Fourty Fo's

Ever since I returned from my trip to Taiwan I have been hankering for a taste of the good ol' 12-starred nation. However before I left, I preemptively chose Business Chinese as a class for an elective. It sounded easy, no pre-requirements, and since I took Advanced Mandarin-1 in my freshman year, I figured, I got this in-the-bag. And God knows, I've needed a GPA boost since like 7th grade...

So I go in on the first day, feeling pretty confident this class was beneath me... The teacher like the one that taught my freshman Mandarin class was also from mainland China. His English is... understandable and he comprehends pretty well, but his ability to speak/recall words is a bit slow as he hesitates between nouns... It kind of reminds me of Ross from Friends...x3.

Anyways. More than about half the kids in the class are from Taiwan, or grew up speaking Mandarin, and abilities far exceed mine. The other half were of other ethnicities having never spoken a word or very limited Mandarin.

We spend the first day introducing ourselves and then learning the lesson...How to say, ni hao... (hello). Literally, we spend the entire class period on those, two, words. After we thought the worst was over, he would break the words up... and then the syllables. It was like a chopped and screwed remix marathon that radios play at night. Eventually... He began to act the dialogue out...By saying "ni hao", then shaking each of our, hands...All 13 of us.

What was so ironic about this was because his English was so bad, he'd often speak in Mandarin. However, while he was explaining the lesson in Mandarin, he spoke in a level significantly higher than the lesson. So while we were learning level 1 Chinese, he'd speak in like, level 30 Chinese, so to speak... After class, everyone was pissed off for having to pay for such a class...While I smiled. FREE A, BABY! I thought.

Two classes later, after more torture of various forms of 'ni hao'... He introduces a new book. It was in full blown simplified chinese, first chapter is about airports, customs, passports, and taxes. Low and behold, within two class periods the class shrunk down to around nine students with me being the worst student.

I was hesitant to buy the book... it's simplified, I don't want to learn that garbage! I want to learn the full traditional shi-bang. So for days I searched on-campus/off-campus bookstores, and eventually was forced to ordered a used-copy from Amazon. I had to wait about a week before it came and had to share books with fellow-classmates. I felt so turned off by the simplified language I foolishly ignored that class.

When the book came in, I felt so anxious. I chopped it open with an axe, when it was sealed in a manilla envelope. OH BOY, I can finally learn, I thought. Slipped that sucker out, and bam. It was the simplified version... What the fu*boop*! Why is life so hard... I thought. My first thoughts were to give the guy I bought it from some serious lip. But I figured I'd use it first before I returned it until I got the traditional...

Unmotivated and unexcited I got like a 54 on the first quiz(Out of 100). Awesome. A classmate of mine had the traditional, she also ordered it from Amazon...Bitterly I went back and ordered a new copy. I did the homeworks with the used book I bought.

The next week the new copy was delivered. I drove through the cardboard box with chainsaw-ferocity. OH BOY, I can finally learn, I thought. I slipped it out and saw it was once again simplified... My house resembled pretty much any cable-reality tv show when there's an altercation, or Jerry Springer. My mouth became an everlasting fountain of pure phallic imagery, cursing, and overbearing/unreasonable demands from Amazon, the user that sold the book to me and the teacher.
----
A few days later when my rant was over my dad offered to type up the chapter for me in traditional Chinese... I obliged, and then ran it through some online translaters to help me study. This is not bad I thought. He was going back to Taiwan and offered to take the other book and help type things up for me and send them to me. It's the one thing he could teach me, he joked. I was able to study that week.

Next week I get my quiz back... Fourty-four. Nevermind the fact that the test was in simplified, and I was a bit slow in reading it. Nevermind the fact that most of my classmates studied and those that weren't born in Asia still scored below a 70%. Nevermind the fact that those who were already fluent in Mandarin barely finished before the time limit, anyways. And nevermind the fact he disliked our answers to open questions because they were not word for word from the book. However I will mind that he gave us 15-20 minutes for a quiz that was front and back and then said the reason we sucked it up, was because we didn't study. What the fu*boop*.

Story Dump Deux

Doh It
Before class took my Thursday nights away I used to attend a Christian College Fellowship. In my freshman year it was a fair size of around 15 regulars. My best friend, Mack, agreed to accompany me on the speculation that there would a new set of female faces.

Afterward we would usually hang around and loiter at the venue. While I was catching up with an old friend of mine, Mack for some unbeknown reason was trying to break dance. His handicap was only that he did not know how... he found that his awkward attempts of off-beat jumping and hand shuffling was very discouraging...soon he was just doing Tae Kwon Do moves... Jumping snap-kicks, round houses, inside/outside crescent kicks isolated him from others until ---

Josh: OWWW...aww... my... oww...
Mack: What happened?
Josh: YOU KICKED ME... IN MY GROIN.
Mack: What...I didn't feel a thing. Why would you walk into my kicks, anyways?!
Josh: I didn't! It HURTS!
Mack: Don't be such a girl... I barely touched you...I'm sorry.
Josh: awWw...Ow....

Apparently one of Mack's roundhouses had lightly brushed Josh's scrotum, through his pants. This is awkward, I thought, as the whole room's attention was soon given to the two in the middle. The incident did not die down at all, as Josh continued to complain and give Mack a hard time.

Me: Let him kick you back in the crotch!

I joked. Fully forgetting Mack's extremely masochistic-competitive nature.

Mack: You know what, that's a good idea, here Josh, kick me back.
Josh: ...What..?
Mack: Here, return the favor..!

Mack shifted his footing, spreading the distance between his feet. Mack started taunting Josh with his hands as if he was a wrestler, commanding/demanding sexual innuendo. Oh my God...This is so dumb...But awesome! I thought.

Jason: Hey, tuck your jeans under your feet, so it'll reduce the impact!

Jason chuckled as he commented. Jason was another member.

Mack: That's a good idea..! (Mack smiles as he kicks off his sandal and tucks the ends of his jeans under his heels, and stands on his jeans with his legs spread apart, creating a trampoline-like damage reduction?)
Almost shouting...Mack continued to taunt Josh.

Mack: C'mon, bring it! Doh it.
Josh: uhh... (Josh gets into a good posture but looks very hesitant)
Josh: aww... You sure?
Mack: Doh it!

Mack began chopping his crotch to demonstrate the resilience of his new found impact-mitigating technique.

Mack: Doh it!

The girls came in from outside, finishing their gossip just in time to see Mack, with his legs spread, chopping at his crotch. His taunts became louder and his chops faster and harder until --- *TSHERRR* ... Mack's hand did not come back up for another chop. I had already made my way up to the front row of this show...to see that Mack had chopped a hole into his pants, in front of everyone... Everyone began to laugh, and Mack began to exhibit his boxers to everyone.

Story Dump

Right now I am currently working on another project and it is eating all of my creativity! But to keep readers truly entertained, I will share some of my favorite stories as the days go by.

Snow Globe
In my freshman year of college I was very open and to hanging out with pretty much anyone. So I accompanied my friend, Anthony, to his friend, Josh's apartment during my free time. We were chilling, checking out his room, admiring how his Cantonese roots have decorated his room. He was wealthy. Binders of burnt games/DVDs/CDs, ace-load of food, condiments, Chinese calligraphy scrolls, jade mini-statues, books, and mysterious files enclosed most of his room except the entrance/exit and the door to the bathroom.

As they were working out their business, and asking for notes/quizzes I fooled around with his trinkets and toys. I must have had a heavily enriched diet that afternoon, because I was very hyper.

I saw a beautiful snow globe on the bottom shelf of one of his cabinets. I picked it up and shook it lightly. I knew if my best friend was there, he would have said I was the biggest pussy cat in the entire Animal Shelter. He would also add that a quadriplegic 10 year old girl would be able to shake it harder than that.

I began to shake it harder and faster like the heaviest salt shaker that had no holes for salt to escape. This would not do, I thought.

So I stood up and widened my stance, slightly wider than shoulder-length apart with my knees, bent and did the most exaggerated vertical dice throwing motion. If Anthony or Josh were close enough they may have been knocked out by my semi-diagonal uppercutting trajectory.

They turn to me dumb-founded as I repeatedly created and kept the biggest blizzard that snow-globe's community has ever seen!

---STOP!!! What the hell are you doing!
Josh took it from my hands. He frowned. I frowned. Anthony was shocked. My snow-globe-shaking-party was over.

Josh: Why the hell would you do that?!

Me: Why wouldn't I; it's a snow globe...

Josh: No, it's not!!!

Wha? What's this FOB talking about? I thought. I looked closer. Slowly and slowly... the snow-flakes were no longer snow-flakes... but rocks, and pebbles. The trees were no longer trees, but algae. I had just shook the shi*boop* out of an ecosphere. My tone was soon apologetic, after Anthony explained to me what it was. Meanwhile...

Josh: Oh my God, they're all gone... all dead! As I felt like a murderer, I took it from him and we all examined my infliction of a natural disaster. One by one, those red shrimps surfaced through the debris.

Me: See, no biggie... I said as I sighed with relief.

Josh: There's supposed to be 7! There's only 6!

Oh God.

Commencer

There was once a boy named Hong Hai Er(紅孩兒) who had no friends. But we will call him Red. A lot of his classmates were acquaintances; they would not share their crayons with him, and he would most definitely not invite them to his birthday party of 1000 people, either. Red was the type of boy who would only be loved by his Mother. Many of the kids picked on him because of his name, dimensions and race. So on a lonely night as Red hugged his Friend Bear (Carebear with flowers on her stomach), he prayed to God for a friend.

“If there was a God, he’d send me a friend.”

The next day a girl named Steph was a new student to their school. Coincident or not, Red refused to befriend her, she was a girl and had a peculiar Vietnamese accent. Vietnamese or not, girls had coodies and Red did not want _any_ of that all up on his body.

Because they were both considered foreign students they were put into ESL/ESOL classes and saw each other often. Hostilities naturally grew between them when (platonic) love did not.

Red made fun of her a lot, to the point where he would have to have an awkward reconciliation with her almost 5 years later. He would learn that he had scarred her deeply as she did have problems with her father and just recently moving to a place where she too had no friends did not help. But that lesson of guilt is for another time.

As if a panther waiting for vulnerable moments to pounce his prey, Red would wait for moments to slip in sly comments and hurtful statements. With an arsenal of a mouth and words like daggers it felt good to drop the heaviest of disses on Steph. Each tear she shed made him feel like he won a thousand dollars. And everyday he’d feel like a millionaire.

But as schools changed Red hardly saw her. Good riddance. He thought.

Years later, still feeling companion-less he tried it out again.

“ If there was a God, he'd send me another friend.”

The next day there was Kim, 6th grade, a Korean girl on the verge of turning A-Z-N. Red refused to talk to her too; she was _real_ frumpy, and once again a girl. He only saw her a few times a week and he figured it was a wasted effort. Her blunt and belligerent attitude scared him as well. So Red, dismissed any thoughts of reaching out…Fu*boop* that. He thought.

As time went on, Red felt empty and watched as Steph and Kim became skinnier, prettier and more popular each year. However his pride would not let that get the best of him, when he heard rumors of things like “anal itching cream” and the sort, it only reinforced his thoughts of staying away from them and how much better off he was without them.

At the beginning of Junior High school. ---Red says.

“ If there was a God, he'd send me…more friends.”

He went to class the next day and found Nami and Leslie in his first period AP English class. They sat in the back behind him. Feeling like he should befriend them, he was but too afraid. Affirmation and appreciation was not received often by Red so insecurities ran high and shyness was never lacking. Though they were also all in the same Orchestra for a long time together he returned their pleasantries but never really spoke to them or tried to get to know them.

Red’s tenure was plentiful with empty companionship from his computer. For years it went on, and Red fattened, and became sociably worse. No proms. No banquets. No hanging out. Though the truth was that he didn’t bother trying to find a date…but he also didn’t have people to go with, or a car to take him anywhere.

While others reminisce about high school in the future Red will never be able to share in it.

All grown up at the age of 18, holding Friend-Bear tightly as it soaked up all his tears, Red says…

“If there was a God, he’d send me…even more friends.”

Feeling like he should finally apply the lessons he learned he decided to be more outgoing and treat others like he would like to be treated. Though Red was socially and emotionally stunted in growth, his long enduring pain of loneliness and the extended period to play by himself, created a strange character out of him. His sense of humor and creativity amused others and attracted friends and strangers.

There was free food that night. Red half awakened by the noise at 8PM while holding his sponge of tears, Friend Bear, sees the pizza from his window. He kicked out his front door and scurried downstairs. He greeted all his acquaintances and loaded up his plate with pizza, and stands right next to the boxes so he can refill immediately. It was all for quicker efficiency before those other ignoramuses could take his pizza, Red made sandwiches out of the pizza, using pizza as the meat and bun. He’d take the biggest bites he could and swallow, chewing as little as possible, if at all.

Red was not fond of the food…

Man this tastes like a bucket of jiz.----“Hi… I’m Luke. “

Can’t talk, eating. Red thought, but said…“Oh, hi, I’m Red…”

"!...My friends told me about you… they said you’re really funny and that I should be looking out for you… “ There stood Luke, shirtless, wet from the pool, and shoulder to shoulder sandwiched between two women that made even the oldest of heads turn and the coldest of blood boil.

Many people would not be surprised if they heard Luke actually washed clothes on his abs, which he did. Or that he slept on a pile of beautiful women, which he denies, but is true. His body was so chiseled and sculpted that it looked like he should be bleeding from multiple parts of his body.

So that was how Red met Luke. As time progressed Red was becoming better friends with the few that came with him to the local college from his high school. As Red went to sleep a few months later, holding a moldy and tear-stained Friend-Bear he thought to himself…

If there was a God, he has shown himself to me.