I recently celebrated my 18 month anniversary of moving to this fantastic city, and I’ve found that the longer you live here, the more you find some Chinese habits quirky and silly rather than alien or culturally significant. For example, it’s quite well known that Chinese people drink hot water instead of cold water, because they believe that cold water will make you ill. Nothing refreshes you on a hot, humid day like a glass of piping hot water, eh? There’s also a rule that […]
Archive for the ‘Tales of Yang Mei’ Category
I’m off to Australia and New Zealand for 3 weeks, so don’t be expecting any updates for a while… though at the rate I’m updating here, you probably shouldn’t be expecting too much anyway. Here’s a quick ToYM to tide you over… Yang Mei teaches people from all over the world (and unlike the majority of Chinese people, she has come to appreciate different cultures because of it), including America, England, France, Germany, Finland, Sweden, and Japan […]
Yáng Méi told me this story just today. Unfortunately it needs a little explanation, but hey, you’re here to learn, right? So, she has a Japanese student who had a friend visiting him. His friend is called Laurence. When Yáng Méi went over last week to teach her student, he introduced Laurence to her. However, in an attempt to make it easier (and, I suppose, more polite), he transliterated Laurence’s name into Chinese and introduced him as that. At this […]
My Chinese teacher has quite a few American students, since she speaks English well and there are plenty of Americans here trying to improve their Mandarin. One of her recent ones sticks out, because he’s something of a rarity here in Shanghai – a black guy. If there’s one group of people that get stared at more than my kind of wide-eye, it’s black people. There just aren’t many around, many Chinese people can probably claim to have never seen one, and […]
Here’s another story told to me by my wonderful Chinese teacher, Yáng Méi (Carrie). It’s quite similar to the first one, but then again, most of her stories involve her hapless students and misunderstandings in restaurants. This particular student is another American, but this guy is a super serious businessman. Carrie claims that she’s never seen him laugh. Having studied for a few months, he was comfortable with ordering food in fast food places, but like any […]
Pretty soon after moving here I started Chinese lessons. You kind of have to, it’s next to impossible to get by with just English here – but quite honestly I welcomed the challenge of learning such a difficult language. My teacher is awesome: she comes to my flat twice a week and gives me 1-to-1 Mandarin tuition. It’s crazy how much progress I’ve made over the last 5 or so months; going from completely useless to only slightly useless. I can now order food and […]