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 ducation
is, as everyone knows, taken very seriously in China. Two of the
grandest and — to judge from externals — best-constructed
new buildings in the neighborhood are the middle school my nephew
attends and the corresponding high school. At the latter, college
entrance examinations were being held this last week. This has caused
great inconvenience for everybody because the mothers of the examinees,
in order to minimize noise, have closed down the street in front
of the school, erecting barricades at each end. It's a major road,
and everyone has to detour through crowded and ill-paved back streets.
No one dares defy the mothers though. I saw one minibus driver try,
edging past one of the barricades when the mothers were distracted
elsewhere. They soon spotted him though, and converged on him like
antibodies on a bacterium. I thought I was going to witness another
Reginald Denny incident. "Can't the authorities act to keep the
road open?" I asked a cousin. He laughed. "They wouldn't dare."
 Someone
called me "Comrade" the other day. It was a half-crazy old beggar-woman
on the streets of a small town in eastern Manchuria, a very out-of-the-way
place, but it jolted me nonetheless. In two weeks back in China
this was the first time I have been called "Comrade" — the
universal form of address 20 years ago. I have the impression that
this whole area of the Chinese language is in a state of flux, and
that Chinese people are not quite sure how to address each other
when they meet as strangers. The loose rule seems to be: anyone
in a service job is called fuwuyuan ("serviceperson"); anyone
with a claim to having trained extensively for his job is a shifu
("master"); any youngish woman is a xiaojie ("Miss"); anyone
else defaults to "Mr." or "Mrs." I find that I am generally addressed
by strangers as "Mr.", being a foreigner apparently perceived as
requiring no special training. Similar uncertainties occur all over
the modern world, I think. I have noticed that my children's playmates
do not know how to address me. Occasionally they call me "John,"
which I dislike hearing very much from eight-year-olds. None of
their parents seem to have taught them that "Mr. Derbyshire" is
the correct form. Why not?
At
the banquet where he announced his Party membership, Fifth Uncle
passed some disparaging remarks about the Falun Gong sect, against
whom the Party is waging all-out war. This stirred Rosie to protest.
She has a dear friend in New York who is an ardent FLG disciple.
He has lent her their "Bible" and some videotapes that teach FLG
meditation techniques. A spirited conversation broke out around
the table (there were a dozen or so adults present: it was a private
room). Only Fifth Uncle and Rosie's father — a Party member
since 1956 — took the official line. Most of the others were
more or less sympathetic. Sample remarks:
-
Ten thousand of them assembled in Tiananmen Square that time.
Yet when they left, there wasn't a scrap of litter left behind!
-
The Party, with all its prestige and propaganda, has 80 million
members. FLG, in spite of all the persecution, has 100 million.
What does that tell you about the appeal of their beliefs?
- [This
one from a person who had read the FLG "Bible" himself]: The main
principles they teach are truth, kindness, and forbearance. Yet
the government says they are "leading people astray". How can
they be "leading people astray" by teaching truth, kindness and
forbearance?
Where their nationalist passions are not engaged, the Chinese people
can see through their government's propaganda with no difficulty.
I have
an odd, not-much-shared fascination with onomastic fashions. My
own kids' names were chosen in a conventional way, from the histories
of my family and my country, and from the Bible. Their elementary-school
classmates, however, are mainly Kyles and Dylans, Ashleys and Brittanys,
names which (snobbery alert here) seem to me as rootless and ephemeral
as if they had been plucked from among the brand names on the shampoo
shelves of my local supermarket. I have not much explored the meanings
of current Chinese given names, beyond a vague feeling that they
are more whimsical than those of older generations, but there is
definitely a fashion here recently for one-syllable given names.
If you are Chinese you have a family name, almost invariably one-syllable
(the only exception you are likely to encounter is "Ouyang"), and
a given name that may be either one syllable or two. The family
name is placed first, so that a person whose name is Liang Weilin
has family name "Liang" and given name "Weilin". If a person has
a two-syllable given name like this, you use it to address him informally:
"Hey, Weilin!" When a person has a one-syllable given name, however
— as it might be, Liang Yu — you hail him by the entire
name: "Hey, Liang Yu!" Well, the fashion for one-syllable given
names is now running so strong that people are dropping syllables.
My twin cousins, full names Liu Jinfang and Liu Yaofang, have let
it be known that they wish to be addressed as "Liu Jin" and "Liu
Yao". I am still trying to come up with a sociological explanation
for this. All that my Chinese acquaintances can tell me is: "It
just sounds cool."
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