Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

Yesterday was my birthday (not much happened, I just had dinner with a friend in a Thai place...very good food, not that expensive...well, 100+ RMB per person, so its not that cheap either for a normal person, I guess) and tomorrow my father makes his return from the States. Given the intense scrutiny over alleged extramarital affairs that he is facing from the entire extended family (I would like to talk about the details even in this blog), the peace and independence I am enjoying right now will not return until I leave Shanghai for Japan almost a month later. Now, with my father back here, so will my grandmother get here from Nanjing to watch over him to make sure nothing else happens to aggravate the existing situation that further ruin the family name (I wrote about my rather uncaring and angry attitude toward this issue not that while back on this blog, so I won't talk about this anymore). I will be put in an incredibly awkward position between the silent tension between my

While in Taiwan and since coming back, I have been asked multiple times what are the most striking differences between the mainland and the island...and so far I have not been able to put the fundamental things in anything beyond a few superficial traits. Like I said in the previous post, Taiwanese people are respectful, polite, attentive to detail, allowing for a society filled with order. Traditions are protected and there is an overwhelming sense of peace and mutual trust within a service-oriented society despite a physical look resembling some old Chinatowns at certain parts. However, descriptions like this are definitely satisfying. People of both sides should expect something of this sort without the need for a visit to the other side. After all, reading the political and economic histories as well as the societal and ideological developments is enough to predict all such differences. Everyone on the mainland knows that Taiwan is ahead economically, especially when consideri

Language unites a civilization. Only with efficient communication can a group of people bond so much as to consider themselves to belong to one society and one culture. A common language creates common languages and diminishes the separating effects of geographic and transportation barriers. Nowhere is such a principle more aptly illustrated than here in China, where 20% of humanity have become one nation through the use of Mandarin Chinese as a prevailing lingua franca. Sure, unintelligible local dialects still exists, but as internal migration pick up pace (and it certainly has with hundreds of millions of migrant labor moving into large cities), the power of local tongues has considerably weakened as people from all areas of China begin to live next to each other in expanding cities. People no longer use their local tongues because the majority of the people they come across everyday cannot understand them even if the tongues are used in the original localities. Politics have al

Just got back to Shanghai after an overnight bus ride from Fuzhou (where I only walked around for an hour and a half after I landed on a ship from Matzu Islands in Taiwan)...now with the trip over and not much else to do before my father returns from the States and my grandmother getting here from Nanjing, I suppose it is time to write some reflections on the entire trip (two weeks long...even thought it was too much...after all, the Taiwanese leg happened rather spontaneously without much planning). The main purpose of this entire trip, seen retrospectively, is the comparison of mainland China with Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. Same language and culture does not mean a similar present, and the result of 6 decades of different political and economic backgrounds really show on the outer appearance, social order, and especially, the characters and attitudes of the people, both to themselves and to each others, especially in the case of mainlanders vs. the other Chinese-speakers. Perhaps

When I was planning my trip to Taiwan not that long ago (in fact, I didn't seriously think about it til I got to Xiamen, across the Strait from Taiwan....AFTER already on the road for a week in Wuhan, Guangdong Province, plus Hong Kong and Macao...I was kind of suspicions from Chinese border customs regarding why I am leaving the country 3 times in 4 days), going to an Internet cafe was definitely part of the plan...all the blocked sites, especially Facebook and this one (I have been posting via email for the past month and half on the mainland), need to be accessed... Now here I am, sitting in a loud 24-hour Net Cafe in Tainan City, my first chance in accessing the Internet in Taiwan...there is a dog barking and walking down the hall in the net cafe rather leisurely and I am getting constantly distracted by the sounds of someone playing some gambling machine next door (I suppose the net cafes here also do other entertainment options?)...so yeah, the writing is and will be pretty h

Recently, my mother has been worrying that my brother's writing is not up to par with his classmates and the requirements for getting into elite colleges. Besides the fact that he is still only in 7th grade, a period of time that is really premature is judging the readiness for college-level writing, I suppose the fear is legitimate for a parent who does not know better. Chinese people can't stress enough about the importance of writing in American education system (primarily because Chinese people generally believe in technical stuff, such as engineering, medicine, and sciences, as the only legitimate education for preparation for good jobs...and because they generally suck at English writing) as Chinese kids, even those that have lived most of their lives in the US, tend to fall apart on the writing section of the SAT and in English classes both in high school and college. Having taught writing for so long to high school students in Korea, I have a general grasp of what are