As a Westerner with a Chinese character tattoo, this made me laugh!

When I first returned from living in China back in the early 1980s there was a sudden popularity of t-shirts with Chinese characters on them, often upside down or backwards, sometimes clearly written by someone who did not know how to write a character. Later, I began to see tattoos of characters and it was not uncommon for the person with the tattoo to explain that he thinks it means xy or z.

Usually his understanding was within the realm of possibility; sometimes I could only conclude that the character might mean something very different as used in Japanese or Korean, because what he thought it meant was nothing at all like what it might mean in Chinese usage. Here is my Chinese character tattoo...

This, rather low quality, picture was taken not long after I was inked. Might have been the very same day in 2010. And this is one of my favorite stories.

For the academic year 2000-2001, Julie, Philip, Brian and I lived in a fairly spacious but spartan apartment on the campus of BFSU in the Northwestern neighborhood of Beijing called the Haidian District. That year was critically important in the ongoing process of us coming together as a family. Julie and I fell in love...another important story, for another time.

One of the most important gifts I ever received in my life was that when we decided to join our lives, Brian and Philip, immediately and without ever turning back, warmly and openly and without reservation welcomed me into their lives in every way. I was not replacing their dad, but I was absolutely one of their parents. I will never be able to fully express how much that meant to me at the time and continues to mean to me every day since.

Of course, there were the teenage years...and looking back I think Philip and Brian handled the conflict that resulted a lot better than I did...but we made it and grew stronger together. Our year in Beijing before high school was key. Then, in 2010 Brian asked me if I had ever thought about getting a tattoo. I said yes, I had played with the idea, but never seriously. He proposed that all four of us get the same tattoo...and we did. See above.

He wanted the tattoo to read 'Lei Family.' Why? When we were in Beijing we all took the same Chinese surname, Lei (thunder), that I had used in the early 1980s in China. We each took Chinese names with that shared family name. I do not recall whose idea it was in 2000, but everyone embraced it. But Brian was taking this to another whole level. A tattoo.

Philip then suggested that we ask my favorite teacher of all time, from 1980 at Beijing Normal University, to do the calligraphy and her daughter was happy to help by sending the characters to me electronically. That is how I came to have my one and only tattoo, how we all came to have the same tattoo. Thanks Brian and Philip, for this, for being two of the finest men I know, and for all the good times together.