The long dark tea-time of the soul

SHANGHAI -- At times these past two months, it's been rough going as I've struggled to master Mandarin Chinese.\n"Master" Chinese? Perhaps "become acquainted with" is a better description of the progress I've made. I can finally get around by myself without referring to my trusty Lonely Planet guide to Shanghai, but having a conversation is still a hit-and-miss affair. Even ordering coffee has only recently joined my conversational skills; I had been drinking only cappuccinos because I couldn't quite figure out how to order an American-style brew. (It turns out it's ridiculously easy: "Meiguo de kafei" -- literally, American coffee.) I've learned two important lessons this week about language and culture shock.\nLiving without language is a terrible curse. You are suddenly an infant again, with an infant's conversational repertoire. Are you thirsty? Then you can grunt out a request for water. Hungry? Then you can beg for some food -- and, like a child, you will probably send it away again because it isn't what you wanted. Do you want to discuss the rhetorical framing of postmodern literary criticism according to the theories of Derrida, Habermas and Foucault? You're out of luck, bud -- you can't even discuss how pretty the flowers are. "Huar hen piaoliang," you say expectantly to a flowery girl, and you know that she won't give you a reply you can understand. (This does take the sting out of rejection, though, since the actual rejection is always somewhat ambiguous.)\nWorst of all, the elementary school children here speak better English than I speak Mandarin. I know this firsthand, because I am teaching an hour a week in a third-grade class in the primary school next door to my university. The children, all 35 of them, are active and eager, and indeed they make me feel awfully embarrassed by memories of my own, somewhat sullen and apathetic, third-grade year.\nTeaching in the classroom is a real learning experience. I will never again consider primary school teachers unskilled -- how anyone can possibly stand in front of so many kids for seven hours a day is beyond me. Chinese students, too, seem even rowdier than American kids at the same age; the conventional wisdom is the country's one-child policy has bred a generation of "xiao huangdi" -- little emperors -- who have their every need met.\nEncountering primary school texts as an adult is a shock. They really are as blatantly sexist as their critics say they are. At least the English-language books are, anyway. "I like dolls," Kate says in one exercise. "They are beautiful. Do you like dolls, Kevin?"\n"No," Kevin says. "I don't like dolls. I like robots. They are super!"\nAnd so on. Suffice it to say every little girl wears a dress, and every little boy wears blue.\nI am happy to report, though, I have managed to do what I think few Chinese -- or American -- teachers do: Call on girls and boys equally. I maintain a pretty strict ratio -- never exactly 50-50, since the girls raise their hands more (the girls, indeed, are better students generally) -- but I also don't call on the boys when they're making noise to get my attention.\nOne day, the children and I were asking each other "What do you see?" "I see something blue," one child said. "It is a globe."\n"I see something yellow," another said. "It is a desk." (Bless their hearts, they don't quite get contractions yet.)\n"I see something red," a third child reported. "It is a flag."\nHe pointed, and I looked -- and there it was, the red flag of the People's Republic, in the same spot where American flags fly in our elementary schools. I was speechless.