The place looked like so many schools. It was an open area featuring white tables, with each sporting a cup of crayons. The walls were lined with cubbies half filled with belongings, and sported brightly colored posters of everyday items, each one with an accompanying character pictogram.
Orchid imagined Phoenix striding in, his confidence flattening the everyday humans in his path.
Sissy, the owner whose photo Orchid had seen online, came over to greet her. “Welcome! Jian tian di yi ci lai ma?” she said.
Aw crap. Was this going to be one of those immersive experiences that would make her brain hurt. Luckily, the context helped her foggy memory unearth Sissy’s meaning. “Yes, it’s my first time here.”
Sissy beamed and led her to a glass-walled conference room. A dozen students sat around a table, their faces angled towards an Asian woman whose round glasses echoed the shape of her cheeks.
“Tang lao shi,” Sissy introduced the plump woman with a formal ‘teacher’ moniker.
The teacher came over and shook Orchid’s hand. “Ni jiao shenme mingzi?”
“Orchid,” she replied, glad that she understood the request for her name.
“Lan Hua, qing zuo,” teacher Tang instructed. Orchid hadn’t heard her Chinese name in many years.
As requested, Orchid looked for a place to sit. A guy with long hair scooched over to make space on the long bench. Orchid slipped onto the edge, leaving space between them. A young professional-looking woman on the other side nodded at her.
“Xie xie,” she managed to say, thanking them, while still absorbing the foreign feeling of hearing her name in Chinese. Lan hua was a literal translation of the flower.
Teacher Tang, full of enthusiasm for Orchid’s apparent understanding of Mandarin, started by asking her questions. “Ni de gongzi zai nali?”
Orchid tried to puzzle through the unfamiliar sounds. “Uncle?” she muttered under her breath, having some vague memory of having to call distant Chinese relativesgong gong.
Long-haired guy whispered to her. “Work.”
“Wo de gonzi shi Lauder.” She managed to say the name of her company, and the teacher moved to another unwitting student.
“Thanks,” she whispered to her bench partner.
“Bu ke qi.” He responded with a simple “You’re welcome.”
At the end of the hour, a mish-mosh of words floated through Orchid’s brain, a jumble of English, Chinese, and business acronyms that had kept her busy during the work day.
She stood and stretched. “Want to grab drinks with us?” the professional woman on the other side asked. She’d been introduced as Lee-da, which she now explained was actually Linda.
Orchid had no brain power left for the emails that awaited her if she went home, so she agreed. “Drinks sound great, thanks.”
The three of them—Orchid, Linda, and the long-haired fellow named Peter—walked the few blocks to a noisy neighborhood bar. It felt like good fortune to score a high-top table by the open-air windows. The waitress asked to see IDs, then jotted down their beer and cocktail orders.
“So, how’d you like your first lesson?” Peter asked.
She tossed up both hands. “I was a hot mess!”
Peter cackled. He had a way of laughing—it started from his belly and erupted out of his nostrils—that told Orchid that his humor was genuine. “You should’ve seen my first class.”
“What happened?” Orchid really wanted to know, to help her burn off the shame of misunderstanding, guessing wrong, and generally being humiliated in front of a dozen strangers.
“Ni shi shei?” Peter mimicked their teacher’s nasal tone when she asked who he was. “So, I saidwo shi Peter.”
Linda began to snicker.
“Okay, then what happened?”
Peter feigned indignation. “I had to defend myself after she called me Pee-duh.”
Linda chuckled louder.
