Chapter 1 #11
The textbook included sixteen such articles, too many to cover in ten weeks, so we went through and marked the ones that were of most interest. No one wanted to talk about the growing threat to food from the decline in biodiversity, but everyone wanted to read about how a Japanese women’s university had decided to accept transgender students.
MY LAST CLASS OF THE DAY WAS MY ONE-ON-ONE CLASS—MY PRIVATE tutoring session. The classroom was on the fourth floor, at the far end of the hall. I opened the door, and someone inside screamed, “Chen Li-Li! Enter!”
I walked in. “Hi—”
“Nice to meet you!” Teacher Sun was a tiny woman with deep laugh lines crinkling around her eyes.
Her default volume was a scream. She didn’t seem hard of hearing—she had hawk ears for even my mumbles—but she loved to enunciate the exclamation point.
I understood why they had put her at the far end of the hall.
It was not just a matter of volume but one of pitch.
Her voice was like an alarm siren, and I jumped every time she spoke. “Tell me about yourself!”
I went over the basics: that I had been born in Guangzhou, that my family had moved to the United States when I was young, that I had spoken Chinese as a child but had forgotten most of it and was now making a serious study of it as an adult.
“Ah, okay! So you have a good ear for tones, and you have an intuitive sense of grammar, but you need to practice your vocabulary and more complex ways to express yourself, is that right?”
I was amazed. No one had so astutely described my language level before.
In high school I was always being placed in levels that were far below or far above my abilities.
The heritage-speaker advantage led to a bizarre patchwork of near-fluency and shocking foundational gaps, but I never knew how to explain this, except by telling teachers, “I spoke a bit of Chinese at home.”
“I feel like I can hear what everything is supposed to be. I just don’t know how to say it myself.”
“Okay, I think I understand!” She got up and strode to the whiteboard. “Do you know what a resultative ending is?”
“No?”
“Do you recognize this pattern?”
She wrote some characters on the board: 打不開, 看得到, 穿不上. Can’t open it, can see it, can’t wear it.
“Oh!” I said. “Well, that’s easy. That’s just . . .” But I had no way to articulate how this pattern worked. I didn’t even know how to translate it to English. I knew exactly what these words meant, but only in Chinese.
“It is an extremely difficult grammatical structure! I have American students who can never get over this. I have students doing advanced research in Classical Chinese who still do not have an intuitive grasp of the resultative ending. But you don’t struggle with it at all. Do you know what this means?”
“That I will learn faster?”
“No!” Her voice shot up in pitch. “It means you are lazy. I know your type! Some things come easy to you, so you think everything will. But in fact, you are more prone to making mistakes, because you trust an inner ear that only works some of the time. You will have a very difficult time developing a more sophisticated grammar repertoire unless you treat Chinese as seriously as you would any foreign language—like French. Okay, Lily?”
I had the sudden urge to cry. “Okay.”
“Good! Now, today’s vocabulary!” She pointed to her computer monitor. “症狀—use this in a sentence!”
When our fifty minutes were up, I felt like I had been electrocuted. Teacher Sun asked me if I was otherwise adjusting well to Taipei, and I said that for the most part everything was fine, except for the mosquitoes.
“Ah!” she screamed. “Get a Japanese spray!” She pulled up the brand on her monitor so that I could recognize it at Watsons: a bright blue tonic with a katakana label.
“It has an ingredient that’s banned in the US.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s poison—maybe it will make your children deformed, ha ha.
But it will absolutely stop the itching! ”
I WAS STARTLED TO SEE SUNLIGHT WHEN I LEFT THE BUILDING. IT was only four in the afternoon; I felt, spiritually, that it was two in the morning. I thought of the hours of homework I had been assigned, and I wanted to shrink into a ball.
Anna was beat too. She hadn’t waited for me in the student lounge—she texted that she had already gone home.
We had meant to check out a nearby café after class, but she was, as she put it, fighting for her life.
She had written this in Chinese, so it read like “waging a war on the behalf of me.” When I returned to the apartment, she was sprawled facedown on the couch, her textbooks strewn on the floor beside her.
I nudged her ankle. She moaned. I adopted the same position on the floor, and we lay there in silence for a moment, stirring only to scratch at our bites.
We tried to figure out why we were so tired.
The conversation was halting, but after much dictionary consultation, we worked out a theory.
In high school, this kind of schedule had been effortless.
We were in class from eight to four every day, with homework afterward, and this was just normal.
But one year of university, with days where we had only one class in the afternoon, or days when we didn’t have class at all, had spoiled us.
We were incapable of doing good, hard work now. We were doomed.
“We will get tougher,” said Anna. She tapped at her phone and read, “We will be tempered a hundred times to become steel.”
But I did not feel like steel. The novelty had worn off.
Nothing about Taipei was exciting anymore; not the colorful IC metro cards, not the abundance of milk tea shops, not the clean public bathrooms, not the buses and trains that ran so miraculously on time.
All I could notice were the indignities: how the tap water was not safe to drink; how we had to refill our water bottles from a dispenser in the hallway; how the laundry machine never fully dried our clothes, only made them hot and wet, so that we had to drape them over the chairs, the bed, the windowsill, every surface with an edge; how this room, which was clearly too small for two people, had no chairs or desks.
To do our homework we had to sprawl on the bed, which hurt our necks; or we would have to go to a café, and this meant venturing back out into the heat, the mosquitoes, spraying another full-body layer of sticky, staining Off!
The vacation was over. We were here to work.