…or yesterday rather. Pretend it’s 08/08/09 and this entry will be more compelling…
Last night I was gabbing nonstop in Chinese on the way home from a party with a group of friends. They just chuckled and stared at me like I was crazy. I’m definitely losing my Mandarin skills, maybe partially because when I practice, it apparently makes other people feel uncomfortable.
Today is the one-year anniversary of the start of the Beijing Olympics (and midpoint of the most amazing 60 days of my life) last summer. Wow…it’s been one whole year? That’s 365 days since the tall security guard from our Beijing hotel lobby broke off the cap of my drink before a group of us went to watch the opening ceremony. He didn’t have a bottle opener so he just kept jamming it on the top of the desk, totally scratching up the wood. This was the guy who looked like he hated Americans when we first arrived a month earlier. I’m talking in-pain-just-breathing-around-us hatred, like he would die if he had to make any effort to acknowledge our existence. Ironically enough, he ended up being my favorite of all 20-some odd security guards that we saw day in and day out manning the hotel. Oh Beijing…
I am determined to write a novel about my China experience. I better start typing up some drafts soon before all the precious little memories are forgotten… Then again I don’t think I could ever forget. But it would be awesome to have something tangible that would forever capture my first and only time abroad. Writing a novel is in no way easy. I admire authors for their ability to tell a story, especially recently with all the reading I’ve been doing. A really good author can, in one page, make me laugh and cry. Now that’s talent.
Summer Palace, Beijing
At the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library in Chinatown, there’s a whole shelf full of fiction and nonfiction books in Chinese. I got really excited but knew I wouldn’t be able to check any out until I got into the swing of studying Chinese again. Baby steps. I did go to a Beginner’s Chinese meeting a couple Sundays ago. It refreshed my memory on a lot of vocabulary words I used to know 12 months ago walking the streets of Haidian district in northwest Beijing. I nearly became fluent then. The language meetup in DC made me feel like I was in class again, not having done my homework. Another obstacle is the fact that being in DC makes me want to catch up on my Spanish as well. That’s a little easier to practice here. Frequently people just start talking to me in Spanish and I have to disappoint them with my rusty basic español that I haven’t really utilized since high school. And now I want to finally learn Italian…too many languages on my list.
It’ll happen though, someday…my novel, my quadrilingual aspirations, and perhaps another trip to China. These are just a few of my many preoccupations these days.
Learning to Fly 