Maggie in the Middle Kingdom

How I Became a Concubine

As soon as I arrived here in May, people started asking for my Chinese name. I told them I didn't have one; I was waiting until I knew more about the language and had some trusted friends to help me. Chinese names are very different from American names, and not just in how they sound. Our names are mostly a melting pot of European/Middle Eastern languages and ancient origins, their original meaning all but forgotten. So for us, a name is often just a name. But the Chinese language is almost completely self-referential, and fittingly most of its names have meanings that all native speakers understand.

After a couple of months here, my friends Wangyen and Luo Gang insisted on giving me a name. They suggested Mei Ji, because it sounds like Maggie and, according to them, is a really great name. They wrote the Hanzi for me. Mei is a word I know well, meaning beautiful (one of my favorite Chinese characters, it combines yang [sheep] with da [big], so big is beautiful). The Ji they said was a word not used in common speech anymore, that essentially means "beautiful girl." I couldn't find it in my dictionary, so I took their word for it.

Though calling myself "Beautiful Beautiful Girl" makes me a little uncomfortable, my friends assured me this was entirely acceptable. They gave me the surname Yao (as in Yao Ming). I checked it all out with some other Chinese friends, and always got the same response: "That's a very good name." So I wrote this name on the blackboard on the first day of school and bought business cards that said Yao Meiji.

One night I was hanging out with an American guy who had a Palm Treo equipped with a Chinese dictionary. We got to talking about my Chinese name and looked up Ji in his dictionary. And there it was, Ji: imperial concubine. I went back to my printed dictionary for further research. Though the character for this Ji is not in there, both of its components are. The first part of ji is a nuzipang, the sign for woman. The second part comes from the word chen (second tone), for which my dictionary gives these translations: official under a feudal ruler; subject; minister. To chenfu is to submit oneself to the rule of; acknowledge allegiance to.

So I have been calling myself "Beautiful Imperial Concubine" for two months. And I have distributed business cards with this name. Although the Chinese seem to think nothing of it, I now know that I definitely need a new name.

Zaogao!

You know how some people like to say, "Try to learn something new every day"? I can't avoid learning every day here. Today, I learned that when you drop a cell phone in a Chinese toilet, it doesn't make a splash, just a "clunk," since Chinese toilets don't include a bowl of water like Western ones.

That's right, I dropped my cell phone in the toilet. Zaogao! This is one of my favorite Chinese words. It's an exclamation that means, "What a mess!" While I've had lots of zaogao moments in China, this is my first truly self-created zaogao.

******WARNING: The rest of this post is BORING. But it gives you an idea of how badly you can screw things up when you're a stupid laowai in China.********

I do not have my friends' phone numbers written down anywhere, and I do not have the e-mail addresses of half of the people in my phone. When I originally went to get the phone, I didn't know I would need my passport for ID, so my teacher gave them hers. At the time, this seemed like a clever quick fix. Now it means that I probably can't get a new phone for this account, with my old number, until my teacher returns from her summer vacation. In any event, I don't have my passport. It's with the Public Security Bureau along with my student visa application. And, oh yeah, I don't speak Chinese.

Finally, as this post is so short, let me direct you toward some great material on another site. This photo gallery is a collection of photos from University of Michigan students. They're all shot in China, all interesting, and each includes an explanatory caption from the photographer. Together, they paint an interesting and realistic sketch of how China is changing.