Masozi, his head buzzing with Mandarin syllables and characters, lines up in the cafeteria and fills a tray with SO MUCH food and goes to sit at the Shanghai table.

"Masozi!" he says with delight.

Ayako-- who was paying attention to the Kyoto table at lunch, or at least, enough attention to know that Lan Xichen was there and to guess why-- would really, really like to talk to her upperclassmen right now.

She sits down at the Shanghai table anyway, because if said upperclassmen wanted to keep her closer they'd say so which means it'd be a personal conversation, and those can wait until they aren't in public. But. 

Masozi looks around the table. "Does anyone have books in Mandarin, I want to practice reading." 

Oh right she'd had that idea--

"The Maleficaria Studies textbooks are in everyone's native languages," she says around her fork, "so if someone lent you theirs-- not me, mine's in Japanese, but Wei Wuxian maybe-- then you'd have the same text in your native language and in Mandarin?" 

Wei Wuxian hears his name. "Hey! Are you guys saying I'm great?"

"Yes, I'm saying you're extremely excellent and infinitely generous and definitely going to lend Masozi your mal studies textbook so he can compare the Mandarin version to his version." 

"Oh, yeah, sure, I'll do that."

Masozi is so delighted! He opens up both textbooks side by side and stares very hard at the characters and tries to pronounce out loud the ones he recognizes. He can recognize a few dozen by this point.

Lan Xichen should do his job and not do a Mandarin lesson.

...

Okay, one very small Mandarin lesson.

Masozi is so eager to get more Mandarin lessons! When he manages to accurately recognize a character, his whole face lights up. The first time he deciphers a whole sentence, he BOUNCES.

Teaching, it turns out, is incredibly rewarding.

Masozi is an unusually quick learner and has a pretty good memory for any character he's seen before - and he's carefully been re-organizing his notebook of decoding-notes by similarity so he can more easily track down a character he vaguely recognizes - but his main advantage here is that he doesn't seem to get frustrated, at all, ever, by the fact that he is attempting to read a book which is still almost entirely incomprehensible code to him. Or that he's still requiring frequent correction on getting the tones exactly right, and fairly frequently mixing up which character corresponds to which spoken word. He seems to have a much better visual than auditory memory; he might actually be able to read and write sentences before he can reliably speak or understand them. 

Lan Xichen is so pleased in his investment here!

Reluctantly, he says "I should go talk with some of the freshmen, we can do more tomorrow morning?" and extricates himself from the conversation. 

That's totally fine. Masozi can continue making quite a lot of progress on his own, with the two books laid out side by side.

He's pretty enthralled, but can probably eventually be engaged in conversation if anyone else wishes to try. 

Meng Yao occasionally helps when he's not busy handling a dozen other conversations.

An American shows up out of the blue. Specifically the one who's been standing on tables shouting out gossip every week. He sits down with no regard to manners or seating charts.

"I am James Holden. I want to ask after your freshmen's wellbeing and be told if there is anything that they need."

His Mandarin is not terrible? It's not good and he has an obvious accent, but he's intelligible.

"He.......llo?" 

Ayako has, in fact, been warned about James Holden. Specifically, she has been warned not to tell him anything she doesn't want the entire school to hear about come Wednesday. (The obvious corollary about things she does want the whole school to hear about come Wednesday was left unspoken, but nonetheless understood perfectly well.)

"I want to make freshmen happy and alive!"

"Oh! That's good! I like alive!"

(Wei Wuxian has received absolutely no instructions about James Holden, on the principle that if he were told not to tell James Holden things he would do so immediately out of spite.)

Meng Yao casually monitors this situation while pretending to be interested in Jin Zixun's class schedule.

R.....ight. 

She looks at Holden. She looks over at the Kyoto table and makes eye contact with one of the seniors, Yoshida Rin, who gives her a very subtle nod. She looks back at Holden. She looks at Masozi, and then at Meng Yao.

"Is there a thing that would help you with that?" He looks at the black kid. He didn't think there were lots of black people in china? Whatever, no point being rude about it.

"What about you? Do you need an object?"

"I'm running a store out of my room," Nie Huaisang says, "selling a variety of items intended to make life in the Scholomance more pleasant! I think that's maybe the sort of thing you'd find interesting to share next Wednesday? --I'm fluent in English, you should tell everyone."