ABSTRACT
In the fall of 2004, during my first semester in Harbin, I ran into a young colleague from the English department, out for a Sunday outing at Sun Island with her family. Her name was An Qi, and her husband Ru Bin and she were both well-placed members of the Communist Party. They had a young daughter in primary school who had been, she informed me, dying to meet me. Said daughter wanted the new “foreign teacher” to give her an English name, it seemed. She was eight, going on sixteen. So I named her Sondra, after a former girlfriend, and she liked it just fine.
