testing our marriage... otherwise known as practicing my mandarin

photo complements of a friend from my frist year in Asia

Many friends have asked with kind concern over the stresses on our marriage during this time of transition.  Heck, I've wondered myself about how we will weather moving our life literally around the world every few years as a part of this lifestyle.  R and I make a pretty good team and while tensions have risen at points in recent months, with so much of our life being in flux, we remain committed to understanding one another. We also always seem to balance each other out- when one is discouraged the other can find something to cheer them up.

While this whole foreign service thing is quite the test, my (re)learning mandarin might be the ultimate test of constancy.  You see, I am painfully insecure about my mandarin. This insecurity slowly developed as I was dating R the second half of my time in Asia. I was competent and able to relate on the heart level with friends in chinese, but whenever I was with R I let him order dinner or tell the cabby where to go or greet a friend.

His Chinese has always been better than mine, there's no doubt. It was one of the things about dating in Asia that made life so fun. Suddenly, while out on the town with R, the language barrier vanished and we could do anything. He had a florist on retainer ready to deliver a bouquet to me at a whim (flowers are cheap in Asia but no one really delivered flowers to individuals out where we were). He could make dinner reservations at a fancy restaurant in the heart of the city or at a small mountain-side inn where they only spoke dialect. Right about this time of year three years ago we had so much fun hunting down a mazhong set for a teammate's Christmas gift. The hunt involved interviewing a series of people about the location of a wholesale market we'd heard was nearby.  Finally (just as they closed) we found the mazhong purveyor and got the perfect secret santa gift.

When we returned from Asia we didn't practice our Chinese together, and quite honestly, I didn't practice at all.  I enjoyed being able to use it in Asia, but life seemed too busy to keep it up without any real plans to get back there. (Hindsight is 20/20, but why I didn't think we would absolutely go back with R's love of that place is a mystery now.)

My mandarin exam is Tuesday (prayers much appreciated), and I feel about 50/50 on whether I'll pass the speaking part or not. My main hang up is just expressing myself fluidly and the only way to get more comfortable with that is practice. R has been patient with me as I've pressed him to work with me on it. Even though after our dialogues I often end up frustrated or discouraged.  I do feel like some of it has come back over the last 6 weeks, but so much that was there when I left is lacking too. I know once we're back in Asia I'll probably get back to where I was or better within 6 months or so, but the exam has to happen before we leave if I'm to apply for the visa adjudicator's job in the consulate.

I'm glad I've had a chance to talk to others who've taken the various language exams. It sounds like the examiners are doing their job if you leave frustrated. They're not trying to be jerks, they just have to find your threshold so they will let you talk comfortably and then challenge you over and over again until they have a sense of your limits in the language. Even R felt that, and he did twice as well as he needed to on the test. Knowing that going into the exam should help me from getting too easily frustrated early on and to remember it doesn't mean I "failed."

I'll have to wait a few days to get the results back and hopefully I'll be surprised in a good way at where I land. I'm definitely looking forward to just getting the exam over with so I can know where I'm at, and move on with getting our move on to China. Three weeks from Friday we will be landing in Shenyang!