Iron Goddess of Mercy

Thousand-armed Avalokitesvara, lord looking down from the Pure Lands toward the faithful at their prayers, moved northeast to China and became a woman-- Guanyin. In Fujian province by the South China Sea, they pick a tea named after her, Iron Goddess of Mercy-- tieguanyin. She's actually a bodhisattva, but whatever. I almost bought a cup during Reading Week at Jojo's, the little teashop near Davenport run by two Chinese women, who took my order in its hesitant Mandarin and asked me where I was from. I've got a little sitting on my bookshelf now, an inch of dark green looseleaf sitting in two nested paper cups. When I shake them, the tealeaves inside wash against each other with a cool sound like beads. They're twisted in shape-- misshapen origami stars, broken paper cranes.

I used to read perfume catalogs, collecting the adjectives. I was charmed by the idea of their transience, top note to base note, mimosa fading as the minutes passed so you could smell the amber underneath. (Does fossilized resin have a scent? That's got to be a metaphor.) The obvious analogy is music, but I usually thought about it in terms of how planned the whole experience was, the fragrances unraveling as preordained. Cue tacky metaphor-- choreographed chemistry. But when I lift the cup of tieguanyin over my face and inhale, I don't have the right words for the scent. Musky? Oriental? A salt tang and an evocation of mist. None of that's right. I won't be able to get a job writing copy for those catalogs, have yet to learn the dialect of perfume.

But I'd like to bottle that scent, wear it in two dashes along my wrist. Iron Goddess of Mercy. I'll leave it in the cup for a while, exuding inert scent.

I got it at a guest lecture a few of us went to last week-- an expert on tea culture expounding on the variations of China's favorite drink (making ever finer distinctions) to a PowerPoint that flashed past so quickly I could never make my way to be bottom of the text. I understood about half. Then a woman from the Center for Tea Culture (rough translation) performed a short tea ceremony, made a small pot of tieguanyin and poured it out for the first row. Her mandarin-collared top, singsong declamations, and dance-like movements (down to the way she flicked her wrist to release a carefully controlled stream of hot water) were so obviously performative, it was hard to connect her actions to anything I might do in a Yale dorm with a bag of Tazo and a hot water heater. Afterward, we were given cups of fresh-brewed tea to sample, allowed to scoop some tieguanyin to take home.

The lecture was planned by one of the student orgs, a group of material engineers to which fellow Yalie Dana's roommate belongs. When we got there, the room was full, but a nice berth at the front had been cleared for us (Dana's the only blonde head in the room, a photographer with his Canon Rebel pointing his camera at us and snapping publicity photos again, again, as I strive to look attentive). After the lecture, the good-natured engineers circled Dana and Aisha and quizzed them over the six different types of tea. Chishio and I, being obviously Asian in phenotype, were given less notice, although I did get the usual. (Are you Korean? No, but everyone thinks that.)

Being mistaken for Korean was already kind of a running joke with me in America. Something about the thick, square-framed glasses, the straight-cut bangs and permed hair? But in Harbin, it happens roughly twice a day-- every time I make the acquaintance of someone new, every time I strike up a conversation with a fuwuyuan as I'm being served food or directed to the right aisle of the supermarket. On the one hand, I'm faintly flattered-- Young, another Yalie with whom I took Tina Lu's Chinese lit course, said she thought I was Korean all term because of my clothes. Hey, that's pretty cool, Korean women are famously stylish. On the other hand, I wonder what it means about my Chinese. My aunt (actually the wife of my father's cousin) claims there's something off in the rhythm of my speech-- too even, as if I'm chanting sutras or intoning aloud a freshly memorized text. I don't have the jarring tones of an American accent, but there's still that element of foreignness.

I'm wondering if that foreignness is being reinforced by the language pledge. I find myself speaking really slowly so the other students can understand me, sounding singsong or robotic by turns. There's a trade-off-- it forces me to think more about my diction, makes it more precise. It's not that I'm better at Chinese than anyone else-- there are plenty of students who read at a higher level, students who used more polished syntax in speech even if their pronunciation is less accurate. It's a form of cultural privilege (a word I can never say without smirking slightly, because I'm aware I've... got it? Because my use of it will mark me as something admirable but typically, fashionably collegiate...?).

Both my parents were Dongbeiren who spoke CCTV-standard Mandarin; I grew up without the linguistic baggage of a Southern accent, a Tianjin twang, a Cantonese intonation. It means that, when it comes to Chinese, the things I'm good at are fairly showy-- so much so that I worry about becoming a section asshole. The things I suck at, though, are easily hidden away. You'd have to watch me struggle over my readings to find out how few characters I actually recognize, or ask me how many words in that essay I had to look up online. I think my proficiency at spoken Chinese may be masking my actual linguistic deficiencies. And it's faintly humbling that what I'm good at, I'm good at through an accident of birth-- running start, no doing of my own.

I'm grateful, though. It makes this whole language pledge thing a lot less painful. In our last minute of English, Rusty gave an extemporaneous speech compared it to having a cigarette put out on your arm for two months continuously. We all clapped, glanced sideways at each other. Young wished me good luck, and I told her goodbye.

But honestly, it's been a week. It's not that bad. Sometimes I wonder at its efficacy-- great for learning to communicate at any possible cost, potentially problematic if you want to master legit shu1mian4yu3 because we default to ridiculous circumlocutions and sometimes even buffoonish gesturing. I actually feel slightly guilty about how not-restrictive it feels, as if I'm not experiencing enough adversity to grow as a person, or something. I guess I've got some faintly masochistic tendencies. The pain the feels productive becomes an anticipatory pleasure. Also, I overuse the modifier "faintly".

Of course I've slipped a little. Not in conversation-- just letting loose filler words, curses, uncaught. Don't have any viable Chinese-language replacements, yet. What's interesting, if not entirely surprising, is that I'm more talkative in Chinese. There's no pressure to be articulate. In English, I always felt the need to make my every comment not only accurate but also eloquent, so that I rarely spoke in class. My standards for myself are lower here. Come to think of it, I may have the language pledge to thank for that. I think on balance it's still a useful thing, although we're all slightly unclear on some of the details. Are loanwords allowed? Proper nouns? At a Korean restaurant, we had a tortuous but amusing conversation on western philosophy during which we tried to Sinify a bunch of names likely to show up on a DS syllabus, unsure whether "Lucretius" counted as a violation of the pledge.