Mind Your Language

As someone who isn’t generally totally horrible at learning languages, I naively touched down in China loaded with the absolute basics (hi, bye, thanks) alongside a few random words and an unfounded air of “I’ve got this,” an air that was swiftly knocked out of me as soon as I stepped off the plane. As I congratulated myself for having passed the first challenge of making it through passport control (I take the silent approach, which seems safest), I watched as every suitcase slowly takes its turn on the baggage carousel, except for mine. I waited it out a bit, putting off the inevitable, until I saw the one remaining case come round for a second time, accept the fact that mine is not coming and that I’m going to have to deal with it.　　

Thanks to a severe lack of foresight, I had no functioning phone to help with the translation and so I uncertainly wandered over to an official looking individual and gave him my finest “Ni hao.” My Chinese exhausted, our “conversation” devolved into a bad game of charades in which I frantically tried to mime a suitcase, arms flailing all over the place, and the unsuspecting official alternated between trying to direct me to the neglected suitcase on the baggage carousel and the toilets.　　

A few days in, suitcase retrieved, I started to venture out on my own to restaurants. The thing is, I’m a vegetarian, which in itself can pose enough of an issue in China at times, but paired with the fact that for some unfortunate reason I taught myself to say “I am a vegetable person” instead of “I’m a vegetarian,” and spent about a week (or two) using that peachy line on soon-to-be confused wait staff in restaurants, it proved doubly challenging. I was mostly met with blank stares and a repeat of the dreaded question, “But what do you want to eat?” At this point I generally took a gamble and pointed at one of the more meat-free looking options, which actually rarely worked because, as I was soon to learn, pork often plays a supporting role even in vegetable dishes as flavoring.　　

At the more terrifying end of the scale, a month or so in during a late-night taxi ride I was forced to try and talk my driver out of falling asleep at the wheel. Armed with a limited bank of conversation starters ranging from “What’s the date today?” to “Where is the bank?” to “The book is on the table,” I managed to piece together a disjointed chat that I can only assume confused him out of his slumber.　　

Over time, as I carefully continued to navigate the pitfalls of everyday language barriers and my Chinese progressed little by little to something resembling what you might call conversant, I’ve still had taxi drivers try to drop me off in the wrong place more often that I care to admit, I’ve been prescribed unknown medicines for unknown illnesses, and even unintentionally almost entered a political debate after using the wrong tone to tell my landlord that my partner didn’t like cats (māo).　　

I broke into an actual cold sweat when I arrived home one day to a house without electricity, realized it had been cut off thanks to a mislaid, overdue bill, and that I had zero idea of what to do next. I called a number I found on a utility bill (or so I thought) and spent the next 10 minutes asking someone at the bank if they could please switch my electricity back on. When I finally grasped what the person on the other end of the line had been saying to me over and over, “This is ICBC bank. Do you need help with something banking related?” she took enough pity on me to actually give me the phone number of the power company, after which the process started all over.　　

Frustrating though it might be, this self-inflicted impediment does come with an upside. When learning one of the hardest languages on the planet, overcoming any tiny challenge is surely a gold star victory. And even though it’s only a matter of time until I next find myself lost in translation, the more I study, the further away I hopefully get from being thrown off a possessed elliptical.