by Jun Youb Lee
Student
September 11, 2008
When I first signed up for the Dragons China semester, I thought everybody would be fluent in Chinese and not having studied Chinese for the last two years, thougth I'd struggle to keep up with them. But to my surprise, almost everybody in the group had studied another language in high school (And Emily likes to sing songs in French) and I turned out to be the person with the most Chinese experience, having studied Chinese for four years between middle school and high school and visited the country three years ago.
On top of this, my first role turned out to be the 'translator'(*1) which meant I was in charge of doing all the talking between the Chinese people and our group. So naturally, until everybody caught up in Chinese, I took a leadership role in speaking part of our excursions among ourselves (students only) and even had to order Chinese dishes in a restaurant that did not speak English nor had English menu.
Yesterday, we embarked on our first challenging group activity and John, Ikia and I were in a group with five tasks to accomplish. (*2) We breezed through the first four, and my little Chinese skills came in handy and I was doing the most of the asking and directing although I should also acknowledge my group members' spotting skills. But the last task turned out to be the most difficult. We had to get the Green Lake Hotel's business card and we realized we did not know how to say "Green Lake" in Chinese. I knew green was 'lu' (u with two dots on top) and lake was 'hu.' But everybody I asked told me there was no such hotel. Frustrated, I went to the nearest hotel and tried to ask for 'luhu' 'binguan' (hotel)- but even the hotel could not help us (I suspected that the hotel did not want to lose customers to its competitors but the xiaojie (lady) at the front desk seemed genuine.)
So we went out the door and I did not know what to do, planning on just looking for a way back home and hoping to find the hotel by luck. And then came my savior Ikia, who handed me the business card she picked up at the last hotel. I was puzzled, as she also saw that the last hotel was not Green Lake. But then she showed me that there are locations of the major nearby attractions on the card, which included the Green lake Hotel. And fortunately, there was also 'Green Lake Hotel' written in Chinese below, which she suggested we use to navigate by showing the Chinese characters to the Chinese people. And soon we found our way to the hotel and we finished first among the groups that did not use the map.
Today lunch, (I guess technically yesterday since it's 12:30am now) we were given 50 yuan for lunch (around $7~8 US) and we had to feed 9 people. We were on our way to the Green Lake park when we ran into a restaurant that everybody agreed to go to. And having successfully ordered Chinese dishes last time, the group just told me to order whatever I wanted without consulting the group. So I tried to get 9 dishes and fully exploit our given money, and ended up ordering 9 fried rices of different kinds. I thought I smartly finished ordering the dishes again, but when the plates came out, it was not quite what we (or more I) expected. Each fried rice was huge, and we were forced to have a 'rice party.' Although we gave one rice dish to a homeless person who begged us for money and therefore only had to deal with 8 plates, I felt slightly sorry for the group as eating rice became more of a chore after a few plates.
Then afterwards, we went to the Yunnan Daxue (Yunnan Univ- "Yunda") to practice asking some questions in Chinese to the Yunda students. We were grouped into pairs and given several questions to ask. I was with Kyuri, and I doubted I would learn much being with Kyuri (or anybody) as I felt more confident in Chinese than most of the group did. After the first interview, we decided to split off and wander on our own. And although I liked the freedom of talking about whatever I wanted, I was scared to bother Yunda students who seemed to be in the middle of intense studying or talking to others about important matters. I sauntered around aimlessly and soon found Kyuri sitting with two Chinese female students, and thanks to Kyuri, I got to hang out with them.
I'm excited to see what the nine heads here are capable of achieving.
*1= For parents and friends- we all had different roles such as the 'leader', 'alarm clock (time keeper),' 'sweeper' (cleaner and last minute check person), treasurer, and 'waterboy' (who turned out to be a Zoe, which was a fitting job for her due to her extreme passion for hydration)
*2= This activity explained in other yaks
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