July 1, 2006
Knowing only a few words in Chinese, we are reduced to a crude type of pattern matching to decode the script, and often we develop picture mnemonics to remember the characters. For any city, the name becomes the first characters we memorize. Fortunately for the pattern matching and like many cities, Beijing has only two characters; the first looks like the profile of two people sitting back to back and decidedly not speaking to one another, while the second (Leah's creation) looks like an elephant face (complete with trunk and tusks) with a little hat. (If your computer can display Asian fonts, you can see for yourself: 北京)
In addition to pattern matching, we have finally purchased a Chinese phrasebook, the Lonely Planet's Mandarin Phrasebook. Somewhat surprisingly, in the Northern cities, phrasebooks aren't available or, at least not stocked, even in huge multi-floor bookstores with English language sections. Even with our new book, most of our communication involves pointing, miming and gestures. Our train travelling companions helped us to discover our number gestures were almost completely wrong, which has been a huge source of confusion so far. Now we know, one through five start with the index finger, unlike European who start with the thumb. Six involves only the thumb and pinkie in a hang loose configuration. Seven requires straight fingers, finger tips together like Italians questioning comprehension, although without the movement. Eight is a straight pointer and thumb, which we'd been using for two. Nine is a coiled pointer, similar to 'X' in ASL. And ten, is a fist or two pointer fingers crossed like the Chinese character. So now we know, when forced to bargain with the unscrupulous vendors, if our counter-offer is ten, we should shake our fists, right (?!)
-David
