Life and Leisure

There's a cheetah in the building and my Chinese is responsible

By Thomas Talhelm (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-12-16 08:01

Happiness can be found on sweaty Chinese buses. I find it almost every day, but it lasts just a second.

The happiness comes every time I imagine all my time studying Chinese has paid off. You see, learning Chinese is a thankless job. At least half of the friends I make in China are as excited to practice their English with me as I am to practice my Chinese with them.

I see the disappointment in their eyes when I switch the conversation to Chinese. Friendly conversations often turn into linguistic Cold Wars, hidden underneath a veneer of politeness.

So I spend a surprising amount of my waking hours imagining a China that doesn't want me to be its language partner.

That fantasy soars every time I'm reading my smudged copy of The Analects on a Beijing bus. There's a moment of ecstasy every time an onlooker nudges me on the shoulder.

For a second - before they speak - I imagine that nudge is coming from a wealthy businessman with money spilling out of his pockets. He's amazed that I'm reading The Analects on Beijing's route 331.

"That's just the dedication we need at my money factory," I imagine him telling me. "Take this bonus and bring that hard work to your new office in my moneyed empire."

That's as far as I get in my imagination before they say: "Can you read that?"

My happiness quickly transforms into despair as I'm reminded that my greatest reward is to have people suggest that I bought The Analects to look at the pretty pictures.

Over many months, I have fallen into despair, that is, until I got a phone call from my cousin. She wanted help putting up notices in her Beijing apartment building to find the owner of a kitten she had found. As I rushed over, I felt the sort of eagerness Clark Kent might experience if he were running to a spelling bee instead of a phone booth.

Soon I was rolling my pen back and forth over each stroke to make it easier for the citizens to read. "Found", "one" "small" and 10 minutes later the building's three elevators were plastered with my masterpieces.

"All in a day's work," I told my cousin. She wasn't a billionaire and offered no bonus, but she had given me a job so I could use my Chinese.

That evening, I joined the crowds as I waited for the slow crawl up to the 28th floor. An old man looked at me with bug eyes. "There's a what loose in the building!?"

I froze for a second, then shrugged my shoulders and pretended not to have anything to do with the sign.

When the man left, I took a closer look. I had messed up the most important character: cat. With one extra horizontal line, I managed to blend cat (猫) with the character that means hunt (猎) and is used for the word cheetah (猎豹). So I inadvertently convinced 28 floors of residents that I had found a mysterious hunting cheetah loose in their building.

On my sweaty bus ride home that night, I held my copy of The Analects as low as I could in my lap. I dropped my dreams of being a public-transport-bound Donald Trump. Now if I get the nudge, I'll be happy if it isn't followed by, "Is that your sign in the elevator?"