The Universal "Ehh!" of Approval

     Stick four American teenagers in the home of rural Chinese villagers, and communication of one form or another is unavoidable. A simple smile, ordinary gestures, exchanges of gifts, these are all forms of communication that can get you pretty far along, sometimes even further than verbal communication can.

     Bob, Ben, Ned and I had been learning Mandarin Chinese for the previous several months, and were at a reasonable level of fluency, being that, without much trouble, we could get across just about anything on our minds with the help of a dictionary. But as roommates in this village homestay, there were times when we wished that we had spent our time in Beijing working on our nonverbal communication skills. If nothing else, this experience perhaps made us reconsider just what it meant to make productive use of our time on School Year Abroad.

     "Downtown Dazhai" consisted of a thirty by thirty foot square, with a little tobacco shop in the corner. Our mother for the next two days led us down the long walkway to her house, the very last one.

     "Their Mandarin's not all that great, hope we get used to it," I remarked as we hiked out to our home, perhaps a kilometer away from the center of town, in what we liked to call "the 'burbs."

     "Don't worry," replied Ben, "If you speak English loud enough, anyone can understand you."

     Upon reaching our home, we all sat down with our host family and eagerly began speaking Mandarin. We asked them what they did for a living, whether or not they liked the village, all sorts of questions that you might ordinarily ask a acquaintence. When one of us smiled brightly enough, or made the simplest remark such as an expression of thanks, a nod and a pleased "ehh!" would be the response, and would often be followed by a stream of words that bordered between very fuzzy and completely unintelligible. As one classmate put it, "They sounded like a cross between the Sand Warriors and the Ewoks."

     Soon we realized that our hosts didn't have a clue what we were saying either. At this, we immediately gave up on the act of speaking, and sat back to observe, knowing that it would take more than just several tall, goofy Americans speaking broken, accented Chinese to win them over.

     Our host parents were an older couple who seemed quite friendly and appeared to have a sense of humor as well. Dad liked to laugh a lot and wore a funny hat. Mom always seemed to be mocking him. As we talked less, they began to talk more. Pretty soon, we were all masters of the "nod and smile" technique. Dad showed us the correct way to eat a sunflower seed. He spoke his own language and we spoke ours but it didn't make a difference. When we cracked the seed correctly, we got the same nod of approval followed by the universal "ehhh!" Ben held his hand out to our little brother, didi for a high five. After several demonstrations he caught on, and he too got the "ehh!" of approval from the four of us.

     We later found that perhaps the best way to reach out to our didi was to show him that these six-foot tall foreigners knew how to be kids just like him. I believe that the "shoot 'em up" phase with toy guns and the desire to blow stuff up is inherent in all males; we never really grow out of it. I discovered this after having the time of my life playing real-life "Duckhunt for Nintendo" with our didi's bebee gun, followed by "Naval Warfare" with his firecrackers- blowing up bamboo leaves in the pond behind our house. When Mom called us inside for dinner, I found myself genuinely disappointed, wishing we could continue our game.

     Few words were spoken in the following two days. When Kemble, who is fluent in Cantonese and Mandarin and could therefore understand their mixture of the two, came to our house for a visit, we politely told him to go away.

     So when asked about these people when we return home, we won't know any facts, nor will we be able to tell our friends and family the history of the village or even the names of our hosts. We'll tell them about the time we sunk a Soviet battleship in Southern China with the help of a 10-year-old kid, which, in my humble opinion, is perhaps more meaningful than words can describe.