The Big Shit With Your Name On It

My Spanish teacher, who had until now had that practiced look of language instructors around the world – feigned interest in the grammatically mangled, pedestrian utterances of their students – was startled. “Mahatma Gandhi was a what?” she asked, eyes wide. “An avocado,” I repeated, more hesitantly this time, tipped off by her reaction that I must have said something odd. Again.

I had meant to say “lawyer,” or “abogado” in Spanish, but had ended up saying, “aguacate” or “avocado,” no doubt tricked by the French that lingered subterraneously in my linguistically overcrowded brain.  “Avocat” referred to both lawyers and the fruit en français.

In my mid-40s I was a serial learner of languages. Not one of those gifted polyglots who effortlessly inhaled new tongues as though langorously sucking on a flavoured hookah while watching nubile belly dancers wobble their bits. I was more akin to a seriously out of shape marathon runner, huffing and puffing and hurting but always with a long way still to go.

I had grown up bilingual, speaking Hindi and English, the type of child who participated in debating contests. So far, so glib. My problems began when I met Julio while at university in London. He was from Spain, had gone to a French school and later, a British university where he’d studied Chinese. We fell in love and my fate as a peripatetic was sealed. I spent the next two decades in various countries around the world: China, Belgium, Indonesia, Japan and Spain- trying to learn enough of the local languages to avoid embarrassment. Unfortunately, embarrassment was essentially a synonym for learning a new language.

But after years of ordering lawyers when all I wanted was avocado salad, I realized that embarrassment was not the most important aspect of the story. The real value of learning a new language wasn’t gaining new vocabulary or syntax, but empathy for vulnerability and a realization of the privilege bestowed by having access to the right words.

The inability to say interesting things, not think them or know them, but to express them with casual felicity, is an automatic demotion in your perceived value. Lacking the right words strips you of the cultural capital that allows those well-endowed with it to inhabit the world with confidence. Instead you become diffident, refraining from offering your opinions, not because you don’t have them, but because you are ashamed of your pronunciation.

Learning a new language means that you know what it is like to hesitate and stutter on the sidelines while others hold center stage. It is to understand the truth that people who cannot speak “well” can still be worth listening to. That by making the effort to understand someone who is struggling to express themselves you do more than a mere kindness to them, you open yourself up to the possibility of learning. The privilege of words may be less obvious than material privilege, but it is equally distorting.

I am clumsy in several languages, Spanish only being the most recent. But clumsy trumps illiterate, which is what I found myself to be when I moved to China back in 2002. 

I remembered writing about this in my China Memoir, Smoke and Mirrors, and dug up the passage:

“It was a miserable, powerless feeling being unable to walk into a shop and ask for a bar of chocolate, or read the menu in a restaurant or ask for help when confused.

Even daily routines I felt I had mastered held undiscovered terrors. I had regularly been taking bus # 928 from SOHO to the Beijing Broadcasting Institute (BBI) for over a month without a hitch when one day I boarded the bus as usual only to discover it zooming past the university and entering the expressway that led straight out of the city into Hebei province.

I asked around desperately if anyone spoke English but my query was met with silent bemusement. I was unable to ascertain why we hadn’t stopped at BBI, where we were going or whether we would ever stop, the bus seemingly speeding on forever as we left the university further and further behind. The bus did eventually stop and I took a cab back to BBI. It cost me an arm and a leg and I was woefully late for class but most of all I felt shook up by how helpless I had been, disempowered by my lack of Chinese, literally without voice.

It transpired that bus #928 had two route services: the standard one that I usually took and an express one that went directly, with no stops, to the city’s outskirts. The latter was marked by a special character clearly visible at the front of the bus, but being illiterate it had held no meaning for me.”

In the event I learned to speak Chinese with a modicum of intelligibility, although I never shed the tendency to sound like an adolescent boy whose voice was breaking. My tones could veer alarmingly and inexplicably up and down and I often ended up ordering soup (tang) when I wanted sugar (also tang but in a different tone), although I suppose at least both tangs were taxonomically related, unlike lawyers and avocados.

Language learning leads to the epiphany that making a mistake is an act of bravery, and the people making them should be patted on the back, not sniggered at. This does not mean however, that we can’t enjoy the  glorious comedy of mistakes

I absolutely love it when I’m asked to enter buildings from the “backside” in India. And in France a woman I was traveling to interview sent me a text message saying that she would wait for me at the train station holding up “a big shit with my name on it.” Gold! In China, where I taught English at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute for a while, it was standard practice for students to give themselves “English names,” so that amongst my wards I counted people called: “An Apple,” “Fat” and “Better.”

It’s in the mistakes that the magic happens and you fall in love with the world. Here’s hoping that we all get plenty of opportunities to do precisely that in a post COVID world, whenever that may be.

Oh, and I would love it if you would share some of your funniest/most embarrassing/insightful linguistically related moments in the comments.

Thanks for reading  and “see” you again, in a week.

PS: Do spread the word re this newsletter. I’d appreciate it if you could share it with your friends.