Dan in La Crosse

Mary's letter

Embarrassed by my inadequacy as their teacher, I turned to my students to help me, asking them to write an essay titled, "What I want to gain out of oral English class, and how I can best achieve my goals." Through this, I introduced to them the concept of "democracy," in which they, the people, can tell me, the leader, how they want oral English class to be governed.

They responded with a flurry of ideas, a tornado of energy, eyes wide open to this radical idea that they actually have a say in what happens in their own lives.

Each letter is a treasure, but Mary's letter stands out as particularly insightful. It's written in perfect handwriting, with mistakes whited out and rewritten. She wrote it not a sheet of paper but on a fold-out angel piece of stationary. In it, she writes:

"To our Dearest Great Professor Simmons:

Hi, I'm happy to express my feeling in this way, 'cause I'm a girl who is shy indeed, aha!

Last time you asked us to give us some advice about how to improve your class. You know, the weak point of our Chinese students is overmodest. For we have been taught by our parents 'Be modest, be prudent' again and again. So we dare not show ourselves in any of places, including your oral English class.

Now, what we need most is courage. Saying that 'Silence is not golden any longer, you'd better manifest yourself.' If done, we'll be more self-confident. So I suggest we make different scene dialogues such as 'A Disappointing Result,' 'My 1st Lesson,' by ourselves and act it out in front of the classroom. As it can improve our oral English, it will strengthen our courage at the same time.

What are we fond of? The Internet, the friendship between our mates, a sweet memory of our puppy love, computer games (usually popular among the boys) . . . These can be used for the topic in classroom discussions.

Sorry to have bothered you for using a long time to read my uninteresting letter. I'm just a little girl, childish and ridiculous, do not know how to say in serious way, forgive me, please.

Best wishes.

Yours sincerely,
Mary"

Visa issues

Read this article, titled, "Crackdown on visas strains U's close ties with China," at http://www.startribune.com/stories/1592/4238723.html. The article cites the amazing stat that the U of M has more native Chinese graduate students than any other university in the country. Since Bush was pseudo-elected (and even before 9/11), however, visa procedures have become much more restrictive, keeping more and more Chinese students (and, of course, foreign students of every other nationality) out of American universities. At lunch yesterday, one of my colleagues, also named Daniel, said, "Chinese are very welcoming to all Americans, except Mr. Bush. We love Americans, we just hate Mr. Bush." I'm starting to understand why.

The People's Game

Read the fantastic story by this name in the NYT magazine: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/23/magazine/23CHINABB.html. It's about the basketball craze sweeping China, and the cultural facets of basketball that historically have made it appealing to the people and acceptable to the Party. I'm working on an essay right now about this campus' curious obsession with the Minnesota Forest Wolves, an obsession that took root long before I, an actual Minnesotan, arrived.

Chinglish

Everywhere in China are signs roughly, very roughly translated from Chinese into English. Many of my students wear clothes with slogans so discombobulatedly confusing that you'd swear George W. Bush composed them. This morning, after my run, I was swinging on a group swing, chowing some sausage dumplings, when two of my itty-bitty friends, a boy and a girl, came over and started swinging with me. The boy wore a shirt that read, "No gtus, no glory." Words to live by.

Breakfast with Mary

On Saturday morning, I slurped noodles at the local noodle shack with one of my first-year students, Mary. Mary is a pop-star-in-training – perfect complexion, perfect posture, a sweet disposition, a flair for bright lights and a gift for language. Her English is about as good as a first-year student’s English gets.

For example, she told me she would get a haircut later that day, so I asked her if she’d get a Mo-hawk. Without a moment’s hesitation, she replied, in her sweet, earnest voice, “No, I will get my hair cut like Rolo.” She meant Ronaldo, the Brazilian soccer star who wore a hideous triangular clump of hair atop his head for the last World Cup. The ability to joke in English, and actually be funny, is rare among my students. With Mary, she does it all the time.

The discussion about the haircut led to Mary explaining that she’s taking an elective class on Saturdays about how to apply make-up. The course meets at the college and is open only to girls. “They also teach us the proper way to sit and stand,” Mary explained, “and methods to make our skin more white and to keep thin.” Noodles are tough to choke on, but I nearly did upon hearing about university-sponsored charm school in 2003.

Mary then explained that she could eat only half her noodles because “she is turning into a very fat girl.” Again, near-death by noodle choking. Mary has the figure of at best a celery stalk, although she does look very healthy. I told her as much, and that neglecting to eat will make her only less healthy, and more ugly, as she gets older. Mary then explained that, when she started university, she was 35 kilograms, nearly weightless, and now she’s up to 55 kilograms. “Many people tell me that I’m very fat,” she explained.

And then I told her that I would go to Shaoshan, the hometown of Chairman Mao, on Sunday. I asked her if she wanted to join us. No, she said, on Sunday I have all-day lesson about joining “The Party.” I asked her what this class consisted of. “They teach us about loving our country and studying its history and pledging ourselves to fight for China,” she explained. “Mostly, when they are saying these things, we are sound asleep.” Again, she said this in the most earnest, innocent voice, and it was hilarious, almost enough to make me overlook the reality of her joining “The Party” at age 18, surely without proper mental preparation. How's that for a weekend: all-day charm school on Saturday, all-day brainwashing on Sunday.

As we walked out of the restaurant, Mary explained to me that her mom is an English teacher. I told her that must be why she has such good English. She replied by stating that, when her mother was her age, her mother was very beautiful. But, she explained, her father was very ugly. “And so my poor mother had me, this ugly, terrible baby. I am so sorry for my whole life to be so ugly for her. I look like my ugly father.” By this point, I stopped arguing with her; she seemed content to bask in her groundless, baseless misery.

Sadly, people probably do tell Mary that she’s fat and that she’s ugly. Each statement could not be less true, but this is a society covetous of Western standards of beauty – white skin, physique of an anorexic sparrow – and excruciatingly blunt and cruel in judging its women by those standards.

A friend of mine who’s taught in China for four years says that it’s not at all uncommon for Chinese parents to tell their female children that they found them in the garbage, and to deny them full rights to the family name and inheritance. A trip to the drugstore reveals aisles of creams promising to “whiten skin,” and the slightest hint of sunshine makes women rush for their umbrellas, lest they get a bit of vitamin D. It’s such a contrast from the West, where people lie on a beach, or slow broil like hot-dogs, seeking an extra coat of varnish. We have what they want, but we want what they have.

All of this shite made me extra sympathetic to my female students. Being a dude never seemed more attractive. In fact, one of my first-year students, a very sweet, diligent girl who happens to be tall and not beautiful in the conventional sense, calls herself Rex in English. “Why Rex,” I asked her. “Because I wish I could be a boy,” she explained.

Roadkill

On the way to Changsha, the bus slowed a bit, swerved right and just missed the puddle of blood surrounding the dead man. He lay exactly in the middle of the two-lane road, on his side, bent at the waist, still. A thick beige coat covered his hefty torso. His tousled black hair was combed over the dome of his head. Blood spilled out his mouth.

A dozen or so people stood beside the road, somber looks on their faces. Two bouquets of yellow flowers lay near them. A police car, red and blue sirens flashing, sat nearby. Blue dumptrucks and minibikes and busses slowed momentarily, blared their horns, swerved left or right, and carried on at breakneck pace once past the obstacle. It was 7:15 in the morning. It wouldn’t be until after rush hour, I suppose, that there would be an opening long enough to clear him away.

We arrived at the Changsha campus at 7:35. My friend Helen, a law professor who was seated next to me on the bus, said, “Daniel, let’s get breakfast.” I declined.

I will never know who was this man or how he died. I imagine he was crossing the street and fell victim to an overzealous dumptruck or taxicab, and I imagine that the driver sped away into anonymity, in a rush to get wherever was next on his agenda. I imagine the man who died was a common man, and that he leaves behind a family that relied on him emotionally and financially. And I imagine that his death will bring his family no justice, little if any compensation, just emptiness and uncertainty.

I had a strong emotional reaction to the sight of the man lying dead, but a stronger reaction to the lack of a reaction of those around me. A bus loaded with fellow college teachers passed him without so much as a sigh, and, twenty minutes later, my colleagues rushed to the campus canteen for some steamed buns. The road remained open, trafficked, and vehicles sped by, honking their horns as if annoyed. It wouldn’t shock me if he was run over again.

This is not the first dead man I encountered, and not the first time I was shocked by the lack of reaction of those around me. One morning in New York City, I got off a subway at Times Square and, four feet in front of me, sitting on a bench, was a homeless man frozen to death, his face the color of his gray jacket. And the people who streamed out the subway doors with me passed him without a pause. It was rush hour, and they had places to be. No time to mourn, or even acknowledge, a dead man in front of them.

I told a cop. “How you know he’s dead – you a doctor or something?” he asked. And he badgered me further: did I poke him to see if he’d move? What business was it of mine? What’s my name and phone number? Do I have an ID to show him? And he asked me where was the man, and told me I best be on my way, annoyed.

Maybe those around me have it right: leave the clean-up, and the mourning, to those who knew the dead man. Maybe I get too emotionally involved in the lives, and untimely deaths, of strangers. Maybe the modern world moves too quickly, and maybe those around me would expect the same lack of reaction if they were to meet their doom on a Changsha highway or at a Time Square subway station.

Somehow, though, it occurs to me that human life and human death deserve a bit more of a reaction. Not necessarily any grand gesture, just a pause, a prayer, a recognition that what I see before me makes me cherish my own life and the lives of those people whom I love, and that, if I were to meet the same fate, I would deserve the same recognition, even though I’m a stranger and even though the modern world moves at breakneck pace and I happened to die during rush hour.

Marquez autobiography

Please find a copy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' newly published autobiography (the first of three parts) and send it down the nearest hole to Zhuzhou City, China. It's newly published in English and is supposed to be every bit the magical thrill ride that his stories are. I covet this book; I will dig the hole myself, from the other end, using only a toothpick if necessary, if you can find a copy. Here's a review, with the first chapter excerpted:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/16/books/review/16STAPLET.html

letter to Michelle, my sister-in-law, on Nov. 18

Do you love China? Every person I meet -- and I am the Beatles everywhere I go, meeting hundreds of people, blowing kisses, singing songs -- asks me if I love China. Of course I freakin love China, I tell them. And then they provide a litany of possible excuses for me not to love China: but what about the food, the weather, the language, the government, and on and on. The truth is, I can find only a few complaints: I wish Chinese had bigger feet, so that I could buy new running shoes; I wish that the ping-pong gym was open longer hours so I could get more practice; I wish I spoke Chinese. Other than those petty things, I am infatuated with my daily life in China and continually find new reasons to love it.

My fear is that the daily sights -- a woman walks by in a business suit, carrying a live, flapping fish; a scrawny antique of a man shuffles by, carrying fifty pounds of water, suspended on two buckets on either end of his shoulder pole; elderly ladies gracefully dance around, doing their tai-chi with swords at 6 in the morning; my students bump into each other, reciting English aloud, pacing the streets with nose buried in their book -- will cease to amaze me someday. For now, every day is an adventure, every trip out of my apartment an occasion for some wonderful surprise.

I also wish that I knew how to teach. We have nothing in the way of textbooks, no ability to make copies, we're given zero direction. The other American here, an elderly man named Rauol, told me, "as long as you get them speaking English, you're doing your job." And so, every class, we speak English, but I pay little heed to introducing new vocab, emphasizing finer points of grammar, etc. Of course, I correct these things as I hear mistakes made, but I follow no structured plan from which my students can learn and chart their progress. Granted, they take four other English classes: grammar, reading, writing, listening. Perhaps my class, oral English, should be only what it is: conversation, a chance to put into use all the skills learned in the other classes. But, I still feel like a slug, like I'm failing my students a bit.

To be sure, my students treat me like the emperor. I cannot imagine students more obedient, diligent, eager. And so, so, so sweet. Each of my seven classes meets just once a week, and I dearly miss my students in the interim.

I spend every spare second with my best friend here, Manabu Kawahira. He's from Okinawa, he's 5-foot-2, he teaches Japanese, he's vicious on the badminton court and he's desperate to learn basketball. I think my experience would be dramatically less great if Manabu weren't here. He's the best of friends, absolutely without self-pity, always eager to follow along whichever scheme-du-jour I have cooked up, absolutley lovingly hilarious in the English language and loyal to death.

Every day, we have dinner and debrief: all the beautiful women we met, all the opportunistic schemers who approached us, all the bureaucratic bullshit, all the zany, wild characters and events that define daily life. We have created an entire mythical village out of the characters we've met in Zhuzhou. Each character has a single name, immediately recognizable only to us: Skye, Julia, barber, Homosexual, Mongolian, Jessy, Ms. Linyanfa, Mr. Yo, Mr. O and on and on. The best days are those in which two or more characters are together at the same time for us to witness and tell about. Bliss would be a roomful of all the weirdos we love. Can't a guy dream?

It's a pity God's not dyslexic, because I could easily occupy 42 hours every day writing about my daily existence. I have not been excited about writing like this since grad school, and I am far, far more excited now even than I was then. Every second not spent writing, I itch to write. Every experience, every day, instantly finds its place and structure in the story I will write about it later. If an idea strikes in the middle of class, I desperately want to flee so I can write it down. My mind is writing constantly; I wish, again, that God could turn dyslexic and make my days 42 hours. A simple request, really. A few people have written and said my blogs might turn into a book. Of course, my mind races even faster, my fingers pound the keyboard with even greater urgency at the thought.

My main limitation is my lack of Chinese. Manabu and I study Chinese every morning, from 5:30 to 7, and I take an individual, 2-hour lesson from a teacher four times a week. I am manic to learn this language, so that I can be a reporter here and get deeper into the society. All the important things -- food, shopping, teaching -- my pipsqueak vocabularly gets me by. But, I desperately want to master this language, talk to the tai-chi ladies, the blind masseuse, the fancy ladies carrying flapping fish. If ever there was a society where every last human is a character, it's this one. And I'm a sucker for great characters but, at present, my Chinese is just too sucky to converse much. Ugh ugh ugh.

Of course, I'm giddy with my experience and will probably hate it all within a month. For now, though, my plan is to learn Chinese this year, publish a book about my experiences, move to the north, on the coast, after next year, and write write write. There's a book, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, that's my Bible. The author, Peter Hessler, wrote it about his two years teaching in a little town, and it became a bestseller. Now, he writes from China for all the bigwigs: New Yorker, National Geographic, Boston Globe, NYT. I envy the man, and I've emailed him, hoping to meet him in Beijing in January. My long-term goal is to work at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. I think I can be happy living in China at least until 2008.

First, though, I must learn the freakin language, so I should get to sleep and rest up for my 5:30 lesson tomorrow morning. It would be my greatest joy to introduce you and Bob to all the wonderful weirdos, the surprises around every rice paddy, that define my blissful existence in Zhuzhou. If someone else were living this life, I would get cranky and bitter if the person didn't force me to come and experience it for awhile. So, I don't want to return to you and Bob being cranky and bitter, so I'm telling you: visit if you can. It will thrill you. Cripes, I must stop my Zhuzhou proselythizing, or however it's spelled.

Say hello to your neighbors and parents for me.

Love,

Dan

Manabu's lesson

I was free on Friday because I showed my classes the movie "Dumb and Dumber" this week. So, I attended Manabu's Japanese classes, and it bummed me out. He teaches like a master, engaging each of his students, putting them at ease with great humor, mixing light-hearted conversations with harder-edged grammar and pronunciation lessons.

So why did it bum me out? Because I realized that I will never truly know Manabu, because I'll never speak Japanese. The guy I eat dinner with every night, fumbling through English in a comical way, transformed before my eyes into an eloquent, articulate raconteur. And I realized that, as a person changes languages, so too does the person change personalities.

Whereas Manabu is a bit passive and insecure in English, he's vivacious and extremely confident in Japanese. Whereas he pauses long and hard before almost every sentence in English, Japanese flows out of him thoughtlessly, smoothly, in a steady stream. His forehead is relaxed. His shoulders are loose. In English, his body language conveys tightness and unease.

His lesson reminded me of a story by Garrison Keillor, in which he pays homage to New York's cab drivers. In part of the passage, Keillor writes that the cabbies will never be as funny, never be as articulate, never express themselves as clearly in English as in their native language. And Keillor writes that they are true heroes.

I now more fully realize that all of my foreign friends through the years, who've come to America and left their old language and customs completely behind, are my heroes. And my students who walk around campus every day at 6 in the morning, reciting English aloud, are my heroes. To change into a new language, and adopt a new personality, and know that the new will never match up to the old, and to go ahead anyway, full-steam, that's courage.

To: WWW
From: Department of shameless self-promotion

I gave a speech to the English Departments at the College of St. Benedict and St. John's University last fall. It was recently published online at: http://www.csbsju.edu/english/misc/TheEnglishWeb/November2003/article6.htm

Drunk on Marquez

I’m reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ collected short stories, which I’ve been doing sporadically since the first I read in college – “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” – grabbed hold of my imagination and made me desperate for more. My slow pace is mainly because I’m a lazy slug with the attention span of a bluegill; I like to tell myself, though, that I’m pacing myself, terribly afraid that I will run out of new Marquez stories to read before I run out of days to live. What, then, would I have to look forward to?

To read Marquez is to realize that life is beautiful precisely because life is a bloody mess. He explores the culture of Latin America, full of poverty, political revolutions, war and Catholicism, and introduces us to characters heavily influenced by all those forces yet thankful for each breath and fully able to see beauty amid squalor. We see the big world on a human scale, meeting the wives of political scoundrels, the mothers of thieves, priests’ maids and, of course, the political scoundrels, the thieves and the priests themselves.

Here’s his introduction to the widow of Jose Montiel, a political scoundrel, in “Montiel’s Widow:”
“She was sincere, that fragile woman, lacerated by superstition, married at twenty by her parents’ will to the only suitor they had allowed her to see at less than thirty feet; she had never been in direct contact with reality. Three days after they took her husband’s body out of the house, she understood through her tears that she ought to pull herself together, but she could not find the direction of her new life. She had to begin at the beginning.”

And here’s his introduction to a political crony and escaped prisoner, Nelson Farina, in “Death Constant Beyond Love:”
“For the first time in twelve years, Nelson Farina didn’t go to greet the senator. He listened to the speech from his hammock amidst the remains of his siesta, under the cool bower of a house of unplaned boards which he had built with the same pharmacist’s hands with which he had drawn and quartered his first wife. He had escaped from Devil’s Island and appeared in Rosal del Virrey on a ship loaded with innocent macaws, with a beautiful and blasphemous black woman he had found in Paramaribo and by whom he had a daughter. The woman died of natural causes a short while later and she didn’t suffer the fate of the other, whose pieces had fertilized her own cauliflower patch, but was buried whole and with her Dutch name in the local cemetery. The daughter had inherited her color and her figure along with her father’s yellow and astonished eyes, and he had good reason to imagine that he was rearing the most beautiful woman in the world.”

One of the more inspiring parts of grad school, for me, was the speech given to us at graduation by Pete Hammil (sp?), an old-school New York journalist, master storyteller and recovering alcoholic. During his speech, in which he implored us to report in the spirit of Don Quixote, he said, “When I think I’m pretty good, I just read some Faulkner.” For me, if I ever start to harbor delusions that I know how to write, I just read Marquez.

Where's her burka?

Manabu has taken English mispronunciations to a new level of art. To his endless credit, he talks English constantly, not a bit afraid of making mistakes or looking like a fool. For most of his mispronunciations, I correct him, and he practices the word over and over for the next few minutes until he gets it right.

For example, last night we were talking about Jessy, my Chinese teacher here. "Daniel, I agree with you, she is very arrogant," Manabu said. I was rather taken aback by his statement and questioned him on it. He could not find an alternate explanation, continuing to proclaim, "But, Daniel, she is very sweet, very arrogant." After he went to his Genius -- an electronic contraption that translates between English, Chinese and Japanese -- he showed me the word he was trying to say. It was not "arrogant," but rather "elegant." And, so, again, he practiced, "Larry Bird really likes left-handed layups."

One of his mispronunciations, however, I haven't yet corrected because it's so much better mispronounced. His English teacher and the object of his undying love, Skye, has a roommate who now is learning Japanese from Manabu. She teaches Physical Education at the college and is very eager to play doubles badminton against us -- she and Skye versus Manabu and me. Every time we see her, she is dressed in black stretch pants, aerobic shoes and a tank-top; a coach's whistle dangles down from her neck and her mouth is locked in a permasmile.

Manabu reminds me, before we greet her, that she "is an Arabic instructor." Of course, he means to say, "she is an aerobics instructor," but I'd much prefer to play cutthroat badminton against an Arabic instructor who looks like the Chinese Joannie Greggins.

Cadillacs on the State Highway for the Insane?

Read this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/12/business/12CND-AUTO.html. The Big Three American automakers signed a deal to export 15,000 cars to China in the next, I think, three years. Among many models of cars, GM will send a few thousand Cadillacs, to test the luxury ride on newly comfortable Chinese people, driving on newly paved roads.

Cadillacs, for me, will forever call to mind carrying up bags as a caddy. Rich white guy, wearing collared polo shirt, puffing on a stogie, drives up to the front gate of Midland Hills Country Club in his shiny Deville with gold hubcaps. Wordlessly, he stops, pops the trunk from his driver's seat, and four other little squirts and I fight for the privilege to dig into the icebox-sized trunk and scoop out his golf bag. Whichever little squirt wins the squabble gets the bag and the two bucks the rich guy dangles out the driver's-side window, just before he speeds off, not a word spoken, and the little squirt hauls his bag up to the clubhouse.

I hope I'm here to see the first shiny new Deville cruising down the State Highway for the Insane. It won't be shiny for long, and the ride won't be smooth, and it will have to cede right-of-way to intrepid chickens and bicycle rickshaws hauling live fish. Blue dumptrucks, entire trees hanging out their beds, will bear down on it, and there will be no little squirts fighting for the chance to do its dirty work. And Cadillacs everywhere will strike, demanding a return to the Midland Hills parking lot. We weren't made for this shit, they'll whine.

Ping-pong with Procson

The Chinese are wise enough to recognize ping-pong as bloodsport. Nearly every night, ping-pong matches are on national TV. Arenas are jammed with thousands of rabid fans, eyeballs racing left-right-left-right, trained on the fluorescent orange sphere as it races back and forth at supersonic speeds.

The players look like Nas cars, every inch of torso used to advertise cigarettes or the latest kung-fu movie or, in some cases, Coca-Cola. They play four or five feet back from the table, exchanging torrid fastballs and mixing in the occasional splitter, a curve, maybe a change-up every sixth hit.

As American TV covers every crunching hit in football as if you’re the one with the pads on, so too does Chinese TV cover ping-pong. After every point, an instant, slo-mo replay shows you what your eyes didn’t catch in real-time. You see a ripped forearm connecting paddle to orange ball, applying a coat of topspin, and then watch the ball’s wicked curve as it crosses the net, its kiddy-wampus bounce off the table, and the eyes of the opposing player grow into saucers as he goes into his wind-up. And then, close-up of ripped forearm connecting paddle with the orange ball, the ball leaping off the paddle as if it’s a trampoline. And the ball screams over the net, an eyelash of room to spare, and skips meekly after the first bounce, a shiny flat rock thrown into a calm Lake Superior by a master skipper. And, again, the ripped forearm, the saucer eyes, the wind-up and the pitch, and back and forth and back and forth. Beads of sweat fly. Crowd goes ballistic. Riveting.

Last night, I went to English Corner, or “free-chat with the foreigner,” for graduate students. It’s located on their campus, about a five minute walk from the undergraduate campus, on the opposite side of the village. I arrived in the room, a garage-sized brick shack with concrete floor, a vaulted ceiling, bare light bulbs and layers of dust. It’s empty, save for two ping-pong tables.

Procson, as in People’s Republic of China Son, was the only student there when I arrived. He’s well-dressed, well-coiffed, professional in his manners and a born leader. He organizes the English Corner, hence his early arrival. I walked in, greeted him, and pumped my fist: we could play ping-pong!

Procson had this idea that we should speak English, and thus didn’t bring his paddles. I insisted, however, that we could speak English as we played ping-pong. And so off he went to his dorm room and soon returned with his paddles and orange balls.

“Ping-pong is the national game of China, you know,” Procson said as we began. Goosebumps formed on my arms, adrenaline poured through me. There’s no greater advantage in sports than being taken for granted, assumed to be a weak sister. And, clearly, to Procson, I was the ping-pong equivalent of the Los Angeles Clippers.

Procson holds his paddle the way professionals do, with his thumb gripping the handle and his other four fingers behind the paddle. I hold it American style, all five fingers on the handle, as if it’s a tennis racket. “No, you should hold it like this, see,” Procson said, showing me his grip as if, by papal edict, it was the only way a human being could grasp a ping-pong paddle. I told him it was like chopsticks and steak knives – he grew up in China, thus his grip, ala chopsticks; I grew up in America, thus my grip, ala steak knife. And my blood boiled ever more.

Finally, we started hitting, and I was a player possessed. Procson would serve up wicked curves, and I’d drop my return just over the net, to one side of the court or the other, the ball skidding off the side of the table as Procson screamed and lunged. Often, his determined efforts would result in a return, albeit weak, and I’d slam it back. He was upset. There would be no more taking me for granted, no more treating me like the Clippers.

Soon, almost every one of Procson’s returns was a smash. It didn’t matter how hard my hit would come at him, or how low it was to the table, or if it was to his forehand or backhand, Procson answered with a thunderous return. And, somehow, I made like Manny Fernandez, discovering lightning-quick reflexes I never knew I had, and held firm. He’d smash. I’d react instantly, connecting paddle to racket, sending a blooper back over the net, and a lazy, big bounce on his side of the court. He’d wind up, scream, and blister a torrid fastball back at me, and, with God on my side, I’d somehow respond, sending him another blooper. If the series went over four smashes, I’d win, as Procson’s next smash would sail long, off the table, as the ball was spinning itself dizzy by that point. About half the time, though, the series would end early, as my blooper sailed off the back of the table on his side. Almost never, though, did one of his smashes go unreturned. My paddle made contact with whatever came at it.

We didn’t keep score, not yet, as each of us was so completely wrapped up in our volleys that we didn’t want to break rhythm. Finally, as a crowd of other graduate students surrounded the table, cheering, I realized that I was showering them -- all very professional, well-dressed graduate students in biology and engineering and forestry and eco-tourism -- with rivers of my sweat. And I looked down and saw my red shirt drenched as if I had just finished a 20-mile run, and I looked at my side of the ping-pong table. The dust that covered it now joined with my sweat beads to form little mud puddles. And I realized, cripes, I better put down the racket, hang myself out to dry and start to speak freakin English. Ugh.

Hoops and linguistics

Manabu has the hardest time pronouncing “l” and “r.” We work on the problem constantly, repeating this sentence: “Larry really likes rowing the boat along the lake.”

As we hooped it up on Sunday, I realized something else: Manabu has the hardest time dribbling left-handed and shooting lay-ups with his left hand. When we play one-on-one, I overdefend his right hand, forcing him left. Still, he drives left while dribbling right-handed.

And during lay-up drills, he always jumps off his left foot while doing left-handed lay-ups. As Mr. Einan taught me in sixth grade, it’s best to jump off the opposite foot when doing lay-ups. So, for right-handed lay-ups, hop off the left foot, and vice versa.

To rectify the problem, I had Manabu drive the length of the court, dribbling with his left hand, and then finishing with a left-handed lay-up. And up and down the court he went, gaining a bit of confidence in his left hand, but still losing his dribble often and frequently reverting to jumping off the left foot on his lay-ups.

As I watched him struggle, I thought of Larry Bird, the Hick from French Lick and my childhood hero. Legend has it that Bird practiced with his left hand so diligently that, by the time he was a teen-ager, he was stronger with his left hand than with his right. Bird inspired me to practice endlessly with my left hand in our driveway as I grew up, and, by extension, was now doing the same for Manabu.

And thinking of Bird, it dawned on me: Manabu is troubled, in English and basketball, with his “l”s and “r”s. And I thought of the old sentence (“Larry really likes rowing the boat along the lake”) and then created a new sentence: “Larry Bird really likes left-handed lay-ups.” I taught the new sentence to Manabu.

And up and down the court he went, dribbling with his left hand, saying aloud, “Larry Bird really likes left-handed lay-ups,” as I counted aloud his dribbles in Chinese: “ee-ur-san-si-wuh-leo-chi-ba-jow-shuh.” And I thought of my good friend Brad Bergman’s words, as we used to run through neighborhoods in Rochester, chasing a golf ball down the street: “I wonder if people think we’re retarded.”