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Craving the howya
Nov. 3rd, 2005 07:34 pmI am in the bosom of my family and my mother is stealing my clothes. She likes a red paisley-ish top of mine and has asked me for it before. I pointed out that at the moment I live out of a bag and have maybe five tops total. Yesterday she took in my laundry and spirited the top away to her room. Now, my mum hates ironing and only the other day she was announcing that she doesn't iron anything if she can possibly help it. Today I caught her ironing my top while packing for her ballroom-dancing week in Kerry. "Oh, I often give things a little rub when they're dry. I was doing it for you," she said.
Anyway, some more travel journal.
*
I never knew how it felt not to be able to read until I came to China.
Russia was relatively okay. There’s a pretty close correspondence between Cyrillic letters and our alphabet, I is backwards N, N is H, R is P, V is B, etc, fine, sorted. I could never remember what the one that looked like ‘bI’ sounded like, but even that would have sunk in given a few more days. But Chinese... whoa. I was helpless. I wished I’d done a course or something before I went. It refused to go into my head. After a week and a half I had two or three phrases and recognised maybe ten characters. I'd look at a street name and seconds later all I could remember was that it began with J. I felt guilty that I was there and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
robot_mel, Chinese scholar extraordinaire, wasn't.
I have often been snooty and withering about coddled package-tourists in the past, but because of the language barrier, trying to organise things in China was enough to make me cry. All my life-admin, coping and sorting-things-out skills were useless. Intensive bursts of telephoning, Google-fu, looking things up, navigation, persuasion: they’re all based on language. I felt so overwhelmed by it all one day in Shanghai that I wanted to hide in the hotel room and not come out. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn’t dream of discouraging anyone from experiencing it themselves. It’s... an experience. But it’s hard.
Now see how hard.
( Adventures in medicine-buying! )
( Weeks of fun with boat tickets! )
Anyway, some more travel journal.
*
I never knew how it felt not to be able to read until I came to China.
Russia was relatively okay. There’s a pretty close correspondence between Cyrillic letters and our alphabet, I is backwards N, N is H, R is P, V is B, etc, fine, sorted. I could never remember what the one that looked like ‘bI’ sounded like, but even that would have sunk in given a few more days. But Chinese... whoa. I was helpless. I wished I’d done a course or something before I went. It refused to go into my head. After a week and a half I had two or three phrases and recognised maybe ten characters. I'd look at a street name and seconds later all I could remember was that it began with J. I felt guilty that I was there and
robot_mel, Chinese scholar extraordinaire, wasn't. I have often been snooty and withering about coddled package-tourists in the past, but because of the language barrier, trying to organise things in China was enough to make me cry. All my life-admin, coping and sorting-things-out skills were useless. Intensive bursts of telephoning, Google-fu, looking things up, navigation, persuasion: they’re all based on language. I felt so overwhelmed by it all one day in Shanghai that I wanted to hide in the hotel room and not come out. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn’t dream of discouraging anyone from experiencing it themselves. It’s... an experience. But it’s hard.
Now see how hard.
( Adventures in medicine-buying! )
( Weeks of fun with boat tickets! )
