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I wonder if I will be a chipped trophy, or a baseball, or a framed drawing, or a letter written in childish Chinese.
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n Su Wei’s cluttered office, Chinese calligraphy, framed photographs, and awards cover the wall. Papers and books are spread across every surface. The floor creaks as Su Wei walks across the room. From a shelf filled with thick Chinese encyclopedias, he picks up a baseball and turns it over in his hands. It is a gift from a former non-heritage student, a baseball player who impressed Su Wei with his unexpected use of a Chinese idiom one day and who now works in China. Su Wei approaches another shelf and picks up a framed drawing. On the back, in Chinese characters, a student wrote, “Thank you for saving my life.” The young woman felt that Su Wei had helped her out of depression by teaching her how to “taste Chinese.” Learning how to appreciate the melody and metaphor of the language led her to rediscover meaning in her life and eventually to pursue a master’s degree in Chinese Studies. Since 1998, Su Wei has been a senior lector of Chinese at Yale. The many gifts that occupy his bookshelves and hang on his walls are from Ma Yuanmao, Tang Kailin, Shi Liwen, and others — Yalies who usually go by their well-worn English names. But Su Wei refers to them only by their Chinese names, as if transforming them into characters from a story. As Su Wei recounts anecdotes from generations of his former students, alternately beaming with pride or raising his eyebrows with concern, I find myself in an odd position, for I am his student too. I wonder how I will be represented someday. I wonder if I will be a big chipped trophy, or a baseball, or a framed drawing, or a letter written in childish Chinese.
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Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag
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t Yale, you kind of expect your professors to change your life. After my first day in Su Wei’s class “Readings in Modern Text,” I wondered if he might change mine. That Monday morning, he awed the class into silence with quotations from Chinese poets and intellectuals. Perhaps it was when he told us to write down and memorize a Confucius quotation that I realized this wasn’t just a standard Chinese language course. We would be talking about society, literature, and philosophy — he promised that we would try to achieve a depth of thinking in Chinese. Su Wei came to America in the early eighties as one of the first Chinese students to pursue a western degree after the Cultural Revolution. He played a key role as a leading intellectual in the Tiananmen Square student protests of 1989, was blacklisted by the Chinese government soon after the bloody June 4 crackdown, and eventually fled his home country. Also an acclaimed essayist and novelist, he has published three novels and several books of short stories and personal essays in Chinese. He also seems to know all the major figures in Chinese literary and intellectual circles; when I mention some of my favorite writers, he is quick to call them “close personal friends.” But at Yale, most of us don’t call our professor “Su Wei.” We call him “Su Laoshi,” Teacher Su, a title which carries respect and affection. He currently teaches classes in modern Chinese fiction and nonfiction. Su Laoshi loves to talk about his past. Very little is deemed inappropriate for class discussion. In our nonfiction course, general themes in our reading often trigger long personal narratives. If our class discusses