我们有一个很重要的业务会议！

On Monday, one of the office assistants, Kathy**(see below for a footnote on Kathy), invited me to a meeting that would take place this morning.  The meeting was an introduction to a new piece of software that the research team here will be using to assess and present data to clients.  I figured there was very little chance I needed to know how to use this program, but agreed to attend the meeting anyway because a) I probably wasn't going to have many more productive uses for my time, b) it would be a good way to interact with my colleagues, and c) lunch was to be served (needless to say, that's in the reverse order of importance to me).

So, with the meeting about to start, and my stomach enjoying anticipatory growls associated with the prospect of free food, a fact dawns on me that ought to have been perfectly clear from the second Kathy told me about the training session on Monday.  The meeting was to be conducted entirely in Chinese.  There were about 10 of my colleagues in Shanghai, and another handful listening in from Beijing.  And in contrast to everyone else in the room and on the phone, I was whiter than the rice that was later served for lunch.  More to the point, I was the only one for whom Mandarin wasn't a native language.

After assuring Kathy and the rest of my colleagues that I'd stick around anyway, and try to understand as much as I could (I just didn't want to miss out on the lunch), the meeting started.  A colleague launched into an in depth crash course on this obscure, yet actually pretty cool data program.  It's called mTAB (not sure if any of your business types are familiar with it) and it's sort of a Microsoft Excel on steroids.  More impressive than the program itself was that I was actually able to follow most of the meeting!  Some of the specifics were naturally lost on me, and I was greatly aided by the fact that everything my colleague was explaining was also being projected onto a screen as she did it.  But for the first time since I've been here, I was genuinely proud of my Chinese ability.  It was a step in the right direction for a heretofore dampened confidence.  And it suggests to me that, given my qualms with the expat community's impact on my linguistic and cultural progressions (or lack thereof), that I may need to actively make my office and colleagues a real means of getting some consistent Chinese in my daily life.

There were a few moments during the meeting, however, when I had trouble stifling laughter.  First of all, a colleague showed up to the meeting wearing a surgical mask.  You know, like the ones you saw Chinese people wearing during the SARS scare.  Now, I sometimes see people on the Metro here wearing masks, and I suppose I can muster some justification for that.  The Chinese are very concerned with good health, and the Metro involves many hundreds of people standing at very close quarters.  So, if masks helps you get through the trauma of sharing a train with potential pathogens, then so be it.  But, seriously...a business meeting?  In a big room with maybe 12 people in it, all of them sitting at least five feet from you?  That I just don't get.  So I spent part of the meeting dodging images of Beth Wilkinson wearing a mask in front of the jury.

I don't know if this is true about other languages, but a weird thing about Mandarin is that certain terms either don't have translations, or people are just too lazy to use them.  So they just revert to the English terms.  Here are a few examples from the meeting: "Mandarin mandarin mandarin mandarin standard deviation mandarain mandarin mandarin median."  "Mandarin mandarin mandarin mandarin business team mandarin mandarin mandarin mandarin consulting team mandarin mandarin mandarin."  It just sounds funny to have native Chinese speakers flow seamlessly into English when there's a word that doesn't have an easy translation in Chinese.  Perhaps there's a reason for this, but it's lost on me.  The standard deviation example was particularly tickling, because they frequently abbreviated it "STD."  I think you can guess where this is going.  I had to bury face in my hands when I saw the Powerpoint slide with just "Mean + STDs" in big block letters.

Oh, and in case anyone was wondering, the title of this post says "We have an important business meeting!"


**On my first day, Kathy introduced herself to me as Cassie.  Or, at least, that's how she and everyone else in the office pronounces her name.  Cassie.  Not Kathy.  So imagine my surprise and embarassment when, after a day or so of calling her Cassie, I notice that her name card says Kathy Li, not Cassie Li.  Many Chinese people, it seems, have difficulty with the "th" phoneme.  Ever since, I've avoided calling her by name.  I don't know what to do!  Do I say it like everyone else in the office says it?  Or do I say it like, you know, it's supposed to be said given that's how she freaking spells it?!