My Eureka moment
Quite simply one the most amazing moments of my China life so far. I guess there will always be the first time and this is mine. The first time when you feel real triumph. That you've started on your journey to actually living in a different country and not just visiting. My tale begins at school on an unspectacular weekday. I had gone in early to plan my lessons and my manager asked if I could get together a stock of headphones for the teachers to use when the students have a test. Oh yeah, we do some of our tests on ipads, posh eh? I was pretty impressed when I arrived although sometimes they are a little more trouble than they're worth – you know, just the usual tech complaints. Amazing when it actually works etc.
Anyway ... headphones. So cut to me sat in the office unpacking forty or so (pairs of?) headphones from their rather OTT packaging (let's not go down the packaging road otherwise I will never finish my story!) and now I'm thinking what do I do with all this cardboard and plastic. This is again another drawback to being new. When you've been somewhere for a while you would know what to do in this kind of situation, but alas I did not. So I turned to one of my local colleagues (as I often do) for advice. She said the cleaner will take them away if they're bagged up. So naturally my next question was and where do we keep the bin bags? She informed me that the cleaner has them. Ok. Now, I knew where to find the cleaner as she usually hangs out outside the loos when she's not on her rounds but I didn't know if she would know any English, probably not. Sometimes it is a bit of a tough thing to get your head around. Working at a school which teaches English sometimes removes you from the fact that you’re actually living in China. The fact of it is that even though we’re teaching lots of children day after day, there are still so many people who don’t know English. It’s just easy to forget. So I turn to my local colleague again and ask, what’s bin bags in Chinese?
Now I need to digress purposefully here (I promise) as I do need to emphasise that I do this a lot. I ask my local colleagues what random words are in Chinese, not for any purpose but just because I think of something and wonder what it is in Chinese. I guess I can con myself into thinking that this is a small part of my big Chinese language development plan, but I can assure you that it is not. The number of words I instantly forget as soon as I've recited them is about 90%. It is pretty darned high. But in some cases I do retain the information and strangely enough this is one of those examples, bin bags. I know it's crazy. As you all know my brain is programmed to remember the useful stuff!
Not forgetting that this day I'm referring to, bin bag day as we shall affectionately call it, took place around two months ago and yet I can still tell you what bin bags are in Chinese. Thankfully, I'm proud to say that I have managed to retain SOME useful snippets (not that bin bags isn't massively useful of course ...) such as asking 'how much is it?' and things like left, right, straight on and stop, which are all very useful when you're in a taxi. I think I've come across one taxi driver the whole time I've been here who could speak English and what I mean when I say this is that even when I say my address in Chinese (no doubt pronounced very badly) some drivers are even unable to understand this and so I have to resort to showing them my address written in Chinese characters. Having this information is fantastically useful and has saved me many times, especially in the early days. So if you ever do venture out this way make sure to get the address of your hotel or wherever you're staying written down in Chinese characters, it will be a life saver. Thankfully one of the HR girls at school gave me a few addresses in Chinese when I first arrived and I have them saved on my phone in case I ever need them. My phone is my life out here, way more than it was in England.
Anyway, bin bags. So I rehearsed my line 'do you have any bin bags?' with my Chinese colleague over and over and over and over and then ran off (I couldn't risk walking in case I forgot it along the way) and there was the cleaner outside the toilets as predicted. So I did it. I asked her if she had any bin bags and without saying a word she went into the cupboard under the sink (very useful to remember this location for future bin bag supplies …) and gave me a roll of bin bags. It felt so good. I skipped back up to the office to tell my colleague who just laughed and carried on with her lesson planning. I have told many people about my Eureka moment since it happened and they are now at ease in the thought that if we are ever in need of bin bags I am the one to come to for assistance. What a feeling. A small victory but a massive one at the same time.
I’m loving living here but there are days when life is really hard, when you can’t communicate with people. Sometimes you just don't want to go out for fear of making a bit of an idiot of yourself (this is me on a regular basis) or just struggling and have them ask you more Chinese than you can understand. So being able to form the simplest of questions and being understood is just fabulous. So there it is. My Eureka moment. Bin bags. Who would have guessed.
There are of course times since that I have been particularly proud of myself at how I have handled situations with very limited Chinese such as helping a friend to buy foundation, asking if we can take away our food and ordering a meal or buying things from a stall with no pricing. But I have also had Chinese fails, such as the time I was trying to ask a supermarket worker whether they sold cooking oil as a spray (yes I was miming spraying) or when I got right and left mixed up with a taxi driver (but let’s be honest I have some friends who don’t know their left from their right in English - you know who you are. You’re the ones miming writing now so you can confirm to yourself which is your right hand).
A useful phrase I have learnt whilst here is how to say I don’t understand. There are some Chinese people who completely out the blue start full on conversations with me in Chinese. I do understand that there are a number of people who aren’t Chinese but can speak Chinese surprisingly well. But surely it’s a risk to take? I guess it’s nice though that they want to start a conversation with me. But this comes back to how helpful people are out here. Even the smallest assistance can be helpful. I was once in a restaurant, maybe two weeks after I arrived and I was trying to order and the woman at the till didn’t speak any English so she ran and got anther customer, a young boy around the age of ten to come and help me. He was fab.
But honestly, I am super lucky because everyone who I spend time with has a better grasp of the language and the characters than myself. So I am usually pretty molly coddled (happy to receive feedback on whether I’ve spelt this correctly) when it comes to using the language, which is a good thing and also a bad thing because it’s probably slowed my development but on the flip side I have been able to access a number of other places I would never have been able to on my own.
Ironically enough, one of the hardest things to get your head around is when you go somewhere and they speak ENGLISH. You get so used to asking for one of those or saying thank you in Chinese that when you do find somewhere and the staff speak English, it can be a real mind meld. One such place is Camel bar, it’s an expat bar and honestly when you’ve not been for a while it’s like walking into the twilight zone.
The majority of the people in there are westerners; English, Americans, Australians, Germans, French. I have seen some Chinese in there but if there are then they’re in the minority or they’re in a mixed group with westerners. So as I was saying having them speak and understand English can sometimes make it harder! It may take you all your time to get out, can I have two glasses of the merlot please? (but of course I always manage it ;)) A massive plus about Camel is that the wine is very tasty. Wine is one of the things I wasn't sure what it would be like over here and in the supermarkets it is more expensive than England, so much so that I've not a bought a bottle since I've been out here (I know shock horror right?!). But Camel has ‘happy hour’ (which of course is more than one hour) each day and wine is included in the discounted drinks list during this time so yay!
Of course, Camel is an expat bar and so the prices outside of happy hour or the drinks not included in the discounted list are not that far behind the prices you’d expect to pay in England and it definitely doesn’t give you an authentic Chinese experience. So I’d only really recommend it if you were staying in China for a long time or were planning to live here because in that case there will always come the day when you crave some kind of homely comfort or western atmosphere and for this it’s almost perfect (or just for a cheap drink!!). So much so that any westerner who comes to Suzhou for the first time but is living in China seems to know by osmosis that this is the place to go. So it’s popularity and ongoing custom is pretty much guaranteed forever. Long live Camel and it’s very yummy happy hour vino.
Well that’s all for now folks. But of course I cannot complete this entry without asking you the question you all want to hear ...
Ni yo laji dai ma?