Make sure you forget to breathe

I have this 12 year old little brother in my homestay family. He’s a genuine miniature version of me, but more intense and his quirks and oddities are his own.

This kid is the shiz-natch, and he makes no sense at all. He loves his two adorable little mice and massive fluffy stuffed animals. He loves the taste of tasteless air sticks and tasteless orange sea creature eggs. He loves silly cartoon shows and he really really really loves his two adorable little mice.

I think he’s freaking awesome. He runs up and down the aisles of the super market at a billion miles per hour with ABSOLUTELY no regard for a thing in his way. He forgets his stuff everywhere, he is entirely focused on the moment and he seizes that moment like it is the greatest thing to happen on earth and it is entirely his. We play with the mice like 20 hours a day and he force feeds me – literally cramming things down my mouth – whatever it is that at that moment suits his fancy for him to eat. After all, if he loves it every sensible being must -- especially his smiling older brother who for the most part only understands what the heck is happening a good 10 minutes later.

He yammers incessantly, but he’s really cute and agrees with me on the fundamentals of life such as – you should run fast, ignore the cold, have fun, play all the time, and never let anyone tell you that what you enjoy is silly. Its how a kid should be.

In other news, I’m drowning in a world that has no one else like me. The thing about learning a language is that the your teacher is the single most qualified individual to understand you with your bad accent and propensity to mess up, because they know the language you are thinking in as you make mistakes. It’s a horrible false sense of security. When you go to talk to the people in the store, or worse, the people in the street – they don’t really have the, time patience, or frame of reference to understand what the heck your saying – On your side of the equation, you lack something as well -- ability – and that makes it hard to understand them when they tell you they don’t quite understand … It’s a process that starts at the bottom and goes down hill from there.

There’s nobody to speak English to … you know? Hardly a chance to breathe. My options are to nervously speak Chinese and deal with being utterly confused on a frequent basis, or to hide in my room and bask in the glory of English words on a page. Maybe I’m crazy, but that’s a little scary no? I have to encourage myself to engage in terrifying confrontations where I am nearly guaranteed to either say something other than what I mean, or be misunderstood anyway. It feels like it’d be nice just to shoot the breeze with a friend. I know and believe that its good for me though – I’m not defeated yet. We’re at day 2 and I still really really like it here.

Today Li Zi (my little brother) taught me how to say “that company went bankrupt” in Chinese, he also asked me many meters tall I was. I said 2 and he said more like 1.7 then like 10 minutes later he goes “You slouch a lot - if you straighten up you’ll be more like 1.9 maybe you really are 2 meters tall HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA” I mean … my parents will totally agree with him – but I thought that was pretty daring for a kid to say – he didn’t think twice about it – probably didn’t think once . Its scary how cheap things are here I bough all the school supplies I could possibly need or want today for under 5 dollars. That included like 8 notebooks, more than 20 pens of multiple colors, a pack of cards and some banana bread. For Li Zi though – its all real money. There are these huge stuffed animals that he was literally going ballistic over running excitedly between his favorites and lamenting their price as the most unaffordable thing ever and cursing the brutal injustice of the world. They are like less than $9 – there is nothing at all he can do to stop me from getting one for him as a gift.