December 2011
7 posts
Welcome to Beijing.
It’s hard to believe that Mandarin is a language at all. It is so absurdly foreign, so screechingly unnatural that I marvel that anybody can communicate with it. It is also tonal and bone china-delicate, and our attempts to enunciate a hotel address to an open-shirted, big-bellied cab driver must have looked piteous. ‘Chaoyang?’ we ask, referring to the district name. The cabbie looks as if...
