The Last Word On Nothing

Can I just tell you about something funny that happened/is happening?

I’ve been working at a university, and one of the most appealing perks—given I’m not anywhere in the world of tenure or sabbaticals—is the free tuition on any course in the whole place. I could get an MBA…for free! I could become some crazy mathematician, on the side, with a steady income!

Of course, hardly anybody ends up using it. They’re far too busy. It’s a bilingual university, so they might brush up on their French, but then they call it a day and go home already. Plus, most of the interesting courses happen at the downtown campus, and I’m stuck at a satellite campus with nothing but a cluster of hospitals and a web of highways to educate me.

So when coronavirus came along and we all decamped for home offices, I thought, now’s my chance! All the courses are online now–I can treat it like my very own enhanced Coursera.

I’ll start with Chinese.

I’ve been teaching myself Chinese characters from some books. It’s just my sort of thing. Those characters might as well be hieroglyphics for all the connection I have to China or Chinese culture. I just wanted to learn how to read in a language that had been entirely inscrutable to me months before. With a lot of languages, you can kind of guess at the meaning of a sentence. Some word is bound to be borrowed from a language you know, and you extrapolate from there. Not with Chinese.

Now with a chance to take a real, interactive class, I could venture from the safety of quiet, silent codebreaking to the infinitely scarier world of live, human communication. I might have the thrilling experience of a person asking me a question and expecting me to answer! This is the adrenaline I need in the anodyne world of covid quarantine, I thought.

So I went online last week to sign up for a class through my workplace.  Three years’ worth of course level options appeared—from basic vocabulary all the way up to the analysis of contemporary Chinese texts. I couldn’t wait to get started. “If you have prior education in Chinese, please take the placement test below. You will receive notice within 48 hours of the appropriate course for your level.”

Wonderful. I’ve never had a single conversation in this language, but I’d studied those characters, so I took the test. There are 111 questions, all testing my reading comprehension, and 95 of them are well within my comfort level. The rest contain some characters I don’t know, but I can guess at them.

Yesterday I got an email back from the modern languages department. I am ineligible for any of their classes.

I aced the placement test, and the system thinks I’m a native Chinese-speaking student looking for a bird course to raise her GPA. They want nothing to do with me. Nevermind that I’ve never spoken a word of Chinese.

I was tempted to take the win and accept the verdict, happy with a story to tell. But goddamit I want to speak Chinese. I wrote to the program coordinator insisting that I surely haven’t accidentally transcended university-level Chinese without so much as a ‘Ni hao’ to my neighbor.

So today she replied. She would like to set up a Zoom meeting with me. We’ll have a call in Chinese so she can see for herself, she writes. In Chinese.

And I said yes. Because this should be good. My very first spoken words of Chinese, stammered out to a person who is convinced I am fluent.

Do you dare me to record my side of it?