You Know What They Say About Assumptions...

While shopping in a department store the other day, I happened to pass by two sales clerks who were having a conversation in Mandarin Chinese.  This being highly uncommon in my part of the world, I tuned in just for practice as I was going about my business, and was pleased at how much of the conversation I actually understood.  It was nothing exciting, just a discussion about what the store had on order for the holidays.  But it reminded me of one of the ways I entertained myself in graduate school other than playing practical jokes on Texan football fanatics.

Now, I am close to six feet tall and clearly Caucasian.  Not exactly an obvious candidate for a Chinese speaker.  However, my father's career landed us in Hong Kong while I was in junior high and high school, and I studied Mandarin as my foreign language in school.  Despite the difficulty of learning Chinese--very interesting article, if a bit long--at one point I was reasonably fluent, and a good bit stuck with me through college even though I took German for my required language credits there.  (I did mix the two languages together fairly regularly, though, much to the amusement of the TA teaching the German class...my brain would crap out and insert a Mandarin word or phrase in the middle of a German sentence.)

At any rate, by the time I got to grad school, my Mandarin was still there but a bit rusty.  In any scientific institution pretty much anywhere in the world you will find an abundance of Chinese researchers, and my grad school was no exception.  As I did my lab rotations the first year, I eavesdropped on the conversations going on around me--not out of any prurient interest, just to get my fluency back.  (These were normal-volume conversations held in the same room with me, nothing secretive.)  To the credit of my colleagues, I have to say that I never overheard anything that couldn't have been said in English...not the case with foreign-language conversations in a lot of nail salons, I'm sure!!  But it was really, really funny to casually throw out a sentence in Chinese after about the fifth or sixth week in a lab and watch the look of blank horror as people mentally scrolled back through everything they'd said in front of me...yes, it probably wasn't very nice of me, but grad school sucks and survival mechanisms are survival mechanisms!