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?”