The means of our relief

The Chinese language uses only the word ta as a pronoun for others. There is no gender distinction such as "he" and "she" in English. But I got so fed up hearing and correcting my English students who keep making mistakes such as "My girlfriend said he is tired of his classes", I wrote the words HE and SHE on the chalkboard along with the Masculine and Feminine signs. And when I hear mistakes I will just point to the board and laugh.

So to be fair, where do I make the most mistakes speaking Chinese? I believe that it is in using the right tone. Every word in Chinese has one of four tones, and a fifth neutral tone. If you make a mistake with the tones, you could be misunderstood. The only difference between the word La-ji meaning Spicy Chicken and La-ji meaning Garbage is the tone! So if you don't get the tone right, you could be asking the waitress for a helping of something you would prefer not to eat.

Fortunately, the better you get at speaking the better the Chinese listener can understand what you said based on context and other words you said. But sometimes Chinese people just start laughing at what you said and you don't know why. I suppose you said something you did not mean to say.

I have a cell phone but I rarely use it to make voice calls. But I often use it to send a SMS, or short-message, a kind of e-mail by phone. It seems most people in China, including myself find the per-minute charges to make a call expensive. But you can send a short-message for very cheap. I have become very adept writing messages in Chinese on my phone. Yes, I said that, I send messages on my phone in Chinese! For example, I would write Dao as in "arrive". I press the letters D-A-O on the keypad and all the Chinese characters for Dao show up on my screen. I then just select the correct character for my meaning. The Romanization of Chinese words is called Pinyin and I can write whole paragraphs of messages on my phone using this method.

The Means of Our Relief

I finished the book Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe that I was reading for recreation and to keep my mind and English skills sharp. I couldn’t help but compare my life in China to Crusoe’s life on an island. I suppose the key similarity would be that we both have to be creative and work hard in response to our new surroundings.
There were many passages in the book I found to be applicable to life. One interesting moment was Crusoe, after having lived alone on the island for 24 years discovers a single footprint, not of his own making, in the sand on the beach. This discovery eventually leads to his escaping the island, but his initial fear to see another human after being isolated so long is interesting.

"How strange a checker-work of Providence is the life of man! And by what differing springs are the affections hurried about as differing circumstances present? Today we love what tomorrow we hate; today we seek what tomorrow we shun; today we desire what tomorrow we fear; nay, even tremble at the apprehensions of; this was exemplified in me at this time in the most lively manner imaginable; for I, whose only affliction was that I was alone, circumscribed by the boundless ocean, cut off from mankind, and condemned to what I called the silent life; that I was one who Heaven thought not worthy to be numbered among the living, or to appear among the rest of His creatures; that to have seen one of my own species would have raised me from death to life, and the greatest blessing that Heaven itself, next to the supreme blessing of salvation, could bestow; I say, that I should now tremble to sink into the ground at but the shadow or silent appearance of a man’s having set his foot in the island."

If I had not known that Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe around 1720, I would have guessed he had read the same book I am reading on Emotional Intelligence. As my book on EI explains, we have a core part of the brain that handles emotions and another part that acts as our working space for reasoning and rational thought. The part of our brain that controls emotions has the power to takeover in emergencies, essentially making the rational, working part of our brain the passenger rather than the driver.However, these may or may not really be emergencies and we may do things we may regret later for having acted too rashly.

As Crusoe says later, “O what ridiculous resolution men take when possessed with fear! It deprives them of the use of those means which reason offers for their relief.”

I find that in myself, emotions take control too often and override my rational thought. Where as Crusoe discovered, reason is what offers a means for relief. I want to believe that.