Thursday, August 2, 2001

(July 24)

China is definitely the hardest place I've traveled, I've decided. Not physically; as long as you don't go to western Tibet, it's pretty comfortable. Nor financially; it can be cheap, though it's still not India. What makes it so hard is the communication. Because of the importance of different tones, it's really difficult to be understood even if you think you know how to pronounce a word. And because Chinese people aren't used to speaking with foreigners, they don't have any experience in speaking slowly or using hand gestures to communicate.

Simple things are easy -- once you learn the numbers and "How much money?" you can go shopping. With just a few additional words like "this" and "not this," you can order a variety of food. But if you want to talk about something you can't point at, things start to get confusing.

"Where is the train station?" Okay, that's not so hard, as long as their response is merely pointing. But if they try to explain detailed directions how to get there, I end up more lost than before. Sometimes they'll try to be really helpful and flag down a cab for you, even though you want to walk.

The more unusual my requests are, the less likely I am to be able to get a real answer. For example, I wanted to take a shower between trains, so I visited a guest house where I knew they charged their guests two quai for a shower.

"Yo me yo wo sinyu?" I asked. Literally this means something like "Is not is me shower?" This might give you some idea why I have trouble making myself understood, but honestly that's the best I can come up with. "Yo me yo" is an idiom, it basically means "Is there?"

The response was a long one, involving a discussion between two hotel employees, a digression about whether I wanted to sleep there or whether I had slept there before, and a final result of "me yo." Not is. No.

At this point, even though the answer wasn't the one I wanted, I would have called it a successful communication. I asked a question and got an answer -- I couldn't take a shower here because I didn't sleep here. Simple enough. I tried a few other things, like offering to pay and asking for just a "small shower" -- that's as close as my Chinese vocabulary brings me to "please," asking for "a little." These last attempts failing, I prepared to leave, but thought to ask if there might be a public shower somewhere nearby. "Sinyu zainar?" I asked -- "Shower where?"

They pointed to their shower room. "Yo?" I asked. "Yo." they confirmed. And they meant it -- after all the discussion and denial, I ended up taking a shower for two quai just ilke I thought I had asked for in the beginning. So even though it was a successful shower, it was an entirely unsuccessful communication -- I wonder what we'd actually been talking about all that time?

Strange communications like this one aren't so rare, either. Nowadays I rarely assume anything someone tells me is true, including the prices of things. Sometimes the same meal in the same restaurant with the same employees changes prices day to day, in either direction. Yesterday I bargained my dinner down two quai, but then was surprised at the end to find that rice was one quai extra. A few times Juliette and I discovered after eating that the price they told us was for each person, not total. The French travelers we met tried for five minutes to explain to the luggage storage woman that she had undercharged them, but she refused to accept the extra yuan. This afternoon I ran into a pair of westerners as they were refusing a taxi ride because it was too cheap, making them suspicious. "There's no way he would take us there for ten quai!" they exclaimed, "Let's try a different one."

The most insidious things about communication problems is that at the time I'm having them, everything seems so clear. Even when I later realize my understanding was completely wrong, it's difficult to see any reasonable alternatives -- and yet apparently there were some.

(August 2)

Last night's dinner was another great example of communication in China. Juliette and I ordered from the cook's daughter who speaks English. Or so we thought.

"Zega, zega, dofu, mifan," I ordered. Zega, or more accurately "zheige" in the Pinyin transliteration system, means "this" -- you have to imagine me pointing at a tomato and a cucumber as I'm saying this. Dofu is tofu, and mifan is steamed rice. Actually mifan can also mean food in general, but this particular ambiguity has never actually caused a problem.

"Potato?" the daughter asked, holding up a nice red tomato.

"Yo," I confirmed, then corrected her out of compulsion, "tomato."

Comfortable that she understood what I wanted, I added the usual restrictions, "Bu chi drou, bu yao la, bu yao veijing." She seemed to understand -- I don't eat meat, I don't want spice, I don't want MSG. Great. I sat down.

"Yo me yo ke shui?" Juliette asked -- "Is there hot water?"

"Me yo," the daughter replied, "only eat." Strange -- all restaurants in China have hot water, but this one seemed to have run out of beverages altogether. Maybe they hadn't boiled any more water since it was so close to closing time.

We were surprised a moment later when she brought us cups and filled them from a thermos -- full of tea! "Only eat," indeed.

The cook, a middle-aged woman, brought us a plate of stir-fried veggies, straight out of the wok and still steaming. When I noticed the missing tofu, I asked about it: "Yo me yo dofu?" Kind of a dumb question, I admit -- "Is there tofu?" when obviously there wasn't -- but my Chinese isn't very good; I was just hoping to remind her.

"Me yo," she responded matter-of-factly. No -- there was, in fact, no tofu. She'd stumped me -- I didn't know how to elaborate on my question, like saying "But five minutes ago you said there was," so I let it drop and ate my vegetables.

The hardships presented by these communication problems aren't so great usually -- doing without tofu with my tomato (potato?) doesn't cause so much suffering; drinking "eat" instead of plain hot water is actually preferable; and even my shower came through eventually. So the real products of these strange conversations are small lessons in clinging to desires and expectations -- perhaps it's these lessons that make China seem so difficult.