Because I'm usually the one asking a Chinese person to 'read' Chinesecharacters for me when I don't understand the writing on a product orsign, I always feel tickled when a Chinese native asks me to translatea product printed in English.

My very first, and certainly not the last, such encounter was back inZhenjiang, when a fruit vendor with a Charlie Chaplain moustachehanded me a Cartier watch and asked me where it was made. I didn'tknow the word for Switzerland, but I went home and looked it up. Don'trecall it now, but he seemed pleased with it.

Tonight, after mistakenly agreeing to sit at a table with a man who'dalready had three bottles of beer and had not finished his plate ofvinegar-soaked jiaozi, I got home, ready to wash clothes, and realizedwe were out of powder.

I've never commited the word for detergent, and so I'm always saying,"Wash clothes sand," which isn't how you say it, and making up for mystupidity by miming a native handwashing clothes.

The guy next to the small-buy-something shop, whose wife and babyreturned to his hometown while he sweats out his hallway-sized home and delivers mail on a big green bicycle and spends his evenings perched outside with the teeny-tiny man who turns out not tobe a pimp.

He asks me, "Are you buying beer?" And I"m like, no, I'mbuying wash-clothes-sand, and he tells me to wait a minute. The shopowner laughs and says she didn't understand what else he said either.

He pops back out of his darkened entranceway moments later with a pinkbottle of beauty product. It was all in English. He asked me what itwas.

I tried to explain: "You know, sometimes you're cooking, andyou open the gas, and then, Ow! Fire. Hurt. You know? And sometimes,the sun is too hot and your skin turns red."

They laughed, and the man asked, just to further clarify, "So you'resaying that it's not shampoo?"