Birthday Duck

When I was a sophomore at Columbia, suffering through my second year of Chinese, my parents took me for my birthday to an elegant Chinese restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village. I had rehearsed my lines for a week, and when we walked through the door I looked brightly at the beautiful Chinese woman facing us and said—in what must have been preposterously bad Chinese—“We are three people. Have you table or not?” The woman beamed and led us to a table, then helped us to order a pressed duck g