Initial Exchange Inquiries

Sometimes, a couple of students from the 对外汉语 (teaching Chinese to foreigners) department at Heilongjiang University come to sit in on our classes - cheap training for them and, I suppose, a stamp of approval on HIT's students for us foreigner students.

A couple of days ago, I got to chatting with one, called Jin Ran, before class.

"You're from England?" she asked quizzically.

I sighed, preparing to give my tiresomely well-versed explanation of "foreign-born Chinese".

"You mean a 华裔?" she interjected, leaving me gratified and shocked into a stunned silence. "Well I've got a friend, Yudi, who needs an English teacher. Would you meet up with her?"

Preferring to find language exchange-partners on my own terms, I threw up some evasive conditions.

"Is she a Chinese major?"

"Yup".

"Uhh... well Heilongjiang University's quite far..."

"Oh, don't worry, she's a fourth year too, and we don't have lectures this year - she can come to you."

I was almost out of excuses.

"She's a 美女 (a beauty)" Jin Ran said, reading my mind. I gave my best sceptical look. Her classmates nodded vigorously and made "uh huh" noises.

"I wasn't thinking that!" I lied. "Well let's exchange numbers and she can get in touch". I said, conceding privately that I probably needed a language-exchange partner after the weekend's debilitatingly spirit-crushing classes.

Honestly - and this is no doubt horribly un-PC mainlander bigotry creeping in here - female teachers are better than their male counterparts. Is it any wonder that the majority of students at teaching universities are female? Not only do they tend to be more patient, and easier on the ears, they smell nicer and have better standards of hygiene. On those terms anything would be an improvement on Paul, who enjoyed picking his nose with my pens and sneezing on my feet.

Fast-forward to today. I send Yudi a text. "Do you know the 正门 on 西大直街? I'll meet you there at 5pm. Blue jeans, brown jacket, and black bag. 注意阿！我是华裔而不是老外！(Take note! I'm Chinese, not a foreigner").

Yudi replies "哈哈 那你有没有老外血统呀：） 方便你便认我穿白色风衣象个淑女！(Haha, then do you have any foreigner blood in you? So you can tell who I am, I'm wearing a white jacket and look like a lady!) See you soon!"

I get to the gate a couple of minutes past five and a plain girl with short-hair in glasses and a blue jacket tries to catch my hair.

"That can't be right" I think to myself.

"Hey!" she smiles at me "Why look at me like that? You look like nothing like your photo".

"What!?" I manage just as a taxi pulls up and another, taller girl, in a white jacket steps out. A very confused five seconds as short-girl resolves her case of mistaken identity; I try to ascertain if taller-girl is Yudi while resolving said case of mistaken identity with short-girl; and taller-girl completely ignores us both (later: "I didn't think it was you because I thought you knew that girl.")

Happily, everything is soon resolved. Yudi and I go to Hamamas - a local cafe (apparently legendary among the local Western ex-pat community) serving real coffee and burgers - to discuss the terms of language exchange and get to know each other.

Harbin's air isn't noticeably worse than any other big city's but for some reason (probably all the burning coal for heating) there's a lot of air-borne particulates. On the way, I catch something in my eye, and have to walk a couple of hundred metres with tears streaming out from under one scrunched up eyelid. Real classy.

Over chocolate milkshakes we arrange an exchange schedule, ascertain each other's language needs and demands, and evaluate our respective language levels. Yudi knows her stuff, as you'd expect from someone specialising in Chinese, and was impressively keen on explaining words and elaborating on mistakes I made, before going on to embarass me with her grasp of the International Phonetic Alphabet and English grammar rules. On the flip side, she's cripplingly shy in English, despite scoring a level 6 of 8 in the English equivalent of the HSK.

It occurs to me, and not for the first time, that language has the capability to shape your thinking and personality hugely. Certainly the small obvious distinctions such as one word encompassing both "mouse" and "rat" in Chinese (actually in evolutionary terms they're totally distinct), or the lack of a concise concept of "schadenfreude" (deriving pleasure from others' misfortune) in English constitute a palpable difference.

It's probably a given that one is always going to be wittier in one's own mother tongue, and that most people are going to be shyer and less responsive in their second or third language. What effect does a different mother-tongue make to one's thinking though? I wonder if Oscar Wilde would have been as effective operating in a homophonic pun-heavy oeuvre such as Chinese, or if 相声 master Hou Baolin could have found fame if his mother-tongue was the comparatively rigidly-structured German?

And if your responsiveness and wit depends so much on your mother tongue, who's to say your power of reasoning and rhetoric aren't affected too? Only recently have I begun to realise what George Orwell was getting at, when he postulated that 'Newspeak' was a useful component of authoritarian rule.

But i digress. An hour and a half of discussion later (一个半小时而不是一个小时半！) and we're done. First proper language exchange session on Thursday!