Esperanto and a Drug Proposition

In China, traveling by hard seat on trains is always a good way to meet people. The trip home from Guangzhou was no different. The 10:45 pm train was SO so crowded that there were people trying to squeeze onto seats that weren't theirs, people squatting down on the floor, people everywhere. I was seated on the opposite side of the aisle from Nhu and Jenna, surrounded by four university student-age friends. I tried to make small talk with them, but after first insulting them because I thought they were speaking Cantonese but really they were speaking Changsha dialect, and then asking a few questions and discovering that they neither went to university nor worked and that they lived in Changsha but had just come to Guangzhou to "play" for the weekend, I gave up. I had the aisle seat, but the girl next to me let me take the window so that I could sleep and she could play cards with her friends. Nice. She was cute, small, and had lots of small tattoos on her wrists, hands, and shoulders, strange for a young girl in China.

I slept on and off until 3 am, when I woke up and stared out the window for a while. The girl next to me asked to switch back seats if I wasn't going to sleep, and I let her have her seat back. Then, this older man across from me struck up a conversation. He asked the usual questions, where I was from and what I was doing here, before explaining that he was a teacher of English and Esperanto at the Changsha Foreign Language Institute. CRAZY. Esperanto* is the world language that I knew was invented some time ago and was supposed to incorporate lots of different languages but never really caught on.

Anyway, so I was really interested and kept talking to this teacher. His spoken English was not so good -- his main foreign language was Esperanto -- and so we continued the conversation in Chinese. He taught me some words in Esperanto (Ĉu vi parolas Esperanton? = Can you speak Esperanto? and Kiel vi (fartas)? = How are you? and Dankon = Thank you). I asked him about how useful he thought it was and he said it was SO useful because you could go anywhere in the world with it; he said with English you can only go to the UK or the US, but with Esperanto you can go anywhere because people all over the world speak it. I listened carefully, but thought about how so many more people all over the world speak English and so if you speak that, then you're pretty set. He said that Esperanto has also helped him to be able to study new languages, and to get to know some really good people from other cultures. He and some students were just coming back from an international Esperanto conference (either in Guangzhou or Hong Kong, I didn't ask).

Then I talked to one of his students for a while in English so that she could practice. She told me how Esperanto was a designed as an international second language so that it would be EVERYONE's second language, and we'd all be on a level playing field. Like there wouldn't be native speakers, like the US and UK have with English, and everyone would just have started from the same place, and so when they communicated in Esperanto, it would be with a level of mutual understanding that they both had worked hard to learn this new language, along with a tolerance for the other person's culture. I thought that was a nice, idealist, good international relations kind of a goal, I just didn't know how practical it was, given that it had been around for a while and not caught on really. She kept saying how nice Esperanto speakers were and how English speakers were not so nice. Just to make sure she realized it, I said that this observation made sense because of the differences in the makeup of the pool of people she was sampling. There are so many English speakers that of course some are going to be good and some are going to be bad; furthermore, the people who have studied Esperanto are more likely to be those who are on the more open and international-minded side. So yeah.

*In case you were wondering, Esperanto was invented in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof of what is now Poland but was at that time part of the Russian Empire as a universal second language in order to foster peace and international understanding. I looked it up just now and Wikipedia says that the vocabulary comes from the Romance and Germanic languages while the phonology comes from Slavic languages and there is evidence that learning Esperanto first is better preparation for later language learning than learning any other single language. Makes sense. There are between 100,000 and 2 million (what an insane range, I know) fluent speakers, and about 1000 native speakers of Esperanto.

One of the girls in my section (the university-age people) was trying to listen and understand what we were talking about, but her English wasn't good enough to chime in. I felt bad leaving her out of the conversation and so when the other girl left to go to the bathroom, I asked her what she had understood and she told me and then I was like yeah, wow, your English is so good, and then told her what we'd been talking about in Chinese. And then the cute, tattooed girl next to me woke up and we all talked together. She said her name was So-So*, but that wasn't her real name, even these friends she was hanging out with didn't know her real name. After a bit, she typed it into her phone and showed me her real name, which she hated. I felt privy to a big secret and it made me feel special. She was only 19 and an interesting mix of child-like innocence and grown-up-world hardness. There was something about her that really attracted me, some mysteriousness that made me want to learn more about her. She showed me pictures of her and her boyfriend on her phone, and when I expressed interest in seeing more, she took out a Keropi sticker book (like Hello Kitty, kid stuff) and showed me her collection of sticker pictures of her and him together. They had been together for more than three years (which struck me as very grown up), and she was going back to Changsha for his birthday. I asked her for her favorite songs and she wrote some down for me. We teased back and forth about stupid stuff, like watching each other sleep, using a lot of the same teasing/kiddy phrases that little kids use to tease each other (我不理你！- I'm not talking to you! and 不要碰我！- Don't touch me!) and those kinds of silly children's jokes.

They were all rich and lived the party life. Soso played Usher, Lil Jon, and Ludacris' "Yeah!" on her phone and I was tapping my feet to it and she asked if I liked to dance. I said yes, and asked if they went out dancing (clubbing) a lot in Changsha. She said yes and said that if I wanted to come I was invited. Then she asked me if I did "anything else" and I didn't understand. I thought I had heard wrong, or missed some part of the conversation for the context of that question. After she said it again three times, and I was like eh? What do you mean? Can you say that again? She finally was like... "you know, other stuff, other stuff, like [smoking motion]". And I was like (in my mind) OOOOOOOOH! DRUGS! and my eyes got big and I was like NOOOOO, I don't do that stuff. And she was like cool. And we went back to our conversation about music.

Interesting. I'm kind of proud of the fact that I got close enough to a stranger in China that I was offered (kind of) access to drugs. Yay for my Chinese getting better! :)

Before I got off the train, the teacher gave me his card and told me that if I wanted to teach Spanish, they had an opening, and he would love it if I would come teach there. I told him I was most likely going to study Chinese in Nanjing next year, but that I would pass the news along. So, if you want to teach Spanish in China in a REALLY awesome city, let me know and I'll hook you up! :)