Me vs. Mandarin

China and I have a healthy relationship over movies and food. I learn most of my mandarin either buying DVDs or ordering food.

I am, in Mandarin, an enthusiastic blunderer. I like to try it but I generally make a hash of things. On the tones, I am hopeless. I can eventually make myself understood, but it's not pretty.

Last week, we went shopping first for knickknacks, then for DVDs. By way of knickknacks I bought an old poster of Mao with Lin Biao. Of course, for some reason I thought Lin Biao's name was Li Peng. Chinese names largely do this to me. Then again I could not find a Chinese person to correctly name poor old Lin Biao. They could tell me that I paid too much for it. They always do that.

There is no haggling in the DVD store. But some language is required. On this day, I had to figure out whether a group of Chinese, Japanese, French and German movies had English subtitles. This I can do. I asked the sales clerk, "this have not have English subtitles?" four times for four different disks.

Then came another problem: The Graduate. The Girl and I have run through about four different copies of The Graduate with zero of them working. I have no idea why China or our computer hates The Graduate, but it was starting to get frustrating. I had worked through my pile of foreign movies and got to this one. I have no idea how to say, "does this work?"

The clerk looked at The Graduate. "Have English," she said. I tend to bring down the level of Chinese in a room. But she could see I was not happy, even after being reassured that Dustin Hoffman would be speaking English, with subtitles if I so wanted.

I scrunched up my face into an apology for what I was about to do to her language. "This have not have movie." She giggled, but comprehended and tested the disk out.

"Have"

Suddenly, I remembered that I had left my poster of Mao and Lin on the second floor of the shop. I started to walk upstairs. The clerk, alarmed that she had just spent ten minutes going through this and listening to my crappy Mandarin, said something to me that I didn't understand. It was probably, "don't wander off, retard."

I groped for a way to reassure her. "I don't have Li Peng." Sometimes your brain just doesnn't grope hard enough.

She was kind of awed by that statement. She let me go upstairs without fuss. Probably just to find out why I thought I should have Li Peng.

I grabbed my poster. I showed it to everyone, "This, I have Li Peng."

Nobody told me that it wasn't Li Peng. I would have understood that. I had to wait to get home to a history book to find out that my poster was of Lin Biao and that Li Peng was the charming fellow who took over the premiership after Tianamien. You can't expect all of your brain to work all the time.