My Chinese lessons have been disrupted by an unscheduled trip to San Francisco and a sprained ankle, but new lessons about China continue daily. Talking to Westerners can be useful–and enlightening, as was my talk yesterday with Harry Kendall of UC Berkeley, who served in western China during World War II–but it is conversations with Chinese people that help most, and often in surprising ways.

In our next issue of Guanxi: The China Letter (June 2006), WTdB talks about how in China today the classics are not being taught. This is alarming, and I found myself wondering if the deep culture of China would somehow vanish in the next decades. But I’ve spoken to two young Chinese men this week, both trained as engineers in China before coming to the United States for graduate school. One has been living and working in the United States for 10 years now, while the other is still studying. One talked about wanting to do something more meaningful, more academic or even activist, than his day job at a technology company. The other mentioned, with pride, a friend who had published a first volume of poetry. This suggests a valuing of exactly the kinds of things that Professor de Bary explains as part of the Confucian tradition, the deep culture of China.

By the way, one often hears the phrase “Chinese people,” instead of “the Chinese.” I wasn’t sure why this usage was different from “the French” or “Americans.” But I now see that echoes the construction in the Chinese language, where a nationality is expressed by combining the name of the country with ren, being person or people. How intriguing that we should pick this up and use it in English. Is this because it’s what we hear our native Chinese friends and colleagues say?