Last week a new student, Erik Eisel, came to my Chinese class. He had seen my teaching advertisement on the net and came to class at a pre-arranged time. I reminded him of the secret for learning a new foreign language: 1) please carefully observe the shape of my lips and try to pronounce the words as accurately as possible. When I was in junior high in Taiwan there was a fellow student, a girl, whose English pronunciation and conversation were fantastic. When I made so bold as to ask her for help, she replied, "My mother works in the house of a foreign pastor whose wife, on her own initiative and with great enthusiasm, teaches me English. The only demand she makes is for me to study by staring at the shape of her lips when she talks."

2) Every Chinese character is a picture. Use your imagination and try to "guess" at the meaning of the character. And practice at a fixed time every day. I can teach you to write Chinese characters step by step according to the stroke order. All you have to do is bring your eyes, ears, mouth, hands and mind to bear and establish good basic habits, then the more you study, the more you will be interested.

Yesterday Erik came to class promptly at 1:00 p.m. Right away the first thing he did was to show me the results of his practicing Chinese characters by writing them in squares. The characters were all done nice and neat, well formed, just like they should be. I praised his work, telling him he had reached the level of our junior high students in Taiwan.

Then he asked: "Isn't the character for 'to thank' [謝, xie] made up of three different characters?" What imagination he had! I answered, "Chinese use language, yan [言], to express their sense of thanks and then respectfully bow their body, shen [身], slightly, cun [寸]. And so, they use these three characters for the word "to thank." A 60-minute class seemed to just fly by.

I also remember just before class was over last time, he asked, "Laoshi, how much tuition should I give you?" I said, 'The first class was gratis. You can go shop around, see if you can find a better teacher. In the future, each class will be US$28." Who would have guessed--today he put 14 new $20 bills in a nice red envelope for tuition, saying, "Can I give the tuition for ten classes all at once?" His sense of respect really impressed me.

I then thought of what my father had taught me. When I was young and studied piano and violin, and even when I went to church on Sunday, for the tuition or donations my father used to go to the bank several days earlier for some brand new bills and put them into an envelope, and then had me take them and give them to my teacher or put them into the church collection box. My father's teaching in word and deed has stuck with me all my life and the lessons I learned have been of inestimable value.

The art of paying, throughout history and throughout the world, is not only a manifestation of body language, it is even more an expression of an internal sincerity and respect. It gives sufficient proof that the adage "if you have the money, you're the boss" is certainly not accepted in modern civilized, progressive human society. Being respectful and polite--this is the basis of our interaction with others.