(Chinese) Wo de sixiang hui geng shang yi ceng lou.

(English) My way of thinking will rise to a higher level.

It’s not that hard to impress most Chinese (aside from Chinese language teachers) with your speaking ability if you obviously lack Chinese ancestry. This is fairly easy to experience — on your way out of a Chinese restaurant, simply toss “Xiexie, zaijian!” (Thank you, good bye!) and you probably won’t make it to the door. You will instead find yourself hounded into a corner by the store owner demanding to know where you learned to speak Chinese so well. This low expectation of foreigners really can come in handy when you’re trying to buy things. Drop “Tai gui le” (Too expensive) and, after a short pause, the shopkeeper will state a new price that’s a good third less than the previous. Granted, foreigners usually simply dish out whatever outrageous amount of money they’re asked for, so this isn’t all that surprising. You are, in effect, given a discount off of a marked-up price. Hey, it works.

Sometimes, however, there is that odd foreigner that actually wants to learn enough Chinese to communicate with others, not merely impress strangers. These are the foreigners that learn how to ask directions, read and understand menus and even pay rent. Within this group of odd foreigners, there is an even odder group: the uppity foreigners that wish to speak fluently enough to carry on normal conversations, and perhaps even sound well-educated. These are the only people who would benefit from knowing the introductory sentence; but they might benefit from it quite a bit. The phrase “Geng shang yi ceng lou” is the key element to sounding educated (and not merely uppity, as the sentence might seem if you said instead “Wo de sixiang hui tigao,” which means the same but has fewer syllables). It is actually the last line of a well-known Chinese poem, and dropping it into a conversation or paper is a way of marking yourself a snob, which is a good thing there. Here, on the other hand, it would be like someone mumbling “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood” with a wise expression on their face when talking about choosing between law school and med school. Which wouldn’t be the best way to increase your popularity.

This might indicate a good reason for our status in the world hierarchy of education, leaving us one less thing to wonder about. The United States keeps slipping in its education rankings internationally — around fourth grade, our students still perform above average, but by the time they reach 12th grade, American students are some of the, well, dumbest of the developed world. But we spend more per head than a lot of other countries, have smaller class sizes and so on. There are so many reasons we could give for this: Students here spend fewer days in school per year than in many other countries. Our students are better balanced, because we put more emphasis on sports and social activities. This means we have happier students, not to mention having such a great national soccer team that brings so much excitement to everyone who watches their victories. Sweeping the Olympics is much more satisfying than having an extra stem cell scientist or two.

We do have our vocabulary items that reference literature or history. If you’re acting foolishly out of idealism, you might be called quixotic, after “Don Quixote.” If you feel like you really understand something or someone on a deep level, you might say you grok it or them, vocabulary coined in “Stranger in a Strange Land.” And in psychology, we have the infamous Oedipus complex, after the tragic Greek hero.

But then, maybe the fact that I toss “grok” around brands me as a geek — not necessarily a good thing when I’m trying to demonstrate cultural fluency.

Kate is busily falling behind on her Chinese homework, so if you feel like offering her another distraction, email her at kltang@stanford.edu.