I now know why every Singaporean of my age looks back on their Mandarin classes with a mix of anger and smoldering resentment, and a dangerous, cold, homicidal gleam in their eye. For months my Singaporean friends have been asking me with amazement, “You actually want to go sit in a Mandarin class?”

 

“Yeah, I’ve been having great fun studying Mandarin!” I say. They then usually offer to drive me to a hospital or call someone to come pick me up and take me home.

 

After nearly two weeks sitting in Mandarin class I am beginning to understand why they feel this way. Working in a class is not like working with a tutor.

 

Working with a tutor spoils you. The class moves at your speed. You can miss a day, or a week, without consequence. You can control the emphasis of the sessions. (Do you need more grammar? More conversation? More writing? More snacks?) When you say something incorrect, hey, it’s just you and the tutor, who gently corrects you. Too much homework? Dial back the pace a bit.

 

In class your weaknesses, like bad hair, are clear for everyone else to see. When you are confronted with a question you can’t answer, you are painfully aware of every second ticking by. When another student effortlessly answers that question, you start thinking about how you can hide the corpse or whether you want to display it as a warning to others.

 

Don’t get me wrong. In general, the classes are good. Two out of my three teachers are genuinely quite good (one is a charm), and the third is adequate. I am learning at what I feel is a fairly ferocious pace. But, let’s be clear here, I am busting my nuts. I haven’t felt this kind of pressure since I was at Santa Cruz doing organic chemistry, which was the class that separated the people who would graduate with hard-science degrees (I read biology) from those who would ultimately pursue gentler disciplines like psych, or liberal arts. And even then I slept through one final and passed.

 

In Singapore I memorized about thirty or forty characters a week. Here, in two weeks, I have done something on the order of three hundred. And most of those aren’t from the vocabulary per se, they are words I am already expected to know at this level which I am having to study remedially. (You may recall that I, following some suicidal impulse, asked to be bumped up a class.)

 

Monday I have tests. Tests! I didn’t even have tests in graduate school. I don’t think I’ve had a test since Ronald Reagan was president. I don’t even remember how to take a test. Should I cram? Panic? Buy the answers off the Internet? I don’t know. I haven’t been to school in years.

 

But, I tell myself, I didn’t come to Beijing to nancy around buying pirate movies, prowling the Sanlitun clubs, and trying to get between the knees of the college chicks in the language program (and this seems to be a major pastime among the college boys, as you’d expect). I came to learn some Mandarin. So, I tell myself, quit all that whining and hit the books. Fer chrissake, man, you do public relations. You’ve practically made a career out of humiliation and long hours! Furthermore, I tell myself, I chose to do this for myself, and I made sacrifices to bring it about. No test, no teacher, will ever be harder on me than I will be on myself.

 

Then I feel better, and I go back to my characters and cassette tapes.