Ubiquitous

Ubiquitous is one of my favorite words.  Also included in no particular order are the words ironic, toboggan, polliwog, ephemeral, preposterous, quotidian, nebulous, and charlatan.  Ironically, moments when you can use "ubiquitous" correctly are few and far between.  In China, however, ubiquity is a reoccurring feature of my quotidian life.  At first, the unanimity of my students' beliefs and actions seemed preposterous.  I regularly chalked it up to a mistranslation.  I would think to myself, I'm sure she doesn't mean to say, "ALL northern people in China take cold showers."  I would assume the abhorrent generalization was purely meant to simplify her phrase lexically, but as I met people from the north of China defending and exemplifying such statements, I slowly came to accept that maybe these wide-sweeping generalizations are actually somewhat true.  Moreover, I began to hear people making the same kind of claims in Chinese.  It's no wonder then, that my students fail to comprehend the intellectual and personal diversity of countries, like America, which don't subsume the individual into a nebulous collective.  Although statements that begin, "All Chinese people…" sometimes prove to be accurate, statements beginning, "All American people…" are almost always flat-out wrong.  When I tell them that not all American people own a gun, my students look at me as if I was a charlatan sent here to sell them toboggans in summer.

As an extremely individualistic person, it grates me to encounter so many ubiquitous opinions.  To make myself feel better this semester, I am secretly using my students' similarities against them.  In their communal experience, the collective of their teachers all taught them the exact same set of mistakes, which have now been carved deeply into the Broca's area of their brains by years of rote Chinglish memorization.  I now start each class with a mistake of the week in order to snipe out each mistake one by one.  I wish I could have gotten rid of these pests while they were still just polliwogs, but it's just as effective to kill the fully formed frogs, as long as I do it before they plant their eggs in the next generation.  It was rough returning to the basics of asking, "What does ephemeral mean?" instead of always just spitting out the ever so popular, "What means ephemeral?" but it had to be done.  I hope their Chinglish proves to be ephemeral.