My China :: Personal Narrative Essay

My China   I had lived in capital of Red China for a year and a half at the age of four, and had be Chinese nursery school. I had also grown up oral presentation Mandarin at home. However, I was not at all prompt for what met me the year we spent in Beijing when my father headed an international syllabus for a small group of American students.   At the time, though I spoke Mandarin without a foreign accent, my vocabulary did not splinter short far beyond a grade-school level, and I was next to illiterate. Well advised of that, my parents, fond followers of the sink or swim theory, dropped me off at the local Chinese school the first day of classes and promptly disappeared.   In thinking back, I can honestly say that during the first fewer months I was completely in the dark both socially and academically. thither were so many intricacies of the classroom that no one had prepared me for. I was shocked by the power that the Chinese teacher held over the students the meretriciousness with which she scolded them even after they had been reduced to muted sobbing and her unceasing ornateness about their duties to the ancestral land. I was shocked at the same time, however, by her extreme involvement in and dedication to the lives of the students. The relationships shared among the students were foreign to me as well I had to get used to girls holding hands with girls and boys as well with boys. Arguments were settled in the open, often with loud screaming and eventually crying. cryptograph was suppressed.   I made all sorts of blunders, such as wearing my blur down, crossing my legs when speaking to the principal, or forgetting to stand when answering a head in class. Actually, the students greeted everything I did with laughter, giggling, and stolen glances in my direction. It took me so long to understand and take in the nature of that laughter. Gym class (or rather, military marching drills class) provided me with the ultimate kick downstairs to be a blundering fool. Though the students assured me that the teacher was speaking Mandarin, I could hear only a garbled shout of Fragrance, followed by roughly vowelless consonants, while the others somehow heard Face right and march. Of course, my being run into was not beneficial to the appearance of the drill.