英文習作｜Letter to Bertha

It was early December in 2018 when I got to know WordPress.com, an online writing and self-publishing platform, as I observed. I read a few articles there and was impressed by a blogger named Bertha Lathos, whose essays explored themes like loneliness, job seeking, and how hard it is for graduates with liberal arts degrees to land proper jobs, which were very appealing to me, an unemployed guy with a lonely soul.

As if seized by a demon that day, I couldn’t suppress the desire of “writing something”, which turned out to be drafting a letter at midnight. My letter pretended to address Bertha, for a letter should always be supposed to address somebody, right? But I had nobody to address, so I targeted the innocent Bertha, otherwise, with no expectation of being read, how was it possible that I even bothered to write, to perform such a physically and emotionally draining act as writing, especially in a foreign language?

Meanwhile, Bertha didn’t seem to read in Chinese, so I had to write in her language. WordPress.com is a platform dominated by content producers who write in English, I have yet to find any Chinese articles there, except my own writings.

This is Shawn Zhong, a reader of your blog on WordPress.com, writing from China. Today I read two of the three articles you have posted, one is about loneliness, the other about job seeking, both fascinated me.

I am fully aware that such a cold letter, like a cold call, deserves no response from the receiver, so you have every reason to ignore it for good.

If you have ever been in China, you might have encountered “Cold Hello”, by which I mean being addressed by a stranger, usually a Chinese, who has learned some English and has always been desperate for practicing it with native speakers. You might be forced to participate in a conversation in English, which is often meaningless and boring, largely due to the stranger’s limited vocabulary, then you might decide to say “excuse me” and walk away, smiling politely.

Maybe you have already sensed the weirdness of the way I use English. Yes, I use English as a foreign language. What’s more, never being a professional writer, I haven’t written much, either in Chinese (which is my mother tongue) or in English. (Is that a reasonable justification for writing badly?)

Sure, I’ve been learning English for a ridiculously long time, reading and listening quite a lot. However, I still use it (speaking and writing) much less fluently than I use Chinese. By “a ridiculously long time” I mean 27 years, I began to study English in middle school, when I was thirteen, and this September I celebrated my fortieth birthday.

I can distinctly remember my father’s sigh when he reached the age of 40. It’s a summer evening in 1992, we (I, my father, and my elder cousin who visited us as a guest) were eating dinner outside the house, in front of the right window of the building.

On those remote hot summer evenings, people in our village tended to eat outdoors, to avoid the indoor heat. Our house was a low, single-floor concrete building with a flat roof, which turned out to be very cold in winter and extremely hot in summer. I would say our house was totally a design failure, on most summer nights the heat in the building was unbearable, we had to eat and sleep outside to survive the heat.

My father was silent, after taking a few mouthfuls of beer, he became talkative. He shared some of his thoughts on life with us, then encouraged the two teenage boys to study hard in school and achieve the ultimate goal of entering college. Suddenly, my father breathed a long sigh, and said sadly, “Ah, I am already 40, how fast time is going! What have I achieved?”

How fast time goes! Now it’s my turn to have a long and deep sigh. What have I achieved over the past 40 years? 40 years, oh, I have achieved nothing! I even fail to write elegantly in a language I have been learning since my teenage years. How horrible it is! Am I a fool? Have I squandered my life by spending so much time, without any good reason, on improving the fluency of a foreign language? Nobody paid me for that, after all, there is no such profession as learner or reader.

Are you still reading my letter? I know what I am doing now is very similar to what I mentioned earlier: stop a foreigner who might be a native English speaker, and rudely start a conversation, just for the sake of practicing one’s English!

I went to college in 1997, and graduated in the summer of 2001 with a degree of economics, then started a long journey of “climbing corporate ladder”. You couldn’t imagine how volatile a career I have. (Does a migrant worker have a “career”?) I “jumped” between all those bad jobs, moving from one city to another, never settling down anywhere.

Am I writing in Chinglish? Have you ever heard about such a word? Chinglish can be explained as “English with Chinese characteristics”. Forgive me, I am just incapable of using a proper English word to say “change one’s job”.

When I was employed, I usually played a sales/marketing role — which was not my favorite — targeting overseas markets. Believe me, I really didn’t enjoy jumping and would rather stay with one employer, work hard enough to be rewarded with reasonable promotions, climbing higher on the ladder. I would rather forget about all those impractical dreams, such as being a writer and writing in a foreign language. (Could, or is it possible that a mid-aged guy still have a dream?) However, I just failed to cultivate any interest in climbing corporate ladder, my passion was always elsewhere.

Even though I majored in economics, as an undergraduate, I’ve learned little of economics. I dare say that’s how most of my classmates graduated. We learned dancing, dating, driving a car, investing in a stock market, how to speak a second or even third language. However, economics had never been seriously taught or learned. Many of us selected courses of law, because our college had one of the top law schools in China, and a lot of courses of law were open to all students.

I lost my job this October, which was supposed to be miserable — to be a jobless guy, again, at 40! But I had just landed that job for two months, so I didn’t have much to lose. The last three years were especially “volatile” for me, I changed my job five times! Could I find a new job? Or, if the question being asked correctly, am I still employable? How could those smart and cold-hearted employers fail to detect my unemployability?

You disclosed your email address and encouraged readers to send you emails. So, I thought, why not having a try, writing a letter in English? Haven’t I being waiting for such a golden opportunity to practice English writing all my life? How could I afford to miss such an occasion? So I decided to write this letter.

Many thanks for reading me!

(Written in December 2018, revised in September 2020)