Death of a Neuron

I open the door and set my backpack on the floor. Then, grinning impishly at my Chinese tutor, I announce, "The Panda is arrived!"

"No!" she shouts.
And so it begins.
"'The Panda is arrived' is wrong," she says. "You should say 'The Panda has arrived!'"

I nod and sit down. My tutor slides today's offering across the table, an article about the perils of job seeking in China, and she tells me to read it. I squint and I squint, to no avail.

"Sorry, teacher," I say meekly, "but I've never seen any of these words in my life."
She laughs.
"What? You don't know the word 'job-hopping?'"
"Ah. No."
"You don't know the verb 'to establish?'"
"Negative."
"'To fall behind?'"
I shake my head. She huffs and shuffles through her papers. My ignorance has once again disrupted her lesson plan.

"Okay," she says. "Job-hopping is tiao cao. To establish is cheng li. To fall behind is luo huo. How do you say job-hopping?"
"Um. Ching ... chong?" I squeak.
"No! How do you say establish?"
"Chong ... ching?"
"No! How do you say fall behind?"
"Ah. Tiao cao."
"No, no, no!" She sighs. Clearly, I am a lost cause. "Okay, write tiao cao."
"But I don't know how."

She writes this on a scrap of paper:



I write this:



"No! That is wrong. Like this."
She writes.
"Like this?"



"No! Like this."
"Aha! Okay. So like this?"



"No, no, no!"

Over the course of an hour, I manage to stumble my way to the end of the article. Questions ensue.

"Why can't young people find jobs in China?" my Chinese tutor asks in English.
"Because there are too many young people and not enough jobs," I rattle off in Mandarin.
"No! That is wrong!" she shouts, again in English. "It's because there are too many college graduates and not enough jobs!"

I blink.

"Why do young people want to live in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai?" she asks.
"Young people want to live in big cities because their hometowns have ... " I reach for the word but can't find it. "Wait. I know this one. Their hometowns have ... have ... wait, I've got this. Their hometowns have -"

And though only a couple of seconds pass in realtime, in braintime those seconds are an eternity in which my brain cells are waging an epic struggle against my chronic forgetfulness. A single neuron unfurls her tendrils, they go waggling out into empty brainspace. Her sexy little axon snakes this way and that, beckoning one of her nearby suitors. A few nanoseconds later, she has wooed the handsome Chinese neuron who lives next door. He unfurls his tendrils, they go waggling out into empty brainspace. She reaches for the Chinese neuron and he reaches for her, and for an instant, it's the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: all those terminal buttons on the point of touching, almost, not quite, just one ... nanosecond ... more -

"To fall behind!" shouts my tutor. "Luo huo!"

I cringe. There is a burst of static, then my mind shuts down completely. Then a dull ache sets in.

"Ah. Luo huo," I murmur to myself. "Of course. Luo huo. Their hometowns have fallen behind."


The hardest part of learning Chinese in China is not the language. In fact, most foreigners are struck by the elegant simplicity of Mandarin: no conjugations, no plurals, no articles, no genders; he and she and it are all the same word; tense is implied by context; and if you happen to live in Sichuan, those ordinarily pesky tones are mostly irrelevant, because the locals speak a creole of dialect and the proper Mandarin they learn from watching so much damned television. Mandarin is surprisingly easy, and like most languages, it comes naturally after a while. What appears linguistically daunting at first becomes second nature after you've played with the language long enough. But Chinese is not a language one can tackle by oneself, so it is necessary to find a Chinese Virgil to shepherd you through the 36 Chambers of Mandarin Hell. And that, by far, is the hardest part of learning Chinese in China: finding someone who can lead you through those 36 chambers without roundhouse kicking you in the brain so many times that you are forced to leave the monastery altogether.

Thus far, my experience with the aforementioned Chinese tutor has been overwhelmingly positive. She works hard and she is technically well-qualified to teach a laowai like me: as an undergrad, she studied Teaching Mandarin as a Foreign Language. She bought me a bottle of rice vodka at the end of my first semester, bought me a cat-themed writing notebook for Christmas, lent me her copy of the Dao De Jing indefinitely. All things considered, she is one of the very few people in Nanchong who treats me like a human being. But she remains Chinese, and she teaches accordingly.

A couple months ago, I borrowed another book indefinitely - this time from the Peace Corps - named The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently ... and Why. Despite flipping through its pages for close to an hour, I couldn't find the quote I was looking for, so this will have to do:

Western parents constantly require their children to do things on their own and ask them to make their own choices. ... The Asian parent makes the decision for the child on the assumption that the parent knows best what is good for the child.

If a young American child is struggling to unlock the front door, her father will watch her fumble with the keys until she figures it out herself. If an Asian child is caught in the same predicament, his mother will cut in and say, "No, like this," and unlock the door herself. This is the classic example everyone bats around in China, but I don't know enough about children to confirm or deny whether or not it is true. Nevertheless, it does point toward a fundamental difference between Eastern and Western education. In the West, we learn by trial and error and mostly error. In the East, teachers tell their students what to do, every step of the way. This persists through college and beyond. If I give my Chinese college students an activity to work on independently, chaos ensues. If I lecture at them for ninety minutes, the universe is in perfect order.

So I don't fault my tutor for her teaching methods. I can't fault her for being Chinese. All and all, I am ridiculously lucky to have found her. Many of my friends study with Christian fundamentalists, or Sichuanese college girls who can't even speak Mandarin. But eight months ago, on a rainy night in October, my phone rang for the 1.3 billionth time - yet another anonymous number - and I have no idea what inspired me to answer my tutor's call. But if I hadn't, I'd probably be studying Mandarin with the duckhead vendor on Feng Dun Road.

Thankful as I am for having met my tutor, the way in which she teaches me does more harm to my neurons than good. She practices her English most of the time and laughs at my Chinese. I never went to Catholic school, but my tutor raps me across the mental knuckles with a steel-tipped ruler every time I screw up. She assumes, like many Chinese, that the Chinese writing system is an alphabet, easily decipherable by even the most foreign of foreigners - when in reality, you can comprehend a new Chinese character no better than you can recognize the face of a complete stranger. That's Blake Johnston from Sandpoint, Idaho. Whaddaya mean you don't know him?

I am a man who earned a D minus in Handwriting on what was otherwise a valedictorian sixth grade report card. Even today I am inclined to write my letter E's backwards, and when I read my own journal entries from several months ago, I can barely make out what I was blathering about. So in those early days of Chinese class, I told my tutor that I did not want to study writing, that I wanted to focus on conversational Mandarin. In the weeks that followed, we plunged headlong into the depths of writing and vocabulary, and in the rare moments that I could summon the courage to speak, my words were swatted down with the steel-tipped rulers of No! and Wrong! And so it goes.

In the meantime, my Sichuanese has improved a great deal, mostly from the ten kuai taxi lessons I receive on the ride home from the Jack Bar. The other day, my cabby was a young dude in a silk suitcoat, and when I told him to take me to Xi Hua Shi Fan Da Xue Xin Qu, he shivered all over and giggled. Then he hooted.

"Ooh-wee! Your Chinese sounds so good!"
"Where, where?" I asked in my modest way.
"Everywhere," he said.

He asked me how much money I made every month. I told him. He shook his head and suggested that I look into a different line of work.

"Well," I said, "it's hard for college graduates to find jobs in America. I've been job-hopping for several years now. Our economy's really fallen behind."
"Ooh-wee!" the cabby hooted. "Job-hopping! Fall behind! Your Chinese is really fantastic!"
"Where, where?" I asked again, and blushed a bit.

The cabby drove and I rode. And meanwhile, in braintime, all my drunk neurons unfurled their tendrils, extended their axons and gave each other high-fives. Despite the best efforts of China and its brewing companies, my neurons yet live.

The White Whale

On Saturday morning, I heaved myself out of bed, stuffed my books in a backpack, and walked over to the library. I downed a coffee on the way and had to pee something fierce by the time I got there, so I ducked into a bathroom, couldn't find any urinals, and made use of one of the squatters. On my way out, a girl stopped dead in her tracks and just about dropped her teacup at my feet. I turned and took an uncomfortably long time reading the sign above my head: "Woman ... bath ... room."

Getting into the teachers' reading room took some doing.
"You're a teacher?"
"Yes," I said, uneasily.
"Do you have an I.D. card?"
"No," I said, decisively.
"What th - why don't you have an I.D. card?"
"I'm new here."

The library troll granted me passage, but I had to register all of the books I was bringing in with me. My list looked like this:

1. The Norton Anthology of American Literature
2. Oxford English-Chinese Chinese-English Minidictionary
3. Peace Corps Language Manual - Mandarin
4. Las Muertas - Jorge Ibargüengoitia
5. Larousse Pocket Diccionario

I asked if I had to sign in my water bottle of Nescafe. The clerk shook her head, no.

And I remained in the library for six hours, writing Chapter One of Laowai de Riji: Diary of a Foreigner - my first stab at composing anything in Chinese more involved than "My name is Pan Da. I am an American," etc.

I told my tutor on the first day of class that I didn't want to study Chinese characters. I am a man who has yet to master the 26 letters of the English alphabet. At the time I judged that learning 10,000 Chinese pictographs was beyond my ability, and that we should focus on chit-chat. My tutor - in her Chinese way - showed up the following day with a pageful of symbols and asked me to copy them. So, coffee hands a-trembling, I did. We started with mama and papa, auntie and uncle, but even those four characters seemed impossible to mimic. After five minutes of concentrated effort, I would find that "papa" had somehow flipped itself mirrorwise on the page, which would send my tutor into a giggling fit.

But a month later, I find myself writing short essays in a script that was Greek - nay, Chinese - to me a month ago. I'm not bragging, here. I am indebted to my tutor, who knew better than I what a laowai can accomplish when he's paying 900 kuai a month.

After my day in the library, I went home and watched an overdubbed version of The Matrix. I'm not such a big fan of the film, overdubbed or otherwise, but I sat there in the dark with my notebook, scribbling down any and all words I recognized but didn't know. And in so doing, I acquired a pretty decent working vocabulary in the field that interests me most: bullshit philosophy. I then watched ten minutes of a BBC documentary about the Space Race before I realized it was overdubbed in Cantonese, which is probably why I couldn't understand a word of it.

I returned to the library this morning and studied for four hours. Although there is much to be said for whooping it up with the locals and learning 600 words for the male anatomy, mastering a language is a profoundly unsexy process, one that involves rote memorizing a lot of phrases that you have little use for and absolutely no interest in knowing: to invest in the stock market, to wait in line, and so on. I remember such-and-such foreign friend in such-and-such foreign country explaining to me why he'd never bothered to learn such-and-such foreign language. It's easy, he said, just use gestures. If you want a plunger, make a plunging gesture. If it's toilet paper you need, make an ass-wiping gesture. It seemed like a very apelike way to live, but I suppose it is one means of survival. That said, I am committed to avoiding pantomime at all costs and, if I am able, I would like one day to communicate my nest of weird western ideas to the Chinese in their own language.

This evening, I showed up early to class and played ping-pong with the wall until my tutor arrived and sat down to dissect my first journal entry. There were the expected syntax errors. But what surprised me was that she wasn't so much critiquing my grammar as much as she was trying to correct my writing style.

"Your writing is very," she paused and made a bouncy gesture with her hands. Desultory? Scatterbrained? I understood. "I don't see what the third and fourth sentences have to do with the first two sentences."

My first paragraph went as follows:
"In China, there are good days and bad days. On a good day, I am invisible, nobody seems to notice me. My students are excited to practice their English. I remember all of my new Chinese words and my tutor (Wendy) is happy with me. On a bad day ... "

She understood the sentences individually, but couldn't see why they were linked together into a paragraph. I tried to explain myself: good days consist of invisibility, good students, good Mandarin classes. The next paragraph is about bad days, which consist of ... but she didn't follow.

"You are talking about people not noticing you, and then you're suddenly talking about your English classes."

At that point, I had to laugh out loud. The beast had come out into the open. The problem was not my grammar or even my writing, but the way I organized my thoughts: in order to write Chinese, I am going to have to learn to think like the Chinese. Events which seem sequential and orderly to me make no sense whatsoever to my tutor. And so it's back to the drawing board for me, back to the library with my harpoon and nautical maps and a bottle of instant grog to keep me company on my tireless pursuit of the White Whale: avast! there she blows! -- there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Mandarin!

Milgram Experiment

Because I am chronically three minutes and 37 seconds behind the rest of the world, every morning I miss the bus and wind up riding shotgun in one of the Toyotavans that wait for me just off campus. The drivers charge me ten yuan, which is two kuai more than a taxi, and ten times more expensive than a bus. But it's well worth footing the bill for companionship and a complimentary lesson in Sichuanese, and the comfort that comes with knowing the Toyotavan cannot exceed thirty miles per hour, which gives me ample time to grab the "oh shit" handle prior to head-on collision.

This morning, I told the driver to wait while I hit up the ATM so I could pay him. It was raining, as it has been for the past month. Poised there with my fingers hovering over the keypad, some inner Pavlovian voice barked at me, some vague memory of a past trauma suffered at the hands of a rain-drenched Chinese cashbox, perhaps this very one - but I ignored it. "Please be entering your secret number," said the ATM. The instant my first digit met the first digit, the ATM dealt me an electric shock that made my Amish beard stand on end. A stream of religious personages and scatology flew out of my mouth. The security guards stared. I hobbled in a circle and slapped my thighs. The Toyotavan man tooted his horn. I returned to the machine and was shocked again. And again. Chinese pin numbers are six digits long. So, zap, I hit the "cancel" button and withdrew my card, which sent a current of not unpleasant energy coursing through my bones.

I jerked and jolted over to the machine across the street and waited in the queue for the girl ahead of me to finish. That she was not screaming and cursing throughout her transaction seemed to me to be a good sign. I inserted my card and zap, I flew away from the machine. I staggered back to it and zap. I snuck up on it from the side and zap. As a foreigner, apparently, I am a much better conductor than your average Asian coed. I needed something plastic to put between me and all that misdirected Chinese energy. But I had neither pen, nor lighter, nor tiddlywink. One of my students passed by, no doubt wondering why I looked like Gene Wilder on meth. I asked him for a pen. And thusly was the transaction completed and the taxi paid for. Now the problem was that I was five minutes late for class.

And oddly, trembling with static, my mind still lost somewhere in Tuesday night, I taught the best class of my life. It was my first run-through of a lesson I had dubbed "Poetry Slam." I began by reading the entirety of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot, and nearly succumbed to a crying jag when I came to the part about the coffee spoons. My students gave me a polite ovation. I asked how the poem made them feel.

"Depressed," offered a girl in the front row.
"Excellent! That's how it's supposed to make you feel. And why did it seem depressing to you?"
"Because it was too long."

Laughter. I laughed, too, though me and the ghost of Tough Shit Eliot were both wounded by the remark.

"Prufrock seems scared of some event in the future. I think it is coming soon," another girl said. "What is he scared of?"

"I don't know," I shrugged. "Probably death or something."

I had them read aloud and analyze poems by Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Carl Sandburg. One of the groups was reading The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Langston Hughes, and though the word "Negro" made them giggle, they loved the poem. One girl began to write her thoughts on the bottom of the page - "I am warm," she wrote - but I asked her to please write on another piece of paper, as these hand-written copies were the only ones I had.

When it came time for her group to slam Langston Hughes, her friend walked up to the podium and read him beautifully, with a sincerely oppressed tremolo in her voice.

"I've known rivers. Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers." She paused and her sad eyes searched the crowd. " ... I am warm."

I spent several minutes keeled over a desk until I'd laughed myself out.

After class, feeling awfully smug, I treated myself to a cigarette on the balcony. Across the way, I saw a girl leaning on the ledge with her head in her hands. She stayed that way for a long time. I wasn't about to abide any suicides on my watch, so I walked over and said, in Chinese, "Hey. What's wrong?"

She looked up. She wasn't crying.

"Are you an English teacher?"
"Yes," I said. "I am a laowai."
She looked me over.
"I know that," she said.

She wanted English lessons. She wanted to improve her oral English. She wanted a foreigner friend. And so on. Fairly certain that she wasn't a jumper, I wished her a good afternoon and ran off to my next class.

As I was walking out to the bus, I heard my name and saw her standing up on the balcony four stories above me.

"Can you catch?" she asked.
"Some things!"
She let a folded-up scrap of paper flutter down to me and I missed it. I plucked it up from the wet ground and hurried off to catch the bus. I was meeting an Italian for lunch.

One of my handlers from the university knew a girl who was married to an Italian. So she had arranged a foreigner playdate. It occurred to me that never in my travels had I ever met a Real Live Italian. Truth be told, I wasn't entirely convinced that they existed. But Fiero's story checked out. He was a chain smoker. He loved wine. He was old and fat and missing a few important teeth. He spoke little, probably because I was young and American. But when he did, his English, I thought, was better than my own: riddled with endearing errors and full of old world European depth and character.

There is always some conversational inertia when a European first meets an American. I'm not sure whether it's because the European has encountered unpleasant Americans in the past, or because the America we broadcast is so loud and schizophrenic and domineering that, as a European, you are no more inclined to talk to an American than you are to your television set. But over the years, I have developed an international charm that I didn't have before, and of course, it is easy for westerners to relate on matters pertaining to the experience that is China. So, by the time the fifth course had arrived, the Italian was waxing Chomsky on linguistic differences and Chinese etiquette.

"The Chinese have this way of making themselves disappear," he said, sucking a three-kuai cigarette through the gap in his front teeth. "When they are wanting to go, they stand up and say bye bye and they are gone!"
"This is not normal?" asked his wife.
"No! No. No!" Much gesticulating. "In Italy and in America, you must stay and shake hands and say, oh how I hate to leave, and make excuses and say goodbye to each person ten times."

Fiero and I agreed on the strangeness of Chinese teleportation. And we both agreed that we liked the Chinese way better.

I mentioned how, when I first visited China, I was curious as to how the Chinese typed. At the time, I said, I wasn't sure how it was even possible. Did they have 5,000-character keyboards that wrapped around you like a control panel? The Italian spit out a chunk of eggplant laughing and began spinning in his chair, pressing invisible buttons behind his back: "Dear ... mother ... I ... miss ... you ... so ... much!" The two Chinese girls tittered.

"But yes," the Italian said, composing himself. "This is problem with Chinese. You cannot have too many hieroglyphics because you cannot learn 300,000 hieroglyphics. So every symbol have fifteen or twenty meanings."
"Hence we have Chinglish," I said. "It's difficult to translate the openness of a Chinese sentence into the precision of English. So we have signs telling us, 'Please, gentlemen, how barbaric it is to shit on the floor!' And so on."

It is through conversations with Italians that you come across ideas you didn't know you had. While the Italian translated a verse of Dante's Inferno for me, I thought about Chinglish: I had always thought of it as bad English, plain and simple. It hadn't occurred to me before that there might be a deeper linguistic reason for Chinglish, but a fundamental difference in language seems to me, now, to be precisely the problem: each Chinese symbol has several possible interpretations, and as a reader of Chinese, you learn to choose the interpretations that make the most sense to you. But we have half a billion words in English, so the difference between a good writer and a literary hack is precision - putting the exact right words in the exact right places - and just about any English speaker, whether they can write or not, can separate good writing from bad writing. Chinglish is nowhere to be found on the quality spectrum, though it often reads like James Joyce at his best.

The four of us lingered for several hours. The Italian raged about the restaurant's interior design. "They construct this beautiful granite waterfall and then put it in the corner by the bathroom where it is invisible!" He asked whether I liked European beer and European coffee and I nodded emphatically on both counts. He invited me downtown to his European beer and coffee bar. And I trembled at the possibility of savoring a bottle or a cup of foul and bitter stuff without having to endure the formaldehyde hangover that comes ten minutes later.

I had to jet off to my Mandarin lesson, so I made my escape the Chinese way: "I'd love to stay and chew the fat, but bye-bye!" I caught the Number Five bus home and, on the way, passed a new restaurant whose logo was a black-and-white portrait of Saddam Hussein raising a finger in defiance. It reminded me of The Hitler Bar in Daejeon, South Korea - where the Third Reich comes alive! - with its balsa wood Messerschmitt BF109's rotating slowly on catgut cords dangling from the ceiling, the walls decked a la Applebee's with Afrikacorps caps, castrated Karabiner 98K's, framed photographs of The Fuhrer himself ... the smiling waiter clomping towards your table in his steel-toed jackboots, brown uniform decorated in Panzer Assault Badges and silver eagle patches ... the unabridged version of "Deutschland über Alles" warbling and crackling through the speakers in the bathroom. It is these warped glimpses of the West that remind you how far away from home you really are.

Schizoglot

Chinese lessons have begun. For want of a classroom, my tutor and I meet in the security guard vestibule by the main gate of China West Normal University. When the pseudo-police come in for smokes and tea, they gather round the desk to watch me prattle along in rudimentary Mandarin. My efforts seem to perplex them: this full-grown man can bullshit 'til the maos come home but he can't even pronounce the word "mama." In America, we are used to having our language butchered by foreigners and Americans alike. Here, the illiterate are so few and far between that I imagine the general population lumps me in with the hopelessly poor and mentally retarded.

And yet the people I meet are delighted that I have bothered to learn their language - the most widely spoken in the world - at all. Only the surliest of cabbies will take my money without telling me how bang my Chinese is. Whether it really is all that bang is an open question. I possess a knack for language, but for the moment I have the vocabulary of a Chinese fruit fly. And the Chinese will compliment just about any foreigner on his language skills, whether they exist or not. But even in Chongqing, the Starbucks baristas are stunned by a westerner who can order a small black coffee without choking on his tongue.

I have the unfortunate reputation of being a polyglot. But I am not. If anything, I am a schizoglot. I am functionally illiterate in five foreign languages and a bluthering idiot in my native tongue. I know the word for "whore" in all five of those languages, but I'm not sure I could find a bathroom if my life depended on it. I do not believe I am fluent in anything.

My attempts at learning language have been mostly frustrating and wholly unsuccessful. It is hard to find anyone, for one, who doesn't speak better English than your piddling amount of whatever language it is you hope to learn. So you wind up speaking English with your language tutors. Plus, at least for me, the gumption to learn a language evaporates once I am surrounded by it. In Germany, I studied Polish. In Poland, I studied German. In Korea, I studied everything but Korean.

Wendy is my Mandarin tutor. She is a graduate student majoring in Teaching Mandarin as a Foreign Language - TMFL? She has as much gumption to teach me as I have to learn. When we first met, I cautiously posed six hours a week, fearing that I'd jumped the gun, that it was too much for her hectic schedule. "Why not eight?" she asked. "Or more? Any time you're bored, call me and we'll have class."

Well, then. After my first month in Nanchong, I feared that I would leave China with less Chinese than I had when I came, that I would curl up in a ball on my pleather sofa watching 2001: A Space Odyssey until every muscle and brain cell in my body atrophied and expired. But now it seems I will leave this place fluent in Mandarin, all because I bothered to answer a phone call from an unknown number on a rainy Thursday evening as I was walking back to my apartment with a bowl of ramen.

I have never gotten to the point with a language where I felt the flaps go up and the whole mother start to lift off into the fluent air. Perhaps I came close with Spanish, at 3 AM on some wild night a few days before I left Mexico. It is hard to tell with Chinese. Mandarin is an abyss of a language, a tongue so different from our own that you could lose a lifetime in studying it. But there are moments - when I've slept well and I've slurped down just the right amount of coffee - when I can feel the vertical lift pulling me skyward.

There are good days and better days. On the better days, I wake up and can barely lift my head because it is so heavy with fresh neural connections. Forgive me for referencing There Will Be Blood two posts in a row, but it's a bit like the scene where H.W. is learning sign language: I bitch to my tutor about what's chapping my ass. She listens and, every so often, corrects me.

On the good days, I feel like I'm making no progress at all and I can see myself frozen lizardlike on the side of a plateau covered in Chinese hieroglyphs that stretches up into the heavens and beyond.

There is the added difficulty that the people around me are not speaking Mandarin, but Sichuanese. As far as dialects go, Mandarin and Sichuanese are fairly similar. But in essence, I am learning Queen's English in a place that speaks Creole. The more Mandarin I learn, the less I understand the cab driver. I would like to master both tongues, but I am uncertain as to whether I should learn to speak like an anchorman before I go out and get myself dirty, or whether I should go the Pygmalion route and learn to be a Cockney first.

Like China itself, Chinese grew overcrowded with words, so they started stacking them vertically into tones. Ma, depending on your intonation, can mean horse, mom, morphine, numb, grasshopper, ant, dragonfly, toad, or leprosy. Liang kuai can mean two bucks, or nice and cool. And so on. This is the main distinction between Mandarin and Sichuanese: two of the four tones are reversed and the other two are completely different. On top of that, the Sichuanese pronounce things strangely. The numbers four and ten, as well as the verbs to be, to eat, and to die sound exactly the same to the untrained ear. So the sentence "It's not fourteen, it's forty-four," easily parsable in Mandarin, sounds something like "Bu suh suh suh, suh suh suh suh."

But for now, I focus on the basics. Today I broke down giggling after I asked Wendy the words for number one and number two. On Chinese toilets, I have seen them represented by the symbol for small and the symbol for big.

"So you want to know pee and poop?" she asked. I bit my tongue and nodded. Then I lost it again. Then I recovered.
"Sorry," I told her. "I am a child."
"We say xiao hao for take a pee and da hao for take a poop."
"Little number and big number. We say the same thing in English, sort of," I said. "Thank you. I'll never forget them."

And I won't. To your tutor's chagrin, though you may forget the words for Christmas and autumn and environment, you will never forget pee and poop and an endless litany of other crudities that you might recite on your deathbed, should you so happen to expire in China.