It was 11:10 pm. I was worn out. I had been “on” for more than 2 1/2 hours. I felt drained. They say that the language test isn’t supposed to feel fun. In fact, you’re supposed to feel stressed. The examiners are supposed to push you. They did their job. My brain was as tired as my body.

My language score had expired ten days before I got to post. No valid language score means no language incentive pay, which is a difference of hundreds of dollars a month. Testing again to re-establish language proficiency isn’t just a matter of personal pride, there’s a financial incentive as well.

When you’re in DC for training, you can test at the testing center in the Foreign Service Institute. The tester and examiner are both in the room with you, you can interact with them naturally during the test, it’s more like a real interaction. When you test from post, you have to do it via Digital Video Conferencing. That used to be a significant thing back in the pre-plague years. It used to feel strange having a meeting over videoconference. Now, of course, we’re all used to interacting on Zoom, WebEx, Teams, Skype, FaceTime, etc.

At 7:30 am Monday morning Washington, D.C. time, I signed in to WebEx for my language test. That’s 8:30 pm China time. After a full day of work. The test finished after 11:00 pm.

This was my fifth Foreign Service language test, and the second time testing remotely from post. It was also my third Chinese language test. I tested in Vietnamese after my language training was done and I was ready to go to post. Then I tried again after almost two years of in-country work, during which time I studied with a private tutor four hours a week. Both times, I hit a wall. I improved, but not enough.

I’m clearly doing something wrong. I’m not making the progress that I want to. The last two times I tested in Chinese, I “only” got to a 3+/3+. This was the same score that I got in 2016, after two years in China. I put “only” in quotes, because a 3+/3+ is objectively a good score. I know many people who struggle to get to a 3/3. The “+” after the number means that my performance was somewhere between a 3 and a 4. The testers witnessed me wandering into the range of a 4 at times, but not consistently. So for me, the 4 isn’t an impossible goal. But exactly what am I doing wrong?

As someone who’s been a speaker of Chinese for 30+ years, and who’s put in a lot of hours of study, I was really hoping to break through to a 4. The highest score is a 5, which equates to the language ability of a college-educated native speaker. The folks in the Foreign Service Institute call that a “unicorn,” almost no one ever gets to a 5 in a language that isn’t their native tongue. But I know people who have achieved a 4 in Chinese. Why can’t I?

I have such mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, the external validation of getting to a 4 isn’t my main goal. They say that you are only really competing with yourself. As long as you can look back and see that your current performance is better than your past performance, you’re doing well. From that point of view, I’m making progress. I feel that my Chinese is getting better and better. But the external validation isn’t nothing, either.

One of my friends, a native speaker of Chinese, tested in Chinese (I’m still not sure why she did it, but whatever), and tested at the same level that I did. If my score is the same as that of a native speaker, then clearly what’s wrong isn’t my raw language ability. It must be my test-taking strategy.

Time to take stock, and re-examine how I’m preparing for the test. This isn’t over. I can test every six months. I still have more than 19 months left in this tour. There are still three more shots at the brass ring. And I’m going to take every single one of those opportunities to show myself that I can do it.

Iconic area of Shanghai.

During the dark days of the pandemic lockdown, Americans got comfortable with doing more things online: working, communicating, shopping, ordering groceries, etc. Chinese people had already been living that life for years.

So much of daily life in China requires a deep integration into the Chinese digital ecosystem, and once you’re part of that biosphere, your life gets convenient in many ways. Once you’re plugged in, your cell phone becomes your most important accessory, more important than your wallet, your ID, your cash. Your cell phone replaces all of those things. Someone told me the other day that he has stopped carrying a wallet, because everything that he needs on a daily basis, he can do with his phone.

Getting plugged into this matrix takes some work, though. It’s a multi-step process that has to occur in the correct sequence: first get a WeChat account. Then get a local cellphone SIM card. Then get a bank account. Then get a digital payment account. Then link all of them together. It takes most of a day to complete all of these steps. It’s a complicated process for a foreign newcomer. The other day someone told me that she did these things in the wrong order, and she’s still trying to straighten it all out.

And simply being able to speak Chinese isn’t quite enough. You have to know the correct words to use. The local bank, for example, didn’t understand us when we said we wanted to open an account. They were confused: why would you want a bank account? We were confused that they were confused. We need to be able to deposit money into the online payment system! Oh, the bank employee said. You need to open a bank CARD. Not a bank ACCOUNT.

Whatever.

Then we had to link the bank card (not account) to the online payment system. That required a phone call, because the account was frozen. We said that we couldn’t register our account. What do you mean, you can’t register? the customer service rep asked, mystified. You have an account already. We were mystified, too. The app says we’re frozen. Oh, was the reply, you mean you can’t LOG IN.

Whatever.

Then we couldn’t link the online payment system to the online shopping platform. Another phone call to customer service. What’s your account number? What do you mean, account number? We just got here, we don’t have an account yet! Yes you do, when you create an account with the online payment system, you automatically get an account in the shopping platform. So what’s your member number? How the hell do I know what my member number is, I didn’t even know that I had an account!!

And so on.

Eventually, we got everything sorted out. I learned some new terminology, and feel a bit more humble about my language skills. The upside is that we can use our cell phones to buy stuff, to take the subway, order food, pay for the food, rent a bicycle, call a cab, etc. China’s cybereconomy system makes the material aspects of city life much easier.

All of this convenience comes at a tremendous cost to personal data privacy, though. China has been a surveillance state for a long time, and technology makes following individuals easier and more invasive. That the government is monitoring our text messages and movement is not a secret. It’s a feature, not a bug. We had to register for a “health code” so that we can get into buildings. The Chinese government has implemented a complex social tracing network to combat the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. We are being actively tracked. The upside is convenience and safety. Petty crime is pretty low, largely due to the ubiquitous security cameras and cellphone tracking. The downside is that the authorities can and do get into individuals’ business at an Orwellian level.

The Matrix has us.

The building that I live in goes up to floor 35, but there aren’t 35 floors in the building. Why? Superstition.

You might have experienced this in hotels or office buildings in the United States: there often is no floor 13. That is because 13 is an unlucky number in western culture. In China, the unlucky number is four, because “four” in Chinese (四) rhymes with the word for “death” (死).

This is the bank of buttons in the elevators in my building. What’s missing?

Not only is there no floor 13, nut there is also no floor 4. Or 14. Or 24. Or 34.

So, even though in theory there are 35 floors in this building, in reality, there are only 30. Thanks, superstition!

It’s been pretty well established that COVID-19 spreads through droplets of moisture suspended in the air. Apparently, a very cautious person wants to be sure that we don’t spread the virus through the sewage system. Or maybe someone’s worried that people will be smelling stuff that normal people would avoid smelling.

When we “checked in” to the quarantine hotel, we were given a bottle of chlorine tablets, and written instructions for how to use them. We are supposed to put a tablet in the toilet before we flush down our business. This makes our poop nice and clean before it hits the sewage system.

The written instructions were to put ten pellets in the toilet, wait 30 minutes, then flush. A friend had shared the written instructions with me in advance, so the Poopoo Pellet thing wasn’t a surprise. What the hotel staff told us was different, though. The hotel staff told me to put in ONE pellet, and to flush it right away. I asked for confirmation that she said one pellet, not ten, and that we didn’t have to wait 30 minutes. She confirmed yes, one pellet, and don’t let it mellow, just flush it down.

Because it was so important to get it right, we were given written and oral instructions. I believe that this is a arbitrary bureaucratic policy informed by pseudo-science, and so the fact that two sets of instructions were contradictory does not bother me in the slightest. I think that waiting 30 minutes for the poopoo pills to do their magic, and flushing the pills down with the poop right away, are equally effective in preventing the spread of COVID-19. That is to say, not at all.

Yes, I’m pretty skeptical that even if I were carrying the COVID-19 virus, that I could spread it via my poop and pee. And if I could spread it that way, I doubt that a chlorine tablet in the toilet would prevent that. In fact, if this is a danger, then we have a bigger problem to worry about. To be honest, the whole thing sounds like something I’d hear from a certain elected official in the U.S. You know who I mean: the guy who talked about stuffing ultraviolet lightbulbs up our body cavities (or something like that). But I try not to be a jerk, and I admit that I’m not an expert on poop-born COVID, so I’m playing along.

I plop a poopoo pill into the pottie before I begin my business. The chlorine smell that wafts up from the toilet bowl invokes happy memories of frolicking in a swimming pool, during the salad days of my youth. The smell cheers me up as I sit on a Chinese toilet, waiting for this silliness to end.