Free Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler Page B

decade later, Chinese in the big cities often had access to the Internet and cable television, but the Voice remained an important source of information in smaller places such as Yuhuan. It broadcast in Mandarin, Cantonese, and Tibetan.
    The Voice of America also provided programming in English, including a form of the language known as “Special English.” The best description of the tongue can be found on the Voice Web site, which is also Special:
Three elements make Special English unique. It has a limited vocabulary of 1,500 words. Most are simple words that describe objects, actions or emotions. Some are more difficult. They are used for reporting world events and describing discoveries in medicine and science. Special English is written in short, simple sentences that contain only one idea. No idioms are used. And Special English is spoken at a slower pace, about two-thirds the speed of standard English.
    Special English was a product of the cold war. In the late 1950s, when the Soviet Union frequently jammed the Voice of America, broadcasters decided that a simpler form of the language would be easier to understand through the static. It wasn’t intended as a teaching tool, but that’s what it quickly became. Millions of people around the world studied English through the Special broadcasts.
    In Fuling, my students listened religiously, mimicking the rhythms, andsoon Adam and I learned to talk the same way whenever we needed to make ourselves understood. We were the only native English speakers in the city, and after a couple of months we began holding routine conversations in Special English without realizing it. During my first year in the Peace Corps, a friend from New York visited and wondered if Adam and I were losing our native tongue. He kept telling us to stop talking to him as if he were a child.
    Sometimes I wondered if Special English was the linguistic equivalent of McDonald’s—a slow-paced fast-food language. But I was studying Chinese myself, and soon I realized that I was developing my own Special Chinese. It was a natural method for picking up a new language: First, you established basic sentence structures and vocabulary, the way a painter might initially outline a portrait’s fundamental elements. Over time, you acquired more sophisticated words and phrases, attaching them to the existing foundation. It felt like living in a rough sketch of the world where new details appeared day by day.
    In Yuhuan, Willy listened to the Special English broadcasts almost every night. In a lined notebook, he jotted down words and phrases from various programs, all jumbled together:
Most Americans like to sleep late on Saturday morning.
Special English
VOA
Washington
President end Kosovo
present might fly to Belgrade
depend on the meeting
    Usually, the topic was news, but occasionally an entry was sparked by some program about American culture, politics, or history:
First floor: Congress Library
By the fireplace: George Washington
132 rooms 20 bedrooms
move on 34 bathrooms
privacy = a-way from public
rooms owned by presidents and their families are not allowed to visit but they never think that this rooms are theirs, thy don’t own it.
American people own the White House.
    One of Willy’s favorite Voice of America programs was called American Idioms , which introduced new phrases that were too obscure or complicated for Special English. In his journal, Willy made lists:

turn over a new leaf
see beyond one’s nose
turn up one’s nose at
on spin and needles
    Unfortunately, American Idioms was obscenity-free, but Willy tracked down supplementary materials. He found a Chinese-published book called American Colloquialisms , but his most valuable discovery, in a used-book store in Hangzhou, was A Dictionary of English Euphemisms . The volume was dedicated almost exclusively to the sexual, the scatological, the graphic. Once, when I visited Willy, I opened the book to a random page, whose first word leaped out at