My Dear Mushroom

So, over the last few weeks our Chinese lessons have started, and we've been having fun amusing our friend and Chinese teacher, Jenny (yes, even in China there are bajillions of Jennys - thanks again for that dear parents) with our terrible Mandarin. According to Jenny I have already cultivated a Chongqing accent, and although this basically means I am as crap at doing tones properly as the locals are, I'm taking it as a compliment.

Anyway, Chinese has some brilliantly literal words ('jeans' in Chinese literally translates as 'cowboy trousers') but our absolute new favourite is the word for mushroom, 蘑菰 or 'mo gu.' According to Jenny, the Chinese also use 蘑菰 as a word to describe someone of rather limited brain capacity. Taking inspiration from this, we have thus adapted the anglicized version, 'mogu,' to affectionately describe all of our, erm, slightly dimmer kids.

Now, I have a good few really bright students, I have plenty of average Joes (although the only kid I have who is actually called Joe is a little ten-year old shithead who likes shouting out 'F-U-C-K' what it mean?), but, well, there are a few little sweeties who appear to be just a few sandwiches short of a picnic. They are the children for whom you repeat a word five times, demonstrate it, attempt to use every possible means at your disposal (including, often, translation by the Chinese teacher) to convey that 'apple' means 'pingguo,' and yet will still be met with a smile and a completely blank stare. You can practically see the tumbleweed bouncing through their little minds as they smile sweetly and uncomprehendingly at you. And these are my mogus.

My favourite little mogu is Bobby. Bobby is my youngest student at Aston, being only four years old, and is a gorgeously vacant little kid who attends the parent and child class with one other student, five-year old Lily. At first, I thought Bobby was struggling because he was so young, but Annie, my Chinese co-teacher and I have come to the conclusion that he is in fact just a wee bit dim. A typical attempt to teach Bobby something goes like this:

Jenny: What is it (holds up flashcard at Lily)?
Lily: It's a rabbit?
Jenny: Are you a rabbit?
Lily: No, I'm a girl.
Jenny: What is it (holds up flashcard at Bobby)?
Bobby: Monkey
Jenny: Are you a monkey (points at Bobby)?
Bobby: Monkey
Jenny: Are you a monkey (points at Bobby and then at monkey picture, shakes head)?
Bobby: It's a monkey.
Annie: Ni shi houzi ma? (Are you a monkey? in Chinese)
Bobby: Monkey.
Annie: Bobby, ni shi houzi ma?
Bobby: It's a monkey.
Jenny: Annie, are you a monkey?
Annie: No, I'm a girl.
Jenny: Lily, are you a monkey?
Lily: No, I'm a girl.
Jenny: Bobby, are you a monkey?
Bobby: [blank stare]

(continue by revising 'girl' and 'boy' flashcards and getting Bobby and Lily to say 'I'm a boy,' 'I'm a girl.' Try 'are you a monkey?' again to no avail ad infinitum)

Yep, the kid's the cutest mogu in all of Chongqing. Poor little mushroom. Anyway, Katie and I have been bandying about the word 'mogu' for a couple of weeks now, so I just thought I'd share. I love 'mogu' as a word, and would also like to forewarn a certain Ms VD Trinh that she might have been proclaimed 'Mogu In Chief'. I mean sure, Van, you're a med student, which indicates that you might be part of a strangely academic subset of mogus, but in every other respect you embody the virtues of true mogu-dom. I hope you are proud, and that you embrace Bobby and his friends in your heart as your own little mushrooms.

Mangled Names

One of the many wonderful things about the language school where we are teaching is that all the pupils at the school are given English first names to use. This is an absolute lifesaver, as it saves me having to learn the near-identical sounding (but, alas, tonal and thus likely to be badly mangled by my foreign tongue) Chinese names of over 100 students.

There seems, however, to be very little consistency as to how our students acquire their English names. Some of the little kids who are just starting English classes are named by us, but many of our students arrive with English names intact. And some these names are wonderful. Absolutely, head-spinningly wonderful. Between us, Katie and I are currently teaching:

- Scrabble
- Derail
- Sharpie
- Moon
- Susie (boy)
- Tessie (boy)
- Uriel
- Sun
- Sago
- Ice
- Sesame
- Thunder
- GeeGeeBoy

Now some of these missteps I can understand. Some kids seem just to directly translate the meaning of their Chinese name into English, but whilst 'Little Cloud' might be a perfectly lovely name in Chinese, it is a rather less than wonderful moniker in English. Although, y'know,Sun,Moon, and Ice actually sound pretty cool. Others, however, seem to have just opened a dictionary and picked names out completely at random. Scrabble? Sharpie??? Derail???? Why on earth, when a child is looking for an English name, would anyone happen upon 'derail' in a dictionary and decide they want the little darling to be named after a train accident?

And finally, GEEGEEBOY????. There are quite simply not enough WTFs in the universe.