About a week ago I learned a little more about the Wu family poem. Together with Helen, I met Wynne’s father, Jim, for lunch at Wing Shoon restaurant on the Lower East Side (@Rutgers St & Essex). I also invited my Chinese teacher, Susan, to join. Jim explained the poem and Susan wrote it down for me on a Post-it note (below).
The significance is that each person’s name in their family is based on the characters in the poem. And each generation uses the subsequent character. So Wynne and Winslow’s names–Wen-Ren (Ask Humanity/Kindness) and Wen-Tian (Ask Heaven) are based on the character “wen” (bottom character in the 3rd column from the left) which means “ask.” And Helen and her cousin Preston’s names are Zi-Zhen and Zi-Zhong. The character “zi” (top character, 2nd column from the left) means self. (I haven’t figured out yet what the whole poem says or means.)
Wynne had told me about the family poem before, a common tradition in many Chinese families. What occurred to me is that I’d never seen the poem. And when I asked Wynne about it, she didn’t have it written down anywhere. She just told me her dad knows it. And none of his relatives made it out of China after 1949 and other than him, none of them survived.
I asked Jim how he knew the poem, and he explained that he had just learned it growing up. He also explained that it is actually not the full poem but only the part that he was taught growing up. And he also explained that according to the poem, Jim represents the 23rd generation of his family. Wynne and Winslow represent the 24th. And Helen and Preston represent the 25th generation.
It made me feel good to learn all of these things. And I’m extremely grateful to Susan for joining us for lunch and helping to translate and explain these things to me.
An interesting side note: Susan is now one of the two Chinese teachers at Bard High School Early College, where Wynne taught. They were looking for a new Chinese teacher this summer, and Susan applied. One day at my lesson, the mentioned she was applying for a teaching position and asked, isn’t this where your wife worked? Susan is an experienced and terrific teacher and got the job. And it of course makes me feel very good to know that this connection exists. Almost as if Wynne is somehow pushing buttons and pulling strings somewhere.
Thanks Wynne, for all of this.