~~~~ odd man out ~~~~
Once long ago I was interviewed for a job as language director of the Defence Cooperation Language School in Melbourne, Australia. (The place pretends to teach English in three months or so to exchange military officers from places like Indonesia). It was a pretty strange detour for [...]
The deal was 8am. I’m a just-in-time guy, but here she was knocking on the door at 7:15. Jeez. Can I offer you some breakfast? We sat looking at each other across a big wooden coffee table, the golden drapes suffusing a soft glow of early sunshine. She’d never tried anything like my special concoction [...]
Winter morning light had broken clear and cold, so early that night’s shadows were still about and a wispy moon hung in the sky. A small collection of street food vendors had already parked their hand carts by the college gates, and by this time there was usually a crowd of girls in jeans and [...]
All the world art mad but thou and I. So it seems. The collective mind of peoples as nations expressed either through the ballot box or by the voice of the emperor ( L’Etat c’est moi) seems erratic at best in most locales. Right now Americans are making up their collective mind whether to continue [...]
On the wrong side of the railway tracks in Zhengzhou city, central China, you can find some ugly old concrete classrooms built around a small paved sports ground. It is a railway technical college to train nurses and logistics students, 19 year old kids mostly from the country. Last term they kept telling me that [...]
Centre country scene:
A thousand miles of desert,
Ten thousand miles of shimmering heat.
In and out the Dead Heart,
Only one great vastness;
Up and down the Diamantina,
Sand torrents stopped and stilled.
Hills dance like rainbow serpents,
Mirages race like shadowed giants,
Trying to vie with the sun in their reach.
A wild eye is needed
To view this wilderness decked with blue
In all [...]
The earthquake: I was running back to my apartment from the classroom for something, and didn’t feel a thing. The other foreign teacher here staggered out of her apartment and said she thought she was dying. I told her to put her head between her legs and I’d get a doctor. While I was racing [...]
My own first introduction to Chinese thought and political economy was a university course in New Zealand in 1974. I especially recall one book, Mark Elvin’s “The Pattern of the Chinese Past”. If you are not familiar with the arguments in this book already, there is a reasonable summary at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Chinese-Past-Mark-Elvin/dp/0413286304 . Of course, [...]
China has one of the world’s biggest rail networks. With 20% of the world’s population that is hardly surprising, and it still comes nowhere near meeting demand on existing networks, or on actual network coverage in densely populated provinces like Henan with its 100 million + people. It is a mind-bending logistics operation, greatly improved [...]