Shi-shi

Apparently my life is boring, as yesterday I wrote about pee. I think this means that I need to get out more. But instead, I'm going to write about pee more.

I need to do laundry. What does that have to do with pee, you ask. Well, I'll tell you. One of the pipes above one of the washers in the laundry room drips sometimes. Now I can't tell if it's condensation or a leak, but it's an "out" pipe. So when it's dripping, we don't use it. I learned of this mess early in our apartment residency when a neighbor, an elderly Japanese woman, pointed to the pipe saying shi-shi and shaking her head.

My neighbors speak a variety of languages, and English is not always one. It's really fun to talk with people in the elevator. A lady on my floor speaks Korean and Japanese, but not English. She invited me out to sing Karaoke at the bar down the street, and I had to explain that I don't sing in public. I'm pretty sure the amount of tequila I would need to consume in order to sing in public is greater than the amount of tequila I need to consume in order to pass out. I'm shy. She reminded me a lot of a grandmother-type Korean lady I worked with at my first job (bourbon chicken anyone?) who was teaching me Korean and had me recite something about Jesus everyday. She was so much fun to work with. I remember none of the Korean. And I speak no Japanese, but I have watched enough anime that I can recognize when someone on the bus is speaking Japanese rather than Chinese or Korean or one of the many other Asian languages spoken here. They really don't sound that much alike. Of course, I don't ask people what language they're speaking, so I could be completely wrong.

Young, fellow bourbon chicken lady, like to play "Guess the Asian Heritage" when we worked at the mall. She would point at someone of Asian descent, insist that I guess, she would guess, then she would CALL THEM OVER, and ask "You Korean, right?" or whatever her guess was. She was almost always right. Odd game.

At my second job (preschool teacher), there were two Chinese girls in my class. Both were born in this country, but one began our class not speaking much English. She spoke Mandarin. She learned English very quickly, and it was great to watch her teaching the other kids Mandarin words simply because the other kids wanted to learn them - no prompting from us teachers. One of the girls was learning Spanish, so she contributed a few words, and a third taught a bit of vocabulary from her own made-up language, "Alien Spanish" (which actually had a consistent vocab - brilliant, brilliant child). But when she (the girl who spoke Mandarin) got angry, she yelled in Mandarin. There was one day that she, the other Chinese girl (who spoke Cantonese at home with her mother and grandparents, but no where else), and the princess of the class were playing at the lego table. First Girl started yelling in Mandarin, Second Girl (an incredibly shy child who never raised her voice) began yelling back in Cantonese, and Princess looked on, mouth hanging open. Princess wasn't surprised at first (our class had become used to hearing Mandarin). I think she was surprised when she figured out that the two girls weren't speaking the same the same language (er, dialect?). I actually had no idea that Second Girl spoke Cantonese until that day, and asked her mom about it when she picked her up.

As part of the "multi-cultural" rigamarole for accreditation, teachers at the preschool were supposed to be able to great and say farewell to every child in every language that she or he spoke at home. Zàijiàn.