Chinese Immigrants: Yesterday and Today

Chinese immigrants first came to the U.S. in significant numbers more than a century and a half ago—mainly as low-skilled male laborers who mined, farmed, did laundry, ran restaurants, and built the railroads. They endured generations of officially sanctioned racial prejudice—including regulations that prohibited the immigration of Asian women; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred all new immigration from China; and both the Immigration Act of 1917 and the National Origins Act of 1924, which extended the immigration ban to include virtually all of Asia. (Pew Social Trends)

While "Asian Americans are the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States. They are more satisfied than the general public with their lives, finances and the direction of the country, and they place more value than other Americans do on marriage, parenthood, hard work and career success," those from China, Korea, and  Vietnam are less fortunate than most Americans. Those from Japan, India, and the Philippines have a lower share living in poverty than the average American.

"The Japanese are the only group that is majority U.S. born (73% of the total population and 68% of adults); all other subgroups [of Asians] are majority foreign born."

Today, the Chinese diaspora in the US includes 4.01 million Chinese or roughly a quarter of America's Asian population. Only half of Chinese Americans are affiliated with a religion. We can, therefore, conclude that more than 2 million people of Chinese extraction came to America during their lifetime. Why did they come? Why were more than 700,000 immigrants born in Mainland China and Hong Kong granted green cards between 2001 and 2010?

• More than one in ten employment-based green cards went to Chinese immigrants in 2010.
• Chinese nationals received more asylum grants than any other nationality in 2010.
• The People's Republic of China was the third most common birthplace for lawful permanent residents in 2010.
• In 2010, roughly 1 percent of all unauthorized immigrants in the United States were from China.

These statistics contradict a conversation that I had yesterday with a highly-educated Chinese citizen. He portrayed most Chinese immigrants as people from specific villages in Fujian Province and Canton (interestingly, he did not call it Guangzhou, which is its Chinese name) who sneak in the way that Alex Kotlowitz's story in a New York Times' sponsored teen magazine describes. He told me about how people in Northern China, where he is from, have more value on education and that these villagers cannot read. (This kind of snobbery is rampant in the Northeast of the United States and, as a bona fide Brahmin, I find it bemusing rather than offensive. If I was from Alabama or Sichuan, I might not.)

In fact, as a whole Chinese Americans are high educational achievers. Even in the 1980 and 1990 Census "levels of educational attainment among Chinese Americans were significantly higher than those of the general U.S. population." It is true that in 2010, 62.8 percent of Chinese immigrants age 5 and older were limited English proficient (LEP), meaning that they reported speaking English less than "very well." However, LEP is not always a measure of education, but of how well you speak and where you learned. In the case of many Asians, since it is a self-assessment, the numbers may also be skewed by a higher incidence of humility! There are plenty of educated people who don't speak good English...or, rather, speak English well.

Kotlowitz is a respected and, in my view, highly respectable social critic. He did a service in this article by calling attention to "child trafficking" and describing how some illegal immigrants cheat the system, but I think he would be disappointed if he knew that his article was being misconstrued as the typical Chinese immigrants' story. Chinese immigrants were less likely than immigrants overall in 2010 to obtain lawful permanent residence through family-based channels. Among those immigrants from Mainland China and Hong Kong who obtained lawful permanent residence in 2010, a bit more than half (54.2 percent) did so through family-based routes, compared to about two-thirds (66.3 percent) of immigrants overall. Perhaps, Eastern Europeans and Sub-Saharan Africans are better at hustling in the rest of their clan than Chinese, but there is little evidence to support my friends' conclusions from our wide-ranging QQ chat-session yesterday. His claim that the Chinese are successfully whisking their families to America is not belied by the evidence:

MY FRIEND: Most of the Chinese immigrants are in the US ...are from Canton or Fujian province: peasants..who barely just finish 9th grade..they a lot of money to get smuggled into the Chinatowns in the US and work in the restaurants...after they land, they fake their stories in order to get asylum green cards..or something through fake marriages once they get their greens..they bring their whole family. 

ME: on what do you base this "fact"? 

MY FRIEND: And you don't know .. I thought you did.. Every Chinese in America knows 

My friend further painted a picture of most Chinese immigrants getting into America through using the schemes proposed by the crooked lawyers in this article: Immigration Fraud Investigation leads to Bust by FBI on East Broadway. He quoted, "To perpetuate these schemes, the law firms made up stories of persecution that often followed one of three fact patterns: (a) forced abortions performed pursuant to China’s family planning policy; (b) persecution based on the client’s belief in Christianity; or (c) political or ideological persecution, typically for membership in China’s Democratic Party or against followers of Falun Gong." These lawyers, in addition to perpetrating fraud or encouraging clients to do so, prayed on the worst fears of Americans about China. That said, a handful of lawyers encouraging fraud does not legitimately constitute the immigration policy of the United States. Most Chinese people are not pretending to be part of the Local Church or Falun Gong, feigning an abortion or waving their China Democratic Party credentials to get residency in America.

That a young Chinese man who attended a prestigious college in Boston could hold these views, speaks as much to the failures of media as it does to the indoctrination, propaganda, and rumor-mongering of both world powers' governments and educational systems. 

Apple's Customer Service for Americans in China Rots

"I'd not even make cidah with these manure-laden Apples." 

                                                  -disgruntled New Englander  

It is a beautiful day, but I am just miserable enough to sit here writing this therapeutic post about Apple's corporate misbehavior.

In April, I purchased an Apple iPhone 4S in America for use in China because they told us we could get it fixed easily if something were to go wrong. After less than a month, the incoming and outgoing phone and text functions ceased to work, but we could still use the Internet using Wi-fi. We went to an Authorized Apple Reseller who told us to call Apple-China who, in turn, told us they could not help and then to China Mobile to replace the SIM Card for 30RMB. Finally, we called Apple in America because it still did not work.

Kyle, a very nice technician who calls you back when you enter your telephone number on the Apple site, emailed me the names of five places in Changchun where we could bring the phone to get it fixed. This morning we went to one of these locations and they refused to help us. I sat down on their couch and began to chat with Apple in America on a laptop that we had brought with us.

Fragments of my conversation with Apple-US's iPhone Chat Support team follow:

Junior Advisor Harry [9:39 a.m.]: Ah I see. With repairing, it is the technicians call on if they are able to accept the device for repair.

Customer [9:39 a.m.]: this is unacceptable

Junior Advisor [9:40 a.m.]: To get the iPhone fixed Alexander, you can send it to a friend or family member to have it repaired on your behalf in the U.S.

Customer [9:42 a.m.]: this is what the warranty looks like: you tell us unequivocally that we can take it to [any of] these five places, we waste half a day to come here and now it is the tech's call so I have to spend more money to send it to a relative and then have a relative send it back?

Junior Advisor [9:43 a.m.]: I am so sorry Alexander you have been going through this! I know you have spent a lot of time and money to get this resolved! I am on your side on this issue and want to make sure that we get the iPhone repaired the proper way!!

Customer [9:45 a.m.]: You are well trained, but I don't care whose side you are on. I hope you are on Apple's side. This is unacceptable. I will go home now and write a blog post about this experience and see what my friends think.

Junior Advisor [9:46 a.m.]: I understand and I would feel the same way about all that has happened Alexander! I want to make sure that I am here to help you get this iPhone repaired!

Customer [9:47 a.m.]: so what are you going to do to help me with that? Pay for the shipping?

Advisor [9:49 a.m.]: I definitely wish I could Alexander but...

[There is an inexplicable escalation a bit later to a less helpful, more firm, and more senior "advisor." I feel for a second that I am getting somewhere.]

Senior Advisor Kevin [9:57 a.m.]: The warranty that comes with the phone states that Apple may restrict service of your device to the country of original purchase.

Customer [9:57 a.m.]: I am fine if you want to fix it in America. How are you going to get it there?

Senior Advisor [9:58 a.m.]: That will be up to you. Apple is not responsible for any additional cost incurred with getting the repair set up.

Customer [10:00 a.m.]: In fact, service "may" be restricted to there, but clearly is not since you people told us to bring it to this location to get it serviced

Advisor [10:01 a.m.]: I wish there was some way that I could help you here, Alexander. But if a repair center in China says they cannot perform the service needed, they cannot do it. I'm sorry that you were told they could definitely perform the service for you.

Customer [10:02 a.m.]: I am sorry that your company told me that there would be no problem buying it in American and using it in China

Advisor [10:03 a.m.]: Using it in China and having the device serviced in China are two completely different things. I really am sorry, Alexander.

Customer [10:04 a.m.]: but what they really meant was "as long as it works fine (for less than a month!) you will love our product". If you need it to get fixed, you are out of luck

Customer [10:05 a.m.]: I will send you a copy of my blog post, if you would like. I am a lawyer and will have a great deal of fun researching your warranty and the other people who have experienced similar misleading conversations

Senior Advisor [10:06 a.m.]: If you are wanting to pursue legal action in any way, I cannot continue this chat and you will need to contact Apple's legal department as I am not a legal representative of Apple.

Customer [10:07 a.m.]: I have not threatened legal action. I have informed you of PR action. If you would like to refer me to Marketing, I would be happy to tell them what I think.

Senior Advisor [10:08 a.m.]: You can find all of our contact information at this page. http://www.apple.com/contact/

Customer [10:09 a.m.]: I am not looking to speak to Marketing. I have wasted enough time. Do you have anything helpful to suggest?

Senior Advisor [10:09 a.m.]: Do you have any friends or family members in the US that you could ship the phone to so it can be serviced and mailed back to you? 

At this point, I did not ask if he was the Assistant Deputy Undersecretary from the Department of Redundancy Department at 1 Infinite Loop; Cupertino, CA 95014, U.S.A., but it was clear they were not going to help. I explained to him that shipping the most expensive item that I have purchased in several years via China Post is tantamount to negligence. 

I felt a bit bad about telling Harry that I did not care whose side he was on, but I am not so easily subdued with disarming, albeit disingenuous assurances of loyalty to the customer. A small company would not treat its customers like this. For a multinational that herds serfs from the countryside into its Foxcomm factories to manufacture their product for them, we clearly do not matter.

As it turns out, I should have bought the phone here in China because Apple was forced to apologize for its sub-standard Apple 4 and 4S after-sales service and, more to the point, they changed their policy here so that, "Now, Apple will offer full replacements of iPhone 4 and 4S instead of major repairs, adding a one-year warranty starting from the date of replacement." 

I have now read the warranty carefully. In relevant part, it states, "Apple reserves the right to change the method by which Apple may provide warranty service to you, and your Apple Product’s eligibility to receive a particular method of service." In other words, they can behave in an arbitrary and capricious fashion because they reserved the right to do so? "Service will be limited to the options available in the country where service is requested." This would seem to indicate that we are eligible for a full replacement with a one-year warranty per the aforementioned Reuters article.

Later, the warranty continues: "You may be responsible for shipping and handling charges if the Apple Product cannot be serviced in the country it is in." Shipping it to a friend or relative instead of shipping it directly to Apple does not seem to be implied by this nor a logical request for a company that sells expensive products.

Interestingly, many people who bought their iPhone in Hong Kong are experiencing the same problem, if their telephone carrier is China Mobile. The new cooperation between Apple and China may not extend to its biggest telephone carrier, but that is entirely speculation.

At least Siri would have asked me if she would like her to find a solution by searching the web.

The Great Leapfrog Forward

250 million people moving to the city

Yesterday, I took my bicycle--that ancient vestige of Chinese civilization--and pedaled far out Renmin Dajie (People's Avenue), which is the main thoroughfare of Changchun. After I passed a major traffic detour, because they are building a subway here and Weixing Guangchang (Satellite Square) needed to be closed for major earth-moving equipment, I got to an area with some tremendous new governmental buildings, easily identified by the Chinese government's ubiquitous seal. For instance, one of them is 40,000 sq meters, or more than 120,000 sq. feet. It won first place international from Albert Speer and Partners the German architect and urban planning firm. Speer, Jr. is son of Albert Speer (1905-1981), who was Adolf Hitler's chief architect before assuming the office of Minister of Armaments and War Production for the Third Reich during World War II. His grandfather, Albert Friedrich Speer, was also an architect. DW Staff (jp) (20 April 2004). "Architect Sheds Father's Legacy in China". dw-world.de. Deutsche Welle. Retrieved 6 January 2012.

While these buildings are awesome in their scale and architectural design, it was the new park alongside that I discovered which I found most delightful. Then I pedaled out behind the building and discovered a new section of the city. A new red-and-white striped power plant chimney has sprouted among more than two dozen 17-story apartment buildings under construction. This is the pace of growth in China.

CAIDA Administrative Committee Changchun of 40,000 sq. m.

This morning in the Old Grey Lady there was a piece by Ian Johnson about the magnitude of China's social engineering experiment. The cutesy video about how many cities you would need to encompass to equal 250,000,000 people is also worth comprehending, though (if you will indulge me to fall into the role of film critic) a bit tedious to watch all the way through. The article states, "In theory, new urbanites mean vast new opportunities for construction companies, public transportation, utilities and appliance makers, and a break from the cycle of farmers consuming only what they produce." [my emphasis] This is terrifying, but I fail to see how this is "in theory"; the experiment has already commenced on a gargantuan, irreversible scale. Does Haier want to conspire with State Grid to make sure there is an AC unit in very window in addition to a chicken in every pot? You bet.

James' troubling response in the comments on the article is typical of many Chinese with whom I speak:

I couldn't imagine how accurate the report of NY times can be before I read this article.Well,I in fact have been in China for 19 years,and that's my age.I have see many things that those farmers have experienced. Personally speaking, China need to develop, there is no question about it ,but sometimes(maybe most times)the approach is not that appropriate, I mean ,too fast.Besides,I wanna say sth about the image of China,it seems that in many people's eyes,China is a typical tyranny country.but most times,people live in China don't need to involve with government officials. I mean you can have a peaceful life without others give you troubles.After all,everybody get his own business to do,who care so much about government?And the government also don't have so much time to tell you what you should do or not,.

The first part, where he allows himself to be a bit critical, I can accept. The second section, where he defends the "typical tyranny" is what concerns me. There is a more elegant proverb--four characters in length--that states the precept that "James" posits:  天高皇帝远 or "Heaven is high, but the Emperor is far away." This widely-held belief (in some circles) is today, in fact, a figment of the bourgeoisie's mythology. For most of the hundreds of thousands of farmers who are "still excluded from national pension plans, putting pressure on relatives to provide" the reality of the government's sins of omission are perhaps more real than their sins of commission, but this sort of apathetic response is the deepest form of cynical disengagement from the meaningful processes of change.

A caption on one of the 16 photos that accompanied the article said, matter-of-factly, "Rural workers gathered in Chongqing in search of jobs as chefs. The cooks say that when they can get a job, they earn $325 to $1,100 a month, a huge improvement over tilling the fields." From my ivory tower, getting paid about a $1000 USD/month myself as a mere knowledge worker, I wonder if an increase in wages is equal to an improvement in life. I will let readers draw their own conclusions. The other question, though, is how many of the men squatting on this curbside will actually get a job as a chef and is what they project to be their salary (a huge range, by the way) representative of most chef jobs? Does $1,100 USD in Shanghai get you as far as $325 in Changchun? The caption begs these questions.

In conclusion, I would agree with the article that what is happening certainly brings to mind the Great Leap Forward, but it has worrisome attributes that make it appear to be the Great Leapfrog Forward in that the leapers must crawl over other people's broken backs to get to the front of the line. And how do you win this game?

Durian: How Great Thou Stink!

Today, I just want to share a picture of a durian that my lovely girlfriend took. It was 58 yuan for this one--not a cheap price for a single piece of fruit.

This fruit is famous for its potent smell, but is so utterly tasty. Either you hate it or love it, but there is no denying it is the consistency of butter and nearly as rich, but much sweeter. In addition to mango, durian is a staple of the Hong Kong-style (Cantonese) dessert places that were mentioned in my last post. I have often wondered who has the job of collecting them for human consumption (learn more here). They grow high in trees and are absolutely deadly, especially when falling from a great height.

More Popular than Fortune Cookies: Cantonese Desserts

I grew up in a household where my mother always coached us that we should begin reading any menu from the bottom up, because that way you could know what to save room for. In addition, my maternal clan prides itself on an affinity for chocolate. These confessions aside, my mother had a strict rule for her three children: If you did not have fruit for dessert at lunch time, you had to have it at dinnertime. My little sister, who will graduate from law school tomorrow and has always been re-writing the rules, would sometimes "fib" so that she could have ice cream or some non-fruit desert item. I remember vaguely some rather complex legal maneuvering to prove that fruit had been consumed at her primary school cafeteria. I am sure that the standard of proof was not "beyond a reasonable doubt", but what would you expect from a mother who professes a hatred of vegetables and a distaste for most anything that does not come from a dead animal or the dessert menu.

Glutinous rice balls in mango with a scoop
of mango sorbet, 28yuan in Changchun and
38 yuan in Beijing

There is a gorgeous little boutique that has opened up a block from where I work. It is a Cantonese dessert restaurant that satisfies the fruit requirement and also would lead most customers to want to begin with dessert. There is really no other choice.

Most American "Chinese restaurants" offer some riff of Cantonese or Sichuan food, two vastly different cuisines. In my limited experience, though, most of them are long on ginger ice cream and fortune cookies, but short on any other options for dessert. Well, in China, dessert is certainly a rarity, but not as uncommon as somebody who has heard of a fortune cookie. Aside from some bakeries and Western-style cake shops, I don't know of any other strictly dessert restaurants in our city.

Deborah (Jingjing), my girlfriend, and I first went to this Cantonese dessert restaurant a few months back just before they ripped out its innards for a high-class remodeling effort. When she told me that she had walked by and it was gone, I was disappointed. Today, I found that it was just having a face-lift. These places are, from my quick survey of the web, beginning to catch on elsewhere in China. Beijing Today ran a story over a year ago about three new places opening there:


"Cantonese desserts, especially sweet and iced ones like herb jelly teas, are hard to find in Beijing.
Following in the footsteps of Manji, a dessert chain that opened on the mainland, Hui Lau Shan, another well-known Hong Kong brand, opened three stores in Beijing last week. They have 100 desserts made from mixed fruits and homemade ingredients."

On your next trip to Changchun, I hope that you will check it out on Xikang Lu between Tongzhi Jie and Lixin Jie.

On Literature from (or of) China by its Nobel Laureates

First, I read Soul Mountain. Then, I read The Good Earth. Now, I am in the midst of Red Sorghum. The first is by Gao Xingjian (b. 1940). The second and, perhaps, the most famous was penned by Pearl Buck in 1931; it won a Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1932. This year's Nobel Prize for Literature went to Mo Yan (b. 1955). Each of these books are, arguably, the best known works of three Nobel Laureates for Literature. Mr. Gao is Chinese born and now a citizen of France. Ms. Buck was an American of European extraction, but raised in China by missionary parents. Mr. Yan is a citizen of the People's Republic of China and was born in Shandong, the province where Confucius lived so long ago.

To my way of thinking, Soul Mountain is the best of these three books. The New York Times review describes the richness and success of this inventive piece. "His 81 chapters are an often bewildering and considerably uneven congeries of forms: vignettes, travel writing, ethnographic jottings, daydreams, nightmares, recollections, conversations, lists of dynasties and archeological [sic] artifacts, erotic encounters, legends, current history, folklore, political, social and ecological commentary, philosophical epigrams, vivid poetical evocation and much else." It also took me the longest amount of time to read. Dense and esoteric, it needs to be chewed slowly.

For a pithy description of Buck, read the Foreign Affairs book review of Spurlings's biography, Pearl Buck in China: Journey to the Good Earth. That her book needs to be defended still as more than just the racist memoir of a missionary's daughter is sad. It is surely a great work, but our dissatisfaction with it now should be, and is, that it is a period piece with little remaining relevance to current day China.

For an accurate portrayal of the diseased language of Mo Yan, read Anna Sun's critique. She is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Asian Studies at Kenyon College, who has been a McDowell Colony fellow in fiction.

Mo Yan bashing has become a popular sport and I am not eager to join the ranks. Ai Weiwei, the loudmouth artist-dissident who continues to suffer under house arrest in Beijing, went even further than Salman Rushdie, who stopped at calling Mr. Mo a "patsy." Mr. Ai said, “Giving the award to a writer like this is an insult to humanity and to literature. It’s shameful for the committee to have made this selection which does not live up to the previous quality of literature in the award.”

I would say that Mo Yan is not a patsy; he is an apparatchik and employee of the PLA Cultural Affairs Department. It is impractical or even silly to want him to be different than he is.

While a bit more subtle than the boosterism, propagandizing, and censorship facially apparent in My Husband Puyi: Last Emperor of China, the book that I am in the middle of is not subtle or graceful. His "hallucinatory realism", which is how literary critics brand his non-chronological storytelling, has none of the artfulness of Gao Xingjian's meandering novel. Still, it is a worthwhile read. Why? Because it is a riveting, action-packed, made for the movies drama.

The Embarrassment of President Obama's Presidency?

Ain't No Full Mettle Backin'

in memory of Francois-Marie Arouet (with a couple nods to Allen Ginsberg and Bruce Springsteen)

Was not Voltaire himself thrown into the Bastille after his conviction on May 16, 1717, for satirizing a ridiculous government?

As the very last person from America who still has an iota of pride for supporting the philandering philanthropic Philistine, John "son-of-a-millworker" Edwards, I am ready to join The Old Grey Lady in lambasting the duly-elected, never-my-choice President, but I will not pretend to be writing "news" when I am editorializing. Nor will I cite the same things that "reporter" Peter Baker did in this morning's top-headline-posing-as-news: "He presides over a government that to critics appears ever more intrusive, dictating health care choices, playing politics with the Internal Revenue Service and snooping into journalists’ phone records." [my emphasis] Baker's list is the flash-in-the-pan, sensational, ripped-from-the-headlines chaff that sells dying print-media to "the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked." My list is more substantive and grave, IMHO...much like my careful use of IM lexical phraseology.

At least since Tammany Hall and probably since John Winthrop added his John Hancock to the Mayflower Compact (that is not a mixed metaphor, but an anachronism), we have seen, in American government, the sort of silly business that the IRS has now been accused of. In fact, the clear-eyed and level-headed will probably find that, while partisans certainly over-stepped, the far bigger contributing factor to their malfeasance was the blundering idiocy that is born of mammoth bureaucracies. A tax code that is larger than the OED begs revision.

That the whodunit nonsense of Benghazi can be strung out by the news stringers for another month is the absurdity brought to us by the simian listener-ship of SS-Unterscharführer Glenn Beck and Rush "12-step-programming" Limbaugh. Does Joe Six-Pack or Jose Wetback (the contingent of voters that will matter in coming elections) really think the credibility of this Presidency and its political party hinge on how many agencies helped develop talking points for talk-show hosts one Saturday morning in October or on the Justice Department's just investigation of a national security leak? It is not like Eric Holder, Susan Rice and Victoria Nuland were creeping around with flashlights in some hotel, despite what FOX might contend.

That the once careful editors of the United States' paper-of-record would permit "dictating health care choices" to appear in Mr. Baker's fanciful list of reasons that "critics" see Mr. Obama as unable to master his presidency rankles me. I am no huge defender of the incremental Obamacare proposal; however, it is not Obamacare, folks. It is the legislatively approved law-of-the-land and our POTUS is charged with carrying it out.

All of this Peter Baker mumbo-jumbo is outrageous, for sure. It is the sort of news that feeds political apathy and the sense of hopelessness best exemplified by my friend-of-a-Facebook-friend who just accepted my gentle correction that the sexual assault case from the military that she thought she heard about a week ago was, in fact, a different case not involving a sergeant responsible for sexual harassment at Fort Hood, but instead "the recent arrest of the Air Force's head of sexual assault prevention on charges of groping a woman."

This stuff all needs to give-way to the real problems of our generation which are "dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix." Here is my list for Obama about stuff that really calls into question "Mr. Obama’s ability to master his own presidency."

Number one: Stand behind your environmental women. First, Lisa Jackson and now Gina McCarthy deserve your full-mettle backing. You were a sunshine patriot and summer soldier with Jackson, often letting her get run over by a natural-gas powered bus, and now you have boldly put forth McCarthy as your next Cabinet-level EPA Administrator. Listen to Maureen Dowd. Stop being a sally. Cut some fucking deals and install the people you need to act like grown-ups in your Administration. The only thing that matters for the continuation of our great republic and a bearable human existence, for that matter, is the mitigation and adaptation strategies that you put in place for climate change. That responsibility has been squandered by every Administration since 1988 and simply cannot wait until 2016...or the return of Billary. 

Number two: While Paul Krugman and Rogoff-Reinhart dicker about coding errors in Excel sheets (with the full involvement of the pundit class of the Financial Times, New York Times, Guardian, and WSJ ), drive through a bailout with some teeth. Do you want to be remembered as the douche-bag who believed in investment, but stood by as austerity measures were imposed? I am no supporter of American exceptionalism, but we ain't the PIIGS or even Olde England. We may not have German unemployment rates, but we have some wiggle-room. Let Chancellor of the Exchequer and Second Lord of the Treasury George Gideon Oliver Osborne exhume the ghost of Margaret Thatcher. You need to get on with the Keynesian agenda...and I don't mean eugenics.

Number three:  I am sure that you will manage to castrate Krusinski and you let Matlovich be "out." Huzzah! Now it is time to do Eisenhower's bidding and hold a bake-sale. If you cannot reverse the death march of the military-industrial complex, if you let us get dragged into more endless wars, not only will you make a mockery of the Nobel Peace Prize that you received in your early moments in office, but you will condemn the United States by leaving it ripe for a rising fascism.

Number four: Mr. Obama, tear down that prison. The school board of Newtown, CT, can vote to tear down their school and re-build in just a few short months, but we have waited five long years for you to restore America's moral high-ground by razing Guantanamo.

Keep your eyes on the prize.

Food Issues

Lotus Root

Valerie asked me to write more about food and what I eat. Tonight for dinner, I will have ground pork in lotus root with er liang mi fan (0.1 kg of rice) and a side of broccoli with garlic and too much oil. I will get the battery to my camera replaced and then do some videos and more colorful pictures. It has been pineapple season for quite some time now, but when I fried up some chunks with rice for lunch with Deborah, my girlfriend, she was surprised that it tasted good. Yet, I gleaned this idea from visiting Chinese restaurants at home!

People here eat out a lot, at least among the foreign contingent. There is less variety of international cuisine, but a greater variety of Chinese cuisines. Last night for dinner, we shared a half jin (0.25 kg) of a leggy frog in a hot pot with leafy greens, potatoes, mushrooms and black fungus. It was yummy. Deborah insisted on adding meat (lamb, in this instance), because "you cannot have hotpot with out meat. It is strange." That said, I have gained a lot of weight since coming to China. I thought, at first, it was wheat so I gave that up again, but it has made little difference. Maybe because I eat much more meat (and not grass-fed!) than I did in America.

The Woman Who Is Always Cooking

In a different iteration of my life, I would have expected to see a woodpecker when I opened my blinds, but the rat-a-tat-tat of a large knife was the cause of this mornings very perceptible sound. I knew already what the cause was: The sound of women chopping the stuffing for dumplings is the music of early mornings in Northeast China. What surprised me, though, was that this sound was coming from far away. I look out from my fourth floor apartment across the roof of a three-story building at the balconies of several apartments. I have named  the woman in one of these apartments: the Woman Who Is Always Cooking. She is not there at this moment, which is aberrant; however, on most mornings and afternoons when I look across she is cooking something or throwing her trash out the window--a medieval habit that I detest.

A Beautiful Hereafter

Chinese embrace eco-burials

BEIJING - Chinese traditionally believe that souls may rest in peace only if their bodies properly buried underground in coffins. But today, many are becoming open to other options, like scattering ashes in the sea or inlaying funeral urns in walls.

Ahead of this year's Tomb-Sweeping Day, a holiday that falls on April 4, a citizen surnamed Huang in East China's city of Nanjing went to a cemetery to commemorate her deceased father by burning paper in front of an osmanthus tree, the same tree under which his ashes were buried.

Tomb-Sweeping Day, also known as the Qingming Festival, calls for surviving relatives to tend to the graves of their loved ones by leaving food and liquor at their burial sites, as well as by burning fake money as a form of offering.

Read more...

State of the Climate...Debate (in China)

It is appalling that a US Representative, elected by the people, holds the belief that anthropogenic (human induced) climate change is not a big problem. That there is a need for the NCSE in the United States is a sad reminder of the ignorance that I left behind when I moved here more than two years ago. Asked "Is the earth's climate changing?" 49.9% of [American] respondents said, "Yes, I'm convinced," and 33.5% said, "Probably yes, but I'd like more evidence," while only 8.5% said, "Probably no, but more evidence could convince me," and only 7.6% said, "No, there isn't any solid evidence." (http://ncse.com/news/2013/02/new-poll-climate-change-0014705) Yet the 16.1% have a lot of sway in the halls of our democracy.

In China this "climate debate" is non-existent. A combination of the focus on science in the education system and the hegemony of a secular (atheist?) state mean that Creationists and so-called "climate-deniers" are not given a spot at the podium--the nonsense is back-benched. Instead, another problem exists: corruption. Sinopec does not fight the science; they fight the financing of the necessary changes in policy. The euphemism used by the New York Times in an article entitled As Pollution Worsens in China, Solutions Succumb to Infighting is "infighting," but the article lays out the real problem:

The state-owned enterprises are given critical roles in policy-making on environmental standards. The committees that determine fuel standards, for example, are housed in the buildings of an oil company...Fuel standards are issued by the Standardization Administration of China, which convenes a committee and a subcommittee to research standards. They each have 30 to 40 members, almost all of whom are from oil companies... 

Dire predictions from Deutsche Bank about the expected number of cars on the road by 2030 mean “a strong government will to overcome the opposition from interest groups” is necessary to begin the work that must be done.

The New Pope and China: Healing Time

"He is absolutely capable of undertaking the necessary renovation without any leaps into the unknown. He would be a balancing force. He shares the view that the Church should have a missionary role, that gets out to meet people, that is active ... a Church that does not so much regulate the faith as promote and facilitate it." 

-Francesca Ambrogetti, who co-authored a biography of Bergoglio

The first Jesuit pope and the first from Latin America (not the first non-European, but "the 11th non-European pope in the church’s history, and the first in 1,272 years") has the potential to heal the rift between the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association (CPCA), or 中国天主教爱国会, and the Roman Curia.

"Former" Bishop Thaddeus Ma Daqin

Choosing a new Secretary of State will be one of his most important early tasks, "given the dreadful mess the last Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, is considered to have made of it. Cardinal Bertone was seen to have accumulated too much power over the Vatican’s finances for himself and close associates, as well as presiding over the Holy See’s calamitous diplomatic relations, which in the past two years have broken down with Beijing," reports The Independent. This break-down in diplomatic relations has centered around the CPCA's desire to appoint bishop's without Vatican approval. An AP article published in The Japan Times lays out the challenges and the hopes of some Chinese Catholics. The other issue that has dominated the conversation between Beijing and the Vatican, since their formal break 50 years ago, is Taiwan and the "one China Policy."


The rift between the Roman Catholic Church and China pre-dates the ascendancy of the Communist Party. Some readers will remember an earlier post of mine that treated the issue of so-called "Chinese Rites" and the response of the Kangxi Emperor to the itinerant orders and Pope Clement XI's papal bull, Ex illa die. Of course, this is ancient history, but Ricci is still a central figure for Chinese Catholics. Like the new pope, Ricci was a Jesuit who thought that allowing the Chinese to continue ancient Confucian practices, like the celebration of ancestors on Tomb-Sweeping Day, was not contrary to being Catholic. More than a hundred years after Ricci's death, Clement XI sided with the Dominicans and other itinerant orders more fundamentalist point-of-view. As a result, the Kangxi Emperor said that Christians were no longer welcome in China because they cause trouble.

Today, the Chinese government rejects exercise of any authority by organs of the Catholic Church outside China. This has been their position since 1949, the year communists gained power over all of mainland China.  CPCA, which was founded in 1957, thus does not recognize the proclamation of the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary by Pope Pius XII in 1950, canonizations from 1949 onward (e.g. the canonization of Pope Pius X), Vatican declarations on even well-established devotional piety (e.g. on the Sacred Heart of Jesus or on Mary as Queen), and the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). There are still card-carrying members of the CPC who believe that only atheists should be allowed to participate in the governance of China, but that is quickly becoming an out-moded way of thinking.

It will be interesting to see what Xi Jinping does. He and the Pope do have some commonalities. There are likely to be many sarcastic commentaries in the coming weeks, such as Anthony Tao's at Beijing Cream. My hope is that more serious people will work diligently to bring a fragmented Church closer together.

Drying for Freedom in China

As most of my readers know, in 1995, when I was an undergraduate at Middlebury College, the speaker at a peace sympoisum that I had organized, Dr. Helen Caldicott, gave a speech. In the company of my high school mentors, Bud and Barbara James, I had heard her speak in Newburyport, MA, in 1993. Both experiences were significant for me and eye-opening. In Newburyport, she plucked an infant from the arms of a young mother and asked if the child would be a down-winder. It was in Middlebury, though, that she made a statement which truly changed the course of my life: "If we all hung out our clothes, we could shut down the nuclear industry."

For the seventeen or eighteen intervening years, a great deal of my free time and even a couple year of poorly remunerated employment have been devoured by Project Laundry List. Still, I left--and not on Sabbatical, either--in 2010 and came to China in February of 2011 to teach English. My departure came as a result of several frustrations, which I won't cover in this post, and, because, after 15 years (nine of them in Concord), I was ready for a new adventure.

In the year following my departure, the board moved slowly to hire a new executive director and finally, just over a year later, they hired somebody. Unfortunately, poor health led to his resignation about a month ago and I have stepped, perhaps too boldly, back into the breach.

The board had essentially dwindled to one or one and a half semi-active members and so the first step I took to breathe some life back into the group was to approach some wonderful old volunteers to join the board of directors. We now have a board of six and hope to double that in the coming months. Volunteers, like the woman who said she was willing to publish our newsletter, who had heard from nobody in two years, have been approached and are getting actively engaged again. I set up a Skype number and have been re-connecting with dozens of volunteers and supporters. It has been rewarding and fun, but I do not intend to continue at the current pace.

Our Facebook presence has continued unabated, thanks to a wacky volunteer from Seattle, whose creative attempts to bolster "likes" and meaningful engagement, as well provide moments of joy, have succeeded. Somebody else has created a Pinterest page and we are talking about how to leverage YouTube and other social media.

Serendipitously, the filmmakers who tailed me half way across the nation for the 2009 Clotheslines Across America Tour have scheduled a grassroots festival of Drying for Freedom screenings to begin on National Hanging Out Day (April 19th). This has given us something to rally around and focus on as we seek to get North Americans re-focused on the tremendous amounts of energy wasted on bad laundry practices. I will participate in screenings in Changchun, Jilin, CHINA; Wolfeboro, NH; Concord, NH; and, hopefully, in Exeter, NH, and Boston, MA. Local supporters are helping with all of these venues and dozens more.

We will be having a board meeting on Tuesday, March 19 at 9AM Eastern Standard Time. I hope that if you are interested in joining the board, doing a screening, or contributing to the cause in dollars or hours, you will be in touch. Thanks!

Beijing Redux

We had a lovely trip to Beijing, though the housing situation was less than ideal. At first, the four of us were in one hostel, but Deborah and I decided to move to a (cheaper) hotel where the room promised to be a little warmer and the smell of sewage did not permeate the air. [The overall air quality of Beijing during our visit was tolerable. We really lucked out, in that respect!] Our two friends continued to brave it at The Three-legged Frog, where the people were very nice and the service was good. It was, in fact, a fairly charming place and would probably be wonderful in the warmer months.

We arrived in Beijing on the morning of February 9th. The TV show that the whole country tunes into begins around 8:30PM and goes well past midnight. We shivered in our room after a nice day of wandering about Tian'anmen Square and the Quianmen area.

The pictures below show Deborah and I in front of the Great Hall of the People, in front of Tian'anmen with Mao's mug betwixt us, in front of the first movie theater in China, and finally in front of the original Quanjude Peking Duck restaurant. We would eat there later that evening and one of our number won four boxes of monogrammed chopsticks by participating in a dumpling stuffing activity.

On the first day of the Chinese New Year (Sunday, February 10),we went to the Forbidden City. You could spend a year there and not see it all. I did not take many pictures, but will share one of great beauty, one of great symbolism and one of great humor:

It was very cold for Beijing and this cat had found a warm manhole cover seeping with steam.

On the last full day there, we also went for a swim in the WaterCube. There are no pictures of that (thankfully), but here we are standing in front of the Bird's Nest, designed by Ai Weiwei for the 2008 Olympic Games.

While our companions went to the most touristy, accessible section of the Great Wall at Baodaling, we toured the campuses of Tsinghua University and Peking University. This is me in front of the Peking University Law School.

Deborah and I were both impressed by the large number of bicycles. "It's like the olden days," she remarked.

The best part of both campuses were the lakes. I had seen the one at Peking University on my summer trip, but the skating scene at Tsinghua University was positively out of Currier & Ives. The red litter comes from the abundance of fireworks lit off at this time of year for celebration of the new year (look for a post soon on the Year of the Snake). 

 
We saw an amazing show of Chinese acrobatics called Legend of Jinsha.

The most impressive segment included five motorcyclists barreling around in a steel ball.

When we arrived on the 9th, Qianmen was dead. I felt sheepish that so many things were closed, but the days ahead saw an explosion of people and we estimated that there were 500,000 people in Tian'anmen on the 13th of February. With security such as it is in the square, I could not get enough height to really show the magnitude of humanity waiting in various queues.

A small section of Tian'anmen Square on Feb. 13, 2013.

The crowds at Qianmen (next to Starbucks) on 2.13.13.

The Public Baths and Electric Showers

Many people in China have no shower in their apartment still so they make a weekly sojourn to the public bathhouse. As I have, for months, had the chance of getting a stream of electricity when taking a shower in my own apartment, I have "turned Chinese"  and last night I went to one of the finest bathhouses in the city. One must be careful in choosing a place, I am warned, but there did not seem to be anything shady about the place I went.

You walk through the revolving doors and are handed a key on a bracelet. You remove your shoes and tread gingerly in blue flip-flops (red for women) to the locker-room. Your key has a number on it which identifies the correct locker. You remove your clothes and place them inside and then proceed to the showers.

I had the chance to weigh myself first and was appalled at what I have gained over the last year. I am shedding it quickly now that I have given up wheat again, but as one of my friends asked when I posted a NYT article to Facebook, entitled Gluten-Free, Whether You Need It or Not: "What have we done to our wheat, Ma?" I think there are few ways to better sum up gluten-free living than a recent video from YouTube:



Anyway, I digress. Back to the bathhouse. You enter the humid shower room at this particular place, where everybody is naked, and there are nine or ten men lying face-down or face-up on tables being scrubbed by old men whose job it is to slough skin from the clientele all day. I skip this procedure, but avail myself of the shampoo and soap that is included in the 58RMB price.There are probably thirty showers. At any one time, five or ten men lounge in a couple pools of hot water and very hot water. After cleaning myself, I went immediately to the hottest one. I turned red like a lobster and my heart started to pound. I glanced around furtively to see if the other occupants were also turning colors, but I seemed to be the only one.

Not wanting to expire, I got out and went to a special shower, akin to what you might find in a laboratory, that rains cold water down on you for a few seconds. Then, in my flip-flops, I plodded up to the mezzanine where there are three sauna rooms. (It seems, at least, that saunas are safe for the healthy among us.) One room was dry; one, tolerable; and the other a steam room infused with the odor of a bag full of potpourri. I spent a few moments in each, more like a tourist than an experienced Roman. (My girlfriend and I had just watched Spartacus [1960] the previous night.) There was no clock in the place, which contributed to the pace with which I cycled through the various activities. I had planned to meet my girlfriend upstairs at 8:20 when she was done on the ladies side. To meet her, obviously, I had to put some clothes on. When you step out of the shower room, there are piles of brown towels and stacks of silk pajamas. I pulled on a set and clopped upstairs to wait for her. I was still red and my heart was still pounding so I asked an employee to open one of the locked refrigerators and bought some coconut milk to replenish myself.

She did eventually show up, but had been waiting for me on the third floor while I lounged on the second. We wandered around the rest of the premises. There were about five more co-ed saunas and oodles of tables with old people and twenty-somethings drinking tea or playing cards or chatting on their cell phones. You could get a full-body massage or a foot massage and watch a TV channel of your choosing while a man worked oil into your soles. You could eat a meal in a cafeteria and even buy women's shoes.

Altogether, it was quite an experience that will be repeated many times, because four electricians have not been able to discover why there is electricity in the water that comes from the shower. It is not the hot-water heater, which I leave unplugged when showering. It is not the fan, which I leave turned off. It may be that the building is not properly grounded or maybe just my apartment. Nobody seems to know. Another foreign tenant, who lives on the other side of the building and down a flight, also has periodic experience with getting juice (of the electron variety) in the shower.

The 嗡嗡 (wēng wēng) of Your Complaints

Over the last few weeks, I have had a wonderful time talking to Chinese friends about the differences in onomatopoeia (拟声) between English and Mandarin. 

I have never seen so much complaining about the cold weather as I have this week. People--not normal people, but New Hampshirites--are complaining that it is -10°F. Tonight it will be -33°F here in Changchun and the sky is not blue. In English, we might say, "Waaaaah." The weng-weng sound in my title is a droning, humming, buzzing noise.

Every post complaining about the weather is like a mosquito biting me, "叮." (Ding!)

Want to learn the other sounds of animals in Chinese? Visit my favorite Chinese language-learning website to quiz yourself: http://blog.nciku.com/blog/en/2010/12/17/animal-sounds-in-chinese-onomatopeia/. 

In researching this article, I found a wonderful post from The Confused Laowei. In it, he reminds us that Snap, Crackle and Pop of Rice Krispies-fame have different monikers in various tongues:

English: “Snap! Crackle! Pop!”
Swedish: Piff! Paff! Puff!
German: Knisper! Knasper! Knusper!
Mexican: Pim! Pam! Pum!
Finnish: Riks! Raks! Poks!
Canadian French: Cric! Crac! Croc!
Dutch: Pif! Paf! Pof!
Afrikaans: Knap! Knaetter! Knak!

I hope the weather gets better, but at least the ice on Lake Winnipesaukee will be heard this winter, "轰隆 [hōnglóng]!" That is the rumbling sound of freezing lakes, distant battles, and far-off thunder.

Additional Sources: 
http://www.chinese-tools.com/chinese/vocabulary/list/130/onomatopoeias.html 
http://www.chinesedic.com/?q=onomatopoeia&Submit=Search&langue=EN

Counterfactual History Perfected

The librarian from my law school and another friend teamed up to send me a copy of Barbara Tuchman's Practicing History for Christmas. Sadly, as things have not reached me in the past, it is the only gift I received from America for Christmas. Yankees don't like to waste money on things like FedEx and UPS. Lest this seem like a complaint, rather than an observation about a situation that has caused me a little sadness, let me say that I have not sent anything the other way. I will come in May on my sleigh.

Anyway, the Twelve Days of Christmas concluded yesterday. I went to Mass at Saint Theresa's Cathedral for the first time, as I had my Sunday free for a change. I brought Deborah, my girlfriend, who is a Christian, but she had never dabbled in the dark art of Mary-worship before. I think she was a bit surprised by all the sitting down and standing up. The thing that she remarked on was how powerful it was to have three hundred or so people all praying in unison. For me, the remarkable thing is that in a city of four million, I think this may be the only place for an "above ground" Catholic service--one at 6:30AM and one at 8:30AM, as well as an English service at 2PM in the basement of an adjoining building.

The family churches and underground places of worship must be everywhere, because China is home to an estimated 12 million Catholics, the majority of whom worship outside the official Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CPA). The State Administration for Religious Affairs states that there are 5.3 million Catholics belonging to the official Catholic Patriotic Association, which oversees 70 bishops, and approximately 6,000 churches nationwide.

The other thing that I did yesterday was finish my book. Barbara Tuchman's collection of essays is brilliant and most of them stand the test of time. The book is broken into three parts. In the first part she talks about the craft of being a historian. The second part is a collection of thirteen wonderful pieces that she calls, collectively, "The Yield." The final part is about learning from history. This final part also contains a not immodest, but fanciful proposal to eliminate the Presidency and replace it with a six-person Cabinet, where the chief member would get two votes. This seems to be the lesson that she gleaned from Watergate and all of the undeclared wars of the post-War era, which are certainly proof of the expanded power of the chief executive.

It is the middle section that has two essays pertaining to the Far East, which I would like to treat here, though. The first was published in April of 1936 when Tuchman was all of 24. She was writing for Foreign Affairs and her reflections about the Japanese boil down to two essential points. If I had to choose a sentence that encapsulates her thoughts it would be this:

More fundamentally troublesome to Japan's foreign relations than the disability or disinclination to use Occidental tactics in the practice of diplomacy [by which she means, in part, employing the art of compromise] is the combination of an inferiority and a persecution complex which she feels vis-a-vis the West.

In light of what is happening now, in this current time, I thought these words to be extremely prescient. Living as I do in the capital of the Manchurian occupation and with the clear distance provided by the almost eighty years that have passed since she wrote the essay, it is hard not to look with awe and disbelief at how Japan conceived of itself at that time--as a just nation protecting its reputation in the face of a world that misunderstood it. One wonders if buried in this essay is not a description of the root cause of all discontent between all peoples and all nations.

Before I go on, it is worth saying something about Tuchman herself. Tuchman was the daughter of the banker Maurice Wertheim. She was a first cousin of New York district attorney Robert M. Morgenthau, a niece of Henry Morgenthau, Jr. and granddaughter of Henry Morgenthau, Sr., Woodrow Wilson's Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Radcliffe College in 1933. In other words, she was about as well-connected as they come. In no way did this diminish her scholarship. In the craft part, she insists strongly that historians of any worth must rely on primary sources and not the re-stated opinion of other historians. She seemed to scorn the field of sociology and had a love-hate relationship with Sigmund Freud...and all that followed from his efforts.

Anyway, in the course of her research she had de-classified a memorandum that Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai had sent to FDR, but which never reached its intended recipient. In the chapter of this book, entitled If Mao Had Come to Washington also published in Foreign Affairs (but 35 years later in October of 1972), she participates in a wonderful intellectual exercise, where she imagines that there might of been no conflicts in Korea or Vietnam if this entreaty had not been held up by the pompous ass, Ambassador Patrick J. Hurley.

She describes in painstaking detail--having obtained a great deal of her primary material from John Service, a member of the Foreign Service, who was stationed in Chongqing--the terrible disregard of career diplomats, who suggested that the US ally itself with the ascendant Communists instead of arming Chiang Kai-shek. As we know, this was not the course taken. Those who advocated this position would later get caught up in the scourge of Joseph McCarthy.

This was the dispatch:

"Yenan Government wants [to] dispatch to America an unofficial rpt unofficial group to interpret and explain to American civilians and officials interested the present situation and problems of China. Next is strictly off record suggestion by same: Mao and Chou will be immediately available either singly or together for exploratory conference at Washington should President Roosevelt express desire to receive them at White House as leaders of a primary Chinese party."

Nixon went to China in the era of ping-pong to meet with Mao and Zhou Enlai, but it was not until then that this all came to light, thanks to Barbara Tuchman. A fascinating tale!

The Deadly Cost of Wars in China

One of the more fascinating discoveries I have made in the last few weeks is that when it comes to war deaths, internecine conflicts in China can account for more casualties than those from all other major wars. In Wikipedia, you may sort by high estimate and low estimate of casualties.

Seal of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom

While the Second World War is usually considered the most deadly of all wars, with somewhere between 40 million and 72 million killed, the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864) is thought to have accounted for somewhere between 20 million and 100 million deaths so it may be the "winner."

Warfare during the late Yuan Dynasty and transition to the Ming Dynasty accounts for some 30 million lives lost and the Qing dynasty conquest of the Ming Dynasty between 1616 and 1662 cost another 25 million lives (high and low estimates are the same for both these dynastic transition periods).

General An Lushan

The Mongol Conquests killed around 30 to 60 million people between 1207 and 1472 AD--a 265 year period, and, then, even earlier between 13 and 36 million people died in the An Lushan Rebellion (755 to 763 AD).

Also, a mere 8 to 12 million lost their lives in the Dungan revolt, which was set off by a pricing dispute over bamboo poles which a Han was selling to a Hui, who did not pay the amount the Han merchant demanded. The Dungan Revolt and Panthay Rebellion, of which the Dungan Revolt is sometimes considered part, took place between 1862 and 1877. They are separate from the Taiping Rebellion, mentioned earlier, which partially overlaps.

Finally, we ought not to forget the Yellow Turban Rebellion, which accounted for another 3 to 7 million between 184 and 205 AD--known in China as the opening event in Luan Guanzhong's historical novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Last night I watched Red Cliff (2008), which deals with the Battle of Red Cliffs. From the plethora of arrows, the wanton use of explosives and fire, and the swaths of people cut down with swords, this too seemed like no trivial matter. In fact, in the minds of the modern Chinese, this event is paramount. The movie is the only one to have grossed more than Titanic in China.

Goat Cheek for Lunch

This is me this afternoon at one of my favorite restaurants in Changchun, which serves food from ethnically Chinese Muslims, or Hui zu. We ordered meat-stuffed bing (greasy pancakes) and each had a bowl of rice (size: er liang, which means 0.2 jin or 0.1 kilograms). We also had qie zi, or eggplant, with suan, or garlic. It was the final, main dish that prompted me to write this post, though. We had the cheek of a goat!

Here I am, pictured eating cheek, thus the cheeky picture.

Finally, a close up of the dish:

Both pictures were taken with the ZTE V955, which was my Christmas present to Deborah. We cannot stop playing this "detective" game where you have to get into the next room (level) by collecting items, inspecting them, properly deploying them, and breaking codes.

Seven Sages, Six Arts, Five Punishments, Four Novels, etc., etc., and so forth

Everything Important is Countable in China

Seven Sages

The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove were a group of Chinese Taoist Qingtan scholars, writers, and musicians who came together in the 3rd century CE. They are depicted in dozens of important paintings and became symbols of high culture for the remainder of the imperial age.

By Qingtan scholars, I mean that these men engaged in witty back-and-forth about metaphysics and philosophy. The Seven Sages stressed the enjoyment of ale, personal freedom, spontaneity and a celebration of nature.

These men of intellect were exasperated with the intrigues, corruption and rigidity of court life during the politically fraught Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history. They gathered near the home Xi Kang (also and usually, Ji Kang), perhaps their most illustrious member. Xi Kang was highly critical of Confucianism and challenged many social conventions of his time. As such, he was considered scandalous and seditious. Three thousand university students signed a petition to release him after he was sentenced to death by Sima Zhao, but the appeal was denied. Before his execution, Xi Kang asked for his zither and played his swan song, the famous guqin masterpiece Guangling san, which music is presumed to be forever lost.

The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove (with boy attendant), in a Kano school Japanese painting of the Edo period

 

Six Arts

The Six Arts formed the basis of education in ancient Chinese culture. During the Zhou Dynasty (1122–256 BCE), students were required to master the "liù yì" (六藝) (Six Arts):

1. Rites (禮)
2. Music (樂)
3. Archery (射)
4. Charioteering (禦)
5. Calligraphy (書)
6. Mathematics (數)

Zhou Tong teaching Yue Fei archery.

Men who excelled in these six arts were thought to have become perfect gentlemen. One example from Chinese history of a famous archer was Yu Fei, picture here as the family tutor schools him in the Eighteen Arms of Wushu, or the primary weapons of Chinese martial arts.

The Six Arts grew out of the Confucian philosophy. As such, Xu Gan (170–217 CE) discusses them in the Balanced Discourses. Eventually they evolved to just four arts. Math was replaced by the Game of Go or weiqi, about which quite a bit has been written on these pages. Music was limited to the playing of a specific traditional Chinese instrument, the qin. Calligraphy was retained and painting was added. Manners or etiquette ("rites") went the way of chivalry in the West and mastery of the outmoded transport (chariot) and weaponry (bow and arrow) was abandoned.

 

Five Punishments

A Wikipedia entry tells us that The Five Punishments in Ancient China evolved into The Five Punishments in Imperial China and that there were also The Five Punishments for female offenders. The “Five Punishments for Slaves” were abolished during the reign of Emperor Wen of Han following a petition from a female subject Chunyu Tiying (淳于缇萦), and replaced by the “Five Punishments for Serfs”.

These are the ancient ones:

• Mò (墨), also known as qíng (黥), where the offender would be tattooed on the face or forehead with indelible ink. (1,000 crimes)
• Yì (劓), where the offender's nose was cut off. (1,000 crimes)
• Yuè (刖), also known as bìn (膑/臏) during the Xia Dynasty and zhǎnzhǐ (斩趾) during the Qin Dynasty, involved amputation of the left or right foot or both. Other sources claim that this punishment involved removal of the kneecap, which is claimed to be the source of Warring States Period military strategist Sun Bin’s name. (500 crimes)
• Gōng (宫), also known as yínxíng (淫刑), fǔxíng (腐刑)^[7][8] or cánshì xíng (蚕室刑), where the male offender’s reproductive organs were removed.^[9][10] The penis was removed and testicles were cut off, and the offender was sentenced to work as a eunuch in the Imperial palace.^[11][12] Gōng for men was applied to the same crime as gōng for women, namely adultery, "licentious" or "promiscuous" activity.^[13] (300 crimes)
• Dà Pì (大辟), the death sentence. Methods of execution were quartering, or cutting the body into four pieces (fēn wéi lù 分为戮); boiling alive (pēng 烹); tearing off an offender's head and four limbs by attaching them to chariots (chēliè 车裂); beheading (xiāoshǒu 枭首); execution then abandonment of the offender’s body in the local public market (qìshì 弃市); strangulation (jiǎo 绞); and slow slicing (língchí 凌迟). Other methods of execution were also used. (200 crimes)

 

The Four Classic Novels

Not be confused with the Four Books and Five Classics, the Four Classic novels are:

English	Simplified Chinese	Author	Date
Water Margin	水浒传	Shi Nai'an[2]	14th century
Romance of the Three Kingdoms	三国演义	Luo Guanzhong	14th century
Journey to the West	西游记	Wu Cheng'en	16th century
Dream of the Red Chamber	红楼梦	Cao Xueqin	18th century

I have not read Water Margin, alternatively called Outlaws of the Swamp, nor have I cracked the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

I am currently mired in The Dream of Red Mansions, variously called Dream of the Red Chamber. It competes with Tolstoy in terms of the introduction of a large number of different characters. It dwarfs War and Peace with its 120 chapters. I will not participate in the absurd reductionism that would be required to offer a synopsis of the story, but rather simply recommend it to one and all. It is widely read here and there are questions on the national college entrance examination that require recitation of the characters. It is filled with elegant, masterful poetry that in my translation is still superlatively elegant.

I have written about the Journey to the West previously, I think. It is the tale of a Taoist priest and monkey--the Monkey King-- and their fellow travelers. It was the source of a vintage television classic, produced in the 1970s by the Japanese, called Monkey, and had continued to be the source of TV dramas.



Finally, a fifth book bears mention, The Plum in the Golden Vase. It is banned in China as a piece of pornography, but is recognized by the Princeton University Press as "a landmark in the development of the narrative art form – not only from a specifically Chinese perspective but in a world-historical context...noted for its surprisingly modern technique" and "with the possible exception of The Tale of Genji (ca. 1010) and Don Quixote (1605, 1615), there is no earlier work of prose fiction of equal sophistication in world literature."

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Most of this information has been lifted from the font of all knowledge (Wikipedia) and carefully picked-over by yours truly. There are some segments that I have not even bothered to re-write. It is