People come to China from a number of different countries and for a variety of reasons (even if the generalized notion ‘is’ that all foreigners are Americans, here to find Chinese wives) and the numbers of those seeking to visit China for lengthy periods or even to find a new home here has increased, according to one eChinacities article, to something in the region of 600,000. Now that’s a lot of Americans, for a lot of Chinese wives, but given that China’s native population has risen to over 1.37 billion people, that meager 600,000 is quickly dissolved to nothing when held in comparison.

   So where does that leave the average non-Chinese speaking expatriate who’s trying to create a routine of relative normality in their daily life, be that picking up groceries, giving addresses to a taxi driver, visiting the dentist, withdrawing money from the bank or making a visit to the local post office, when the vast majority of people around them are unable to speak anything but Chinese? We quickly find ourselves carrying increasingly large numbers of pieces of paper on which are written the various translations we are unable to give ourselves. Otherwise we have to turn, time and time again, to our Chinese spouse, friend or colleague to come and hold our hand as we go about one of these many day to day chores before retiring in the evening to the safety of whichever foreigner bar we have adopted as our home from home, often to spend another evening bemoaning the difficulties of living in China.

   Ironically many of those unwilling to knuckle down to the study of Chinese are language teachers themselves. One ex-colleague I remember in particular (an American gentleman who came here to look for a Chinese wife) would yell “bu hao” at the top of his lungs for whatever minor infraction one of his ‘six year old’ students had committed, and yet he’d been in this country as long as his students had been alive and he could still barely order noodles.

   Another ex-colleague, though this time one of my fellow Brits, made so little effort to understand the language, that by the time his mixed-race son was old enough to say “Baba, wo xiang he niunai” (Dad, I want some milk), the best he could offer in response was a look of befuddlement and a shrug of his shoulders.

   So why is it that so many of us ex-pats are reluctant to turn our heads to the study of the language that now determines so much of our day to day quality of life? If the reaction of shock and amazement which I so often get from Chinese people when I speak to them in their own language is anything to go by, I can only assume that, as far as many Chinese are concerned anyway, it is because most foreigners are not capable of learning Chinese. Well that is blatantly absurd and just spurs me on to study harder, because really, if tv presenter ‘Da Shan’ (Big Mountain), a man named after a 90s cover band, can speak with perfect fluency, then I can at least learn to ask directions to the toilet.

   Or is the reason for our laziness that we are afraid of making fools of ourselves? That I can understand, a foreigner in China lives under a huge spotlight of attention, and nobody wants to be the butt of a joke, especially when the audience is quite so large. One of my first attempts at speaking Chinese was in a local pharmacy and my mission was to procure a tube of hemorrhoid cream. My initial efforts at pronouncing the Chinese word for said fire-grapes ointment were unsuccessful and so I had to turn instead to the task of describing my problem, which I did in my very broken Chinese by explaining that “I have bottom pain, serious bottom pain, very hot, hot pain, I have hot bottom pain”, which amazingly enough did the trick and I got the cream I needed. By the time I was finished however, there was a small gathering of about five people, all laughing openly. Personally though, I was just glad I didn’t have to pull down my pants.

   On another occasion I tried to order for myself in a restaurant one evening, and ended up mistakenly asking for sweet and sour anus, my point being that as ridiculous as one inevitably looks when struggling with a second language, it is at the very least a source of some pretty good fun, and in my case an endless lesson in humility.

   So why don’t more ex-pats study and speak this interesting language? Personally I think the main reason is that it appears as such a daunting task to most people that they might rather attempt to climb Everest dragging an elephant, but the truth is that learning to speak Chinese is not difficult, it’s managed by an entire nation of people, young and old, smart and stupid, sane and wandering down the road naked, nuts. It is actually very simple - just hugely time consuming. It is kind of like walking around the world: all you need do is put one foot in front of the other and keep going, albeit for literally ages and ages and ages, but then every now and again you get to look back with great satisfaction and see how far you’ve come - really not very far at all.

   The grammar is awkward for westerners, but then so much sentence structuring in Chinese is kind of like back to front English (eg. What do you want to eat? You want to eat what?) so I ignore the grammar altogether, concentrate on building my vocabulary, then when I want to say something I just ask myself “How would Yoda say this?” and half the time I get it spot on. (“You are from where come, hmmmm?”) The other half the time I get roughly ejected from the restaurant, but it’s all part and parcel of the adventure of being a foreigner in China. Better to be involved than watching from the sidelines. Better to be embarrassed than baby-sat. Better to try and then make mistakes, than make the mistake of never trying.

   China is a huge place, full of a diversity of interesting people, and to come all this way only to spend one’s time in the goldfish bowl of our own little English corner would be a terrible, terrible shame - It is in fact the only mistake that I absolutely ‘refuse’ to make.