For three years I taught English for Academic Purposes and English for Business in a university in eastern China. It was a fun and exhilarating time, and I found many things to interest me. But in the evenings, when all of us expat teachers would gather for a cool beer, the one thing we often spoke of was the wacky western names our students had chosen for themselves. Oh, sure, there were plenty of Peters, Marys, and Janes too. But there was also Dime, Tomcat, and King. Who could forget River, Sheriff, or Jupiter? And Ark. There was a boy named Ark.
I never asked my students what they might have been thinking when they came up with their western names. As long as they were happy, that was good enough for me. But I happened to be friends with Ark's mother, and, one day, I asked her about it. She is a passionate and expressive Chinese woman, middle-aged and newly middle class. "Oh, teacher," she said, grabbing my forearm, "Ark have all my hope, my mother hope, my grandmother hope. All the hope in Ark." And I asked her if she had heard of Noah and his famous ark? Turns out, that's where she got the idea.
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