I’m in P’s bedroom on the computer.  I just heard Ayi in another room tear a piece of paper out from my notebook. She’s scribbling something. I know what this means. I’m going to be doing some decoding in a minute or two.

If you’ve ever watched old World War II movies, you are aware of those scenes that always pop up now and again of the American guy or the Nazi guy sitting here in a small darkened room with headphones on in front of some obsolete looking electronic equipment. Suddenly, in comes another guy with the all-important slip of paper. He says “Read this!!” or “This just in!!” Quickly, the guy at the table starts trying to hurriedly figure out what all the weird symbols or pictures on the piece of paper mean. Right – it’s a newly intercepted enemy message and it’s his job to figure out what it all means.

I’m the guy with the headphones on, and P’s room is the darkened decoding room. Only in my situation, there’s no enemy, just an Ayi (the Chinese nanny who watches Paige and does housecleaning here 6 days a week). She speaks no English at all (though she is learning some, like “okay!” and “lunch!” and “bye bye!”). Most of the time, we interact with Ayi through hand signals, miming, Pictionary-like communication, or any variety of linguistic charades. Basically, whatever works at the time is what we do. Here’s Ayi:

Sometimes the communications are complicated, and Ayi needs to get a point across that she thinks is important. So she writes out a long string of words in Pinyin (that’s the letter-like version of Mandarin) and then she shows it to me and says verbally what it says (which to me always says the same thing: “This just in!!” or “Read this!!”). Now my job begins. First, I have to take each word in Pinyin and use my Pinyin-Chinese Character translator on my computer to locate the Chinese character (the picture-looking symbol) for the pinyin term. Then I take the Chinese character and I pop it into a different computer translator that goes from Chinese Characters to English.

This takes time, and it’s pretty tedious. Finally, at the end, I wind up with my word-by-word translation of Ayi’s message. At that point I have to then do some further translation to figure out what the sentence was meant to say (there are always words that have contextual meaning, and that gets lost in word-by-word translations). Sometimes I get it, sometimes I have no idea, sometimes I get a part of the meaning.

I remember one time I spent an inordinate amount of time translating a particular string of pinyin, thinking that there was a problem and that I urgently needed to figure out what Ayi’s desperate message was before it was too late. By the time I was nearly finished, I had it figured out: Ayi said that I needed to buy Comet (the Chinese version) so that she could clean the sink properly. I felt pretty stupid doing all that rushing. Other times, though, the messages are cute. One said “The baby is very good, she sleeps well today!”

Of course, it would save a lot of time if we just dedicated all this code-cracking time to learning Chinese (both of us are getting one-on-one tutors soon). Speaking of which, today I uttered my first full sentence to Ayi and she actually understood what I meant. I said (with all my tones forcefully enunciated): “Ne yao chi wufan ma?” (which means, no doubt badly, “do you want to go to lunch?”) and she said “yes!” and went out to do so. When she left the apartment I strode around like a peacock proud of my colorful plumage. No need for translations now! Ha Ha!

Oh jeez. She’s coming — here’s comes that sheet of paper now. And it looks like a long message. I better get cracking.