8/31 e-mail from me to Li Li, “senior executive director at Palo Alto Commons and The Avant” (lightly edited):
Talking with you briefly about your path from China to Palo Alto brought back a gigantic flood of memories of my teaching at what was then the Beijing Language Institute in 1985 (under a program of country exchanges of college professors — I was exchanged by Fang Li of BLI, and then sponsored his time a bit later at Stanford).
I taught two courses: a general introduction to sociolinguistics, and then a more technical syntax course Fang Li chose to label “Zwicky construction grammar”. Afterwards, a young BLI colleague took me sightseeing (the Wall, Hangzhou, Suzhou, Shanghai, and more). Significantly, most of it was made much more interesting because when BLI had to fill out forms about my class status, though I was indeed a college professor and apparently an elite, my family history quite clearly put me as belonging to the proletariat: workers and peasants.
As a result, I was paid, and generally dealt financially, not in Foreign Exchange Certificates, but in renminbi, people’s money. And I got a lovely certificate I was to carry everywhere that identified me as proletariat and said I was a friend of the Chinese people and commanded respect. Although in Beijing I lived and dined (entirely on Chinese food) in Friendship Hotel, with other “foreign experts”, on the road I was mostly in with the other proles, which suited me perfectly.
But no certificate could hide my stereotypically American appearance (hairy, big nose, smelly — though I showered a lot), and in the parks on Sunday I was sometimes pursued by young children giggling Mei-guo ye ye, Mei-guo ye ye (‘American monster, American monster’).
At the end of my time at BLI, there was a long drinking party — all male — with speeches and then obligatory performances. I was able to wow my Chinese colleagues (a fair number of whom had been trained by the Russians, before the Americans settled in) by singing a series of passionate numbers in Russian (the unlikely gift of a Princeton education). I did not attempt to dance, despite entreaties.
There’s more, of course, much more. Well, now long ago swept away. It really was a different world.
The linguist’s annoying note: the name of my living community is anarthrous for me (just Avant), but I now see that officially it’s arthrous (the Avant / The Avant). I used to teach at (the / The) Ohio State University (and have blogged several times about the name). Here we are again.
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