"Ha-ah, aah, ya..." so hard did the shy and stammering like boy, at age of 11, try to spit out every last breathe of his throat when practicing "how are you" for the first time with his girl desk-mate rolling her somber eyes impatiently. Desperate as he was, he would hardly believe that in his up-coming 3/4 life time, English will be strongly tied and attached to him as a foreign language, an auxiliary job hunting tool and even a spiritual harbor, nor would he imagine someday he will settle down before middle age, in a small city where the sky is literally blue and clear. 

I missed that boy and really appreciated his choice of spending his most precious campus life, career life and family life in the city of Zhoushan. It was relatively easy to get paid for a young man like me who can speak, understand English of distinctive accents and don't mind sleeping between noisy and steamy engine rooms or bitterly cold tally rooms. Similar things happened again when I shifted into roofed office, and I started to cherish the memory of being a boarding agent counting dark red iron ore grabs from one barge to another. 

Working as a civil servant seemed to be a plain job, but interpreting in investment promotion department would be quite different. Unexpected meeting translation tasks arrived when worldwide foreign investors stopped by with their fanciful products or just prototypes. Sitting at the furthest corner of the meeting table, I had witnessed a mathematician introducing anhydrous cultured seafood, a senior accountant absorbed in unmanned micro rocket mounted by liquid fuel, an elite gardener popularizing wearable night vision kit with LiFePo4 portable batteries and even a banker selling crackers and separators. For the first time, I deeply doubted that learning English in the campus was the only wise choice to get rid of any course in science. You could easily imagine that I was struggling to compose myself by using well written opening remarks like "on the behalf of XXX, please allow me to express my sincere gratitude and warmest welcome..." with deliberately lower voice to buy me some time to select better tolerable interpretation. Those meetings might last for hours before my boss announced "let's call it a day and have meal together" as closing remarks with his heavenly gentle voice. If lucky enough, I would be praised by the guests asking "where did you learn your English, the United States or Middle East?"