What It's Like To Be Illiterate

Here are a few examples of what it's like to be illiterate:

1. Last week, after going to the supermarket, I noticed an item on the receipt that cost 42 yuan. I couldn't remember buying anything that cost that much so I had to take the receipt to the Senior English Teachers' office to ask one of the Chinese teachers to read the entry to me. Other than the numbers, the entire receipt is in Chinese characters, of course.

2. Shortly after arriving in Zhuzhou, I bought a map of the city. However, everything on the map is labelled in Chinese. Some of the actual street signs have the street names in both characters and pinyin, but there was no way I could relate the pinyin to the map. I was having a hard time getting oriented to the streets around the school (see next item) so I finally photocopied part of the map and asked Tyler, my Chinese tutor, to help me label the streets in pinyin.

3. Because I can't read the names of buildings or shops, many streets in Zhuzhou (and, in fact, in all the Chinese cities that I've seen) look remarkably alike. There isn't much variety in the architecture (I'll have to do a separate entry on that topic as well!) so unless a sign happens to be labeled in both Chinese and English (e.g. there's a Bridgestone sign on a building not far from the school), I can't use the signs as indicators. Of course, there are lots of China Mobile signs in English as well as Chinese, but since there is one on just about every street corner, that doesn't help a lot! So unless there's an obvious landmark (like a statue), it's easy to get turned around. Now that I have the map labeled, I'm starting to feel that I know where I am, as long as I can find a street sign in pinyin!

4. At one point, a notice was put up in our building that said something like "move your bicycles to the new Parking Area." Of course, we couldn't read it so someone had to tell us to move our bikes.

5. The most painful: I can walk into a bookstore and not find a single book I can read. Newspapers . . . magazines . . . forget it.