Zhongbing. He’s at the Ancient Szechuan Restarant in El Cerrito with his wife and the female half of his twins.
YaZheng, Ziyan, and Zhongbing
Zhongbing is my current “CP” or Conversational Partner. A couple of years ago Jadyne saw on the Kensington kiosk a request for volunteers to pair up with graduate students from UC Berkeley who, being from foreign countries, wanted to improve their conversational English. If you think of the language in three parts—reading, writing, and speaking—many ESL learners can manage two of them. The third, speaking, is often taught by ESL teachers who don’t speak it well themselves. In China, that means that Chinese teachers, many of whom have poor conversational skills, are the ones guiding their students. Naturally, their focus is on reading and writing.
Zhonging can read and write reasonably well, but when it comes to speaking, oh me oh my. When we first met a year or so ago I couldn’t understand a word he said. I wondered what I had gotten myself into. The previous year my CP was Hao Yun, who was pursuing his second Ph.D. He already had one in Optical Engineering and felt that he needed one in Chemistry, too.
Both Hao Yun and Zhong are in their thirties, married and have children. Hao Yun spoke good English and our conversations centered on fairly sophisticated subjects—the relationship between the US and the two Koreas, elections in the US, social issues, such as abortion and homosexuality. We would walk around Berkeley looking at personalized license plates, many of which were puns, and he would try to figure them out. We might spend an hour in Andronico’s, looking at breakfast cereals and talking about what Americans eat.
Alas, Zhongbing is another story. When I first met him I couldn’t decipher a single sentence he spoke. We have English-Mandarin dictionaries on our phones, and we frequently summoned them to complete a thought. It wasn’t that Zhongbing didn’t know the word. He did. There are so many sounds in English that aren’t replicated in Mandarin, and Zhong would show me the word in the dictionary, a word we both knew, and then I would make him say it over and over again, trying to get the sound of the word right. The “V” sound in English comes out as a “W” when Zhongbing says it. When he says “very” I hear “weary.” After a year we’re making progress.
“Zhong”, I said this morning, “How many hours a week do you speak to someone else in English?” “None,” he answered. He studies, lives, and spends his time with Mandarin speakers. There are 168 hours in the week. I spend an hour with him. Not much, but it helps. He’s improved considerably in the last year.
YaZheng, however, came over for three weeks, her first visit to an English speaking country. She spoke exactly 0 words of English. And his daughter? Another story.
Here he is. Or here she is. When Jadyne first saw her she thought that she was a he.
You be the Judge.
Zhong wanted Jadyne and me to meet his family, so he hosted us all at the Ancient Szechuan Restaurant for a midday banquet highlighted by this incredible fish dish.
The tail emerges from a sea of peppers and vegetables in the front of the pan.
Jadyne has a conversational partner, too. Here we all are in front of the restaurant post-banquet.
Danesh, Celia, YaZheng Ziyan. Zhong, Jadyne, and me
Danesh loves to drive. He never drove in China and was scared to death to drive here. When he took his driving test he turned left into oncoming traffic at which point he was told to “Stop immediately and get out of the car.” A few weeks later he passed. Zhong, Danesh, and Celia all took their tests in Corte Madera, eschewing the El Cerrito DMV because word spread through “We Chat”, an Asian version of Facebook, that the test was easier in Corte Madera, despite the fact that it was several miles away, across a toll bridge. Danesh doesn’t speak English at all, but he loves to eat. Celia, however, lived in Australia for a year, and she’s almost fluent. She and Jadyne carry on conversations once a week for an hour, too.
Zhong and YaZheng met in college. He is a professor; she is a building designer. Zhong’s major is “Building, Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning.” They study and design ventilation, heating, and climate controlled systems for high rises. Zhong writes papers on subjects so obscure that I have no way of knowing what he’s talking about. I can, however, match subject and verbs, help him with parallelism, and other English grammatical tricks.
Jadyne’s brother and sister-in-law are visiting from Colorado. We’re taking them to the Ancient Szechuan Restaurant in El Cerrito. Zhongbing tonight will be our honored guest.