The New Yorker:

“I tell the truth in Chinese, I make up stories in English. I don’t take it that seriously.”

By Ling Ma 

In my first years in the U.S., my parents take me to the library to encourage my learning of English. With my mother’s guidance, I check out ten, fifteen books every weekend. Though I gravitate toward picture books, my mother pushes me to start reading more advanced chapter books. “Just the words themselves should be enough,” she says. “If you can’t think up the image on your own, then that’s a failure of imagination.”

This is how I come across “Iron & Silk,” recommended by a librarian as an adult book that’s easy to read. It’s a memoir by Mark Salzman, a wushu enthusiast who was among the first wave of Americans accepted into China in the early nineteen-eighties. He travelled to Changsha and taught English at the Hunan Medical College.

Salzman recounts how, during one lesson, he asked the students to read aloud their essays on the topic of “My Happiest Moment.” The class consisted of middle-aged teachers brushing up on English. The last to read was Teacher Zhu, who wrote about attending a banquet dinner in Beijing years before. “First we ate cold dishes,” he read, “such as marinated pig stomach and sea slugs. Then we had steamed fish, then at last the duck arrived! The skin was brown and crisp and shiny, in my mouth it was like clouds disappearing.” He recounted other courses of the Peking-duck dinner: the duck skin in pancakes with sauce and scallions, the meat with vegetables, the duck-bone soup and fruits.

Go to link