A Chinese Adolescents Take on 1+1

So it’s good ol’ summer intensive time and that means that we have a group of 12 kids twice a week for essentially an entire day. We also take them out to lunch which is kinda cool, kinda fun, kinda exhausting, and kinda pointless all at the same time. On this particular day I was sitting with (keeping an eye on) my table of kids in which one of them I named Mace.
I take pride in giving my kids names and I refuse to ever give out something common or lame. It also allows me to have a little “foreigner fun” because I can label a child something that would completely fly over the head of anyone not savvy with American culture or movies (most all Chinese people). For instance, I have named a boy Hannibal because I thought he was a little shit. The next ADD boy I have will be named Sal for Shut up And Listen.
The boy I sat with during lunch I named Mace. Not short for Mason but rather Mace like the spray because I’d like to use it on him. I’m only joking of course because he is actually not a bad kid at all. “Problem” children are a joke compared to the West and there are not enough RMB, Doichmarks, Euro’s, or Dollars in the world to make me teach in a school in America…sorry mom. So I’m sitting with Mace and they quickly got wind that I could understand and speak a bit of Chinese. I am careful letting kids know about this because as an English teacher teaching in an emersion environment it inadvertently tells the kids, “I don’t have to always try to speak English because Beau Laoshi (teacher) will understand me.
So Mace asks me, after discovering I understand, what is one plus one? Thinking this was some idiotic 11 year old comprehension test I uttered in a semi-retarded tone, “san (three).” He looked quite shocked at my answer and immediately exclaimed, “YES! HAHA, its three! A mamma plus papa equals a baby. 1,2,3 BAM!”
Damn, my plan at proving ignorance to the language completely backfired. Not only did it backfire but I beat him to the punch line of his own joke and thus he believed my Chinese to be excellent.
The next day I ran into his mother outside of class and she say’s, “So my son tells me that your Mandarin is EXCELLENT! I was hoping you could tell me, rabble rabble rabble, blah blah, shenme shenme…. I didn’t catch a word of it. I only stared at her like a deer in headlights as she eagerly awaited my reply to… China’s one China policy? What I knew about wholly foreign owned enterprises? Her son’s performance?…. I had no idea. Damn that little Mace.