My daughter spent her ‘terrible twos’ in the strict control of a Chinese preschool (and in somewhat inarticulate culture shock), where her mostly 3-year-old classmates would greet her like a celebrity every morning with “秋秋来了!” She would rarely smile all day, until I picked her up in the afternoon. That and the little old ladies of Guangdong who couldn’t resist pinching her cheeks made it a bit of a traumatic year for her. People in the north were much more restrained in that regard.

My own name is 林蜀道. How I got the name is a bit of a long story but I like it since few Chinese seem to forget the easy to remember “Shudao” part of it, which comes from a poem by 李白. The poem is about the difficulty of climbing the mountain roads of Sichuan and is known as 蜀道難. I love some of the beautiful natural images of the poem. Most Chinese I have met seem to know the first few lines of the poem, perhaps they learn it in school. Ironically, though, I have yet to enjoy the experience of hiking in Sichuan for myself – something I very much look forward to.

Actually, I also have a funny story about the name. When I did some part time faculty technical support work at Columbia University while a masters student there, I ended up spending a lot of time working on computers in the language departments. On one occasion I was sent in to fix a minor printer problem of some kind in one of the offices of the Chinese language instructors, who knew me already as Shudao. I ended up making the printer problem a lot worse than when I found it. Apparently (I heard from a friend) they then started calling me 蜀道難 but instead of the 難 (nán = difficult) of the poem (“the roads of Shu are difficult”), they used the fourth tone (nàn) for the character (“Shudao is a disaster”).