Magic Words

Enter any store and clerks would bombard me with insistent sales pitch (little of which I understood). I imagined the click in their eyes: “White guy = money.” To be sure, my Chinese salary was double what an average Beijing worker made (¥800 as opposed to ¥350), so by their standards I was well off. But that’s not how I felt. ¥800 was about $100/month, and with no savings plus college loans waiting back home, I felt downright poor.

So the sales talk persisted as long as I lingered in the store, and I persistently blocked it out.

This went on for six months of buying basic necessities.

Then: magic.

Sole customer in one store, I was being harangued by two clerks when a woman entered. They redirected their barrage at her, but the woman said something, four words at most, and they fell quiet.

Immediately I replayed her words in my mind, parsing them. Wo kan yi kan. What did it mean? Wo I knew – it meant “I.” Yi sounded like the word for “one.” Kan was unfamiliar to me. Still, the phrase was potent. I left that store and entered the very next one for no purpose other than to try out the phrase before I forgot it. As I crossed the threshold, the sales pitch commenced.

“Wo kan yi kan,” I said.

They stopped.

I used that phrase for weeks before remembering to ask Davy about it. Kan meant to look. Wo kan yi kan = “I look one look” = I’m just looking.

My Mandarin vocabulary was limited, but I learned many words the way babies do, absorbing them from real situations and using them to accomplish real things without fully understanding their meaning.

Fourteen years later, Mandarin phrases still creep into my dreams.

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