What can F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Roaring ‘20s novel tell us about present-day China? Matt Lombardi teaches the American classic to students in the city of Chengdu.
Danghao Geng, the sophomore class president at Southwestern University in Chengdu, China, stood at the front of a cinder block classroom before a crowd of eager students—and sold books. The university had failed to acquire the course texts in time for the first class, but Danghao, an industrious Insurance major who prefers to be called Harry (“like Harry Potter”), had solved the problem at a local copy shop. As Harry watched stacks of his bootlegged books diminish and the stack of yuan in his hand grow, he joked, “I could really be making a lot more money right now.” That seemed fitting, considering one of the novels he was selling told the story of American fiction’s most notorious bootlegger. In inky black letters across a stark mint cover, the title read, “THE GREAT GATSBY BY F,” followed by a line a few inches below in smaller type, “Scott Fitzgerald.”
cinder[|sɪndə(r) 타고남은 재
bootleg[|bu:tleg 불법의, 해적판의
diminish[dɪ|mɪnɪʃ] 해적판의
A view the skyline of the south west Chinese city of Chengdu. (Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images)
The Great Gatsby is one of those taught-to-death novels in America, due in part to its critique of the American Dream. Most students meet Fitzgerald’s glittery gang of socialites and big reader-friendly symbols in high school, if not sooner. Last fall, Baruch College at the City University of New York sent me to Chengdu, in southwestern China, to teach English 2150, a writing course that I titled “Strangers in Strange Lands.” One of the books that I taught was The Great Gatsby, and I was curious to see how one country’s sacred classic played out in another. The parallels between post-World War I America and present-day China seemed relevant. Chinese youth culture is not “roaring,” but the country’s prosperity, industrial growth, rampant consumerism, new technology, and thriving cities resemble the American 1920s.
sacred[|seɪkrɪd 성스러운 종교적인
But as China’s new president, Xi Jinping, touts the “Chinese Dream” despite dire rural poverty, what is the “dream” for a technologically savvy Chinese generation born in the booming 1990s, with only vague notions of the Tiananmen Square student protests of 1989?
tout[taʊt] 설득하려 장점을 내세우다. 홍보하다
If we look to The Great Gatsby for answers, it wasn’t Nick Carraway, the novel’s conflicted narrator, whom students sympathized with. As one student stated in an essay, “Gatsby’s unyieldingness to the gauntlet lay down by the sham world acted like a shooting star in the darkest night, giving the darkness dawn, the sorrow comfort, and the desperation hope.”
unyieldingness 양보하지 않음, 완강함
unyieldingness 양보하지 않음, 완강함
gauntlet[|gɔ:ntlət] 튼튼한 장갑
sham[ʃӕm]가짜 엉터리
When Harry was not copying my entire reading list and selling it at a bargain, then he was giving a TED-Talk-like PowerPoint presentation to a packed house of over 80 students on how to live in New York, where he has never been before; or he was presiding over the “English Club” he headed, where they have met to discuss such texts as the Gettysburg Address and the script for the pilot episode of “Friends”; or he was acting as class president, an unelected position to which he was appointed by the preceding class president and friend of the family. Harry’s dream is to become a wealthy CFO of a large company in Switzerland, where he once visited on a business trip with his father and was impressed by the friendly people, cleanliness, and beauty of its cities, though he believes Canada or the United States to be more realistic options. Like Jay Gatsby, and many of my students, Harry’s family came from rural poverty. His father grew up a poor sheep farmer in Inner Mongolia, but as the youngest child he managed to attend college at Xi’an Jiaotong University where he met his first girlfriend and later his wife. Harry’s parents worked as engineers for the government in Beijing and lived in a cramped, leaky sixth-floor walk-up with no heat or air conditioning, until Harry’s father was sent on a business trip to Italy to study some new machinery. It was there he was offered a job with a Swiss company looking to expand in China. After that, Harry grew up away from home at boarding schools in China.
presiding[prizáidiŋ]통솔하는, 사회하는
How one country’s sacred classic played out in another.
On a cool fall Saturday afternoon between classes, Harry and I sat on low stools at a long greasy table in a packed open-air restaurant, drinking peanut milk from glass bottles to cool our tongues from the enormous metal pan of chili wheat noodles we shared. Harry was 19, short, with a broad face and thick eyebrows above his glasses. A few days prior, the Chinese writer, Mo Yan, had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Harry was still surprised. “I really thought it would be Haruki Murakami,” he said.
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