Bag

Our Mandarin teacher is a sweetheart. She is very kind and shows genuine concern for our communication skills and the effect they have on our well-being. By this, I mean she looks out for us with textbook material as well as everyday, spoken language. But lately, she’s taken up language boxing lessons and I’ve become the Chinese punching bag - staunch and lumpy, tough to make an impression under my skin. That things panned out this way are not a mistake; in fact, it was expected for two reasons:

1. This is my first time seriously studying a foreign language with the goal of eventually using it one day. The other students can bust out anywhere from two to six languages apiece, ranging from Spanish to Russian. Yours truly has difficulty ordering “water” in the Midwest.

2. In South Philly, sardonic humor is considered an art form. I grew up with it and (to some extent) it’s engrained in my personality, if not my blood. And while it’s cool that our class is mostly void of dry, biting humor, I can’t help myself sometimes. So, I try to liven things up by grading my tests before handing them in, telling the teacher I don’t like her and want a new instructor (via my inchoate Chinese skills), trying to steal the answer key to our homework, and convincing her that this bottle (with Absolut written on it) I brought to the Christmas Eve party is, in fact, water and she should pour more in her cup.

We jab back and forth and it keeps the room’s mood light, interesting. Today, she taught us the word “danshi,” which means “but.” And it was in this lesson that she displayed her most impressive sparring skills. She opened the lesson with “Greta studies seriously, but Chris sleeps.” I’m proud of her. Then it was, “Marko scored well on the test, but Chris goes to the bar to drink beer.” Cute, but that’s enough. But, in closing, when the judges had already scored the cards in her favor, she came through with the following uppercut: “Marina speaks Chinese like she is from China, but Chris does not understand anything I say.” Of course, the fact that I understood 35% of what she just said partially proves her wrong, but I let her have the moment and admit: she used the jab, hook, and uppercut in effective fashion. And now I plot my comeback.