It's all about China

Life is full of odd threads and loose ends and can appear a bit incoherent if one doesn't try to weave them together. These pages therefore, are an exercise in coherence, some form of self-structuring meditation - a bit like sitting down to play the piano - but it is also intended to be useful for my students, and conceivably of some interest for those scattered about the world that I like to call my friends.

There is a recurring and dominant theme in all this, which is easily identifiable: it's all about China. The arts and the language of China, it's culture and its people, have been one of my few persistent passions since I was a teenager. That isn't to say I didn't have other dreams along the way, for I wasn't as single-minded and inspired as a Mark Salzman (Iron & Silk remains one of my favourite books on Western encounters with China).

When I was ten I wanted to be a pianist, until I realized how hard one had to practice. When I was fourteen I considered becoming a pastry chef: I made marzipan and chocolate sculptures inspired by Willy Wonka, and produced almost a dozen different cakes for my sister's confirmation. At sixteen I wanted to be a pyrotechnician - I blew several holes in my parents' garden in the pursuit of this goal, though I think I made up for that with the display that lit up the night on my father's sixtieth birthday.

At seventeen I was fed-up with learning Latin (after seven years of uninspired teaching it remained a dead language with a past but no future) so I thought I'd start to study something beginning with 'C' instead - the clarinet, or Chinese. Having had some early exposure to Chinese (thanks to a colleague of my father's who had come to visit us from Shanghai) and finding an extracurricular course in a nearby school, I signed up - for life: I have never stopped practising brush strokes and leafing through character dictionaries. (I also learned to play the clarinet, a little later.) After high school I persuaded my parents to send me to language schools in Shanghai and Beijing, where my Chinese identity was coined: my Chinese surname 田 means the same as it does in German (it's a field with a cross in it) and my personal names mean "bright" and "Asia". Well, to be perfectly honest, 亞 can also mean second, or inferior. But never mind that, I've met a lot of great people with the character 亞 in it.

When I was nineteen I worked at a hospital and thought of becoming a psychiatrist - if only I didn't have to study general medicine. So I turned my mind to China for good and read Chinese studies at Durham. One thing led to another and here I am, two decades later and still trying to make sense of everything.

A drop within a mighty stream, I rise, I sink, I float, a thousand things at once may seem both close yet so remote. My fellow river drops therefore I cling not nor let go, I beckon briefly you to shore, before we, parting, flow.

Benjamin Creutzfeldt 田亞明