Chinese Fire Drill

Thank God I’m back. That was scary. I’m lucky to be alive. Seriously. I was in the back of the car as it sped through traffic, weaving in and out of cars, finally coming to a stop, only to burn rubber when it took off again.

You would think that it was a bank job, but it wasn’t. The funny thing is that it was MY car - - but I wasn’t driving.

Let me back up (pun intended.) I decided to sell my car a couple of weeks ago. I’ve had a cavalcade of characters who were interested, some which never showed up and some which wanted it for free.

The most captivating potential buyer(s) were a Chinese family. That’s where we left our story with me in the back of the car holding onto the ceiling handle with my face pressed to the glass mouthing the word, “Help,” while it was being test driven by a Chinese family, though not all at once.

The Chinese family in question was comprised of a mother, father, teenage son and young daughter. We were all in the car together - - and they were driving me crazy!

The parents didn’t speak English, the teenage son was glued to his iPod so the 10 year old daughter translated. To top it off, the father was hard of hearing so he would speak at higher decibel than most people. Have you ever noticed that people who are hard of hearing make YOU hard of hearing?

Chinese is an absorbingly tonal language to hear. It sounds a little like the tongue running off of a diving board and that guttural sound when your body hits the water.

There is a long string of words and then the last word just lingers like a whole note in music. (A whole note is one that you hold to the count of four.)

As one person would drive a few miles, they would then switch drivers. The parents would say something in their native tongue that took what felt like hours to say and when the daughter told me what they said, she only said it in a couple of words. I wonder if she left anything out?

There’s a certain paranoia that comes over you when you are in a situation where you don’t speak the lingo and someone interprets for you. I was trying to keep the paranoia at bay.

In Chinese, the meaning of a word changes according to its tone. There are 4 tones in Mandarin Chinese: flat, rising, falling then rising and falling. Other dialects feature up to 9 different tones. There are so many dialects, including Mandarin, Wu, and Cantonese.

Most Chinese-speaking people in the United States speak Cantonese.

So we finally get back to my house - - and not a moment too soon. The little girl was very engaging, the teenage son slept through the whole ordeal and I lived to write about it.

While her parents examined the outside of the car with a jeweler’s eye, looking for scratches, dents and dirt, they bounced one of those mellifluous phrases off of their daughter. She looked at me and said, They want to discuss it.”

All of us went inside and sat around the table. They spoke to the daughter and she told me that they liked the car and they wanted to know what my bottom price was.

I, being the clever business woman said, “What are you offering?”

They went back and forth between them and the little girl took out a piece of paper and wrote a figure down. I thought I only saw that in films, but apparently it happens.

I countered the offer and the couple spoke to their daughter. Her expression looked like she didn’t want to say what they said. She wrote another figure on a piece of paper and slid it to my side of the table.

It was like we were playing tic-tac-toe. She was “O” and I was “X.” Every time she gave me a figure, I would X it out. I didn’t feel comfortable negotiating with a child, so I told her to tell her parents that I wasn’t willing to take anything less than my price.

She said, “They like it, but they want an air conditioner.”

I said, “Tell them they that that should look for another car with air conditioning, mine was no longer for sale.”

If looks could kill, I may be dead. I heard a lot more Chinese words spew from their mouth, but the little girl didn’t translate.

The whole episode reminded me at how we are all being test driven daily by everyone around us. There are times when we feel that we are at our wits end, when we are vulnerable and other people can sense it. That’s when they will come in for the kill.

Those are the times when we have to put up our shield. We have to protect ourselves because there is always someone waiting to tear us down if we let them.

There's always someone willing to take advantage. We have to know when to put on the brakes and stop the behavior. We have to know when to walk way.

We have to know when enough is enough. And the way we gauge that is to know that when we don’t feel good about a situation, then it’s probably not good for us. Don’t be afriad to say, “Stop.”