中国海员不会拉丁语英语美文

　　Chinese Sailors Don’t Speak Latin

中国海员不会拉丁语英语美文

　　Forsaking Latin for Chinese was my own form of juvenile defiance. However, I have since used Chinese in some way almost every day. I confess to occasional curiosity as to what all those A students from Miss Leslie’s Latin class are doing these days with their Latin.

　　During summer vacation we went to Miami Beach to visit my grandparents. On one trip, as Uncle Bill drove us from the train station in Miami to Miami Beach, we passed a large group of marching sailors. As we drew abreast of the last row I noticed that the sailor on the end was Chinese. Then I noticed that the sailor beside him was also Chinese. I blinked. The whole last row was Chinese. And the next whole row was Chinese too.

　　The entire contingent of marching sailors was Chinese!

　　I felt like a multimillion dollar lottery winner slowly realising he’d gotten all the right numbers. I had no idea there were Chinese sailors in Miami, but why not? It was during World War II, China was our ally, and Miami was a port. There they were, hundreds of native speakers of the language I was trying to learn.

　　I couldn’t wait to fling myself into their midst sputtering my few phrases of Chinese at machine gun velocity. I didn’t know what adventures were awaiting my Latin classmates that summer, but I was confident none of them were about to approach an entire contingent of sailors who spoke Latin!

　　When we got to my grandparents’ hotel, I gave them the quickest possible hug and kiss, ran out, took the jitney back over the causeway to Miami, and started asking strangers if they knew where the Chinese sailors were.

　　Everybody knew the Chinese sailors were billeted in the old Hotel Alcazar on Biscayne Boulevard. After their training, I was told, they gathered in groups and strolled around Bayfront Park.

　　I waited. Sure enough, in late afternoon the park filled with Chinese sailors. I picked a clump of them at random and waded on in, greeting them in phrases I’d been able to learn from the book my parents had bought me. I’d never heard Chinese spoken before. No records, tapes, or cassettes. I could hit them only with the Chinese a D student in Latin could assemble from an elementary self study book in Chinese conversation in Greensboro, North Carolina.

　　It sounded extraplanetary to the Chinese sailors, but at least they understood enough to get the point that here was no Chinese American, here was no child of missionary parents who’d served in China. Here was essentially an American urchin hellbent on learning Chinese without any help.

　　They decided to provide the help.

　　You don’t have to win a war to get a hero’s welcome. The Chinese naval units stationed in Miami seemed suddenly to have two missions – to defeat the Japanese and to help me learn Chinese! A great side benefit to learning foreign languages is the love and respect you get from the native speakers when you set out to learn their language. You’re far from an annoying foreigner to them. They spring to you with joy and gratitude.

　　The sailors adopted me as their mascot. We met every afternoon in Bayfront Park for my daily immersion in conversational Chinese. A young teenager surrounded by

　　native speakers and eager to avenge a knockout by a language like Latin learns quickly. There was something eerie about my rapid progress. I couldn’t believe I was actually speaking Chinese with our military allies in the shadow of the American built destroyers on which they would return to fight in the Far East. If only Miss Leslie could see me now!

　　Naturally my grandparents were disappointed that I didn’t spend much time with them, but their bitterness was more than assuaged when I bought gangs of my Chinese sailor friends over to Miami Beach and introduced them to my family. My grandparents had the pleasure of introducing me to their friends as “my grandson, the interpreter for the Chinese navy.

　　I exchanged addresses and correspondence with my main Chinese mentor, Fan Tung-shi, for the next five years. Sadly, his letters stopped coming when the Chinese Communists completed their conquest of the Mainland. (He and I were joyously reunited exactly forty years later when a Taiwan newspaper interviewed me and asked me how I learned Chinese. One of Fan’s friends saw his name in the article.)

　　That summer, in Will’s Bookstore on South Green Street back in Greensboro, I walked past the foreign language section and spotted a book entitled Hugo’s Italian Simplified. I opened it, and within ten or fifteen seconds the “background music” started again.

【中国海员不会拉丁语英语美文】相关文章：

生活不会总如意人生不会都称心美文05-29

懂得休息的人不会在假期想工作英语美文07-14

舌尖上的中国为何这么火英语美文07-10

随笔美文欣赏：不会忘却的纪念01-02