Country Driving [135]
Sometimes a child’s name change occurs for more serious reasons. Parents believe that an inauspicious name brings bad fortune, and a child who is chronically ill might benefit from a new title. When I taught in Sichuan, one of my colleagues had a daughter who suffered from childhood cancer, and after years of treatment the parents finally gave her a new name. Around the same time, they were granted permission to have another baby by the local Planned Birth authorities, who sometimes make an exception if the couple’s first kid has serious medical problems. The sick daughter was school-age—old enough to understand exactly what it means when your name is changed and your mother becomes pregnant. Later that year the poor girl died, and I always thought it was awful that she spent her last months with an unfamiliar name. It seemed terrible to leave the world as somebody else.
Wei Jia’s given name is simple: the character jia means “good.” But it requires fourteen strokes of the pen, an unlucky number in China, and the boy’s health had never been strong. He no longer suffered from blood problems, but he often complained of stomachaches and he had a tendency to catch colds. In the early years I blamed it on boarding at school; dormitory conditions were poor and he didn’t like the cafeteria meals. But recently junk food and inactivity had become bigger threats. The parents were strict about his studies; during weekends they made sure that he stayed on the kang, doing his homework. Their respect for education was admirable, but the boy never got any exercise, and certain traditional ideas about health were counterproductive. Given Wei Jia’s chronic colds, I recommended that he eat oranges, but his mother believed that a person should avoid too much fruit during winter—it’s bad for the qi, she said. Like most people in China, Wei Jia rarely drank water. The Chinese have countless obscure beliefs about which times of day are bad for fluids, and the end result is that most people simply don’t drink much. Once, Cao Chunmei and I took Wei Jia to Huairou for a routine checkup, and the doctor couldn’t run the urine test—the boy was so dehydrated that he had blood in his sample. But I couldn’t convince the parents to make sure he drank more, ate vegetables and fruits, and got more exercise. It was typical that the father responded to the boy’s health problems by changing his name. Sometimes they seemed to grasp instinctively at the worst of both worlds: the worst modern habits, the worst traditional beliefs.
The longer I lived in China, the more I worried about how people responded to rapid change. This wasn’t an issue of modernization, at least not in the absolute sense; I never opposed progress. I understood why people were eager to escape poverty, and I had a deep respect for their willingness to work and adapt. But there were costs when this process happened so fast. Often the problems were subtle—this was hard to recognize as an outsider. In the West, newspaper stories about China tended to focus on the dramatic and the political, and they emphasized the risk of instability, especially the localized protests that often occurred in the countryside. But from what I saw, the nation’s greatest turmoil was more personal and internal. Many people were searching; they longed for some kind of religious or philosophical truth, and they wanted a meaningful connection with others. They had trouble applying past experiences to current challenges. Parents and children occupied different worlds, and marriages were complicated—rarely did I know a Chinese couple who seemed happy together. It was all but impossible for people to keep their bearings in a country that changed so fast.
Wei Jia’s new name had been selected by computer. This detail was important to Wei Ziqi—he told me that computerized name analysis was becoming more common in the cities. A man in Huairou