I spent Saturday afternoon at the Centro Cultural Beijing (北京文化馆) with two dozen, mostly young, Peruvians studying Chinese. The center is the biggest Chinese language school I’ve come across in Lima and is run by Benjamín Gutiérrez González, a Peruvian who lived and studied martial arts in China for years. One Saturday per month, the center puts on Chinese cultural activities. The occasion this past Saturday was the return of two Peruvian girls from their semester abroad in Beijing.

The girls sat at the front of the classroom, in front of posters of Summer Palace and the Great Wall, and addressed the group in Spanish. Most bases were touched: food, weather, safety, friendliness of the people, classes, professors, pollution, censorship, social life, etc. They gave Beijing fairly good marks, with exceptions being pollution – “the sky is gray; people wear masks,” initial comfort – “no one can really speak English, not professors, not other students, not people on the street, let alone Spanish,” and food – “it is not like in Peru, where we love meat; most food is cut into small pieces and greasy.”

I sat next to Ettorena, a Peruvian in her early twenties with long hair and faded blond highlights, and a predilection for all things China. Rena, or 琳娜 or 爱多琳娜 or 小爱 depending on who’s asking, has studied Chinese for two years and works in the center as a secretary during the week. When I first met her two weeks ago, she greeted me at the doorway with chopsticks stuck in her hair. We spoke in Chinese for an hour, and she showed me her key chain with the Olympic Fuwa. I asked her if she got bored at the office during the day with no one else around.

“It’s not so bad,” she told me, “I just chat with my Chinese friends on QQ. I can type characters really fast!” She jotted down some characters in my notebook, about twice as fast as I could have written them.

Rena’s dream is to go and study in China, of course. She told about a job she was planning to apply for here in Lima, at a casino called Atlantic City. The casino is looking for Chinese and Spanish speakers to cope with the influx of Chinese tourists (and gamblers). She reckons if she could land that job, she’d be able to pay for her plane ticket to Beijing sometime next year. During the talk last Saturday, Rena leaned forward with her elbows on the desk, engrossed.

After the talk, we broke into small groups around wooden tables. There were a handful of young Chinese guys there too, from Liaoning, Jilin and Beijing – themselves Spanish students at another language school twenty minutes away. The Chinese speakers dispersed to the seven tables and the groups spoke in a mash up of Chinese and Spanish.

There were three other people at my table: Pablo, a 21-year-old engineering student who’d studied Chinese for six months; Roxana, a Guangdong woman in her 70s who immigrated to Peru in 1982 and owns a shop in Chinatown; and, A Long, an angular foreign student to Lima who’d dropped out of college in Beijing and arrived here six months prior. The conversation was disjointed and tended to flow through Roxana, who was the only one who spoke both languages well.

“Let me tell you about my husband,” she began and proceeded to sketch a biography of the man for about 10 minutes, including his salary a various milestones. I followed about three-quarters of it. Pablo nodded.

“Where are you from?” Pablo asked me when Roxana had finished.

I told him and asked what the hardest part of learning Chinese was.

“Speaking and listening are not hard. Writing is hard. Reading is hard.” He paused for a beat and spoke rapid Spanish to Roxana.

“Money, health, family,” she answered, in Spanish.

Later, on my way out, I stopped by Rena’s table, which was littered with papers filled with Chinese characters.

“I’ve got to go,” I said. “Call or email me the next time you’re having Cultural Saturday, ok?”

“Dangran!” (Of course!) she beamed. “Zai jian!”