“He reached into his memory to recall how Chinese conversations felt, how Mandarin sounded when it rolled naturally off his tongue, when he didn’t have to pause to remember the tones of the next word he uttered. But he was forgetting. That terrified him. Sometimes, during practice conversations, he found himself blanking on a word he used to toss around constantly. And sometimes he sounded, to his own ears, like a European sailor imitating Chinese without knowing what he said.”
