Free Dreaming in Chinese by Deborah Fallows Page B

may sometimes say she when meaning he, since it is so hard for them to hear the difference.
    Back home in smoggy Beijing, I was thinking about English corner in Xizhou and wondering if the pronoun lesson would stick with any of the kids. Perhaps there would be a clutch of Chinese kids who would grow up using he and she flawlessly. But probably not; if even my Chinese teachers don’t use them correctly, the odds are stacked against the kids from Xizhou.
    I was also thinking about an experience with the “I” pronoun that really caught my ear during one of my early lessons at the Miracle Mandarin language school in Shanghai. Our teacher used to have us students give little impromptu presentations whenever class became too dull. That certainly woke us up. The topics were normally the mundane “What I did over the weekend” variety. But one day, she asked us to talk about “What I believe in.” All of us students started with the predictable Western concepts of democracy, or free speech, or pursuit of happiness. It was hard, especially given our limited vocabulary in Mandarin.
    When my turn came, I stalled for time by asking our teacher, Sandy, to tell us what she believed in. Sandy, who was very earnest and a diligent teacher, paused for a moment, and then declared almost defiantly: “ I BELIEVE IN MYSELF. ”
    We were stunned. Sandy was normally shy, still learning to stand her ground in front of a class of brash Westerners, and typically did not insert her personality into the business of her teaching. Her defiance was remarkable to me in two ways: one for what she said (the outright declaration) and one for how she said it (her use of pronouns). And they were connected. Sandy recognized and was declaring that, once raised and educated, her destiny was singularly up to her. She could well have been speaking for the whole cohort of people in their twenties, who are growing up in a very different China from that of their parents. Sandy’s generation will not see the cradle-to-grave care and control that the state both provided for and imposed on earlier generations. This was a new world, where she would make her own way.
    And when Sandy said, “ I believe in myself, ” there was nothing wishy-washy about how she said it. She knew precisely that using those pronouns beamed the attention right on herself. I wondered if she also knew how this use of “self” flew in the face of the tone of her parents’ generation, who grew up during the Cultural Revolution.
    From a novel by a Chinese woman who relocated to London:
We Chinese are not encouraged to use the word “self” so often. The old comrades in the work unit would say, how can you think of “self” most of the time but not about others and the whole society? 17
    What I never learned was why Sandy made her declaration in English. This was our Chinese class, after all, and we would have understood her Chinese at that point: Wǒ xiāngxìn wǒ zìjǐ “I believe I self.” Did speaking English somehow free Sandy up to go straight for the pronouns and ram her point home? I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know that we were impressed.

Rènao Hot-and-noisy
9. Think like the Chinese think
    W ALKING HOME ONE drizzly night along Shanghai’s busy Nanjing Lu, I passed a laborer doing roadwork. He was submerged to his ankles in a soggy trench, wearing rubber flip-flops and wielding a heavy, sparking blowtorch. It looked very dangerous. Most mornings as I walked to school along the same road, I watched a restaurant staff hosing down their concrete deck. They padded around puddles in their bare feet, plugging and unplugging radios, fans and electric tools.
    There is more: one day I passed a telephone linesman who hooked his homemade ladder over a set of swinging cables, then clambered up, and edged like a tightrope walker along the tension wires 15 feet above the ground. In Shanghai pairs of window cleaners routinely dangle and sway tens of stories high, buckets