comes down to the fact that I get off on knowing things I'm not really supposed to know. This isn't forbidden knowledge by any stretch of the imagination, but it's stuff that nobody really assumes a White American is gonna know, so it qualifies.
Who knows where it'll all lead? I don't. All I know is, it's better than not knowing.
I fell into that last category, because I'd brought my Mandarin textbook and wanted to ask some of my Chinese speaking classmates if they could help me practice at some point. It's a little unnerving to suddenly be confronted by the need to come up with a sentence. Everything went flying out of my head when Della (I can't remember her Chinese name, my apologies) asked me what I could say. . . I got lucky. She laughed, patted me on the head, and flipped the book open to a page I recognized. At least I could pronounce the stuff there, and read a few of the characters, but it's pathetically obvious that I need someone to practice with. As it stands I instinctively cringe when people other than Huang Laoshi ask me to say something - anything. I've had *squints at calendar* five lessons and we spent the first week or two entirely on pronunciation. I can make the sounds right - Della was very pleased with my pronunciation and tones - but I can't say a damn thing yet. . .
I have so got to memorize that line from the I Can Eat Glass project. Once you can look at someone and cheerfully inform them "Wo ke yi chi bo li, wo bu huei sho shang", you're well on your way, I think. This will be the equivalent of "Olen pahoillanen, mutta olen amerikkalainen" - Finnish for "I am very sorry, I am only an American". (I was using a Finnish name on a MUSH and got paged in Finnish, so I asked a Finn to teach me how to say that - it made other Finns happy to hear I was at least trying.)
On another note, Della asked me if I ever watched any Chinese movies. Have y'all ever seen Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure? I was sorely tempted to give her the Beethoven Look. Instead I just smiled and said yes, I did, and pulled up a few of them in the Internet Movie Database so she could see which ones. She asked what kind I liked to watch and I honestly told her, "The kind where people beat each other up." I think she thought I was joking. I ran a few things past her - The Emperor and the Assassin, Farewell My Concubine (at which point she got excited about Leslie Cheung being one of the leads, but seemed surprised I could understand him as his native dialect is Cantonese), and Rumble in the Bronx. She asked who my favourite Chinese actor was and I told her instantly that I was gonna have to go with Jet Li; she laughed and said "the little guy? Not Jackie Chan?"
I did give her the Beethoven Look at that, since Della is about five feet tall herself, but nodded. Told her Jackie would always have a special place in my heart as the first Chinese actor I ever really saw in a movie (Rumble in the Bronx came out while I was in college and is the first beat-people-up movie I ever went to see - might even have been the first I ever really saw, as I never watched Kung Fu Theatre on TV as a kid), but Jet took first prize. She and some of the other Chinese students seemed to approve, and we wound up talking about other stuff.
It's very odd. I know a lot more than I'm really supposed to, but it's all in English. So often dealing with Chinese stuff I feel as if I'm completely out of my depth, and other times I feel as if I've found submerged rocks so close to the surface that if I stand on them the water only comes up to my ankles. And nobody expects me to be able to find the rocks, so the fact that I can find them at all is astonishing. (Della patted me on the head because I could remember the Five Relationships from Confucius but couldn't remember the names of his four major books, f'rex.)
She and one of my other Chinese classmates asked me why I was so interested in this kind of thing, which is a valid question considering how most of my countrybeings are... I told them that when I was born a Chinese nurse brought me to my mother and Mom said 'that's not my baby, that's your baby', and they laughed and accepted that. A joke's as good as anything else, I guess, but I expect in the end it comes down to the fact that I get off on knowing things I'm not really supposed to know. This isn't forbidden knowledge by any stretch of the imagination, but it's stuff that nobody really assumes a White American is gonna know, so it qualifies.
Who knows where it'll all lead? I don't. All I know is, it's better than not knowing.
