Chinese Profile #7: Steve Wu

Faithful readers of this blog are certainly not strangers to Steve. Wu Xuesong (吴雪松)or 吴老师 (Teacher Wu)as he’s know to everyone on campus, has been a frequent subject of this blog. DTMS and I often commented that we could easily write a book about him, and how disappointed we were to not have been prescient enough to have carried around a voice recorder to document all conversations had with the affable, inquisitive, irreverent, forthright, and jovial professor. Eating dinner at his house, sharing a beer or some tea with him after class, getting drenched playing badminton together, and poker nights peppered with his unpredictable comments became an institution of my two years in Changzhou, China.

Steve grew up in a rural community in Nantong, Jiangsu province. Nantong is the city north of the Yangzi River as it hits the Pacific. Shanghai is just across the river, but as the Yangzi is the third largest river, it divides these two cities completely. Nantong is a central city for the poor rice, peanut, and rape growing area. His family had been fairly well off landowners before the Japanese invasion/civil war/Cultural Revolution. But, having land was bad, bad news during the Cultural Revolution, so his grandparents were stripped of their land and his parents were pushed into the general poverty that permeated all of China in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet, his parents pursued and received some education, as well as saving enough to allow Steve to attend high school and college. Of course, he had to score well enough to do these things, and he did. He studied English education at Nanjing Normal University, a top tier university. He was a self-described nerd in college, never venturing very far from his English books, and certainly nowhere near the students of the fairer sex. He used a special relationship (关系) to allow him to take a job in Changzhou instead of returning to his hometown, Nantong, which was then the protocol for university graduates.

He would marry the first girl he kissed (Su ChuanXie?) and they would have a son, Wu PenFei (Michael) eleven years ago. But, for me and the rest of the “foreign experts” at JSTU, the important moment in his life happened about eight years ago. Steve was working as an English professor at an accounting school associated with JSTU (and now part of it) as well as its coordinator for foreign teachers (the job Teddy did for me). He was interested in the cultures of these young foreigners he was responsible for so he decided to make a big decision. He decided to lose lots of face (maintaining/losing face is super important in China) and try to talk with these foreign dudes in their own language, which would assuredly involve him making mistakes. Additionally, befriending foreigners would but him at some distance with his colleagues, family, and friends. The thing is, (and I’m generalizing because, generally, generalizations are true) Chinese people are really excited about Westerners, think they are all beautiful, rich, and smart yet, they don’t want to get to close to them or be seen as welcoming them too much. This is because a huge part of the Chinese identity is the purity of their race, culture, and history. In their minds, the Chinese have been an exclusive society, not bending to foreign ways, not interbreeding with others, and maintaining reign over their kingdom for 5,000 years. So, welcoming a foreigner or adapting too much to his ways, is seen as a traitorous affront to one’s identity as Chinese. Steve’s curiosity won out, and he made such an affront, so for the past eight or nine years, he has been going out of his way to befriend the foreign teachers that come every year, and most often, leave within one or two.

Steve has had the opportunity to travel to Australia twice, once for an English teaching conference and once to spend part of his summer with the family of an Aussie that taught at JSTU years ago. This brief glances into Western culture had piqued an interest in Steve that is almost insatiable. Some teachers found Steve a bit too needy at the beginning (always wanting to hang out) and a bit too direct when he would chat with them. Well, frankness isn’t really something that I have a problem with, so I was always happy to chat with Steve. Whether he was discussing his worries about the pressures the Chinese educational system put on his son (and how much pressure he should put) or whether girls with long fingernails get injured when masturbating, Steve always (and I mean always) had something on his mind that he wanted to discuss. Plus, his wife wasn’t a big fan of him drinking more than two beers, so Steve would occasionally seek refuge at my or Dave’s apartment for a few extra cold ones. And, man, did a couple of TsingTao’s really loosen Steve up. Needless to say I’ll look back with nothing but fondness and gratitude at the afternoons sitting on my porch with Teacher Wu.