November 29th, 2007 Chris
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.
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November 28th, 2007 Chris
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.
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June 25th, 2007 Chris
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.
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June 23rd, 2007 Chris
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…
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June 18th, 2007 Chris
It’s good to be from a country that makes a national pastime of taking the piss out of its political leaders. Enjoy!
Make your own at Current TV (via Teaching Online Journalism)
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June 12th, 2007 Chris
OK, so I try not to do this too often, but I need some advice from the blogosphere, which is full of people far smarter than me who’ve apparently got things far more figured out. Enough vaguely directed flattery? Alright, here’s my quandary:
I’m staying in China another year (at least), and I have no desire to teach another semester at my current university. This probably isn’t a shock to anyone. I have two options on the table.
I could study Chinese full time. A month or so ago, I tossed around the idea of going intensive on the language over coffee with Alex, and he turned it around and said he was planning on doing so himself. DongCai, where Alex just enrolled, is my top choice right now, or Dalian University of Technology. Both are close to my current neighborhood, and I’m consistently impressed by my friends who study at both colleges.
Cost: 8,000 RMB per semester, plus housing.
This would be intense, maybe working on the side, plowing all energy into getting good and functional, if not fluent, as fast as possible. Haven’t done anything like it in years.
Work. I have a job offer, of sorts, from a tech company in Dalian, doing marketing and research. The job would entail coaxing companies to set up outsourcing centers in China and giving their managers all the information necessary to sell said decision internally. This would be (gulp) a real job. It pays better than teaching, though less on a per-hour basis. The two prime benefits are flexibility and learning. “You basically get to invent your own career,” one of my potential coworkers, who is Swiss, told me after I interviewed.
The downside is that working 40+ hours a week would pretty well sideline language study. I’m sure I’ll keep improving, but I don’t expect to be close to fluent if I go this route. (It would also make freelancing difficult, but since I’ve barely sold anything all year, that hardly seems worth considering at this point.)
In my head, this is all coming down to a question of how committed I am to China. I told myself before I came that I’d stay through the Olympics, come what may. I went through this same pounding-my-head-on-a-wall process a year ago, when I ultimately decided to turn down a Peace Corps invitation to Cape Verde in favor of teaching in China.
A better question, which I keep trying ask myself, is what’s more important/useful/practical to learn now, language or business, and on that one, I’m utterly stumped. I still have every intention of returning to journalism at some point, sooner rather than later, so all this goes into the context of what’s likely to make me a better writer and reporter down the line.
Thoughts anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
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May 29th, 2007 Chris
When pigs are dying in droves down south and China’s top health inspector is on death row, maybe it’s time to cut back on the swine. And Xinhua doesn’t seem to want to talk about it.
Jeremiah over in the Granite Studio has a way of seeing the world through Terentino-colored glasses. I tend to view things a slightly yellower shade:
Homer: Are you saying you’re never going to eat any animal again? What about bacon?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Ham?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Pork chops?
Lisa: Dad, those all come from the same animal.
Homer: Heh heh heh. Ooh, yeah, right, Lisa. A wonderful, magical animal.
via The Simpsons Quote Page
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April 24th, 2007 Chris
The Santa Cruz Sentinel has a good multimedia feature today on one school’s efforts to get out of No Child Left Behind sanctions after three years of missing the mark. There are 2,218 California schools receiving federal penalties this year (source), and Branciforte sounds a lot like the schools I used to cover. It has a growing immigrant population that needs to learn English fast. Requirements are tightening. The school is struggling.
Why am I writing about education reform in my home state? you may be asking. Isn’t this a China blog? Yes. That it is. Halfway through the first slide show (via Ryan Sholin, who built it) is this choice turn of phrase from Kathy Sandidge, an English Language Development teacher:
I think people aren’t empathetic to what it means to be in another country, learning another language. If I talk to adults I say, ‘Pretend you’re in China. You’re sitting in a classroom and everything’s in Chinese. The culture is different. The expectations are different. The language is different. It’s all foreign.’
A year ago, I would have processed that quote differently. China is a big, scary, complicated and maybe threatening place when you’ve never been there, and more so if you, like too many in the States, have never left comfortable American shores (I’d been around Europe, but that’s beside the point). Once you’ve been here a while, it’s still a big, sometimes scary, always complicated but not quite so threatening kind of place, but in a different way.
This is a long way of saying: Living here changes the way I see the world.
Globalization and æ±‰å— don’t frighten me like they used to. Pollution and crowds, more so. This country has a way of tempting me to oversimplify things, then reminding me why that’s a bad idea.
I haven’t gone all the way through this thought, but it’s got my mind going in the just-after-midnight haze. So here’s tonight’s question for the blogosphere:
How has China changed your thinking?
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April 9th, 2007 Chris
A priest is walking through a cemetery in Ireland on Easter Sunday, and he comes upon a man weeping over a tombstone.”Why did you have to die?” he sobs.
The priest approaches, seeking to comfort the aggrieved. “Dear sir,” he says, “is this your father you’re crying over?”
The man shakes his head and continues moaning: “Why? Why did you die?”
“Was it your brother then?” the priest persists.
“No,” the man sniffles. “Oh God why?”
The priest asks cautiously, “Could it be your son?”
The man calms for a moment. “No,” he says. “In truth, I never knew him.”
The priest is puzzled. “Who was he, then?”
“He was my wife’s first husband.”
Happy Easter.
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April 1st, 2007 Chris
Sometimes, China is just one big spoof of itself. Three stories from the blogosphere had me laughing today, for better or worse:
On the Humanaught’s Blog:
Though long thought to have evolved from the UK-created rounders, new evidence suggests that the sport of baseball’s origins extend back nearly 500 years to China’s Ming Dynasty (c1368-1644).
Li Gang, of the National Council of History and Culture (NCHC), recently announced findings from a year-long study into the origins of various sporting events thought to have Chinese roots.
“We were quite surprised by this discovery,†said Li. “It is common knowledge that table tennis, tai chi, swimming and football all have a long history in China, but we could not have expected baseball too would make the list.â€
OK, baseball has to be a joke. No way that’s real. And swimming? I’m pretty sure the guy who invented swimming was the first one thrown into the pond who didn’t sink.
This story had China Law Blog contemplating a new post category: Fiction.
“China’s ethnic groups enjoy equal status and live in harmony. There is no discrimination (directed at any ethnicity),” Dainzhub, who is of Tibetan origin, said at a press conference in response to a Reuters reporter who asked whether racial discrimination existed in Chinese society.
China has 55 ethnic minority groups. The Han people account for more than 90 percent of the country’s total population.
“People from different ethnic groups often help each other and their relations are harmonious,” he said, adding the central government was investing more money to alleviate poverty in some ethnic minority groups.
“The 56 ethnic groups are like brothers and sisters living in one family,” said Dainzhub.
And then there was this site, which looks curiously familiar:
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