I went to the Philippine embassy once, for fun. The building looked tiny and abandoned and there was no flag on the pole. The Chinese guard saw me looking behind the gate and chased me away from where I had stood. I hadn't brought my passport with me. If I had he would have opened the gate for me and I would have danced past him.


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NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKER WANTED. My friend had found a company searching for someone to teach English to their representatives, but they turned her down, saying she looked too much like a local. This is a story in Beijing. It is not likely that it would have turned out another way. It is likely that an Italian with a working facility in English would have been hired, but my friend did not look Italian.
He spoke little English and she spoke no Korean, so they used the language they were only beginning to grasp. In the brokenness of the Mandarin they spoke, they found the distance that they would need for their own defense later. All of us who knew transience understood that what happened in Beijing stayed there.
I met my language partners every Friday in the school library, two local girls who wanted to practice their English with me, but they frequently slipped back to Mandarin because there were too many interesting questions to be asked. How can you be Chinese? How can you be Filipino? How can you speak English? You speak Filipino too, right? How do you say, 'How do you do?'
I taught them to say kumusta, simplest thing in the world, contraction of como esta, consonants crunchy and hard, vowels wide and open. Back in the Philippines, some people would be so surprised with my speaking Filipino that they would forget to stop speaking English with me. Would you have to marry a Chinese too? You speak a little Chinese too, right? How do you say, 'How do you do?'
A French friend in Beijing, whom my language partners had first accosted, had referred Miao Ban and Xin Feng to me. Xin Feng spoke English with the recklessness and confidence of someone who wanted to learn. Miao Ban was made of inquisitiveness and less eloquence, looking for Xin Feng for the frequent translation