Ni Jiao Shenme Mingzi?

My first attempt to speak Chinese on this long stay in China was not encouraging. After the grueling transcontinental flight, I was greeted at the Shanghai airport by…no one. Hundreds of people stood holding signs as I exited from the international gate, but I saw no sign bearing my name. Surely they could not have missed me, with my head poking out above all the rest. I walked up and down the line several times with no better luck and then began to thumb through my phrasebook to learn how to say, “How do I take a bus to Suzhou?” Then, two men came toward me. One of them carried a small square of cardboard with my name scribbled on it.

“Sorry we are late,” Zhou said. “There was much traffic coming into Shanghai tonight.”

Zhou and his companion took my fat suitcases and led me out to the deck where they had parked. Zhou and I conversed a little along the way, mostly small talk about the flight. I had corresponded with Zhou several times by e-mail in making arrangements, but I quickly discovered that that he is much easier to understand in writing than in speech. He speaks Chinese, Japanese, and English, and, to my ear, sometimes interchangeably.

His companion said nothing the whole way to the van and remained silent as Zhou sped away from the airport. I presumed that he could speak little or no English, but I wanted to acknowledge him in some way. After all, he had just hauled a seventy-pound suitcase for me. So I drew on my store of a dozen stock phases that I knew in full and believed I could pronounce passably well.

“Ni jiao shenme mingzi?” I asked. (What is your name?)

He paused for thirty seconds, as if pondering the deep philosophical scope of the question and the psychology of personal identity.

“Sorry,” he said at last. “I can’t speak much English.”

I’m happy to report that I’ve improved somewhat in my pronunciation of Chinese since that blundering start, but that was just the beginning of my problems learning names.

The biggest challenge is in my classes. I have 245 students in seven classes, with between thirty and forty in each section. About 220 of those students are young women, and the disproportion both helps and hinders my ability to learn their names. It helps by ensuring that I can learn all of the boys’ names with ease. In one section, I have thirty-four girls and two boys. When Asuka and Crazy are absent, as they often are, I notice. As for the girls, the imbalance hinders, and I can only guess.

After twenty weeks of teaching them, I estimate that I know about one-third of my students by name. I tried to use seating charts to improve my retention, but, for several reasons, this didn’t work as well as I had hoped. First, the students didn’t observe my directive to sit always in the same place. More than once, I stole a glance at my chart and confidently called on a student by name only to find the person occupying the seat staring blankly ahead while another student pointed to the other side of the room. Second, for my students, English names are disposable and often don’t stick. A girl named Sunny morphed into Summer and then Spring, all within a few months, as variable as the seasons. Another girl called Tony grew weary of gender bending and settled on the more traditional Alice.

These difficulties occurred in my writing courses for second-year students, all of whom had selected English names before they met me. This was not the case with my oral English classes for first-year students. About half of these students didn’t have English names at all when the semester began. As described in his book River Town, Peter Hessler, during a teaching assignment in China in the mid 1990s, resolved a similar problem by assigning English names to his students, often giving them joke names to amuse himself. Claiming such power over the identity of students struck me as neo-colonialist, and if I were to assume it, I could only do so in good faith by changing my own name to Mr. Kurtz. Instead, I encouraged the students to choose an English name. I didn’t force them to, and most did not. Thus, I was left with seating charts half-full of names that continue to befuddle me. As I write this, I’m looking down at one of those charts, which includes the following row of names: Zhang Ting, Xu Jinjie, Lu Yi, Liu Yi Si, and Hu Xiao Yan. Despite working with them for twenty weeks, I can’t put a face to any of these names.

Among the second-year students, some of the English names they had chosen are quite memorable. Here are just a few of my favorites: Crazy, Coffee, Sunshine, Winter, Eleven, Lemoncy, Lemon, Terrific, Jones, Careful, Rainy, Cherry, Main, Libra, Trackle, Cooking, Seven, Stony, Florrie, Summy, Penguin, Cherish. A few of these names are rough translations of the students’ Chinese names. Most, however, are expressions of taste: a favorite season, number, animal, beverage, or activity. Lemoncy and Trackle stand out, for they appear to express a taste for the pleasure in the sounds of words that lack sense. Finally, a few names hint at the nature of the student, but the hints sometimes clash with perception. Terrific, a stone-faced boy who never interacts with me and rarely with any of his classmates, evidently thinks very highly of himself, even if he keeps the reasons for his high regard hidden behind the mask of his silence.

From talking with other foreign teachers in Suzhou, I’ve learned that this pattern of naming among Chinese students is quite common. The best name I’ve heard thus far came from a fellow American, who told me that he has a student named Lucifer in his English poetry class. Let’s hope, for my colleague’s sake, that Lucifer is content with his grade at the end of the term.

Initially, these names were simply humorous to me, and I wondered why the students didn’t choose “proper” English names. The more I think about the power of naming, however, the more I sense my students chose names of greater significance than my own. Cooking and Careful say more about the individual’s identity than a name like William does. I know that William derives from the German words for “will” and “helmet,” but what in the world does that have to do with me? Even my surname is empty. It’s the adoptive name of my father, and I have no relatives outside my nuclear family who bear it. Unless I surprise myself by having a child, it will die along with me, and none will mourn its loss. Perhaps, like my students, I should choose a new name, to make my name, too, an expression of taste or nature. Perhaps like a fasting Indian who has met his totem animal, I should view this journey as a rite of passage and return home with a new name.

While I ponder a new name for myself, I will continue the struggle to learn the names of my students. In China, after the long break for Spring Festival, classes resume with part two of the writing and oral English courses. This means that I will teach the same 245 students in exactly the same groups. Such an arrangement has many disadvantages, the most prominent among them the fact that my bag of teaching tricks is nearly empty after twenty weeks. In fact, I’m not quite sure what I will do. After twenty more weeks together, I fear we will become quite bored with one another at best; at worst, I envision chaos and violence and a harrowing flight in tattered clothes to the American embassy.

The only advantage that I can see is that I will have twenty more weeks to learn my students’ names. Even so, I doubt that I will ever fix all 245 in my brain. My Chinese friends have tried to console me by assuring me that teachers in China never know all of their students by name, but, still, I can’t shake the American sense that not knowing their names is a sign of not caring. And I can’t help but look ahead to my last days in China, when a student will approach me to inquire about her grade in the course, and I’ll be forced to make some of my last words in China echo some of the first: “Ni jiao shenme mingzi?”

Mao: A Life in Six Parts

1

What do men
born to kill millions
look like at birth?

Do they cry their way
out the dank canal
or do they hatch
impervious to pain?

Do their mouths suck
with telling force
and a hunger
no milk can sate?

When they crawl,
do their mother’s weep?

When they walk,
is there something
awful in the gait?

2

At twenty-four,
sharp-tongued and lean,
he set out on foot
seeking China,

his pockets bare,
feeding off monks
in time-sealed robes

and feudal temples,
floating the short
draft of gratitude.

A seer studied his palm:
“You could kill ten thousand
without blinking an eye.”

Unblinking, he smiled,
knowing how low
she’d set the bar.

3

Hard rules he learned
at Futian:

a live enemy
is worth more than
a dead enemy.

for a while.

truths that hide
can be pried
from beneath

a man’s fingernails.

the way to right
knows no limits,
is a path paved

with stones of wrong.

cruelty in the right hands
is a kind clasp.

4

Greek-like,
she learned the folly
of wedding a god—

sharing the march,
bearing his children,
freeing his bowels
with her bare fingers,

out-breathing him,
broken, alone.

Once, he sat
in her mad room
and spoke of the past,

this flesh made myth
who sired a nation
and left his own child
by the side of the road.

5

A most guileful
gardener was he,
who grew flowers
to sever the buds.

Come out, come out,
reticent rose;
come out, come out,
you wary mumes,

let one hundred
flowers blossom
in the garden
of discontent

so that color can be
purged from the earth
and the lotuses
drowned in their blooms.

6

Do embalmed men
muse as they float
between death and life?

Do they note words
spoken by callers
to their crypts

or see in faces
the misshapen ghosts
of themselves?

Do lips ever quiver
to smile or speak
or bones long to sleep?

How do they feel,
deprived of a heart,
awaiting the keeper
to cut off the light?

Suzhou Blues II

Last summer, after returning from a three-week language study program in China, I wrote a song called “Suzhou Blues.” The song has a tone of affectionate and mocking complaint, for mosquitoes, intense heat, linguistic ineptitude, and dirty water don’t rise—or rather fall—to the level of suffering required for a true blues. Instead, a blues with such content cannot be more than a parody, no matter how much the guitar and harmonica riffs bend to approximate the sound.

Now, nearly mid-way through eleven months of living and working in China, I feel that I could sing an authentic blues about my life here, if only I had verse and a new melody. Lacking either, I must make due with prose and write an essay that chants the blues in monotone or else lapse into parody. Or perhaps a little of both.

I got them Suzhou Blues
and I can’t get ‘em out of my mind.
No matter how far I roam,
I’ll never leave them Suzhou Blues behind.

I came to China less in search of something and more in flight. While I’ve always been enchanted with traveling and experiencing life in cultures different from my own, I would not have signed on to teach in China for a year had my marriage not been terminally ill. It was too emotionally entangling for me to separate while remaining in Maryland, and the distance in this respect has done me much good. Generally, however, I concealed my primary motive in the months before I departed. Dozen of times, people asked me questions like this: “What about your wife? Will she go with you? Will she visit? Will you come home during your break?” I answered such inquiries in vague terms—not exactly lies but with words that were surely less than honest. I have come to think of all of this as the secret history of my trip to China and my reticence as the fulfillment of a social obligation. Our culture has rituals in response to one kind of grief, but when a marriage dies, we lie. Even now, I sense that I am saying more than I ought to. Even now, I am unwilling to say more.

I intended for the year I spend here to be a buffer between what came before and what is to come afterwards. The trip has more or less already achieved the purpose. I don’t know exactly what I will do when I go back to the US, but I will not return to my old life. This is probably the most powerful force in the Suzhou blues I’m presently feeling. My main reason for coming here was to sever ties with the past, and I have already accomplished the goal. Yet here I am, idling in the long break between terms, facing another semester with the same 245 Chinese students whose names I can’t remember. Those in flight, I suppose, can’t escape the fact that, in life, we are always seeking purpose, whether we set out to find it or not.

Well, it’s four flights up
to your room in the Dongwu Hotel
where the mosquitoes are swarming
and the air conditioner don’t work very well.

Maybe, as the parody lyrics suggest, it all comes down to climate in the end. The mosquitoes, of course, have long since perished, and the only creature stirring outside these days is a lean and filthy cat that has taken to waiting by the door of my building for me to feed him. I’ve started calling him Mao for two reasons: 1) ‘mao,’ pronounced in the first tone, is the Chinese word for ‘cat’; 2) appropriating the name for such purposes cuts the chairman down to size. Mao is the closest friend I’ve made in China, and we have come to depend on one another as only close friends can. Without me, he would likely die of starvation this winter, and without him, I would lose the sense of knowing that someone here is happy to see me. Maybe, purpose for me has always been bound up in caring for someone or something. Maybe, without that, I am lost.

Winter is deceptively harsh in Suzhou. It rarely snows here, but the cold is a damp cold, a chill floating on beads of mist that squeeze through pores and ice the bones. There are deciduous trees in Suzhou with leaves that stay green all year, shaking in the taunting wind and giving the false sense that, as I look out my window, it surely cannot be winter. And the air conditioner really doesn’t work very well. In winter, the problem is mostly a matter of spatial arrangement. The air conditioner in my room was installed about a foot from the ceiling. As we all know, heat rises. Were I a fly, I could hang upside down and stay comfortable and warm. Since I am not, I freeze close to the floor and keep my fingers thawed enough to type by squeezing bottles of boiled water.

Note: the Chinese word for air conditioner, ‘kongtiaoji,’ refers to both heating and cooling. This makes a lot sense, for whether we are making a room warmer or cooler, we are conditioning the air. Even so, it always causes a moment’s confusion when a Chinese friend asks if my air conditioner is keeping me warm. I guess this just shows how much language shapes our perceptions and makes what is actually arbitrary appear natural.

When it’s a hundred and ten
and you think it can’t go any higher,
you’ll be sweating hot rain
and you’ll feel like your skin is on fire.

If only I could have bottled some of that hot rain in July and saved it to set my skin on fire in January. Boiled water helps, but it doesn’t hold the heat for long. I don’t want to leave my room or even change out of my pajamas today. Even inside, I am wearing long underwear, pajama bottoms, three shirts, two pairs of socks, and a knit cap. I can see my breath when I talk to myself. Outside, it has begun to snow—big wind-blown flakes that melt when they hit the wet ground. Too many days are passing this way, alone in a cold room plucking phrases from a fog of words. Sometimes I wonder how I’ve managed to fit a country so vast and populous as China within the walls of such a small room. Sometimes I can’t help but laugh at myself for traveling 7000 miles to sit in a room and read about China in books.

When you’re out on the street,
people speak, and you don’t understand.
Then you know how it feels
to be a stranger inside a strange land.

I met my teacher and friend Liru for lunch on Saturday. She is busy trying to finish up a thesis on the literary theory of Milan Kundera, and I can only imagine what is like to read that in Chinese translation. I haven’t seen much of her recently—in fact, not at all for about three months. She asked how my Chinese has been progressing since we last met. “Bu hao,” I said—not well. Together, we identified the two primary reasons for my stagnation. First is the lack of desire. Learning a language is hard work, and one has to be driven from within to cut through the tedium toward mastery. Simply skimming through vocabulary lists a couple of times a week and sending text messages to friends in pinyin, as I have been doing, isn’t nearly enough. The second reason relates to the first. If the inner fire to learn is lacking, necessity can create a spark. But in Suzhou, it is too easy to live in China without speaking Chinese. Around the university and on the tourist strip of Shi Quan Jie where I live, English speakers are everywhere, and when none is to be found, a few dozen stock phrases of even poorly pronounced Chinese will usually suffice. The sad and simple fact is that I am not putting much effort into learning to speak Chinese because I don’t have to.

Despite remaining a linguistic outsider, I no longer feel like a stranger, and Suzhou no longer seems strange to me—for better or worse. Mostly, I think it’s for worse. In fact, Suzhou has begun to bore me with its familiarity. I remember the excitement I felt in coming here the first two times. Every second seemed precious to me then, and I sought to mine the depths of each moment. I took nearly a thousand photographs on those trips. I hardly take any at all now. Scenes reflected on the still canal waters once left me breathless; I don’t even notice them anymore. I tried to discern something of the lives of the people on the street by studying the lines on their faces and the reflections in their eyes. I don’t do this anymore, mostly because I rarely walk on the street at all, and I can see no face but my own in reflection on the days when I don’t leave my room.

Well, the canal water’s dirty,
and you know if you drink it you’ll die,
but your mouth is so parched you think,
“what the hell—why don’t I give it a try.”

I found myself thinking recently of Albert Camus’s dark yet hopeful essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” that begins with the sentence, “There is but one truly serious philosophical question, and that is suicide.” I had hoped this trip might give me a new sense of direction in life, but thus far that has not happened. At the very least, I had hoped it might provide a means of escape. This can never be, for, when we travel, we must bring ourselves along. This is why geographical cures inevitably fail. In his essay, Camus asserts that despite the absurdity of life we can gain meaning through pushing our stone repeatedly up the hill as an act of defiance and dignity. I like the poetry of the essay but am not fully swayed by the thought. I am not convinced that defiance and dignity are meaning enough. After one semester in Suzhou, I feel like I’ve pushed my stone to the crest of the hill and watched it roll back down into the dell. I will let it lie there a while before I begin the long ascent back up the slope. Or, better yet, I'll find another metaphor.

I got them Suzhou Blues
and I can’t get ‘em out of my mind.
No matter how far I roam,
I’ll never leave them Suzhou Blues behind.

Living in the Ever-Shortening Shadow of Mao

The huge portrait still hangs on Tiananmen Gate, but the distance between the China Chairman Mao envisioned and the China that is currently unfolding grows longer each day. And his shadow shortens in inverse proportion. In the bland square below, Mao’s embalmed body lies, stripped of its once-monumental power beyond the ability to draw a daily line of mostly Chinese tourists who file past respectfully. The wallets of everyone moving about in the square bear his image as well. Identical prints of Mao’s bust are on the one, five, ten, twenty, and one hundred yuan notes. Perhaps few think about the irony of honoring Mao in this fashion, but Mao himself seems to know. His eyes are fixed on something moving unseen to the left of the print, and his lips bend upward slightly into a thin, ironic smile.

As a foreigner living and working in China, I have found myself struggling to make sense of Mao. Toward this end, I have read three biographies, which, taken together, are like the proverbial three bowls of porridge. The first, Edgar Snow’s hagiographic Red Star Over China, presents the heroic revolutionary Mao. It is a gripping narrative, but more a matter of myth-making than historical truth. The second, Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, portrays the demonic Mao, a Mao who is just as wholly evil as Snow’s Mao is wholly good. Jung Chang’s own family suffered persecution under Mao’s regime, and she has a well-founded hatred of the man. Personal vendetta, however, is not an especially attractive trait in a biographer. The third book, Michael Lynch’s Mao, takes a measured look at the man. Lynch’s Mao is an admirable but flawed revolutionary and largely a disaster as a head-of-state. This is the conflicted legacy that the Chinese people must contend with today: what to do with the memory of a man once worshiped but now the icon of a discredited vision, a man once deemed infallible but now acknowledged even by his admirers to be deeply flawed?

Deng Xiaoping, who survived two purges by Mao to become his successor and who more than anyone was responsible for setting China on a decidedly anti-Maoist course, offered a mathematical resolution to the problem of Mao: Mao, Deng asserted, was 100% right 70% of the time and 100% wrong 30% of the time. Presumably the period of unmitigated error occurred during the last two decades of Mao’s life, with state of perfection spanning the long revolutionary struggle and the early years after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

For Westerners bred on Cold War ideology, the notion of the heroic Mao may initially be difficult to grasp. Our image of him derives primarily from the Cultural Revolution and the excesses and cruelty of those worshiping in the cult of his personality. But Mao as a revolutionary leader is truly a remarkable figure. From the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, he endured for nearly thirty years against extremely long odds to establish a new nation. He accomplished this despite the fact that both the United States and Soviet Union favored his rival for power in China, Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang.

The creation of the People’s Republic ended a century of humiliating foreign intervention and economic domination. Later, Deng would insist that his opening of the economy would lead to socialism with Chinese characteristics. On the streets of China today, it is hard to see the difference between such “socialism" and capitalism. Mao’s communism, in contrast, always remained Chinese. Marxism may have been a Western import, but Mao’s tendency was to bend Marxism to fit what he perceived to be the needs of China. As the increasingly hostile nature of China’s relations with the Soviet Union would show, Mao was a nationalist first and a communist second.

In making revolution in China, Mao not only had to combat foreign and domestic foes; more dauntingly, he had to push against the weight of a cultural tendency to treat the existing social order as divinely sanctioned. Such a worldview benefited those at the top of the hierarchy. It least served the interests of those at the bottom, the peasants and women. In the 1930s, Mao won over many peasants simply by insisting that the Red Army treat the peasants humanely—a policy never adhered to by armies in China’s long history and in marked contrast to the routine brutality and rapine visited upon the peasants by both Kuomingtang and Japanese soldiers in the 1930s. Mao offered peasants who joined the Red Army training in basic literary—the first formal education most had ever received. Beyond education, he offered them hope—a commodity nearly unknown in thousands of years of Chinese peasant life.

Mao had been a strong advocate for women since the 1920s. In a culture that still practiced foot-binding, Mao insisted on the unbinding of women in the social and economic spheres. His position would have been radical for its time anywhere but was remarkably so in China. After assuming power, Mao banned both foot-binding and prostitution and created an environment in which women might aspire to something higher than subordination to the men in their lives.

Even so, Mao always embodied contradictions. He waged revolution in the peasants’ name, but no class suffered more than the peasants once Mao gained power. The Great Famine of the late 1950s and early 1960s resulted in the deaths of approximately fifty million Chinese people—nearly all of them peasants. Each death ultimately could be attributed to failed policies of Mao: the poorly planned collectivization of farming and the demand that farmers divert attention away from their crops to smelting down household implements in backyard furnaces that produced worthless steel. Mao had created a political culture premised on his own infallibility. Consequently, Mao could not acknowledge his own failures of judgment, and the sycophants that served him dared not speak in terms other than praise, even in the face of ideas that were clearly ruinous. As a result, fifty million people died in a famine that was both the worst in Chinese history and easily the most avoidable.

Similarly, Mao’s progressive stand on women’s equality conflicted with his behavior toward the women in his own life. The public feminist, apparently, was a private patriarch and letch. Married four times, Mao discarded one woman and took up with another when it pleased him. Although he never divorced his fourth wife, Jiang Qing—the strong-willed and sadistic scourge of the arts during the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s alliance with her during the last three decades of their marriage was strictly political. While Mao may have advocated women’s equality in the abstract, he did not want an equal partner in his own life, and this ensured a rift with the outspoken Jiang Qing. From the mid-1940s on, they shared the same hard-line vision for China, but no longer a bed.

At sixty-eight, Mao took up with a teen-aged mistress, Zhang Yufeng. Among Zhang’s many duties as the chairman’s chief mistress was to procure other young women to join Mao in his “pleasure rooms” at Zhongnanhai inside the Forbidden City. Mao’s path to power had come full circle, for, as China fell into the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, Mao frolicked inside the Forbidden City with what amounted to an imperial harem. In the isolation of his unchecked power, Mao had come to resemble the decadent princes of the late-Qing period whom he had despised as a young man. The revolutionary had become an emperor. Lord Acton’s maxim about the corrupting force of absolute power could hardly find a better illustration.

Perhaps the last purely Maoist act of the People’s Republic of China was the violent suppression of the student movement in 1989. From his framed perch high above Tiananmen Square, Mao must have smiled down on that scene. But he has surely scowled at most that has transpired since. China now has a capitalist economy with a one-party state. The bargain the party has made with the Chinese people is unchallenged political power in exchange for a less invasive presence in the daily lives of ordinary citizens, increasing choice in the marketplace in exchange for the continued dearth of political choice.

Direct challenges to the party’s hold on power still exact a harsh response, and always there is memory of Tiananmen. The balance is tenuous at best, and one wonders how long the state can cling so tightly to political power while relinquishing control in other respects. There is, however, one certainty: China is no longer Maoist. Each day, it fact, it moves a little farther away from the world that Mao made, and the position of reverence he still holds requires a little more cognitive dissonance to sustain. Perhaps one day, the gulf will grow too great, and, during the night, workmen will raise scaffolding on Tiananmen Gate and draw down the giant portrait of Mao. The sun will rise again the next morning, and the people will go about their daily routines, pretending not to notice that there is now one less star in the sky.