Silly experiences in China

On the first real day that we were in Shanghai, I remember going to the museum in the downtown area. It was especially memorable because of a boy who really made his mark in my memories. It was during the later part of the day when every had been taking that written poll in the hallway on the second or third floor of the museum. Everyone else had left except Amy, Jillian, and I. Right after we finished the written poll and received our thank you Chinese knots Jillian mentioned that the guy sitting on the other side on the bench of her looked kind of sketch and she was curious to know if he was a pickpocket since we’d been warned to watch out for them. Being the foreigners we are, we ended up chattering away while staring the poor boy down, who eventually got so flustered he ran off and ducked into a nearby exhibit hall, but peeked around the corner after he’d been gone for all of three seconds. We sat there and chattered away, noticing that he came out of the room and pretty much ran off to the other side of the floor and was talking on his phone. Somehow we came up with the genius idea to slide over on the bench and wait until he looked in our direction and wave at him just to see what he did. Eventually he did look at us and we, of course, waved at him which served to fluster him and he ran off into yet another exhibit. At this point, we wondered if it was strange to wave at boys when you were a girl, but were determined to do it again. When he came out of the exhibit and stood on the landing of a nearby stairway, we waved again and, at last, he waved back. When he disappeared again, we gave up on the idea of him coming back and I wandered off to ask Dr. Yao if it was audacious of young women to wave at young men. When I returned to where Jillian and Amy were sitting, waiting for me, I discovered that the boy had returned and somehow had asked where I had gone. We got into a very difficult conversation as neither could speak the other’s language with any kind of proficiency. At one point he left and sought out someone who spoke Chinese and English and we saw that he was talking to Dr. Yao, which made us laugh. The whole situation ended with him giving me his phone number and we traded e-mail addresses before Jillian, Amy, and I fled the museum.

The whole ordeal with the boy was enough to fluster me for a few days as I’d really just had it put into perspective how horrible my Mandarin was. I mean, I knew it was really bad since I only knew a few words and maybe three phrases, one of which included “Wo shi mei guo ren.” But to be face to face with a person around my own age who could speak as much English as I could speak Mandarin was both frustrating and funny. It was even funnier for us because Amy realized that even after a whole year of Mandarin classes, she couldn’t speak much more Mandarin than the boy could speak English. This experience made me realize, later on, that even a year’s worth of Mandarin training wouldn’t be enough to adequately prepare myself for being thrown straight into China. I would need much more training than Amy had and then some before I would be comfortable with the idea of returning to China again.