While teaching acrobatics in China...

I spent about a year teaching acrobatics to middle school kids a couple of hours outside of Beijing, China. Before taking my students over to the gym, I would start the day in their classroom and go over a simple, usually one word, English lesson.  Despite the fact that the students, their parents, and the school all intended for these kids to study in America at some point, we were using somewhat outdated British textbooks and tools. This created a lot of opportunities for quick lessons, because these kids weren’t going to have much luck finding a “water closet” in the United States, and that could be a problem. Although my abbreviated English lessons were technically intended to cover a word related to sports, their Chinese teacher was much more interested in having me cover regional differences, and help with contractions and pronouns, both of which her students struggled with, so that’s typically what we did. 

Mandarin, if I oversimplify things a bit, uses only three pronouns, based on proximity, and they cover individuals or groups by simply changing the end of the word. If I’m talking about me, it’s WO, but if I’m talking about my household, or my dinner party, it’s WO-MEN. If I’m talking to you, personally, I’d use NI, but if I’m talking to an audience it’s NI-MEN. If we’re talking about someone who isn’t here, we’d use TA, and if we were talking about a group we’d use TA-MEN. It’s beautifully simple, and most of my students struggled to work their way through I, me, mine, ours, theirs, yours, and the rest of our pronoun buffet, but these lessons were easy to work into the 90 minute block I got to spend with them in the gym. I also did my best to use contractions throughout our time together, and get the kids to practice using them, because Mandarin doesn’t contract words like shouldn’t, couldn’t, won’t, can’t, etc. and the British textbooks tended not to.

Attribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SmirkusRolaBolaHandBalance.jpg

After a couple of months this settled into a comfortable routine, until the day that I had to tell my students that, despite weeks of effort, I had still had no luck getting support to purchase the PVC pipe sections and wood that I would need to make balance boards for them. As soon as I came into the classroom on that day, the teacher and one of the students, Maggie, who helped me with Mandarin in the gym, came up to me and asked me if I was angry. I explained that I had wanted to have the class learn how to balance on a rolling board today, and maybe try juggling while they did so, and so I wrote the day’s word on the board: frustrated.

Once the students settled into their seats I started to explain, in the slow, plodding way of a foreign language teacher, the similarities and differences between the words angry and frustrated. I was feeling pretty good about the direction of my brief lesson, and was about to wrap up, when there came an audible gasp from the back of the room, where the teacher and Maggie were sitting, followed by a brief but explosive exchange in Mandarin before Maggie’s hand shot up and she said, quite firmly, “you cannot mean this word. It is not like angry.”

I began to explain again how angry and frustrated were similar when Maggie stood up and said, again, “you cannot mean this word,” at which point I realized that she was holding her electronic dictionary and seemed genuinely shocked by what I had said. Her teacher, still seated beside her, was flushed red and wouldn’t make eye contact with me. 

Understand that this happened in 2001, so when I say that Maggie was holding an electronic dictionary, I mean something just a bit smaller than your typical iPad, which had no internet connectivity, very limited storage and was, in fact, just a dictionary. A somewhat outdated British dictionary at that. You typed in a word, hit enter, and the device returned very brief definitions on a very small high contrast screen. Like a Speak-n-Spell, if you’re old enough to remember those, and barely more sophisticated. 

Maggie had another short exchange with her teacher before she began to walk toward me, eyes wide, her face bright red, with the dictionary held out in front of her like it might bite. She walked briskly to the front of the classroom, placed the dictionary in my hand, and watched as I read the singular definition on the screen:

Not satisfied sexually.

That was it, just those three words. There was no second definition, and the usage example was:

Ex: He is not satisfied sexually.

Which is when Maggie turned around and dutifully explained the issue to a classroom full of teenage girls before practically leaping back to her desk, her eyes now firmly locked on her feet, and every face in that room turned to look at me and perceptibly began to blush. It took longer than normal to get out of the classroom that day as I had to spend some time explaining how many words, especially in English, can have more than one meaning. 

When we got to the gym I broke my students into groups and took one to practice going from back arches into handstands. This involved going onto the mats with them, and supporting their lower backs as they bent backward, into an arch, with their hands and feet equally on the ground. Once they did that I would kneel in front of them, keep support on their lower back, and while rocking on a count of three provide any additional umph they needed to kick their legs out, around, and up into a handstand. By this time I had been teaching in China for several months, and I had been teaching basic circus skills, acrobatics, and dance for many years, so it was easy to settle into a routine with my students, and I loved watching them simply explode when struggle turned into payoff. We would get to the mats, they would gracefully bend into a back arch, rock their hips as we count one, two, three, and up they go into a handstand. Boom. That’s usually when they’d make a happy sound and fall down because they weren’t paying enough attention to their handstand at that point.

But not so for Maggie. 

I would like to take a moment to remind you that some words have been spent in this recollection explaining that English contractions, such as can’t, are tricky little things when English is not your first language, and how our pronouns, like I, can be confounding for a Mandarin speaker. Which is why, when Maggie did her back arch, and I knelt in front of her to help lift her lower back into a handstand on the count of three, she meant to shout “I can’t,” and instead, with every ounce of force her teenage voice could muster, shouted

“MY CUNT! MY CUNT! MY CUNT!”

Which is why I dropped her on head. 

There is a period after that where all that I can remember is laughing so hard that I had to find a trash can because I honestly thought that I was going to be sick.

This left me with some explaining to do, again, because it turns out that if you’re trying to do a new athletic thing with your coach, and it’s very difficult for you, then having them drop you on your head and start laughing when you can’t do it doesn’t do wonders for your self esteem. Of course there was absolutely no way that I was going to tell her the truth, and so I fell back on something that is incredibly common when you’re coaching gymnastics and acrobatics, and I told her that she let out the most incredible, earth shattering fart, right in my face.

And she believed me.