Annoying my Chinese teacher, again, my gym photo stalker, Chinese swear words (never to be used), Indonesian street fighting and Beijing taxi drivers

Guard your food, China man!

Learning Chinese is hard.  One thing I’ve discovered about myself is that I’m actually quite a shy person (stop laughing) – particularly when it comes to speaking Chinese with other Chinese people.  Because it’s not that good, at the moment, and the Chinese are rather unforgiving about language, AND, rather frustratingly, it’s the best way to practice and learn. 

My Chinese teacher insists on teaching us, testing us, and re-teaching us the characters for the words and phrases we learn.  This is all very useful, you might think.  Except that in a 3 hour lesson, all we end up learning is “How many people are there in your family. Oh, there are three people in my family, my mother, my father and me.  Is your brother married  Do your brother and his wife have children.  My sister is a bank clerk.  Bye Bye”, because we spend so long learning the characters.  My spoken Chinese is way, way better than my written , so it becomes frustrating when I’m learning stuff I already knew.  Phew.  Rant over.

It is fun though.  Apart from the Koreans in class.  They’re usually very hard working and know a lot of the Chinese characters – which makes it bloody easy for them and makes us mere westerners look stupid.  (Some Chinese people call Koreans “Banzi” which means stick.  It’s a term of insult, but I don’t get it). 

Actually, there are few westerners in my school.  There are a lot of Embassy kids, Russians, Koreans and Japanese.  The latter three groups seem very keen to learn Chinese, and there are a lot of them in Beijing.

My teacher is a bit of a hard nut when it comes to teaching us Chinese characters, shouting at us occasionally.  If China had a “rate my teacher” website, I’d rate her as a “closet hard nut inside a frustrated Chinese woman’s body”.  I sometimes tease the her when she’s shouting at us (for generally being a bit thick and not remembering the character for “white” or “sun”) by pretending not to understand her English.  It’s a bit cruel, but quid pro quo and all that.

So I’ve enlisted a personal trainer to help with my 12 week challenge.  His name is Xu Chang Sheng – which means Gentle Strong Victory, which I think is a great name for a personal trainer, and he works at my gym.  I think English personal trainers should have names like his – maybe “Improve Running Strong” or “Yes, I know you have an impeccable body, but that’s because you work in a gym, whereas I work in an office, slumped miserably into a mal-adjusted chair staring at a screen wishing the fire alarm would go off to bring some excitement into my day”. 

When I was trying to negotiate with the receptionist staff with my poor Chinese to get  a personal trainer, I noticed something funny about myself.  Whenever I don’t understand something someone is saying to me, I say “Dui” which means yes.  The more I don’t understand, the more I say “Ah! Dui dui dui dui dui dui dui dui dui!” in the hope that my “dui”s will drown out their question or just make them stop talking.  I must sound like a retard.

The Chinese people who go to the gym find him helping me a little funny.  So much so that one woman asked if she could take a picture of him helping me to do some bicep curls and post it on her Weibo (Chinese Twitter).  Apparently she had 410 Weibo friends, which makes her important, or something, so the fact that a white guy was exercising was interesting enough to post.  Damn.  I wish Stephen Fry would post pictures of Asian men eating, or Chinese men reading or something, on his Twitter feed.

What she should have taken a picture of is me at my new Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) class.  Actually, it’s not really an MMA class so much as one hard nutter teaching me and a few Chinese people how to defend oneself against an attacker with a knife, gun, sharp object, dustbin lid, whatever. 

The teacher is pretty interesting.  He’s an ex US army guy who apparently trained also with the British army.  On his right arm is the British Army’s motto with “Who Dares Wins”.  Apparently it wasn’t done by a tattoo artist, but a fellow soldier, with no tattoo experience.  Hard.

I’ve been to two lessons.  The first, I walked in and he was demonstrating how to come out better from a knife fight.  I thought to myself, I’m never going to be in a knife fight, and may have actually said this out loud to him.  He said you never know.   He had a point (no pun intended), there was no way that I could say 100% that I would never be in a knife fight.  We were then taught how to disable the knife form the attacker, and then use it to stab him/ her in the vital organs, cut their hamstring and making sure they never got up.  I think I’d probably have to apologise profusely if I did that to someone, even if they were trying to stab me.

In fairness, it’s my own fault.  The website told me that I would be taught Indonesian Street Fighting and a couple of other martial arts, so I should have known.  But, like all the weird shit I’ve done so far in China, it’s a good way to meet people.  And if I do ever get into that street knife fight…I’ll probably call the police.

I’ve not stopped my “living on the edge” there.  I’ve started to negotiate Beijing’s roads with my friend’s electric scooter.  It goes at about 3mph and the “beep” sounds like a little girl crying.  But it’s still perilous, especially with the junk food vans taking up the road and the merciless Beijing taxi drivers.

A word on Beijing taxi drivers.  Imagine you could take all the worst qualities of all taxi drivers around the world and concentrate them into liquid spray.  Imagine, then, that Beijing taxi drivers take this spray, and every morning dowse themselves in it like a pig rolling in mud.  They are a pretty special bunch, I have to hand it to them.

Want a taxi in Beijing? On the right side of the road?  Got the right change and are smiling?  No chance.   Trying to get a taxi in Beijing, especially when it’s raining, is like trying to get an American to understand Cheryl Cole. 

The nose of a Beijing taxi, from inside a Beijing taxi

And then, once you’re in the taxi, you better speak good Chinese.  Because if you don’t understand, they’ll just shout it, shout it louder, and shout it even louder again until they go red in the face .  In fact, Beijing taxi drivers are a bit like easy jet.  You ask them to take you to your destination, but actually where they’re going to take you probably a good mile away, because they’re “changing shifts”.  Wow, this blog post is cathartic.   

Let me tell you a story now.  It’s about numbers. No, wait, it’s interesting.  If you want to call someone stupid, you say “Ni shi er bai wu ma?” Which roughly translates as “Are you 250?” Here’s the story.  There was once a good man in China.  He was killed by four bad Chinese men.  Bummer. The Emperor found out, and boy was he pissed.  His advisers told him he needed to capture the four bad men.  And he said “You know what dawg, hold up, I gotta think of me a good plan!”  And so he did.  He ordered his officials to put up posters all around the province where the man was killed, saying that he was actually a bad ass man, and there was a reward for his murder of 1000 of the finest silver pieces.  The four real bad men saw this, and hatched a plan to go to the Imperial Palace to collect their reward. Upon arriving, they each demanded 250 silver pieces.  The Emperor popped a cap in each of their asses, and duly killed them.  Hence, “Are you 250?” (Real Chinese story embellished with modern gangster words for added drama.)

There is also a slight adjunct to this.  You can call a woman 290 “er bai jiu”.  This is because 290 is 250 plus 38 plus 2.  38 is the date of woman’s day in China (March 8) and 2 means you’re dizzy.  So 290 is a stupid dizzy woman. 

But let me tell you this.  The Chinese never use these phrases unless to very close friends.  Which is strange as in England we reserve swear words for when strangers have really pissed us off.  In China, if you swore at a stranger, you’d most likely get punched.  (I learned the hard way – not by being punched, but certainly getting an earful from someone I swore at).   One of the worst is the “f” word.  It translates literally, but it’s taken to have a much more serious meaning in China.  So after being taught all of these pretty creative swear words in Chinese, I can’t actually use them.  Fuck.