White Boy

I regret to inform you that my comprehension of spoken Chinese has not improved much during my first month back in Suzhou. My formal study of Chinese consisted of the same three-week class two summers in a row. During the seasons between, I forgot everything I learned the first time and have essentially been spinning on a linguistic wheel.

My tutors Liru and Yuanyuan are always patient with me but must find me incredibly dense as they repeatedly teach me the same sentence patterns and words. It is as if my ability to learn a new language is confined to a small box in my brain that is already full. I can only let in new words if I squeeze a few others out. My cause is not helped by my sense that all languages must share the same box. One of my friends, Yimin, expressed to me an interest in learning Spanish. I deemed myself up to the task of teaching her, for, while my Spanish is poor, it is infinitely better than my Chinese—or at least I used to think so. A few days ago, I found myself stumped by the most elementary Spanish, unable able to recall the Spanish word for “I.” Apparently, there’s no space left for “yo” in my box now that it’s been supplanted by “wo.”

I’d estimate that I understand about one percent of the Chinese words I hear, and that’s probably being a little generous. I’m sure the percentage would go up several points if I could get everyone in the country to agree to speak about twenty times slower, but I know that the odds of that happening are not good.

Recently, riding in a van to go get my residence permit, I listened carefully to a conversation in Chinese. I was able to pick out four words—wo (I) xiang (want) dongxi (something) meiyou (not have)—which, when strung together, make a little sense. The problem was, however, that they were not strung together in the conversation. Instead, on average, there were about one hundred words I didn’t recognize between the ones I did.

Ineptitude with the language is just one of many things that set me apart here. I’ve come to loathe the tourist strip on Shi Quan Jie and spend most of my time in places where I am the only foreigner in sight. This is desirable in many respects, as I came here to experience the culture, not to seek comfort in the familiar. However, the weight of difference can be quite burdensome to bear. It is in my skin, in my height, in my curly brown hair and my blue eyes, in my tone-dead English tongue and ears—everything about me is touched with the taint of “the other.”

Fortunately, I’ve been able to keep a sense of humor, even when my sense of difference leads to auditory hallucinations. On three occasions while walking in public places where I seemed to be the only non-Chinese person present, I overheard conversations that went something like this: beibian xianglian guoji canjin yaba WHITE BOY meikong haoyou chou yangqu ceng. It seems highly unlikely that the phrase “white boy” actually came out of the speakers’ mouths, but the experience suggests that sometimes what we hear has more to do with what we feel within than with what we sense from without. Anxieties can take such a powerful hold that they project themselves into the world. Perhaps laugher is the only way to counter such anxieties, the only way to stumble along with them without weeping.