Invisible Gifts

          The night is humid and muggy as I walk along Spadina Street for my Mandarin class. Sweat starts to accumulate on my collar, even though the sun has already started to fall bit by bit. Tonight will be a review of colors in Ping Yin, along with hair styles and facial shapes. I struggle to remember what the words for ‘round’ and ‘square’ are. I am convinced that the colors should be easier to remember.

My Mandarin teacher waits for me in the Grad House when I text her to come downstairs. A few minutes ensue. I see students coming back to the dormitories, with faces of triumph and expectancy. The new summer term has started, and the campus is less deserted than it was back in May and June. I feel apprehension as seconds slip into minutes. I feel all the vocabulary slip away from me in tiny rivulets of perspiration.

My teacher asks if we could do the class outside, since the seats we normally have are facing the setting sun.  I hesitate to agree, but we head to the outside patio anyway. The sounds of sirens and horns fill the air. And I point to the flowers around me to show off my colour vocabulary. But then I forget what “round” is in Mandarin.

“Yuan”, my teacher says, calmly.

I nervously twitch my pen and laugh. I had been trying to memorize it for quite some time, but ‘round’ somehow doesn’t look like “Yuan”.

And we proceed down through the possible shapes of the face: ‘cheng’ for ‘long’, ‘jian’ for ‘diamond-shaped’, ‘tuo-yuan’ for oval.  And I picture stick figures with hair of different colors, some cheng (long),some  duan (short), some straight (zhi) and some curly (juan). Some have brown kafei hair, some black hei-ze hair, some grey hui-ze hair.

I figure it might take me many years to learn the language, or perhaps even decades in my case. And I hardly have the time let alone the concentration to learn. So the feeling then arises: why do I learn this if the result is so miniscule, compared to anything I might be able to contribute within myself? Could I spend this time helping someone else in some way, rather than trying to learn vocabulary that is so basic to Mandarin speakers? In this way, my motivation sags. I wonder what it means that I am learning the rudiments of this language. And suddenly, I feel as though there is a very large and barely scale-able mountain ahead of me, and I haven’t even touched the very beginning of it.

As I walk home, I wonder, what would Shifu Sheng Yen have said about this dilemma in my heart? Actually, my mind seems to recall his face, and what he said at one point about giving others the chance to give something of their own abilities and talents. I think sometimes receiving the teaching of someone else is also a way of giving to them. It is also a lesson in patience for both teacher and learner. Here is an opportunity for me, as a tutor in English, to understand what it must feel like for an adult to learn a new language completely from scratch: the frustration, the laughter and the loneliness of it all. If I can’t grasp what it means to be a beginner, how can I empathize with learners? If I have no patience for my own inability to remember certain basic vocabulary, how can I have patience for beginners to my own native language?

So I think that in some sense, there is a way to see this so that I don’t feel that I am receiving something without giving in return. But there is also something about ‘not being in a position to give’, to ‘being an absolute beginner’, that is so humbling that it subverts the false confidence in my own role as a giver. It subverts the traditional notion that ‘givers’ are ‘all knowing’ and omnipotent, when in fact, giving can also be giving one’s presence to something, or giving one’s commitment to a teacher/learner relationship, or giving one’s donation or support. There are perhaps infinite ways to give, and this kind of experience might encourage me to reframe how I might understand the role and purpose of giving as well as the form it takes.