Kevin's Blog

The boat

2011-06-29T09:39:00.000-07:00

Someone thought that the boat featured in an earlier post was the boat we were on. No, we were on a much larger boat, the J. J. Mesquite, with two stories (not counting the roof) and about 10 cabins or so. It had recently been refurbished, and this was the second time the boat had been used since then. I don't have a picture of the whole boat but here are some parts. First, one of the hallways on the second story:

Here's the main common room, where we eat and hang out:

Then the place where the captain steers the ship. The captain, Capitão Rai (pronounced "hi"), is on the far left:

Edit: Blogger is having trouble loading this picture for now. I'll add it later.

The schedule on a typical day. The actual times vary quite a bit depending on the situation.

6:00 am: they turn off the AC in the rooms. This is enough to get most people up in the next 30 minutes.
7:00 am: Form a bucket brigade in the common room to bring the food from the kitchen (downstairs) up to the tables. Grace, and then breakfast. Two people clean dishes (rotates among everyone in the boat)
8:00 am: Group worship time
9:30 am: Start duties: Medical team starts seeing patients, Vacation Bible School starts for kids, teams go to visit homes
11:30 am: Return to the boat. Same routine as breakfast, for lunch.
12:30 pm: siesta
2:00 pm: Second round of duties (medical, VBS, house visits)
4:00 pm: Soccer with the locals
5:30 pm: Return to the boat, dinner (same routine as in Breakfast, lunch)
6:30 pm: Devotional
7:30 pm: Hang out, play cards, watch the stars, chat about life
10:00 pm: Most people go to bed by now

The Amazon river

2011-06-25T12:13:00.000-07:00

As I said we traveled by boat from Manaus. Our first stop was at Autazes, just for picking up supplies. To do this we went downstream and back up a tributary. Below is a map from Google Maps. Manaus is in the upper left and Autazes is in the lower right, labeled with a red A marker:

The rivers flow from left (west) to right (east). Note that some rivers are blue, and others are black. The blue rivers actually look brown up close, and are full of sediment; the black rivers actually look black in real life and are full of organic matter. Manaus is actually at the crossing of two rivers: the Rio Negro in black on the top-left and the Solimões river (the Amazon proper) in blue on the bottom-left. As you can see, the rivers maintain their color for some distance even after they merge. This is apparently something you can see when you're there but we missed it because we got there at night.

We visited several villages: São Félix, Igapizú, Murutinga, and one place that we had church services at that I didn't get the name of. I did find Murutinga on Google maps (the others are probably too small, but are in the area of Autazes and Murutinga):

We came at the peak of flood season, so there was more water and less land than is in the map here.

For Igapizú, we couldn't bring the boat in to shore but took some smaller boats in. In the previous post there was a picture of locals taking a boat. That was at Igapizú, and that shot was from our boat.

More about the boat next.

What we did

2011-06-24T01:01:00.000-07:00

We started in Manaus (the capital of Amazonas) and together with Manaus Presbyterian Church went on a boat to various villages along the Amazon river.

I mainly worked with the kids, helping teach Bible lessons. Here's a school in one of the villages:

Here is Ketyb (one of the translators from Manaus) running the Bible school in our first village, São Felix:

Here are some kids after class. They're playing with balloons they received at the end of class.

Boats are the main mode of transportation to and from the village:

Besides Bible school, there was providing medical care (I didn't do this so I don't have pictures) and visiting homes (often lay leaders of the local village church and the sick). We also had worship services, prayed for villagers, and shared our testimonies. But mainly we were there in union with the Christian community in the villages.

More later about the boat and the Amazon.

I'm back!

2011-06-21T16:30:00.000-07:00

I've returned to the US now. The trip was amazing. More details to follow.

Going to Brazil

2011-06-11T12:11:00.000-07:00

I haven't updated this blog for a number of years, but I figured this would be a convenient way to share with my friends and family what is going on with the mission trip to Brazil.

Unfortunately I won't be able to update this blog while I'm on the Amazon--there's no internet access--but I'll post a few things beforehand and maybe while we're in Manaus I'll find a way to update it, but most of the updating will be when I get back home.

First, what the trip is: This is a mission trip with my church, Malibu Presbyterian Church, to support the work in the Amazon by Manaus Presbyterian Church, located in Manaus, the capital of the Amazonas region of Brazil. They send medical missions up and down the Amazon river to villages that are mainly only accessible by boat. Our role is to support and encourage that mission by joining one of these boats, helping with medical work, help run what needs to happen on the boat, work with locals on what they need, sharing our lives with them, doing a Bible program for kids, and in general, help with whatever the regular year-round team needs to do their work.

We leave this evening. More specifically, I leave for the airport this evening, and our flight leaves at 2 a.m. from LAX, connecting in Panama City, to Manaus. We'll arrive at 4:17 p.m. local time (I think it's 4 hours ahead of us, considering we're on daylight savings and they're not) and go to their evening church service. Monday through Friday we'll be on the river. Saturday and Sunday we'll be in Manaus, and Monday early in the morning we leave for Panama, where we take a tour and leave for home.

Here is our team, mostly (photo taken at a group meeting at Gary's house this past Sunday):
From left to right: Gary Isbell, his daughter Haley Isbell, Nicole Schussel, Brett Schussel, John Lawrence, Kevin Iga, Tim Jones. Not pictured: Jonathan Fast, who is Tim's friend from somewhere else, who will be flying into LA today and meet us at LAX.

New Chinese characters

2008-09-01T18:54:00.000-07:00

[Sorry for those who've been waiting for another blog post--I've mostly abandoned this blog but I "needed" to post something on Language Log, and this seemed the way to do it.]

On the MTR (the Hong Kong subway system) there were random signs like the ones below.

The sign purports to define a new Chinese character, newly coined, though constructed from pieces of other characters. A HK native informant tells me that the cultural reference is to Shaolin Soccer, a very popular comedy about a Kung Fu group that comes together to fight evil and win soccer tournaments. Apparently they had some made-up words there, and this was one of them.

Immediately below, in white, it gives a character dictionary entry, with sound "kwen2" (the 2 refers to the tone), and then a mock definition.

In black, it mentions that 3,529,000 people will be learning this in three weeks, and that you can advertise.

The sign appears to be advertising the concept of advertising on the MTR--I'm not sure, but I can't figure out any other purpose.

Conference in New Orleans

2007-01-07T13:36:00.000-08:00

I've been at a math conference in New Orleans.

I haven't really had time to go see the city much. We're in the French Quarter, which was never really hit particularly hard. But there are tours to the other areas. I didn't go. Around here there has been some visible damage, but most of it is back up and running. The other areas are still without electricity.

The talks here have been really interesting. I've also unexpectedly run into people I've met before. And people I met before but they remembered me more than I remembered them.

Just got through judging an undergraduate poster session. Quite a wide range, from very impressive to pretty good. In each case, I think the students really got a lot out of it.

I also went to the talks sponsored by the Philosophy of Math group, which I'm an officer of. Quite a wide range of ideas there too.

One of my colleagues got food poisoning, so he's recovering in my room. We check out in about an hour and head to the airport back to LA tonight.

Bible podcasts

2007-01-03T09:07:00.000-08:00

There are several podcasts that read through the Bible. If you don't know, a podcast is like a radio show except on the internet, and every time an episode comes out, your computer automatically loads it, so that you can listen to it whenever you want. On your ipod, or on your computer, you decide. In this case, there are people reading through the Bible. Here are some I know about:

The Daily Audio Bible
http://www.dailyaudiobible.com/wordpress/
This is produced by Brian Hardin, a music producer in Nashville, who reads through the Bible in a year. The Old Testament and the New Testament are divided into 365 sections, and he reads the Old Testament section, the New Testament section, a psalm, and a section from Proverbs.

This is the most professionally-produced one I know. Because it's the whole Bible in one year, each podcast is about 15 to 30 minutes. He switches translations every week so you get to be familiar with many translations.

Podbible
http://podbible.com/
This one is probably the most fun, for several reasons. It has an amateurish feel, though the sound is clear. The reading quality is irregular since different people take turns reading. This one doesn't have a goal of reading through the Bible in a year, so they take a smaller chunk each time. Each episode is roughly 3 to 7 minutes long. They don't go strictly consecutively through the Bible; instead, they take a book seemingly chosen at random, and read through it.

The translation they use is the CEV (Contemporary English Version), which is pretty easy to listen to and understand for even those who don't have much experience with Christian phraseology. Each episode ends with a suggestion on what to "think about", what to "pray about" and what to "do". They're sometimes insightful, and sometimes just funny.

The Bible Podcast
http://thebiblepodcast.org/podcast/
This is somewhat in between the previous two. It's intermediate in professionalism, length of episodes (4 to 8 minutes each episode), it uses the New English translation which is fairly easy to understand but is a bit more standard than the CEV is, it does the same thing as the Podbible in jumping around to different books, but for each book, reading several consecutively.

They also shut down last year for several months. I don't know why. But they're back up again.

In case you don't know, you use podcasts with iTunes or some other program (generically called a "podcatcher") to regularly download these episodes when they come out, and iTunes or whatever podcatcher you use will alert you when the new episode is ready. At each of these sites there is a button you can click on to have your podcatcher subscribe to the service.

Back to the USA

2007-01-01T22:08:00.000-08:00

I'm back. Flew in today. My parents picked me up and we had a New Years/welcome back lunch with my sister. That was fun. Now I'm unpacking and trying to figure out where I put things before I left.

Now I have a fast internet connection (well, DSL which is fast compared to what was going on in Hong Kong) so I'm going to upload the other pictures from Chiang Mai, Thailand:

First, a food bazaar that has great food, available on street stands. Looks sketchy but perfectly fine. One odd thing I noticed, though, is that there were absolutely no insects. Then when I got back to my hotel I saw someone spraying something. A connection?

Dogs are everywhere. They are cared for in temples (a part of Buddhist compassion, perhaps) and come and go as they please.

Here's a dog that was waiting for someone in particular. Tuk-tuks drove by and he didn't chase them. When a woman and a child went past he bounded over to them, then realized he made a mistake and went back to his spot.

Travel agents everywhere selling tours to the outlying areas. Ride an elephant, see some villagers, that sort of thing. This tour agency was run out of a beauty salon near my hotel.

Another temple picture. I included it to point out the Thailand flags and the king's flags. This is actually common. There might be some association between Buddhism and the monarchy going on here.

On a street outside a temple, where lots of Western tourists walk, there are small little pillars that clearly go with the temple. But people have been using them as trash cans.

Here is a typical spirit house, traditionally placed outside every home, and the residents set out flowers and food for the spirits. Often arranged with miniatures like a doll house. What makes this interesting is that this is outside a small police box. Police boxes get them too, I guess.

There's a building dedicated to promoting Chiang Mai exports. They have a store where you can wander through and see the goods.

Starbucks is three stories high.

Riding elephants. I did this. It was okay, but you ride in a basket so you don't really interact with the animal.

You do get to hand the elephant food, though.

but you don't need to ride to do that.
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They had an elephant show. Elephants playing soccer, lifting hats off trainers, etc.

The elephant show featured elephants painting.

After that you can buy the paintings. Don't know what the artist's cut is.

The problem with posting

2006-12-30T09:29:00.000-08:00

Okay, this time I have an excuse for not posting often enough. The internet is broken.

More specifically, that huge earthquake off the southern tip of Taiwan on December 26 seems to have severed 6 of the 7 trunklines of data cables that connect Hong Kong to the outside world. And Blogger seems to be its old slow self, and this combines into making it extremely long to enter a post. Especially with pictures. Sometimes the whole thing crashes. Sometimes I wait forever to get a screen where I can enter another entry. I've tried many times tonight already, and never got this far. I'm going to try now and enter something fast, on the hopes of staying in the window where connectivity is working.

Suffice it to say that next time I go to Thailand, I won't really bother with Bangkok--the 2 days I spent there was enough. But I will try to spend a few weeks in Chiang Mai and especially in the surrounding areas.

I'm leaving Hong Kong on January 1, arriving in Los Angeles over an hour before I left! Well, not really, of course--but it looks like it based on the airline ticket, because of the time difference.

I'll probably do my next post from the states, where I have more internet stability.

Pictures from Bangkok

2006-12-28T11:43:00.000-08:00

I'm back from not only Bangkok but also Chiang Mai. Yes, I'm back in Hong Kong.

But it takes forever to load these pictures, so you'll only get the pictures from Bangkok for now.

And I rebooked my return flight to January 1 so that will give me a couple of days in LA before I have to leave for New Orleans (Math conference).

First, the skyline. Temples (called Wats) and skyscrapers.

Transport by canal, subway, or river:

Now the King's palace:

Note the mixture of Thai and Victorian styles here.

And now come the guards both human:

and otherwise:

Attached to this is the Emerald Buddha complex of temples. Generally you can't take pictures inside temples so to see the real thing you have to fly on over and see for yourself.

Some of these are demons, and some are monkeys, apparently.

This one is part "angel" part monkey. I put "angel" in quotes because presumably the concept in Buddhism is not identical to the one in the Abrahamic faiths, but the tour guides were using that translation.

They have a model of Angkor Wat (the famous huge temple complex in Cambodia) from the time when Thailand ruled Cambodia:

If you look on the columns of the Emerald Buddha temple, you can see the effects of hundreds of years of people touching the gold plating:

And if you look further up you can see where people can't reach:

Now, here is a photo of the place where the tuk-tuk driver drove me to see: "Buddha standing, Buddha sitting, Buddha sleeping," as he put it. Also where they stationed the accomplice to make the advice about buying silk suits appealing. It is interesting how there was no problem in photographing these Buddhas. Maybe because they're outside. Maybe because they're not mobbed by tourists all the time. If you come to Bangkok and all you want to see is some Buddhist temple, just walk in any direction for a short time and you'll see one, usually in use.

Here's my tuk-tuk driver

And here he is going away, upset. I should also mention that the picture of the canal above is also from the tuk-tuk.

Now, as I've said, the Thai love their king. It's like being in Camelot. See the commoners throng to welcome their king! We love you King Bhumibol Adulyadej! Quite the Romanti c view of the Middle Ages.

And here people are setting out and watering flowers for an image of the king. Nearby they are selling yellow shirts to honor the king. Lots of people are wearing them. I bought one and when I wore it, people thought I was Thai.

And they have a monument called the "democracy monument". With flags of Thailand and flags of the king. No contradiction here--a past king brought democracy to Thailand. Of course, they're a bit under strain, with the military coup and all.

In general, the Thai love to decorate, and their streets are no exception. There are street decorations for no apparent purpose except to make things look nicer:

Also on display in the city: lots of hawkers. That's to be expected. Here's a wholesale distributor, making the rounds. I think it's some kinds of seafood.

But I didn't expect a stall like this. What is this guy selling? Teeth?!

Here's the seller. Also I'm posting this in case one of you reads Thai and can translate the sign.

Thailand update

2006-12-26T07:50:00.000-08:00

OK. I'm here in Thailand, and I have a bit of time to post something. I didn't bring my laptop or my USB cord for my camera, so this one will be without pictures. But pictures should come in a few days. Be patient.

I arrived in Bangkok on Dec. 23, at night. The airport has a big silver (almost aluminum-looking) Christmas tree with bright white lights that go "flash". There are people trying to suggest their taxi services for 900 Baht. If you go outside you see the official taxi stand where the fare is more like 250 Baht. The driver takes me to the vague vicinity but doesn't know the address (and Frommer's guide's map is not very clear). I eventually find the Bangkok Christian Guest House, where I'm staying. This is a hotel that is perfect: close to public transportation, the rooms have all the facilities they need to be comfortable, and no more. The staff is very friendly and helpful. And all for 1000 Baht per night (USD $30).

It's also in a seedy area of town, which is fine because there doesn't seem to be much violent crime in it. Just lots of tourists going to brothels. At no point did I sense that I was going to get mugged or shot.

Went up to see the Grand Palace and the Emerald Buddha. Very large, very impressive. There was a lot that wasn't available for public viewing, though on certain days some of it opens.

The National museum was also large, with many separate buildings. It seems that the 1500 years of Thai culture is stuffed into the area. I didn't see it all.

A friendly person was advertising a party that would happen in the area later on, but when he found out I wasn't Thai, he then got more friendly and asked me what I saw. He made some suggestions that weren't in Frommer's guide to Thailand. I feigned interest out of politeness. He then suggested I get a tuk-tuk driver to take me to those places. But not one of those that has a yellow plate; only those with a white plate. Oh, and there's one now!

I'll spoil it a bit and say right now that this was a scam. I had read about such scams in Frommer's and several other places. They take you to shops and glean a commission. All in all, not a terrible scam, in that it's not like you're being forced out of your money. But they are not taking you to good deals. They are taking you to places that get big profits and hand some over to the tuk-tuk driver.

The tuk-tuk driver first takes me to a Buddhist temple that my "friend" recommended. What's so special about this one? Well, there's a standing Buddha, a sitting Buddha, and a reclining Buddha. And there's some event happening today. I go there, and someone is bowing to one of the smaller Buddhas there. He starts talking to me (I later figure out he must be in on the scam too) and he confirms that there are special things happening at the temple today. He also looks at my map, where my "friend" had written down the name of a silk suit shop. He gets excited and says that he's glad I'm going there. Today is the last day for some kind of sale where locals can buy the clothes at a fraction of the usual price. This confirms what the first "friend" said.

Of course, the next stop is this silk suit shop. I look around, and the sales rep shows me some suits. Tailor-fitted. I'm not interested--I can get a suit for that price in the States. Sure, not tailor-fitted, and not silk, and not fine-quality (who knows how well these were made anyway), but I don't care about those things. I just need a suit to function as a costume, as an actor wears on a stage, when I go to people's weddings and funerals. He shows me Cashmere suits. I'm not interested. I eventually leave.

The tuk-tuk driver takes me to a jewelry shop. I should mention that this is the first place the driver takes me that is not on the list my "friend" wrote out for me. The next place on the list was supposed to be a museum, but it's closed by now. I'm not interested in jewelry.

The tuk-tuk driver takes me to a carpet shop. I'm not interested. The salesperson seems annoyed that I wasted his time. I now wonder if perhaps this is beyond the "regulars" the tuk-tuk driver goes to--this guy doesn't seem to be happy about the set up. I tell my tuk-tuk driver that he took me to the number of places he was supposed to go to. So I thank him and pay him the 50 Baht (USD $1.50). Incidentally, when I read the section in Frommer's again, it seems that even this was overpriced. Whatever. But the tuk-tuk driver insists on taking me to more places. No extra charge, he says--please, every place he takes me, he gets a gas coupon.

Eventually he agrees to "only two more" places. Which is good because I have a vague sense that I'm pretty far north of the public transit system now. He takes me to another suit store. I tell the salesperson the tuk-tuk driver brought me here but I have no interest in a suit. The salesperson thanks me for being forthright about this and I leave. The tuk-tuk driver is upset that I didn't spend more time there. He takes me to a jewelry store. I tell the salesperson the same thing, but since the tuk-tuk driver told me to stay at least 5 minutes, I do so. The salesperson rattles off names and qualities of different gems. Apparently garnet and cubic zirconium is popular there.

I tell the tuk-tuk driver thank you, and he pleads with me, but I say I'm hungry for some lunch, and I can find one in the area. Thankfully he had brought me into a fairly central part of the city, so that is easy. If he were really nefarious he could have ensured that I was very far away from anything at all. But in this case I had the power to walk away.

So all in all, not a very dangerous "scam" to be caught up in--I just lost about an hour or so of my time, and in the process got to see some shops and a few neighborhoods of non-touristy Bangkok.

One thing about Thailand: everybody loves the king and queen. It's like one big fan club here. People happily selling yellow shirts (yellow is the king's color) and people wearing them. And it's not a Potemkin village either--no one is watching )as far as I can tell) and people set up shrines to the king, and others bring flowers. I bought a shirt. The sign says the proceeds go to some orphanage. The people selling me the shirt were especially pleased that a foreigner bought one--"Now you can celebrate like us!" they said.

One major means of transportation is boats. It's weird--in many ways Bangkok is a modern city with skyscrapers and subways, but it still relies on boats. On the other hand, the boats are very efficient and useful for navigating the river and the various canals, and solves a lot of the traffic problems related to criss-crossing the river. So in some ways it's more advanced than paving the whole thing with asphalt.

Lots of markets, like Hong Kong. I feel not much commentary is needed here, because Hong Kong has so much of all of this atmosphere. Yet I think I didn't blog about it very much. Oh well--you'll see the pictures. Not much to say, really. People are buying and seling, as in any shopping mall, but you meet the owners in little stalls instead of wage slaves dressed in uniforms.

Christmas isn't that special in Bangkok--mostly, they don't notice, though some stores have decorations. One restaurant had a band that came in to sing Christmas carols. They were bad. More specifically, they didn't groove. The drummer was unimaginative, and the pianist was following a jazz score pretty exactly. It calls for some anticipated beats, which the drummer used to re-adjust, with the result that the song kept speeding up. A double bass player was doing his best, but either he or the piano player was making mistakes because they were often on different chords. Then a singer came and tried to follow the Christmas songs. She was reading from the score, and having trouble with the words. The sound system was exactly the sort you get in a for-the-family Karaoke set, and had a heavy reverb to cover up the fact that the singing wasn't very good. After that they switched to Thai songs and it's possible they were doing better then.

On Christmas Day itself I flew to Chiang Mai, in the north of Thailand. My church supports some missionaries there so I arranged to meet with them. Actually they're in the field up in the mountains now, so I communicated with another one who actually went home to the states, so she put me in contact with another person who would be in Chiang Mai, who had to leave to get a new visa in Singapore, so she put me in touch with someone else, named Bea.

I also made contact with Mike Anderson who taught at Pepperdine for awhile but now teaches students from exchange programs around the US who come to Thailand. We went for a Thai massage, had lunch at his favorite restaurant, and we went together to see Bea.

The missionary organization goes by many names, and one of them is "Free Burma Rangers". They bring in medical supplies and emergency supplies and help out a people group called the Karen who are being burned out of their homes, raped, shot at, and massacred by the Burmese military.

Of course, my being in Chiang Mai, I didn't see the action (that happens in Burma) but at least I got to see a couple of people who work there and see some of the videos they made.

Tomorrow the plan is to go to an elephant farm and ride some elephants. Meanwhile, Mike is taking a kayak down the river to Bangkok.

Students are gone, I go to Thailand

2006-12-22T08:36:00.000-08:00

The students have gone home. I saw them off at the airport. You know how, if your suitcase is over a certain limit, you have to pay extra? Well, it turns out there is another limit beyond that, where the airline won't take your luggage. Many Pepperdine students were above that limit. They scrounged around and found backpacks in each others' luggage, and moved stuff around so that they could check in extra luggage.

Anyway, I'm leaving for Thailand tomorrow (23rd to the 28th).

I have so much to post but I've been pushing it back and back, so there's quite a backlog now. Going to Thailand won't help any--I'm sure I won't be able to post much while I'm there, and I'll have a lot to post when I get back.

The Chinese Christian Pagoda Church

2006-12-22T04:53:00.001-08:00

I was recently reading a book on the history of communicating the Christian gospel in China, by Ralph Covell from 1986, titled, "Confucius, The Buddha, and Christ: A History of the Gospel in Chinese". The title isn't very good but he covers a lot of interesting material. It's a good introduction to the history of Christianity in China, though a bit of his history is superceded by new scholarship. Anyway, I've been reading about things happening in Xi'an, Beijing, Shanghai, and so on, and then I come across the following:

The buildings on the top of the small mountain in the Shatin Valley about ten miles from Kowloon City in the New Territories did not have the usual appearance of a church. Most prominent was an octagonal temple, with its roof curved in the familiar lines of Chinese architecture. Within this place for meditation and worship there was:

[An] altar in beautiful Chinese style, with a red lacquer finish and adorned with golden symbols--the lily of purity, the cross of sacrifice, the sun of righteousness, the fire and water of the Spirit's cleansing, the swastika of cosmic unity and perfect peace, the fish of Eastern and Western sanctity, and the Greek monogram for Christ. Red candles, so often used in Chinese ceremonies, were used on the altar as was incense whose ascending smoke and fragrance were symbols of aspiration [Noren, 14].

Even more symbolic than the temple decor was the entrance into this complex of buildings--above the gate, a cross rising out of a lotus to show that the best of Buddhism was fulfilled in Christ. The title was also unique, Dao Feng Shan--"The moutnain from which the Logos wind, the Christ-Spirit, blows" [Reichelt, "Buddhism," 162]. The Dao, that ancient Chinese term signifying way, principle, reason, doctrine or speech, was identified with God's eternal Logos, manifest now in the incarnate Christ.

In formulating the gospel in Chinese, Protestant missionaries in one way or another had to speak in the context of a pervasive Buddhism that had been in China for eighteen hundred years. Karl Reichelt, with his innovative approach at Dao Feng Shan, was hardly typical of the missionary community...

The first thing to catch my attention is the place: Sha Tin is two stops away on the KCR railway. Kowloon is where I'm living now! So I decided to find the place.

It turns out it's not too hard to get to. Go on the KCR and get off on the Sha Tin stop, then go outside where the buses are. Turn left and go down the ramp. There is a "village" named Pai Tau (the "village" is smaller than some of the shopping malls here) and a sign pointing to "Tao Fong Shan". You go up a steep ramp (and sometimes second-guessing yourself because it's such a steep hill--you hope you're on the right path). It's about 10-15 minutes before you reach a road with another sign to the place.

The place is really cool. I'll stop talking now and let you see it.

The entrance here is circular, as you find in many Chinese (especially Taoist) temples. The building to your right has this on the top:

And the pagoda in the distance looks like this up close:

It's actually a church buildling, in Chinese architectural style. Here's the inside:

to the left is the lectern

and outside is a bell somewhat in between a Western and an Eastern style:

The site overlooks a Buddhist cemetery in the valley:

A little path brings you to a large cross on a hillside. The cross is in a Chinese garden, with a gateway. The gate into it is Chinese:

On top it says, "The Gate of Life". To the right and left are the words are the words of Jesus, and here I will try to translate the Chinese instead of adhering to an English translation of the Greek: "On a wide road go many more people and do not find true happiness. Into the narrow gate enter few people, and receive eternal life." (A more familiar translation goes: "Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many find it. But small is the gate and narrow is the road that leads to life, and only a few find it." Matthew 7:13-14).

As you enter the dominating view is that of the cross, with the last words of Jesus, "It is finished", written in Chinese:

Elsewhere in the Cross garden, there's a stone with Chinese writing on it. I've seen stones like these at Taoist temples before: they contain two or four Chinese characters on it, and you're supposed to contemplate what the characters together mean. The four characters here say, "Life, Located, Lord, Inside". This is a bit more literal than the mind-riddles you see in other places. Maybe that's the point, though. Or maybe it's for Chinese who are not as familiar with Christianity, to help them see as mystical something we Westerners say all the time.

There's a pavilion with scenes from the gospels and a description. Most of these pictures didn't come out. The only one I was almost able to salvage using software was this one:

The text to the left (that photo didn't come out at all so I'm doing this from memory) talks about Jesus calling some fishermen to be His disciples. He says, "I will make you fishers of men". Note that everyone looks Chinese. Just as in the West, all the pictures of the disciples and Jesus make them all look like Europeans.

When you have seen all of this, you exit the garden through the same gate, but this time you see the following text:

The top says, "Universal love", and the text on the sides say, "As you go to all under heaven, tell the gospel, give it to ten thousand nationalities to hear". A more typical translation of Matthew 28:19-20 is "Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you."

So as you enter the garden, it says, "few enter it to receive eternal life", and after you have seen it all, it says, "Go and tell others."

Very moving, for a Christian. At the time, though, there were lots of concerns by other missionaries about this Norwegian's crazy ideas--was it syncretism?

The hard life of the Finnish

2006-12-19T01:18:00.000-08:00

If you ever feel like bemoaning your fate, recognize that the people of Finland have it worse. They said so themselves, to music! See the video:

Helsinki Complaints Choir

More on the Star Ferry tower

2006-12-16T09:51:00.000-08:00

I went to the Star Ferry pier again today to take pictures of the demonstrations.

First, though, I want to show you the time progression in photos of the demolition of the tower. It's not perfect, because I never had a picture of the clock tower in its original glory. But the protesters had such pictures, so first I have a picture of that. Next there's the same picture I gave last time of the clock tower with scaffolding around it. Then there's a picture I took today where the clock tower is missing. It's been demolished. The shot is not the same angle as the one I took last time because quite frankly I forgot where I shot it from. This one turns out to be more face-on, while last time it was at a sharp angle.

Now for the demonstrations. Last time I said it was about a couple dozen, because that's what the newspaper article said. A later news article said there were more like 100 demonstrators. When I was there (3 pm) it was definitely more than 100 people, though some of that could have been curious onlookers.

They had a panel of people talking about different things. I randomly ran into someone who works at the HKBU International Office, so she told me that the speaker was saying that this shows the need for real democracy in Hong Kong.

But still the work goes on. There's a hole in the corrugated metal that allowed a view of the actual destruction.

I got a flyer from one of the demonstrators. It mentioned that this clock tower was in fact the site of a hunger strike against the British in 1966. And now, the irony is, the very clock tower is the focus of demonstrations against the Hong Kong government, or in its words:

At the moment that the Clock-Tower ... is being murdered, we begin our hunger-strike... against the Hong Kong SAR Gov't, the so-called "Ruled by Hong Kong People" and "For the people" one.

It goes on:

Someone may say, we are too late. We say, the opposing voice have never stopped. Professionals ... have prepared alternative plans but the gov't does not listen... We can only use the most fundamental weapon of the people, our body to resist the black hand behind the bulldozer.

It seems that this is a focal point for people who want real democracy to come to Hong Kong. Universal suffrage. Free elections. The flyer goes on:

Let Cultural Heritage and Public Space of Hong Kong People return to democratic discussion procedures.

We demand real "For The People".

We want to be Real Hong Kong People and our Real Hong Kong Culture.

If this is supposed to be a touchstone for the burgeoning democracy movement, I don't know how effective it's being. The government realizes now that many Hong Kong people feel they have gone too far. But only 100 or maybe 200 people are here. They're not really disrupting anything. Most Hong Kong people I've talked to are sad to see the clock tower go. But most of them are not at the protest.

Out with the old

2006-12-15T11:45:00.000-08:00

Someone was visiting Hong Kong from Germany recently, and asked me about where to find old buildings.

There basically aren't any, really. Certainly not for European standards.

For that, go to Xi'an in the middle of mainland China. That was the capital of China for centuries, and by those standards, Beijing is a newcomer, being the capital of China for only 700 years.

Hong Kong was a backwater town with nothing of note when the British took over after the first Opium War in the 1840s, and only grew when persecution in China caused many Chinese to flee here. You'd be hard pressed to find any building that even dates from the 19th century, because Hong Kong has never been a fan of preserving their history.

Go to Macau, a Portuguese colony a short boatride away, and there's colonial architecture going back 400 years. But in Hong Kong, the colonial architecture was taken down to make room for skyscrapers.

In fact, when the Bank of China decided to build its landmark skyscraper, they decided to tear down the earliest colonial building in Hong Kong, Murray House, to do it. Some people protested, and the government ordered that Murray House be dismantled and built somewhere else. They dismantled it, quickly built the Bank of China building, then decades later finally got aroudn to rebuilding Murray House in Stanley, where the British live. There are still six columns that are left over that they don't know what to do with.

Well, this year, the big news is they are tearing down the Star Ferry pier. The Star Ferry is a common way to get from Kowloon to Hong Kong island, and has two piers on the Kowloon side, and two piers on the Hong Kong side. The best-known one is Edinburgh Place on the Hong Kong side. It has a clock tower and is a Hong Kong landmark.

Well, they're tearing it down to build a shopping mall. The Star Ferry now docks at Central Pier, which is about a block away.

Welcome to Hong Kong, where your Lonely Planet guide is obsolete by the time it makes it off the printing press.

Here's Edinburgh Place, with scaffolding as they prepare to demolish it:

This is the side that faces inland. The tower in the middle has a clockface that they're removing.

The Star Ferry now docks at Central Pier:

And now locals, upon arriving at the pier by the Star Ferry, are a bit confused as to how to get to where they need to go:

Well, not all of Hong Kong is happy about the demolition. There have been protests. A couple dozen people are trying to stop the bulldozing, and a few people have been arrested. Still, the Chief Executive Donald Tsang says the demolition will continue. Maybe the clockface will be incorporated into the design of the shopping mall, he says.

A Student Video

2006-12-14T08:12:00.000-08:00

Sean Bartemes, one of the exchange students at Hong Kong Baptist University (not from Pepperdine but from the US) is studying film, and for one of his classes, did a short. It's on Youtube now. Check it out:

The Hong Kong Job

Yes, that is exactly what happens at Hong Kong Baptist University. Send your students here and that is the kind of thing they will get into. Just kidding. But Sean did a good job, I think.

Taikonauts and Nazis

2006-12-10T08:59:00.000-08:00

The US space program had lots of help from European-trained engineers who fled or were forced out of top positions by the Nazis during World War II. Before this, the United States had lots of production capacity, but little in the way of technical scientific expertise. The US, being practical-minded, never invested a great deal in basic research, unlike Germany, France, and other European nations who saw basic science as an end in itself.

When the Nazis took over, they made a point to kick out of academic posts and government positions those whose views or race they saw as suspect. Many of these people fled to the US, where they helped in the war effort and later, the Cold War and the Space Race.

I bring this up because I just read an article in the South China Morning Post about China's race to the moon. In it, one man features prominently: Tsien Hsuehshen (Qian Xueshen). He is basically the father of China's space program. And get this: he got his start by getting kicked out of the US during the McCarthy period. Here's what The Economist says, in an article from April 11, 2002, "Taikonauts are go":

China's space programme was unwittingly spurred by the Americans. Nearly 100 scientists of Chinese ancestry were thrown out during the McCarthyite era and sent to the recently formed People's Republic. One of them was Tsien Hsueshen, an aeronautical engineer who was an expert in the new technology of jet propulsion. In 1956 he became head of China's new missile programme.

Dr Tsien's team, working initially with Russian help and then—after the rupture of relations between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic in 1959—on its own, built up a secretive but successful operation. It was based, like the Soviet and American programmes, on knowledge gleaned from Germany's second-world-war V-2 missile project. Before the rupture, the Russians gave China a slightly improved version of the V-2, known as the R-2, and the team took it to pieces to find out how it worked. By the time the Russians had left, Chinese engineers were expert enough to strike out on their own. Within a few months, they had successfully launched their first home-grown R-2, known as Dong Feng (East Wind).

Paranoia has a nasty self-defeating effect.

Concert

2006-12-03T08:21:00.000-08:00

I sang with the Hong Kong Baptist University Choir last night. It was for the 50th anniversary of HKBU, and we performed with the HKBU orchestra, singing a piece written specially for the occasion by one of the music faculty here, David Urrows. It went well but I felt bad for Dr. Urrows that in the middle of one section, the choir got one measure behind. It's easy to do that in these atonal pieces, but that movement was more tonal than the other movements. But the conductor, Johnny Poon, got us back on track at the next entrance.

But the big event was we got to sing the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the one with "Ode to Joy". This we sang with several other choirs from around Hong Kong. It was an exhillirating experience. As famous as this movement is, it's not very often that one gets to sing it. I must admit that I don't often go for the wash of sound and feeling that characterizes the Romantic period, but still, the wash of sound affects you.

The biggest struggle for Cantonese choirs is singing legato. Cantonese is such a staccato language, with each syllable discrete and clipped. There's also some unfamiliarity with German. I'm realizing how much exposure we have in the U.S. to Spanish, French, and German--for Hong Kongers, all of these are very distant. They have no idea how these languages sound. They might as well be Urdu, Xhosa, and Tongan. I helped some of my fellow basses with the German, and they were amazed.

A friend at church was asking for help in learning Spanish. She was having a great deal of difficulty with "¿Qué tal?"--each of those consonants were problematic. The first because it lies between Cantonese "k" and "g". It is actually the "k" in English "sky", but Cantonese speakers have trouble with that one, too. The "t" is a little easier, except that the Cantonese version of this has a slight tendency toward "d". The final "l" is hard because it happens at the end of the word. She kept saying "Gue da".

Another thing--joining a student group is one of the best ways to get to know the local students. I certainly wouldn't have gotten to know them otherwise. The only difficulty is that sometimes announcements are made in Cantonese, especially if students are doing the announcements. They are sometimes a bit shy about their English. I had to ask one student about what was said, and it turns out, it was the location and time we were meeting for the concert.

At the concert, the orchestra also played pieces by Shostakovich, Wieniawski, X. L. Wang, and Sarasate. Featured was a violinist Li Chuan Yun, who took the show. Wow. From the very beginning the pure clarity of sound was stunning, but then his expression was far beyond what I thought was possible in a violin. I hadn't heard of him before, I'm embarrased to say--presumably he is fairly famous. But I'm sure we'll be hearing more from him in the future.

This is also the first concert I've been to that began with speeches. But that's the way, I suppose, in ceremony-happy Hong Kong, on a 50th anniversary. The featured guest was Dr. Patrick Ho, Secretary for Home Affairs of Hong Kong, but he wasn't even there. Instead, his assistant came to read his speech. Kind of weird. HKBU President Ng gave a speech and handed her a gift.

News from Hong Kong--don't eat the freshwater fish or the eggs

2006-11-29T01:33:00.000-08:00

The big news here now is about a couple of food safety scares that came right on top of each other. Some red yolk eggs from the mainland have been found with Sudan Red dye, and some freshwater fish were found with Malachite Green. Both are suspected to be carcinogenic. Animal tests for either being carcinogenic have been inconclusive. Which I interpret to mean that a difference was found, but at a level that could be explained by random fluctuation, so that it is hard to know whether the difference is real. No human cases are known.

Apparently, many people on the mainland believe that an egg is healthier if the yolk is red. So one imagines that Red Sudan dye was injected into the eggs to make them sell at a higher price. Perhaps it is to make a non-red yolk look red, or a red yolk look redder.

Also, malachite green was found in a high proportion of freshwater fish from the mainland. This is probably due to pollution. Malachite green used to be used as a kind of antibiotic for fish. It's apparently banned in China and the US.

Well, it has really hurt business here. And it has hurt fisheries in Guangdong province on the mainland (right next to Hong Kong). The fisheries have stopped exports. The fish merchants here are turning to other goods.

The thing is, the level of the contaminants has been very low, and it's necessarily clear that it is dangerous, or if it is, at what levels. Still, people are playing it safe.

One fun quote is some health official saying not to panic--that the majority of food is still safe. I should hope so. Can you imagine it if over 50% of all food available is unsafe?!

Graduation in November

2006-11-24T08:16:00.000-08:00

I know I haven't posted in a bit and it shows that these pictures are from November 13, last week Monday. They have graduation... in November! These are for the students who graduated last June. Apparently this is common in Hong Kong universities. It takes a while, apparently, for them to figure out who really graduated, and to send out announcements, etc. Those whose work will allow them to take the day off can come back and march.

They have several such ceremonies during Graduation Week. About eight of them, actually. They split the students up according to what degree they're getting. Each such ceremony has a certain day and place. The one for Monday was for those in Communication and MBAs of certain types.

Instead of Cum Laude and so on, they specify 1st class, 2nd class(1) and 2nd class(2) honors. To get 2nd class(2) honors you need a 2.5 GPA or higher. To get 1st class you need a 3.5 GPA (or something). I don't think they have as big a grade inflation there compared to Pepperdine.

The choir sang during this graduation, so I was there. Our main piece was a Mendelsohn piece "Ye Nations", though we also led the crowd in singing the University Anthem. This last one we practiced once. I think the conductor assumed most of us (and most of the audience) knew the piece, but judging from some of the choir members around me, that's not quite true. I had to practice it quite a bit because we sang it in Cantonese. They gave me the music with the words in Chinese characters. I had to ask for help, and because someone mistakenly took my copy, I had to look them all up in my dictionary. The person returned it on the day we were supposed to sing it

The last words were "tou leih gu dou yiht cheuhng" (桃李古道熱腸) whose characters literally mean "peach, plum, old road, hot intestines". I later found out that "peach plum" actually is a word for "students" (perhaps more poetic than "hohk sang", 學生, the usual word for students). I don't know what "old road" means or "hot intestines". I'm posting the Chinese characters because I know at least one person reading this blog knows Chinese and maybe they can post a comment to help.

After the graduation ceremony (the choir had to sit through it all, unfortunately, even though we only sang at the beginning) I went to hear John Polkinghorne and Yang. Polkinghorne is a physicist who decided to become an Anglican priest, and later served as a theologian in the Anglican church. He's written a lot on the interface between science and religion, and I'm in particular glad for his contributions, because he brings it beyond the whole creation-evolution business. The whole creation-evolution debate was once fun for me, but I came to terms with it ages ago, and now I'm tired of it, and I'm tired of the assumption that this is the only issue where science and religion can meet. I've met Polkinghorne at Pepperdine when he came to talk, and he was a very nice, down-to-earth guy who has thought about a lot of these issues very deeply. That being said, what he talked about was a small subset of what he has written, and I've read a few things that he's written, so nothing he said was new to me.

Since this was in a Chinese context, he didn't want to come right out and emphasize Christian doctrine per se, though in his books he has often explained the need for the dialogue to get to that point (Polkinghorne, Science and the Trinity). He stayed with natural theology: what can we know about God from the universe. And people have been hashing that over for quite a while before Polkinghorne, and afterward. I think Polkinghorne's main contributions are outside that: understanding how the picture science gives us of a universe that participates in creation (or if you prefer, a God that "empties himself" by willingly relinquishing His sovereignty over creation to creation itself), helps with understanding the fallen character of the world (the problem of why there is evil). And the religious hope of the new heaven and new earth answering the fatalistic pessimism of the fate of the universe that modern cosmology paints. (Polkinghorne, The God of Hope and the End of the World)

C.N. Yang is a physicist, who won the Nobel prize for developing a way to see how symmetry can help explain the fundamental forces of nature in a way that is consistent with quantum mechanics. This has been the foundations of particle physics since the 1950s. Yang said he used to be an atheist, and now he is coming to big questions about the meaning of life and the future of science and technology unfettered by ethical restraint, and he sees a role for religious faith. He is apparently quite a newcomer to the field of science and religion. Polkinghorne was the one being honored at the occasion with an honorary doctorate, but it was clear that the press and the locals saw Yang as the real draw. Nevertheless, Polkinghorne had much more to say on the subject.

I mentioned earlier (I'll find the post later) that Yang is known here, while no living American scientist is known in America. They even have a dorm at Hong Kong Baptist University named for Yang.

One student from mainland China who is a physics students, was very excited to see him, and he borrowed my camera so he could take a picture with Yang.

The Pepperdine students generally had a negative impression of the whole thing, it seems. Most were doing other things during the lecture, writing notes or doodling or staring into space. Afterward their main response was, "They were terrible. They just read from their notes." Yikes. Just a simple thing like that stopped them from being opened to some mind-bending ideas. We teach these students public speaking early on, and the flip side is that they are now turned off to anything that doesn't follow that mold.

Most non-Americans speak from prepared notes, especially on an important address like this one. Maybe we can say it's the non-Americans' fault for not practicing good oratory technique, but does that mean Pepperdine students will never be willing to listen to someone unless they're American? In some subjects, reading from papers is all you will ever see: historians and theologians come to mind. John was doing a pretty good job, too--just by listening, you could never tell he was reading from his notes except for a few times when the pages got stuck. His style was British academic--packed with insightful comments, delivered concisely. I wonder if the Pepperdine students were waiting for him to choose one point and say it three times (intro, statement, conclusion).

Yang didn't have as much to say, and he spoke more slowly (English being his second tongue), but depended more on his powerpoint presentation. The Pepperdine students were less harsh on him, but still weren't positive.

Speech 180 is one of the most important courses for what the students will be doing after they graduate, in a very practical sense. But I wonder if it can keep the students from really benefiting from important thinkers.

On a different note, the occasion was marked, Hong Kong style, with ceremony and picture-taking. All those involved in setting up this historic occasion lined up for photos. Actually there were three such groups, each with their photo shoot. This all took place before the lectures. The press went crazy. I think that without these ceremonies, the Hong Kongers would feel like it was less of a dignified event, somehow.

Ocean Park

2006-11-16T03:52:00.000-08:00

Ocean Park is an amusement park on Hong Kong Island, but it's like a combination of Six Flags, Seaworld, Monterey Bay Aquarium, the zoo, a local haunted house, and a country fair.

It's got a few roller coasters, a log ride, a dolphin show, a couple of pandas, an aviary, a shark tank, and a gondola that connects the two parts of the park.

The last two pictures here come with commentary. First, there are opportunities to take pictures everywhere. Not only on the skyway, or on the log ride just as everyone is getting wet, but also in the aquarium. Professional photos. Just stand here by this blue screen. Will just take a few minutes, and by the time you are leaving we will be willing to sell you many copies of you standing in front of a picture of fish.

The other thing is the food. Pretty standard carnival-style stuff, really, except since this is Hong Kong, you have to have seafood. Here's Mr. Squid. This is the one next to Raging River (the log ride). It was closed when I took this picture, but normally you get seafood here.

Incidentally, the aquarium had a neat collection of seahorses. It had helpful signs describing their weird life (the male is the one who carries the eggs, for instance) and signs directing you as to how to help preserve this wonder. It doesn't say not to eat it. It says to "minimize your intake" of seahorse to times when you need it medically. Minimize your intake of seahorses. Really.

So THAT'S why the Beijing dogs are small

2006-11-15T03:56:00.000-08:00

A blurb in the South China Morning Post today (Wed. Nov. 15):

"The Beijing municipal government issued a circular last week outlining a ban on dogs taller than 35 cm in nine central districts and limiting ownership to one dog per household. Reports and photos documenting seizures and gruesome killings of dogs by police have been circulating over the internet in the past few days. Up to 500 dog owners staged a violent demonstration at Beijing Zoo at the weekend against the measures."

Apparently the regulations have been in place for awhile, but the authorities are now "seeking to persuade" owners to comply. Protesters claim the crackdown has been quite severe.

We did notice that the dogs in Beijing were typically very small. Though it was also clear that a few people were not abiding by the one-dog policy.

The article ends with the following quote by Bao Suixian, deputy head of the Public Security Management Bureau:

"Authorities everywhere are pushing standard behaviour for raising dogs, and I think this programme still needs to be carried out in accordance with the law, scientifically and orderly."

uh... standard behaviour for raising dogs?

Lantau island

2006-11-14T02:59:00.000-08:00

Lantau Island is where the airport is (the new one--the old airport was near HKBU and planes had to take off on short runways and land among highrise buildings). It's also the location of a massive Buddha--the largest metal seated Buddha (apparently there are stone standing ones carved, Mt. Rushmore-like, in other places).

You get to the massive Buddha at Ngohn Ping via a gondola on a cable, like in Disneyland (there's a Disneyland on Lantau Island, too, but I didn't visit it):

Actually, like Disneyland, they put you in a line, which prepares you for another line, and so on, until you finally get on the skylift.

And it puts you in a pseudo-ancient Chinese village (with modern restaurants and shops):

You are next greeted by a big pot

and finally the long flight of stairs to the Buddha:

Inside, there are memorial plaques for the deceased. Buddhism here (as in Japan) is a lot about the deceased:

There's a monastery nearby. Most of the pictures I have of that didn't come out well, but here's us having fun, posing with some Buddhist ancients:

I should mention that this whole complex is pretty new, as is the big Buddha: they're maybe 10 or 20 years old or so. The monastery itself might be older, but the current buildings are fairly recent.

Hong Kong has a lot of open space. It's a surprise, given how crowded it is. But the government has been very careful about this. The government actually historically owned almost all of the land, and it leases and sells little bits for income. This encourages the government to be very cautious about selling land--it's its future livelihood.

Some updates

2006-11-11T07:02:00.000-08:00

I've gone on about new stuff for awhile, and it occurs to me that I haven't brought closure to several topics I've posted on before.

1. The weather is now nice. When I first arrived in mid-August, the humidity was oppressive. Ever since mid-September, the humidity has been really come down. It's more humid than Los Angeles, certainly, but it's still comfortable. The temperature is generally comfortable, in the high 70s or low 80s. And the skies are generally clear. Okay, a bit smoggy, but not anywhere near as polluted as Beijing.

2. I'm drinking water from the tap. I have been for many weeks, and no ill effects. So, I'd say, yes, you can drink the water in Hong Kong.

I should mention, however, that I periodically get water bottles from the hotel where I'm staying. When I first arrived and thought I couldn't drink the water, I was forever going to stores getting large jugs of purified water. It was kind of a pain. Then I got a pitcher so I could boil water and put it in the fridge. That was less of a pain. Then suddenly, two bottles of water showed up. Apparently the cleaning staff put them there. The next day, two more bottles came. It's as if the staff somehow noticed I needed water, and decided to enact a policy whereby all guests get two bottles of free water. After about a week of this, the water stopped showing up. Then every now and then more bottles of water will appear. I think it just depends on who is cleaning my room that day. It's kind of nice. Though it's less useful now that I know I can drink tap water.

3. I'm not making a lot of progress on learning the language. I don't normally need to use Cantonese to even get by (except tell a bus driver where to stop) and I don't have many opportunities to use my Mandarin, except a few folks at church who are from Mainland China. I am learning more characters, though, because I'm seeing them on signs.

More importantly I don't have as much time to learn the language as I did in the States. It's always the same, in the middle of the semester, being behind in grading, etc.

4. Halloween was interesting. I didn't do anything special for it, but there were people who did. It's mostly being pushed by a few corporations. There were ads on building-sized TV screens telling people how to celebrate it. I don't think anyone went trick-or-treating, but I may be wrong about that. I do know that a bunch of students dressed up and went to an area of Hong Kong known for its clubs and bars, and saw other people from the U.S. having a good time.

5. The induction cooker is working well. It has the advantage of turning on and off very quickly. As soon as it is off, the heating stops--no residual heat from heating coils. If I have water boiling, there is maybe one second after I turn it off that the bubbles continue to rise to the surface, but after that, nothing.

One of the students' family was in town, so we went to Lantau Island and Ocean Park. Watch here for some pictures coming soon.

Voting absentee

2006-11-05T20:10:00.000-08:00

I voted.

Yes, I'm in Hong Kong, but it's possible to vote while overseas. I just did a search on the web and found that it's pretty simple, though it does require advance planning.

I filled out the forms for getting an absentee ballot in early October, sent it in, and around October 30th I received the absentee ballot. Maybe I got it earlier, but it had arrived while I was in Beijing.

I took a few days to get around to filling it out, and then I asked the staff at Hong Kong Baptist University how long it normally takes to get mail to the US. They said, "about a week". Oops: one week later would be the day after the election.

Luckily they had a provision for that. You can fax in your ballot. So I did that on Thursday.

It's a bit disconcerting not really knowing if they received your fax or not, but I guess it would be the same way if I mailed it.

By the way, I've been having trouble uploading stuff to Blogger this entire past weekend. I hope this works now.

Beijing pictures

2006-11-01T02:03:00.000-08:00

I went to Beijing with Pepperdine students Mike and Jenna, and Ohio University students Sean and Yee. Sean and Yee left a day earlier. Other Pepperdine students went a day earlier too, but we never met up with them.

Beijing, once a bastion of communism, now a bastion of marketing. On the flight there (China Air), we got ads on our seatbacks.

The top part is "Citic Bank", whatever that's supposed to be. The blue sticker would have looked like random vandalism if it weren't placed in exactly the same spot on every single seatback on the plane. I forgot what it was advertising, and my camera's not good enough for me to figure it out from this picture.

And this is before we land! On the ground, we see ads, mostly on behalf of the Chinese government.

Beijing 2008, it says. I don't know if olympics normally get hyped two years ahead of schedule, with a countdown and everything. But you can find countdowns everywhere. This one is in front of a museum on Tiananmen Square.

Here are soldiers marching in on Tiananmen Square, just for a changing of the guard.

Everywhere Beijing is officially welcoming people. They had a lot of things set up for the Africa-China development summit, which actually started after we left.

Apparently China has been investing like crazy in Africa, mostly because Africa has raw resources (metal, oil, etc.) that China desperately needs during this growth spurt, and the West hasn't been doing it. Only now there's some concern among the Africans that the Chinese are underpaying people and in general not being nice. There's probably some culture clash going on, in terms of what both sides are expecting. But in general, there's a lot of hope on both sides for mutual benefit.

I'll try not to give you the pictures you can easily find on the web. Here's the famous Tiananmen gate with Mao's picture, but you get to see people bustling through. And a police car trying to make it through, too. Sometimes, in Tiananmen, the police don't always get what they want immediately.

We did make it out to the Great Wall, not at the usual stop in Badaling, but a more secluded area in Huanghua. Here's the countryside on the way there.

We took a bus out to Huairou, and a taxi from there to Huanghua. We paid 100 yuan for the trip there, and asked the driver to wait. As it turned out, we didn't end up at the place where the taxi was, and I would feel worse about it if it weren't for the fact that there was a bus that took us all back to Huairou for 4.5 yuan each, indicating that the driver knew just how much she was overcharging us, and knew that we would find cheaper transportation back. She probably took off after a bit of waiting.

This part of the wall is not restored, and the road in fact cuts right through it. The entrance is along a dam on a reservoir.

Officially, the government says not to climb the wall here. They even put up a sign. But locals here set up shop, charging tourists 2 yuan apiece to enter the site. Further along the wall, some locals set up a makeshift gate made of twigs, and charged us 20 yuan to go through. Communism had no chance with these people.

The wall is quite a climb in places. Sometimes, stairs. Sometimes a very steep ramp. It's in pretty good condition for something that is not restored, but not all the steps are very even.

The wall is long. In Chinese it's not called the "Great Wall"--it's called the "Long Wall" (長城）and indeed, though it's wide enough and tall enough to be an impressive feat, it's true breathtaking quality is its length, going on and on, dragon-like, across the mountains.

This is from one of the parapets.

But it's easy to see why the Great Wall never worked--tall as it was, the height was still nothing compared to the mountains nearby. For people willing to scale the mountains, what would the wall do? And the Huns, the Mongols, the Manchus, were all nomadic people, and for nomads, they can always choose their invasion point to be wherever the wall is weakest.

I hear we're thinking about putting a wall across our border with Mexico. I think China will laugh, saying, "we already tried that."

Here's a spot where the wall overlooks a village:

Eventually, the wall crumbles into rubble. Some people went down this treacherous climb. I didn't. But we all ended up descending the wall and going down a trail to the village. On the way, a peasant with lots of dogs charged us 3 yuan apiece for going through her property. The guidebook's directions were completely useless--there was so much development here (a new road, a very nice house under construction) that these guidebooks go out of date very quickly. We randomly wander in the direction of the highway we came in and eventually made it there.

We found a restaurant (we had skipped lunch so we were hungry and thirsty) advertising the fact that it was featured in the Lonely Planet guidebook.

The owner was a bubbly older woman, who loves to go on about how she's in the Lonely Planet guidebook. She's very friendly, and happily takes our order. She also sells souvenirs. We're so glad to see that a restaurant with water exists, that we happily buy lots of souvenirs. Here's the restaurant/inn:

We got to hang out with Marcus and Martin Rodriguez, and Marcus's fiancée and her mother. We had Peking Duck at a very nice place, and it was very inexpensive.

On Sunday we went to see the rest of the sites. First, Mao. Mao's body is preserved in a mausoleum, and throngs of people (mostly Chinese) come to pay their respects. The long is very, very long, but it moves very fast. No cameras are allowed (in fact, you have to check your bags in across the street), and you have to keep moving right past the casket. In the antechamber, though, people bring flowers and lay them at the feet of a statue of Mao. Then afterward, you can buy Mao souvenirs, like a lighter that plays the Chinese national anthem when you open it.

Then, the Forbidden City:

though some of it was under construction:

I learned why it's called a "city". It's enormous. Lots of throne rooms, lots of living quarters, going on and on. Only the Forbidden City was allowed to have yellow tiles on the roofs. Yellow was the emperor's color.

We didn't see all of it. One interesting piece was this one.

We then went by taxi to the Temple of Heaven.

The Temple of Heaven is actually a big park with about four temples, all connected with the emperor's role in offering sacrifices to the gods, and ensuring a good coming harvest. Lots of interesting stuff here, including a door that one emperor had installed since he was too frail to go through the regular way (being 70 years old). But lest his successors view this as an easy way out, he made a rule that the emperor could only use this door if he were at least 70 years old. I don't know what was stopping his successors from making a new rule. Maybe tradition.

We didn't see all of these temples. Even some of them that we visited were hard to see because of the crowd of people.

Then we went to the Silk Market (秀水), a multistory swap market selling everything from jewelry to cell phones to mahjongg sets to suits to yes, silk stuff. They even had someone carving clay sculptures of you while you wait. On the bulletin boards they have an English phrasebook for the sellers:

My final picture is from the sixth story of this, where you can see the Beijing skyline. No wonder Caterpillar is always running out of stock.

One addendum: It seems that uploading this stuff to Blogger is a LOT faster than it used to be. I used to dread putting up lots of pictures like this, knowing it would take hours. Now it zooms along. Not as fast as it would be ideally, but much, much, better than before. I know Blogger has been doing some upgrades. Looks like they were worth it.

Beijing, pre-post

2006-10-31T05:03:00.000-08:00

I have a lot to say about our visit to Beijing but I don't have time right now. But just so you have something to see in the meantime, here's a picture from the Forbidden City.

Also, I just saw a movie in our European Film Festival, called "Twin Sisters". It's from the Netherlands (De Tweeling), 2002, directed by Ben Sombogaart. It's moving and thought-provoking. Two sisters are separated at the age of 8 when they are orphaned, and one gets raised in Germany (with its Nazi propaganda) and one gets raised in Holland (with its anti-Nazi propaganda). The sisters see WWII through very different perspectives, and each must learn about the other perspective before they can reconcile. I don't know how easy it is to find it outside of European Film Festivals, but if you find it, I recommend seeing it.

1956: Budapest is rising

2006-10-26T10:01:00.000-07:00

This is not only the 50th anniversary of Hong Kong Baptist University; it is also the 50th anniversary of the famous 1956 uprising of the Hungarian people against the Soviets.

The past two days there have been talks on the HKBU campus by Istvan Darvasi and Istvan Szerdahelyi, both from Hungary, talking about the future of Hungary and of Hong Kong. The relevance of Hungary to the future of Hong Kong may come as a surprise to some, until you hear the following.

In the aftermath of World War II, Hungary ended up under occupation by the Soviets. The Soviet Union installed a communist government loyal to the Soviets to take power in Hungary. On 23 October of 1956, Hungarians revolted, marching on Budapest. The Hungarian communist government quickly made some drastic changes and soon, the revolutionaries were involved in reinventing Hungary. For a time, it seemed that Hungary would leave the Warsaw Pact and drop its communism. But after a few weeks, in November of 1956, the Soviets came in with tanks and legions of troops, and defeated the would-be revolutionaries, executing many.

Where was the West? This seems to be a controversial question. Istvan Szerdahelyi suggests that perhaps the US did not want to fully come out and support the revolution publicly, since it would taint the new government as perhaps a puppet of the US.

But the revolt was not a total failure--the Communist government of Hungary began to realize that there was a line somewhere they could not cross, or there would be another revolution. They convinced the Soviets to allow them to allow some kinds of freedoms. For many years, Hungary was the only Warsaw Pact nation that allowed travel to other places in Europe (I always had wondered why people fleeing East Berlin were always going to Hungary to emigrate). There was less collectivization, and more individual freedom. Eventually, the government began offering more and more services and wealth, so that people would be more content with the government. It was Communism Lite.

In 1989, Soviet Premier Gorbachev indicated that the Soviet Union would no longer use the Soviet Army to enforce communism in Warsaw Pact countries. In other words, if 1956 were to happen again, he would send no troops. Hungary, then other eastern bloc countries, quickly abandoned communism, and went to a multiparty democracy, with full private property rights and a free market economy.

In the years up to 1989, China was abuzz with Hungary. During this time period, China was looking to make free market reforms, but without giving up the one-party control, and Hungary was a model. Until 1989. Then suddenly it became dangerous to talk about Hungary--surely they wouldn't want a multiparty democracy, right?

It's always hard at these well-publicized meetings to discern people's true views. But I wonder if there was a suggestion that Hungary's transformation in 1989 was a model for what might come next in China. China often worries about the slide into chaos if government control is not absolute. And yet, Hungary made the transition peacefully and in an orderly fashion. It wasn't without some economic pains--the government had been outspending its tax base to maintain loyalty to it, and it was now no longer being subsidized by the Soviets. And recent events (the scandal of who knew what about overly-optimistic economic reports leading up to the elections) show that there are still problems with openness of government. But the real test will be what happens as a result--will the critics be silenced, or will those in power have to suffer the consequences?

One interesting comment, by a discussant today: he noted that in Eastern Europe, the word "democracy" carries with it a notion of pride in one's nation, since it opposes the conquest by the Soviet Union. By contrast, he said, in Hong Kong, democracy is seen as an import from America, and thus, national pride tends to push away from "democracy".

This is the first I heard of such a situation. HKBU has a "democracy club", which televised protests at the WTO against human rights violations in China. Other than that I have never heard Hong Kong people talk politics. So I don't know what to make of the discussant's comment. Is this really how Hong Kong people think about democracy?

They've never had it, of course. Sometimes we Americans think the Hong Kong people were part of the democratic world under Britain, but of course, they were a colony then, and couldn't elect their own leaders. Now they're under China and still don't elect their own leaders.

The title of this post, by the way, comes from the musical "Chess". Check it out. It's awesome.

The Cyrillic Umbrella

2006-10-22T23:41:00.000-07:00

On Cheung Chau Island, I saw a bunch of umbrellas advertising random things in various languages. Mostly, they were handy for providing shade on tables, and the advertisers probably had no idea their umbrellas were being used for this purpose.

One odd one was this one:

That's Cyrillic lettering, with an English flag.

On closer examination, there were letters that don't belong in Cyrillic, like the second letter which kind of looks like an "F".

Well, I sent this to Tristan Hübsch, a physicist friend of mine who was born in former Yugoslavia, who identified all the words in the second line, and none in the first. The second line, according to Tristan, reads "Tea of Higher Quality from England" in Russian. He couldn't make heads or tails out of ANY of the words in the first line.

The probability, given that someone knows exactly 5 of the 9 words in a string, that they would know precisely the last five and not the first four, is less than 1 percent (it's close to 0.8 percent, actually). It's looking more likely that the first line is not in Russian at all. And also note that the Fs ONLY appear in the first line. Also, the last word in the first line, "Shai", sounds a bit like the first word on the second line "Chai" (meaning, "Tea"). Thus, it seems the first line is simply a translation of the second (or the other way around) in another language.

Now since Tristan speaks Serbo-Croatian and apparently has facility in Russian, I thought it would be unlikely that the first line was in a Slavic language at all.

Tristan also told me he contacted someone he knew who knows Bulgarian, and this person said it was not Bulgarian nor was it Belarussian.

I began to suspect it was a former Soviet republic in Central Asia.

So I contacted Alex Diener, a professor I know at Pepperdine who researches the Kazakh and Mongol peoples in the Central Asian Steppe, and he told me the first line was Kazakh (or Kyrgyz--these languages are very much alike) for "Higher Quality Tea from England". But "England" was misspelled: there is supposed to be a letter that looks like an "H" (but is pronounced like an "n") inserted after the first letter of the first word.

The "F" letter, by the way, is pronounced "gh".

So, there you have it. On an outlying island in Hong Kong, an umbrella advertising an English product, with Russian and Kazakh writing, slightly misspelled, indicating that perhaps it was written by someone who wasn't a native Kazakh speaker.

Globalization, thy name is Hong Kong.

Cheung Chau Island

2006-10-21T09:31:00.000-07:00

We went to Cheung Chau Island today. It's a weird dumbbell shape, with a narrow isthmus between two lobes:

There are so many contrasts crammed together here. Open natural green areas, windsurfers congregating to find the ideal spot, locals living a simple and laid back life fishing and chatting away the day in shops, crowded alleyways with merchandise piled in storefronts:

The only motorized vehicles were occasional three-wheel carts, like this one:

People like the beach here.

There are a few Pepperdine students sunning themselves on the nearest floating platform in the water.

There are also a few fun rock formations:

That's Nate from Baylor on the rock in question, and YiChieh Chang (one of the Pepperdine students) heading toward him.

It was near Flower Vase Rock and Human Head Rock. I'm hoping the last one was not named in the same syntactic pattern as "Steak knife".

I don't know what this rock formation was called. On it is painted in white the characters "ding dong", which apparently refers to a Japanese cartoon character popular in Hong Kong.

In general, it seems that this island has a bunch of nice things, that they decided to market overly aggressively, to the point where they're putting up signs toward rock formations that most people would stop to say, "huh".

They have a "Little Great Wall of China". It looks like this:

We had been walking on it for about a minute before I asked where the "Little Great Wall" was. "It's right here".

Oh.

I think the same person who started naming random rock formations and putting signs not only by them, but pointing along the trail to them, and putting informational signs with maps featuring these formations as major sites, is the same person who decided this rock trail should be called "the Little Great Wall of China".

But one fun thing to see along the Little Great Wall was their fire control equipment, at various points on the trail:

In general, it seems there is a lot more open green space in the Hong Kong area than you'd think there would be, for the population density. Much of the land is public park land, especially in the very mountainous areas where you can't really build anything. That's why the apartment buildings are so tall. The limited remaining land is required to house everyone. This is especially true on these outlying islands. No highrises here.

People also had pets here. The SPCA had big signs around, but I think they were redundant. It's interesting: in Hong Kong I hadn't seen a lot of people walking their pets around, but here it was common. There were sandboxes for dogs to do their business in (like a kitty litter box). We saw a couple of cats that wandered around like they owned the place. One was stretched out on a schoolyard, and lifted his head only to see us go by. Another was on the ancient rock carvings (discovered 1970--ancient Chinese rock carvings-- hmm... more hype?) but since there was a cage protecting the rock carvings from humans, the cat had the area all to himself. That is, until he decided to chase a bird, and left the cage.

People were walking their dogs everywhere, including on the beach, by signs that said very plainly, "no dogs".

Come to think of it, the signs said "No kites" but not only were there kites, there were kiteboarders!

This is got to be the only time I've seen a playground with this sign.

Yes, it says, "No drying of linen and clothes." Now pan left, and...

It's also the only time I've seen clothes actually hanging on the fence of a playground. Yes, not only the blue shirt in the foreground, but clotheslines attached to the fence of this playground. This was called the "Temple Playground" because it was attached to a temple. I don't have pictures of it, because I got tired of taking pictures of temples, as if that were the only thing interesting about a place.

Still trying to figure out the steak knives comment? Hint: do it like an SAT analogy, like "steak knives are called that because they are..., just as human head rock is called that because it is a ....".

Copyright

2006-10-19T11:00:00.000-07:00

Here's a podcast by JClark on copyrights. Debunks a lot of misinformation out there that you might have heard on the topic. Pretty interesting stuff.

Induction cooker

2006-10-18T20:51:00.000-07:00

I know I haven't posted in a week, but it's not because of drinking the water. So far, no problems have resulted from that decision.

I've bought an electric hot plate, so I can cook my food now. The hotel room I'm in has a kitchen, but no stove. Here's the cooker, cooking some pasta:

Yes, that means I can finally cook pasta.

It works by electromagnetic induction. Let this snapshot from the user's manual be the explanation:

Now, I have a degree in physics, but I must say I've never heard the expression "whorl electric current" before.

But the idea is simple, if a bit weird: They set up a fluctuating electric current in a coil in the unit. Fluctuating electric currents create fluctuating magnetic fields. Fluctuating magnetic fields create fluctuating electric fields nearby. These fluctuating electric fields in something that conducts electricity (like a steel pot) sets up a current in the pot. This, in turn, heats up the pot, allowing you to cook stuff.

Are you scared? I am. What, precisely, is preventing this electric field from setting up currents in me, for instance? Well, distance, of course, but that doesn't mean there's NOTHING that's happening to me. And those electric currents in the pot: I know they won't shock me, even if I stir using a metal spoon, but it does seem scary. Here's another point: you can apparently use a wide range of different kinds of pots, as long as they're metalic. Stainless steel is fine. Cast iron is fine. What I don't get is: fine, there's an electric current in the pot, and this generates heat, but doesn't that depend on the resistivity of the pot? Couldn't you end up with a pot that was too resistive or too conductive and end up with too much or not enough heat? Or that you might start "boiling off" electrons and sending beta rays everywhere? I'm kind of curious as to how they knew this would work on such a wide range of metals.

Anyway, here's the result:

I actually took these pictures a few days ago, but it's taken me a while to post them. Now I'm off to cook some hot dogs.

Can you drink the tap water in Hong Kong?

2006-10-12T14:33:00.000-07:00

I've heard conflicting stories about whether the tap water in Hong Kong is safe to drink. Some say it is, some say it's not: that you have to boil it to get rid of the germs. "Let's Go"'s guide to Hong Kong says that it depends on the quality of the plumming. That could explain the varied responses.

So I ask the receptionist at the NTT International House, where I'm staying, whether the tap water is safe to drink. She looks a bit shocked, and says, "Wha? No, you have to boil it first." So I decide that in this case, I should be boiling my water. I also notice there's a water boiler apparently for this purpose already in the room. At first I thought it was for coffee and tea, and it probably is, but I noticed that unlike coffee makers, this just pours out hot water.

So I began to boil my water, and I even get a pitcher so I can cool the boiling water off in the refrigerator. But I started seeing signs that perhaps this was unnecessary.

1. No one was getting traveller's diarrhea. Usually in a group of 12 students, we would expect at least someone to be careless over the span of several weeks, or at least eat at a restaurant that was sufficiently careless. Especially since some of them thought it was fine to drink tap water when they first arrived (and locals set them straight, but not immediately). And one would expect that someone would be incapacitated enough for others to know about it. Now Jenna was in the hospital for food poisoning last week, but that was a case that seemed too severe to be just problems with the water. Typically bad water might give you the runs, but not put you in the hospital feeling sick.

2. When we went to Monkey Mountain last month (a place where wild monkeys come up to humans and beg for food) we ran across a reservoir and a water pumping station which was unlocked (?!) and we saw signs in English for things like "Chlorination area". So Hong Kong is not as lax with its germs as we were led to believe.

3. As evidence that Hong Kongers can sometimes be overly cautious, a few locals have been worried about the sanitation of utensils at nice restaurants. The restaurant brings out hot water before the meal, and the local might pour some in a cup, then put the chopsticks in, apparently to sterilize it. If you don't do the same, the local may be worried for you, and put your chopsticks in, too. I understand this for sketchy hole-in-the-wall places, but one local did this at the nice seafood restaurant on the HKBU campus. This is a minority of locals that do this at nice places, but it's evidence that it's not unreasonable that Hong Kongers were just being overly cautious when they say you have to boil your tap water to drink it. Note that in washing dishes, the main issue is not sterilization: to kill bacteria you need water that is generally much, much, hotter than what is typically available. Rather, the idea is to physically remove bits of stuff from the utensils, and water is a solvent.

4. The idea of boiling water because of bad pipes doesn't even make sense. Bad pipes may contribute rust, but typically not bacteria. I remember being an undergrad in Boston and the water would sometimes come out brown. I just waited a few seconds for the water to clear, and drank it all the same. I may have ended up with a higher intake of dietary iron, but I didn't get sick because of it.

Put this together with the fact that some Hong Kongers say it's fine to drink the water, and I'm left very skeptical about the idea that I have to boil my water to drink it.

So I'm going to do my next adventure. For the sake of scientific exploration, and to entertain you, my audience, I have been drinking tap water unboiled for the past few days, and will continue to do so until any bad consequences ensue.

So far, there are no problems. The water tastes fine, or at least it's as reasonable-tasting as tap water in Los Angeles. And no traveller's diarrhea yet. I did choose to do this experiment when I wouldn't be on trips or have to be at a long event (like a Gala dinner). But I'll update you on the progress of this as time goes on.

Views of America, China, North Korea

2006-10-11T09:35:00.000-07:00

I was at KIBC tonight, for game night. There were several folks from the US and a bunch of people from Mainland China, and a few local Hong Kongers, playing various games in different parts of the room, with different discussions.

Some random conversations.

A discussion I overhear about North Korea. A mainlander (Aaron from Chengdu) expressing concern about North Korea. Though in the US we take it for granted that China and North Korea are allies (they're both Communist, right?) he feels it necessary to explain that China and the US fought a war in the 1950s and China supported North Korea then, so China and North Korea are sort of like allies. That's it? The Korean War is the only tie? He said that a year ago, if you asked anyone if the US and North Korea were to get into a fight, which side China would choose, anyone would have said "North Korea". Now, China would support the US.

Not that he supports such a military solution. There's a lot of suffering in North Korea, and what would an attack solve? Maybe it's best to let this go, he suggests.

Later, I'm talking with another mainlander, Diana. She is an exchange student for one semester from Xiamen University, in Fujian, studying English and PR. She would like to study in the United States, but feels she needs to go back to Beijing to support her parents when they grow old--as the only child (with China's one child policy) it's her filial duty.

Xiamen University is apparently a very beautiful and clean university. She says other mainland students come to Hong Kong and say, "Wow, how beautiful and clean". She feels it's just like her home university. I didn't tell her how people at Pepperdine University see HKBU in comparison.

Xiamen is across the Taiwan Strait from Taiwan. She feels that Taiwan should be united with China, and inevitably, it will be. The way she phrases it is interesting: "Anyone who is truly Chinese sees that Taiwan should be part of China". Every now and then the army practices nearby, and she gets nervous, though. Will there be fighting? She hopes not.

She is amazed at the strength of the US, having only a 200 year history. She wonders what its secret is. Perhaps because it is welcoming to so many people from around the world? She wants China to be great too. She calls herself patriotic.

Diana also knows a surprising amount of US history. Apparently, in schools, they have to learn US history as part of world history. In US schools, we learn world history, but we get a vague idea about China, and that's it. Chinese students have to memorize all the states, the names of the presidents, and knew about the Civil War. They also learn about English history, German history, and cover the history of each of the continents.

These were in her textbook and she had to read about them all. Wow. The grade school students in China actually read their textbooks?! She compared the educational system in China to that of the US, and said that in China, there was a lot of lecture and people just had to learn what the teacher said, while in the US, students might be put in groups where they are supposed to learn by experience. In China, therefore, the teacher can give a lot of the reasons why, where in the US, the focus is more practical: on how. This is the reverse of the connection that is usually made in the US between experiential learning and lecture: lecture is viewed as rote learning, while experiential learning lets students discover why.

One thing to note in all of this: these Chinese students are very patriotic and Chinese-centered in their perspective. But they are not in favor of war, and they are not antagonistic against the US. They don't see the US as a natural enemy of China, and in fact they all express a desire to travel there. Temporarily, of course--their true home is in China and always will be.

When I was in grad school I had a roommate who was from mainland China, and when he first arrived he felt sure he would go back to China. By the end of the year, he wanted to stay in the US. He also learned about the Tiananmen square massacre, and changed his view of his government.

Of course these students don't have a say in the direction of Chinese politics. But the next generation of Chinese leaders will come from backgrounds like these, and have these perspectives. There are some in the US that see China as a potential military threat. It is true that they have a considerable investment in military (though nothing compared to the US). But culturally, they don't see the US as a rival militarily. Perhaps they feel that they should, by all rights, be the leaders of the world, and indeed, perhaps all peoples feel something of this. But they don't see an attack on the US as the way this will be achieved: rather, they seem generally against war, and seem bent on developing their country and achieving prosperity.

Anniversary Gala Dinner

2006-10-10T07:45:00.000-07:00

The Gala dinner was quite an event. Hong Kong Baptist University is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and the Chief Executive of Hong Kong, Donald Tsang, came, as well as a number of distinguished guests: various consul generals from places like Hungary and the E.U., business leaders in Hong Kong, representatives from other universities in Hong Kong, representatives from affiliated universities in Thailand, Taiwan, and so on.

The event itself took place in the Hong Kong Convention Center main ballroom, and it was the most elaborate event I've ever seen. I thought it would be a regular banquet, but no, it bore a closer resemblance to an Emmy awards show. Professional people from the entertainment industry with some connection to HKBU were MCs (alternating in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin) and featured singers. Awards were given with klieg lights and presentation music.

The meal had 10 courses, and the menu describing them was a very clever acrostic, where the first character of each dish, put together, spelled out "Hong Kong Baptist University Golden Anniversary Evening Banquet". More specifically, for those of you who can read it, it spelled out:
香港浸會大學金禱晚宴
where the first dish was
香江錦潚滿華堂
and so on. The challenge, I think was 學 meaning learning (it is featured in the word for "University") and that one was "Deep-fried Crispy Chicken":
學有所成鳳報喜
(the word-for-word translation is: "learn have place become phoenix transmit happiness". Go figure.) The last one was
宴樂進宵滿桃季
which is a bun filled with lotus bean paste (like the moon cakes for mid-Autumn festival which just happened) and these are traditional buns for birthdays.

The food was delicious. They leaned a bit on the side of being Western-friendly, probably, but everyone seemed to enjoy it. I talked with a Hong Kong student who was there and he didn't go for the speeches but said the food was excellent.

Everyone was taking pictures. They had a set right outside the ballroom specifically for this purpose. Our International office did that too.

Sorry I don't have other pictures from the event; I didn't bring my camera. We took this one while everyone else was supposed to be playing a game, where each table got quizzes about HKBU.

I also discovered that there is a local Cantonese Happy Birthday song, though they also sang the English Happy Birthday song, as was fitting for Hong Kong.

North Korea's got da bomb

2006-10-08T20:33:00.000-07:00

I must admit here I was wrong. I thought North Korea did not actually have nuclear weapon capability, but they just did a nuclear test. My reasons for coming to the conclusions I did was that just about no one goes around saying, "We've got nuclear weapons". They just do a nuclear test and take everyone by surprise. The reason for this is that they can suffer international sanctions if they get nuclear weapons, but once they have them, it is a done deal--there's no going back, take it or leave it. So the rest of the world simply must accept the reality of the situation.

North Korea, on the other hand, has been hinting that they have nuclear weapons for some time, but not doing a nuclear test (which, by its very nature, provides independent incontrovertible proof of their nuclear capability). Why do this? Because the US has flip-flopped on its commitments to help them build a nuclear power plant. Several times, the US promised to help them build this plant which would not allow uranium enrichment to military grade, in return for North Korea not pursuing its own nuclear power program, which would lead to bomb-grade uranium production, and eventually a nuclear bomb. Of course, since we switch from Democrat to Republican presidents and back and forth, we end up promising, then taking back our promise. North Korea then said, "OK, if you're not going to help us, then we're going to build a bomb." This generated a tepid response, more along the lines of, "Iraq Iraq Iraq Iraq Iraq Oh, North Korea? Whatever. Iraq Iraq Iraq Iraq" from the current administration. The administration seemed to understand the point I was making: no one claims to be building a nuclear weapon. They just test it when they're done and let the world come to its own conclusions. So Washington was going to call North Korea's bluff.

Well, I must admit, North Korea wasn't bluffing.

What next? Will North Korea attack the United States? The problem with making predictions is that it is hard to predict a single person. A mass of people is easier to understand. But North Korea really doesn't want to conquer the United States (or even "take away our freedoms") but just wants the US to make some concessions (like a power plant or aid or at least stopping our crackdown on North-Korean-made counterfeit US currency). That makes it unlikely that North Korea will actually launch a nuclear attack on the US or its neighbors or anyone. But they might use it as a negotiating chip, and if their bluff is called, they (I mean he) might feel obliged to go through with it just for honor's sake. But I was wrong before.

Another big problem is that this nuclear test helps Kim Jong Il domestically. Not that Kim Jong Il has to get votes in the next election, but no leader can survive a situation where he is universally hated for long. Kim is probably not hated, only because people in North Korea don't know any different. But the nuclear test is worth a bunch of kudos points and an occasion for patriotic fervor, which will mitigate any dissatisfaction with how the regime is handling domestic situations.

The other issue this raises is what should be done in response. The problem with going back to the negotiating table is that we reinforce an environment where the only way to get people to talk to you is to build your own nuclear bomb. This is a problem if you are against nuclear proliferation, as I am. One might argue that such an environment is the only reason we're in this mess right now. We need to create an environment where all the negotiation happens before anyone even threatens to build a nuclear bomb. And that's impossible because it means listening carefully and sympathetically to everyone who wants to talk to you.

What about a military response? Any such response would make many enemies of our friends in the region, and could give North Korea the excuse it needs to attack the US, and actually have some of the world on its side. Well, I don't know if anyone will be on its side, but Kim Jong Il might think they will, and so he might act accordingly. Of course, that's assuming Kim Jong Il actually wants to attack the US. It is notable that there was no military response to any country doing a nuclear test in the past. So an invasion or bombing in response to Pyongyang's actions would be hard to justify to the world.

There's another reason: the US has had a policy since the end of the Cold War to maintain the readiness to fight in two wars. We have those wars already: Afghanistan and Iraq. We don't have the strength to fight in three wars. We do have the capability of doing an aerial bombing raid on the palace, say, but it's not clear that this will do anything. Well, it might do one thing: right now the world is on our side in this: North Korea is clearly the bad guy. But if we respond with bombings (making good TV media copy), we equalize the moral high ground. And in return for nothing.

How about an economic sanctions approach? The problem is that we're already doing that to the maximum extent possible. So is just about everyone else. So what more can we do?

Well, it may be that the people who had been doing business with North Korea under the table might be tired of holding their noses and walk away from the deal. Perhaps. But given that their work was clandestine to begin with, they don't have to worry about public opinion, only their consciences, and somehow I don't think conscience is a high priority among that demographic.

What about doing nothing? This does have some appeal: no one can accuse the US of escalating anything, it has precedence (it's what was done whenever anyone else has done a nuclear test), and it doesn't reward North Korea for being bad. It's even possible to do this while looking strong domestically: just make condemnation speeches, impose economic sanctions (maybe the public won't notice that these sanctions are already in place), disband the six-nation negotiations (North Korea has been boycotting them anyway so this will have no effect), and say we will never talk with them again (a lie but who'll catch us on it?). And because of Iraq, no one will call Bush a roll-over.

And all of this of course is relevant to Iran, who has been denying that it is developing nuclear weapons, then winking out of the corner of its eye. "No, we're not developing nuclear weapons. But in case you see a mushroom cloud in, say, the next few weeks, remember, we have the right to do it." This is political gold for Ahmedinejad. Here's my analysis of Iran's nuclear program: Once upon a time, the people were upset about the Shah and ended up with the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic Republic of Iran. The birth rate spurt under Khomeini turned into a large demographic of youth who don't know what it was like under the Shah (Khomeini encouraged couples to have lots of children) but don't especially like restrictions on their clothes, music, and so on. They voted in reformers like President Khatami. But unemployment was high and making a living was hard, and Khatami didn't deliver (mostly because he couldn't). The populace said, "fine, if you're not going to deliver for us, we're going to the other party." Ahmedinejad understands that this is the only reason he's in power, but he also knows he has as little chance at delivering economic prosperity as Khatami did. So he hints at building a nuclear program, which excites patriotic fervor, and people can forget that they have no jobs. This draws international criticism and threats, which emphasizes to the people that they really do need nuclear weapons. And so on.

Does Iran want to attack the US, or Israel, or anywhere else? Probably not. Those of us who watched the 1979 Revolution saw fanatic idealogues, but one thing about staying in power for 25 years: you get less radical and end up more for the status quo. Ahmedinejad, for all his demagoguery, doesn't actually want a war with the West or with Israel, or at least he has given little evidence that he is actually so blinded by his ideology that he's suicidal. In fact, he's been pretty cunning politically up to now, suggesting that he does have his wits together.

But the big issue is that our response to North Korea has vast implications for what will happen with Iran. There's the precedence issue, but also the more resources we throw at dealing with North Korea, the fewer resources we will have for Iran. And by "resources" I mean military, but also international opinion, political opinion domestically, etc.

Now, domestically, all of this can help the Republicans, as long as they can say, "The world is a dangerous place and we're the ones that can make you safer." These events strengthen the first part, anyway. I don't know if people will buy the second half of that.

Well, this is all familiar. A song by Tom Lehrer, anyone?

Extra! Extra! Inside info. on Thailand

2006-10-08T08:35:00.000-07:00

Okay, I just got back from the 50th anniversary gala dinner for Hong Kong Baptist University, and I do have some stuff to say about that. But I met someone who's been in Thailand for much of his adult life (going back and forth from the US) and he says that military coup in Thailand was brought about when the civilian government started to make some changes to the military structure. For a long time the military worried about military things and the business world worried about business things, and everything was fine. But the businessmen running the immediately previous government started to change the constitution to put civilians in charge of the military. Then the coup happened. Two days before the new civilians were supposed to start work.

The whole scandal story is real, but nothing that would necessitate the military stepping in.

Anyway, that's what he says from his perspective on the ground. And it does explain one fact that is otherwise puzzling: why the military only picked ex-military types for positions of power. You'd think if it was just that the military had to fix the country for the country's sake, saving the country from corruption, then they'd just pick a bunch of people who are generally well-respected by the populace, military background or not. But if it is to protect military interests, you can see why they would only use ex-military.

Anyway, I thought this was worth putting up as a separate blog entry.

Moon festival

2006-10-07T10:19:00.000-07:00

This is the Mid-Autumn festival, supposedly the night that is ideal for gazing at the moon. Either that, or that was last night--I don't know which.

People eat moon cakes in recognition of the holiday. They don't taste like cake, per se. They are sweet--kind of. They have a yellow "yolk" in the center and as you eat it, it looks like a moon.

Anyway, I'm not sure whether the moon is supposed to be closest to the earth, or brightest in the sky, but I'm pretty sure you can look this info. up in an astronomical ephemeris, and it won't follow the Chinese lunar calendar. But whatever. Here is a picture of the moon.

For some context, I took a picture through a railing on a nearby building:

Now, doesn't it look brighter or bigger than usual? If not, turn up the contrast on your monitor or get a bigger and brighter monitor. For good measure, copy it onto your desktop and use photoshop to make it bigger and brighter. Now is it bigger or brighter than usual? Good.

Happy mid-Autumn festival!

Congress makes fodder for standup again.

2006-10-06T10:28:00.000-07:00

I wonder: Perhaps the US Capitol building should be required to post signs for the benefit of parents travelling with children, informing them that congressmen may be present.

More pictures from Vietnam

2006-10-05T07:12:00.000-07:00

I decided it would be easier for me to post all my pictures with short captions now, and post a more serious piece later. Partly this is because of requests for pictures, and partly it is because my internet connection at home is so slow, blogger times out when I try to upload pictures from there. So while I'm still at work I should upload the pictures.

First, Cao Dai, a religion homegrown in Vietnam in the early 20th century, who see themselves as a successor to Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism.

There are various levels here: while most wear white, there are those who wear other colors to represent various Asian religions: red for Confucianism, yellow for Buddhism, and blue for Taoism. This worship happens 4 times a day: 6am, 6pm, noon, and midnight. We saw the service at noon. People go through various bowing motions on the floor as a choir and orchestra chant.

Our tour guide says it's in Vietnamese but though he's a native speaker, he can't understand what they're chanting. The symbol they use is the all-seeing eye of God, just like on the dollar bill:

These eyes follow you as you walk by them.

Cao Dai does seances, and this is their main source of religious knowledge. Through these seances they contacted various people from the past, including Sun Yat Sen (founder of Modern China) and Victor Hugo (author of Les Miserables). Here they are, as saints, pointing the way to Cao Daism.

A bit out of order chronologically in our tour, but while I'm on the subject of religion, here's a Buddhist temple. This is Theravada Buddhism, in a Khmer community. North Vietnam has a bunch of Mahayana Buddhism. That bookcase has a bunch of books in English, including one on Zen, which is NOT Theravada Buddhism. Vietnam seems to be a place where different religions get along a bit better than in other places.

Khmer youth all train in a Buddhist temple until they turn 18 and decide whether to remain monks or not.

Notre Dame Cathedral in Saigon:

This is during a service. Note the crowd around, some trying to get in, Others feel it's a party. Note the balloons being sold on the lower left.

Next: During a service. It was packed. Service in Vietnamese. I tried to be discreet so I didn't use flash and couldn't get a good angle.

Meanwhile I hear singing across the street. I go and find a kind of Sunday school class, I suppose. It's next to a Catholic bookstore. I know it's Catholic because it's featuring books like these:

But it also has books like these:

Steven Covey, of "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" fame (here's one for teens) is, of course, Mormon. But, as I said, in the atmosphere in Vietnam, Catholics and Mormons get along fine together.

Here's another look at the church. Lots of traffic. Takes lots of practice to cross the street.

Motorbikes everywhere. Worse than in Taipei. And not all of them are experienced drivers, either. Sometimes a whole family is riding one. They follow traffic lights, but as a pedestrian you often can't see them lights. There are often no crosswalks. Luckily no one is really speeding, so you can do quick negotiations with each driver as you approach collisions.

Here's rush hour going to the airport:

On another topic, we toured the Mekong River delta. No one knows how long it is because its source is somewhere in the inaccessible Tibetan plateau. But it brings lots of rich silt and periodically floods the river delta, depositing fresh fertilizer every year. Farmers just plant, sit back, then harvest. They still do that. Not because it's quaint--it's still a viable way to make a living. They only make about a dollar a day, but they grow their own food and live on boats. It's apparently a viable way of living. We toured by boat.

There was some rain, but not the sort you would associate with a hurricane. We got more water splashing up from the river. Not comforting to think how many countries the Mekong goes through to get to us, and how polluted it might be. Some have a different attitude than others:

That's Sangi in the front right, basking in the water, stretching out his legs, having a good time. YiChieh is behind him, using him as a shield and crouching to avoid getting any of that dirty water on him.

As the weather gets nicer, students relax on the bow:

And we eventually get two human prows, looking out over the bow:

Here is a floating market, where people buy and sell from boat to boat:

A view from the floating market to the houses on land. Lots of TV antennas. The guide says that ever since they had something new to do at night (watch TV), the birth rate has gone way down.

They pop rice, just like popcorn, in a big skillet:

We handled a pet python at a restaurant on one of the islands:

And we walked on rickety bridges.

Well, not rickety, really, but you have to watch your step and the railing is only on one side. They call these "monkey bridges" because you have to be a monkey to cross them. I'm proud of Priscilla here, especially. Who would have thought she'd agree to this?

Speaking of monkeys, you can feed a monkey at a rest stop on the way to the Mekong:

At the same stop, a truck pulled up with a tarp on the bottom, filled with water, and live fish. Here's someone bucket brigading the fish into bags.

We see Mt. Ba Den on the way back from the Cao Dai temple and the Cu Chi tunnels (yes, these pictures are out of order).

Those are rice paddies in the foreground. The canal is an irrigation ditch. Sangi hops across one:

and loses one of his slippers:

The response back at Pepperdine's International Programs office is, "What's he doing without close-toed shoes in an Avian Flu-infested area?!" But I trust our tour guide Viet, who keeps up on these things, and when he says you can wear sandals, I go with that. Mind you, he didn't think Sangi was going to wander into a rice paddy. But we did cancel our tour of the aviary because of a recent case (in a bird, not in a human) there. It's been over a year since there's been a human case of Avian flu in Vietnam, mostly because the government has been very quick to react to it.

Don't worry about his slippers: Sangi got another pair at a market later that day, and probably paid less than a dollar for it.

Here are a couple of flower vendors pedaling on the highway who stopped to see the commotion about the slipper:

Now for miscellaneous: Across the street from where we stayed in Saigon is a youth activities hall of some sort, that has the internet cafe where I had trouble typing because of the Vietnamese accents that kept coming out. Still, it was a few cents an hour.

They also have concerts. This one was from Sunday night. They did a bunch of Western pop songs, Vietnamese style.

There weren't many people inside at the concert. More of them were outside, peering in through the front gate. Perhaps they couldn't afford admission. I don't know. But they were really into it. I wonder if maybe the bigger party was happening outside than inside.

Okay, I've got the pictures from Vietnam up now. Now I can post even when I'm at home without worrying about how long it will take to upload.

Vietnam, part I

2006-10-04T08:08:00.000-07:00

Okay, this may not be part 1 because I posted something while in Vietnam. But this is the first post after I got back, and more importantly for Prof. Williams, the first post with pictures from Vietnam.

Of course I had gotten slightly behind in my work when I left and did not make any progress while there, and since I'm giving a test tomorrow, I spent much of the past few days catching up with grading, writing the test, and doing a bunch of administrative work unrelated to either, but related to the Hong Kong program. Anyway, it's 11:28 pm on Wednesday, and this is the first time I have to post anything from the trip.

We arrived last Thursday on Cathay Pacific into Ho Chi Minh City (still known as Saigon to locals but all the official documents say "Ho Chi Minh City"). We had Pho. We toured the city. Here's a statue of Ho Chi Minh (known as "Uncle Ho"), welcoming a child.

We saw statues of Ho Chi Minh everywhere. In this case, I went around to see what Uncle Ho was looking at. He gazes at bright lights in highrise office buildings.

The tall one on the right says "Citibank". The bright lights on the lower right come from what was once the Russian market, but now offers a lot at very low rates. "Motorola", say signs emblazoned on its windows. Even the little guy is in on it. The middle pedestrian is rolling some kind of toy that makes clacking noises as it moves, drawing attention from tourists who might want to buy such a thing. Cheap price! And Uncle Ho sits there, contented.

After all, all Ho Chi Minh wanted was the best for his country. And now his country has discovered that free markets are just what are needed.

I say that with only a little irony. Because it's very clear that Vietnam suffered under communist strictures, and now is flourishing under the free market. There's now a sizeable middle class that has food and clothing and shelter, where once such things were in short supply. They're at restaurants. They frequent massage parlors. They buy brand name clothing at shopping malls and hang out at popular rock concerts. Young couples find secretive places in parks to snuggle, but with so many of them, the general activity is not so secret.

In the 1980s, Vietnam adopted a policy known as "Doi Moi", or "renovation", adopting, like China, a "one party, free market" slogan. And it's worked. I saw prosperity and freedom, though I knew of course that they were not a democracy. But as has often been pointed out, most people don't go for ideologies. They want to live normal lives. They want to enjoy life, and raise their families without fear of danger or deprivation. They want to eat their favorite foods and sleep at home near their spouse and children. And, it seems, many Vietnamese can do just that.

They keep comparing themselves to other countries. If China can get all this foreign investment, so should they! If Singapore is the Asian financial dragon, then the Vietnamese, children of the dragon (or so the legend says), will one day surpass Singapore.

There's also poverty. Kids pushing roses on men walking with women, through the night, a necessary job to put food on the table. People at the river, cleaning plastic bags they salvaged from the dump so they can sell it to recyclers. But under communism, they didn't even have these opportunities. Our tour guide, Viet, lived through both times, and he said they have a saying: Under capitalism they share wealth. Under communism they share poor [sic]. I don't know if people really share now, but it's hard to deny that the people overall seem to be living a better life today.

The next day we went to the Cu Chi tunnels. These were tunnels by the Viet Cong in the jungle to subvert the South Vietnamese and US forces during the Vietnam War (and before that, in their struggle for independence against the French).

They were too small for most American soldiers to crawl through, though it was fine for our Blair Warner:

They had a section of tunnels widened for tourists so we could all go through, even if we weren't Blair Warner:

A display of some of the booby traps used:

And a war trophy: a dismantled US tank, left in the jungle, to be a tourist trap for a later generation of US citizens:

On the left is Andrea Rodriguez, then Jonathan Hippensteel, and right behind him is Andrew Fay. On the right is Alejandro Sangiovanni.

Young mothers would keep US tanks from going into the jungle, saying that to go into the jungle, "you will have to run over me, a mother. You will have to kill your own mother."

There's something democratic about every system of power. No one can be in power with no support. The most disciplined army in the world executed their own Emperor Nero when there was no one left to support him. The Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huangdi maintained control through horrific tyrannical methods, but by the time he died, there was sufficient unrest to dismantle his empire. The fact that women would throw their bodies in front of tanks shows that there is always some way to stop a tyrannical regime if enough people want to badly enough.

I actually predicted (without knowing specifics) back when we invaded Iraq in 2003 that there were probably many in the minority who supported Saddam. We can't know that based on the elections, rigged as they were. But we can know that because otherwise, Saddam's own private Republican Guard would have killed him. Well, I didn't predict they would be a problem for American armed forces this many years into the conflict, but I did predict they represented a sizeable chunk of the population.

I said there's "something democratic". It's possible to rule with a minority. But it can't be too small of a minority or you won't be able to pull it off.

Well, the moment many of the students were waiting for: the opportunity to shoot Vietnam War era weapons. AK 47s, M16s, M60s, all mounted and ready for tourists who are willing to shell out USD $1 a bullet. All left over from the war, in perfect working condition, firing every day for thousands of trigger-happy tourists.

Sangi (Alejandro Sangiovanni, one of our students) gets set up for shooting at the range.

Delia shoots. She gets ear mufflers. Priscilla (lower left) doesn't. Ouch. Those are loud.

This was by far the single biggest event we were all hoping for when we came to Vietnam. But by the end of the tour, we saw so many other things that although this was definitely up there as an attraction, other parts of the trip wowed us just as much.

More on those in my next post tomorrow.

We're still alive

2006-09-30T04:53:00.000-07:00

Just in case any of you were watching the news and worried, knowing we were in Vietnam, no, the typhoon didn't even come close to us. It hit central Vietnam, and we're in Southern Vietnam. We went to Can Tho on the Mekong River delta in the very south, and tomorrow we go back to Ho Chi Minh City. We got a little rain, but nothing that would require an umbrella.

More stuff later. Most of the report of what's going on will have to wait until Tuesday, when I can upload my photos onto this blog. But I'll probably post something short when we get back to Ho Chi Minh City. The internet cafe there was challenging because it was set to a Vietnamese keyboard input, which means that when you type certain combinations of letters, it transforms those letters into letters with accents.

You'll see what I mean on the next blog entry.

Hong Kong food and "Chinese food"

2006-09-26T20:18:00.000-07:00

I've always loved Chinese food. You know, sweet and sour chicken, Moo Shu pork, broccoli with beef, General Gao's chicken, Garlic beef, etc.

Now, as you might expect, there's a difference between US Chinese food and Hong Kong Chinese food. But it's not that the US Chinese food is made up (well, General Gao's chicken is, but it's not too far from other dishes that are authentic). Rather, it's that what is popular in Hong Kong is very different from what is popular in the US. Almost all of the above can be found somewhere in Hong Kong. But just about none of them is considered "standard fare".

What is standard: noodle soups with various vegetables and seafood, and a hard-boiled egg. Small pieces of pork in a delicious sauce, but every piece has been carefully selected to make sure it has a bone in it. Fish. Lots of fish. Seafood is king here. Eel, squid, jellyfish, and some other things I can't recognize. Mushrooms and other fungi. Cabbage. Pea pods. Steaming hot soups you can sip slowly with your steaming hot tea. Crazy for a place that already has hot weather, but I guess that's what they like. Most of it is in a very bland sauce.

Now, I had been informed that though China has many separate cuisines, the US Chinese food we get is most often from Hong Kong. So I was wondering whether I was misinformed, or whether I was missing out on the "real" Hong Kong food.

It turns out neither is the case. Once, at a restaurant with a bunch of other people (local Hong Kongers and foreigners), a local ordered for the whole table, and we ate family style. Out came a bunch of dishes, including sweet and sour pork. One of the foreigners excitedly asked what that dish was called. "Gu lou yuhk". I recognized the last word, "yuhk" as literally meaning "meat" but "meat" most often means "pork". We got the characters for it so we could recognize it on the menu. Another local asked, "Oh, so you guys like this?" To us, it was obvious that this is far superior to fungi on noodles, but to her, it was all good, and since foreigners didn't like some things, she was surprised we would all like "Gu lou yuhk". I asked whether "Gu lou gaai" meant "sweet and sour chicken", trying my mix-and-match language skills. One local said "yes". Another local repeated it and looked at me with a confused expression. "Sweet and sour chicken?!" Those crazy Americans!

I think chicken is most often served with bones and skin. I don't mean drumsticks. I mean small pieces of chicken with the bones chopped inside it, so you can suck out the marrow. For me (and most Americans), that's too much work. It wouldn't be battered. I suspect this is what she was thinking when I asked about sweet and sour chicken. Generally, I think Hong Kongers are willing to work more for their food than Americans are. I want the process to be efficient. Why bother having the bones there when I can eat it faster without them? They want the process to take some time. Hence the chicken feet that you chew on for hours. You have to search them out to pay the bill. Once I went to an American restaurant with some locals and mainland Chinese, and when the server came to take away our plates, a mainland Chinese person told me that he thought this was rather rude, as if they're saying we should leave. I can imagine many restaurants in the States where they'd say, "Darn right, we want you to leave!"

Later I tried to look for "Gu lou yuhk" on menus. I never found it. A local student I know happened to be eating at the same restaurant I went to, and stopped by my table to see if I needed help with translating the menu. I asked if they had "Gu lou", and he asked them. It wasn't on the menu, but they did have it. This verified to me that "pork" is the only thing you get "Gu lou", so that you don't even have to say "yuhk". It also demonstrated that although everyone knows what it is, generally speaking no one cares to order it, so it's never on the menu. It would be as if foreigners to America hated hamburgers, hot dogs, steak and eggs, french fries, and fried chicken, but loved cole slaw, and ordered it for a meal every time they could.

As an American I think of a dish as primarily what kind of meat it features, then what kind of preparation is has, which includes what vegetables might be on it or what kind of sauce it's in or how it was cooked. I think for Hong Kongers, a dish is primarily a combination of vegetables and seafood, and sometimes there might be meat as a kind of flavorful addition, like one might add garlic or nutmeg to a dish.

And "seafood" is really big here. It's not a matter of whether a dish has seafood. It's whether it has eel, sea cucumber, jellyfish, shrimp, or squid. These are generally bland flavors, and so the sauce used is bland, to make sure you can taste the flavors.

Dessert is a strange concept here. It involves beans. And is not necessarily sweet. Around now, in anticipation for the Mid-Autumn festival, mooncakes (made of hardened bean paste with egg yolks in the middle) are available. These are kind of sweet, but not what you'd expect when you hear "cake". A Hong Kong local told me he didn't like it because it was too sweet.

Tomorrow we head to Vietnam. So I won't be posting here until Tuesday. But then you'll see what we did in Vietnam. So be patient and you will be rewarded.

Singing out

2006-09-24T09:43:00.000-07:00

I'm in two choirs here: one at the church, Kowloon International Baptist Church, and the other is the University (Hong Kong Baptist University) student choir.

The student choir is predictably more challenging, but they're both lots of fun. The KIBC choir is singing a Michael W. Smith piece for Christmas, and we've got a lot of music for the student choir, including Beethoven's 9th symphony (which we haven't practiced yet but the choir part for that is fairly short anyway) and a piece written by an HKBU music prof. for the HKBU 50th anniversary bash. We've also got a Negro spiritual. I don't know whether the students here have the cultural background to know what this is about. But they're not getting the sound. Yet.

This is my best opportunity to get into the local culture, since in my classes, I only teach Pepperdine students. I've met a few fellow basses, and there's the same fun camaraderie that there is in a student choir in the US. They're not so physical but they're just as rambunctious.

Asians have a reputation for being shy and reserved. But when they're among peers, the Hong Kongers can be quite gregarious and loud. Especially when the teacher's not in the room and this is especially true about the guys. You don't have random tenors showing off their singing in silly ways (like Dominic Falbo at Pepperdine) but you do have boisterous chatter about random things. About what? I don't know--it was in Cantonese.

I would say that the sight reading abilities are higher than those I've seen in student choirs in the States. That's probably because many more of them know how to play the piano, for instance. But as we are reading through some songs in English, many of them (predictably) have trouble. They can all speak English, but not at the same speed, while also trying to read the notes. So they sign nonsense syllables when they're learning the music.

I did play a role in correcting people's pronunciation. The kinds of pronunciation issues are very different. In the HKBU Prof's piece, there's a part where the text is, "My heart will praise you without ceasing". Some students were voicing the "s" in "ceasing", so that it sounded like they were singing, "My heart will praise you without seizing". Yes. Very different.

I tried to make a joke of it, but I don't think people understood it. They didn't quite get what "heart seizing" would mean. Or "heart ceasing".

This is all very natural to a native speaker, but I realized how difficult this can be for a non-native speaker. Neither "cease" nor "seize" are common words in conversation, and very often, an undoubled continuant consonant between two vowels is voiced, as in "bruised", "bathing", "rising", etc., and you need to have a double consonant to make it unvoiced, as in "passed", "missed", "possum", etc. But then there's "facing", "based", and, well, "ceasing".

I'm glad I'm a native English speaker, struggling with learning Cantonese, rather than the other way around.

At the church, Angie (the music director) was coaching everyone to sing "In excelsis Deo" with a pure "i", as in "een" rather than "inn". That's a common frustration for teaching Latin phrases to English speakers. But it only affected the folks from the US. The native Tagalog and Cantonese speakers in the choir usually make the reverse mistake: when speaking English, saying "een" for "in".

Back to the student choir, we had sectionals, meaning the men and women met separately to practice their respective parts. The conductor had to depend on individual students to help her run the rehearsal. The student guest conductors ran the rehearsal in Cantonese. I had some help from the people around me to figure out what was said, but I think I missed most of it. At least I know the numbers so I could know where what measure we were starting on.

The first day, the conductor made announcements about class policies. Apparently tardiness is a big problem. The section leaders suggested a HK$10 fine for being tardy. One student pointed out that this is in conflict with HKBU regulations on student payments. The conductor asked for suggestions. One that was suggested, and most people liked, was the tardy student would have to sing a solo in front of the class. This seemed to be viewed as quite a deterrent. I don't think it would be a deterrent in the States. It was used once during warmup, and a student had to do a warmup arpeggio by himself, and was visibly embarassed.

Even when asked to guest conduct, the students were in general shy to get up in front of the class, but once the guest conductors were there, they had no problem with poise. One time, when the professor started with the women's choir, the appointed student conductor came to the front and aped the conductor, using his falsetto, copying the professor's phrases in English, to comic effect. I think the shyness might be an act.

Xi'an, part 2

2006-09-21T08:14:00.000-07:00

I said I was going to write part 2 of the Xi'an trip, but the trip itself set me behind in grading, and I've been trying to get several things settled, including figuring out how to pay our tour guide (more on that later), and get everyone's visas to go to Vietnam.

And all of a sudden my internet connection goes out. I can ping the router, but not the DNS server or anything else in the area. So I'm typing this off-line and I'll upload it when the internet comes back on. The internet connection at HKBU is pretty slow, and temperamental. You'd think that in Hong Kong, where top-of-the-line technology is available for low prices, that HKBU would be much better than anywhere else I've seen, but instead it's much worse than everything else except dialup.

Anyway, the highlight of the trip to Xi'an was, for me, the trip to the Da Qin Christian monastery. See two posts ago for a historical view of this, and see the last post for some stuff about the stone tablet discovered in the 16th century.

The monastery was discovered many times, most recently by a team by Martin Palmer with local contact Peter Zhao (Zhao Xiaomin). In 1998 they stumbled upon this site near a famous Taoist site, and Martin, who knows Christian iconography, recognized that not only was this pagoda not a typical Chinese pagoda, but everything about it was Christian. A local nun said, "Sure, it's a Christian pagoda. We all know that."

I tried to find how to get into this site, and eventually ended up emailing Martin Palmer, who put me in touch with Peter Zhao. He arranged everything in this Xi'an trip and gave us an introduction to the Christian pagoda.

It's about an hour to the southwest of Xi'an, at the base of the Qingling mountains dividing North China from South China, in the middle of farm country. Corn fields, everywhere. People picking corn, drying corn, laying corn on the sides of roads, grinding corn. Made the folks from Ohio University feel right at home.

There are a bunch of locals trying to get us to ride horses. A few of us took them up on the offer. It's not too far to walk, and the horses don't get you there any faster, but for some, it was an opportunity not to be missed. Here's Blair Warner on one.

The pagoda stands, or rather tilts, in the middle of these corn fields. It has leaned since an earthquake in the 1500s.

This is where there is a replica of the stone monument and where I bought the rubbings. By the way, I found out that typing in Chinese is already built into my computer. Yay, Apple! I just go to System Preferences, International, and Input Menu, and select that i want to be able to enter stuff in Chinese. 中文。That means "Chinese". It's hard to type this, because I don't have the characters marked on my keyboard, which means I'm doing this by trial and error, mostly.

So anyway, one of these days I'm going to type in the text of the rubbing and then the internet will truly have everything.

The bottom is now a Buddhist shrine, but the statues in there kind of creeped me out. I think because they're designed to appear like they're always staring at you.

To enter the rest of the pagoda, they built a ladder out of pipes. I kid you not--there's no regular entrance; every time someone wants to come, they build the ladder again. The rungs were far apart and not consistently spaced, and it went up the side of a tilting building. Still, many of us went up.

Here's a nativity scene on the second floor, or at least the direction of the legs fits the pattern of Eastern Orthodox nativity scenes.

I'd read that the stairs in 1998 were missing several pieces and the remaining pieces were in bad shape. Now they're fine, except that they are a bit irregular and sometimes slope in unpredictable ways. That and sometimes it's hard to maneuver to them. Yet there's electric lighting up here, apparently.

At the top, we rest for pictures of the scenery around us. Way down there are the horses. We truly are in the middle of nowhere.

The hand there is Andrea's. She insisted on walking on the outside of the pagoda, on the rim. In fact, dancing. Did I tell you this pagoda leans? And it's 1300 years old?! Someone else joined her. Was it Nicole? Or Delia? I forgot. But they're the ones who also joined me in jumping off of Macau Tower. I think walking around like that was the highlight for them. For others, it was the fact that we're looking at an ancient site and we're the only tourists in sight. For me, it was the fact that this was built by people who share my faith in Jesus but who have a completely different cultural mindset, more Eastern than Western.

There's a sublime mixture of darkness and light here, like twilight. Very dark in the pagoda, but light coming from the outside. Here's Yee, from Ohio University, right at the border.

Then there's going back down that ladder. Yikes.

Next we went to the nearby site of Lou Tai Guan, where legend has it that Lao Zi, the founder of Taoism, wrote the "scripture" of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching, in one night, as he was about to leave China forever to wander the mountains of the west. In the Tang dynasty, the emperors viewed themselves as descendants of Lao Zi, and emphasized Taoist sites like this one.

The Tao Te Ching is inscribed in tablets behind the two red-fenced areas near the entrance in the picture.

The fact that the Tang emperor invited the Nestorian church to build a pagoda in the midst of this the most sacred of Taoist complexes, so near the capital, is nothing short of astounding, especially since the emperor viewed himself as in some way a successor of Lao Zi. Perhaps there is truth in the statements of the monument that the emperor came to see truth in the Christian monks' teachings, and accepted Christianity as part of Taoism.

Still, at the side of the Taoist temple, there are a pair of bronze lions, which Peter Zhao says was built shortly after the Christians put up their pagoda. They are guards, and directly face the Christian pagoda. The Taoist priests may not have been able to countermand the Emperor's orders to allow the Christian pagoda, but they could set up things like this to register their protest.

The bus driver, meanwhile, bought a puppy for 100 RMB (about $12 USD) from a local farmer. He was very cute and was brown with black tiger-like stripes.

We then saw a modern Christian church in a nearby village. It was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s but rebulit soon thereafter.

They say the Nestorian church died out long ago, but why is Christianity so strong in this countryside area? Perhaps when waves of persecution hit, they went underground every time, and according to the official documents, Christianity died out. But in reality, who can track what goes on in the remote countryside?

All in all, a very worthwhile trip. It was a hassle to get here, but I'm glad we came. I learned a lot along the way. And got to meet Peter Zhao. Apparently very few people come to this site--mostly the few scholars who really know about Nestorian Christianity in 7th century China. He estimates around 500 people came to visit last year. More than I thought, but still really very few.

I'm really indebted to Peter. Now, fairly literally. I brought HK$10,000 to help pay for things when I arrived but I didn't have the full amount. The reason for that is my bank has a limit for how much I can withdraw in one day. The students are paying me back now, but in US dollars in checks, which I will mail to my bank. Peter said we should go to the bank to do a cash transfer. I hand them my credit card, and they deposit the money into Peter's account. This did not work. One bank said we had to go to the main branch to do transfers. We went to the main bank and they couldn't get my card to work. I tried several cards, and smaller amounts. To no avail. They concluded they just can't handle international credit cards. We needed to get a card from China Construction Bank or China Agricultural Bank or something like that. You know, the regular ones you can get if you are Chinese.

This China Construction Bank in Xi'an is under construction. The bottom left stuff is bamboo scaffolding holding up tarps.

I instead withdrew the maximum from an ATM and handed it to Peter. I now have to pay the remaining balance, and it's been difficult. Peter says I can just go to a Hong Kong bank and try the same thing. Each one says I need an account there. I might get an account just to get this thing going, even though it takes a lot of random paperwork and evidence to get an account. But there's also the issue of how to get money to my new Hong Kong account from my US account. Apparently I need to tell my US bank to do it. Which then raises the question: Why not just ask my US bank to pay Peter directly?

Well, I called Washington Mutual, long distance, and they said I had to be present at the bank to do a cash transfer.

In the meantime I'm just withdrawing the maximum from my ATM so that if worse came to worse, I can just deposit the money into Peter's account.

Well, now the internet is working so I can finally upload this all. I'm still in my office at 12:34 am, because I don't want to do this at home--the internet connection there is usually so slow, it times out when I try to upload pictures onto the blog.

Adventures on Mainland China

2006-09-18T08:47:00.000-07:00

This was an eventful weekend. We went to Xi'an. See the previous post as to why.

The first group was on the 8:30 am flight from Shenzhen to Xi'an. I now know why paying by international credit card is called "cash". They use the international credit card to reserve the ticket, but you still have to pay in cash. We didn't have that much cash on us. So I handed them a credit card. They said they couldn't handle it. Then Priscilla (a native Chinese speaker) argued with them, and then they said they couldn't handle credit cards here. We'd have to go somewhere else. Now we'd been all over both terminals by now, so we weren't happy about that. It transpires that "somewhere else" is the booth right next to the booth where we were. They explain that they'll have to charge a 4% fee. According to VISA, they're not supposed to do that. But, hey, whatever. Then they see it's an international credit card and say they have to charge a 5% fee. Again, we're willing. They then say it will take quite a lot of time to do each of ours, and we might miss our flight. So could they do them all together? I say, sure. Put it on my card. I'll collect the money later.

The second group was scheduled to leave at 4:10 pm that day. Priscilla managed to explain to them what they needed to do, so they were saved that hassle. But the hassle they received was more than enough to compensate. The ticketing agent only found one. Luckily they had Yee (an exchange student from Ohio University who speaks Cantonese) and she convinced them to let her look through the pile of tickets. She found another. But they couldn't find the last one. After arguing with them, the plane leaves without them. She tries to get them to waive the cancellation fee but they insist it's not their fault. Eventually they agree to waive the fee but the next time she tries to book through them, she will get the fee. Apparently they really didn't like her business. She tries to get them to book them a hotel room where they can stay, but to no avail. They wander around the airport and hole up on a bench. The security guard chases them off. They eventually get a hotel room, and come the next morning.

Mishaps aside, we had a great time. Since this was centered on the Da Qin Christian site, we had a somewhat different itinerary than most tourists. We first started at the Forest of the Stone Tablets museum, where the stone tablet dug up in the 16th century from around the Da Qin site is kept.

We're walking into the museum. It's easy to get ahead of a group of 10. Groups of 10 move quite a bit more slowly than smaller groups. In the front, on the left, is Sean, a student from Ohio University that's been hanging around the Pepperdine group pretty often, and has become our collective friend. Then is Blair, taking a picture, and Bonnie, and on the right, in the shadows, is Priscilla, talking on the phone. She's probably trying to explain airport check-in procedure to the group leaving on the second flight, so it's not that bad. Behind them is Delia, Nicole, Andrea, and Jenna. Mike Simon is taking pictures all over the place, so he's not in the picture.

The museum has many large stone monuments, often inscribed with famous philosophical treatises or poems. At the front is a large one done in the Tang dynasty, diligently and masterfully engraving a Confucian treatise on filial piety:

There were many impressive works here. The main reason for me, though was the Nestorian Christian tablet from the 700s AD that was unearthed in the 16th century.

Okay, that was a really bad picture. But none of the other pictures I took worked out any better. The lighting was bad, there was glass in front of the tablet, my camera doesn't have a lot of adjustments I can do, and I'm not much of a photographer. And furthermore, my camera was really low on batteries, and so some of the pictures I thought I took didn't come out. And flash was not really an option for many of these reasons put together, but mainly the battery issue.

I just put in batteries the week before I left on the trip. Luckily I had extra batteries I brought along just in case, and after we went to the Stone Tablet museum, I put them in, but even then, they were almost shot by the end of the weekend. I don't know what's up with that. Maybe when I carry the camera in my pocket I accidentally turn it off and on all the time. It's pretty easy to do accidentally.

As I mentioned in the previous post, this is very interesting to me, since it shows that the gospel maintained its integrity even as it was transplanted to a very different culture, with very little influence from Roman thought, and plenty of Eastern influence. But for our tour guide, rattling off the official line, this "shows that in those days, China had friendly relations with far away countries." A cute line now, politically, that China seeks to be accepted by the world community, but completely misses the point, from my perspective. Similarly, at a museum she mentions religious artifacts saying, "In those days there was a lot of political instability so people turned to religion for comfort." Again, it sounds like the party line.

Well, I did get better pictures of the Nestorian monument when we went to the Da Qin monastery--someone made a replica of the monument and set it up there.

Okay, that's slightly better, but not enough to read anything. Peter Zhao, who was present at the discovery of the Da Qin site, is on the right in the blue shirt. He showed us around the site.

At the Da Qin site, I bought a rubbing for 100 RMB (USD $13) of the whole front face. Here is the rubbing spread out on my bed when I got back home:

Note the Aramaic (in Syriac script) on the lower left. The Assyrian (so-called Nestorian church) still has their services in Aramaic and reads the Bible in Aramaic with Syriac script. The top part is hard to see, so here it is in closeup:

Note the cross at the top, and Eastern-style lotus along the bottom.
From upper right to lower left, reading downward on each column:
Da(great)-Qin (Roman/Persian empire) luminous teaching/religion flow-transmit Middle-country(China) tablet

One of my goals is to make the Chinese text of this available on the web. I've been frustrated by the fact that the only available resources I've found have had this only in translation, and so it is hard to tell how they translated God or Jesus or Messiah, for instance. First I have to learn to use Chinese word processors, assuming I can find one.

Anyway, in one of the museum rooms experts are doing rubbings:

They spread paper over the stone, and use a tool to push the paper into the carvings on the stone, then dab ink onto the paper, leaving white where the stone was carved. Several students bought some rubbings, but I decided to get a book with a description of all of the carvings. They weren't doing rubbings of the Nestorian tablet--I had to go to Da Qin to get that one.

After this we saw the city wall. This is not the city wall from the heyday of the Tang dynasty, but from about 1000 years later in the Ming dynasty, when this was no longer the capital of China, and the city was a sixth of its original size. Still, this wall is enormous. It runs 30 km around the city at the time, which is not as long as a marathon, but longer than a half-marathon.

They had battlements at regular intervals to more easily fit more archers to fire at incoming invaders. Note the modern and elegant-looking Howard Johnsons contrasting with the Ming dynasty battlement station.

Here is a view from the city wall down on the traffic below inside the city:

We crossed this street a few times. It was as scary as it looks. To quote the famous travel expert Dave Barry describing the Arc d'Triomphe in Paris, "It is a moving monument to the many thousands of people who have died trying to get there".

Really. The word "traffic" assumes too much about the regularity of the behavior of automobiles to accurately be used in relation to the streets of Xi'an. Our bus driver, for instance, regularly does U turns in the middle of a major 4-lane road, across double yellow lines, with traffic coming at him, sometimes when some of the cars are passing by driving on the wrong side of the road, while dodging mopeds, pedestrians, pedestrians pulling farming carts, and random farm animals.

Probably the only thing keeping everyone alive is that they don't drive as fast as we do in the US. They can't, not on many of the bumpy roads. Even when the streets are well-paved, as in the picture above, they know to keep their speed down.

Except our bus. Because we took so long at all the stops, we were often late, and our tour guide kept telling our bus driver how late we were. And so we passed trucks, passed cars, passed taxis... passed taxis! honking our multi-toned horn at pedestrians who wouldn't yield to that crazed bus with those crazy foreigners...

After the second group arrived on Saturday, we went to see the Terra Cotta warriors. The first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang Di, unified China by an iron fist, and by sheer force unified the currency, the writing system, built the Great Wall (using the bodies of those who died in its construction as filler), and when scholars said he wasn't ruling according to Confucian ideals, had those Confucian texts burned, and the scholars with them. He also planned ahead for his burial, forcing thousands of artisans to make pottery replicas of the individual soldiers, generals, and horses in his army. About 30 years ago, a farmer, when digging a well, found some pottery, and this led to one of the most spectacular finds in Chinese archaeology of the 20th century. Now you find replicas of these soldiers at P. F. Chang's Chinese Bistro in LA.

The individual soldiers, then, were not new to me. What was new was the grand scope. There were three pits we know about. Here is a view of the first pit. To get a sense of scale, look not at the people in front but the people along the left and right sides of the "aircraft hangar", especially toward the back.

A closer look at the warriors:

The location of the well they were digging when they made this find:

Most of this is not even excavated yet.

I hear they're worried that they won't be able to preserve them all if they expose them to the elements now. Some people are skeptical but I accept their explanation at face value. It's enough work reconstructing the warriors and horses we already have, a process we see here, above the pits:

They say that the terra cotta warriors had paint on them when they were first discovered. The paint lasted thousands of years only to degrade quickly in the open air environment in the past 30 years. So they don't want to dig up any more until they know how to fix this.

It's taking a long time to write this post. So I'll post the rest of the stuff (about Da Qin) next time. In the meantime, take a look at this: apparently, on the day we were there, perhaps while we were there (for all we know), a German performance artist/exchange student posed as one of the Terra Cotta warriors! We didn't see the arrest, but it was on that very day.

Setting up the trip to Xi'an

2006-09-14T06:29:00.000-07:00

I want to post this now because it's mostly negative, and I want to let my positive feelings about actually being in Xi'an come out when I get back.

Trying to get to Xi'an was hard.

I should mention that there is more than the Terracotta Warriors to see in Xi'an. Xi'an was the capital of China for a lot longer than Beijing ever was. It was the capital under the first emperor Qin Huangdi, it was the capital under the golden age of the Tang dynasty, and so on. Only after the Mongols invaded did the Mongols move the capital to Beijing.

Quiz question: When was the first Christian mission into China? If you're thinking of the Age of Exploration, the Jesuits, and the Portuguese, you're off by almost a millenium. You see, though we think of Christianity as beginning in Israel and moving west, Christianity also moved east at the same time. This was a Christianity that was not as colored by Greco-Roman thought (but it was probably influenced by Persian thought), and in the 600s, a Persian missionary named Alopen went to bring the gospel to China.

Evidence of this is the Da Qin monastery that was built during the Tang Dynasty and numerous artifacts including a large stone tablet with a summary of the gospel in Chinese, erected at the behest of the Emperor as a show of Imperial encouragement of the gospel. It was reported to the Jesuits in the 1600s, forgotten, then rediscovered several more times after that. The Japanese invasion of WWII led a Japanese archaeologist to find it, but he gave exactly the opposite directions to it, perhaps to throw others off the mark. In the Cultural Revolution it was forgotten again. Then Martin Palmer, a British archeologist, found it again in the 1980s.

The Da Qin monastery is in Xi'an.

Most books on Xi'an don't mention it. David Aikman's book on Christianity in China has it but he says when he got there, he was disappointed when he was told he couldn't go in, that if he had called ahead, they could have arranged a tour.

So I called ahead to arrange a tour.

It's hard to find anyone who even knows of it, much less gives tours of it. I eventually found via google the text of a lecture by its most recent discoverer, Martin Palmer, and found that he was associated with the Association for Religion and Conservation. I found their website, started sending emails, and eventually these emails reached Martin Palmer. He put me in contact with Peter Zhou who runs a lot of the operation for him in Xi'an.

Peter couldn't book me a ticket, but he told me to ask around Hong Kong to get good rates. Jay, who came with us to the airport to meet the Pepperdine students, is actually from Xi'an. He showed me a website to book tickets. It assumes you are not coming from Hong Kong Airport but Shenzhen Airport, which is right across the border in Mainland China. You generally can't get an E-ticket. It asks you where you want your ticket to be dropped off. If you say Kowloon (where we are), it gives you an error message in Chinese. You have to say "Shenzhen", even if you don't have an address there. The website is hard to use. At some point you have to say you want to pay "cash" (if you say "credit card" it lists a large number of Chinese credit cards, none of which is VISA or MasterCard) then specify you want to use a foreign credit card. You say you want to pick up the ticket at the airport, but it won't let you pick it up before 10 am or after 9pm. If your flight is at 8:30 am, you have to write an email to the airline and ask them, and they'll say you should just write in the comment that you're going to pick it up at 7am.

On top of all this, Peter tells me we have to pay cash (he doesn't take credit cards) and I should collect the cash first. He's quoted me the price in USD, but I don't have that much US currency on me. When I withdraw money from an ATM here, it's in Hong Kong dollars. I don't have that much Hong Kong dollars on me either, and there's a limit to how much I can withdraw. I still haven't heard from him as to how he wants to deal with this.

To get to the 8:30 am flight, it would require some travel on a train and a bus, but given how early we would have to start out, the train doesn't run that early. So we rented a private coach to take us there. Since most of us (10) are going on the early flight, that works.

Well, we're meeting at 5:30 am tomorrow, so I'd better get some sleep. Good night, and I'll report on Xi'an when I get back. I hope.

rain, rain...

2006-09-14T01:26:00.000-07:00

It's the end of Monsoon season. Whew. Also known as the beginning of Typhoon season. Yikes!

We got a typhoon warning yesterday. We were pretty far away from the typhoon which passed to the southwest of us. It started two days ago at a typhoon warning level 1, and jumped yesterday morning to a typhoon level 3. I'm told there is no typhoon level 2. Classes would get cancelled if it went to a typhoon level 8 (and no, there is no typhoon level between 3 and 8==this feels like tennis).

We also got warnings for rain. It went from Amber to Red (in Southern California, an Amber alert means they're trying to find a child abductor; here, it means it's raining). Classes would get cancelled if it went to black.

I find that many Hong Kongers don't make much of a distinction between heavy and light rain, though. Sometimes it was pouring down pretty hard, sometimes it was lightly misting in a way that Seattle residents would characterize as "a nice day for a leisurely stroll". But Hong Kongers, in either scenario, crouch under awnings, then dash out with umbrellas, hoping to minimize the damage to their bodies due to water, and complain that it is, well, quite wet out. Several weeks ago, when it was lightly misting (no typhoon warning), the office staff at the HKBU international office were concerned for me that I didn't bring an umbrella in to work. They wondered if I was going to be okay. This, considering that it sometimes rains quite a bit more than that here, and sometimes people just have to handle it.

I wonder what it's like when the rain warning level goes to black.

We leave for Xi'an tomorrow morning. It's been a headache trying to arrange all of this, and that's when we already have a tour guide set up. We're leaving from Shenzhen airport because it's a LOT cheaper to fly to mainland China from there. I didn't consider, however, the practicalities of 10 people trying to get there to make an 8:30 am flight. Considering that there is at least one stop for switching transport, and one stop to go through customs/immigration, so that we'd need to leave before any public transportation is running.

Winifred from the International Office here solved our problem by booking us a private bus to take us to the airport. It's still a cost I hadn't counted on, though.

And we still have to work out details as to how our tour guide will be paid. He doesn't take credit cards. And much of it is in US prices. Well, I'll report on how it went when we get back.

But for color coded alerts, I thought I'd share these links. They're old but they're fun.

New terror alert codes

Ze Frank's satirical movie on terror alert codes

Return to Macau

2006-09-12T09:33:00.000-07:00

I went back to Macau on Saturday. One of our students needed to activate his visa, just like I did last time I went to Macau.

This time just about the whole Pepperdine group went, together with several other international students, and including Jay from Xi'an (I found out that's how he spells his English name--I'd been spelling it Jie assuming it was a Chinese name). We also had help from a local Hong Konger, Ellison, who I met at Hong Kong Baptist University.

This time we went via the hovercraft leaving from Hong Kong Island, instead of the ferry leaving from Kowloon.

It was very comfortable. As you might be able to tell, a dreary day outside that brought rain occasionally throughout the day. I hoped to get a good shot of the cabin but someone boarding walked in just as I took the shot. But in front on the right you can see Andrew Fay, one of our own Pepperdine students. Next to him was a random person who mistook Jay for a server and wanted to buy water from him. Four rows behind them you can see Mike Simon, another Pepperdine student.

We went to Fernando's, a famous place for its excellent food. It's not in Macau proper, but on the adjoining island of Taipa/Colonae. After shooing away bus drivers who offered to give us tours, Ellison came and hired one of them to take us to Fernando's. Very far. Excellent food. But I don't know if it was worth the hassle to get there and back.

The buses then took us to a temple dedicated to the goddess A Ma, who protected the fishermen of the area. One theory has it that Macau was named after her. Very impressive were the large coils of incense with prayers written on the inside.

We then went to the ruins of St. Paul's Cathedral (described in this post) and I got to actually take a picture.

Just in case you don't want to click on the link, to read it again, the dove at the top is the Holy Spirit, and under Him you get a young Jesus flanked by symbols of the crucifixion, wearing a sword, and below Him is Mary. To the left of her are the Portuguese ships repelling the Devil (on the far left) and following a star to the east, that is, to China. On the right is the Woman from Revelation, who is defeating the Beast, which is interpreted here as a Chinese dragon.
Below that level are four main figures of the Jesuit order. On the left you can see St. Ignatius of Loyola. There's an impressive archway beneath all this, not shown.

What is shown, at the bottom right corner, is Nate, who's an exchange student from Baylor University to HKBU, who joined us on the trip. In the center at the bottom is someone with a blue umbrella, indicating that yes, there are stairs that take you up to that level from behind hte facade.

I should have mentioned that many people were psyched about jumping off Macau Tower (down a zip line, hooked onto cables), and I was among them. I didn't do it last time and I'd been thinking about it for two weeks in anticipation. We were a bit impatient here because the A Ma temple is almost at the Macau tower, but the bus driver took us to the St. Paul Cathedral through rush hour traffic, at the other end of Macau, and then brought us back through rush hour traffic.

Now travelling with 20 people is time-consuming. Every little thing is likely to catch someone's attention, and everyone else then gets interested. We were supposed to spend 15 minutes at the A Ma temple (according to the bus driver) but we spent something like 45 minutes instead. Not to mention the delays involved in ordering food at Ferndando's, etc. So it was getting kind of late in the day, and I was wondering if the zip line on the tower would even be open after dark, especially given the come-and-go drizzle.

So when we reached Macau Tower, I wasn't surprised to find that it was closed.

But actually, that was a false alarm. The lower, indoor observation deck was closed for a private function. The upper, outdoor observation deck, with the sky jump, was open.

Here are some tips on doing the skyjump:
1. You don't pay for a ticket to go to the top. This is included in the HK$588 fee (=$75 USD) for the jump.
2. Get several people to do it but make sure there are others who aren't going to do it. You can't have anything on you--wallet, wristwatch, etc., and you need someone to hold it.
3. Don't do this at night. It's safe, but you can't get good pictures. They are supposed to take your picture as you hang suspended in the air, before they let you drop. They did that for the first jump (Delia and Nicole did a tandem jump) but after that the lights were turned off, perhaps in anticipation for the fireworks competition later that night. Then they didn't take anyone else's picture. Well, we got some before pictures, but it's not the same. They also take a video. I bought the video because there were no photos to buy, but it was a DVD and I couldn't crop out pictures. For some reason Apple's screenshot capture is disabled whenever the DVD player is running (and it tells you so in so many words).
4. It's scary only for the first tenth of a second when you can still feel your feet leave the platform and your mind says, "What in the world am I doing?!". Then after that it feels like you're flying. It's also over way too quickly for having jumped off the tenth tallest building in the world.

After the jump we got our stuff back from the people who were holding it (they were already done looking out at the city from the observation deck) and we went back up to return our jumpsuits. As mentioned above, we didn't all get pictures or even decent videos, and going with business majors meant they were trying to get a good deal.

Communication barriers were high. Especially in an environment where there was a lack of trust. At some point the manager came in and negotiated a deal where if we all bought DVDs he would give the last one for free, and they could pay $50 for a CD with the only photos that came out. But the clerk wasn't listening and when we tried to explain it to her, she refused. She went to talk to the manager. The manager came out. "Why you lie to her?", he accused. He explained the deal again. We said, "Yes, that's what we told her." I think she thought we wanted to get the CD for free. Eventually this process was done, we paid, and we were told we had to wait for them to now make the copies. This would take about 10 minutes each.

As I mentioned, for all this trouble I couldn't actually get any photos of me to upload at all. All I have is a picture of me before I jumped and that was taken with my camera:

So no, you don't get proof. And you can scoff in disbelief all you like. Whatever.

I went down to tell the others what was going on, but they had apparently given up on us, and gone to a casino. From what I heard, all except one lost all they had budgeted for gambling, and the blackjack dealers were getting only 20s and 21s seven times in a row before they decided that this was just not fun. This, I suspect, is how one gets lucky at gambling for the first time. Turns you off to the whole concept straight away.

Anyway, once I was convinced they had left, and that you couldn't reach them by phone (Macau is in a different area code, but even with dialing the area code for HK it wasn't working), we ate a small meal at a pricey deli in the tower and went back home, arriving at midnight.

Language

2006-09-08T17:03:00.000-07:00

I promised a post on language a few weeks ago, and I'm finally getting around to it.

I had been learning Mandarin off-and-on on my own for years, but only really got serious about it a couple years ago. When I found I was to be the faculty visitor to Hong Kong in the Pepperdine Hong Kong program, I realized I should have studied Cantonese (the local language here). But I decided then to intensify my efforts in learning Mandarin, and learn a little Cantonese along the way.

The reasons were:
1. It would make it easier to keep the two separate, since anything I knew in Cantonese I would already know well in Mandarin.
2. It's much easier to find resources for learning Mandarin. In fact, some of the resources for learning Cantonese assume you have some Mandarin background.
3. The written language in all of China, including Hong Kong, is the same anyway, and often chooses Mandarin phraseology over Cantonese.

I started with characters, because some of it was already accessible to me since I knew Japanese which uses many of the same characters. There's "Reading and Writing Chinese" by McNaughton and Ying that I like. For pronunciation I got Pimsleur tapes, which I highly recommend. But for Cantonese they only have a level 1 course, which is enough to ask "where is Boundary street" but not enough to understand the answer you might get. I got a whole bunch of books, which was probably redundant, but I didn't know which were going to be most useful. At some point I got a tutor in Mandarin and later got a tutor in Cantonese--both Pepperdine students.

I would say that in Mandarin I can carry on conversations with someone if they speak slowly and are very patient with me, and stick with a range of topics where I know most of the vocabulary. In Cantonese I'm more at a phrasebook level. My goal before leaving LA was to have enough Cantonese that immersion would actually help. People say that immersion is the best way to learn the language, but that only applies if you know some of the language--otherwise, you waste a lot of time trying to get an ear for the phonemes. It all sounds like gibberish if you don't know anything about the language at all. But if you have some background, you'll be able to say, "Okay, I don't understand what was just said, but they just used a word I've been hearing a lot in this context. I'd better look it up."

Actually, in Hong Kong, most of my interactions are in English. All the administrative staff at Hong Kong Baptist University and at Kowloon International Baptist Church speak excellent English. The same goes for most of the HKBU students. Same for the hotel staff where I'm living. The main places where Cantonese is useful is in restaurants (including on-campus), some shops (even here, the staff knows enough English to talk about their products), bus drivers, and cleaning staff. And my conversations in those contexts are fairly limited.

Reading signs is a different matter: even if they have translations in English, I can still try to read the characters. I can read about 70% of the characters I see, which is sometimes enough to figure out what's going on, and sometimes not. Often the main concept is hidden in a character I don't know, which is to be expected since I know the more basic characters.

Sometimes I've had an opportunity to have Cantonese spoken to me, and most of the time I'm not ready for it. Often, I'll hear the first word, and two seconds later, have an "aha" moment where I remember what that word means. By that time, of course, they have said many other words which I wasn't paying attention to because I was trying to figure out the first word. So I have to ask them to repeat it. Which may lead them to try saying it in a very different way, or try to find someone who can translate for them into English.

In Taiwan, they speak Mandarin, and even there I had trouble, though somewhat less (since I know Mandarin better). Still, the next thing they tried was to speak to me in Japanese.

I mentioned in a previous post that I surmised they could recognize someone of Japanese ancestry very easily, and wondered if in Hong Kong this would be true (it's not). I was even slightly peeved that they assumed I would speak Japanese. I'm not sure why. Because I do, sort of. Michele Langford at Pepperdine, a French-American, got me thinking about this kind of assumption. For instance, speaking to a dark-looking person in a service industry in Spanish, which she sees as racist. And she's probably right, though I argued with her just to be a devil's advocate.

I wondered about this as everyone spoke to me in Japanese in Taipei, and sometimes I would say in Mandarin that I spoke English, or that I was American. Sometimes I would just reply in Japanese because it was easier that way. A few times they said something in Mandarin which I didn't understand, then said it in Japanese which I wasn't ready for so I still didn't understand ("would you like a bag for that").

Once at the hotel restaurant, I saw a couple, the man being white and with an American-looking easy-going swagger, and the woman who was partly outside my line of sight but who had dark hair. The wait staff spoke to them in Japanese. This got me thinking that maybe it wasn't racist on their part. They just spoke to everyone in Japanese. After all, Japanese-speaking tourists outnumbered English-speaking tourists (from overhearing their conversations anyway) by at least 5 to 1.

Then I realized I was making the same assumption that these folks were English-speaking. In fact, though I could barely hear them, it sounded like they were speaking Japanese. Why can't a white guy be Japanese? Or at least have Japanese as his main language?

There was also a time when I ordered something, and the response, "Yi bai ba", I didn't understand at first. Then she said, "108" which I realized then was the price. I know the numbers, but for whatever reason, I wasn't thinking numbers when she said it. It doesn't help that in Chinese, there are many homonyms, and a sentence often ends in "ba" for a very different reason (in making suggestions, for instance).

Another time I wanted to see the Presidential Palace and went to a guard and asked in Mandarin where the entrance for tourists was (it wasn't obvious). He said, "Jintian guanmen le". I asked in Mandarin, "where's that?" He explained in English that he had said "today it's closed". I actually knew that phrase, but I didn't recognize it because I was expecting a location.

More on this later. We're going to Macau to activate one of the students' visas. This time I have a camera!

When they start calling

2006-09-06T01:47:00.000-07:00

Okay, I've posted about my day, soapboxed about current events, and posted pictures. But I haven't earned the title of "blogger" until I've post a link to a site I find hilarious.

This one acknowledges that we often get called by telemarketers, and the telemarketer has a script, giving them an advantage in the conversation. This site provides a counter-script in hopes of balancing the sides, while providing fun for everyone.

Someone let me know how it turns out. I haven't received any telemarketing calls yet in Hong Kong, and I suspect that if I do, they won't be in English.

Starting Madness

2006-09-05T06:07:00.000-07:00

Classes started.

Pepperdine students hurriedly changed around their schedules. They did get to choose some at first, but without knowing when the classes would meet. They submitted these choices last March, I think, but it wasn't until mid-August that they knew which classes they actually would get, and when they would meet. And some of those times changed by the time the students arrived in Hong Kong. To make matters worse, they weren't allowed to make any changes to their schedule until the first day of classes, Monday.

It seems most students found a way to deal with this, but the range of courses that were actually available (and not already full) was limited, and not everyone was happy about the results.

Other problems:
1. The art classes are pretty far away. In fact, you need to take the subway (MTR) a few stops and then take a bus to get there. Some students struggled to investigate where it was today, and eventually they decided it was fine.
2. A student left her wallet on a bus. The bus eventually caught up with her and flagged her down! Another student left his wallet somewhere and a local student found it and returned it. I lost my octopus card (which I keep in my wallet), and I just bought another one. It seems that when you don't have a regular routine, it's easy to misplace things.
3. Students are supposed to get a stipend from Pepperdine for food using a "stored value card", which works like an ATM card. They are supposed to have received this before they left LA. That didn't happen. Then the cards were supposed to come into Pepperdine at some point last week. They didn't. I have no idea when they're supposed to come in. In the meantime I'm handing out cash, but I'm running into my maximum ATM withdrawal limits. This will hopefully be resolved using a Pepperdine credit card I have. We'll have to try tomorrow.
4. I can't print to the department printer. The printer that Pepperdine owns is fine, but at first it couldn't pick up the paper from the tray.
5. Not all the students in my classes have their books. Some didn't even receive the message that they were supposed to buy their books in LA until the day before they boarded the aircraft headed for Hong Kong. I'm xeroxing pages from the books in the meantime.
6. The AC in the seminar room is very efficient. In fact, maybe too efficient. With the AC on low, it gets very cold. If you turn it off, it gets warm and stuffy pretty quickly. When you turn it back on, it gets cold very quickly. The temperature knob on it is set to something pretty moderate, but clearly this is ignored.
7. Apparently there's no such thing as a "multiple entry visa" to mainland China anymore. Only single-entry and double-entry. We're not sure what happens if you want to go from Hong Kong to Tibet through mainland China, and return the same way. Maybe you use both of your entries on a single trip.

Still, there's a lot that's going well.
1. Everyone is adjusting very well. One student asked when he was supposed to be experiencing this "culture shock" thing. Another student felt that the sights he was wowed by when he first arrived now seem normal to him, and was kind of worried he would eventually take it all for granted. This is in contrast to a student from a different US university who felt overwhelmed by the change. At lunch, she said she was done with trying to "fit in" and just wanted to be American again. I think this difference is partly because our students are together, and had gotten to know each other in the previous Spring semester in the cultural awareness class. So if anything is overwhelming, they have a safe environment to return to. We had our group dinner and invited the student from the other university.
2. Our mishaps have ended happily. Yichieh got his student visa, finally, and we get to activate it in Macau this Saturday. Lost items got returned, as mentioned above. Once two people got separated from our group, and they were able to find their way home.
3. Many students (and I) are getting plugged into Kowloon International Baptist Church. The new college/youth pastor there (Maik, mentioned in an earlier post) is enthusiastic and gregarious, and has really reached out to us. So have several others in the KIBC staff: the music director Angie, and the Minister of Education Phil, and his wife Irene.
4. Students are connecting with each other, and with students from other universities. I think we have a pretty close-knit community, and yet everyone seems to have made friends outside Pepperdine as well, who we often include.
5. So far no major complaints about classes. We'll see how that holds up when midterms come, though.
6. So far no major issues with roommates. Again, maybe it's too early to tell.
7. The load has been fairly manageable so far for me. I've been having fun, and I have enough time to prepare for classes, even though the setup is very different from what I'm used to. The International Office at HKBU has been very helpful in meeting all of our needs.

I just auditioned for the college choir here. We'll be singing for the 50th anniversary of HKBU. We'll sing Beethoven's 9th Symphony. I'm really looking forward to that.

We're also going to Xi'an on 15-17 Sept. Some of us are going early, on the 14th. More on that later.

Happy birthday

2006-09-03T12:25:00.000-07:00

We celebrated Nicole's 20th birthday a few days ago. I left at about 11 pm, but some of the others, including Nicole, stayed out until 6 am. They finally got to bed at 8 am. And found that suddenly, the corridors were full of noise. Noise of orientation for local students.

If you've ever been to an orientation for new students at a college, then you know that the college pays people to rile up the new students to make as much noise as they are physically capable of making. Apparently, the folks at HKBU are pretty good at their jobs.

Here's one event I took a picture of after 10 pm tonight:

The main student dorm is divided into the north tower and the south tower. Here's the entrance to the south tower:

Note the turnstiles and the guard. I can't just go in without a specific invitation from a student and some paperwork. Students can get in (and out) using their student card, which has an RFID tag that they just hold up to a box, even if it's still in their wallet.

Each tower is about 20 stories high, and is divided into two halls each. These halls used to be divided by bottom half, top half, but because the bottom half halls were bummed about being less desirable (having no view), they started splitting it by odd numbered floors vs. even numbered floors. The sign to the right of the doors says what halls are in that tower.

As you can see, one of them is named after C. N. Yang. Now Yang is a physicist, and Nobel laureate. I don't know what his connection is with HKBU. But the fact that they named a hall after a physicist is interesting.

Chen Ning Yang, together with Robert Mills, proposed in the 1950s a new way of thinking about the forces of nature. The history of physics might be viewed as a string of such advances in our thinking about the forces of nature. Newton found that gravity and the motion of the planets (and the moons around those planets) could be explained by a single force (the "gravitational force") that is a mysterious attraction that any two objects have toward each other, proportional to their masses and falling off with distance using the "inverse square law". This mysterious "action at a distance" bothered many people over the years, and it's possible to instead imagine that there is a "gravitational field" filling all of space, that interacts with objects. Objects increase the gravitational field, and they also get pushed around by it.

It turns out that a very similar description also works with electricity and magnetism, and the work of Faraday, Ampere, Maxwell, and others in the 19th century showed that electricity and magnetism were fundamentally linked into a single electromagnetic force, with an electromagnetic field filling all of space. This field was found to have a real existence when it was realized that you could generate waves in this field. These waves are exactly what we call "light".

In the very beginning of the 20th century Einstein discovers relativity, and one of the developments in this theory is that gravitation is not a mysterious action at a distance, nor is it a field filling all of space, but rather, it is the result of curved space-time. Trajectories get bent not because of a force, but because they're travelling straight in a curved space-time. One way of thinking of curvature is to imagine the surface of the earth. Start at the north pole, and point your hand in the direction of the prime meridian. If you walk along the prime meridian, your hand will continue to point south. Stop when you reach the equator. Now move west until you reach 90 degrees west. If you still try to keep your hand pointed in the same direction relative to your movement, you must be pointing to your left, which is also south. Now walk north until you reach the north pole. All throughout, keep your hand pointed in the same direction relative to your movement. This means pointing behind you, which is awkward but possible. When you reach the north pole, you are pointing in a different direction from where you started. This feature is known as anholonomy, and is only possible because there is a symmetry, that is, rotation of the sphere around any point on it still results in the same sphere.

The mathematician Hermann Weyl came up with a modification of this idea where lengths changed too, and this seemed to explain electromagnetism! But this theory (called "gauge theory") had physical problems: all the hydrogen atoms we observe are the same size, but if Weyl were right, you'd expect after some amount of moving around, some would get bigger or smaller. The physicist Erwin Schrödinger came up with a way of turning Weyl's idea around, positing an extra rotation of some internal unseen phase, instead of a rescaling, and this worked very well.

In the 1950s, Yang and Mills found a way to do this with more general kinds of symmetries (these are called "non-abelian gauge theories") and this turned out to be the perfect tool to understand the remaining forces of nature: the weak and strong nuclear forces. In fact, it was through this route that the electromagnetic and the weak nuclear forces were unified. The strong force can be pushed into this as well. In fact, the only one left is gravity, the one that started this whole thing, but the problem seems to be trying to make it quantum mechanical without getting "infinity" as the answer to reasonable questions.

I say all this because I find this development really cool. It's an example of an inherently beautiful and elegant idea turning out to be useful in understanding nature. It's perhaps evidence that God is a mathematician at heart (an idea that seems to be prevalent among many who have studied the subject).

And I bring this up to say that C. N. Yang is no random dude who hung out at HKBU and decided to give money one day. He's one of the people who really changed how we look at the universe. And HKBU named a hall after him.

The United States has its share of major discoverers and thinkers, at least in the last 60 years. But we don't honor them. The vast majority of people on the street in the US could not name a single living mathematician or physicist or philosopher or poet. We know about Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Michael Eisner, Steve Forbes. It's even more likely this random person would know Paris Hilton. We know about rich people. We know about famous athletes or pop singers.

I'm told in China, many people on the street know about the mathematician S. T. Yau, for instance. And though he's Chinese, he actually teaches in the US (at Harvard). I'll have to ask around to see if Hong Kongers also know about him.

China has a long history of respect for learning. Since the time of Confucius (around 600 BC, I think?) doing well on examinations on fundamental knowledge was the path of success: people in low classes could be promoted to the highest levels of government based on their knowledge and their ability to demonstrate that knowledge on tests.

In the US, education was valued but only for very utilitarian ends. One advanced by getting money, and perhaps education could be used for that aim. We've always been fairly practical, and in fact, our egalitarianism may have worked against intellectualism. The concept of knowledge for its own sake has not generally been respected in the US.

This could explain why China can be responsible for so many developments in the past 50 years, even during times when the government did not support education (except for party indoctrination) and repressed intellectuals. That, given the level of severe poverty that sometimes characterized those years. The US did produce a lot of these advances in knowledge-for-its-own-sake, but not when compared to the amount of GDP that was available to invest in these developments, or the fraction of the population that was well-off enough. Especially if you discount those who were born outside the US.

It seems that though the respect for abstract learning is still here in Hong Kong, the most common major around HKBU now is business (as it is at Pepperdine). And many students here are interested in just being able to use their education to land them a job. Jie, who came with me to meet the Pepperdine students at the airport, is a physics major, living in Yang hall, as it turns out, and he finds the trend toward education-for-vocation disturbing (he's from Xi'an on the mainland). Lewis, who met us at the airport, is a humanities major and local to Hong Kong, and he bemoans the Chinese (and Hong Kongers in particular) losing their cultural heritage in pursuit of modernity. Is it Hong Kong, or is it the direction of China in recent years?

Here are the new students of Yang Hall, at a group dinner. Note their shirts.

Apparently, someone from Yang Hall is a "Yangster" and their theme this year is "Hall With A Heart".

The grouping into four halls may be Harry Potter-esque, but take a look at their welcome dinner, with everyone wearing academic robes. As Pepperdine students came by (we were meeting near there) at least three people made the same comment about Harry Potter. But I think this is just a general British academic tradition.

At least one student here is aware he's a part of a photo op. See him?

Here's another orientation shot, this time as people are learning the song "happy birthday":

They're singing in Cantonese, then in English, then repeating, with dance moves. The tune is "Happy Birthday" (sounding a bit like "Happy Barthday") but a bit jazzed up and to no one in particular.

Happy Birthday... To! You! (clap) (clap)
Happy Birthday... To! You! (clap) (clap)
Happy Birthday, Happy birthday,
Happy Birthday... To! You! (clap) (clap)

Happy Birthday, Nicole!

Chinese Chess

2006-09-01T15:43:00.000-07:00

I recently bought a Chinese Chess set. Chinese chess is not a modern faddish attempt at modifying a European game and calling it Chinese. Rather, chess, invented in either Persia or India, spread both east and west, changing as it went in each direction. It was originally a battle simulation of sorts, with chariots (rooks), horsemen (knights), elephants (bishops), soldiers (pawns), and an advisor (queen) protecting the king. The elephants were positioned head-up, which is what the pieces look like today, without the trunk and tusks. Someone in Europe at some point suggested it looked like a bishop's mitre, which is how it got associated with a bishop. Eventually in medieval Europe the names started to change to reflect a royal court instead of a battlefield.

In China, this game developed differently. For one, the pieces stay on the intersections, not the squares. Most of the pieces are like the Persian original, but have more limitations on their movements. But there's also a cannon, which moves like a rook (horizontally or vertically any number of spaces) but when it captures, must jump exactly one piece (your own or your opponent's) along the way of taking your opponent's piece.

In Mandarin, the name of this game is Xiangqi (pronounced something like "shong chee"), and in Cantonese it's Jan kei (pronounced something like "Junk kehy").

When it spread to Japan, it became Shogi, which added a new rule that completely changed the game: when you take a piece, it becomes your piece to place anywhere on the board.

But back to Xiangqi. I was in Mong Kok, looking at random clothes stores. Stores in Hong Kong seem to be clustered according to type. All the shoe stores are on one street. All the cell phone stores are in one complex. All the stereo stores are in one area. So I was surprised to see, in the middle of the shoe store area, a small stall selling Mahjongg sets (another game). I went to the stall, intending to get a Mahjongg set, and saw that they had Xiangqi sets, which I became more interested in, since I didn't know how to play it.

I asked the salesperson if they had instructions in English for this game, and he said no. I asked about the difference between the sets, and he pointed out the materials, eventually suggesting I get the cheapest one, for HK$3.50 (US$0.50), which had wooden pieces and a paper board. Here it is:

Without an instruction book, I learned the rules using the ancient Chinese meditative technique of looking it up on the internet.

You're looking through black's perspective. The middle of the board, between the red and black sides, is a river, which is not an obstacle, but it does come up in the rules. The forwardmost 5 pieces are the pawns. The character on the pieces means "soldier". Red's pawns have a different character that also means "soldier". They move forward one space each move, even when capturing, until they cross the river, when they can also move (or capture) left and right. Nothing special happens when they reach the far end.

On the first row, there are lots of pieces. The outermost pieces have the Chinese character for "cart" or "car", and are the rooks. They act just like rooks, moving horizontally or vertically any distance. The next pieces in have the Chinese character for "horse" and they move like ordinary knights except they cannot jump. The movement is considered one step in a horizontal or vertical direction, then one step in a diagonal direction. The next ones in are the elephants (red's characters are different but they are both pronounced "Xiang"--in fact, this is what the game is named after) and they move diagonally like bishops, except they must move exactly a distance of two each move, and may not cross the river. This makes them, in my view, very weak pieces, but maybe that's because I don't yet know how to use them strategically yet.

The next pieces in are the guards. They cannot leave the "palace" (the region marked with an X) and move one space diagonally. Then there's the king, who also cannot leave the palace and moves one space horizontally or vertically each move. There's also a special rule that the two kings cannot "see each other". That is, the kings cannot be on the same file with no pieces intervening. Any move that results in this is illegal. This gives the kings a kind of distance "attack" or at least influence, sometimes preventing the other king from escaping, and sometimes pinning a piece.

Between the first row and the pawns are two cannons, described above. You win by checkmating or stalemating the opponent's king. Rules are found here.

I tried playing against myself a few times, just to figure out strategy. The problem with this is that I might come up with what I think is a clever attack, and when I'm playing the other side, I'm still in the mindset that the clever attack will actually work, and so I don't always see what the correct response should be. Still, I've found a few ways to get a checkmate, and some interesting uses of pawns and cannons. Pawns are a bit more powerful because they can't get "blocked" by another pawn, and because they "promote" fairly quickly, when they cross the river. They're also useful in being the intermediate piece in making an attack with a cannon.

In contrast, the "bishops" are pretty useless, except for protecting one square two spaces in front of the king. But since nothing naturally protects that square, it's not that useful for blocking checks. The knights are a bit less powerful because they can't jump. And the guards and the king are very much restricted because they can't leave the palace. In fact, only rooks and cannons can make really long-range attacks in this game. And knights, bishops, and cannons can be "blocked" from moving in some direction without being able to take the thing that blocks its movement.

I did get the chance of playing a live person. Aaron is from Chengdu, the main city in Szechuan province (famous for pandas and for spicy food), and has been studying at the City University of Hong Kong for the past few years, and just graduated. He's been going to Kowloon International Baptist Church (see an earlier post below), even though he's not a Christian. But he does like the friends he's developed there in the college group. After church last Sunday, we played a game. I won, but it was close.

I hope to find other opportunities to play this game. Meanwhile, the church college group told me we'd play Mahjongg at some point. I had learned the rules when I was a kid, but I never had 3 others to play it with. Mahjongg is like gin rummy in its rules, but like bridge in the seriousness and devotion to it by the players. More on that later.

Today the International Office is giving us a tour of Hong Kong island. I still haven't been there yet.

One of the Pepperdine students who's in the Hong Kong program, Jonathan Hippensteel, has a blog, too. It's got lots more pictures and has a very different perspective from mine. I'm actually going to require all the students to get a blog, come the beginning of classes (gasp) Monday.

Hurricane Katrina

2006-08-30T16:57:00.000-07:00

The first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina just passed, and it's an opportunity to revisit the decisions that were made one year ago in response to the devastation. There's a lot of talk about FEMA chief Brown, and whether Bush was really to blame, and whether New Orleans Mayor Nagin could have done more.

There's one point that I don't hear expressed very much, though, that seems almost obvious. You've got a political party in power that has said for years that the federal government has gotten too big, and that we need "smaller government". Over half of government spending is defense, but is this what is meant? No, typically Republicans want to increase defense spending. What about Social Security? While some Republicans want to cut government spending on Social Security, that's not a very popular position: among seniors, even conservatives feel that it wouldn't be right for their benefits to be cut when they paid into the system for years under the impression that they would get these benefits.

What's left to cut? Medicare. Food stamps. FEMA. There's more, of course, but we're talking the big ticket items.

According to Republican rhetoric, much of what the Federal government does should be done by the free market: companies and individuals that work on their own, deriving a profit for their work. What can't be done by the free market should be done by local control instead of involving the federal government.

So Hurricane Katrina comes along, and what happens? The Federal government waits for the private sector and for local government to act, and waits to see if they might be needed as a last resort. Surprised?

The Bush administration got caught in their own rhetoric, and now that their slow response garnered criticism nation-wide, they're trying to imply that their slow response was a one-time mistake, and not a natural consequence of their political philosophy. They tried to suggest early on that it was really the responsibility of local government to respond, but this stance was viewed as very unpopular.

This could have been the death knell of the "small government" mantra. But I'm not sure people are making that connection.

I got to thinking: What would China's response be to a major disaster destroying much of Hong Kong? China does not have a policy of "small government", nor does it really look for "local control". But it is sometimes out of touch with what is happening in a distant province. Numerous times, the news has reported a disaster, and Beijing has spent more time denying that the disaster happened than actually responding to the disaster. But Hong Kong is more public.

Hong Kong is a different story in many senses: it has quite a bit of money, which means that it might be able to do more on its own. That also means that China has an interest in making sure Hong Kong does well, especially since Hong Kong is one of the gateways through which the Chinese economy has been flourishing. Finally, it is a "special administrative region" meaning that it is a part of China, but Chinese laws don't directly affect it. It's not clear how this status would affect China's response to a disaster in Hong Kong.

Jared Diamond calls China's policy toward the environment as "lurching". This "lurching" is probably due to the fact that China would like to project a stance of unity in policy, so when they commit to some policy direction, everything goes that way. But in fact there are different people with different views, and a shift in power could make everything lurch in the opposite direction. And since power is concentrated so tightly at the top, it just takes the change of one person to make a big difference in policy. This "lurching" phenomenon makes it difficult to predict what China's policy will be on any particular point. The fact that China had a certain policy under Premier Jiang Ze Min does not imply anything about what the policy will be like under Hu Jin Dao.

In the United States, there are differences in policy depending on who is president (note the shift in policy toward global warming under Bush, compared to Clinton, for instance). But this is tempered by what Congress can do or what the courts decide.

What will China do in case of a natural disaster hitting Hong Kong? They might take some time to act, as they might be out of touch with what is happening. Any attempts to evacuate the population might be viewed with suspicion here, especially as people had tried so hard to immigrate to Hong Kong from the mainland. It's hard to imagine what China would do. It's also hard to imagine the results being particularly good.

We did get a Typhoon alert at the lowest level last week, but that disappeared after a day.

Roles reverse

2006-08-29T11:19:00.000-07:00

I showed the Pepperdine students Mong Kok, Tsim Sha Tsui, Sham Shui Po, and Festival Walk. I'm a tour guide now. I'm their "local contact". All after a week of being here. They're asking me questions about Hong Kong, assuming I know the answer. How did this happen?

Pepperdine students arrive!

2006-08-28T11:47:00.000-07:00

The Pepperdine students arrived tonight. Christina, Jay, and I met them at the airport. Jay was a student from last year who specifically asked for a Pepperdine student as a roommate this year, because he had such a good experience in the past. He was excited to meet the Pepperdine students this year. Jay is a physics major from Xi'an, and would one day like to study in the United States.

We met them as they arrived out of customs at about 8 p.m. (their flight came in at about 7 p.m.). Well, we met most of them. Priscilla Tan came in from Singapore, but Christina's list didn't have that information, so I guess we missed her. Lewis, another student at HKBU, met us at the airport.

HKBU had rented a bus, which was pretty useful given how much luggage the students brought. We got to the dorms, and it was dicey trying to stop at the dorms because half the street was under construction. The bus had to circle around and pull into a parking lot.

9 p.m.: The students checked in. Jay found out that his roommate is Andrew Fay, and both are pretty excited about that.

10 p.m.: We meet and Lewis and Jay take us to Lok Fu, a nearby area that will hopefully have somewhere to buy sheets and pillows (the students mostly didn't choose to buy them from the dorm) and someplace to eat.

10:20 p.m.: We get to Lok Fu and find a store that sells linens that closes at 10:30. There's a bit of confusion about exactly what the dimensions of the beds are. By the time we're leaving, the store is closing.

Here's a picture of us going through a deserted shopping mall at Lok Fu, walking to get food. It's blurry because people are walking.

The person to the very right is Lewis, the HKBU student who's leading us to the food. I won't try to name everyone else because I don't know most of their names yet, and if I say some of them and don't say some of them, that would seem unfair. I'll just blame it on the blurry photo.

We had two options at 11 p.m.: McDonalds, and a Chinese restaurant. Lewis was unsure about the Chinese restaurant because it's a dive, and he's not sure everyone's stomachs would be ready for it and the lack of hygiene quite yet. I suggested that everyone's stomachs will have to get used to it sooner or later anyway. I also noted that McDonalds would be a better group meal several months in, when everyone is sick of Chinese food and want a taste of home.

We ate at the Chinese restaurant. We were clearly the only non-locals there. This was not merely a local place--it was a working-class local place. The food, of course, was excellent. Jay and Lewis regaled us with HKBU tips and thoughts about China. More about those some other time.

It's now 3 am and we agreed to meet tomorrow at 10 am. So I'm signing off.

The International Church

2006-08-28T02:32:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went to church at Kowloon International Baptist Church, which has services in English, and is right next to campus.

I, like most Evangelicals, do not see sharp distinctions between many Protestant denominations, so in case you thought I was a Presbyterian just because I'm a member of Malibu Presbyterian Church, and serve as an Elder there, be warned: when I was saved I went to a Congregationalist church, when I went to college I went to a Baptist church, and when I went to grad school I went to the independent Peninsula Bible Church.

What is an Evangelical? There seem to be many definitions out there. It's not a denomination. It's not an organization. It's not even a list of doctrines, per se. It's a vague term that people use to identify themselves with other like-minded people. We're Chrisians, first of all, but within the scope of Christianity, the main emphases of Evangelical Christianity include: the need for personal salvation, that this is available through the death and resurrection of Jesus through faith and not the believer's works, that this brings us into a relationship to Jesus, the ultimate authority of the Holy Bible, and so on.

When I say I am an Evangelical, I associate with these emphases. An Evangelical is also a subculture, in that we have some common jargon ("Are you saved?", "Are you in a small group?", etc.) and as evidenced by the fact that we hear the same urban legends, for instance.

The term also gets used for a bunch of things I don't identify with: Creationism, right-wing politics (in the US), the "I've got the answers because I'm saved and you have nothing to offer me because you're not" attitude that sometimes is the flip side to the emphasis on personal salvation, and so on.

So Kowloon International Baptist Church (KIBC) is definitely an Evangelical church. Definitely along the lines I agree with. I even recognized most of the songs we sang. In a way, it felt very much like churches I'm used to. In a way, comforting. In a way, puzzling.

I've been reading a book by Covell on the history of Christianity in China (I'll get the title to you later--it's not in front of me now). It was written in the 1980s, so it doesn't have the most recent developments which are new and surprising. But from his perspective, Christianity has failed to take hold of China. The reason he gives: from the Nestorians to the Jesuits to the Protestants to the 20th century house churches, they brought their own culture and tied it too closely with Christianity. They failed to create a Chinese Christianity. And thus, Christianity was always seen as "foreign", unlike Buddhism which was just as foreign, but became seen as truly Chinese.

Now, of course, KIBC is not there to serve the local Hong Kong Chrisitans as much as serve the people from abroad. But this includes Filipina domestic servants, Mainland Chinese, and even a few people with roots in Hong Kong but grew up in other parts of the world. There were even some Hong Kong people there. But in light of this, why should it have been as comfortable as it was? Why so American?

I got to know a few people there, especially in the college/post-college group, and we had lunch together. The new youth/college minister, Maik Friedrich, is from Germany (though he did his theological training at Baylor), and he led the group. He has theological depth and a kind of accessibility about him, and he is sure to do a good job. The group is mostly ethnic Chinese, though most were not born in Hong Kong. A few were, though, which I found a bit surprising.

This seems to be the story: In the 1970s, Hong Kong experienced a rapid growth in its economy, largely because of globalization and the opening of the Mainland Chinese market. This allowed a certain segment of Hong Kong society to grow into a kind of middle class. In the 1980s, as talk began of the handover of Hong Kong back to China, people were uncertain of the future and moved, or sent their children, to the West to get educated. Some of these kids came back to Hong Kong, though they were more comfortable with English than Cantonese. These folks preferred an English-speaking church.

More on the church later. I'm going to go with the HKBU staff to pick up the Pepperdine students from the airport.

Trash, glorious treasure

2006-08-26T06:21:00.000-07:00

Due to the insistence of Robert Williams that I include more photos here, and the insistence of the prolific commenter "Anonymous", I will have to talk some trash. Recycling, actually.

You may be used to seeing bins like these, seen on the 4th floor of the International Programs building at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU):

But a much more curious recycle bin, found in various places around campus, is in the shape of a flower, like this:

After I got over the fact that there were many different recycling bins here, I was stunned to realize that "laser printer cartridges" and "inkjet cartridges" each warranted a separate slot, alongside "plastic bottles", "cans", and "waste paper". Just how many printer cartridges do people go through around here?

Actually, not many. The rate of erroneous insertions is higher than the actual rate of printer cartridge recycling, as can be seen here:

As we say in the geek world, the signal-to-noise ratio is fairly low here.

I read an article a number of years ago about how various cities had decided to alter their recycling strategies from having lots of separate bins for paper, cans, bottles, etc. to having a single recycling bin. The idea was this: all it takes is one person to get a bit mixed up every now and then, and you still have to hire someone to sort through it all anyway. If it costs the same, and if people are more willing to recycle if it's easier for them, then it makes sense to have just one bin.

And the photo above perhaps justifies their thinking.

But couldn't they have made different divisions? Batteries? Colored vs. white vs. newsprint vs. glossy paper? How'd they decide on these divisions?

The division into five seems appropriate for Hong Kong, given their flag:

And, c'mon, you gotta love that bee. Which apparently stands for "Better Environment Endeavor":

Here's an article from 2003 Newsletter of the San Francisco Department of the Environment on
recycling issues today.

Pictures!

2006-08-24T20:44:00.000-07:00

I have pictures now! Yes, that means I have a digital camera. More on that below.

This is the view from my apartment/hotel room where I'm staying. The view is looking roughly south (the road in the immediate foreground is Renfrew Road, the main road by HKBU, and runs due south).

The beige buildings on the bottom left are part of HKBU (Hong Kong Baptist University, in case you forgot), and in fact, that's pretty much the end of campus. The greenish buildings on the right, surrounded with barbed wire, is, well, I guess I can safely say they're classified. In the distance you can see a bunch of tall buildings. I don't know exactly which buildings are where on the map, but that should be the main shopping areas of Mong Kok and Tsim Sha Tsui. After Tsim Sha Tsui is water, which you can't see, and then Hong Kong Island, which you can see as the mountains in mist in the very back.

Lots of those very tall buldings you see (except for the ones in the way back on the right) are residential. The shorter residential buildings are older, and pricier. The taller ones represent the rush to build more housing on not very much land.

Here's my adventure in getting a digital camera. As I mentioned before, I didn't have a camera, and I figured the best (meaning cheapest) place to get one was where I was going: Hong Kong.

The reason I didn't have a camera was this: I don't use one. I had a camera a long time ago when I was in grad school, and once, when I went to Germany for a math conference, I took a bunch of pictures. When I got back I completely forgot about developing these pictures for years, until I finally brought it in. The developed pictures were a good example of minimalist art: nothing but gray. In some cases, darker on one end.

I figured, if I wasn't going to develop the pictures, why take them?

On later trips I just bought postcards. Here were photos that a professional took, under ideal conditions. Why not go with those? Then I discovered that I never looked at them. As in, when I moved, I packed them in boxes, and when I moved again, I didn't need to repack the boxes because they were unopened from the last time I moved.

So as you can see I'm not much of a scrapbook person.

But with this blog, I figured this might be a good way to start up again, now that there are things like digital cameras.

So I was in the market for a digital camera. Not a nice one per se, but one that will take pictures that I can put on my blog. In Hawaii I looked at some prices, and it seemed that the low end was around $100.

In Hong Kong, most of the prices I saw in shops were in the HK $3000-3500 (about US$400) range. But these were very nice cameras. In Tsim Sha Tsui I looked around at a Nikon store that didn't have prices on any of the cameras. I asked for a cheap one, and the person showed me one for HK $1200 (US$150) and I said I was looking for something more along the lines of HK $700 (US$90). I walked away, and he said he could do it for HK $900 (US$117). I said no.

Ever since I've been looking for a digital camera. Yesterday in Mong Kok, they had lots to sell (I got a SIM card for Pepperdine's cell phone there) but I didn't see any camera stores.

Now, my Cantonese tutor back in LA had suggested the Sham Shui Po district for cheap electronics. I went there last night. I was kind of procrastinating, so I arrived around 9pm. To my surprise, many of the stores had already closed (Hong Kong is supposed to be a city that never sleeps, just like New York). And most of the stores I saw were selling cell phones. Down the block, most of the stores were selling stereo systems. Not many were selling cameras.

I did see one store that sold lots of different electronic stuff. I said I wanted a cheap camera. He pointed me at the HK$1200 ones. I said I was looking for something more along the lines of HK $800 (US$104) (The experience at Tsim Sha Tsui had me thinking I had lowballed my view of prices). He pointed me at a few cameras he said were HK $890 (US$116). I said 800. He said 890. I said 800. He said 890.

Now you must realize that I was pretty tired of looking for cameras at this point. And I had given up finding a camera at the price I saw in Hawaii. So I said OK.

He then tried to sell me memory cards. Oops: I forgot all about that. I suggested that maybe I didn't need one. He said that the camera would only have 32 MB, enough only to test the camera. I asked how many pictures that was. He said 4 or 5.

Now I didn't do any research on these so I had no idea whether he was right or not. For most blogging purposes I would only need one photo at a time, but when we take a field trip, I'd want more than 5. He showed me a 512 MB card for HK $360. Yikes. So much for saving money. I told him I didn't want to buy it now, that I could buy it later. I already had the HK $900 in cash out in my hand.

He went to ring it up, and came back, asking if I was paying with cash. I said yes, with the actual cash fairly visible this whole time. He told me he would sell it to me for HK $260. I gave in and said OK.

So for HK $1200 (US$156) I have a digital camera and a 512 MB memory stick.

So much for getting cheap deals in Hong Kong.

If I had to do it over again, I'd have bought a camera in LA or Hawaii. It was cheaper there.

The camera, for the geeks out there, is made by Speed, and is a GL-130. It says it is 12.0 megapixel, but that's probably not right. The files turn out to be about 1.6 MB (the one above I degraded through a program to make it smaller and therefore faster to download). It has a digital zoom of 4x, but that's irrelevant given that I'm downloading them to my computer where I can play with the image anyway. It's also a video recorder, for some reason. I suspect I'd need a lot more memory to do that if I want to try it.

Oh, and I estimate I could probably have taken 10 pictures without the memory stick. I probably would have been fine except for the educational field trip we'd take to Vietnam for a few days. Then, I would have had to make on-the-spot decisions about which photos to keep.

So, I've now officially entered the 21st century. I have a digital camera. And you will now see pictures on this blog.

Macau

2006-08-24T01:24:00.000-07:00

In case the end of the last post was confusing, here's the deal: Last March (or something like that) HKBU sent me forms to fill out to process my visa application. As you might expect, this is a good deal more involved than what most people experience when landing, because I'll be working here for 5 months instead of being a tourist for fewer than 30 days. Thankfully, the HKBU staff fills out much of this paperwork, but I still needed to supply things like proof of the the fact that I work for Pepperdine (like a contract) or that I have my Ph.D. No big deal. They told me it required two months for processing, and when I received these forms, I had more than two months. In my mind, I had a whole semester.

Not only this, but our contracts go year to year. I have tenure, but each year during the summer I have to sign a contract again. So the relevant contract for my employment this fall semester should be the one for 2006-2007, which I would receive in the summer. So I decided to wait until the summer.

After the end of the spring semester at the end of April, I started on getting the materials for the visa. It occured to me that if I planned on visiting Hawaii, Taiwan, and the Philippines before I arrived, I would have to get this application ready by June 10. Earlier, even, considering the time it takes to send it to HKBU and for HKBU to send the visa back. I started asking around and found that the contracts wouldn't be ready yet. Eventually it was decided that I could send my old contract, and send the new contract later. I finally sent the packet of information for the visa to HKBU on May 13.

On June 22, the HKBU people pointed out I forgot to sign one of the documents, and that I needed to send more stuff. This other stuff was stuff I thought I had sent, like 2 photos. I faxed what I could and took more photos, but they eventually found the photos. And about the contract, it turned out all that was needed was not a contract but a letter from the International Programs office saying I really was a Pepperdine faculty member.

The HKBU office finally submits everything on June 26. They said the process takes 4-6 weeks, so it should be ready in early August. Whew.

My flight from LA to Hawaii is on August 11. So as that date approaches, I get nervous when the visa stuff hasn't come back yet (By the way, I get the 2006-2007 contract to sign in the last week of July). But apparently this is a situation they deal with a lot at HKBU. The solution: Come in with a tourist visa, come by HKBU and pick up the work visa (which should be in by the time I arrive), then leave the country and come back in.

Luckily, leaving the country is pretty easy: go to Macau.

Now strictly speaking, going from Hong Kong to Macau isn't leaving the country: since 1997, both have been part of the People's Republic of China. But under the "One Country, Two Systems" slogan, both are "Special Administrative Regions" with their own laws, and, as it turns out, their own immigration/visa. So by leaving Hong Kong, I get my tourist visa cancelled and my Macau tourist visa; by leaving Macau I get my Macau tourist visa cancelled and get my Hong Kong work visa activated.

So yesterday I took the 3C bus to Tsim Sha Tsui, where there is a convenient ferry to Macau. The setup is a lot like getting a plane ticket: you buy a ticket, you have to be there 15 minutes early for your departure, you get an assigned seat.

The ferry ride wasn't particularly interesting: there was a lot of fog or pollution, and I couldn't see much of the islands we were passing. It was interesting to see how much forested area there still is on these islands, though. Based on how much Hong Kong is developed, I would have expected there to be housing scattered everywhere.

Macau was a Portuguese colony for the purposes of trading with China, and later, a jumping off point for the Jesuits in bringing Christianity to not only China but other areas in Asia, like Japan. At some point in the 20th century, people in the Portuguese empire decided they didn't want to be ruled by a colonial power, and Portugal decided it didn't really want to rule them either, and quietly, Portugal divested itself of most of its colonies. Macau was the last to go, and the handover to China was much less hyped and in the news as the handover of Hong Kong. But it happened, and in a lot of ways, Macau is like Hong Kong.

Not in every respect, though. The most visible difference when you arrive are the casinos. Some of these are Las Vegas-like monstrosities, rising out of the small colonial city with mock volcanoes, mock Egyptian palaces, mock Chinese cities, and so on. There's even more coming: enormous construction works are taking place, diverting traffic and causing quite a nuisance.

I couldn't find the bus stop. The guidebook was good about telling me what buses to take, but I couldn't figure out where to get one. I eventually walked into town, which wasn't far, or wouldn't be far if it weren't hot and humid outside.

There's not much that's particularly exciting in the main touristy square except a building run by the tourism agency that has the feature of being inside and air conditioned. But a little north of there, past some quaint street vendors, and up a long steep hill, lies the ruins of St. Paul's Cathedral. This was a major area for the Jesuits, and it was partly built by the Japanese that the Jesuits converted, but who had to flee Japan when the Tokugawa Shogunate decided to persecute the Christians. This gave me a point of reference (being Japanese, and being Christian, though almost certainly not descended from these Japanese Christians). At some point the Chinese kicked out the Jesuits, and the cathedral got used for army barracks, and eventually in the 19th century there was a fire and all that is left now is the main facade.

The facade itself is interesting in how it communicates the gospel to those who are illiterate: the Holy Spirit is a dove that is above the scene, a young Jesus is right underneath with items related to the crucifixion, and below him, Mary. The major Jesuit leaders are below her. On the left are 16th century Portuguese ships following a star in the East, bringing the gospel to China. On the right the woman from Revelation is shown crushing a Chinese-style dragon.

There was also a crypt where it is believed several important Jesuit leaders were buried. The door to it explained in English, Chinese, and Portuguese to remain silent out of respect for the dead. But very few people were taking this advice. The whole scene was kind of a circus. Which, based on my experience at the Taoist temple, may not have been conscious.

Nearby is an excellent museum of Macau, where they first exhibit parallels Eastern and Western civilization, then describes the development of Macau, through modern times.

Macau Tower is also hard to get to--it took a lot of explaining on the part of the people in the tourist information center to tell me how to get there by bus. I felt that the distance to the bus stop was almost the distance to the tower. Which isn't true, but it looked like it.

Macau Tower is one of the tallest buildings in the world, and the observation deck also features a sky-walk, where you get tethered onto a line, and you can walk (as a group) around the top of the tower with no railing to keep you from falling. This was not open at the time. Thankfully. They also had a zipline that allows you to jump off, down to the ground. This was open, but I didn't do it. Maybe if I were with friends. Maybe.

Tired of chasing buses, I took a taxi to the ferry (cost 30 Patacas or about USD $4), crossed back, and got my work visa activated.

Food

2006-08-22T16:38:00.001-07:00

I know last post I said I was going to talk about language. I'll do that post later. But first, I have some things I want to say about food.

Hong Kong is one of the famous places in the world for its food. And so far my experiences have been fairly limited but I have enjoyed what I've had. There are just so many choices here, and not just for Chinese food. And I've only tried a few things. So I won't be able to really say much about HK food until awhile from now.

I will say that I subconsciously expected there to be lots of dishes like the Chinese food we have back in LA. And it's not that these don't exist--it's just that the popularity of the various kinds of dishes is very different. Sweet and sour pork is very hard to find. Noodle soup with shredded seafood is very easy to find. Orange chicken, broccoli beef, moo shu pork: these are all among the most popular dishes in Chinese restaurants in LA. But while it's possible to find some of these on some menus, they're not the big items here.

Noodles are really big here. Now, I like noodles. But somehow I had it in my head that noodles were a more northern thing, and stuff-with-sweet-sauce-on-rice was more the Southern Chinese fare. But for every dish I see served on rice, I see about five dishes served in noodles.

Another issue is that most of these are served hot, and quite frankly, it's hot enough outside as it is.

The hotel staff brought me a complimentary fruit basket. It had an apple, two bananas, an orange, and a firedragon fruit (fo long guo). Thanks to my Cantonese tutor, I knew what this was before I got here (Thanks, Jackson!). Here's a picture of some of the varieties. It's the most improbable-looking fruit I've ever seen. And it's quite tasty. Though I had to ask the receptionist downstairs in the hotel lobby how to serve it (do I peel it like an orange? Chop it into slices? No, I cut it in half medially, and treat the top and bottom as bowls, scooping out the white pulp with a spoon).

With the heat as it is, I'm surprised I don't see more restaurants serving these fruits.

Allow me to backtrack a bit to Taiwan. As I've mentioned, I hit Taiwan twice: once on the way to the Philippines, and then back. The second time I was recovering from TD, and had a bit more time to sample the local fare. Actually I think that not all of that was TD. I think some of that was I now was getting a lot more fiber in my diet than I'm used to. You know when your mom said, "eat your vegetables"? And "You'll learn to like it"? Well, it seems the Taiwanese actually did eat their vegetables, and they actually did learn to like it. And now, when I order a meal at a restaurant and ask for recommendations, the waitress points out some dishes, and when I pick out a meat dish, she helpfully suggests that to balance that, I should get a plate of mixed vegetables. This involved a few carrots and mushrooms but many more things that I can't identify. I also didn't know what to expect. I saw a small yellow bulb that looked like a squash or tomato of some sort, but when I bit into it, it seemed like it was made of dough. I gagged at first because of the discrepancy.

I suspect my digestive system just didn't know what to do with all of this fiber. Actually, digestive systems don't know what to do with fiber, which is why it cleans your digestive system out. But the sudden shock of all this fiber was probably partly why my gut felt weird for a few days.

Hong Kong food has lots of veggies too. In fact, I think in the US, there are veggie plates for vegetarians and for people who want to feel healthy. In Hong Kong and Taiwan, there are no veggie plates: there are lots of dishes with lots of veggies in them, because these veggies are popular. Some of these have meat in them, so it's not for the vegetarians per se. In the US, especially when ordering Chinese food, we think in terms of what kind of meat is involved. Here, there might be meat, but the main attraction might be some vegetable.

Also, in Hong Kong especially, everything is seafood. I like seafood, generally speaking. But I don't think of it as one of the main food groups. In fact, it's an afterthought for me. When ordering at a restaurant, thinking about what kind of meat I'd like, I think of chicken, beef, and pork. Oh yes, and there's various kinds of seafood too--I almost forgot. Here, it's more a matter of what kind of seafood you'd like. And if you want a change of pace, sure, we have chicken, beef, and pork.

In the interest of bringing some balance to my diet, I ate at McDonalds last night and had a couple of Big Macs. They tasted just like Big Macs back home. They did seem to have a menu that included breakfast stuff at the same time as regular stuff. In particular they had orange juice. I ordered one. The large orange juice was still small, but that's true of orange juice in McDonalds in the States, too.

The placemat was full of assurances of the quality and cleanliness of their food. It even said that their chickens were kept protected in an enclosed area to prevent mixing with wild birds. Now, in the US this kind of thing brings protests from PETA, but here, in light of Avian Flu, it's the sort of thing that reassures customers.

I'm off to Macau today. It's more than sightseeing, actually: when I left for Hong Kong, my work visa hadn't yet arrived, so I arrived with a tourist visa, went to HKBU, and picked up my work visa. To have this approved, I need to re-enter the country, hence, going to Macau and back. Actually, Hong Kong and Macau are now both part of the same country, namely, the People's Republic of China. But under the "One Country, Two Systems" policy, they are considered separate as far as visas and immigration and such are concerned.

Arrived in Hong Kong

2006-08-21T03:08:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'm in Hong Kong now.

To sum up, for those of you who don't know what the deal is:
I'm teaching in Pepperdine's Hong Kong program this fall, which means a bunch of Pepperdine students come all the way to Hong Kong to take Pepperdine classes, and I am one of the people teaching them (the only one from our Malibu campus). Actually, Pepperdine has many such programs, in Italy, Germany, Argentina, etc., but our Hong Kong program is unique in that we are hosted by a local university, Hong Kong Baptist University, and the Pepperdine students in the program can take classes there, too.

So I'm living in a hotel on the HKBU campus, teaching in HKBU classrooms, holding office hours in an HKBU office, and so on.

Benjamin So from HKBU met me at the airport. He was holding a sign with my name on it. I've never had someone hold a sign for me at the airport before. But, sad to say, the experience was not as exciting as I had hoped it might be: I saw him, he met me, and we went to the car waiting for us.

But it was convenient. I have two suitcases, and the handle of one of them is slowly tearing itself apart, and I was not looking forward to taking public transportation, transferring 3 times (each time going up or down stairs), and then having to wander around campus looking lost. Instead, Ben and a driver from HKBU took me straight to the hotel where I'll be staying for the semester.

I've got a suite. That means I've got two rooms that connect. One hotel room has a bedroom and bathroom; the other has a living room and kitchen (well, it doesn't have a stove but it does have a microwave).

Past folks who did this program told me about the area and I was able to use their help to find a shopping center (Festival Walk) that has a grocery store and stores to buy random other things I didn't bother to pack (like fingernail clippers). Most of the other stores in that shopping center are kind of like the ones I mentioned in Taipei 101: famous brands so exclusive I've never even heard of them. I did see a place selling digital cameras, in the HK$3000 range, or about US$380. Much higher than what I was able to find in Hawaii (where I saw a low-end one for under $100), and I was expecting to find prices much lower than in Hawaii. They're probably only selling high-end cameras. I need to find the place where they sell the cheap stuff.

The past folks told me about this handy shopping center right next to the subway, and they told me about the Chinese Red Army training base next to the school, but they neglected to tell me that the army base was directly between the shopping center and the school. To get there, you have to walk around the base. So much for taking a shortcut. Yikes!

The internet connection in the rooms is convenient, but I'm surprised at how slow it is. I haven't had a connection this slow in a long time. It was noticable enough that I ran a few tests and I found I was experiencing download rates of about 20 KB/s, though McAfee's online test gives between 60 and 100 kb/s. By comparison, DSL and cable can often get between 200 and 500 kb/s or something like that. And it's not that I'm trying to connect from Hong Kong to the US: pages from HKBU take awhile to load, too. Not that I'm complaining--waiting an extra two seconds for a webpage to load is not what one would call "hardship". But I imagined, technology-wise, Hong Kong would be better than anywhere I'd ever been before, so I'm just surprised. Then again, this is a hotel, so I'll see what the connection is like on campus.

I haven't experienced much here yet, so nothing much to report. But if you're one who doesn't check this blog on Sunday, I had a lot of posts yesterday, so check it out. I'll probably post something about language later on tonight or tomorrow morning.

Kitch as Kitch Can

2006-08-20T05:08:00.000-07:00

There's a Taoist temple called "LongShan Temple". In it I saw throngs of people worshiping. Burning incense on bunches of joss sticks at once. Placing food in carefully arranged, ornate arragements. Chanting texts. And on the side, crowding around booths to buy incense, food, and texts to chant. In fact, there seemed to be as much activity in the buying and selling as in the worship itself.

The remarkable thing is that this seemed to bother no one. Just about everyone was doing it: regulars, tourists, monks, teens.

Then I recalled that it is in Christianity that we have the story of Jesus driving out the money changers from the temple. If we didn't have this story, would we be the same way?

Oh, wait... there's a huge market for Christian religious items, from embroidered scripture verses to "Biblical" diet books. But at least we feel this commercialization is a bad thing, right?

I didn't bother to ask anyone there, but I wonder if the worshipers there might not think the commercialization was cheapening the experience in any way.

In a way, it's surprising that it was the West that caught onto the consumerism bug first. A "common sense" approach to religion, which seems to be common all over the world, is that deities are beings who control your circumstances, and you can try to appease them by giving them presents. The most worshiped deity in the Greco-Roman empire was not Zeus or Artemis or anybody we've heard of in our mythology stories. It was Fortuna, the Goddess of Luck. Or as the Greeks called her, Tyche. Doing a risky business venture? Throw a few coins to the Goddess of Luck. Going on a sea voyage? Doesn't hurt to appease Fortuna. When gambling on your last dollar, call out to Lady Luck. And while you're at it, might as well not have any deities feel they're being left out, so let's give a bit to the other folks in the Pantheon.

In a way, it's a very business-like way of doing religion.

Not like Christianity. Jesus bought you with his life. Salvation is for free. You respond by giving your whole life to Him.

Not that people haven't tried bringing back the "common sense" religion back into Christianity. Give a bit of money and take off years in Purgatory. Buy the new best-selling book and your Christian walk will be renewed. Promise to go back to church if God will just help you pass the next exam.

But this approach eventually gets met with disapproval, and eventually, it dissipates.

Everywhere in Taipei I see neon signs and flashing colored animated signs. It's like every street corner is a Times Square. In the West, we see this as kitchy. Cheap. Here, it may be that it's not seen this way at all. In fact, quite a lot of money went into these things. Here, it may be a sign of prosperity. Money doesn't cheapen things here. It's the cost of doing business. In a way, very common sense.

And yet, I think, the money does not belong in the temple. Jesus just might have been onto something here. Non-intuitive. But true.

A photo!

2006-08-20T04:59:00.000-07:00

Here's a photo of the gang from Hawaii taken on August 12. Some of you might be wondering why I hadn't put any pictures on my blog yet. That's because I don't yet have a camera. I figured the best (cheapest?) place to buy a camera is probably Hong Kong, where I'll be going, so why don't I wait 'til I get there to buy one?

This photo is using David Komatsu's camera. I also downgraded the resolution so it wouldn't take forever to load, so any loss of quality is my fault.

From left to right: Daniel Yanai, Mr. Kosziewski (my high school math teacher), Lance, Jay Tamashiro, me, Mrs. Kagan (my high school computer teacher), and David Komatsu. Unless otherwise noted, these are some of my classmates from high school.

Note: I'm blogging several things this evening, so read through several blog entries to see if you got all of them.

Do you really believe in democracy?

2006-08-20T01:36:00.000-07:00

I saw the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall today. Large, impressive, even imposing. Somewhat like the Lincoln Memorial, the building is at the top of a long set of stairs, and inside it is a single room with a large statue of Chiang Kai Shek seated with a look of benevolence and wisdom. Somewhat after the death of Sun Yat Sen, Chiang Kai Shek seized control of China, under the Nationalist Party. When the Communist followers of Mao Ze Dong won victories against the Nationalists, Chiang Kai Shek and his group left for Taiwan and ruled there.

From the perspective of the Cold War, Chiang was "our guy" and Mao was "their (the Soviet's) guy". After all, Mao was Communist, right? And Chiang was for Democracy, right? right? Errr....

Behind the statue of Chiang Kai Shek are three slogans: "Ethics", "Democracy", "Science". The one in the middle, "Democracy", is made up of two characters: people-rule.

Now this was written in the ancient style, going right to left, as opposed to what people do today which is mostly left to right. So I got thrown off for a bit, and read it as: rule-people. Or Lord-of-the-people. Hovering over his head like a caption, to describe just who you're looking at. Which, come to think of it, was more characteristic of Chiang Kai Shek's rule. Prof. Bruce Herschenson at Pepperdine, with whom I disagree with politically more than anyone else I know, does have a fun quote that is probably accurate: "The best thing that can be said about Chiang Kai Shek was that he was not Mao Ze Dong".

Close by, there is a park dedicated to the 2/28 incident. The year was 1947. WWII was over, and Japan was forced to give Taiwan back to China (meaning Chiang Kai Shek and the Nationalists, though Mao's followers were in control of a sizeable chunk of China at the time). Immediately after the handover, the people of Taiwan were relieved to hear they would no longer be under the iron grip of Japan's war-making machine. But they did not expect China's rule to be harsh as well. Tempers simmered with each freedom lost, until a woman selling tobacco on the black market was harrassed then beaten by police on February 27, 1947. The result was an outburst of anger, and people took to the streets, marching through the main government square (much of which was off-limits). The Governor asked for troops from the mainland, which arrived on March 5 and slaughtered protestors, and hunting down the intellectuals who they saw as leaders of the movement. It is estimated that 30,000 people were massacred in this event.

Why, then, was Chiang Kai Shek seen as a force for democracy? In the Cold War era, the concept that the world was being divided ideologically between democracy and communism quickly faded, as it became clear that what was really happening was countries were being asked to ally themselves with either the US or the Soviets. It didn't matter if you were not a democracy--in fact, it was easier to make the quick decisions deemed necessary to rout the communists militarily if you weren't. Or so it was supposed.

In 1954, Guatemala, in its first democratic election, elects a socialist. The US sends in our military to overthrow the government, installing a military dictatorship that lasted until the 1990s. In 1973 we do the same to Chile, bringing into power the feared dictator Pinochet. All in the name of fighting communism.

It seems to me that if you really believe in democracy over a dictatorship, you would trust in it for any situation, no matter how dire. In fact, in good times, any system will work--when there's no threat, the system will hold; when there's plenty, everyone can have what they want. It is only in the face of threat that one's beliefs are really tested. Many dictators have said, "democracy is nice, but we don't have the luxury of that. Let us build up our country, stamp out the communists, solve the unemployment problem, etc., then we can have democracy". Which means they don't believe in democracy at all. Or at least they don't think it's effective at solving problems.

So Chiang Kai Shek did not believe in people-rule. He believed in rule-people.

In recent news, a judge ruled that President Bush cannot simply circumvent search and seizure rules in our constitution and provided by Congress, just because "the terrorists are not playing by the rules". As if the Bill of Rights is a fragile glass sculpture that can only be handled at genteel cocktail parties, but would never survive in the rough-and-tumble biker bar. If we believe in the efficacy of a nation ruled by the principles of natural rights, then we believe it can be effective against ANY alternative, no matter whether they pull their punches. And if our dear President doesn't believe that, he has given up on democracy altogether.

It's not the terrorists who "hate our freedoms". Their rhetoric gives no indication that they have any problem with what freedoms people halfway around the globe from them may or may not have. It's the current administration who "hates our freedoms". Because if it weren't for these darned search and seizure rules, we could finally win this war on terror. Or something.

It's been fashionable ever since WWII to say, whenever we're fighting, that we're fighting "for our freedoms". It's a line that worked in WWII, and it was actually somewhat plausible: if Nazi Germany takes over Europe, will they want to conquer us next? Then would we live under a dictatorship? But no conflict since has ever threatened to take over the US as a country (and it's not clear the Nazis would have either). And the line has gotten to be a bigger and bigger stretch each time. The current War on Terror might be about a lot of things, but "freedom" isn't one of them. To take the interpretation that is most charitable to the current administration, we're fighting for our safety.

Which is not a bad thing, per se. The terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon, and one more was supposed to hit something major, probably, and they killed thousands. They didn't take away our freedoms. They took away our lives. The War on Terror is supposed to stop this from happening again. In other words, it's not a fight for freedom, but for life.

But if we decide to throw away our notions of natural rights of individuals in the process, it must be that we have decided that this democracy experiment had a good run and all, but ultimately, in the Big People world, it just won't work.

I realize that in every war, we've thrown away some of our freedoms. Soon after we became The United States of America, we passed the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798, giving the president power to lock up anyone who he thought was undermining national security. Public outcry of this probably influenced Thomas Jefferson being elected President in 1800. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended Habeus Corpus. This gave him the ability to try people for sedition willy-nilly. During WWII we locked up Japanese Americans (even those living in Latin America) without trial. Martial law was declared in some places. During the Cold War we had federal agents investigating peaceful dissenters. And in the end, we got our freedoms back, right?

It's like someone learning to roller blade in a rink, and holds onto the side. Every now and then, he lets go and skates for a bit, but whenever the threat of falling comes, he grabs the side again. But each time the touch of the side is a bit less, and less frequently. Then we know we're making progress.

Well, I think we're ready to abandon the side.

Okay, let's see if that generates comments, this time!

I do have another point about the 2/28 memorial. The fact is that after a history of arresting opposition leaders, the people in Taiwan said, "enough", and demanded true democracy, eventually electing those opposition leaders into office. And they pushed to have 2/28 remembered, so that such a thing could never be tolerated again, building a memorial where many were murdered, right across the street from the presidential palace. So there is hope. From a region that knew only oppression from the Qing Chinese court, to oppression from the Japanese military dictatorship, to oppression from the KMT (as opposed to the oppression from the Maoists), they have found freedom. How? I'm not sure. I think the people just got fed up and demanded it. It does give me hope about other parts of the world, especially areas where there has never been democracy or respect for human rights.

More blogging in a bit.

Listening to the jade, and religious freedom

2006-08-19T07:49:00.000-07:00

I went to the National Palace Museum today. It was well worth the visit, even though I'm still feeling a bit queasy from the bout of TD mentioned earlier. It's probably foolish for me to give a play-by-play of what I saw there, but just imagine: 8000 years of the best of Chinese art, stored in the Forbidden City in Beijing until opened to the public after the 1911 revolution, then stored away for safekeeping during WWII and the Japanese invasion, then shipped to Taiwan as the Maoists were defeating the Nationalists, then opened to the public. The People's Republic of China says the Republic of China (Taiwan) stole it and wants it all back. Taiwan says no way. They must have much more than they are showing--they have galleries that are closed off because they're not finished, and they're doing more construction to add even more gallery space.

I feel I must say a few words about one particular piece, though: a cabbage (Bok choi) made of jade. It was quite life-like, including a tiny grasshopper on its leaves. If you know bok choi, then you know that like celery, the base is white and the top is green. What is amazing is that this piece was carved from a single piece of jade, with white and green parts corresponding exactly to where the color changes in the cabbage. Even the grasshopper is green.

In much of Western art, we make the medium as generic as possible: an empty canvas, a tabula rasa, a blank slate. The production of this is not the art. It can be mass-produced, ready for the consumer, the artist, to put art on it.

The jade cabbage is a case where the medium was definitely NOT generic. Somehow the sculptor had to be in touch with the stone: perhaps he had to look for just the right piece of jade for this project, or perhaps he looked at a piece of jade and asked what potential it had inside it. What it wanted to be.

Some art students learn by making imitations of other artists. Take the same starting materials (as in a laboratory experiment) and do the same thing, to get the same result. Such a procedure could not work with the jade cabbage.

I should mention, however, that most of the artwork in the museum was not like this. With the exception of a jade carp that similarly used the brown and white natural colors of the jade, all the other pieces appeared to treat the medium as background. And perhaps that's because the opportunity to make such an artwork is so rare: it requires just the right piece of jade with an artist who can carry it out, and who can recognize the cabbage in the lump of jade.

The story goes that when this was presented to the Emperor of China at the time, an official said the grasshopper reminded him of the poem where a farmer had riches in his field and did not know of it. The official meant that the Emperor had many talented people in his kingdom, but did not hire them for his most important posts. They don't say what happened to this particular official.

As I exited, there were people handing out flyers, in Chinese, English, and Japanese. They were adherents of Falun Gong, which the People's Republic of China (Communist China) calls a dangerous cult, but most other people call a religious/spiritual group under persecution by the PRC. It's strange: the PRC had persecuted many religious groups in the past, including Christianity, but much of this persecution (at least of Christians) seems to be waning. And yet persecution of Falun Gong has increased since its beginnings in the 1990s. One might be cynical and say that the PRC's improved treatment of Christians comes with the interest in doing business with the United States, while Falun Gong has no major nation backing it up. I guess that makes Falun Gong a better indicator of the PRC's views of religious freedom--we can see how the PRC acts when it doesn't worry about how it will be perceived.

It also got me thinking: how fragile are the legal freedoms we enjoy in the United States. Strictly speaking, the PRC has freedom of religion. But if the religion is seditious, if it is counter-revolutionary, and now, if it is a dangerous cult, then that's another story. In other words, we give you freedom of religion, but we get to say what a religion is.

In the West we use the term "cult". It's not clear what defines the term, except "a religion we don't like". If you're a Christian, it means a group that appears to be Christian but we want you to stay away from (for some reason, perhaps a good one). If you're a secular-minded fellow, the word "cult" means a group that lets religious belief intrude on how one lives one's life, instead of compartmentalizing it "like we do". If you're for individualism, it's any group that attempts to tell you how to behave. If you're against concentration of power, then it's any group that concentrates power in one or a few top leaders.

Was it Jonestown that started this usage? I don't know. Jonestown happened when America was sure that religious freedom was a good thing--that what one believed was one's own business. Then in 1978, after shooting at a congressional delegation to their base in Jonestown, Guyana, Jim Jones's followers committed mass suicide by drinking poisoned kool aid, killing about 1000 in all. All of a sudden, it became clear that not all religions are okay, after all.

And now when you want to malign a religious group, it's easy: just call it a cult. Most religions have beliefs and practices which, to those who have no exposure to them, seem weird. So just bring some of those beliefs and practices to the fore, and any group becomes a "cult".

Some of you know my view of our Evangelical use of the word "cult". If not, ask me about it later.

But the point is that we should be very careful about the term. The Romans had quite a bit of religious freedom: it was more pluralistic than the US today, by far. But they persecuted Christians because they were weird. They were cannibals, eating the flesh and drinking the blood of their religious leader. They didn't participate in civic sacrifices. They wouldn't play along with the societal system of kissing up to those on the top and disregarding those at the bottom. In today's terms, they were a cult. And that was unforgivable.

Now it's true that some cults do a lot of damage. Secularists would point to the brainwashing, the financial and social losses, the breakup of families and friendships. Christians would point to people thinking they're getting saved when they are not. Obviously the nature and extent of the damage in each case depends on your point of view, and there will probably never be consensus on this. But Jonestown proved that there is such a thing as a "bad" religion.

What, though, is a state supposed to do about this? If we hope to have any sort of freedom of religion, the state cannot act against the group merely because of their beliefs. If anything, it must act on punishable actions: assault, child abuse, fraud, etc. But even this satisfies no one: some would say it's too easy to pass laws making some ritual act (say, animal sacrifice, polygamy, or even serving food to the homeless) illegal for the purpose of delegitimizing a religion, and others would say that by the time the cult actually breaks laws, they would have already caused too much damage (Jim Jones might not have been arrestable until he started shooting at people).

This is a tough nut. And this is without getting into freedom of speech (unless you incite to riot or slander?), freedom of the press (except libel and copyright violations?), freedom of assembly (except where it says "no loitering"?), and so on.

I like my freedoms. I wish they weren't so fragile.

Wrapping up some loose ends

2006-08-18T19:37:00.000-07:00

I must issue an update on an issue I raised last time. I did, in fact, get Traveller's Diarrhea. It was that night, and it was a fairly mild case. Though I had it the rest of the next day, I made it on a two-and-a-half hour flight back to Taipei just fine. I'm able to eat normally and though my gut feels like there's still something weird going on, I'm probably through the whole thing with very little consequence.

I took a taxi to the airport that cost only PhP 350, which is more along the lines of what the travel guide said to expect. One thing I didn't prepare for was a PhP 550 departure fee that everyone must pay in cash when leaving Manila. I actually did see this on the travel itinerary, but I didn't fully realize I had to pay it separately from the cost of the ticket. Now PhP 550 is like US $10, which is fine, but I was so careful about spending my Philippine Pisos pretty exactly by the end, that I didn't have the amount on me. I went to an ATM, and if you've been following my blog, you know that the Manila Airport ATMs don't take my card. I had to exchange US $20 at an airport exchange place. This is fine, but it throws a wrench in the works in my keeping a certain amount of US dollars on me for my return flight in early January. Well, the Hawaii airport ATMs probably take my card, so I'm not too worried, but as they say, the best laid plans of mice and men...

One thing about Manila Airport: They sure have a lot of security checks. To get into the terminal building you need to show your airline ticket or some evidence you're travelling today. Then you get checked again, and you put your luggage through an X-ray machine while you go through a metal detector. Then you check into your flight in the lobby, when they look at your passport and give you a boarding pass. From there to the gate I think there were three more checks, not including customs, immigration, and the regular put-your-carryon-in-the-X-ray routine. They took my boarding pass to get into the gate, of course checking my passport again. I think somewhere along the line, I got frisked. If quantity is a sign of quality, then Manila Airport must be very safe.

I flew to Taipei on EVA Air, which I'd only vaguely heard of before. Based on the map of their flights in their in-flight magazine, it must be based in Taiwan--almost all of their flights involve Taiwan somehow. I'm not sure if EVA is an acronym (pronounced "ee vee ay") or a word (pronounced "eh-vah" or "ee-vah"). It's possible it's related to the Evergreen bus company I saw a lot of in Taipei.

EVA Air was one of the most comfortable flights I've experienced, and that's without realizing that to recline your seat, you don't push the round metallic button, but lift a small brown lever (I discovered this when we were landing and people had to lift it to put their seatbacks in their upright position). The seats were wide, and the bottom of the seat pushes out like a Lazy-boy. The food was also excellent: a full meal, for once, on an airline. They even had metal utensils!

I may have said this before, but I'm going to hang out with a friend in Taipei. That is, if we can make contact. I have no idea when his flight comes in. Just in case he arrived shortly after me, I stayed around the arrival area. They have comfortable seats, and video screens so that people who are looking for someone coming in can watch everyone who comes out of customs. You can even get wireless internet access, or so I assume; I couldn't figure it out. I did supply my credit card number but instead of giving me a username and password, it kicked me back to the main menu. It didn't help that most of the instructions were in Chinese.

I checked into the Cosmos Hotel again (nothing beats familiarity) and they only had the somewhat more expensive rooms this time. I decided to take it (I can afford it and it beats wandering around Taipei looking for another hotel). It was nicer and bigger, and it's on a corner so I get views in both directions. Now, I'm on the 7th floor in a major metropolitan area, so this means, of course, that I get a view of office buildings. But it is a view.

My priorities on a hotel room are roughly as follows (not counting price), from most to least important:
1. It's a room where I can leave my stuff, sleep, and relax
2. I can take a shower and use the restroom facilities
3. It's got internet access
4. It's comfortable and clean
Not at all a priority: nice views, TV (am I going to spend my vacation watching TV?), fancy lampshades, fake flower arrangements, artistic sintered glass division between the bathroom and the bedroom, a nice couch, etc.

Yet, if I want internet access, it's assumed I want all the rest. Not that I'm complaining. but it does seem a waste. In Manila my room didn't even have internet access and the decor was still well above what I would care to pay for.

Well, it's off to the National Palace Museum, where you can find all the really cool stuff that was taken from Beijing when the Maoists pushed the Nationalists out.

edit: While we're tying up loose ends, I CAN put my VONS club card (instead of my hotel room card key) into the slot to turn on the lights. Thanks, whoever posted that comment.

edit on Aug. 20, 2006: I tried my Malibu Yogurt card, and it works. My business card, and it works. I think anything of the proper shape and opaque will work.

To learn before seeing

2006-08-17T03:00:00.000-07:00

If you're following this blog closely, don't worry--I don't plan on updating as frequently as I have as a general rule. But I have to check my email frequently for logistical reasons (meeting up with my friend in Taipei, hoping to hear from my friend in Manila, arranging for how I will be meeting people in Hong Kong) and the internet cafe I'm using in Manila has a PhP 30 minimum which means I'd might as well use the time. That and it's air conditioned in the internet cafe. That and I have more time now since I'm not hanging out with friends. My computer is now my friend, for now.

I went sightseeing today in Manila, going around the old walled city called Intramuros. The Philippines were converted to Christianity by Augustinian monks, which like their namesake has always emphasized the grace given us by Jesus's sacrifice, just as the most famous Augustinian monk, Martin Luther, who to his shock and amazement, began the Protestant Reformation.

A lady outside a cathedral there insisted I take her literature attached to a plastic rosary, and asked for a donation for "prayers". Fairly Catholic. But the literature was pretty Evangelical. Recognize you're a sinner, know that Jesus died for you on the Cross, repent, ask for forgiveness, all that. Of course the literature had stuff related to Mary, but it was all in the context of asking her help in praying to Jesus. Of course, all of this is Catholic. Just the emphasis is Augustinian.

I've discovered something about myself. It's hard to be enthusiastic about sightseeing when I don't know much about the background. I didn't really prepare very much for my trip to the Philippines. For instance, it was only this morning that I read in my guidebook that I should never take a taxi from the departures area in the airport because they'll try to scam you. Ah, well. But the reason i wasn't sufficiently prepared was I was planning on seeing Manila with a friend who was local, so I figured I didn't need to read up myself.

So today, I saw where Jose Rizal was imprisoned and executed. No, I didn't know who he was before today. If I had known before I arrived that he was basically a George Washingon figure for the Philippines I probably would have seen the whole area in a new light. But I wasn't prepared. Now it was moving to read some of his sayings and see exhibits about his life and death, but I suspect the effect would have been more if I had known more beforehand, for instance, reading some of the novels he wrote or learning about the Philippine struggle for independence from Spain (and then from the US and then from Japan).

Rizal was an intellectual who stood up for his country against Spanish rule in the 1890s, and before he was executed wrote a poem that got smuggled out in an oil lamp, "Mi Ultimo Adios" that is now treasured by many in the Philippines:
http://pages.prodigy.net/manila_girl/rizal/rizal4a.htm
or in translation
http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~fasawwu/resources/rizal/my-last-farewell/english.htm
He seems to be quite an admirable man, loyal to his Filipino roots while fully conversant with European learning; fully committed to his Christian faith but not afraid to question what he had been taught about it; embracing his Filipino worldview and yet Modernist in his love of reason. Why hadn't I heard of him before? Surely there are many more such people all around the world, and yet in our globalized culture we are still so parochial we only meet in our educational system the writers who have affected our locale.

When students come to Hong Kong this Fall, I hope they will be more prepared for what they will see. They've read a book on Hong Kong last Spring, but I hope they will do more. I'm most concerned about our educational field trip, actually, because that's going to be to Vietnam. And I'm guessing most of the students don't know squat about Vietnam. I assume that because that's roughly true of me as well. How will we prepare for Vietnam? I'm not sure.

I'm also going to see if there's interest in a student trip to Xi'an. There I do know a bit, but I now recognize that a crucial part of getting students to come will be to learn even more and share some of these ideas with the students well ahead of time. Maybe even inspire them to find out more on their own (if possible).

On another topic, I'm surprised I haven't faced traveler's diarrhea yet. I'm generally pretty careful, but I noticed a few times when I've slipped. Last night I went to an all-you-can-eat buffet (they called it "eat all you can" which makes it sound even more of a gluttonous challenge) and the trouble is, I don't know what any of the dishes are supposed to taste like, so I don't have a good way of telling how good it was. It mostly tasted very good, except for one dish which my mouth reacted to badly. Maybe the trouble was it looked like chopped up chicken so when it tasted slippery and damp I was surprised. Then the fact that the tables were a bit sticky and there was a fly that kept on trying to land on my plate, and the fact that the floor, tiled with half-inch by half-inch linoleum squares set at an angle, was missing a few tiles in quite a large number of places, so that mopping the floor would be a herculean task, all then converged to make me... well, get something else from the buffet instead.

This morning I couldn't find a good breakfast place offhand, so I stopped at a convenience store, and got a couple of canned juices, a candy bar, and a small package of what looked like chocolate-covered thin wafer rolled into a tube. When I opened it I was surprised of a few things in this order: the packaging had arabic translations, it came from Turkey, the tube wafers were very fragile and crumbly and in fact a bit damp, they tasted okay except that the dampness made for a slightly mushy texture, then there were small bugs crawling around in the wafers I hadn't yet eaten.

I realized that if I threw it away I would have to deal with bugs in my room tonight, so I threw away the tubes in the toilet, and spat out what I could. In retrospect, this product was probably safe. Most bugs are not carrying dangerous diseases, and in fact the fact that the bugs were enjoying this pastry product was perhaps a sign that I might survive it too. But if I had to do it over again, I would still spit it out. Actually if I really had the power to do things over I wouldn't have bought the thing in the first place. Bugs don't live very long--they must have been packaged as eggs and they must have hatched recently (I only saw two or so, so there can't have been many generations living in the package).

For lunch I ate at what looked like a very nicely furnished restaurant, but I did notice a fly buzzing by. Which would have been fine if not for the fact that due to the previous experiences, I was on my guard. It was a buffet again, and though it was more expensive, the rich (even opulent) appearance set my mind at ease.

The museum attached to the St. Augustine Cathedral was enormous and had some very nice displays. It also lets you into the Cathedral itself which has Trompe l'Oeil painting everywhere (meaning it is intended to make you believe it is 3-dimensional, with columns and statues, even though it is just painted on a flat surface).

There is a memorial nearby to those innocents who have died in war, and in particular those Filipino civilians who died in WWII. The monument is very moving, and there were fresh flowers placed on the statue of the victims. Before and after pictures of the bombing of Manila were also poignant. Many people say that this is just an unavoidable part of the cost of war. I agree. But why is it that no one counts this cost when people are bandying about calling for the need to go to war?

It's very hot and muggy. I went to my hotel room before the end of the day, mostly because I was looking forward to the air conditioning. When I got out, I saw that it had rained pretty heavily while I was inside. This is the best way to experience a monsoon rain. The air was now clearer and not as muggy. I should mention the pollution which is pretty bad. I haven't had trouble breathing, exactly, but when the guidebook talks about Manila sunsets, I haven't seen one yet because of the haze.

Tomorrow, I head back to Taipei.

Trust

2006-08-16T18:51:00.000-07:00

I'm not really enjoying myself in Manila.

Why not? I think it has to do with noticing how my taxi driver from the airport was trying to rip me off, or how one guy (Luis, he says his name is) was trying to sell me fake Rolex watches and wouldn't take no for an answer. These things are not so bad, really. It's just that it has generated a feeling of mistrust with me. For the first time since my first travel experiences alone, I feel the need to wear a money belt, to worry about what I leave out in the hotel room for the hotel staff to find, to constantly be aware of my wallet and passport. I hadn't felt this way in poor areas of Mexico or in Honduras. I think it has to do with the fact that the experiences I mentioned were situations where the other person was trying to see what they could get out of me. I feel that I'm in a game, and my opponents are watching, ready for me to slip up so that they can steal my stuff. Now paranoia can be a useful thing when travelling to a new city, but it can be tiring.

As it turns out, I haven't heard from my friend in Manila, so he's probably not here. And a friend in Taiwan will be there, so I just booked another ticket back to Taipei and from Taipei to Hong Kong. I got a reasonable price for the deal, so I don't mind giving up on the flight from Manila to Hong Kong. And the irony is that I bought this ticket in Manila, which changes my view of the place favorably.

I'll check out a few sights in Manila today, then leave for Taipei tomorrow.

In Manila

2006-08-16T01:30:00.000-07:00

I'm in Manila now. I was supposed to hook up with a friend in Manila, but it's not clear he's in town now. Ron, if you're out there, email me.

It took me some time to find an ATM machine that I could use. I'm so used to just popping in my ATM card as soon as I arrive at a new country that it didn't occur to me that my ATM card might be on a different network. It turns out that neither of the ATMs at the airport are compatible with my card. Since I had some US dollars, I bought a small orange juice at an airport cafeteria-like restaurant, paying with a 20-US dollar bill and getting the change in Philippine Pesos.

Going by the guidebook, and estimating using their maps, I figured it should be 100 PhP to get a taxi to my hotel. He quoted me 530 PhP. I was weak and said OK--it's still much less than I would pay for a similar ride in the US. Along the way he mentioned that the price is actually 900 PhP, producing an official-looking laminated card that showed that all hotels are 900 PhP. When I suggested he didn't have to drop me off at the hotel per se, he relented, though not without asking for a tip in exchange.

It didn't seem like he really worked for anybody, or at least anybody who would know what he was charging. He didn't run his meter (partly why I asked for an estimate up front).

He was sufficiently unfamiliar with the area that he kept asking for the map in my guidebook I used to show him where the hotel was, and yet knew enough of the area to try to push on me an alternate hotel which wasn't described in my Lonely Planet guidebook.

My first choice had no vacancies. The taxi driver was still there when I got out and I avoided getting back into his taxi, and walked around the block to another hotel in my guidebook.

Along the way someone tried to sell me "Rolex" watches. He followed me quite far, though that might be because his base of operations was right next to the hotel I was headed to. I saw him later and he tried selling me Rolexes again, then US Silver Dollars, which he called "GI silver dollars". When I explained I didn't need anything, he suggested maybe he could get me a woman. Though by this time I was right next to my hotel, I didn't go in. I didn't want him to know where I was staying.

Traffic in both Manila and Taipei goes wherever it wants to go. Even more so in Manila. One might think that this would be stressful for pedestrians. It wasn't. In Taipei, someone was crossing the street with the green light but without the walk signal. Cars were turning with a protected arrow, but he walked right into the stream of cars and they went around him. I walked right behind him, using him as a barrier against the cars, and sure enough, no one hit us. In Manila, I found I could just walk into a stream of cars (they're not moving very fast: it's gridlock, though the term "grid" should be taken very loosely) and weave my way through the traffic, and everyone moves into the new lanes created by this maneuver.

In a way, traffic is like a dance. Traffic in the US and some European countries (like Germany) is like a waltz--it's orderly and it works because everyone knows what they can expect from everyone else. Traffic in Manila is like a rave--it's disorderly but improvisational. It works because everyone is ready for anything and knows how to respond to the others' moves with grace.

To Hawaii and Taiwan

2006-08-15T10:06:00.000-07:00

In my trip to Hong Kong I wasn't sure exactly when I might have internet access. As it turns out, on my first stop, Honolulu, I was staying at a friend's place (Dave Komatsu) who had internet, but updating a blog would take out too much time from hanging out with Dave and other friends, so I didn't do it.

Now I'm staying in a hotel room in Taipei, and staying up way too late given that I have to get up early for my flight tomorrow morning to Manila, but since there's no one to hang out with, I'm blogging.

Lots has happened, but I'll only give the highlights, in the form of travel advice (lots of travel advisories going around now, so I'll give my own):

1. When your mom says you have to be there four hours ahead of time, take her seriously but only so far. She took me from my house in Calabasas with 3 hours and 4o minutes to spare, and we hit traffic. We ended up at the airport with 2 hours to spare, and since the first leg was a domestic flight (LAX to Honolulu) I was there in plenty of time. There were no long lines for security checkpoints. Pretty much all the passengers had gotten the message not to bring shampoo in your carry-on luggage. But arriving this early saved me from another issue:

2. While it is true that just about anything you forget, you can buy when you get there, this is DEFINITELY NOT true about a few things. It is good to keep this very small list in your mind when hurriedly packing because your mother suggested you leave at 3pm to make an 8pm flight and you haven't started packing at 3pm yet. In my case, this was a passport. But my roommate James came through for me, driving an hour and twenty minutes in LA traffic and then back, just to bring me my passport. My mom was driving me to the airport and we were just about entering the airport when it just hit me: I forgot my passport. It's not "I wonder if I packed my passport" or "Hm... it's not in my backpack; it might be in my luggage". No, I distinctly remember NOT taking my passport out of the place I was keeping it.

3. Getting together with friends is interesting--even though I hadn't been good about keeping in touch with many of my friends from high school, when we get together, it's as if no time has elapsed. Sure, we're older, have different perspectives, and may look a bit differently, but the relationship continued as if unpaused.

4. The past few times I had gone to Hawaii, I was surprised at changes--stores that used to be one thing were bought out, new areas of town opened up, etc. It had been 10 years since I visited Hawaii, and this time I was surprised how little things have changed. I think I just extrapolated in my mind based on my previous few visits, and found I had overpredicted change. Sometimes things stay the same. Sure, there are new shopping complexes and there are some stores that I think of as mainland stores that have opened in Hawaii, but overall, most of the things I remembered were still there: the neighborhood around my house is the same (except for one house that burned down, and the house where I grew up in is now painted white), the streets to get to the freeway are the same, my high school has a few more things but otherwise looks the same, etc.

5. As a Japanese American in Hawaii, I was immediately known as Japanese. On the mainland, people don't quite know the difference between the various East Asian groups by look. And with my darker skin and heavy build, people don't classify me as Japanese very quickly. In fact, when they find out I was born in Hawaii, they identify me as Hawaiian first. In Hawaii, the term "Hawaiian" means Native Hawaiian, which I am not, so this is a bit jarring to me, but I know they simply mean "someone from Hawaii" so I let it slide. Now I'm in China, and even from boarding the China Air flight from Honolulu to Taipei, stopping in Tokyo, everyone in the tourist business immediately spots me as Japanese, and starts giving me instructions in Japanese. I sometimes reply to them in English to indicate I prefer that langauge, and sometimes I respond in Japanese if I'm able to if I don't think it's worth the bother. But this addresses an issue I was wondering about: would people in Hong Kong think of me as Japanese? And would this cause any problems for me? I'll see.

6. When buying a ticket from Philippine Air, only believe half the things you hear or read. The ticket I bought over the internet from Taipei to Manila listed a confirmation with a string of characters containing the string 26AUG, which is disconcerting since I actually wanted to have a flight on the 16th of August. I called Philippine Air and they told me my reservation was for the 16th. I also belatedly noticed that my email did NOT say I had an e-ticket. Rather I was supposed to pick up my ticket from some office in downtown Taipei. Which I don't know my way around. I went to the Philippine Air counter in the Taipei airport when I arrived asking about this, and they said they actually wanted people to come to the airport and not the address on the email I got. Well, I'll see tomorrow what happens.

7. Taipei Airport is hard to get around if you want to do anything out of the ordinary. In my case, go from Terminal 2 baggage claim/arrival to Terminal 1 departures to talk with the aforementioned Philippine Air ticket agent, then down to the buses to Taipei downtown. To go between the terminals, the signs point you to a corridor to an elevator to a walkway, past barricades that force you to uncouple your suitcases, into a monorail, past other barricades, to another elevator, to another corridor, until you're outside and you have to get back in to the terminal. To go down to the buses was easy, but since I was coming from departures, not arrivals, I didn't see the bus ticket counters and just waited for the bus, until I was told I needed to go buy a ticket from a counter.

8. Pay attention to the International Dateline when planning your trip. I forgot and thought I would have 2 nights in Taipei, and as it turns out, I have only 1. That means I have basically zero days and 1 night, if "day" means anything open 9am to 5pm. My flight was supposed to have arrived at 4:30pm but it arrived closer to 5:30pm because of various delays. And in any case it takes an hour to go from the airport to the city by bus.

9. When arriving in Taipei, find a location as close as you can to an MTR station. I chose the Cosmos Hotel (Tiancheng DaFanDian) because it was also close to the bus that takes you to the airport. This hotel is not the cheapest around, but I'm only staying 1 night (see above). For NT300 (about 10 US dollars) you can get internet access. It's a comfortable room but the bed is firm (which I actually like). The weirdest thing about it is that your card key is also what turns on the lights: you put your key in a slot and the lights turn on, until you take your key out.

10. Things to do in Taipei if you are there zero days and one night: Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall: The hall is closed, but people hang around and practice Tai Ch'i, ballroom dancing, martial arts, and so on. And you can see Sun Yat Sen surrounded by tablets with various sayings in Chinese. It's also a very impressive building (from the outside: the inside closes at 5pm). Next: Taipei 101. It's a huge shopping mall with brands so expensive I can't even afford to look at the items. Or so I assume--I shielded my eyes and wandered around the huge complex, until I found on the 5th floor you can take an elevator to the top of the world's tallest building. I guess it's a sign of the times or else a sign of Taiwan culture that the other tallest buildings in recent history, like the Empire State or the World Trade Center or the Sears Building, were mostly business offices, except for the tiny bit for tourists, but Taipei 101 has a huge shopping center at the entrance instead. The basement of Taipei 101 has some good food in a huge food court but many of these close between 9 and 10pm. After this, go to the ShiLin Night Market. They have food too that is cheaper but they don't have whole meals: you have to construct your own from various booths, and then you don't have a place to sit. But you can look at weird trinkets being sold or practical things like clothes. As for me, I still have places left in my journey so it makes no sense to buy anything at all here. I bet some Pepperdine students would love it, though.

There are my 10 travel tips.
I guess the 11th should be not to blog too late at night when you have a flight to catch in the morning. Yikes. Bye.

First post

2006-08-10T08:39:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my blog.

I'm a math prof. at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. In a few days I'll be going to Hong Kong to teach at Pepperdine's Hong Kong international program, though I'll be stopping off at Hawaii (where I grew up), Taiwan, and the Philippines, just for fun. I'll be teaching statistics there until December, and I'll be back in Malibu in early January.

This blog will contain some of my thoughts related to this trip at first, though I may continue the blog beyond then.