Eric's Beijing Diary

I'm a doctor. At least that's what they told me today. They took me to a hospital and sat me down in a conference room with some other doctors. Top specialists in their fields. I was supposed to talk to them. About medicine. In Chinese. Well, at least that is what it was supposed to look like. It was all an image.

Yesterday, I was having lunch with Wendy (my tutor) in the BLCU cafeteria, when we were interrupted by some recruiters from an advertising agency that contracts with CCTV. They told Wendy they wanted me to come with them to film a promotional for a hospital. I said, "Wendy, why do they want me?" She said, "Because you look like an expert." ??? What does an expert look like? This morning, Wendy and I, and the other foreigners they had recruited (BLCU has more foreigners than any other university in China) got in a van and went to the hospital. So what do you get when you go to the BLCU campus and pick four foreigners at random? Two Italian ladies, a kid from Argentina, and me. One of the Italian ladies was in the import-export business. I don't know what the other one was doing. When I asked her, she said, "My English is very bad." She was mostly right. Her English was pretty limited. But her Mandarin was impressive. She spoke Chinese better than any of us (except Wendy, of course). The kid from Argentina was a twenty-one-year-old business major who is in China for one semester studying Mandarin. It was interesting to see the Argentine kid communicating with the Italian ladies. He could not speak Italian. They could not speak Spanish. But they could understand eachother, so they didn't even attempt to speak eachother's language. They each spoke their own, and understood each other completely. Fortunately, the kid from Argentina also spoke very good English, and he was friendly and talkative, so he was explaining all this to me. I asked him about Portugese. He said it was the same. He could understand Portugese, but he couldn't speak it. One of the Italian ladies said that she could understand Spanish, but not Portugese. Apparently Spanish is sort of a "bridge" language between Italian and Portugese. I'm just guessing, I don't know. And I can guess with integrity, because I don't speak any of those languages. Complete ignorance is handy that way.

At the hospital, they took us into the board room and seated us around a table. Then they told us to pretend to be talking about something important with the doctors on the other side of the table. It was pretty hilarious. The doctor sitting across from me was pretty talkative and very friendly. I wish I could have understood him. I was thinking about what kind of conversation we could have had if we had understood each other. I cannot imagine what other situation would have put me in the same room with the exclusive attention of this specialist. There are so many questions I would like to have asked him. It was very obvious that he had spent many years studying many things. Unfortunately, English was not one of them. It reminded me of the time two years ago, when I was talking with a school kid in the mountains of Yunnan Province. He was talking a mile a minute, and getting more and more frustrated because I would not answer him. He could see that I was not deaf. I was listening intently to what he was saying to me. But I was not answering him for the simple reason that I had no idea what he was saying. Finally, he stopped, took a deep breath, and in a fit of desparation, he looked at me and said, "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten!!" I looked right back at him and said, "Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty!" He joined me, and we counted all the way to one hundred together. Communication. Language. Oh, what a curse those arrogant fools of Babel brought on all of us!

A few short takes and it was time for the finale. We stood, and everyone applauded as the visiting American physician (me) shook hands with the Chinese specialist. It was an interesting experience, and experience is a good teacher, but I am definitely not cut out for show business. Keep your glitz and glamour; I've got work to do.