The Giving of Names

               There is a mob 15 students crowded around my computer, anxiously watching what I type, not understanding a single word (until I pointed out that they had learned the word “what” when they learned the sentence “What’s this in English?”). They beg for me to play music, but other than that seem content to simply watch me type.

               It was a break in between periods of evening study hall Friday night with seventh grade Class 183 that I had been assigned just hours before. The school administration makes it so most teachers can go home early (we would consider it slightly late in the US – around 5:30) by assigning the three periods of evening study hall (this name is slightly misleading – while some teachers do just allow their students to study and do work during evening study hall, most, including me, teach lessons, though Friday is generally an exception to the rule) to one teacher per class. Thus, Friday night from 6:40 to 9:15 found me teaching seventh grade Class 183.

               While I did allow the students to study by themselves for most of the time, I spent the first period reviewing their newly given English names. Many of the students had trouble pronouncing their English names, and I had yet to give them name tags to write them down, a task that also required time and supervision (telling them explicitly how and where to write it [large, clear, and on one side, with their Chinese name on the other] and correcting any misspellings). The students also laughed at some of the names for no apparent reason (Anna, Olivia, and many more). I like to think that I would have caught any names that sound like dirty words in Chinese, but that is really just wishful thinking. Still, I do think that for a lot of them it was just strange and funny to hear the sounds their classmates and I were saying. Finally, by the end of the period all 60 kids in the class were equipped with their English names, from Allen to Walter.

The giving of English names was a task unto itself. I have around 360 students in six different classes, and I wanted, for the most part, to give a different name to each student. Moreover, if possible, I wanted to make the names significant for the student and, if possible, for me. Finally, there were some names I had to avoid do to difficulty in pronunciation or due to their meaning in Chinese (for instance, I stayed away from the name Ben or Benjamin because in Chinese笨, or ben, means stupid).

I began the process of naming by going to the surveys I gave during the first week of class. On these surveys, I had asked students to write their name, their age, the amount of time they had studied English, their parents’ jobs, their own dream job, and their hobbies. I also asked them to write down their English name if they had one, which in the end applied to about 10 out of my 360 students. With the first class I gave name to, Class 187, I tried to make English names fit to either the sound of their Chinese name or to their dream job or favorite hobbies (or better yet, both). Thus, I gave the girl whose Chinese first name was “li” the name Lisa, the girl who said she wanted to be a star and who loved to sing Adele, and the girl with the character 红or “red” the name Scarlett. This strategy worked for the first 20 to 30 students, but it was astonishing how long it took me to figure out how to read the names (the names were often messily written, and characters used in names are often used few other places in Chinese, making them difficult to recognize) and how quickly I ran out of ideas for names.

I then found myself seeking additional sources of inspiration. Enter friends and family, Harry Potter, Shakespeare, Arrested Development, Neil Gaiman, All the King’s Men, the Wheel of Time series, and a website with the most popular boys’ and girls’ names in the US in 2013. Harry Potter names alone took care of a Class 184 (I left out the strangest names like Minerva, Severus, and Albus, going only as far as Horace and Percy) while Shakespeare covered about half of the honors class, Class 188 (again, I stayed away from the very difficult names like Malvolio, Mercutio, and Benedick, but was too tempted not to name students Prospero, Cordelia, Portia, and Beatrice). Meanwhile, the website filled in any leftover names. In the end, I had around 300 unique names. While I was unable to give them all names that meant something to me or to them, I was able to give what I consider good, interesting names to the all of them. Right now, some of the names have personal or literary significance to me (like Laura or Pip) while others are just cool names (like Aspen and Zander), but I think that by the end of my two years in Dazhai, they will all mean a lot to me.

Dazhai Middle School has a scholarship that past fellows started that gives money to the top performing and best behaved students of the school. Pictured here is Principal Feng and my third year co-fellow, Yang Yue.

All the scholarship winners along with Yang Yue, Hanxiong, Principal Feng, and several vice principals.

The weather was far from ideal for the ceremony, and the grounds around the construction site (which we have to walk through to get from the dorm to the teaching building) were flooded and muddy.

My first real attempt at cooking. Those who know me well will be unsurprised to see I decided to make chocolate chip pancakes.

Pancakes, book, and a view.

A terrible translation. It is not, in fact, "Subtropical chicken tail juice," but rather passion fruit juice. Not sure where they got that translation from.

After my first haircut in Dazhai.

The barber shop floor got its first taste of blonde(-ish) hair.

Beautiful, huge local vegetables. The cucumber was about as thick as my calf.

While the rain brought muddy grounds, it also brought beautiful, dramatic skies.