Something to Red Bean...

She bounds over to me on a daily basis, her face lights up as she says, "Haaaather." She is usually the first to make me smile on any given day. Her name is Jing and she came to Cornell from China at the beginning of the semester. Jing and I often share rides to and from school activities where we chat and conduct grammar lessons. While her English improves each week, we often giggle like the school girls we are over our miscommunications--her confusion over why I would take a yogurt class (it was yoga), her query as to what a condom was...in the middle of a food chem lecture (if I had it to do over, let's just say I'd omit the hand motions), our perpetual bewilderment regarding the use of sounds to convey "yes" and "no" (who knew that the Chinese "nnnnn," while sounding much like a negative, actually equates to the English "uh-huh?")

One night in September I was driving her home and feeling particularly sorry for myself. I was droning on about my unhappiness and all that I missed back home. I asked her what she missed about her home in China and she said, "nothing." I thought maybe the language barrier had gotten the best of our conversation once again, but then she said something that made me realize she had understood perfectly. She said, "you should be thankful that you have something to miss." Wow.

This week during one of our "how do you say" lessons, I asked her how to say "red bean" in Chinese. She told me, I repeated. It sounded exactly like what she said, but she told me no, so I repeated again and again until I got her approval. Next she told me that "red bean means when you miss somebody." I didn't quite understand, so I said, "you mean you tell your boyfriend that you 'red bean' him." She laughed and said that no, it was more like a symbol that expressed the sentiment of missing someone (okay, so those are my words, not hers, but we worked it out!). Like if you give someone a red bean confection, it means you miss him. Cool.

During my days at Cornell, distinguished professors have taught me about rheology, water activity, Reynolds number, and the benefits of flavanols. My amazing friend, Jing, however, has taught me a more important lesson--be thankful that you have something to miss. I will "red bean" her when I move back to Philly. Tomorrow I will ask if there is a Chinese symbol to express gratitude. Until then, I will simply say: Thank you, Jing.