Getting on the bus to go to work in the late morning, an elderly Chinese woman was getting on as well, so I let her go in before me. She asked the bus driver something in Chinese, because evidently he looked to her like he was Chinese himself. After not understanding what she was saying, and assuming that she wanted to go to Chinatown, a white guy came up to the front of the bus and said to her "shuo guoyu ma?" The phrase means "do you speak Mandarin Chinese?" in Mandarin Chinese. (I studied the language for a couple years.) She gave him the universal "I don't understand what you're asking" body language, which meant that no, she didn't speak Mandarin. That took me off the hook if he needed someone with Mandarin skills to interpret words he didn't understand.

Because he put his headphones on after trying to communicate further with the woman (the best way to signal "I wish to not communicate with the outside world" is to put on headphones), and got off at a bus stop well before mine, I didn't have a chance to ask him what his level of Mandarin was, and practice my own. It got me thinking of the idea I had to practice Chinese again: just use the microphone in my laptop to record my speaking Mandarin, perhaps just reading from a book or website page written in Pinyin. The other idea was to buy a video camera that would fit on top of my laptop's screen and, using the laptop screen as the TelePrompTer. And, of course, post it on my website so that you can marvel as a white guy speaks Chinese to you.

Or I could just travel to China again.