My Year In China

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n my house I don’t need a calendar to chart the passage of time. I can plot the years by my husband’s passions. 2009 was The Year of the China Obsession.

Marc decided he wanted to read ancient Chinese classics, and any old translations wouldn’t do. He cruised the Internet, compiling a master reading list from the web sites of the major universities offering courses in Chinese studies—Harvard, Princeton, the University of Chicago—wrote himself a syllabus and tracked down the books through Amazon. Now more than 30 books are piled on his bedside table, his own personal Great Wall of China: such classics as The Three Kingdoms; the six-volume The Dream of the Red Chamber; the Analects of Confucius; the I Ching; assorted myths and legends and, my personal favorite: China’s Examination Hell: Civil Service Exams of Imperialist China. The more arcane, the better.

“This stuff reads like a Chinese Peyton Place!” he says, eyes alight, as he plows through The Plum in the Golden Vase. He particularly savors the footnotes. “Do you want to know about the system of keeping concubines?” he’ll ask. “And did you know they use the patronymic as a first name?” My eyes glaze over.

Marc talks about teaching himself to read Chinese: a character a day. “In ten years I’d know almost 4,000 characters,” he says.

And I may not be one of them, I think, but smile instead. The smile gets a little forced, though, when he starts downloading Chinese fonts for his computer, or does a Google search on tea, where he learns how to prepare it in the traditional Chinese way, and when the tea catalogs arrive, orders $100 worth of loose tea leaves, as well as a traditional covered Chinese tea cup from which to drink it. In self-defense, I flee the house for a cappuccino at Starbucks, only to turn on the CD player in his car and be assaulted by the sound of Chinese Pipa music. Whenever there is a lull in our conversation, he reverts to the subject of his passion. And so it goes: The winter of his Chinese content.