A rash decision...
Feb 8, 03:42 PM
OK. So it was probably rash to agree to be interviewed, on air, live, in Chinese, having only studied the language for just over a year, and having had not nearly as much chance to actually speak the language as I would have liked (something I hope that the coming summer will remedy). But when I agreed to this venture, I’d been drinking far too much coffee, I was slightly excitable, and my defences were down. Anyway, I thought, it’s weeks away.
Or it was. But last night, I remembered what I had agreed to. And so this morning, not without a degree of trepidation, I headed off to an obscure part of the outskirts of town for the interview. I had spent most of last night writing out a script (my written Chinese is better than my spoken language), and having checked over it several times, I was, although far from confident, at least content that I might be able to stammer a few coherent (if not always entirely correct) sentences. A ten minute interview, or so. How wrong could things go?
As it turned out, things started pretty well. We sat around in the studio, and I did a relatively convincing impersonation of somebody who knew what was going on. Twenty minutes in, I was feeling good. A Chinese New Year song was playing. The conversation had come to an end. I had said everything that I had planned to say. We’d been shooting the breeze, chatting about New Year customs, I’d been talking about the book I was writing. I sat back, took off my headphones and thought to myself that my work there was done. 不错, I told myself, 不错，不错…
It was only then that I realised with alarm that I was a guest on the show for the entire hour, and that the listeners (to whom I can only apologise) were being promised that I would be returning to say more after the break. It was at this point that my mind decided to depart the recording booth and leave me to it, on the principle that – having performed relatively well for a short while – it was due a brief holiday.
A strange kind of sleepiness set in at this point. I struggled to concentrate. My fellow guest, a native speaker, was chatting about firecrackers and tigers and other New Year things. I tried to make intelligent-sounding background grunts. I hoped that I wouldn’t be asked any more direct questions. And just when I thought I was off the hook, as the show came to an end, I found the microphone swinging my way again. I stammered, I stuttered, then I conceived of the ridiculous idea that it might be sensible at this point to talk about Chinese philosophy. But no sooner had I said that I was of the opinion that Mengzi was a fairly interesting chap than I realised that I would have trouble talking about the topic in English, let alone Chinese. So I stuttered a bit more, tried various Chinese words at random, put out an urgent call for my mind to return to duty, then ground to a complete halt as I realised that my mind was simply not coming back any time soon. Next I tried a few words in English, by which time it came home to me that I no longer had the capacity for communicating in any language whatsoever. I lapsed into a kind of awkward silence, my fellow interviewee looking at me in perplexity. “And now, a New Year song,” said the friend who was interviewing me, whilst – in an act of considerable kindness – fading out my mic before I could be heard sobbing softly in the corner.
Strangely, however, once we were out of the recording booth, I felt pretty good about life again. It could, no doubt, have gone a lot better. But it could have gone a great deal worse. I had managed around fifteen minutes of chatting more or less coherently. In Chinese. On the radio. Live. As for the ten minutes of incoherence towards the end, well, I blame Mengzi.