About three paragraphs into the story I was writing on a the homecoming party for a squad of local Marines, my editor popped her head around the cubicle with a suggestion:
“Do you think you could take out the drinking and the swearing?” she asked. We were, she reminded me, a family newspaper. (Note: It’s been a couple years since I worked there.)
I’ve never figured out what that means, exactly, a “family newspaper.” We printed some grisly stuff: car and train wrecks, blood stains on sidewalk, skeletons of houses gutted by fire.
And marines are vulgar. Take away the drinking, swearing, crude talk of sex and how it relates to consuming a Jello-shot, and you have something more bland, less real. (My marine friends call this the Army). These men had just come back from their second tour in Iraq. Foul language was the least of their issues.
Pat Thornton sent me on this nostalgia trip with his post this morning, noting that Stars & Stripes grapples with the same issue:
My paper is willing to print “shit†in a story but only in certain editions. Our Mideast edition is keeping the word, while our editions in Europe and the Pacific are dropping it. The Web will not feature the word as well.
…
The expletive was left in the Mideast edition because it’s a theater of war. The feeling was that troops in combat have a different community standard than those living on base with their families.
As much as it is our job, as journalists, to promote civic and civil debate, to calm the passions of our readers with facts and with reason, to enlighten, we’re also in the business of saying it like it is.
We’re not the Family Channel.
I’m leaving Dalian. And China.
I know this seems like a good time to be in China, and hence, an awkward time to leave. I had planned to stay until the Olympics.
I wish there were an easy way to explain why I’ve decided to go back to California, but there isn’t. I woke up one day back in November with one clear thought in my head: “Time to go home.”
The best reasons I can give are my girlfriend and my grandparents. In about two weeks, my girlfriend and I will hit the four year mark. The past 18 months of that have been spent on different continents–Africa and Asia–with the brief exception of this summer when we spent two months traveling together in Madagascar. It’s time to try for a normal(ish) relationship.
My grandparents are in their 80s. I won’t get any time back with them. That’s more important to me than the Olympics, or anything else China does.
Leaving China feels as strange as coming here in the first place. Both decisions were spur of the moment. I can’t say whether either is or was the right course of action.
This is by no means the end of my interest or involvement with China, nor is it the end of this blog. The country is far too interesting, and I’m still fascinated by it. Who knows, I may even come back for the Olympics if the right opportunity comes up.
I’m going to miss Dalian. As cities in China go, this is one of the best. It’s one of the few places in Asia I’d want to live long-term.
Much of the hype is true: It is one of the cleanest cities in China. It benefits from being international and multicultural. It remains an affordable place to live, despite a growing economy.
The local expats here remain a tight community, even as the number grows. Dalian feels like a small town in a big city.
For anyone thinking of coming here, short- or long-term, by all means email me (eyeseast at gmail.com). For continued blogging coverage, some suggestions:
- Rick at Panda Passport: My friend Rick, one of my favorite people in China, also finds some of the wackiest stuff on the Web. He also writes for CNET.
- The Art of Living: Jonathon is newer to the blogosphere. He’s a great writer and keeps things local. Check him out.
- East-West Station: Kim is more than a “fat old Englishman out east.” He’s also a damn smart guy. I know because I never would have won so many bottles of vodka at Quiz Night were he not on my team. He’s married to a local, so he’ll be here a while.
And of course: DalianDalian.com. It really does have the best Dalian map you’re likely to find. Thank Alex for building it.
So long Dalian. Thanks for all the fish.
- It was kinda dull. Much of my experience was a less interesting, more disorganized version of last year.
- I’ve been distracted. On a whim, I started learning Django (and by extension, the Python programming language), and the deeper I get into it, the more I’m enjoying it.
Before I left Dalian a month ago, I’d planned on spending my time (and hence, not my limited budget) plowing into Drupal and PHP, since that’s what we used for DalianDalian. It also seemed a logical follow to my efforts with XHTML and CSS.
What diverted me was Matt Waite’s blog post on learning Django. I followed the links, started playing, and ended up somewhere very different from where I intended to be. Such is life, I suppose.
Anyway, I’ve yet to build anything useful with Django, but I think I’m close. I’m six chapters into the Django Book, which I highly recommend (along with How to Think Like a Computer Scientist for fellow Python newbies).
Ultimately, I’m hoping this helps me do more of the kind of journalism I did at my old newspaper, covering education. I used to rummage through state databases on schools and demographics and test scores and teacher pay, turning it all into blobs of text. Mind you, I think they were very well formed blobs of text, but that’s not always the best thing to do with this kind of information.
Text is good for context and analysis, for presenting trends, for guiding a reader through a pile of numbers. But it’s worth letting people sift data on their own and presenting it in a way that makes doing so easy. Hopefully, Django will help me do that.
Podcasters Marcia and Lisle Veach interviewed me a couple weeks back for their show, At Home in China. We talked about:
How might subtle differences in culture and language become a barrier to mutual understanding between people from the West and China? Marcia interviews Chris, a journalist who is currently teaching English and studying Chinese in northeastern China.
Listen to the whole show here.
I mentioned a few blogs and a few books in the podcast, and I’ll recommend them all again here:
Books
Blogs
And of course: DalianDalian.com
These lists are by no means exhaustive. Look to your right for a better list of blogs worth reading. Lots of good stuff in there.
Seoul is a lovely place. Probably. But for the past week, it’s also been an unbearably, wretchedly, can’t-feel-my-face, my-hands-shouldn’t-be-that-color cold kind of place. Really, it hurts to go outside.
So, if such a thing is possible, I’m spending more time than usual in front of my laptop, which does have the side benefit of warming my hands on it’s overheating core duo. Ah, technology.
What that means for you, dear reader, is that I’m compulsively hitting reload on the social networking sites where I now have more friends than I do in what an online-gamer ex-girlfriend of mine referred to as RL. Should you be trying to find me in either realm, here’s a few places to start:
And if none of those work for you, feel free to shoot me an email: eyeseast at gmail
Last weeks hard drive meltdown hit me pretty hard, but it looks like it wasn’t entirely a surprise to everyone. Patrick emailed me a story today, claiming
Apple was aware of flaws in many MacBook drives but has so far kept silent on it.
The affected drives — model numbers ST96812AS and ST98823AS — are commonly found in notebooks such as Apple’s MacBook or MacBook Pro, the firm says. To determine whether a MacBook has one of the affected drives, it’s suggested that owners go to their Mac’s System Profiler application and check the revision number under the Serial ATA listing.
If the System Profiler indicates that the computer is using a Seagate hard drive with firmware Version 7.01, Retrodata recommends backing up all data and then having the drive replaced.
I can’t say whether my old hard drive was one of those listed; it’s on its way back to the Apple factory (required under my AppleCare warranty). But the symptoms are familiar:
As part of its continued coverage of the vulnerability, Retrodata this week said it continues to receive “quantities” of the affects drives for recovery, nearly all of which display the same cause of failure — the read/write heads appear to fail mechanically, quickly causing deep scratches to the platter surface, and rendering the drives practically unrecoverable.
That would probably explain the clicking sounds the drive made while running.
Sure would have been nice to have this information three weeks ago. The new hard drive is nice, but maybe Apple can give me back those videos of my grandparents. Time to go back stuff up.
I got an email from the guys at China Law Blog this morning begging—OK, asking politely, but begging on their own site—for an endorsement on ABA’s best blawg contest. CLB being one of my favorite China blogs, how could I not?
What sway I have in such things is questionable, but if both my readers vote for CLB, well, I’m sure it will make Dan and Steve happy. And we all want happy lawyers, right? Better than unhappy lawyers (though now that I think about it, which group is more likely to sue?).
CLB was in second place this morning and coming up fast on Patently-O, but as of this writing, appears to have taken the lead. Voting runs until Jan. 2, so it’s still anyone’s game.
I think Imagethief said it best: Vote for CLB and get some lawyer karma. Given my luck lately, I’ll take all the karma I can get.
Vote here.
My hard drive suffered a fatal melt down last week. I woke up on Friday morning to find my screen holding fast at 1:18 a.m. and my 6:30 a.m. alarm telling me it was time for class. The laptop’s fan was almost as loud. I shut down, restarted, nothing. A gray screen, a file folder with a blinking question mark. My computer was checking its own vitals, looking up at me and reporting, “We aren’t detecting any brainwaves. The patient is not responding.”
Attempts to revive the disc failed. Neither a laptop nor an external port could recognize the bits of metal that used to contain 60 gigabytes of my personal data. A technician at the only Mac repair shop in town left the drive in his freezer overnight in a last effort. No good.
And, before you ask, I did not have a good set of backups. I was sorting photos to move them onto other formats when this happened. It was the equivalent of my virtual house burning down. Among the lost items: 20 gb of photos, including those from a trip through California, my first year in China, last January in Korea, my trip through Southeast Asia in February; videos of the same trips, video interviews for a project I never really got going on why people come to China; an interview with my grandparents, recorded just before I left for China.
That last one just plain hurts.
Two bright spots:
- I bought an AppleCare plan with the computer, which was probably the smartest thing I did last year. No cost for service, even in China.
- Over the past year, I’ve posted, blogged, emailed or otherwise shared a great many of my photos, videos and documents. Those are still in email accounts and online, so I’m mining those databases bit by bit to recover what I can.
This whole mess has in some ways reconfirmed that I need to be more disciplined about posting. Backups are great, but those fail, too, as another friend found out this week when his portable hard drive fell off his desk. The safest place to put data is many places.
Now, I only have what I’ve shared.
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
—Douglas Adams, via Most Grave Concern
I need to read more Douglas Adams. Anybody who writes sentences like “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t” ought to be on my shelf, assuming I had a shelf and could buy such relevant books in Dalian.
I will be buying books, though. I’ve already started. Everyone’s advice last week confirmed what I really did want to do. I’m going to study Chinese full time next year. It’s looking like Dalian University of Technology will be the lucky winner of my tuition money, on the recommendation of my friend Adam, whose Chinese sounds frighteningly impressive until you hear his Japanese. I’ve a long way to go.
I actually decided all this a week ago, after all the great comments poured in, mostly from people I’ve never met except through blogging. Those interweb tubes are a comfort sometimes, warm like my overheating core duo processor. But I’ve been holding off on posting, in part because I couldn’t figure out how to put into words why I really want to learn Chinese. It’s too daunting a language to take lightly, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to learn it.
A few days after this post I keep mentioning, I was on the bus heading for Chinese class, when a worker on his way out of the city sat down next to me. He smiled when I said “Nihao,” showing teeth that looked like year-old candy corn in a face that could be described as “well-traveled” in the way old suitcases often are.
Well-traveled described nearly everything about him, actually. He was from Sichuan, now working in Dalian building skyscrapers he’ll likely never set foot in. When I met him, he and four cohorts were on the first, and shortest, leg of a long journey home. We talked about how much he made working construction—”too little”—and how much it would cost to get back to Sichuan—”too much.” There was more, plenty to complain about, but I hit the limits of my speaking ability.
I got off the bus and watched it continue north up Renmin Lu. It’s a long way to Sichuan.
People who travel have always fascinated me. It’s part of why I like lighting out myself, to meet others who ditched one life for another. Mostly, this means I talk to a lot of backpackers who are here (wherever “here” is) because they can be. Take away the luxury of choice, and the trip gets much more interesting.
Last year, with utterly no Chinese ability, I’d have shrugged off that conversation on the bus, offered a “ting bu dong” and gone back to a book. I’d have done it on the cable car tonight, too, and in the taxi every weekend.
With what little of the language I’ve picked up, one thing keeps coming back. Without speaking Chinese, much of this country just doesn’t exist. It remains foreign, intimidating, inaccessible. It’s possible to live in Dalian without knowing more than “nihao” and “xie xie;” I’ve seen plenty of English teachers and IT workers do it.
But that’s just not interesting enough anymore. More to come. 别急.
Side note: Thanks again to everyone who commented before with great ideas and input.
Alex, Bernard, Jason, Kevin S., Rick, CLB, Chris Waugh (btw, I’m much taller than a bar of soap, though just as ivory white these days), D_sh, Yadira and Rob.
I think you all knew exactly what I wanted. Thanks for saying it.
The eldest children in families tend to develop slightly higher IQs than their younger siblings, researchers were to report Friday, citing a large study that could effectively settle more than a half-century of scientific debate about the relationship between IQ and birth order.
Finally, evidence. Turns out it’s not biology, but the little niches that form within families that make first-borns just a touch sharper. We also tend to be more cautious and duty-bound.
I found myself nodding along with this story and picking out my siblings, going, “Yeah, that’s Mike.” Especially this part:
Another potential explanation concerns how individual siblings find a niche in the family. Some studies find that both the older and younger siblings tend to describe the firstborn as more disciplined, responsible, a better student. Studies suggest - and parents know from experience - that to distinguish themselves, younger siblings often develop other skills, like social charm, a good curveball, mastery of the electric bass, acting skills.
“Like Darwin’s finches, they are eking out alternative ways of deriving the maximum benefit out of the environment, and not directly competing for the same resources as the eldest,” Sulloway said. “They are developing diverse interests and expertise that the IQ tests do not measure.”
This kind of experimentation might explain evidence that younger siblings often live more adventurous lives than eldest siblings. They are more likely to participate in dangerous sports than eldest children, and more likely to travel to exotic places, studies find. They tend to be less conventional in general than firstborns, and some of the most provocative and influential figures in science spent their childhoods in the shadow of an older brother or sister (or two or three or four).
My youngest brother Mike taught himself bass, guitar and drums in about 18 months. My sister Katie, the only girl in the family, pulls down more cash than the other three of us combined cutting hair and will knock your front teeth out if you’re not careful. Nick is the charmer. He has, as our cousin describes it, “the ability to turn a bucket of B.S. into a bucket o’ gold.” I’m just a regular guy in China.
But at least I’ve got ‘em beat on IQ…
« Older Entries
Fatal error: Call to undefined function akpc_the_popularity() in
/home/chrisamico/www/www/blog/wp-content/themes/techmaniawp-10/index.php on line
25