"Ms. Zha Jianying, meeting you for me is like meeting The Beatles for most people." There's always a degree of embarrassment involved in meeting your personal hero. You want to appear dignified but not too dull, enthusiastic but not too fawning — all in that fleeting moment of post lecture greetings and the speaker whisked away by her equally luminous colleagues.
Best to use The Beatles, whose fanatic legions of screaming fans did not in fact, detract from their legitimacy and, well, sheer awesomeness.
Now here comes the follow up. "My name is Chen Qing Qing. I want to be a seagull just like you."
The Seagull (hai ou), following the sea turtle (hai gui), is a neologism coined for Chinese people who travel and work frequently between China and an adopted overseas country. In her lecture, Zha used the word to describe herself, the word then tumbled out of me, kicking and screaming, while my heart thumped like techno drum beats. I desperately wished my friend, who baited me just minutes before, "you should really go talk to her you know, just go do it..." would intercept now with some offhand comment about the lecture, about China, politics, food, for godsake, something.
Nope. Nothing. The moment was mine, and as she signed my book, I told her, "it's Qing with the water radical. Qing of Qing Dynasty." Two Qings, and therefore, two explanations. I told her, "I came to the States when I was nine, but I'm going back to China soon." She commended my Chinese, then told me about her daughter — growing up in the States until age seven, schooled in China until age fiften, then back to the States.
How many of us are there now? I wondered. Happily flitting from one place to the other, or neither here nor there?