世界末日－The Day I Learned to Write "The End of the World" in Chinese

I have worked in a Chinese restaurant for more than one year, and yet do not speak Chinese. I think this is kind of disappointing on my part. I have made too little effort to get to know the kitchen staff. I am not personally responsible for them at all, but it bothers me to know that because they don't speak much English, it is easy to forget them, to not think of them (and how much more true is this of multi-ethnic societies?) This is something I can't ignore. Since the beginning of college when I worked in another restaurant that employed immigrants, it's important that I try to talk to people who speak English as a foreign language - no matter how basic. Still, it hasn't been enough of a priority for me to learn their own languages. But I try to reflect on the lives of these people, and that's one drive to keep writing.

The cook I communicate with most is Bin, who's English is probably at a low beginner level, from what I can say as an ESL tutor. It's because Bin himself tries to communicate with me that our friendship grows word by word.

A few days ago Bin communicated to me online that he wanted to get a State ID. I went through the state website and tried to communicate what he needed to collect (a finished application, passport, Social Security Number, and 2 proofs of residence). I filled out the application for him, and I asked the bilingual restaurant manager to interpret what's meant by two proofs of residence. The next day we went to the DMV, but we were soon thwarted when the old man in the red sweater at the counter told us that Bin had not brought proof of his immigration status. It hadn't occurred to me to bring that, though it should have been obvious. I couldn't even interpret for Bin. The old man laughed at us. I called the manager, who explained quickly over the phone to him and to me that the paperwork we needed wasn't yet available. The old man gave us an index of requirements for immigrant applicants, chortling, "I'm not an expert on these [immigration] matters.." Thinking suddenly of my friend's deportation, I said, "I'm learning."

"Well, now what are we going to do?" I asked. Bin shrugged, "I don't know. I follow you." This was his 休息- day off. I had four hours before work. We began wandering through Downtown. We first went to a library and played with a Chinese phrase book, which I really should have checked out. Then we spent the most time visiting two culture shops. I could spend all day in such places with Japanese, Chinese, and Indian art decor, icons, and collectibles - tapestries of Chinese art, Japanese fans, paintings of Hindu gods, several tiny statues of Buddha... Bin tried to explain Chinese characters wherever we saw them in the artworks. We then made a brief visit to the Downtown square before it started to rain. By then it was late in the afternoon anyway, and we sat in a restaurant, and we began a true session of language exchange.

With a notebook, pen, and an online Chinese-English dictionary, we tried to talk and teach. We started with the broken English chatter, our own limited lingua franca. Then we started teaching each other random English and Chinese words, and the notebook became littered with vocabulary and phrases. "Always (总是)", "never" (从来没有), "every day" (每天), "soon" (不久), and "F$@# you!" (I have to double check, I *cough* can't make out the handwriting in my notes) .

I wanted to teach English at that moment, but I felt that I couldn't try to teach Bin English unless he expressly solicited it. And yet I also wanted to know some Chinese, and it feels somewhat imperative that I at least know a little bit about someone else's language before I impose my own. In any case, if he would trust me as a teacher, I would make myself his own student. However insecure he might feel about English, I can't allow that insecurity. I can also show him that I know even less about Chinese.

I asked Bin to teach me the four tones, this most basic concept in the Chinese language. Bin drew: ˉ ´ˇ`

Ok, so: mā, má, mă, mà  (ma1, ma2, ma3, ma4) - high level, rising, rising falling, falling

Can you please read the second one again? The fourth? What word uses the second tone? Máfan -麻烦 - trouble. We repeated the Chinese word and the English word several times each, and then example sentences.

Taking inspiration from the lunch we were eating, I asked Bin to translate, "I like onions" and "I don't like mushrooms" (These sentences are true for me, but opposite for him). From there, how do I say that I like or dislike something?

我喜欢..... Wŏ xǐhuan ....
我不喜欢... Wŏ bu xǐhuan ....

Just these basic sentences would take practice.. 

After nodding to the rain outside, Bin pointed to my backpack and asked, "You no umbrella?"

From that sentence the ESL tutor in me pounced:
"You no umbrella  --> "You don't have an umbrella?"

I / you / we / they - have               I / you / we / they  - don't have
he/ she / it            - has                 he/ she / it             - doesn't have

Bin and I made example sentences with friends as subjects for he/she, and common, recognizable objects like iPhones, cars, cats, and siblings.

After studying a moment, Bin asked "Any name - Annie, Laura,... doesn't have?" "Exactly!"

Bin pointed to "a" and "an" and asked "Why?"

an +  a____                          a  + b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, ......
         e___      (vowels)
         i ___
         o ___
         u ___

Then I drew a sentence making quiz. To my delight and relief, Bin complied:

As an aspiring English as a Foreign Language Teacher, I was thrilled to try to teach. I am always learning to perform on this amateur level, and I am always realizing how I could have done better, and what mistakes I made ( A+ probably didn't translate - I could have simply drawn a ^_^ ).

More importantly, as Bin and I try to communicate on basic levels, it's an interesting journey to see what we can and can't share. Without fluency in each other's language, we can't really share our pasts or our future hopes. We can't really argue either. But It also makes me wonder how people of different languages first began to interact. Bin and I were mostly locked in our own thoughts in our own languages as we walked together through the city streets. We communicate somewhat less than children, but certainly more than animals. I realize that friendship is based on trust, and trust is not based on communication, it's based on the attempts to communicate. It grows with each attempt.

You might notice at the top of the paper is where Bin taught me to write "the end of the world". Funny - because he forgot one stroke in a character, the first translation he showed me on his phone read "World Wood Day" (世界木日). But on December 22, the end of the mysterious Mayan calender, we laughed at the thought of the day's predicted apocalypse. Our own worlds were expanding. We were newly exploring.



Also, a belated

               Merry Christmas - 圣诞快乐 Shèngdàn kuàilè! 



Online Chinese resources: 

http://www.chineseonthego.com

http://mandarin.about.com/

http://www.standardmandarin.com/

My First Visit to the Sri Venkateswara Hindu Temple

The following is an excerpt from a short memoir I drafted about my early cross-cultural exchanges during college. Here I talk about my first visit to the Sri Venkateswara Temple in Pittsburgh.

My personal photo of the temple was accidentally erased, and it's quite a pilgrimmage to get there without a car (though I've done it once), so for now I am shamelessly borrowing this picture, and with a citation

"Bharath... first brought me to the Sri Venkateswara Hindu temple in Pittsburgh, and I followed him like a shadow through the rituals.

The entrance inside the temple. You're not allowed to take pictures beyond this hall.

We removed our shoes at the entrance, we bowed first to a murti statue of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god for overcoming obstacles, whose invocation precedes all other worship. Then we thrice circumnavigated the heart of the temple before we joined the lines of worshippers and approached the shrines of Sri Venkateswara, Lord Balaji, and shrines of two others, one at each side, each of them surrounded by wreaths of flowers, gold-colored bowls, and food offerings of fruit. Bharath bowed with his hands and knees on the ground. He took the red powder from the dish and dabbed it on his forehead. After a moment’s hesitation I did the same. We sat before the main shrine. Sri Venkateswara is embodied in an ebony black statue whose eyes were covered with paper, metaphorically sparing us the intensity of his gaze. We sat as yellow-robed priests chanted long verses in Sanskrit. I could only discern a recitation of his incarnations. The priests blessed the people, even me, asking each of us for names of family members, and then placing a bowl over our heads. I left pondering what I had seen, a red bindi on my own brow.

This was the painting I saw in the entrance hall - Krishna and his mother, Yashoda. Here I realized how amazingly beautiful Hindu art is - the combination of realism, mysticism, and fantastic beauty astounds me.

 I was enamored of all the rituals, and I tried to compare them to what I knew of Christian Lutheran worship, my own religious foundation, close to Catholicism. Just inside the temple there was a painting on the wall of baby Krishna in the arms of his mother, both of them painted angelically like Madonna and the Christ child. The priests were robed too, but in yellow, and their Sanskrit chanting was like the Latin Kyrie. The priests gave blessings, the people gave offerings. Instead of God the Father, Son, and Spirit, the Trinity here is Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. And yet the infinity of differences between Hinduism and Christianity are more profound than I could have realized or understood. Although the stories of gods and rituals of worship are more complicated, I think Hinduism is arguably more free. One need not take the straight and narrow path that leads to Heaven as in Christianity, but any path toward enlightenment. Hinduism for Hindus is more literally understood as philosophical experience – darshana. Divinity also embraces a wider meaning - why, Advait challenged, should God have one specific, human form? A Hindu "idol" is not an idol in the biblical sense, but it is a representation made to form a connection between a deity and one’s self.  Later, further challenging ideas of divinity, eternity, and the self, Buddhism, literally and ostensibly, emerged as an "awakening", partly a reaction to Hinduism (also, as with the development of other religions, as a political challenge, taking a stance against things including the caste system). According to some forms of Buddhism, maybe there is no god, no eternity, and no self, and thus one finds enlightenment. Although I do not pray to Christ, Krishna, Buddha, or Allah, I hope someday to realize in myself a universal sense of spirituality that transcends the specifics of East and West. I want to understand how these different stories and values complement each faith and culture.

Religion, like language, is a vehicle for communication and understanding. I felt marked by the temple experience in a way that was much more permanent than the spot of powder. I entered the temple afraid of being out of place, but I have been brought there with enthusiasm, and the Indians there were so quietly welcoming. When I later brought an Indian friend to a church, he joked about being worried of catching fire. But in the Hindu temple, I was just welcome as anyone else. Bharath said I looked good with a bindi. 

 I knew that even besides the temple visit, I would always be in debt to him. He introduced me to India, by sharing his food, his music, and some of his stories. I used to sit with him in the restaurant while he talked about his family, his life, and the lives of other Indians like himself. Like Bharath, many Indians were raised to be engineers or doctors, and then many come to the United States for graduate school, and then to find a job for supporting their families back in India. Coincidentally somewhat near to New York’s Chinatown, the highest concentration of an Indian population is in Edison, New Jersey, through which most of Bharath’s own friends passed through at some point. Bharath introduced me to Kiran, Raghu, Kiran P., and Nikhil, who all became my friends. I broke bread with Kiran (literally, Subway bread) and we talked about each other’s families as we worked the quiet summer night shifts. He was nicer than anyone I'd ever met. Nikhil showed me his silver Sikh bracelet that a North Indian friend had given him, and I noticed, on the other wrist, a scar. He explained with a sad smile that it was from an attempted suicide, after his girlfriend of six years was forced into an arranged marriage. I was speechless. And yet such tragedy blurs when I remember watching him sing and dance to songs in Telugu and American hip hop, and how he yelled at me playfully in his fast-talking South Indian accent, and then taught me to counter with “Angle chupistunnavu kaddha!?” – “Are you showing me an angle (literally: Are you making fun of me)!? 
And one by one they moved on with their lives. Bharath moved to New Jersey, and then left his search on the job market to go back to Hyderabad, India. Kiran found a job in New York City shortly after his graduation, which Maria and I attended wearing his gifts of colorful, Punjabi Indian dresses. Raghu is in Florida. Nikhil and Kiran P. are in Michigan. And I've been such a poor friend at keeping in touch..    

And though my Indian friends from Subway had moved away by the time of the crisis of failing the Japanese program, I was still given by hope by my new Indian friend Advait, the only one who could tell me that I wasn’t a failure. Advait came to the United States as an engineer who decided instead to study Physics. It might seem like the quintessential American sense of independence, and yet his own philosophy is quintessentially Hindu. His name A-dvait means “non-dual” representing a school of thought that divinity of deity and self are manifestations of one entity. Such a manifestation, he realized, is similar to that of mass and energy. When I first asked him what his name meant, he wrote E=mc². Once while he was studying the laws of the universe, I had approached him admitting I couldn’t grasp a second language. Advait, who speaks Hindi, English, Marathi, and some Telugu and Sanskrit, answered gently, “I know that pain.”

For these friendships and these experiences, I wanted to forever honor my Indian friends. I owe them so much, and I wanted to speak their language, write with their letters, and appreciate their sense of aesthetic. I first wanted revenge, and now I wanted my own redemption. My college didn’t have a class teaching their language of Telugu, but there was a class for Hindi, India’s national language. And so I had changed sides again. To switch from Japanese to Hindi was to switch from short grain rice to long grain rice, and from anime to Bollywood. Even my ideal of feminine beauty and mystique portrayed by traditional courtesans flowed from the kimono-robed and white-faced geisha to the bejeweled and sari-swathed tawaif. I went from austere Shinto shrines to decorous Hindu temples – and to the source of Buddhism."

\Since this draft of writing, I have become further indebted to and inspired by Indian friends and Indian culture. The relationships and experiences have been invaluable. Throughout college, a small group of Indians have been my close friends when I otherwise have had very few, and they gave so much. My Hindi professor and my former partner are among the most personally inspiring people in my life, and I will never forget my other friends, nor the others I have looked up to more distantly, such as Harish Saluja and Azam Ali (Ok, she's Iranian, but she introduced me to Urdu poetry). 

Lately, I have been watching more Indian movies, reading more Indian-based novels, and studying more of the language - as if I am afraid of losing that small part of India in my heart. I really hope to make it there someday, somehow.