One year, a group of four turned up for the Beginners Chinese course. They’d been doing taiji together somewhere, and decided they wanted to do Chinese.
The students had to learn to write Chinese characters right from the start.
One of them, Chris Welch, was a professor of space engineering (now in Strasbourg, Google tells me). He was away one week, missing my lesson. A fax arrived from Austria, where he was attending a conference, with the message on the cover page saying, “Apologies for absence from class. Please find my homework herewith.” On Page 2, five handwritten samples each of the characters for 你好 nǐ hǎo / “you good” = hello, how do you do
你你你你你
好好好好好
Another chap in that taiji group, David, arrived late one evening for class. I happened to be standing by the door while teaching, and saw him (through the glass pane in the door) approaching the door, so I turned the lock. David pounded on the door, “LET ME IN, LET ME IN, I HAVE PAID MY FEES, YOU CAN’T SHUT ME OUT!” (A note here: you can tell which students go to the pub with me after class, as they’re the cheeky ones.)
(London, 1990s?)
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