China Diary, Part VI
Mention of Falun Gong ignites a debate at a family event.

Mr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor
July 26, 2001 10:00 a.m.

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."