I wrote this as a response for UCA Honors College's grant money that paid for my last month of life in Beijing.

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I could count to ten and name my family members before I left.

Yi, er, san, si, wu, liu, qi…

That was pretty much the extent of my half-hearted pre-departure language learning. Then, I jumped on a plane, which led to another and another. A summer in the Philippines later, I had landed in Beijing for a ten-month language immersion.

I had found Beijing Normal University online, and decided to apply, because a group had accepted me to be a member of a new project to send students into Beijing as language learners.

“Is there Beijing Abnormal University?” I asked myself. Apparently overseas English has terms like “normal universities” that we don’t use here in the good ol’ US of A. A normal university is one that trains students to become teachers. Who knew?

When my compatriots and I arrived, some of us stayed in a backpackers’ hostel in Beijing’s centuries-old hutong. These alleys and courtyard homes, the “siheyuan,” made me fall in love with a city that once was. In what is now an emerging café and boutique sector for tourists and the capital’s young rich, I saw a glimpse of something Old World and charming and completely intoxicating. From the rooftop guardians to keep evil spirits away to the constantly-under-construction cobbled street, to the neighborhood restrooms and a smattering of bicycle-pulled rickshaws, the area around the Ancient Drum and Bell Towers grabbed me. Of course, only the young shop workers spoke trade English (a bane of my existence to come), but that was enough for me to be satisfied. I xiexie-ed and ni hao-ed and zai jian-ed my way across the city.

After exploring what I would learn to call Houhai, I moved into BNU’s International Student Aparthotel No. 2. It sounded so luxurious online. It was incredibly pink and narrow in reality. From 400 year-old hutongs into a clearly Soviet-inspired “aparthotel” I moved and settled as best as possible. For the next three months I would learn to live with the cabbage smell of the halls, the morning knocks on the door from the maid, and my consternation that my classes hadn’t gotten “that far” yet.

When the poor housekeeper would come, she would politely ask, “Da sao keyi ma?” Which, in my early estimation, was the same as, “Housekeeping!” As it turns out, it meant, “May I clean?” Over the course of the few months, I went from nodding and waving her in versus head-shaking and waving her away to something like a very blunt, “I don’t want.” Toward the end, I learned to say, “Please, come in,” and “You may.”

Around Christmas, I moved into an apartment with a couple other Americans. Well, a Californian and a Texan. We all spoke one universal language: Mexican food. Probably much to my linguistic detriment, my roommates were mostly content to speak English with Chinese phrases at home. It was fine by me, though, because after hours each day in class, I could certainly use the mental break. One of my roommates tried to institute a “Chinese Only” rule from himself on Tuesday. It helped my translation skills, to be sure, since our other roommate lagged behind in his acquisition, and the first was ahead of my own. Explaining why the NesQuick didn’t dissolve in milk was an interesting conversation across two languages.

Anyone who has lived as an expatriate knows that one meets not only local nationals. Instead, my group of friends came to span the globe from Indonesia and Korea to Australia, Mozambique and all across Europe. What a global soup of friends we truly were. It was quite an accomplishment when my classmates (almost completely Korean and Indonesian) asked me to teach them proper English pronunciation of the word “pizza.” Apparently the double-z sound is a problem worldwide. It was also nice to create friendships across broken Chinese, broken English, and shared experience. My friend Jin Shao Xin, a Korean from Seoul, spoke enough English to know about American profanities, but not enough to string them along in conversation. In marched Chinese!

Over the months, my language comprehension blossomed, and so did my appreciation for the people and place and time. I got to live in a city and country under the complete spell of Olympic fever, and I got to watch as a veneer that may never come back off was painted onto the last vestiges of “Old China.” The remnants from before Mao are fading and being mixed into something post-post-Revolution. While I was there, one could buy honest-to-goodness reproductions of Revolutionary propaganda for five kuai on the street, or buy a cartoon Mao marionette (or the Communist leader finger puppet set including Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao) in boutiques for more money that one might think. New subway lines were being opened as I was there, and I flew out of a newer airport than I flew into. In the face of the renovation, though, the “squatty potty” is still understood as more hygienic (and I was there long enough to understand why) and toddlers in split-butt pants are the norm up to five years of age. I loved the blend of old with new in Beijing. One might ride by the sparklingly new Olympic venues on the way to IKEA on one day, and then pass the Temple of heaven or Tian’anmen Square the next. Or both in one day, if you’ve got the money for the taxi ride. When I was there, the subway didn’t reach to IKEA. I think it does now.

Business was normal everyday, and beyond my gargantuan size, curly brown hair and fair skin, no one noticed me much. The stares I got in China didn’t usually last long, especially since I lived in Beijing. The Uighurs took the edge off of my foreignness. I learned during my tenure that as an American I was not the most hated nationality in China. Rather, the Japanese take that honor for reasons that extend beyond any single reason and resonate to the core of Chinese identity, as I understand it. I often had rough days in the city and I’d chant as a mantra “We’re number two! We’re number two!” As though being the second most hated is a good thing. At least we employed Yao and let the world watch Kobe. As it turns out, ping-pong may have worked years ago for diplomacy, but the modern Chinese young person watches the NBA.

By the end of my tenure in old Peking (the spelling and pronunciation have changed over time and reform), I went along with an acquaintance to a Chinese storytelling event that was supposed to welcome in the Olympic games. The entire thing was in Chinese, but by that point, I could at least hold my own in surface conversations. An American woman and a Canadian man were both in the event, along with several Chinese men and women. I was the only waiguoren, or foreigner, in the audience. The media that had been dispatched to cover the event—like my friend—ate up the fact that I was there. Before hand, some twenty-something newspaper reporters came by and asked who I was and where I lived and why I was there. I’m Long Ni, I live at Xizhimen, I study at Beishida, I came with a friend to have a listen. I gave them my mobile number with the full knowledge they would never call. They reciprocated. I pretended to read the free newspaper provided me. It was in Chinese, but I could understand enough to pick apart the article about the recent earthquake that killed 70,000 in Sichuan. It only fuelled the fire. After the most famous storyteller in China told her story (and thankfully my friend pointed out that she was famous, so I knew to pay special attention to her) the event ended.

And then it happened. A television news reporter descended on me while my friend was schmoozing and getting B-reel footage of the venue. He asked if I spoke Chinese.

“Dian dian hui shuo.” I speak just a tiny bit.
Can I ask you some questions? He was persistent. This waiguoren wasn’t getting out of his clasp. It could spell a promotion.
“My Chinese isn’t clear,” I pleaded.
“It’s ok,” he said, “Just answer how you think.”

The reporter asked me what I thought about the famous woman. He asked what I thought of her story. He wanted to know what it feels like for a white person to watch white people tell stories in Chinese. I wanted to say, “It’s encouraging! It shows such determination to master the language. I hope one day to reach their level of expertise.”

It ended up that I said it was all interesting. The famous woman was, of course, my favorite. And it makes me happy to see other white people speak Chinese. Answer how I think, indeed. After two semesters, I knew enough to give shallow tv interviews. Congratulations to me, I thought. I could be a politician. It only took a year in post-revolutionary China and a couple semesters of talking to taxi drivers to get me there.

Beijing Normal, indeed.

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T