Allison Campbell Jensen

There’s so much I’ve forgotten in my decades of studying Chinese but memories rose to the surface like gold and calico koi to the delightful shreds provided by Deborah Fallows in her “Dreaming in Chinese.” She wrote about the tenderness that emerged in TV coverage after the Sichuan earthquake—and I remembered the man who guided me back to our hotel in Shanghai in 1980. A delightful gentleman, he spoke perfect English; it was my first full day in China and I did not yet know how rare his facility was then. After he escorted me to the gate to the walled foreigners’ hotel, I stopped him from leaving to ask where he learned it. He put his umbrella over his arm, bowed just a little, and said, “My father went to Harvard.” The immersion in the language in the next two months would begin me on my journey to speaking and reading Chinese—including two years at Yale (sorry, Harvard scion). The journey has not always been smooth. About six years later, in a small library in California, I told a man to “stop doing that.” He looked shocked and ran off. My native Chinese boss was, fortunately, amused that I had used the fourth tone instead of the second. “You called him a turtle,” she said, snickering. “That means ‘cuckold’ in Chinese.”

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