‘Thank you, Comfortable!’

So, I’ve been living in Beijing for nearly a year now and, slowly but surely, I’ve managed to feel somewhat confident enough to speak in sudden outbursts of Mandarin phrases with Beijing locals.

Here’s how the process works:

Step 1: Several weeks prior to engaging in said outbursts, I think long and hard about exactly what I want to say to the intended audience.

Step 2: I immediately regress into a pit of self-doubt and self-deprecation when I realize, given the dependency on tones expressing what you actually want to say, I have no idea if this is going to actually come out correctly.

Step 3: I practice it out loud with my boyfriend (namely because he’s so nice and positive and makes me feel special…even when I sound like a total moron).

Step 4: I put myself in situations where I can say the given phrase several times over, building my courage for the impending outburst. It usually takes several more weeks of being in the necessary social situation to use the actual phrase.

Step 5: Courage finally sets in. I wait for the golden moment, seize it, immediately forget what I wanted to say but still go with it, speaking a close approximation of what I had intended to say when I practiced it 7 months before.

And the process repeats on and on, ad infinitum, but in any case, I’m getting something out of it, right? Does it count even when I’m the only person who understands what is being said? I think there’s some merit there…

Well, not too long ago, I decided that I was going to expand the range of conversation I had with taxi drivers in Beijing. They’re usually talkative enough, asking the same handful of questions-Where are you from? What’s your name? Where are you going? What do you do for a living? Etcetera, etcetera. After several weeks of this same introductory banter, I decided to shake things up a little by learning a polite and respectful way to address the taxi driver when saying good-bye upon reaching my destination. I thought it was simple and considerate enough and would add a new dynamic to the conversation. And since I was feeling especially confident, I decided to throw out the previously mentioned process altogether and go with my gut. This time, surely, I knew what I was doing. I had the confidence. I had the background conversational experience. It was only a two-word phrase for goodness sake! I could totally handle a two-word phrase without the process.

So I took hold of every opportunity to give each taxi driver a nice, “Xie xie, shu fu!” when leaving the taxi. After a while, I started to notice that I would get a strange, confused smile from each one, but I took this as confusion for my being overly nice. Chinese people can be like that from my experience; quite humble and unassuming. But I had heard other people referring to cab drivers as ‘shu fu’ before. Or so I thought…

One day, when going out to meet friends for dinner, my boyfriend, Ian, paid the taxi driver and said a nice, “Xie xie shi fu.’ Naturally, I latched onto this obvious mistake and immediately pointed it out to him.

‘No, no, silly Ian,’ I said as I patted his head, ‘It’s shu fu, not shi fu!’

He looked at me incredulously. The fighting and playful condescension went on for a while, and like most Mandarin disagreements, we went to our pocket dictionaries for the final answer.

Turns out, I was wrong. And not only wrong, but awkwardly so, since for about five months prior to Ian correcting me, I had actually been calling taxi drivers ‘comfortable’ instead of referring to them in the respectful manner I had intended to. And to my dismay, each awkward, uncomfortable and confused stare I got from the taxi drivers as I proudly said my awesome farewell phrase came flooding over me as I wallowed in Step 2, realizing that I completely skipped Step 3, the very step that would have saved me months of embarrassment.

Needless to say, I will never waver from the process again.

But to get it out of my system forevermore, here it is one last time:

‘Xie xie shu fu!’ (Thank you, comfortable!)

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I've only had one friend who topped me in the embarrassing Chinese-speaking department. She was telling me about a nice cab driver she chatted with in one of her first months living in Beijing. She proudly said to me, "I didn't understand much, but I was happy that I understood him when he told me his name."

I asked her what his name was. She said, "Shénme míngzì." (Cue crying with laughter here.)

Any funny ones you'd like to share? Leave in the comment section below, please! :)