In the 19th year of my life, I did two things that were profoundly stupid. For two entire days, I made Facebook my homepage – a decision which single-handedly compromised my already dwindling ability to simultaneously do homework, check Twitter and keep up with the Kardashians. That wasn’t the worst of it, though. Just ahead of the fall semester of my second year, I made the well-intended — if woefully misguided — decision to take Chinese.
My interest was largely extra-academic. A student of Spanish for the past six years, I was exempt from the villainous language requirement which too often forces students to slave under strange tongues from foreign lands — an administrative requirement which seems to dangerously imply America isn’t the most free, most brave and most likely to embody the dawn’s early light.
No, it wasn’t the requirements that did this. Inspired only by an incredibly engaging semester in Brad Reed’s course, Modern Chinese History, I became enamored with the idea of pursuing the exotic. This would be bold — different, even. Somehow, simply not owning Bean Boots and a Barbour jacket was no longer enough. I was becoming a “them” — so I decided to commit myself to learning a language spoken by 1.052 billion other people.
Don’t worry, I realize I am a living contradiction. The same night I registered for Chinese, I ordered a Patagonia.
And so, it began. Thrust into a classroom of less than 20 similarly naïve hopefuls, I floundered from the start. Between the hours of 11 and 11:50 a.m., Monday through Friday, I was quizzed on the roughly 20 characters we were expected to learn each night and prompted to speak in both presentational and interpersonal settings. I struggled to make sounds I didn’t realize were a part of my human register. I sought to turn lines, strokes and squiggles into cohesive characters, shaping them into stories like “shooting star teacher flies queen Julia to work under the moon.” This was cute in that it both did not help me memorize the characters and also made me seem crazy.
My real downward decline, however, can be traced back to about two weeks into the semester. We had just learned to implement the complex grammatical structure of: “This man’s name is [insert man’s name here].” Shocked at how quickly I mastered this intricate formula, I volunteered my expertise.
Having just missed the boat on the PowerPoint slide introducing Katniss Everdeen, the stage was set for me to acquaint the class with the tall Chinese man holding a basketball. I stood up, grandiosely gesturing towards the screen. “His name is Jeremy Lin,” I said in Chinese. Unwavering in my conviction — I had nailed that grammatical structure! — I took a seat.
My classmates looked at me with pitied concern. I wavered, but it was too late. It was not Jeremy Lin.
And so ends the story of how roughly 20 people came to think I was a racist in less than a minute.
Let me attempt to justify this gaffe. I do not do sports. They don’t offend me, but they also don’t excite me. I don’t make friends by participating — people always pretend they aren’t that competitive and don’t mind you joining until they realize your only contribution is to consistently spin move away from the ball — and I would rather watch HBO’s documentary on Beyoncé than spend nine innings looking for an easy out. The only reason I know who Jeremy Lin is to begin with is because I saw a Buzzfeed article featuring a spectator sign that read, “I want you LINside of me.”
Thus, I saw a basketball player and, coming from my place of limited of knowledge, had three options: LeBron James, Shaq from the Aaron Carter song and Jeremy Lin.
Ultimately, though, I can only justify my ignorance so much. The comment was not meant to be racial — this became entirely evident when my class watched me pull out my phone and Google Yao Ming. I really just knew nothing about sports. Still, I was quickly introduced to the first rule of studying a language: it’s more than just learning words and forming sentences. It’s about amassing an understanding of a culture and the language that shapes it, about gaining a perspective from the ground up. You can say a sentence correctly grammatically, and still be so, so wrong.
And this is largely why I hope to study Chinese in Shanghai this summer. For all my complaining, placing a language in the context it lives and breathes in seems to be the real deal. If slogging through characters each night means learning things like how four is the unluckiest number in Chinese because the word for “four” sounds similar to the word for “death,” I’ll take it.
And I’ll take a crash course in American athletics, too.
Julia’s column runs biweekly Thursdays. She can be reached at j.horowitz@cavalierdaily.com.
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