The Girl and the Tour Group

I was on vacation recently. Went to the Land Down Under. Yes, Australia. 澳洲Ou3 zau1.

When I was at the boarding gate, waiting to get on my plane, I noticed that there was a rather large group approaching the gate to get in line. As the masses of people, all dressed in identical green windbreakers, kept coming, I decided a horde might be a more apt description.

Seriously. I've seen plenty of Mainland tour groups in my time, especially when going to the Big Buddha or Times Square or Java Road in North Point (I've never figured out why they go there; anyone know?). But this was the mother of all tour groups. They stood four or five abreast, and the line still stretched back across the whole boarding area and around the corner. By the time we had all boarded and sat down, it appeared that more than half of the plane was this tour group.

I found myself sitting by the window next to one of the green-jacketed ladies. She looked nice enough, a bit older. More importantly, she looked like a sleeper. On long flights, I can't stand sitting by the window or in the middle. I'm an....active flier. I like to get up every hour or two. Go the bathroom, stand in the back, walk the aisles, get more water from the flight attendants, chat with other passengers who are also avoiding their seats.

As the lady pulled out her pillow, my fears were confirmed. If she fell asleep, I would be trapped. Even if she didn't sleep (and considering it was a red-eye, unlikely), she would probably hate me for making her get up every hour. Usually I explain the situation to the person next to me and ask them to kindly switch seats with me....unless, of course, they don't mind getting up for me every hour of the entire flight. So far I've had a 100% success rate with this spiel.

But...I didn't know how to give that spiel in Mandarin. I first tried it in English. Nope. Just a smile and blank stare. Then I tried Cantonese. The smile got bigger but so did the head shaking. Thankfully we hadn't even started taxiing, so I could rely on Google to help me out. The combination of Google translate and hand motions got me what I wanted; I was comfortably seated in the aisle.

Then that's where the fun began. The lady asked me a question. Now it was my turn to give her a blank stare. She wrote it down and showed it to me. Simplified characters. It's very hard for me to read simplified characters since I usually can't guess which bits have been trimmed. Not to mention that I'm not so good at reading Standard Written Chinese anyway.

Wait, there were a few that I recognized. She was asking where I was from! Thankfully, "America" is one of the twenty or so Mandarin words that I know. The "conversation" continued with extensive help from Google and a bit of guessing on my part. There were a few words that sounded like Canto words but I wasn't sure if that was right or not (a few of them at least were not).

By that time the flight attendants were trying to get everyone ready for takeoff. Since I was not a flight attendant trying to get a few hundred passengers ready for takeoff with no way to communicate with them, I found it all rather comical.

"Please make sure your chairs are in the upright position," the flight attendant next to me called to the sea of faces around her. Four chairs flopped backwards. "No, upright." She pushed one seat up and reached for another. Clunk, clunk, clunk. Three more seats down. "Sir, sir. You need to put your seat up for takeoff." Her push was a bit more forceful this time.

Clunk. The seat in front of my dropped back into my face. I had to bite my tongue.

Over my shoulder I heard someone say a familiar word. Keyi. What was that? I swear I learned that word on my last trip to Taiwan. Keyi, keyi. Wait! I know!!! Suddenly I remembered. Keyi is like 可以 ho2 ji5, can. And bu is like 唔 m4, not. At least I thought so. I figured I might as well try before the flight attendant burst a blood vessel.

I leaned over to the lady across the aisle who had just reclined her chair as far as it could go.

Bu keyi, bu keyi. You can't. She blinked and sat up. I think she was asking me why not. I made my hand take off like a plane and gave a thumbs up after the "plane" got higher. I may or may not have added sound effects.

The motions must have worked because soon her seat was upright and in a locked position. She even turned to the crowd around me and got them to get their chairs up. They were still plugging in their headphones to their monitors, but the flight attendant would surely be back to yank them out again in a few minutes. At least the chairs were up.

The rest of the flight (before and after they went to sleep) I helped them order drinks and set their tvs (did you ever notice how annoying it is when the "languages" button is in another language? That's really what they should teach you in the basic class; much more useful than animals). I tried the trick of saying the same word in a bunch of different tones to see if one would "stick." Mostly it didn't. I seemed a bit better at guessing what they were saying than they were at guessing what I was saying, though. But who knows, maybe my guesses were actually wrong? Instead of Hunan they could actually be from Hubei. Who's to say?

Towards the end of the flight, one of the flight attendants stopped by to chat.

"It's so great that you can speak their language. It's so hard to communicate sometimes."

"No, I really, really don't. And my communicating is mostly guessing."

"Well at least it sounds good to me." She wandered off down the aisle.

If only being a translator was as easy as "sounding good." Do you think you could get work as a translator when you can't actually speak that language?

At least at the end of the flight I was paid in Chinese candy and snacks. Well worth my "translating."