Last Saturday a student walked into our class wearing a zombie costume. It was Halloween weekend in Salem again. I tried to come up with a Chinese term for zombie. “What is a zombie?” I asked. Don’t laugh at me. I grew up in Beijing and didn’t have all of that Halloween stuff in my childhood. My son told me: “It’s the living dead.” I thought about the term “dead body” 死尸 (sǐ shī), but it is not quite the “living dead”. Then I thought of the term of “raising the dead to life” -- 起死回生 (qǐ sǐ huí shēng). The children took that term. I had them write down the characters for “life” -- 生 and “death” -- 死, thinking they are very important words. Enough of Halloween, then we moved on to All Saints Day. In Chinese it’s “Ten Thousand Saints Holiday” -- 万圣节 (wàn shèng jié).
We have counted the numbers from 0, 1 to 100. That day, we learned all those big numbers, 999; 1000; 9,999; 10,000; 99,999; 100,000; 999,999; 1,000,000; 9,999,999; 10,000,000; 99,999,999; 100,000,000; 1,300,000,000 (the population of China). Then a student asked how to say fractions in Chinese. We learned how to say pi: 3.1415926…
It was fun to learn all those big numbers. However the word 10,000 万 (wàn) is a special word. I said that word almost every day in my elementary school in Beijing by chanting: Long Live Chairman Mao -- Ten Thousand Years of Chairman Mao -- 毛主席万岁 (máo zhǔ xí wàn suì) ! Long Long Live Chairman Mao -- Ten Thousand of Ten Thousand Years of Chairman Mao -- 毛主席万万岁 (máo zhǔ xí wàn wàn suì) !
But today we learned the word 万 (wàn) is used for saints, both living and deceased, on All Saints Day.
