Ping Pong, Meat and Sprained Ankles

You may think this title is somewhat odd. If so, good. Read on.  I spent my day here without anything much to do besides prepare for my first day of classes tomorrow, which was quite leisurely.  When I am at loose ends, I always find going to the teacher’s office to be profitable. I can listen in on conversations and give my Chinese ear some practice, and I participate in conversations as well. These conversations often consist of me asking people to say something again or in a different way, since it’s hard to understand them. In fact, I often get the feeling that I am the butt of the joke when they start rambling and laughing in Chinese. However, I have realized that you must be willing to be the bud of the joke if you want to become fluent in a language. Oftentimes, we are too afraid of seeming like an idiot (even if we know that we are not!) to fully embrace the stage of language acquisition which makes us seem foolish to native speakers. I plan to come back to this school in ten years when I can no longer be made fun of behind my back. Then, I will have the last laugh.

Four things of significance happened today:

1)      At lunch, I realized that the word for “meat” refers to pork unless otherwise specified. In other words, you must specify “chicken meat” or “cow meat” when describing a meat, otherwise you are automatically talking about pork meat. This reflects the prevalence of pork in the Chinese diet. Interesting, I thought.

2)      I played basketball for the first time today with the PE teacher and some of the students. While viciously pulling down a rebound in a crowd of 5’3”, 100 pound Chinese girls, I managed to sprain my ankle. It was slightly embarrassing.

3)      I engaged in a spontaneous game of ping pong today with the students. Even though ping pong is China’s national sport, I represented the US well. I won a great deal of the games I played. I was proud to hang with the Chinese in a game of 乒乓球。

4)       While purchasing some bottled water outside of the school gates, I talked to one of the natives. His skin was weathered from many years in the sun, and he seemed to me the classic Chinese man in the straw hat tilling the fields that you might see on a postcard. He asked me if the ground was the same in America. I responded that, of course, the ground was the same in America, just like everywhere in the world. However, having never seen another part of the world, how would one know that the ground is necessarily the same? Before I left the country and travelled to Beijing in high school, I actually had no idea if the other side of the world would resemble my home at all. I almost miss the wonder of not knowing. Now I realize that different places in this world are not all that different.