Language learning

Date: 2003.05.25 | Category: General | Tags:

Friday night we went to dinner with two friends who work at the Institute of Psychology. Because of SARS, we haven’t seen them nearly as much in the last month as usual, and they’ve mostly stayed at home and worked from there. Their Institute is being extensively renovated during this time, so it would have been closed anyway. But many of their students have gone back to their home towns and the rest have not had a good place to work or much to do.

For some reason, they’d gotten the impression that we don’t eat meat any more. I can trace that back to a conversation on the phone where the woman had been worried that we wouldn’t be able to get food on campus. There are some very good stores for getting vegetables, milk and yogurt, and tofu, but not meat (other than some frozen stuff), but I’d said that we could certainly get by on that. So the husband, who is originally from Guangdong and is a wonderful cook, tried to make vegetarian versions of everything he cooked (including what we termed “gong bao doufu gan’r”—Kung Pao dried tofu). They also made some fish dishes, and it was all very good. What was really wonderful is that my wife was able to really participate in the conversation in Chinese. Being able to speak in your native language to non-native speakers is a skill in itself, and one that not many people have. the wife in this couple in particular is exceptionally easy to speak to in Chinese. She’s originally from Northeast China and so has a fairly standard accent, but she’s also very good at speaking slowly and choosing words her non-native speaker is likely to know. So it was really a delightful evening all around, and a nice benchmark of my wife’s progress in learning Chinese.

In thinking about the meat/vegetarian question, I realized one stupid thing that I do is that I generally avoid eating beef in the U.S. (because the whole concept of “prions” seems extremely weird and frightening), but not over here, because “China doesn’t have mad cow disease.” It’s plausible that they don’t, because why would they be shipping beef byproducts here from England and Europe. On the other hand, what’s the chance that people would know that they had this relatively rare disease here if they did? Maybe it is time to give up meat after all, starting with civet cats