You said we could lie: 02 (names for fictitious children) (London)

For the Beginners class on the evening programme, the oral test was three minutes per student, which is a long time to be speaking in Mandarin for that level.

    This was the strategy I taught the generations of students during my 23 years of teaching on the evening programme, presenting the plan graphically on the board.

    The student is in a bubble in the middle, marked Self, with details such as surname, name, age, nationality.  (That might be 30 seconds of the test time covered.)

    Radiating from that central bubble, like a satellite network, are four different identity bubbles:

    1. Family (the one they were born into), with details such as parents and siblings, plus their names and ages.

    2. Family (the one they've created), with details of their spouse and children.  (I told them all to be married and to have lots of children, to fill up the speaking time.)

    3. Their studies:  I told them all to be full time students, because they knew how to say they were learning Mandarin, and describe their teacher and fellow students.

    4. Their work:  This was the part of their life I told them not to venture into, as their Mandarin wasn't anywhere near good enough to talk about their work in real life, e.g., Hilary was an IP (Intellectual Property) Rights specialist lawyer; Chris Welch was a professor of aeronautics and space engineering at Kingston University.

    Student Dennis, unattached at the time, in answer to my questions in Mandarin, "Are you married?  Do you have any children?  How many? Boy or girl?  What are their names?", would giggle after each of his made-up answers.

    Student Tom didn't even bother to spend time and energy on this.  He simply gave the names of his two fictitious children as Gubo and Palanka, the two characters in the mainland Chinese-designed textbook we were using at the time.

    Palanka could be the Chinese rendition for Blanca, a common enough European name, but I was at a loss (this was pre-googling days) to put a finger on a provenance for Gubo.  Plumping for Albania (since it was, like China, one of the few communist countries left in the world at the time) was exotic and always produced a smile, so I stuck to it.

    Tom coming up with Gubo and Palanka for the names of his two fictitious children took me by surprise.  My eyebrows went up, as I checked in Mandarin, "Your children are called Gubo and Palanka?!?"

    He gave me a look of frustration (and something else -- maybe a touch of derision?) as he switched to English, "It was you who told us to play this silly game."

    Yes, he passed the oral test.  Couldn't fault him on lack of imagination.  Nor even for telling the examiner off....  I did say that they could lie -- as long as they lied grammatically.

(London, early 1990s)