Time to Be a Fang

My paternal name is a reasonably rare one.  People in France pronounce it correctly.   Some Fargis hail from Exideuil, in south western part of the country.   I was fortunate enough to meet two of my distant relatives who live in St. Germain de Salabre, not far from Bordeaux.  This was two summers back.  They have an idyllic farm and hosted us all for a remarkable dinner even though we arrived rather late.  Americans have always pronounced it with grating hard “g.” 

But one name’s enough.  I’m quite happy with the one I was born with.  Never thought of needing another one until, like most people who make plans to be in China for more than a few weeks, you get a Chinese name.  My teacher back in 1993 took my given name, and embellished the traditional Chinese way of Sinosizing “John”, yue han and suggested that I be yue hai, or ‘across the ocean.’  Like most foreigners who near such things but have next to no context this sounded just fine to me at the time.  I was about to cross the ocean.  Let’s do that then. 

And, as I’ve suggested to many, many people over the years, nearly every Chinese person I met thought this was an outstanding name.    The woman who would be come my wife, laid it out for me clearly: “You sound like you sell fruit on the street.  It’s a dumb name.  Drop the ‘ocean.’  You . . . across, is just fine.  That’s all you need.”  Well, who was I to argue with unvarnished candor.  Me, across, is what it’ll be then.  And so, it has been.  To this day, only my brother-in-law persists in calling me yue-hai.  I used to take exception, but now I kinda love it.

This teacher there in Middlebury Vermont, also afforded me a family name:  Fang.  This is not pronounced like the incisor on a puff adder but rather more like the Cantonese spelling “Fong.” While not as rare as Fargis, Fang is certainly one of the less well represented of the old-hundred-surnames.  And it was with great pleasure today that I met another Fang. 

Mr. Fang and I met at Starbucks with the mutual friend who introduced us and we spent most of the time talking business.  But I couldn’t’ help but point out to him that we “shared” a surname, which is ceremonially significant in China, were it to actually be really my own.  Mr. Fang shared with me the story of the name which I was very glad to learn about. 

Apparently the most famous of the Fang’s was Fang Xiaoru, an imperial scholar who was aghast that the Ming Emperor Yongle had usurped the throne and the proper filial line from the prince, his brother’s son.  Fang Xiaoru made it clear to the Yongle Emperor that this was a Confucian sacrilege.  As we might expect, the thin-skinned usurper, had Fang, his family and his friends and relatives and neighbors all killed.  It was, as my new friend suggested, a tough time to be a Fang and many people dropped the character “square” as a result. 

I’d always thought of the Yongle emperor as the grand guy in the yellow robes from the famous painting that hangs in Taipei and once toured the Met, in New York.  He was the man who had sent Zheng He out on his great many voyages to announce to the world that the Middle Kingdom ruled by Han Chinese, was back.  The barbarian Mongols had been overthrown.  I had no idea he’d been so despicable to my adopted ancestors. 

Sunday 4/29/18