The Blind Leading the Blinder or Chinese is really hard

So, I'm learning Chinese. Which is extremely difficult.

As you may or may not know, Chinese is a tonal language, which means that the meaning of any given word is not solely determined by the word's phonetic pronunciation but also by a tone. For example, the word "ma" when said at different tones (meaning pitch and inflection), means mom, hemp, horse, curse, or an interrogative particle. This makes learning and speaking extremely difficult as you would not want to ride a curse, smoke your mom, send a Horse's Day card or misuse an interrogative particle.

The challenge, though, is further exacerbated by the fact that none of our Chinese teachers speak English. Fortunately for us, they are all extremely adept at sign language. Most lessons involve our teacher repeating a word like "Hei Se" and then pointing to as many objects as she can until someone from the back screams out "Oh! I think it means black". Everyday, I spend the entire three hours of the class trying to pick out any Chinese word I can understand from the sea of gobbledygook coming from my teacher's mouth. Most days sound like, "Blah, blah, blah, Korean, blah, blah, blah, chicken leg, blah, blah, blah, arm hair." Context clues also help. Luckily, though, each day seems to have less blah's and more intelligible Chinese words- So I got that goin for me. Which is nice.

Yesterday, in our culture class, we received a special lecture from author, professor and public intellectual Laoshi Sun. This woman is incredibly bright. She spent many years in America and can traverse Chinese and English effortlessly- sweet relief! The lecture was about the presence (and often absence) of women in Chinese Theater. Everyone in the class was enthused and mostly awake after the three hour lecture- which is always a good sign. Laoshi Sun summed up the lecture with a brief discussion of white collar theater which prompted a fairly curious question from the class.

The woman who asked the question, a 58 year old American woman from upstate New York, may or may not be taking a shit load of pain killers. Her head is perpetually buried in her dictionary, though she never seems to resurface knowing any more Chinese words.

"Umm...yea....I have a question" she said. "You keep on talking about white collar theater. What about black collar theater?"

The class was silent. Every student working hard to suppress their laughter. Poor Laoshi Sun straining to understand the question. She furrowed her brow- searching through her mental Rolodex for this western art form "black collar theater". Perhaps is was some avant-garde niche genre she hadn't learned about.

"I'm not really sure how to answer your question. What I'm discussing is white collar theater- you know- yuppies, rich people, all these young kids talking on their blueberries"