“They always laugh about my silly name, Qigan,” the boy said. “If I didn’t come from China, I’d say ‘Chicken’ too.”
I told both kids, “You ought to be careful about changing your names. We decided on them only after consulting a reputable fortune-teller.”
“Phew, who believes in that crap?” the boy muttered.
Our son intervened, saying to his children, “Let me think about this, okay?”
Our daughter-in-law, thin-eyed Mandi, broke in. “They should have American names. Down the road there’ll be lots of trouble if their names remain unpronounceable. We should’ve changed them long ago.”
Gubin, our son, seemed to agree, though he wouldn’t say it in our presence.
My wife and I were unhappy about that, but we didn’t make a serious effort to stop them, so Mandi and Gubin went about looking for suitable names for the children. It was easy in the girl’s case. They picked “Flora” for her, since her name, Hua, means “flower.” But it was not easy to find a name for the boy. English names are simple in meaning, mostly already empty of their original senses. Qigan means “amazing bravery.” Where can you find an English name that combines the import and the resonance of that? When I pointed out the difficulty, the boy blustered, “I don’t want a weird and complicated name. I just need a regular name, like Charlie or Larry or Johnny.”
That I wouldn’t allow. Names are a matter of fortune and fate — that’s why fortune-tellers can divine the vicissitudes of people’s lives by reading the orders and numbers of the strokes in the characters of their names. No one should change his name randomly.
Mandi went to the public library and checked out a book on baby names. She perused the small volume and came up with “Matty” as a choice. She explained, “‘Matty’ is short for ‘Mathilde,’ which is from Old German and means ‘powerful in battle,’ very close to ‘Qigan’ in meaning. Besides, the sound echoes ‘mighty’ in English.”
“It doesn’t sound right,” I said. In the back of my mind I couldn’t reconcile “Matty” with “Xi,” our family name.
“I like it,” the boy crowed.
He seemed determined to contradict me, so I said no more. I wished my son had rejected the choice, but Gubin didn’t make a peep, just sitting in the rocking chair and drinking iced tea. The matter was settled. The boy went to school and told his teacher he had a new name — Matty.
For a week he seemed happy, but his satisfaction was short-lived. One evening he told his parents, “Matty is a girl’s name, my friend Carl told me.”
“Impossible,” his mother said.
“Of course it’s true. I asked around, and people all said it sounded girlish.”
My wife, drying her hands on her apron, suggested to our son, “Why don’t you look it up?”
The book on baby names was not returned yet, so Gubin looked it up and saw “f. or m.” beside the name. Evidently Mandi hadn’t seen that it could be both female and male. Her negligence or ignorance outraged the boy all the more.
What should we do? The eleven-year-old turned tearful, blaming his mother for giving him a name with an ambiguous gender.
Finally my son slapped his knee and said, “I have an idea. ‘Matty’ can also come from ‘Matt.’ Why not drop the letter ‘y’ and call yourself Matt?”
The boy brightened up and said he liked that, but I objected. “Look, this book says ‘Matt’ is a diminutive of ‘Matthew.’ It’s nowhere close to the sense of ‘amazing bravery.’”
“Who gives a damn about that!” the boy spat out. “I’m gonna call myself Matt.”
Wordless, I felt my face tightening. I got up and went out to smoke a pipe on the balcony. My wife followed me, saying, “My old man, don’t take to heart what our grandson said. He’s just confused and desperate. Come back in and eat.”
“After this pipe,” I said.
“Don’t be long.” She stepped back into the apartment, her small shoulders more stooped than before.
Below me, automobiles were gliding past on the wet street like colored whales. If only we hadn’t sold everything in Dalian City and come here to join our son’s family. Gubin is our only child, so we’d thought it would be good to stay with him. Now I wish we hadn’t moved. At our ages — my wife is sixty-three and I’m sixty-seven — and at this time it’s hard to adjust to life here. In America it feels as if the older you are, the more inferior you grow.
Both my wife and I understood we shouldn’t meddle with our grandchildren’s lives, but sometimes I simply couldn’t help offering them a bit of advice. She believed it was our daughter-in-law who had spoiled the kids and made them despise us. I don’t think Mandi is that mean, though beyond question she is an indulgent mother. Flora and Matt look down on everything Chinese except for some food they like. They hated to go to the weekend school to learn to read and write the characters. Matt announced, “I’ve no need for that crap.”
I would have to force down my temper whenever I heard him say that. Their parents managed to make them attend the weekend school, though Matt and Flora had quit inscribing the characters. They went there only to learn how to paint with a brush, taking lessons from an old artist from Taiwan. The girl, sensitive by nature and delicate in health, might have had some talent for arts, but the boy was good at nothing but daydreaming. I just couldn’t help imagining that he might end up a guttersnipe. He wouldn’t draw bamboos or goldfish or landscapes with a brush; instead, he produced merely bands and lines of ink on paper, calling them abstract paintings. He experimented with the shades of the ink as if it were watercolors. Sometimes he did that at home too. Seeing his chubby face and narrow eyes as he worked in dead earnest, I wanted to laugh. He once showed a piece with some vertical lines of ink on it to an art teacher at his school. To my horror, the woman praised it, saying the lines suggested a rainfall or waterfall, and that if you observed them horizontally, they would bring to mind layers of clouds or some sort of landscape.
What a crock was that! I complained to Gubin in private and urged him to pressure the children to study serious subjects, such as science, classics, geography, history, grammar, and penmanship. If Matt really couldn’t handle those, in the future he should consider learning how to repair cars and machines or how to cook like a chef. Auto mechanics make good money here — I know a fellow at a garage who can’t speak any English but pulls in twenty-four dollars an hour, plus a generous bonus at the end of the year. I made it clear to my son that a few tricks in “art” would never get his kids anywhere in life, so they’d better stop dabbling with a brush. Gubin said Matt and Flora were still young and we shouldn’t push them too hard, but he agreed to talk to them. Unlike Gubin, Mandi aligned herself with the children, saying we ought to let them develop freely as individuals, not strait-jacket them as they would back in China. My wife and I were unhappy about our daughter-in-law’s position. Whenever we criticized her, our grandchildren would mock us or yell at us in defense of their mother.
I have serious reservations about elementary education in the United States. Teachers don’t force their pupils to work as hard as they can. Matt had learned both multiplication and division in the third grade, but two months ago I asked him to calculate how much seventy-four percent of $1,586 was, and he had no clue how to do it. I handed him a calculator and said, “Use this.” Even so, he didn’t know he could just multiply the amount by 0.74.
“Didn’t you learn multiplication and division?” I asked him.
“I did, but that was last year.”
“Still, you should know how to do it.”
“We haven’t practiced division and multiplication this year, so I’m not familiar with them anymore.” He offered that as an excuse. There was no way I could make him understand that once you learned something, you were supposed to master it and make it part of yourself. That’s why we say knowledge is wealth. You can get richer and richer by accumulating it within.