Do You Speak English?

Like many adoptive parents, we wondered if it would be beneficial to learn a few phrases in "Chinese" before we left. Not knowing where our daughter was living, I picked up a "Chinese Made Easy" book and started to work on a few basic phrases. "Hello" and "thank you" was all that I used while in China. First of all, our guides warned us that certain basic words - likes shoes - could be offensive if we did not say it with the right intonation. The last thing I wanted to do was offend someone, most likely a government official while going through customs, in a Communist country. Second, whenever we were out on our own, we would run into people who wanted to practice their English. For the most part, this was fun and appreciated by the locals. One little vendor was working very hard on her English in hopes of coming to the US one day.

We had one encounter where I wish we spoke anything but English! We met this group during a walk in the park, and the gentleman in the white shirt knew English but did not have our "tact" so to speak. Our conversat ion went something along the lines of this:

Man - "Is that a boy or a girl?"
Me - "It's a girl!"
Man - "Well, it looks like a boy".
Me - "Well, it's a girl".
Man - Pointing to my friend's daughter "Now that looks like a girl! Your's looks like a boy!"
Me - "Well, she is a girl!"
Man - "But she looks like a boy!"

At that point my friend's husband taught him a new phrase, "Later Dude", and we walked off; I was rubbing my daughter's short, uneven hair and my hubby was muttering "This is all I am going to hear about for the rest of the night! Thanks Man! "