I'm not sure whether Beijing stores have dressing rooms or not. Nonetheless, I panicked because while I could think of kaishi (not sure how to pinyinize text yet), I had no idea how to talk about finishing anything! After a couple of minutes, I thought of the phrase "ni zuowan le ma?" but that didn't seem quite right either, since it seemed to imply some kind of potentially sordid dressing room activity. Even a look at www.mdbg.net, my go-to Chinese resource, proved fruitless. Maybe one always has to be finishing some task as opposed to being "done". I'm still not sure, though perhaps one of my three readers might be able to help me out.
The theme of this message might seem somewhat on the defeatist side. But I think it's actually a reformulation of a question I've received a few times about my decision to go to Beijing. There are a couple of major categories of inquisition. The first assumes that I'm making a good business decision by acquiring Chinese in advance of the country's future economic hegemony. The second express concern about the detriments to my health, mostly due to Beijing's eternal smog. Frankly, after my five days in Shanghai last year I'm somewhat worried myself. Some combination of avian and swine flu usually interjects itself as well. I've had to spend some time reassuring my mom that I'll most likely have much bigger problems on my hands, such as finding time to sleep.
The third reaction I tend to receive is the blunt question: "Why?" Sometimes the question is couched in much more delicate verbiage, sometimes not. In spite of my overall excitement about going to China, I sometimes ask myself the same thing. Depending on who's asking, my responses will vary - but in truth, I don't have a simple response. I could say something about how much I enjoy learning Chinese - that had better be the case, given how much time I'll spend doing just that next year! I could talk about how much I enjoyed visiting Hong Kong and wanting to see what's different about the mainland. Maybe Chinese will end up being useful somewhere down the road. And sometimes it's hard not to get concerned about what will end up being an unfinishable task. By definition, I cannot become a native speaker of Chinese - from my linguistics classes I know that the difference between fluency and nativedom lies in unconscious language instincts reserved almost always for those whose plastic young brains spent ten years of life surrounded by the chatter of their native tongue.
It's also hard for me not to be terrified at times of the magnitude of my task. I have a stack of five hundred flashcards sitting on the living room table, barely a tenth of the characters in a literate Chinese repertoire, and yet as many as a hundred of them will look shockingly unfamiliar as I try to review them in the next week. And even in a more general sense, I sometimes wonder if I'm worthy of the Light Fellowship. All I've ever really done is graduate from high school and college, play scrabble (a money-losing venture, it has to be mentioned) and play ultimate frisbee. Until last night, I didn't even have a way of getting a student visa, thanks to my own idiocy in losing a crucial, supposedly irreplaceable form. I've somehow set myself for up this crazy, yearlong task that I hardly feel competent in achieving at the moment, lollygagging as I am about my house. But then I remind myself once again how much I've enjoyed all the new things I've tried over the years and the places I've gone, my first junk boat trip in hong kong, riding a scooter in saigon traffic, running up payne whitney's stairs over and over again for winter training. And that's the answer to the question, really. I start things I can't finish - perfecting my putonghua, understanding how China works, bettering my scrabble game, learning new juggling tricks - precisely because I'll never run out of things to do, so long as I can keep myself excited.
In general, I plan to be updating this blog very regularly, hopefully as much as three or four times a week. I've tried my hand at travel-blogging before, first during a two week trip around Vietnam, more recently during my ten-week layover in Hong Kong last summer. I've gotten some positive feedback, although almost entirely from my Scrabble buddies and my mom, but really I just like attempting to communicate my own responses to new discoveries. I moved so frequently when I was growing up, something like 12 or 13 times, that I never really considered travel to be a priority in my life. It was axiomatic. But in the last few years, as I've been more responsible for orchestrating my journeys, I've started to realize that going to new places might be one of my favorite things in life. My writerly skills are not all that remarkable, barely reasonable for a Yale and English 120 graduate. But I think that I have an eye for the absurd, and hopefully as I discover Beijing I'll be able to impart some of my own wonderment to whoever ends up reading this blog.
