The Zodiac Schmodiac Story Cycle

Spicy Mice

I spent my youth wishing I was Chinese. I grew up in Toronto, and Andy Chen's apartment was next door to mine. His mom was always home, forcing him to take piano lessons, go to private math classes, dragging him off to Chinese school on Sundays, and in general being exactly like I wished my mom had been. My folks were always working or entertaining clients, so I spent most of my free time over at Andy's house. (When he wasn't off at class, of course.) Mrs. Chen would fuss over me, make sure my hair was trimmed and my shirt tucked in, and as the years went by and I spent more and more time with Andy, she began asking to see my report cards and chiding me when my grades weren't up to her standards. 

I thought Andy was the luckiest guy in the world. His parents paid attention to him. Mine just gave me a big allowance and expected me to not make trouble. Andy never ate out, his mom was always cooking something. I never had home cooked meals unless we went to grandma's house. But the thing I envied Andy the most was the Chinese. When we'd come in together after school, his mother would hear the door open and let loose a stream of Chinese. As she came through the hall towards us Andy would start to answer her, always embarrassed. He hated speaking Chinese at home, and he knew that if I was there his mom would switch to English out of courtesy for me. That may have been one of the reasons he invited me over so often, at least at first. I loved the machine gun, rapid-fire way that his mom talked, short word following short word, all consonants at the front and vowels at the end, chings and changs and zhangs and qings. It was like listening to a dishwasher attack a wall with all of the silverware at once. It was so cool.

In junior high I snuck a "Learn Chinese in 30 minutes a day" book out of the library and started to listen to the CD every night after I got home from Andy's house. I got lucky, one of the first phrases it taught was "you're home," ni huilai le. The next day when I went home with Andy his mom heard the door open and yelled "ni huilai le, guolai yixia." OK, I didn't catch the second part, but when I heard "ni huilai le" and understood it, I yelled back "dui, wo huilai le!" (Yes, I'm home.) Andy stopped dead in his tracks and looked at me like I was an alien. His mom dropped the pan she had been holding and ran out to the front hall.

"Did you just speak Chinese?" Andy asked.

"You never told me you speak Chinese Johnny!" Mrs. Chen said. (Johnny, that's me.) She seemed much more excited than Andy. That afternoon was the beginning of my Chinese lessons. For the next five years we would come home from school and while Andy worked on his homework, practiced his piano, and did all of the other things his mother insisted he do, I sat on the couch while Mrs. Chen flung Chinese at me. Not much of it stuck, but if you fling hard enough something will stick eventually. 

Andy went to the University of Toronto on a full scholarship. (I hate the way Asian kids get such good grades. It's not fair.) I scraped my way too, but no scholarships for me. I went to the Asian Studies department on my first day and said I wanted to declare myself a Chinese major. Four years later I graduated with a degree in Chinese. 

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The first job I found after graduation was as an interpreter in China. I spent a semester in Beijing during my junior year as an exchange student and collected as many business cards as I could while I was there. A few months before graduation I pelted all of those companies with my resume, hoping that I'd be able to find some kind of job in China. I got two offers, one to work in an office and one to work as a freelance translator. I took the second, and was off within a month of getting my diploma. I told my parents I was just going over for six months to try and improve my Chinese, and they said it was a sensible thing to do. They were happy to see me go, I think. More time to entertain customers. 

I arrived in Beijing in the middle of a huge sandstorm. Everything was yellowish-gray and gritty, from the floor to the bedsheets to the toilet paper. I was part of a team of translators that accompanied foreign investors around during their business trips to China. It was a lot of fun traveling the country with them and getting to eat for free at all of their business lunches.