Coal Gram

“I can speak Chinese,” is information that I will seldom voluntarily offer when I’m in a conversation with someone. Not really out of fear of coming across as braggadocious or a show-off, but because it is almost statistically certain-- as much as anything can be in an increasingly entropic universe-- that someone will reply with, “Can I hear?” Suddenly I’ve become an unwilling performer for an audience...was I talking to this many people? My audience has grown fast enough to make a Ringling Brother green with envy, but I think I feel more like the elephant and less like the trainer.

I started learning Chinese when I was in the seventh grade. My best friend and I were trying to decide what language we wanted to take, and, honestly, the decision wasn’t too hard for us. On one hand, we could take Spanish or Latin, but then we would have to do terrifying things like conjugate verbs and learn different forms of the word ‘be’. So, the decision sort of made itself.

A couple years of language study later, I was now a freshman in high school with a new teacher (one that is still one of my favorites), and during the spring break of that year, I was on my first trip to China. We stayed in Guilin first, surrounded by its surreal karst mountains. We went up the river to Yangshuo for a day before making our way back to Guilin, and then we moved on to Beijing before returning home. The school trip was over before it started, and I knew I was hooked.

Two years later I would be back in China, going from Shanghai to Nanjing as well as a brief stint in Wuxi (which does mean I very briefly passed through the now infamous Wuhan).

A year later I was making almost the exact same trip, but this time with my brother in tow. He was graduating college and I was on my way out of high school, and we wanted to take a trip together while we both still had the time.

He still asks me when we’re going back.