Just a Little Favor

One of our adult students recently wrangled me into an uncomfortable corner. After complimenting me on the way I ran classes ("Best in the school!") and telling me he'd be honored if he could take me out to dinner sometime (I accepted, but pointed out that I rarely to never speak English outside of school), he asked me whether I could do him "just a little favor"--review his resume. He said he'd send both the English and Chinese writing so that I could check whether the grammar in his translations were right. Though I'm not too fond of the endless exchanges of favors that run most of life here in China, I figured looking over a resume couldn't be that much work.

Yesterday, he sent me his full resume: all four pages of it, including descriptions of companies and long lists of poorly proofread gobbledygook. He hadn't even bothered running spell-check on the document. I worked through a bit of it, just identifying which portions were suitable for a resume and which parts would need to be condensed. I printed off a sample resume for him and a list with a few resume-writing pointers, then said I'd be happy to look at his resume again once he'd taken some time to condense his four pages of information into a standard format of one page. I figured this was a fair enough effort.

"But how about you correct it first, and then I'll make it smaller, okay?" he asked once I'd given my advice. I pointed out that what he'd given me was a lot of information to go through at one time. "But I just need you to show me my mistakes." I pointed out that in many places I wasn't sure what he was trying to say. "I give you the Chinese." I pointed out that the Chinese I was studying was on a bit simpler level than that (leaving out that almost none of my hanzi have much to do with the corporate world)--things like asking for and giving directions, talking to service staff, 等等. "Then it can be good practice for you."

"Well," I finally said, tired of the needling, "I reckon this will take me about a month, maybe a month and a half to proofread as it is now. I'll have to look up a lot of phrases and words, and I'm going to have to enlist a lot of people for help. On the other hand, if you can make it smaller, just a page or so, then I can go through it in maybe a day and just ask you questions for things I don't understand." I didn't point out that I have absolutely no intention of learning a bunch of corporate terminology, at least not until I'm well done reading a children's comic book.

He finally said he saw what I meant, or at least he didn't try to hand the print-off back to me again. It will be interesting to see how this one plays out. As for the sort of high-brow material I actually am studying, I'll give some of the little mantras I've been working on below:

大头，大头，下雨不愁。人家有伞。我有大头。
Da tou, da tou, xia yu bu chou. Ren jia you san. Wo you da tou.
Big head, big head, when it rains, I don't worry. Other people have umbrellas. I've got my big head.

谁高？我高。满地都是草包。
Shei gao? Wo gao. Man di dou shi cao bao.
Very loosely, this translates, "Who's tall? I'm tall. Everyone else around is useless." More literally, the last sentence is something like, "The full ground, all are grass bags."

电灯泡。砸核桃。谁放屁？我知道。不是他，就是他。
Dian deng pao. Za he tao. Shei fang pi? Wo zhi dao. Bu shi ta, jiu shi ta.
"Light bulb bubbles. Smash walnuts. Who farted? I know. If not him, it must be him." [This is sort of an eeny-meeny-miny-moe chant, one whose English translation I've begun using in classes to pick students.]

These are little nursery rhymes Jia has taught me (and which I'm sure she'll correct if I've messed up any of the hanzi). For some reason these seem to stick better in my head than more useful expressions, and since they have really simple sentences, I usually only have to hunt for one or two hanzi to finish them.