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Today is a full day of conference presentations, so my roommate/colleague Susan and I were up early to have breakfast and talk before the lectures began. I was good and hungry and it was just as well because breakfast in China is a bit different than what we’re used to. Basically, it’s the same menu as lunch and dinner, with a bit more fruit and eggs available, plus “congee”- a kind of rice-porridge, which vaguely resembles oatmeal, but is not accompanied by brown sugar. I filled my plate with sautéed broccoli, some chicken bits, and lo-mein (noodles), plus a fresh Chinese mango, which I ate as my Puerto-Rican friend Lillian taught me, by scoring each half in a checkerboard pattern then biting the cubes of fruit off the skin. I joined a group of Italian scholars from Torino reporting on the legacy of the 2006 Winter Games there. I had met Piervincenzo and his wife Maria at a previous conference in Canada and it was good to see them again. We had a nice discussion about how to view the cycling road race and the Italian team’s chances in the event. Paolo Bettini won the race in Athens, as well as a recent world championship, so he’s a favorite for the race, but no one has won two Olympic road races before.
Susan joined us, so we switched to English briefly, then she took a telephone call in Chinese, so we switched back to Italian. Changing languages in an international environment isn’t as hard as it sounds. I can speak Italian, French, Greek, and some German and I’ve been using them all. But the default common language is English, so I’m rarely in a situation where I have to communicate complex academic ideas in a second language; that burden falls on the others and I almost feel like I have an unfair advantage being a native Anglophone. So I speak the other languages for fun and to get to know people better. Even if you only speak a few words, it shows respect and fosters friendship. Foreigners are especially surprised to find Americans who speak their language, since so few of us do. People are constantly telling me that I’m not a normal American . . . I don’t know what a normal American is.
Of course, most taxi drivers and restaurant workers in Beijing speak only Chinese, but it’s amazing how much you can communicate by hand signals and eye contact. I’m convinced that language is ultimately a very small part of communication.
I spent all day listening to academic papers on the Olympic Games. They came from the perspectives of history, sociology, anthropology, media studies, design studies, political science, and economics. One thing I love about Olympic studies is that we come from different disciplines and have only our subject in common; so we have to learn to communicate across disciplinary boundaries, and to look at the world from a variety of perspectives. It’s good for us as academics, and our international orientation (the scholars here come from 20 countries and all 5 Olympic continents) allows us to experience the kind of intercultural dialogue that the Olympic Games are supposed to promote among athletes.
After the conference I went with Otto from Germany, Guogi from China/USA, and Susan to dinner at a Sichuan restaurant. Sichuan cooking is spicy; Susan explained that the restaurant advertised that it was both “hot” and “mouth numbing.” We had fish, vegetables, cabbage in a soup base, and a wonderful concoction of wild greens sautéed with peppers and sunflower seeds. Guogi asked me if I would drink Chinese wine, and I said yes. A nice wine glass full of very pale white wine was poured . . . it turned out to be more like grappa or vodka— about 40% alcohol! Anyway it wasn’t bad, but I couldn’t keep up with Guogi drinking it; after all my presentation is tomorrow morning and I need to rehearse my speech!
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