My Journey West

Abstract

“Gate” was the first English word I ever uttered to an American. It was in August 1987, at San Francisco airport, where I had just arrived from Shanghai and was looking for my transfer flight. That the person actually understood it was shocking to me. Clearly, my journey from a Chinese academic to an American graduate student did not start with much promise. Like many in my generation, I taught myself English in silence, and in my case, in a rural backwater of central China in 1979 as I prepared for the entrance examinations to one of a few precious graduate programs just opening up in China. In 1980 I was admitted to a history MA program at East China Normal University in Shanghai. But my listening and spoken English was close to none, and I could barely express myself at graduate seminars in the early days of my American journey. A professor of the American West at Northern Arizona University promptly dismissed me in a note: that I did not belong here; I would not make it; and I should go back home. It amused me more than anything else, as I knew even then that the language test would pass, and I was not worried whether I would make it either, whatever that meant; my concern was elsewhere.