Pǔtōnghuà, anyone?

Some time ago, I was told that I am a 'language person'. I'm certainly not a numbers/science/technology person, and the Romance languages and Swahili came easily to me, so I assumed that this was at least partially correct.

Much like the modernisation theory (I won't go into that, I promise), China has blown a huge hole in that hypothesis.

Characters have always been hard for me; my expectations regarding reading and writing are low. I know a handful of characters, some of which come in handy-'Shanghai', 'Beijing', 'entrance', 'meat', 'tofu'-and many of them nice, but really rather useless-'jade', 'Vietnam', 'heart', 'safe', 'hero'. But even the verbal part of the language is tough. Mandarin only has five tones, compared to Cantonese's nine, and I don't have to worry about tongue clicking like I would if I were seeking to learn Khoisan, but there is no getting around the fact that it's a hard language to learn. For those not in the know, Mandarin uses a variety of pitches to differentiate words with the same basic sounds; for example, depending on the tone, 'ma' can be mother, horse, scold, hemp, or used to indicate a question. Understandably, this leads to saying something nonsensical/confusing/hilarious/really really inappropriate (to find out more, look at the entry for 'grass mud horses' on wikipedia; apparently it's been driving the government crazy).

Not being able to read or write is also a rather surreal experience. I now know what it feels like to be illiterate, because no matter how well I can write in Roman script, over here, it's pretty much just squiggles. That sign over there? It could be for a restaurant, or a slaughterhouse, or a brothel-pathetically, I wouldn't know. Someday, hopefully, I will learn these things, but today is not that day. At the moment learning to speak and listen presents enough of a challenge.

This is where my status as resident pink-and-white freak comes in handy (sort of). The way I figure, everyone already regards me as an oddity/mutant/mythical creature anyway, so really, there's very little I can do to shock people. I could probably walk down the street on my hands and people would stare, but oh wait! They stare anyway. So when it comes to Mandarin-pǔtōnghuà-no matter how crudely I speak or how garbled and weird my speech is, my guess is that people will just say, 'That laowai was so weird, telling us that it wanted to buy forty-six giraffes...and did you see the size of its feet?!' In other words, my sounding like I'm either retarded or on an acid trip is really just part of the whole strange package.

A few notable instances of my failing to scale this rather intimidating language barrier:

-Sometime last week I went out to the Marriott Hongqiao on business (haha! This still cracks me up whenever I say it!) with Isabel, a Shanghainese woman who works at Riviera. We got a ride back to the office with a guy called Zane, who was looking over the site (distances, dimensions, etc), and his girlfriend in their car. His girlfriend was holding the tiniest golden Chihuahua mix puppy with the biggest, darkest eyes I've ever seen, drifting in and out of a nap, stretching its little toes, yawning and blinking its long dark lashes, and of course the little thing simply enchanted me. 'Hen xiao!' I squealed ('very small!'). I realised then that I could also ask if this was their dog-'Zhe shi ni de gou ma?' Hurrah! I knew enough to start a conversation in Chinese! Very unfortunately, what came out of my mouth next was, 'Zhe shi ni de rou ma?' In accidentally saying 'rou' instead of 'gou', I had just asked his girlfriend, 'Is this your meat?' The whole car turned to look at me in quiet horror before I exclaimed, 'Aaagh! Ni de GOU!' They laughed, but in the end I didn't get to hold the dog. Understandable, from their point of view, but still pretty gutting for me.
-A few nights ago Jess and I decided to go out for dinner at this little hotpot place on Yanping Lu, which, in retrospect, was probably biting off more than we could chew in terms of our Mandarin capabilities. Hotpot is not one of the more laowai-friendly cuisines to order, as one has to mark tick off boxes on a menu to indicate what one wants. We decided to order three of something random, but then realised that this was not going to work when the perplexed waitress asked the two of us if we really wanted three 7-Ups. In the end, she actually brought us into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and told us to point out what we wanted. Again, kind of embarrassing, but I think we were the only people that got to go into the kitchen all night (it was very nice and clean, by the way).
-It seems as though every time I turn my head in Shanghai, I see a bank-Bank of Shanghai, Bank of China, Bank of Ningbo, China Construction Bank, Everbright, the list goes on. Last night I was down to eight kuai, which for those of you keeping track at home, is about $1.20, or less than a pound sterling. I set off after my Mandarin lesson with two goals-withdraw some cash and get some dinner, as I had had the lesson straight after work and was bordering on ravenous. I suppose that my hunger affected my brain, because as I walked down the pavement I spied one of those places where they give you a box of rice and you get to pick out three vegetable or meat dishes to put on top of it, and it all looked sublime. These places are great because you don't have to know the name of anything or how to say it, and because you can look at exactly what you're ordering, there's no danger of ending up with a slab of lard/a duck head/a raw egg. 'Eleven kuai,' the woman told me. S***! my hungry, hungry brain thought. I showed her my lonely eight kuai and made a pathetic helpless gesture with my hands and then probably made myself look even dumber by taking out my debit card and doing a very bad job at miming withdrawing money. I'm guessing that the proprietors and patrons of this tiny little restaurant couldn't read 'Charles Schawb platinum checking card', or that they had any idea who Charles Schawb was, so they probably thought I was some Western moron who was trying to pay my whopping eight kuai bill with a credit card. I handed over the rest of my cash, held up a finger-wait!-and started to walk out the door, when the woman holding my dinner took my hand and simply placed the bag in it. They clearly felt so bad for me-either they thought I was absolutely destitute or I had lost face so badly-that they knocked three kuai off the price. I was mortified and wished more than anything that I could knew how to say, 'If you wait just a second, I'll withdraw money at the nearest bank and then come back and pay you that last three kuai'. As it is, I don't. So even though they were laughing and smiling as they sent me out the door, I still feel like I owe them three kuai, and it's going to be really, really embarrassing to pay them back.

Other things I lack the ability to talk about are burnt out lightbulbs, clogged toilets, shoe repair, stain remover and life-threatening emergencies. It's cool, though; when I go to a restaurant, I can order something other than beef noodles now.