Chinese Brother

I've gotten myself another brother. But this time round, I've gotten a Chinese brother. Li Yan is my student. He is a terrible student but a very nice boy. He's from Weifang, Shandong. His province is famous for white radish and he gave me one to try. I've never eaten white radish raw but it was really fresh and delicious! Li Yan is really tall! Most people in Shandong are like that. Since he's from China, his parents had to follow the one-child policy. He says being an only child is so lonely, so he wants to have an older sister to 'teng' and care for him.

"Why not an elder brother?" I asked.

"Because I'm so naughty, if I have an elder brother, he would be worse than me. Then he would bully me!"

The way we communicate is funny. His english is terrible and my mandarin..... Well..... Let's just say my A1 for Chinese is not justified. My mandarin is like 50x better than his english.... When we see each other in person, it's no problem as we can speak mandarin. Just that my mandarin seems to come out in chunks..... But online, it's a totally different story. He has problems understanding what I'm typing in english, and I do not know how to type using the chinese characters. So I have resorted to typing in hanyu pinyin! How long has it been since I revised my hanyu pinyin?! And guess how he replies to my online messages? Using han zi! He wanted to use hanyu pinyin to reply, but I think I would rather read the chinese characters than to guess the different sounds of hanyu pinyin! I'm helping him to improve his english and he is helping me to revise my chinese!