Have You Eaten?

I met Daoerji last summer in a gift shop on Shi Quan Jie. He’s from Tibet—a man just shy of thirty with hair that brushes the top of his shoulders, kindly black eyes, a few small Tibetan characters tattooed on his forearm, and garbled English that was still far superior to my infantile Chinese. We struck up a friendship and began some informal tutoring in his shop. Several nights a week, I would bring my textbook and recite the vocabulary words, and he would correct my pronunciation, which was almost invariably wrong. In turn, he would read passages from his English textbook, and I would correct his pronunciation, which was almost invariably wrong. Whenever I entered the shop, he would greet me with a smile and say, “My teacher.” There was warmth and welcoming in those words, and even if I were in reality more the student than the teacher, that shop came to feel like a kind of home to me.

One thing puzzled me about Daoerji. After the initial greeting, he would always ask me if I had eaten. Given that I went into his shop in the evening, the answer was usually “yes” and provided no cause for further thought beyond wondering about his strange fixation on my diet. However on one occasion, I had skipped dinner and answered “no.” I was actually quite hungry, and I got the sense from Daoerji’s sympathetic expression that he was indirectly asking me to join him for dinner. I had visions of us walking into an obscure Tibetan restaurant that I never could have found on my own, a place dimly lit where portraits of the Lamas hung from the walls and the air was full of incense and the servers were monks in red robes who viewed eating as a form of prayer.

Minutes passed, and minutes merged into an hour. I kept reciting my vocabulary as customers came in and diverted Daoerji’s attention. A few of the customers looked over my shoulder to see what I was doing and became my informal instructors. A girl of no more than ten took up the cause and gave it up as hopeless after a dozen words. A prostitute from the brothel-bar next door came in and helped with a dozen more and didn’t charge me the service. Finally, with my stomach grumbling, I left the shop and went to find something on the street to eat.

It was only when I got back to the US that I discovered the source of my misunderstanding. One of the phrasebooks I’d bought noted that “chifan le ma?” (have you eaten?) is a common greeting in many parts of China. It is a question that requires a genuine answer no more than “how are you?” does in English, and one that never holds the promise of a memorable meal in a Tibetan restaurant. What I take from all this is that merely accumulating words will never take one very far in learning a language. Context is everything, and words without context invite confusion—and sometimes lead to an empty stomach.