Absurdity, Allegory and China

It is nearly impossible to be in China right now and not feel the pain of Yao. Not the mythic Golden Age Yao who was reported to have lived until he was 119 and served as the model of the moral ruler for all emperors who followed. I’m talking about the 7’ 6” Houston Rockets’ [...]

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My love-hate relationship with the CCTV Headquarters complex continues, On February 20, 2008 the China Daily published an interview with Ole Scheeren, the architect heading up this project, and it is worth a look. The newspaper (it’s difficult to call a propaganda daily a newspaper, but this sort of sloppy “rectification of names” is the [...]

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Again this year we brought sixteen folks from Qinghai to Tianjin where the 12 students and 4 teachers spent the week at the International School of Tianjin (IST), attending classes and introducing Tibetan culture to the students as well as the teachers at IST. To use a well-worn but accurate cliché, a great time was [...]

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I have been in Beijing for the past two days. Later this morning I will go to Beijing West Train Station to meet the 16 folks coming in from Qinghai, and then we’ll head back to Tianjin. The weather is great in the capital city. Yesterday I spent the day taking photos, and, of course, [...]

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One World, One Dream had another nightmare today. It took awhile, but the inevitable finally happened: Steven Spielberg pulled out from his participation in the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics, and Beijing is … quiet. According to the IHT article, the two spokesmen for the organizing committee were working on a response. [...]

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There continues to be much noise raised about the air quality for the Olympics in Beijing in 6 months, as there well should be. Anyone who has spent any part of a summer in the North China Plain knows how hot and humid it can be, and with the number of cars and factories cranking [...]

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Before moving to China I heated our rural Virginia home with wood and had a variety of tools to assist with the duties of making fallen trees into stove-sized fuel. Of all the tools I owned, the Monster Maul was one that, short of my neighbor’s hydraulic splitter borrowed for the nastiest of hickory, put [...]

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In the beginningThere were rocks.And on those rocks with harder rocksWe learned to make a million bruises.–Robert Ashley, Perfect Lives Being here in China seems to get odder all the time, which I see as a combination of several things: that China is, in fact, getting odder; that I am, in fact, getting older – [...]

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