New Frustrations in Old Chinese

I do not know Chinese. Most of what I know about Chinese culture I learned about in my kindergarten classroom's Chinese New Year lesson. We threw a big party and said "Gung hay fat choy!" to each other while wearing crudely-taped together paper robes with crayon dragons drawn on them, which I'm sure was adorable if you were a parent and pretty offensive if you were actually Asian. But growing up in my small town, we only had one Asian person, and she was only half. So everyone seemed ok with this because we were "learning." (If I dressed up as a paper Inuit now, would everyone be cool with this? Probably not. It's cute if you are 4 and ignorant, less so if you're 24.)

I open with this statement because I am writing a novel. Or rather, I am working on my third novel that I shelved about a year ago, and recently decided was good enough to dust off, re-work, and see what could become of it. My first two novels did not merit such a dusting, the first focusing on the story of a lifeguard that I wrote in high school when (surprise!) I was a lifeguard, and the second that I wrote as a satirical memoir when I turned 23. Every person that I have told this to so far has laughed. Apparently you have to be older to write a memoir, even if it's humorous. I disagree.

I am writing this novel on my trusty mac computer. This computer has stayed up with me many a late night, writing brilliant college essays that, including myself, a total of two people have read. This computer has traveled to the West Coast, the South, and many mid-western cities on a 30 day road trip seeing the sights of America 2 years ago. It has stored numerous terrible poems and short stories, and a laughingly large amount of haikus from back when I thought that people could become real writers by working within the constraints of 5-7-5 syllable form. This computer came with me to the Bahamas one winter where I half studied renewable energy and half worked on a different story on the beach and learned the hard way that salt water, sand, and technology are not the best of friends. This piece of technology has kept me looking busy on innumerable commuter rail and subway rides across the city. This computer has run the gamut with me, but it has seen better days.

While dusting off this most recent of novel endeavors (double entendre!) I was going back through some old stories when I came upon the delightful discovery that my computer, no longer able to process word documents properly, had started to interject Chinese characters into the text after certain word and punctuation combinations.

Exhibit A:

   "泥epends on where you were when you died, I guess." I told him. He laughed.

    展hat would be the worst place to die?" He asked, glancing over from the driver's seat.

    溺ini-golf.”

    展orse than the Dairy Queen?”

    泥epends. Was I eating a Blizzard?”

    哲ah. Unless you were choking on it or something.”

    泥id I choke on an oreo, or butterscotch?”

    的t'd have to be butterscotch, right? That shit is sticky.”

    展ell I'm not really a butterscotch kind of girl. So I guess that'd be pretty bad."

Barring the clearly meaningless conversation and the blatant Dairy Queen reference, I did not write this. I do not know what it now means with it's new Chinese characters. Does it make more sense now? Is it offensive? And yet I'm tempted to keep it because maybe this is an opportunity to explore the creative boundaries and new frontiers of bi-lingual writing!

Or maybe my computer is just dying.

Either way, at least my writing has improved. I would never write about Dairy Queen anymore. I've grown up, and am a Cold Stone girl, through and through.