hello hello

Hello America!

I pray that the worst of the bad weather is behind all of you now. Things are slowly getting nicer here in Beijing as we get closer to the Spring Festival. Beijing is getting quieter now. Many of the foreign students have gone home for winter break, and most of the Chinese students have returned to their home provinces. This Bridge Cafe is fairly empty. 

It's been a couple weeks since I've come back to the Cafe. Anything colder than Seattle really demotivates me from doing anything. I have been keeping  myself busy though. I've spent much of my time studying ahead so I can lighten up my load next quarter, and well, watching more movies in a period of time than I have in the last three years. This is mostly due to the fact that my roommate likes to make regular trips to the "DVD store" to purchase some of the latest releases, including: Milk, the Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Che, and Grand Torino.

Things on the whole have just been really slow. I'm not complaining. I really enjoy this mellow break. It's given me a lot of time to reflect on the state of...everything.

I will admit that I was sort of languidly floating about my apartment for the first part of winter break, but things have gotten better. I guess it helps that I got a letter from a friend that really cheered me up. I hadn't talked to him for a couple months, and I thought that the our distance had given him reason enough to stop talking to me, but he sent me a message, saying cute things and bringing back fond memories. I gained back some my energy, and that day I moped the floors, washed the dishes, washed the windows, cleaned both bathrooms, did the laundry, dusted, and made dinner.

It's silly what a few words can do, especially when they are from the right person. 

In other news:

I was told my real Chinese name last week. Now, since I can remember, I thought my name was "吴小明 － Wu Xiao Ming - Little Bright One (of the Wu family)." The name itself isn't that special. In Chinese, it actually has a air commonness. It's a nickname that children are given. It's the name that characters in children's books have. 

After my birth mother passed away, this was the only name that my family members knew to call me. My maternal aunt had heard me called 小明 once, and when I enrolled in Chinese school when I was 7, my Aunt told the school that that was my name.  I always thought that was my name because my grandfather's name was ”吴明国 - Wu Ming Guo - the Radiant Land," and I thought my mother wanted me to be his namesake. I suppose I didn't really have any reason behind this other than that we both had 明 in our names. 

A couple days ago, I had the chance to talk to my nanny from when I was very young. When I was living with my birth mother, my nanny took care of me when my mother had to work.  I saw my nanny only a couple times a year after my mother passed away. I usually went to her house to celebrate the Spring Festival, and drop off a box of Sees candy during Christmas. When my nanny found out that I came to China, she sent me a message saying that she wanted to talk to me, and in the middle of one of our conversations she said "So, what do they call you in China?" I told her ，“小明.” "Why do they call you that," she said, "that's not your name." I was a confused. I mean, I had been going by 小明, for the last 14 years or so. I told her that my aunt had told me my name was 小明 because that was the name my mother called me (aside from using my English name here and there). My nanny then told me that my Aunt never knew my real name. When I was younger, my mom didnt really correspond with my aunt that often. My aunt was busy raising her own son, and when my mother and I would go visit my aunt, she would only playfully call me my nickname， 小明。

My nanny then told me that my mother had decided my real name at my nanny's house, because my nanny was one of the few supports in my mother's life at the time。 It was with her that my mother named me 吴天成，after two chinese phrases, 上天促成, meaning "Made by God" or "Bestowed by Heaven."

At the time, I was so lost as to why she never told me my real name before. She told me that when I was little, she and my mother both called me 天成. During that time, I was a single child in a single-parent household. When my mother passed and my father took responsibility of me, he called me George, my legal english name. She didn't want to contradict my father, and went along with calling me George. I'm still confused about how it would have contradicted anything, and well, it's strange to think that I was once known by a different name. 

I'm not really sure what to do about it now. People have gotten used to calling me 小明, and I've gotten used to people calling me it, but at the same time, this name that I just discovered is this relic from the past that I have this strange sense of duty to preserve. After all, my promise to my mother to keep learning Chinese is one of the big reasons I am in China right now, and it was she who gave me this name.

I suppose I'll figure the rest of this out as the year progresses. But for now, I should get back to studying. I miss you all, be well.

George