Standard and Normal, Thank Heaven

The internet is fixed! The washing machine is fixed! I have an avocado and some cheddar cheese in the kitchen! The trees and verdantly green and the flowers are in riotous bloom, but the temperature has been in the seventies. Life is back to being okay. Today and yesterday, I even got to run errands and bum around like it really was my days off. In short: it was lovely.

B.A.T and cheddar on wheat with  mustard, anyone?

Yesterday, my friends and I went to the fabric market again. I bought a couple meters of some lovely brown linen. For those of you at home who routinely buy fabric: wanna guess what I paid for it? Then we all wandered up to the top floor, where we found a tailor's shop and flipped through pattern books. I decided to have my linen made into some pants. We'll see how they come out.

The Grandview is one of the skyscrapers on the left.

Today I hopped the bus over to the Grandview Mall to do some grocery shopping. Our little local supermarket is currently gutted and undergoing renovations. While I was there, I went down to my favorite juice place and got a watermelon smoothie. It's possible that I've been to this juice stall a few too many times in the past three and a half months. The counter man recognizes me. Today, I ordered my smoothie, and he smiled and rung me up and relayed my order to the back, and then belatedly asked me if I wanted the small size. Because, I always get the small size. Then while I waited, we had a chat. He commented that I was alone today (I'm usually with one or more of my friends), then he asked me if I was from New York (probably remembering that the fluent Chinese speaker of my group is a New Yorker). I explained where I was from (Maine, which is NE of New York, but doesn't have any cities, and is in fact full of mountains and water and trees, and is very beautiful). I asked if he'd ever been to the US (no, but he'd like to), and then we discussed the weather outside (the juice stand is in a basement food court). He asked if it was hot. I said of course it was hot, it's always hot in GZ. Then my smoothie was ready, and goodbye. In other words, I successfully exchanged small talk in Chinese for a good four minutes. I should probably not be as proud of that as I am.

Canal? Urbanized river? Who knows?

I walked back to my neighborhood from the malls, and I detoured down Guangzhou Dadao to come back via Shuiyin Lu. This makes my walk maybe 15 minutes longer, but it's scenic, and it also takes me passed the locally-famous milk store, the vegetable market, and a barbecued meats shop that a friend swears in the best in the district. Here, I bought some honey barbecued pork (oh my goodness, it's delicious. I stir-fried it with some noodles, bean sprouts, and garlic chives). Of course, I couldn't remember how to say it, but everyone loves the Pointing Method! I politely pointed and asked the name. The woman at the front told me, then I asked how much it was. She replied, then commented as an aside to the man standing next to her that my Chinese was so "biaozhun" (standard). I smile/grimaced and asked for half a jin. (What is a jin 斤? 500g or a pound, it depends on which dictionary you ask. Half a jin is my favorite quantity to order. Half a jin of scallion pancake, half a jin of bean sprouts, half a jin of dumplings, half a jin of noodles. Hmm. I wonder what half a jin of gin looks like?) What can I say? All my Chinese comes from textbooks, and textbooks that teach standard Mandarin, to boot.  I know exactly three exclamations, two of which I'm pretty sure are the Chinese equivalents of "oh golly gee" and "darn it."

Fengxing milk, photo from That's PRD magazine.

So many of my interactions with Chinese people follow a predicable pattern: I'm kinda inarticulate and unable to easily communicate, but I somehow manage to convey my point, and they are a little bit surprised that I am able to communicate at all. Or, more rarely, I'm completely reaching beyond my abilities, and we just end up staring helplessly at each other until I say 'sorry, forget it' and come back later with fluent help (of course, sometimes I blunder forward anyway, and end up with shiny new cell phone plans...). I wonder, though, why locals are so often surprised. Foreigners who speak Chinese aren't that rare. Is it, perhaps, just the cognitive dissonance of expecting a foreign language and hearing Chinese? I don't know the answer. Maybe next time I'm chatting with someone, I'll ask.

No one expects the random photo of a temple!

I'll leave you with one last type scene from my day. I was in the elevator heading back to my apartment and I had a grandfather-grandson pair for company. The grandfather was encouraging the little boy to practice his English on me. He said hello. I smiled and said hello back. Then the grandfather was encouraging him, saying 'what else has your English teacher taught you to ask?' and the little kid is contorting his face and squirming all round, finally shouting sheepishly, "I forgot!" which makes his grandfather and I both laugh. Oh, little kids. Such cuties.