Chapter 7 #4
The Harvard girl and her friend were in the row just behind me.
They were talking about how to maintain their Chinese throughout the year.
The boy was applying to graduate fellowships in the fall, and he wasn’t sure whether he had the time for a full-credit language course.
They talked about hiring tutors, how much this would cost, whether they could get university funding for it, whether the cheaper online tutoring platforms were legitimate, whether those tutors even had teaching credentials.
The girl had looked into pen pal sites, but they seemed sketchy, and she wasn’t sure whether they were a front for sex trafficking.
I too had looked at my course catalog for the fall semester to see how I could keep up my language skills.
But I had advanced past the level where I could take the intensive daily courses, and the only classes I could register for now were content classes.
I could read excerpts of early twentieth-century Chinese novels or do a study in East Asian martial arts cinema.
These seemed interesting, but they couldn’t come close to the level of immersion I’d enjoyed here.
I was going back to a world of English. Chinese would again be a siloed, classroom language: confined to just seventy-five minutes on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.
The girl from Harvard and her friend were now talking about how they hoped to come back to Taipei soon.
Maybe over the winter? Maybe spring break?
Sometime when it wasn’t so stinking hot.
They had to seize the opportunity, because what if China invaded Taiwan and it wasn’t free anymore?
The president didn’t care about protecting Taiwan.
The president didn’t even know where Taiwan was.
Xi Jinping was emboldened, America had given up on primacy in the Asia-Pacific, and now the missiles might start flying at any moment. All jokes until it was real.
The guy said maybe he’d do Beijing next year because Princeton had a good program there, and the girl said, “Maybe, but what if they start taking Americans hostage?” But they weren’t journalists, or drug dealers, or the children of CEOs—did that mean they were safe?
They debated the safety of entering the mainland over the next five years.
They talked about the differences between Simplified and Traditional characters.
The guy thought that Simplified must be so easy to learn after one was fluent in Traditional, and he was glad he had studied in Taipei, which had retained the real Chinese culture, that is, the pre–Cultural Revolution Chinese culture.
It had been a wonderful summer, they agreed. They wanted to come back. They hoped they could, it would be such a dream, but they weren’t sure they could manage.
I understood why. Summers were precious resources.
Summers were for research positions or consulting internships or nonprofit work.
You had to have extensive summer experience if you were to graduate and find a job, and no one would hire you if you had spent all your summers studying a foreign language.
I had learned about the concept of comparative advantage in an economics class last fall.
Trade was better for everyone if all countries produced only whatever they were the best at, even if another country was objectively better at producing that thing.
So by that logic, American students should stick with their comparative advantage of being good at English and leave the jobs that demanded fluent Chinese to the people who had grown up speaking Chinese.
These students were used to being good at things.
They had to be in comfortable territory, somewhere they weren’t always on the back foot, struggling to keep up, asking their interlocutors to repeat themselves and blinking to pretend they understood.
I knew of plenty of recent graduates now working in Asia, and of course there were certain things about their expat status—their Western degrees, their native American accents, the cultural cachet that came with a US passport—that cushioned their lives.
Still, it seemed like such an uphill battle.
Speaking a language wasn’t a generative skill, like playing the guitar or crafting furniture.
It didn’t make you special in any way; your Chinese didn’t count for more just because it was harder to obtain.
Learning Chinese just made you halfway competent in a life that millions of other people were already living.
But maybe these two could make that leap.
Maybe they would become foreign service officers, or naval intelligence officers, or doctoral students researching Hakka folk songs in the mountains.
Maybe they would start their own educational consulting firms. Maybe they would find Taiwanese partners and start families.
Or maybe they would simply pass their university foreign language requirements, stop wasting credits on Chinese language classes, and move on with their lives.
Taiwan would be an anecdote, kept in back pockets for dinner parties.
Did you know that in Taipei—? That in Chinese—?
That one year I—. The food is so—. When my Chinese was better. When I went back.
In any case, I hoped they’d had a good summer.