An American in Beijing

I am a master communicator

Today was so incredibly much fun (for most of the time, anyway) I hardly even know where to begin! It’s the first day when most kids have arrived on campus, but testing/orientation hasn’t started yet (that’s tomorrow) and we are all still allowed to speak English to one another. I met up with a couple of my favorite Chinese Ba/Bb kids, and met a ton of cool new Yalies. (The kids here are predominantly from Harvard and Yale, although I have met one person from Brown, one from UPenn, and two from UChicago, and got really excited as they made an exotic change from all us Harvard kids and Yalies alternatively joking about The Game last year [and Harvard’s great triumph!] and comparing first-year curricula.) I woke up super early (what else is new?) and had a very successful negotiation with the staff here, and wound up with my electricity fixed! Yay!

This is how it all went down: I fell asleep last night to the comfortingly familiar sounds of Harry Potter emanating from my laptop, but was awoken around 2 am to a series of panicky beeps which told me that my laptop had run out of battery power and was shutting down. This struck me as somewhat odd, given that my computer was plugged into the wall and so should not have been using its battery at all, but I shrugged it off, figuring that there had been another blackout in my part of the city and that the battery could charge itself up when the power came back on.

However, when I woke up for good a couple of hours later, my computer was still without power. Saddened, I put some water in the kettle for a cup of tea while I tried to figure things out. The kettle didn’t work, either. I tried the TV. No luck. I was momentarily baffled by the dial tone on the phone until I discovered the battery panel on the bottom of the unit – no electricity needed. The weird thing was that my overhead lights still worked, both in my room and in the bathroom. What on earth was going on? I did a little bit of studying by the light from the window while I hoped against hope that the electricity would come back on in my room. It didn’t.

Eventually, around 6 or 7, I headed down to the front desk to try to get to the bottom of this no electricity business, armed with a scrap of paper which I hoped would help me communicate my somewhat complicated power situation with the person behind the desk. This is what it says:

Kelly Heuer: Room 810

[picture of outlet] <-- these do not have electricity
but
the main light in the bathroom
and
the main lights in my room
and
the bathroom fan all have electricity

“Hello,” I said in Chinese to the girl behind the desk, “I have a problem with the electricity in my room.” And I handed her the sheet. She read it in about two seconds flat (it would have taken me at least a minute or two to read all those characters – I was jealous!) and asked me in Mandarin, “Only these [pointing at picture of outlet] don’t have electricity?” “Yes!” I replied, thrilled that she had cottoned on so quickly. “I’ll have the electrician come to look.” she told me. Would I be in my room at 8? I assured her that I would. I thanked her, all smiles, excited to have had a conversation in which I actually understood everything that was going on.

Of course, when the first and second electricians arrived at 8:10 and 8:20 respectively, I really had very little idea what they were saying to me, and skated by (as I usually try to) on smiles, nods, nervous giggling, and a bunch of “thank yous.” Still, now I know how to get my point across when I really need to: provided I have pen and paper and knowledge of the simplified characters needed, and until my on-the-spot Chinese skills improve from their current incredibly minimal level, putting the characters down on paper should be a decent way to let other people know what I need from them.

posted by Kelly @ 8:55 上午