Mr. Ding’s Chicken Feet: On a Slow Boat from Shanghai to Texas

Chapter Eight: Dolphins Are Not Fish

UWP: Kendall: Mr. Ding’s Chicken Feet page 147 147 Dolphins Are Not Fish A long the journey between continents, certain customs changed from Chinese or American to Chinglish. Having read that it was most polite to address Chinese people formally , I’d begun by calling the men Mr. Wang, Mr. Zen, Mr. Zhao, and so on. And I’d thought the crew would like to call Barry and me by our last names, as well. Barry put up with that for about three days, and then he came barreling into the bar in the middle of a class. “What’s with this ‘Mr. Bradley’ shit? Can’t you teach these guys to use my first name?” “I’d be glad to,” I said. “Only I understood that the Chinese custom was to use surnames.” The students were leaning forward, trying to make out what we were saying. “You got ears? They call each other just Wang, Gu, Pan, whatever . Right?” he addressed everyone in the class, speaking much too rapidly. “Don’t y’all just call each other your last names? Gu, they call you Gu, right?” Gu looked helplessly at me. “It’s okay,” I said softly to him. “Okay, Barry. We’ll work on it.” “Great. Sorry to bust in on you.” He swung off down the passageway , and I turned back to my befuddled students. “Now,” I announced, “we will take a break.” While they filed out, to drink tea or to smoke, I looked over the crew list that Olaf had given me, which included all the crew’s names, birth dates, and jobs. If Barry wanted a change, fine. I agreed that the Chinese men should get used to referring to Americans by their first names. In China the family name came first, but Gu couldn’t introduce himself as Gu Hai Bin because then the Norwegians would call him Mr. Bin. When my students came back I explained to them that in the United States and Europe, we have the given name first, then the family name at the end. This struck my students as exceedingly odd. I had to repeat it many times and give many examples on the board. “My name is Ji Lian, Gillian,” I said. “My family’s name is Kendall— that’s the end of my name. Now let’s try saying names in the American way. Mr. Gu, when you are introduced in the United States, you have to say your name is Hai Bin Gu.” Gu looked ready to explode with amazement. He stood up, straining over the table to see his name as I wrote it on the board: “  .” When he saw it, he shook his head wildly and sat back down. The others in the class laughed and sang out the name, pointing to Gu, and slapping each other on the back. I might have just told the best joke in the world. “What’s so funny?” I said. “Zhao, why is everyone laughing?” Zhao could hardly sputter an answer through his glee. “He name—name not Hai—Hai Bin Gu—” Hearing it out loud made everyone laugh even more. I let them get it out of their systems and, when they were done gasping and wiping their eyes, I carefully asked Gu if he could say his name in the new way. He did so, but he barely got it out through spurts of giggling. UWP: Kendall: Mr. Ding’s Chicken Feet page 148 148 Dolphins Are Not Fish UWP: Kendall: Mr. Ding’s Chicken Feet page 149 149 It was the same with every student. We went around the room, putting their family names last, and they could hardly breathe for laughing. The captain laughed so hard he turned purple in the face, coughed, and got hiccups. He had to leave the room, and we heard him guffawing down the hall. No one could explain the joke to me—Zhao and the chief engineer just kept saying that the names sounded very odd to them. When they’d laughed themselves into a shiny-eyed stupor, I repeated that from now on we would be less formal. “You can call Mr. Bradley ‘Barry,’” I said. “That is his first name. Barry.” “Bally,” repeated Zhao, using the Chinese variant of the hard “r.” The rest of the class copied him, reciting Barry’s new name, the one he’d asked for. “No...