Chinese vignette

8/31 e-mail from me to Li Li, “senior executive director at Palo Alto Commons and The Avant” (lightly edited): Talking with you briefly about your path from China to Palo Alto brought back a gigantic flood of memories of my teaching at what was then the Beijing Language Institute in 1985 (under a program of country exchanges of college professors — I was exchanged by Fang Li of BLI, and then sponsored his time a bit later at Stanford). I taught two courses: a general introduction to sociolinguistics, and then a more technical syntax course Fang Li chose to label “Zwicky construction grammar”. Afterwards, a young BLI colleague took me sightseeing (the Wall, Hangzhou, Suzhou, Shanghai, and more). Significantly, most of it was made much more interesting because when BLI had to fill out forms about my class status, though I was indeed a college professor and apparently an elite, my family history quite clearly put me as belonging to the proletariat: workers and peasants. As a result, I…