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What’s Your Hidden Skill or Talent?

Chinese Characters in Singapore, 2011
Chinese Characters in Singapore, 2011

“So I need a… venti… is that the biggest size? Yeah? So a venti vanilla latte… two shots of espresso… add syrup… Caramel? Caramel drizzle? Well, the other store has it. Sugar-free syrup, of course. With whipped cream and one of these dome lids… Oh, and soy… no, almond milk. Oh and…”

For fuck’s sake, lady, it’s a drink, not a four-course meal. If your coffee order requires more than two adjectives, you failed at life.

The barista glances at me, our eyes meet and I roll my eyes. He can’t, obviously. But he wants to, I can tell. He shrugs discreetly.

While the obnoxious yet-to-be-caffeinated lady is still figuring out what she really wants from life and from a Styrofoam cup, I eavesdrop on other people’s conversations.

“Love it. So you.”

“I bought it on Bank Street, you know… It was like, $30. I just hope it doesn’t say anything stupid. I’d be so embarrassed.”

I turn around and see that she is wearing a cute jacket with Chinese ideograms printed all over.

I squint at the sleeve.

“These are addresses,” I say.

“What?”

“Sorry, didn’t mean to intrude. Just saying, your jacket doesn’t say anything stupid. These are addresses written in Chinese. Like here it says ‘3 Nanjing Road, Shanghai’ and here it says ‘Sichuan’—that’s a province—and here it says ‘Inner Mongolia,’ another province. So just addresses and place names, like our mailboxes that have postal codes printed all over, you know?”

“Oh my God! You can read that?”

I shrug. “Yeah, I swear, I’m not making it up.”

Indeed, I’m not lying. This is my hidden skill. I speak Mandarin. I can read and write as well. Everybody’s got a hidden talent, well, that’s mine. Used to be a fun pickup line in my teens, when Chinese ideogram tattoos were popular.

That said, it’s the kind of “hidden skill” that, when revealed, leads to weird comments.

“My coworker can speak Chinese too, that’s funny!”
“It is! Do you know where he learned Chinese? University?”
“Er… at school, I guess. He is from Beijing.”

“How do you say ‘I like to fuck hot Chinese girls’ in Mandarin?”
“You don’t. Unless you want to get slapped.”

“Can you write my name in the Chinese alphabet?”
“No, I can’t, because there is no alphabet in Chinese.”

“What does it say here?”
“No idea, this is Korean.”

“Oh cool! You must know where to eat good traditional sushi, then.”

“Oh, you speak Mandarin! 真的吗!”
(Chinese person immediately starts talking really fast in some kind of Southern dialect, probably assuming I somehow grew up in the same district as them.).

“You know that China is developing fast and there will be opportunities in business and…”
Yep, been hearing that since 1996. Unfortunately, I’m hopeless in international business (or even at selling lemonade on the street) and speaking Chinese doesn’t automatically qualify me to run a mega-corporation (which is probably a good thing, unless you’re aiming for complete and fast bankruptcy).

Yeah, sometimes I wish I had another cool hidden talent. Like doing splits. I’ve always wanted to be able to do a split, casually and gracefully. “Oh, this? No, just stretching, hi hi hi!” Unfortunately, my hips never quite agreed. Bitch. Around twelve, I wisely realized that I probably would never wear a tutu—I loved Nutella and croissants too much to compete with Russia-trained students anyway. So I turned to gymnastics, and by this I mean I desperately tried to master headstands, flips and cartwheels. The best I could do was a somersault—not the cool kind, in the air, but on a padded surface, on the ground. I don’t even finish on my feet most of the time… and yes, just in case you were wondering, I’ve just tried one in the living room and made a complete fool of myself.

In my late teens, I set the bar lower and aimed at whistling with my fingers, being known for an amazing to-be-determined signature dish, dancing gracefully… oh, singing too. Like those people who burst into song a capella with a deep rich voice you didn’t quite expect, and then laugh it off, “oh no, me? I can’t sing!”

I have mastered exactly zero of these skills. My hidden talent remains knowing the difference between 白 and 百 or shí, shǐ and shì.

I wonder if somewhere, in China, a woman who can read Victor Hugo in French and conjugate subjunctive whines about not being able to do splits…

So, what’s your hidden talent? And what’s the talent you wish you had?

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Zhu

French woman in English Canada.

Exploring the world with my camera since 1999, translating sentences for a living, writing stories that may or may not get attention.

Firm believer that nobody is normal... and it’s better this way.

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