Lunches and Languages

Walking to work the past few days I have discovered that I am very allergic to Shanghai. I don’t know if is the visible exhaust that spews out of the tail pipes, the debris from either of the two construction zones I have to walk through, the cigarette smoke from a majority of the people I shuffle past, of the pollen from the densely planted trees the line the streets. Whatever it is, my body does not like it. I went through half a box of Kleenex yesterday.

Weiwei (who explained to me that her name is actually spelled “Vivi”) helped me with my pronunciation yesterday. The letters I struggled with most were “Z” “C” and “S.” They all so similar sounding—and very different from English—that is feels like a workout moving my tongue through all the different positions.

“I think you are much better than yesterday,” Vivi said. It doesn’t feel that way.

For lunch, Vivi took me to get wantons. “You have wanton soup in the US?” she asked.

“We do,” I told her. “I like wantons.”

As we walked to the restaurant, she pointed at a billboard and asked, “How do you say this animal in English?”

I looked up at the sign. “Lobster,” I said.

“Lobster,” she repeated, and it sounded it pretty good. “I heard that in US lobsters are very big.”

“Yes,” I said, “and very expensive.”

We walked up to the window to order our wanton soup. There was a small sitting room inside, but most customers were coming to the kitchen window to take their soup on the run.

“We get it for take away,” she said. “I think it is nice and we should sit on the balcony back at the office.”

“I agree,” I said. After a few minutes, I interjected, “In the US, we do not say ‘take away’ very often.”

“No?” she asked. “But how do you say it in English?  I thought take away was correct?”

“It is,” I said. “But it is more British English. They use ‘take away’ in Europe. In the US, we normally say ‘To-go.’”

“To go?” she repeated. Then she said it again. “It is very easy to say! Is to-go popular in the US.”

“Yes, I think it is,” I said.

“It is here too,” she said. “But in US, you can eat in the restaurant and get a box if you want to take your food for later.”

“Yes,” I said. “You just ask for a box or say you want to take it to go.”

“I see,” she said. “You cannot do that here. I mean you can, but the restaurant will think you are poor, so not a lot of Chinese people will do it.”

When we got to the window, Vivi asked, “Do you want vegetables or meat?”

“Can we do some of both?” I asked. She studied the menu.

“Yes, we can. Is 13 yuan,” she said.

Peeking in the kitchen, I noticed a small sign on the wall. The top, in both Chinese and English, it read “Shanghai Health Department.” There was a small legend with three faces. One was red and frowning, the next was yellow and expressionless, and the final one was green and smiling. Next to the legend was this restaurants score: a big, red, frowning face.

So we are eating a restaurant that failed its health code inspection!

Looking in the kitchen it wasn’t completely hard to tell way. Not only was the window open over the stove with construction dust blowing into the food, but the lady making the dumplings was doing so by hand. Now typically, that wouldn’t be a problem; in fact it would probably be some sort of artisan delicacy. In this case, she was making them from a pile of meat on the ground.

“This is the vegetable,” Vivi said, holding out her phone. She had an app called Pleco that allowed her to type in the Chinese and translate it to English for me. The text read “Shepherd’s purse.”

“I’ve never heard of it before,” I said.

“Purse,” she said. “Doesn’t it mean bag?”

“It does to me,” I said. We laughed. When we got back to the office I googled it and learned that Shepherds purse is eaten in China, although in most of the western world it is considered a common weed. It is in the same family of weed that grows between the cracks in your driveway.

“How do you say mother and father in Spanish?” she asked. “You told me yesterday but I forget.”

“Madre and padre,” I said. She repeated them. Again, it sounded more like Madrow and Padrow. We repeated them a few times, her trying to echo me, until we finally just started laughing.

“And in Chinese,” I said, “it is mama and baba?”

“Yes,” she said. In Mama, both syllables are the same. In ‘Baba’ the second syllable goes up a little bit.

“Now in the US, I don’t call my mother and father, mother and father,” I explained.

“No?” she said.

“We use the names ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad.’”

“Mom and Dad,” she repeated. “Is very easy.”

We got our food, paid and walked back to the office. Sitting on the balcony, we continued giving each other a vocabulary lesson as she taught me some Chinese phrases and I tried to help her with some English pronunciation.

“I think English is hard because of the past and future tenses,” she said. “I can never remember them.” I asked John about this when we got back and he sent me an article about the confusion. There is a misconception that Chinese does not have any tenses (I was told that by some people before coming.) In fact, it uses something called aspect, which we as English speakers are not as familiar with. Here is the link if you are interested. http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2009/11/19/aspect-not-tense

As I walked home, I was listening to music on iPod until I realized something: I was recognizing some of the words people around me were saying. Silencing my headphones, I walked and just listened. I couldn’t make a single sentence but when I heard a word I knew, my brain latched on to it.

A block or so later, as I was cramming through the people coming out of the subway, I felt a tug on the sleeve of my shirt. It was Jessica. We walked and talked about our jobs until we got to the apartment building. When we did, we decided to go get dinner with Brenda at a noodle house after dropping our stuff. The place was run by a Muslim family, and you could see back into the kitchen where they were making the noodles by hand. I had noodles and chicken. It was spicy, with a very Middle Eastern flavor to it—not being a huge connoisseur of Middle Eastern food I don’t really know how to describe it beyond that—and it tasted great! The noodles were very long and most of them were attached to each other at one end or the other.

I left the restaurant while they were still eating to go Skype a friend of mine. It was fun to relay stories with someone who wasn’t here and laugh about some of the oddities of life in China. I realize that I know very little about the East, its history, customs, religions, etc. and it’s been hard to figure them out on the fly. But I am reading more and I’m really going to start focusing in on some of the things I don’t understand completely.

And eating lunch with Vivi (and occasionally Yang Renjeng) really is a highlight for me. I seem to be hit or miss in choosing my own food—for example, this morning at the bakery, I thought I picked up some sort of sweet roll that had frosting on it. While the roll was sweet, the frosting was actually about a quarter inch of butter—but they have introduced me to some interesting foods.

The wantons were definitely my favorite. When I got to work today, Vivi offered me a small plastic bottle and said, “Try the Yakult.” That’s the brand name. “It is very popular.” I’d seen it in stores, so I had been curious. It turns out, it is great. It is kind of like a vitamin protein drink. John tried translating the ingredients for me, but a lot of them are vitamins and minerals and the names are hard to figure out.

I also learned a new sound today—having pretty much figured out Z, C, S—which is also very hard. This one is “Ü.” To make this sound, you smile, and then with your teeth in that position, purse your lips like you are kissing. The sound is unlike anything I’ve heard before. It kind of resembles “E” and “U” combined. Yang Renjeng said I did it very well, but it was hard.

When Vivi and I went to lunch, she pointed to some kids that looked to be about middle school age. They were all wearing the same white t-shirt and black pants, with a red neckerchief around their neck.

“How do you call the clothes kids wear to school?” she asked.

“Uniforms,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “What is your school’s uniform like?”

“We didn’t wear uniforms,” I said. “Mostly, only private schools have uniforms.”

“I see,” she said. “Do you know scorching?”

“What?” I asked.

“Scorching,” she said.

“No,” I said, “I don’t.”

She pulled out her phone and typed it out. “This,” She said.

I looked at the screen. S-C-O-U-T-I-N-G.

“Scouting!” I said. “Yes, I know it. I was in it.”

“You were in?” she said. “And you had a uniform?”

“Yes,” I said. “I have pictures on my computer, I can show you.”

“Hong Kong has scouting,” she said. “I went there some times. I think it is very fun and teaches a lot of discipline.”

“It does,” I said. We talked about Scouting and some of the differences between the program she went to in Hong Kong that of the US. After lunch—which today was braised pork and sweet ribs—I showed her some pictures.

“Where are the girls?” she asked.

“Boys and girls are separated,” I explained.

“Is very weird,” she said. “And you can be an Eagle Scout in US?”

“Yes,” I said. “There are seven ranks, Eagle is the highest.”

“That’s cool,” she smiled.

It was so much fun exchanging stories and pictures. I’m really glad I get to work with both Vivi and Yang Renjeng so that they can tell me about parts of life in China that I may not get to see as a foreigner.

But it was after lunch, when John returned with a bag of fruit that the day got really interesting.