John and Yoko Syndrome

I’ve been studying Chinese for a pretty long time. I first told my parents it interested me in middle school, and they signed me up right away to attend Chinese classes at my local Confucius Institute. I went to these classes once a week for a few years before moving on to classes at the community college. Chinese became an official part of my high school curriculum when I moved to Utah, and then I went on to minor in Chinese in college. I expect that many people are interested in the prominence of English in China and my experience speaking Chinese as a foreigner, which will likely be the topic of an upcoming post. For now it should suffice to understand that Chinese has been a part of my life for more than a decade. You might reasonably assume that I speak Chinese quite well. I do not. Although the Chinese people here often say I speak Chinese quite well — I presume it’s because most foreigners don’t even try — it’s still an enormous struggle to communicate, and a lot of Chinese people resort to translation apps instead of dealing with the troublesome foreigner. Some people in my life think it’s very impressive that I speak Chinese, and my parents have dedicated a lot of money to helping me learn it, so you can imagine I’m a little nervous to disappoint them. I’ve spent some time coming up with justifications that might soften the blow. Here are three.

For one, Chinese is just a difficult language, full stop. It’s actually one of only four languages listed as “exceptionally difficult” by the Foreign Language Institute (the other three are Arabic, Japanese, and Korean). They estimate that it takes 2200 hours for an expert polyglot employed by the government to study full-time to achieve fluency. I have not been doing that. In fact, prior to college, I only studied sporadically. When you spend one hour every week studying Chinese, you’re spending the other 167 forgetting what you learned, and trying to retain anything is an uphill battle — and this is before considering that you don’t attend during breaks, and that the Confucius Institute is often more concerned with promoting Chinese culture through superfluous festivals than it is teaching anything. In short, my “ten years” of Chinese experience is more like three, followed by another three of no Chinese at all. The last reason was one of my primary motivations to come to China at all: it is exceptionally difficult to learn a language — any language — without using it in daily life. I sometimes hear smug Europeans proclaim that, because they could learn English, it shouldn’t be hard for Anglophones to learn their language. But when you never come into contact with a language outside of a classroom, you can’t really learn it. So this became my strategy. I was ashamed that my Chinese wasn’t that good, and getting immersed in China was my last ditch effort to do something about it. My hope was that just being in China would be enough to learn Chinese, because I’d be using it every day. Maybe I’d even subconsciously absorb it like that one episode of Dexter’s Laboratory. I haven’t been here long enough to say if it’s really working or not. I have encountered a little bit of discouraging evidence, though.

I spend a lot of time with expats. China is like nowhere else on Earth, and that little bit of familiarity is quite comforting. What’s not so comforting is that a huge number of expats in China, including those who have been here for years, speak little or no Chinese. I have several friends who have been here close to a decade who only use English. Out of my four coworkers at the elementary school, only one speaks any Chinese, and she’s just started to learn after being here for at least a year. Another speaks none and makes no effort to learn even though he’s lived here for longer. Now, I personally think it’s a little disrespectful not to speak your host country’s language, but I also understand that Chinese is remarkably difficult and it therefore might not be fair to judge. That’s not really the point, though. The point is that, if these people can go years without learning Chinese, then obviously just being in China isn’t enough. There is a sort of lifestyle into which many expats fall which prevents them from using or having to learn Chinese, and that could happen to me if I’m not careful. I think it almost did.

Your phone is your life in China. You cannot successfully navigate the country without it. Almost all Chinese people carry power banks, and Meituan — we’ll get back to them in a second — rents them out in little boxes that are littered all over every street. This is because phones do everything, from communicating to making payments to navigation and transportation. One of the consequences of your phone doing everything is that you have to do nothing. You can get whatever you want by using your phone. If you want to buy something, you walk into a store, grab what you want, and wave your phone at a scanner. The purchase is complete without a single word between you and the cashier. If you want to get somewhere, you don’t need to hail a taxi and tell the driver where to go. You just type the destination into your phone and order a Didi — the Chinese equivalent of Uber — and the driver will pick you up and take you there, again without a single word spoken. In a restaurant, you don’t tell a waiter what you want to order, you just scan a QR code that lets you send your order directly to the chefs. In China, you never need to talk to anyone. Of course some people don’t speak Chinese. Even in China, a country where hardly anyone speaks English, there’s no need to learn, which can have some pretty diabolical effects. Enter Meituan, the Chinese equivalent to DoorDash, which you can use to deliver food, beverages, groceries, and anything sold at any store directly to your door. You never have to leave your apartment. You might develop a classic case of John and Yoko Syndrome.

The phrase "John and Yoko Syndrome" comes from Levni Yilmaz, whose work has probably inspired me more than any other.

John and Yoko Syndrome is a condition I’ve struggled with many times in my life and in many different places. I like staying in. I remember one semester of college during covid I had the thought “I’m never going to get an opportunity to live this way again.” But even then I had to leave to get food every once in a while. When I substitute taught in Philadelphia, I had to leave for work at least occasionally, and I had to stop by the grocery store sometimes as well. There was hardly ever a day in my life that I could just stay indoors the entire time. It doesn’t work like that in China. In the US, Doordash is so bizarrely expensive that it’s impossible to justify ordering it. In China, it’s dirt cheap. Same with just about everything, actually — I take Didi to and from school every day, which would be unthinkable in America, but the cost here is roughly equivalent to bus fare. The Chinese system facilitates this lifestyle, and I of course benefit from the additional options. But I also proved to myself that, left to my own devices, I’m liable to hermitize. There just isn’t much to report from the past four weeks. The national holiday happened, and I celebrated by… staying in. When I come home from work, I stay in. On the weekends, apart from my Chinese lessons, I relax by staying in. I don’t eat at restaurants often, because it’s easier to order food so I can stay in. Unless I’m working, which itself follows a pretty consistent routine at this point, I typically wake up, use the internet for sixteen hours, order some food, and go to sleep without ever leaving my apartment. Before he drove me to the airport, my dad told me to “have an adventure.” I’m not sure he’d be happy to see what I’m really doing.

The conclusion I’m coming to is that nothing ever “just happens.” You can’t expect to learn Chinese just by showing up in China and hanging out for long enough. You have to grab hold of Chinese by the testicles and refuse to let go. You have to make the effort, you have to insert it into your daily life. It’s like I said — foreigners don’t speak Chinese because they don’t try. It’s the same with everything else. I can’t expect teaching abroad to be this great experience just because I’m doing it. I have to make it great through my own efforts. I have to try. Stephen Covey told a story about this that I’ll never forget. A man approached him and said “I don’t know what to do anymore. I don’t love my wife. The love isn’t there.” Covey told the man to love her anyway, and the man said “You don’t understand. The feeling isn’t there.” Covey responded with “Love is a verb.” That’s a line I’m never going to forget. Love is a verb.