Confusion say...

With the uproar over Professor Amy Chua's "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" and the comments on Kristoff's Sunday, January 16 column, I have begun to delve into the mysteries of Chinese education and parenting, which is to say Confucian teaching practices versus American teaching methods.

The main portion of my job will be at Northeast Normal University Middle Schools where I will be working with very advanced middle schoolers preparing them for the TOEFL. If any of you teachers out there have thoughts about teaching to the test, please post a comment to this blog.

To send me a care package or a letter

I arrive on February 11 and they have an apartment for me with lots of light and lots of shelving. Very exciting. There is no house to house mail delivery, though, so any mail should be sent to:

Mr. Alexander Lee
Perfect English
The Torch Building
2400 Tong Zhi St. 2nd Floor
Jilin, Changchun 130021
CHINA

The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius?

Last night, some dear friends cooked me a good-bye dinner of duckling. This is my favorite thing in the world to eat and it was a gesture of tremendous generosity and love for which I am deeply grateful. I left with a copy of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, which I will watch this morning and return to them with their copy of Oracle Bones. Another friend just sent me a video of a place that may just need to get added to my tourism list: Tianmen Cave. You can watch some incredible pilots fly their planes through this arch/cave.



While I was eating duck, Barack Obama and Hu Jintao dined together on pear salad, lobster, dry-aged ribeye steak with buttermilk onions. They even had apple pie and ice cream for dessert. How utterly American! What is most important, though, is that China views the talks as a success. I am more and more confident that China and the United States can find a harmonious future. It would be shear arrogance to pretend that this blog can play any major role in this dialogue, but so many people each day fill my head with their prejudices and views of China. I hope that each of you will candidly ask questions of me while I am there and I will do my best to answer them in a way that fosters harmony between the two great powers of the world. I will not just serve buttermilk onions, though. I hope to give you a glimpse of the raw China, as much as I can.

I am deep into Pomfret's Chinese Lessons, which my twin sister gave me for Christmas. This is a troubling glance at the deep wounds of China's recent past, but there are lots of reasons to believe that things have changed.

My last post was about the Year of the Rabbit perhaps becoming the Year of the Sharp Pointy Teeth, but I think that luck is turning and many good days and weeks lie ahead for China and the United States. Maybe this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Wikipedia reports: According to the Esoteric Christian tradition, such as the Rosicrucians, the proximity and entrance in the Age of Aquarius—occurring after the present Age of Pisces, or age ruled by the "Sword"—will bring to the majority of human beings the discovery, true living and real knowledge of the inner and deeper Christian teachings which the Christ spoke of in Matthew 13:11 and Luke 8:10. I don't know too much about this nonsense, but I do know that Robert Frost made mention of Rosicrucians in a favorite poem of mine that true Communist revolutionaries are likely to embrace:


Semi-Revolution

I advocate a semi-revolution.
The trouble with a total revolution
(Ask any reputable Rosicrucian)
Is that it brings the same class up on top.
Executives of skillful execution
Will therefore plan to go halfway and stop.
Yes, revolutions are the only salves,
But they're one thing that should be done by halves.

The Year of the Sharp Pointy Teeth?

There is an ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." I read the news today, oh boy, about the J-20. People are asking me about Taiwan and the South Korean situation about which I previously posted. This is the Year of the Rabbit and all I can think of is Monty Python's killer rabbit. "Run away! Run away! Run away!"

Travel Plans

Monday morning I will meet with the Travel Clinic doctor at Concord Hospital so that I can get any last minute immunizations. I hope to see the Three Gorges area of the Yangtze and Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai while I am over there. I may even go to Thailand and Mongolia, but did not put this on my form.

I have made plane reservations that will bring me from Boston to San Francisco for $149.65 on February 2; from San Francisco to Seoul, South Korea for $576.20 on February 6 (leaving SFO on Feb. 5); and from Seoul to Chanchun, China--my final destination--for $366.15 on February 11. That seems reasonable.

This morning I read the chapter called "Money" in Peter Hessler's book, River Town. Everybody in China was very open about money and discussed their salaries, rent, etc. very openly when Hessler was there. I am comfortable saying that it is more than a month's salary for me to get myself to China for this experience and new job! (Maybe a year from now this Yankee will be even more forthcoming.)

The yuan goes a long way. A very good lunch for four people can be had for ten US dollars in Changchun.

Omens and superstitions

My driveway in Concord, NH, goes slightly down hill toward the street between two late nineteenth century duplexes. As I rolled toward the street, suddenly a hawk appeared and he screeched to a halt mid-air, slipping above my car just in time...or so I thought. The dashboard was covered with tiny, downy feathers. I stopped the car to see if the bird was okay. I looked back up into the part of our driveway where the cars park. No sign of the hawk. I looked again and he had landed with another bird in his talons. This was all the explanation that I needed. As I walked toward him, he lumbered off to my neighbor's yard.

A couple weeks ago as a friend and I drove up the dirt road that leads to Knights' Pond in Alton, an Owl swooped down crossing a few yards in front of our car.

The Chinese together with the Romans saw the Owl as the bird of ill-omen. In China the Owl was common in burial ceramics of the Han-dynasty, which was contemporary with the Roman Empire and to which the Chinese had extensive trade relations. [1]

In China, it is a lucky sign to see or hear songbirds or red-colored birds or Swallows. [2]

Though held in esteem in China, where peacocks were once kept as symbols of status and wealth by the ruling families, the peacock receives only scorn from the rest of the world. [3]

In Asia, Cranes are symbols of longevity and immortality. The White Crane can fly to the heavens and it is a Chinese symbol for "wisdom" and is sometimes called the "heavenly" or "blessed" Crane. Cranes were vehicles of the gods and in China fly them to the "Isle of the Immortals", the legendary home of the eight immortals. A Crane's eggs were used in magic potions to grant eternal life upon its drinkers. [4]

Should I subscribe meaning to my experience this morning with the Cooper's Hawk or with the Owl?

Learning About China from Books and Magazines

This blog will become more of a travel journal after I get on a plane to San Francisco on February 2. In the meantime, I will try to help you learn about China through some of the sources that I am exploring. I am half way through Peter Hessler's River Town and about a tenth of the way into John Pomfret's Chinese Lessons. The former is edifying and the latter, a terrifying account of the Cultural Revolution's victims. Hessler writes for the New Yorker. Pomfret is an interesting journalist who writes for the Washington Post.

The biggest lessons from Hessler are a) don't look in the Kleenex in a country where one in four people die of lung disease and b) it is possible for a cab driver to honk in excess of 500 times during a fifteen minute trip. As an opponent to Hydro-Quebec's developments and a life-long opponent of large dam projects, his section on the antediluvian Yangtze River is fascinating and insightful. This is a place that I plan to visit.

I wanted to share this with you, too, from Bill McKibben's interview in Grist with James Hansen:

BM: There are also a lot of people who say that it doesn't matter what the United States does, because China now has the greatest emissions and its emissions are growing the fastest.

JH: China is taking the right steps to move toward carbon-free energy. They are now number one in the world in production of clean energy technologies: solar power, wind power, and nuclear power. Also, China stands to suffer greatly from global climate change because China has several hundred million people living near sea level and the country is already experiencing large damaging regional climate disasters.

There is no doubt that China will want to move rapidly toward clean carbon-free energies. When the United States realizes that it must impose an internal fee on carbon emissions, it should not be difficult to get China to agree to do the same.

Also, it is important to recognize that the United States is responsible for three times more of the excess (human-made) carbon dioxide in the air today than any other nation, with China being second. [My emphasis.]  The much greater responsibility for accumulated human-made emissions is true despite the fact that China's population is three times greater than the United States'. So there is no reason to expect China to act first to reduce emissions.

However, there are advantages in beginning to act rapidly. China is investing heavily in clean energies, and it is likely that they will recognize the merits of imposing an internal carbon price to spur development and implementation of clean energies. The United States risks becoming second-class technologically and economically this century if it does not stop subsidizing dirty technologies and instead move toward progressive policies such as fee and green check, which will stimulate development of clean energies.

Dr. James Hansen is the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Adjunct Professor at the Columbia University Earth Institute. Bill McKibben is an American environmentalist and writer who frequently writes about global warming and alternative energy  and advocates for more localized economies. I wrote my college thesis about him and his family and he serves on the Board of Advisers for Project Laundry List.