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“You speak Danish too?” I ask.
“No, it’s just close to Dutch.”
“How many languages do you speak?”
“Fluently?”
“Oh, God. I’m sorry I asked.”
“Four fluently. I get by in German and Spanish too.”
I shake my head, amazed.
“Yes, but you said you speak Chinese.”
“I wouldn’t say I speak it so much as murder it. I’m kind of tone deaf, and Mandarin is all about tone.”
“Let me hear.”
I look at him. “Ni zhen shuai.”
“Say something else.”
“Wo xiang wen ni.”
“Now I hear it.” He covers his head. “Stop. I’m bleeding from my ears.”
“Shut up or you will be.” I pretend to shove him.
“What did you say?” he asks.
I give him a look. No way I’m telling.
“You just made it up.”
I shrug. “You’ll never know.”
“What does it mean?”
I grin. “You’ll have to look it up.”
“Can you write it too?” He pulls out his little black book and opens to a blank page near the back. He rifles back into his bag. “Do you have a pen?”
I have one of those fancy roller balls I swiped from my dad, this one emblazoned BREATHE EASY WITH PULMOCLEAR. I write the character for sun, moon, stars. Willem nods admiringly.
“And look, I love this one. It’s double happiness.”
“See how the characters are symmetrical?”
“Double happiness,” Willem repeats, tracing the lines with his index finger.
“It’s a popular phrase. You’ll see it on restaurants and things. I think it has to do with luck. In China, it’s apparently big at weddings. Probably because of the story of its origin.”
“Which is?”
“A young man was traveling to take a very important exam to become a minister. On the way, he gets sick in a mountain village. So this mountain doctor takes care of him, and while he’s recovering, he meets the doctor’s daughter, and they fall in love. Right before he leaves, the girl tells him a line of verse. The boy heads off to the capital to take his exam and does well, and the emperor’s all impressed. So, I guess to test him further, he says a line of verse. Of course, the boy immediately recognizes this mysterious line as the other half of the couplet the girl told him, so he repeats what the girl said. The emperor’s doubly impressed, and the boy gets the job. Then he goes back and marries the girl. So, double happiness, I guess. He gets the job and the girl. You know, the Chinese are very big on luck.”
Willem shakes his head. “I think the double happiness is the two halves finding each other. Like the couplet.”
