\u201cClearly she was expected to say something, but panic at having to speak stole the thoughts from her head.\u201d
\n\u2015 Shannon Hale, The Goose Girl
\nWhen living in China, it’s important that you try to communicate as much as possible in Chinese, especially with the locals. But don’t, under any circumstance, say things unless you’re absolutely certain of what they mean. This is pivotal. I was visiting Xi ‘an, a city where most people’s English-speaking capabilities stop at hello and goodbye, so when I wanted to warn the girl next to me that the public restroom that she was about to walk into wasn’t clean, what I intended to say was na ge weishengjian bu ganjing. What I ended up saying was na ge weishengjian bu ANJING which directly translates to “that bathroom is not quiet.” She laughed, repeated what I said and went to investigate why on God’s green earth someone would describe a bathroom as “not quiet”. That being said, the best way to learn is to make mistakes, but I’d strongly advise making these mistakes with your Chinese language teacher and not strangers who will most likely leave your little exchange with some interesting notions about Americans’ standards for public restrooms.<\/p>\n
Sincerely,
\nSomeone who should never be allowed to be an ambassador<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cClearly she was expected to say something, but panic at having to speak stole the thoughts from her head.\u201d \u2015 Shannon Hale, The Goose Girl When living in China, it’s important that you try to communicate as much as possible in Chinese, especially with the locals. But don’t, under any circumstance, say things unless you’re…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":308,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-shanghai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/308"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3915"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16830,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3915\/revisions\/16830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}