Found in Translation

Don’t Believe Everything You Can’t Read
There are also times when foreign visitors wear out their welcome, and we’re
not just referring to the stereotypical ugly American tourist overseas. Picture
this scene: The crowd scatters as the commandeered rickshaw speeds
erratically down the clogged street, narrowly missing street vendors selling
fried peanuts and rice wine, tipping over a cart full of polyester blouses. “Spaβ
muss sein! (You gotta have fun!)” chortles the driver, an inebriated German
surgeon vacationing in China. Close behind him sprints his tour guide and
interpreter, trying in vain to grab the handlebars before a passerby becomes a
drive-by victim. “Dui bu qi, dui bu qi!” he calls out to locals between heaving
breaths. “I’m sorry,” he says. “So sorry.”
Unfortunately, that breathless tour guide was me, Jost. When I worked as a
tour guide in China for several years during the late 1980s and into the 1990s,
my German-speaking tourists tended to be shy about their communication
skills. It wasn’t that they lacked an adventurous spirit, as the drunken example I
just described makes clear. Many German tourists were highly experienced
travelers who made good use of their annual six-week vacation to check off a
bucket list of destinations that inevitably included China. But at the time, China
still seemed mysterious and secluded. Not only that, but the Chinese language
seemed so truly foreign that it tended to stifle any sense of linguistic adventure.
Even the common hand signals these veteran travelers had used elsewhere in
the world were not foolproof in China. Ordering two beers the German way
(holding up the thumb and the index finger) meant eight beers in Chinese.
(Chinese number gestures allow you to show any number between zero and
nine with one hand. These signals are used to bridge the many different

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pronunciations of numbers in Chinese dialects and to allow for a more private
form of bargaining away from public sight. The gesture for eight is derived
from the character for eight: .) The splitting headaches tourists had as a
result of this miscommunication permanently destroyed any desire to
communicate on their own. From that point on, as their tour guide, I had to
interpret everything, including the 2:00 a.m. demands to move to a new hotel
room because of a dripping faucet, the temper tantrums at the lack of a
television in the room (in places with no reception to begin with), and even
encounters with medical professionals.
Chinese medicine holds a mystical fascination for many Westerners, and my
tour guests seemed to have a childlike, implicit trust that whatever they
purchased in a Chinese pharmacy would be beneficial. One genteel lady with