I lived a whole year over there, and every so often I look back at all the stuff I wrote and remember some of it (because it feels pretty far away most of the time). Here's one of my favorite stories, as I told it here:
First, some background, then the punch line.
Big Purple class has been learning about going to the market and how to bargain (albeit simply) in English. For example, the student will tell me, “I want to buy apples,” to which I reply “that’ll be 5 yuan” to which they say, “No, no, no. How about 3 yuan?” Simple enough, right?
Next background: Foreigners have big, ugly noses. This is a well-known fact in China. In fact, even my nose is big and ugly—which I suppose it is compared to most Chinese noses, as they run pretty small and cute. This doesn’t bug me all that much (really at all), but when my students are kind enough to point this out to me (that my nose is big and ugly), I tickle them or give them some sort of hard time. After all, that’s my job. One of the other things I do is cut them off at the pass by asking them questions about my nose: if my nose is beautiful, if they like my nose, etc. I do this in Chinese so they know they can’t talk about my nose right in front of my nose, because, hey, I ting de dong (understand). Or I just do it to get a laugh out of them, which it does. Today, however, one of them got a good laugh out of me.
I was goofing around with some girls from Big Purple on the playground. They’d ask me to say things in Chinese and would laugh hysterically when I said them. So I said in Chinese, “You know, I can speak a little Chinese?” “We know,” they said, and kept on laughing. We continued chatting and eventually, I asked this one girl Cocoa a question. “Cocoa, is my nose beautiful?”
To which she replied, in English, “No, no, no. How about 3 yuan.”
Comments