"Jim.  I must ask you," one boy interrupted me during one conversation I was having with another kid.  "Do you like the NBA?"

"Yea," I said, wondering why this question was important enough to stop my other conversation. 

"Who is the tallest player in the NBA?" 

"Yao Ming." 

"The tallest player is the devil." 

"What?" 

"The tallest player is the devil." I had no idea what he was talking about.

"No," I said, "the tallest player is Yao Ming."

"Yes," he said, before running away to talk to friends.   At least that's what I thought he was saying.  He was almost certainly talking about something else, but the words I wrote above are exactly the ones that my ears heard on that day.  I must have misheard him, but I will never know how.  Perhaps the majority of my conversations with Chinese people, in both Chinese and English, suffered from some major misunderstanding like the one I write about above. 

I had many, many fewer of these misunderstandings when I talked to Grace, though.  I met her randomly one day when I happened to be talking to her friend.  Finally, her friend introduced Grace to me."Hello.  Nice to meet you," Grace said in a near-perfect American accent.

   "You speak really well!" I told her immediately.

   "Thank you," she said, again in her near-perfect accent.

      I wouldn't let her leave me.  I had to talk more with this 15-year-old with the perfect accent.  I found out that she wants to take the SATs and study medicine at Columbia University.  I was floored by her ambitions, yet the truly calm, self-assured tone of her voice told me she was not lost in a fantasy world. Any 15-year-old Chinese girl who can speak English as well as she can (I could speak at a normal speed with her, and use pretty much any word I wanted to and she would understand), without having been to an American or international school (she grew up in the normal Nan Fang public school system) is truly something special, as my experience dealing with hundreds of Chinese students up to that point had taught me.  It turns out Grace is the only girl in her 5,000 student school who plans to take the SATs (at least she thinks she is).  She learned much of her English from an American English teacher she had years ago.  An older man, he would have Grace to his home for lunch every day and they would speak in English.  Another teacher told me that Grace saw the man as sort of an American grandfather to her.

   I can only imagine what she will be doing with herself someday in the future, practicing medicine in America as she plans on doing today.  Considering that she will probably score about an 2300 on her first practice SAT (admittedly, with my help defining the words that she does not know for her as she solves the problems), I suspect she will achieve her goals.  She knows more about American colleges than I do today.