EVEN THOUGH THERE ARE FAR MORE IMPORTANT THINGS THAN TEACHING ENGLISH, I HAVE CHOSEN TO TEACH ENGLISH AND I REFUSE TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTION, "WHY?"

By

Jenny Zhang

In Bucharest they had shot over a hundred street dogs, and in my little corner of the mountains of Western Transylvania, I was teaching fifty Hungarian children the word for hello in Chinese.

"Nihao," I said to them, and a few of them started to buck around like horses.

"No, it means hello.  Cya?"  If you wanted to say hello in Hungarian, you had to say c-ya, and if you wanted to say come here, you said hi, and I said hi to say hello and goodbye to say goodbye, and I said fuck fuck fuck when I was frustrated, which was all the time.

The kids bucked all around the classroom like a bunch of wild horses, shouting, Nihao!  Nihao!  Nihao!

"Chinese people are not horses."

Nihao!  Nihao!  Some of the kids had fully transformed into horses.  Four legs, a swinging tail.  Flies came into the room and began swarming around the children who had turned into horses.

"I'm not a damn horse," I said, hands on my hips.  "Could a horse do this?"  I put up an algebra equation on the board.  Y=mx + b where the slope of a hill is 1.345 something units over units and y= 2, and we are in Ethiopia, the driest part of the Sahara Desert, in which case what does B equal?  "Five," I said triumphantly.  "Could a horse solve this extremely complex equation?"  I shook my head no.  "But a Chinese person could.  Does that mean anything to you?"

All of the children were horses now, even the ones who weren't bucking around and shouting Nihao through their ugly horse lips.  The afternoon had been wasted, once again.  What about my life?  These children/horses would never understand me.  I had signed up to teach English in a rural Hungarian village because I was looking for something—what was it?

I lived with a family who only fed me five slices of paprika on a piece of white bread.  Bon appetit, my host father always said.  I started eating the flowers in their garden because I was so hungry, and once, one of my students caught me sucking on the stem of a violet, and the next morning I woke up to a bouquet of picked flowers thrusted into my face.

"I am making this for you," my student said.

"I love you," I said to her, and clasped her face with both my hands and kissed her in four places: the top of her head, her small, cleft chin, both of her cheeks.

My host sister Zsuzsa, who spoke the most English out of anyone in the village told me after the horse incident, "Broom broom?  Bear.  Nihao?  Horse.  Ertem?"

"Really?  Really?  That's the sound they make in Hungarian?  Okay.  Okay."  Did we even have a sound for bears in English, I wondered.

The next morning, half of us were horses, and the other half were people, and what we did instead of learning languages, was ride off into the woods and eat berries with the sun on our backs—the slipperiness of everyday was finally new to me, and as we galloped through the forest, I clung to my students/horses like cobwebs, pathetic and flimsy, but draped sticky over all the corners of this world like something slightly bothersome that you've come to accept.