Dinner with old friends
Last night I went out to dinner with Fang Ge and Fang Fuxi and Jing Qicheng and his wife Wang Xingan. For some reason the restaurant was plastered with the double-happiness posters you can see in this picture of me, Jing Qicheng, and Wang Xingan. I asked the waitress and she said there had been a lot of weddings recently. Now that your employer no longer needs to approve your marriage (and blood testing is optional), apparently there’s been a big surge in weddings. There was an article in a local paper about a couple getting married who took the blood test, found that the wife was HIV positive, but in the meantime the new rules had taken effect. They decided to get married anyway, and the article (in the Chinese tradition) included commentary by people for and against that idea.
Update-11/7 On the CRI English radio station I heard a report on the new marriage law today, featuring a story of a couple who spent 5 years unsuccessfully trying to get married because they were both entrepeneurs (no employers) and their apartment was in a new area that had no neighborhood committee. So I can see why there’s a sudden surge in marriages.
On the radio that morning I’d heard a report claiming that all of the Wang’s (王, second tone) in the world are related to one ancestor who lived in Taiyuan 2500 years ago. I think it claimed that there are 100 million of them, although that doesn’t seem possible. I brought this out at dinner, talking to Wang Xingan, who looked completely perplexed because in fact her surname is Wang (汪, first tone), so it has nothing to do with her.
Names are tough. At the seminar yesterday the presenter described a study done by an Australian named Kevin something-or-other, and one of the students stopped and asked my why I had done this study that way. It took me about the same amount of time as it took 汪兴安 with my mistake, to realize that she assumed that any research done by a “Professor Kevin” would be my responsibility.