The Great Wall and the Great Barrier
It’s six months ago, and I’m sitting in my dining room with the doors closed, waiting for the ring. I have my hair in a nice enough braid, a button-down shirt on (with pajama pants because the Skype interview will only include my mid chest and up), and a water bottle in hand, pacing quickly as my nerves begin to get the best of me.
Finally, a ringing comes from my laptop. I answer it with a big smile, putting much more effort than I thought I’d need to into looking at the camera and not at the screen, and dive in. Other than when I have pardon myself for a moment to go tell my dad to stop yelling jovial welcomes at my cousin Jackson who has just flown in from Connecticut, the interview goes as well as can be hoped.
I was particularly fond of my answer to the question “What do you hope to gain out of this experience, should you be selected?” I started my answer with the generic stuff, such as good foundational lab skills, a better understanding of food insecurity, a more worldly outlook, so on and so forth. But my final item went something like this: “And I’d really like to get to know the people of where I go, because when I went on a mission trip to Ecuador, I learned that the connections one makes with people are as important if not more so than the work one does with those people.” (I had said this to emphasize my preference of the site in Peru, a nation where I can much more feasibly hold a conversation in the native language, but the point I made got across.)
Since I’ve been here, I think this remains to be true. And since I’ve been here, I’ve been rather disappointed in my ability to try and make these connections.
Two months is a strange amount of time to be abroad. For me, it’s just long enough to feel like I’ve lived here and understand what daily life would look like here in the long term, but it’s not long enough for me to commit to learning the full language. And language, obviously, is a large barrier when trying to get to know someone in a foreign country.
Now, part of the reason I’ve been able to get by with little to no former knowledge of the Chinese language is because I’m in an international lab. There are five other international students who all speak very good English, and even most of the native Chinese students know at least enough English to have a small talk conversation. In the lab, it’s a great system.
Yet when I try to go out, I find myself met with some difficulty, and not the type of difficulty I thought I’d face abroad. For instance, ordering food at a restaurant is easy. Just point at the image of the food you want, hold up the number on your hand of how many of that food you want, and pay in cash at the register. Or with a taxi: simply flag it down, Google translate the name of the location into Chinese characters, and watch the yuan ticker go up as the distance increases. These small, necessary, and vital interactions are very doable with little language knowledge. And there’s even a small sense of accomplishment I feel in figuring out that I can manage myself and do things on my own in such a different place from home.
Obviously, though, there is a trade-off with not knowing the language. For me, it’s not so much that I wish I could order better, read the Chinese news headlines in the canteen, or ask directions if I need them. For me, what I feel I’m losing are the small interactions. The mundane small talk and the simple “My pleasure!” I wish I could offer the people here.
For example, when we went to the Forbidden City a few weeks ago, there was a lady who stopped me and tried to tell me something with a big smile on her face. She touched her own face, pointed at mine, and then looked at Lucas, the Chinese guide who was with us who speaks English but not fluently. The best translation he could give me was that the lady was telling me I was pretty, but I could see there was something more earnest in her words through her gestures. In that moment, I wish I could have understood what she was saying and complimented her as well, or given her a “My goodness, thank you so much!” All I could say was thank you with an equally earnest smile on my face, but that wasn’t enough.
Or the other night, as I came home after the subway had closed from a sendoff dinner for an Australian student I’d met at dinner some weeks ago. I flagged a taxi and got in and translated “Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences” on my phone, and off we went. The driver kept looking over at me and asking me questions, and all I could do was shrug my shoulders. He eventually just said “U S A?”, to which I was able to nod my head, but I wish I could have done more. As I got out of the taxi, he said in a very thick accent with long pauses between each word, “Welcome to Beijing!” Again, all I could say was thank you as I closed the door, but even with the very little he knew, he was able to make me happier than I could make him through our very small fragments of conversation.
These little passes, these seemingly meaningless and mundane interactions would mean more to me here than any full ten-minute fluent conversation I’d have here. Just to be able to find the words to match the expression on my face and make another person smile similarly would be so incredibly meaningful. And let me say it’s not for lack of trying, but clumsily pulling out my phone for google translate and waiting for the app to load while trying to continue a non-clunky, authentic conversation doesn’t really work out most of the time.
And those small interactions I’ve had with people who do speak English have meant the world to me. At the Great Wall, I met an American father-daughter duo who were wearing University of Virginia hats, which is where I’ll be going for school next year. The father went to UVA for environmental science for his undergraduate (which is what I hope to study there, as well) and then to Florida State University for his master’s degree, which is the university in the heart of my home town of Tallahassee. It was a totally simple, very short conversation, but those short three minutes completely made my day. Making these little connections and getting to know at least some of the people around me has made this trip infinitely more interesting.
So while I’ve far from mastered the language, I don’t think one needs to be a master to gain much more out of microscopic interactions than I am here. It’s the little things, the infinitesimal gestures and words, that make the difference between visiting Beijing and living in Beijing. And while I’ve certainly been here for a while, I don’t think I’ve completely lived her. Not just yet.
