Category: Life

As the group discussion began, a classmate handed me his phone and asked me to type the question in English into Google Translate. When he saw the Arabic on the screen, he smiled and we started practicing in broken Swedish.

This is a typical moment of our SFI course, which may also explain its intention – to let people from all over the world learn a new language on a relatively level playing field and gradually acquire a new identity.

It gives me another insight that when you move to a new country and the locals speak their language to you, it might be out of respect rather than arrogance, because they won’t treat you differently just because of how you look.

Of course, it’s not all fairy tales. As an American classmate put it, this new government does not like a single person in this classroom.

I know our Swedish teacher better than I know the Swedish government. She asked another student to write her name transliterated into Chinese and copied the three characters in the upper left corner of the whiteboard. After each lesson, she would erase what she had written. But weeks later, her Chinese name is still there.

During my elementary school years, NATO bombed Yugoslavia. Amidst the social turmoil, some classmates initiated a boycott against learning English, which resulted in a stern reprimand from our teacher. Today, skepticism about learning English has resurfaced, louder than before.

Recently, I visited several major museums in Norrköping and noticed that many exhibits lacked English descriptions. The city library has an extensive collection in almost every language, but Swedish predominates. A mid-week trip to the neighboring IKEA in Linköping revealed not a single word in English.

Though I’ve met very few Swedes who don’t speak English at all during my half-month stay – countable on one hand – I fully understand how the locals can live well speaking only Swedish. In a city of over a hundred thousand people, the abundance of cultural and educational resources provides a basis for seeking a degree of independence.

The more open a place is, the less necessary it is to learn English. Yet, paradoxically, the most open places are the least likely to see English as a threat. This is the paradox we face.

British singer Katie Melua once wrote a song called “Nine Million Bicycles,” which begins, “There are nine million bicycles in Beijing, a fact, something we can’t deny, just like I’ll love you till I die.” The juxtaposition of the two, I don’t know if it’s because they’re both surprising or both irrelevant. In any case, in 2005, when the song was released, the streets of Beijing had not yet been taken over by bike-sharing.

My earliest memory of bicycles is probably sitting on the back of one as a child, staring at the sun with unblinking eyes, thinking I could practice my golden eyes. At that time, my parents took me to kindergarten on their bikes, and as I watched the traffic, I felt sorry for the passersby who were commuting to and from work for the first time. Later, when I was in elementary school, I accidentally put my foot on the wheel one night on my way home from Go lessons. The pain was long forgotten, but the look of panic on my parents’ faces was still fresh in my mind.

Then I learned to ride a bike myself and soon lost my first one. I still believe that people wouldn’t rent a shared bike if they weren’t afraid of losing their own. During the time I lived in the city, I bought a racing bike and spent my nights riding up and down Chang’an Street singing: “On this Chang’an Street, he’s as lonely as I am. He’s like my friend, we cry together.”

I’m not really afraid of heights, but I am a little afraid of objects that sway in heights, like suspension bridges. The first and only time I went skiing was just out of curiosity. I took the cable car to the intermediate trails, but I was so afraid of jumping off that the foreigner sitting next to me turned a circle with me in vain.

A few years ago, I went bungee jumping in Shidu with two friends. We had to take the cable car up first, and it was a bit shaky. I bought a Superman T-shirt just for that. When the staff saw Superman coming, they pushed me straight down.

The free fall seemed slower than expected, and the weightlessness is not as strong as on a roller coaster.

This summer, we went to Shidu again to see other people bungee jumping. There were so few people that it took a long time for anyone to go down. There was also no DJ like before.

I bought two boxes of bang snaps from a small store down the street, and the old store owner was thrilled.

Then we went to Sandu. When we got there, there was a suspension bridge and there was no other way to go. The bridge swayed too much and it was hard to reach the middle of the bridge, so I shouted to the man in front of me. “Don’t shake it.” He was not shaking, it was his child who was afraid to go and stopped there.

About fear, I always think of the claustrophobic Chen Jianbin’s monologue in Chicken Poets.

“Tight spaces, closed planes, swaying fuselages, I’ve never been afraid. What I was afraid of was something else. Not being taken seriously, being abandoned by the crowd, having no talent, being a loser. Who wouldn’t be afraid of that?”