[Dominick: not his real name]
One of the evening programme students was a retired Maths teacher.
He cycled in to class. (This is noteworthy because most, if not all, Chinese retirees would not do it on account of the exertion.)
He carried a vanity case — pale blue if I remember correctly. This, in itself, was an eyebrow raiser, but then, during the break, he’d open it and take out his sandwiches!
Quite a character.
(London, 1987?88?)
[Dominick: not his real name]
Dominick was on the part-time degree course.
The polytechnic (upgraded to university status in 1992) would run a week-long intensive-revision course for them just before the exams.
The timetable included language revision (listening, speaking, translation) and talks on topics related to the culture, such as Confucianism or TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine). For the talks, the students would (i) listen and make notes; (ii) then break up into small groups for Q&A and discussion, for extra listening and speaking.
I happened to be the teacher for Dominick’s Q&A and discussion group that year. Whenever he made a mistake in his Chinese, I’d correct him. He said, “Stop interrupting me! You wait until I’ve finished saying what I have to say, then you correct me.” Fair enough, as his flow of thought was being disrupted — but then, when I tried to go over the list afterwards, he denied everything, “No, I didn’t say that.”
(London, 1987?88?)
[Dominick: not his real name]
It was my idea to have a two-teacher system for each grade, so that the students could have exposure to more than one accent, one style of teaching, etc.
The teacher co-teaching Dominick’s class was a fresh arrival from Taiwan, who told me about this episode with Dominick.
In his typical cantankerous style, Dominick kept interrupting the teaching, asking questions about this, that and everything else.
The teacher from Taiwan, a soft-spoken gentle bookish soul, said to me,
“He wound me up so much that I just flipped. My English wasn’t very good at the time, so I don’t know where I found so much, and the appropriate level of, English to tell him off. I said to him, ‘You’re on a Chinese course, so you have to observe all the cultural behaviour rules that come with learning the language. This means respecting the teacher and not interrupting the teaching, as it’s very disruptive.’”
She went on to say, “He was dumbfounded by this tirade, delivered in fluent English, and was on his best behaviour from then on, even the subsequent weeks, not just for the rest of the lesson.”
(London, 1987?88?)
A lady who had been an associate professor in Taiwan married a Shanghai-native academic from Hong Kong teaching over here, and became a lecturer herself at the same institution.
She told me this story one day over a cup of tea.
Her husband, being a bloke [sorry, generalisation!] and a bookish man, was not very good at looking after himself, so she had to do almost everything, down to buying his clothes and shoes for him.
(Another generalisation: it is almost standard cultural practice for a Chinese woman to know how to run a household. The old Chinese terms for referring to one’s own spouse are 外子 wàizǐ / “outside person” and 内子 nèizǐ / “inside person”, which give a good indication of the clear delineation of their roles.)
One summer, she went back to Taiwan to spend time with her ageing parents. Returned to London to find that her husband had bought a new pair of trousers. She was suitably impressed, “Oh, he’s learned how to do such things for himself!”
She later discovered that what had happened was: he was trying to iron a pair of trousers but managed to burn them, so had to go and get a replacement pair. (Maybe it was the only decent pair he had, or he didn’t want his wife to notice that pair missing.)
(London, 1997?)
I was transferred in my last three years at the university to the full-time degree programme.
This means teaching not mature students but school leavers. I say this because being 18-year-olds fresh from A-levels / high school, their life experience is different from that of the mature students on the evening programme, and therefore their sense of humour too.
During a break in one of the classes one day, a student was eating a banana. I said to her, “Can I have the skin when you’re done?” She asked, “Why would you want the skin?” I said, “The university pays me too little.”
Stunned silence from the whole class.
(London, 2008)
On Registration evening, I saw that a new student was called Justin Smith. I took him to one side, and asked him, “What are your parents’ names?” He was taken aback, “What? I have to give my parents’ names as well just to register on a language course?!”
Back in 1976, a Schlumberger engineer John Smith and his Irish wife Mary arrived in Taipei for his stint on our [Conoco’s] offshore rig. She was eight months pregnant, and they’d flown in on the last possible day for her to fly. The following evening, she went into labour, so they said they’d name the boy Justin Taipei Smith. Hence my asking this young man, who looked about the right age, for his parents’ names. Given that they’d been in Taipei and he was born there, it wouldn’t be surprising that he might be wanting to learn Chinese. No, not them, but how amazing it’d have been to be meeting them again in this way.
(London, 1995)
One of the pieces I’d set for Listening Comprehension for the Tuesday group features a Brit called Thomas who is a new colleague at the bank of the speaker (/storyteller).
The Chinese rendition of Thomas is 湯姆/汤姆 Tāngmǔ, which is supposed to be purely phonetic, as it’s a Western name, therefore whichever characters that happen to fit the sounds in the original.
(The Chinese wicked sense of humour, however, means that, wherever possible from the range of homophones available, those characters will often be chosen for the meanings behind them to reflect their opinion of the target — either to have a laugh at them, or, worse, to show contempt. More in another blog.)
I often say outrageous things to attract the students’ attention (and laughter), which will therefore act as a mnemonic as well, so I give them the literal breakdown of 湯姆/汤姆 Tāngmǔ: “soup nanny”. Thereafter, whenever we dipped into the next paragraph, he’d get referred to as Soup Nanny.
At one point of the story, Thomas and French wife are invited to a reception held by the bank, to welcome them. The Chinese colleagues try to teach the couple how to use chopsticks, with the wife quickly succeeding, but Thomas still unable to grasp [ha! pun!] the technique after a long while.
Singaporean Amy Lim in the class piped up: “He won’t need to learn how to use chopsticks, since he is a Soup Nanny!”
These students are really catching on...
(London, 2023)
