Hemingwei closes out the Year of the Snake

Let me deal first with the name, Hemingwei (he = gentle, ming = regal, wei = YES, by my translation). My students named me this after recollecting Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, which China students study in high school. I consented since the main character in the novel is Santiago, Spain’s patron saint, St. James. Jaime is another word for James.

The Year of the Snake ends today in the Chinese lunar calendar before tomorrow’s Year of the Horse. Hemingwei has become a comfortable appellation I widely used last year as a teacher at Shenyang Aerospace University. At the termination of the SAU contract, and being out of the university setting that provided a meaningful context to the name, I need to decide what to do with it.

Of the year, there is no quarrel. Malevolence and cattiness are qualities of the snake year in Chinese horoscopy. A woman under the sign is known to be irritable, highly suspicious of others’ aims and frequently jealous when others seems to supersede her sense of status and amount of attainment. She overdoes things, preferring her own judgment, and expressing doubts on those of others. Outwardly courteous with polite manners, she is headstrong and willful in personal relationships resulting in frequent stress and strain between love and beloved. This is not the only characterization of the year but it came close to my experience so I am not at all hesitant to let it go.

Being in the culture of harmonious balance and not making too sharp a dichotomy in the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between what-is and what-is-not, I will treasure this year’s name of Hemingwei, but for now, graciously chuck the Year of the Snake a pleasant adieu.

I use all the foregoing and following metaphors to explain what I choose to perceive, not to depict a situation of determinism where somehow events are either beholden to the location of the stars in the sky, or on the qualities of 12 symbolized animals of segments in a cyclical year, even with the added details of an expansion of their qualities on the month, day, and hour’s animal designation. China in the olden days had too many sages doing nothing but swirling in their elite minds interlocking animal qualities to chart a person’s fate and destiny in their view of the nature of things.

After seeing them at work in Hong Kong at the turn of the Gregorian calendar this year, the sages of geomancy and astrology are wealthy and highly regarded feng shui consultants, treasured in HK for their cultural continuity to dynastic Han China and their perceived commercial value. NewsAsia out of Singapore even have them in their newscast in the waning days of this lunar year. I am not much of an admirer of their alleged wisdom nor see much of the practicality of their sage. 

But, as all of human life finally hinges on the telling, perspective and narrative take commanding roles. How one decides to look at things is more often indicative of the meaning of the message rather than the objective content of what is being noticed. 

Take as an example China’s GDP at the end of this year. It was the lowest in the slowdown of growth in more than a decade. That’s one view. The other is that it still registered the fastest growth rate among all the economies around the world bar none, and is projected to continue to do so for a time to come. In the volatile stock market of the world’s exchanges, many scaled down their exposure in investments of previous years on the China market after chucking in their gains, while others increased theirs in recognition that it may be the only viable income-generating game in town. Take your pick.

This gets me back to Hemingwei. The meaning I offered above from the literal equivalence of every syllable is not the only meaning available in Hanyu Pinyin. First, there are four tones in the phonetics of the language, so we already have four separate meanings for each of the three syllables, not to mention separate meanings even with the same tone! Accompanying each of them is an ideogram or pictograph written in squared characters, put together to arrive at a meaning from varied symbols that have an independent meaning of their own. We are dealt an altogether different animal at every tone depending on the starting radical in each of the syllable. In short, there is no one meaning either of the spoken name or the written characters. This holds true in the meaning of my adapted name Hemingwei. The meaning of a word in any language is in its use, and usage is simply a matter of choice!

Obviously, I am limited in the printing of the putunghua characters here but doing an exposition of just the word hemingwei alone will most likely result in a medieval tome. So, I will not even bother attempting that. As for the Year of the Snake, I am unequivocal. In my best serpentine grease to the ophidian creature, “I am glad to see you go!” I hope to hitch a healthy ride on the gallop of next year’s horse.