Guess What, The Earth is Spherical

In the past year I have come under the opinion from my reading that people in the middle ages were not half as stupid as they get credit for. If you read a little bit of history about the middle ages, you will find that most history writers paint the mediaeval people as the most ignorant fools that you could imagine. You will hear things such as, "the middle ages' society was backward because of too much importance on religion" (from a Chinese textbook). Or you will read things about the church burning heretics that dared suggest that the earth doesn't have four corners or that the sun doesn't orbit the earth.

Then such historians will then speak of the renaissance as if it were a magical rose arising ex nihilo out of the world's sleeve, not considering that the middle ages was the stem from which bloomed the flower of the renaissance. They don't usually take the time to discuss why the renaissance bloomed out of the context of a Roman Catholic Europe instead of some other place that did not have the supposedly darkening influence of the church.

I suppose that this sort of mentality comes from two sources, Secularism and Protestantism. Secularism, since it took over dominance on Western culture from Christianity, has almost always scoffed at religious belief and religious believers. This is part of the reason that most Secularists so thoroughly misunderstand it. Richard Dawkins' attitude that theology is the study of nothing, since there is nothing to study, explains his ignorance of the topic.

Protestantism in the Reformation made a complete break from Roman Catholicism, and since then they have generally speaking had a mutual dislike. However, when Protestants sympathize with secular writers' view of history simply because they both dislike Catholics, Protestants are shooting themselves in the foot. Protestants need to realize that much of Roman Catholic doctrine is similar to their own and that if they are saying that Catholic doctrine did only harm to Europe socially and philosophically, then they are putting their own belief in a bad light too.

What lead me to think of all of this was something I read recently that confirmed what I had heard: that the mediaeval church actually did not believe in a flat earth. I was reading Augustine's The City of God, Book 16, Chapter 9 "On whether we are to believe in the Antipodes." In this chapter he says he does not believe that people could live on the other side of the earth because people could not have taken a boat across such a vast ocean. (He obviously hadn't heard of the Bering Strait.) Nevertheless, though he did not believe that people lived on the other side of the world, he did believe that the world was spherical. He says, "But they do not remark that, although it be supposed or scientifically demonstrated that the world is of a round and spherical form, yet it does not follow that the other side of the earth is bare of water; nor even, though it be bare, does it immediately follow that it is peopled."

Something I read this morning about the Venerable Bede confirmed this again. He was one of the first ones to write a history of the English people. Besides his history, he also wrote many commentaries on the Bible and some works of his observations of nature. From the latter works, we know that Bede too in the 8th century knew that the earth was round and furthermore had some idea of latitude.

It seems that the middle ages were not the dark ages because of any darkening influence of the church. Rather it seems that the middle ages are dark to the secular man because he is willingly ignorant of them.

L'Ingenu

L'Ingenu is another work by Voltaire. I have not read it yet, but I heard about a humerous story in it.

An American Indian comes to Europe and becomes a Catholic. He is getting lots of advice on how to be a good Catholic. Someone tells him that the book of James says that a person should confess his sins, so the Indian, eager to do the right thing, goes to confess.

After he tells all of his sins to the priest in the confessional booth, he hops out and yanks the door open to the priest's booth. He hauls out the priest and seats him in the confessional booth. The Indian then leaps into the priest's booth and sits down. The priest, confused and disheveled, says, "What are you doing?!"

The Indian replies, "Saint James says, 'Confess your faults one to another.' I have confessed to you; now you are going to confess to me."

Knowledgeable

The addict knows,

The guy I saw asleep beneath past days news knows,

The lady, needle sharing, partner sharing, lady,
now near her end on white sheets knows,

The girl now knows,
The girl who heard the words
"Forever," "always," "true," and "love"
From lips that spoke them countless times before,
Who now has just a memory the night left and
A woman's clinic receipt of payment,

The boy too knows,
Whose pa buys bargain beers
And having neither punching bag nor wife
Gives his boy reminders, blue and black on pale skin,
To stay away from Dad on drinking days,

I well know too
that it "brings forth death."

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This is a draft of a poem that I am working on. I have been meaning to post it for a long time, but have had no time to revise it. I decided just to post it as is rather than to keep waiting.

Candide

I am currently reading Candide by Voltaire. It is about a young boy, Candide, and his tutor, Pangloss. Pangloss has a conviction that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. No matter what happens, Pangloss declares that it is for the best and that this is the best of all possible situations because it is the situation that is. Candide adores his philosopher/tutor and takes Pangloss theory as firm truth until, that is, he encounters horrible troubles in his life and begins to doubt it. The book is short, an easy read and funny.

Here is one of my favorite lines. Candide and Pangloss are going on a voyage along with an Anabaptist named James.

"On the voyage, Pangloss explained to James the perfection of the scheme of things. James disagreed: 'Men must have deviated somewhat from their original innocence,' he said. 'They were not born wolves, but they are become wolves. God did not give them twenty-four pounders nor bayonets, but they have made these things for their own destruction. I might also speak of bankruptcies, and the law which seizes upon the property of bankrupts solely in order to keep it from the creditors.'

"'All that had to be,' replied [Pangloss]. 'Private ills make up the general good. It therefore follows that, the more numerous the private ills, the greater the general good.'

The Little One

Probably most of you know my news by now, but for those who don't: My wife is pregnant.

Just Thursday we went to a doctor to have the three month checkup. This time we went to a new hospital, and the visit went well. We felt very comfortable there because the building was nice and clean, the doctors seemed to know what they were doing (they doubtless take a lot of care to cultivate that image) and the workers there were all friendly.

We had the first ultrasound, or at least the first one in which we could recognize the baby. Now before seeing the baby in the ultrasound I didn't think I would write something about it here because the experience can never really be related in words except perhaps to those who have experienced it themselves. I also thought that I would never, never post that little ultrasound picture on the Internet, so that everyone can squint and say, "What is that?" I always felt that all ultrasounds of little infants in the womb looked like grainy pictures of peanuts.

However when that little peanut happens to be your baby, the whole thing changes. My wife and myself were excited beyond words to see that little one for the first time. I had thought that the tiny guy would not be recognizable at all as a baby, but actually it was very clear. We saw his (I say "he" in the general sense, not knowing the gender of the child) head, body, arms, legs and even backbone. We even saw his heart beating (at least that's what the doctor said it was). He moved several times during the ultrasound. For the first time he seemed like a real guy.

When the nurse first turned the machine on, I saw the infant clearly. A moment later they turned on the screen for my wife to look at. She didn't recognize it at first, but when she did she gasped. She covered her mouth and giggled. She said, "It never seemed real until now!" She was amazed. I enjoyed watching her enjoyment of it as much as I enjoyed seeing the image myself.

Later as we were walking to catch a bus, she was talking excitedly on the phone to her parents. As she talked, she used animated gestures. She was telling them about how we could see each leg separately, and she held her fingers up and made a scissors motion with her fingers to show "separately." They asked her a question, and she said, "yes," nodding her head with a shining smile. She told them, "We saw him put his hand on his head!" and she put her hand on her head. I was the only one that got to enjoy these gestures.

The hospital gave us a printout of the ultrasound picture, and true to the long tradition of ultrasound operators, the picture they gave us resembled a peanut.
















When my sister sent me a picture of the ultrasound of her first child, I wrote out a little bit of doggerel.

The sonograms show my sister's sweet fruit
In a pillowed pouch with a humble mein.
This precious infant whom they say is cute
Looks to me like a human lima bean.

Bad Egg

I was making eggs and potatoes for my wife just now. I had finished frying the potatoes and went to put in the eggs. The first egg was beautiful with a brilliant yellow yolk.

The second egg was putrid, all watery and disgusting, and it splattered all over the pan. The yolk was black and clumpy. The smell was horrible, making the whole house reek. As I was dumping it into the garbage can I was almost vomiting because the smell was so sharp and so horrible.

But then it struck me that the smell of the stinky egg is really exactly the same as the smell of stinky tofu, a common food here. It came to me secondly that I have eaten stinky tofu several times and never vomited while eating it.

Eating stinky tofu is a strange thing to do now that I think about it. When ever people eat it together they always close the jar tightly when they are not taking some so as to avoid making the room stink. Why put something into your mouth that you don't want filling the room with its fragrance?

Further, this experience made me think of another thing. The stinky egg smelled the same as stinky tofu, so would I slurp up a rotten egg if someone told me it was edible?

Toilet in a Glass House

The Philip Johnson Glass House is one of the most famous houses in America. Its walls are made entirely of glass, and inside there are no walls to break your view from one side of the house to the other. There is only one place you cannot look into from the outside, and that is the bathroom. The bathroom is in a circular enclosure of brick on the inside of the house. It was a revolutionary idea to build a house that is walled completely in glass. However to some people, namely architects in China, Johnson didn’t go far enough. Why not make the bathroom walls out of glass too?

Now, I know what you are thinking. Usually the types of activities that you like to perform in the bathroom you like to perform without an audience, so it really would make sense to have an opaque enclosure. But evidently there millions of people who would disagree with you. In China I have come across countless bathrooms that are built with windows in the door or windows on an inner wall.

I remember staying in a nice apartment in a coastal city for a few days with friends. This apartment must have been pricy, being within walking distance of some of the nicest parts of the city and having the best location on the building. Not only did it have good surroundings, but it was nice inside too, its interior design having been professionally done. When you walked inside, you would probably notice two things immediately. The first thing you would notice was the abstract nude on the wall over the plasma TV. A large portion of the canvas was gilt, so it was really shiny. Plus, it had a bold checkerboard pattern on it, which immediately arrested one’s attention, very striking. And then, of course, there was the nude, the gilt abstract nude, sitting on the checkerboard. I never managed to divine the meaning of that piece; I always was an oaf when it comes to art. But anyway, after you had blushed and looked away from the artwork, the second thing you would see was the bathroom at the end of the hallway, especially if someone were in it. Pretty much the entire end of the hallway was glass. The wooden bathroom door was on the left and had windowpanes from bottom to top. The panes were, mercifully, frosted with a light frost or with those little textured snowflakes or something. Behind the glass door was the sink. Then to the right of the door was a wall of glass brick. At the builders’ supply store there are different kinds of glass brick, probably with names like “Ice Land” and “Ocean Cube.” Well, these were the “Keep no Secrets” glass bricks. Behind the glass bricks was the toilet.

My friends, most of them American, were puzzled and distressed by this bathroom. How were they to carry on their business in front of these floor-to-ceiling glass bricks? The regular inhabitants of this house, on the other hand, were accustomed to this open-bathroom concept. Once, as I was walking from the living room down the hallway to the bedroom I was staying in, I was horrified to see the figure of a person undressing very close to the door. It was a slight figure and was wearing dark blue undies, which were pressed tightly against the window. It turns out that the figure was that of the young boy who lived in the apartment. One of my friends told me later that it was the boy I had seen because this friend of mine had come into the hallway on another occasion and had had the same scare.

My foreign friends were a little more careful in their use of the bathroom and put much thought into how they should conduct their activities. It was suggested by some that we should put a test subject in the bathroom, who would then walk around nearer and farther from the door and the glass bricks and shout out their position. “One foot from the door!” they would shout. “Two feet from the door! Three feet from the door!” And those assembled outside to watch would consider the amount of visual distortion caused by the glass related to the distance from the door to see at what distance it might be safe to change clothes, pick one's nose or do other potentially embarrassing activities. Maybe we could work out a mathematical formula, they suggested. Nevertheless, such an experiment was unnecessary, others said, because one can clearly see the toilet through the glass and clearly see if someone were sitting on it. In such a small room the distortion caused by those little snowflakes was insufficient to make them feel comfortable doing anything anywhere in there, they said.

Therefore, the only solution was to erect a physical barrier of some sort so that one could use the restroom with peace of mind. When I walked in the first time, I looked around carefully to strategize how I would use the room. Beside the shower there was a big wooden tub that was about waist high. With that in front of the glass bricks, there would be something in front of the toilet. However, people outside could still see the color of your shirt and so would know who was in there and what they were doing, more than you want them to know. The solution: the shower curtain. By pulling the shower curtain and spreading it out along the tub, you could hide yourself completely, yet this was difficult to do because the curtain barely stretched that far and would fall back off the tub easily, leaving you scrambling to replace it. I snooped around but never found any clothespins anywhere to pin the curtain to the tub. “Anybody know how to say ‘clothespin’ in Chinese?”

That bathroom was probably one of the worst offenders that I’ve seen against an American’s desire for privacy in the privy. But there are many other examples I could share not only from city houses but also from countryside houses. One countryside house that I visited really caught my fancy. If I could buy a vacation house in the countryside, this would be it. It had a covered gate in true Chinese style, and inside the gate was a wonderful little courtyard. On one side of the courtyard was a garden, the other a storage building and the pet cow’s bedroom and opposite the gate was the house. The house had four large rooms, kitchen, master bedroom (with the kang), garage (of sorts) and guest bedroom. It was a beautiful little brick house with a red tile roof. I learned with sorrow yesterday that it is slated to be demolished to make way for a new highway. When the highway is built to ferry spoiled city slickers as quickly as possible past the countryside, it will have been at great cost to the world. Nevertheless, as wonderful as this little house was, its bathroom design was intolerable.

There were two toilets. One was outside of the courtyard wall. The other was in the pet cow's bedroom. When you think of a toilet, you are probably thinking of a sleek porcelain bowl like the one that you sit on to read the local newspaper. Forget that image. These toilets were just rectangular holes in the ground. You might think that this is awful, but actually it’s not. Many people prefer this kind of squat toilet over the porcelain bowl sitting kind because . . . (how do you explain this? tactfully?) . . . well, suffice it to say that some people like it better. Plus it’s much better for public restrooms because it’s more sanitary: you don’t have to touch the seat.

My grief wasn’t with the toilets themselves. The trouble was with their location. The first one was truly an outhouse because it was outside the courtyard as if it were a boon to weary travelers. It was to the left of the gate and was enclosed on three sides with brick and had a kind of cornstalk roof. The cow spent her days out there beside the toilet under a lean to, so you could talk to her whenever you went out to use the restroom. She was a good companion, but I was always afraid that she would try to eat the privy roof while I was in there. The entrance side, which was completely open with no door, was facing the courtyard entrance. You know how a lot of campuses have security shacks at the entrance? And security guards sit there at the entrance of the campus and can see everyone who goes through the gate and can likewise be seen by everyone passing through? That’s the way this toilet was. You could squat there like a diminutive security guard and shout out a hearty “hullo!” to anyone who came to knock on the courtyard gate.

The other toilet inside the courtyard was all the way in the left corner and shared the same pit with the outside toilet. This one was a little more private, but was still had no door and was in full view of whoever was in the courtyard. It was odd that during the day the family (and guest) would use the toilet outside the courtyard and at night use the one inside the courtyard. In short, we would go wherever the cow was.

Like I said above, this was a beautiful little courtyard house. There was nothing wrong with it. I just think that if I were to move there, I would spend about ten minutes to construct a little cornstalk wall for each of the privies so you could feel a little more at ease.

The last example I want to give of an open bathroom is in a business that some of my expat friends and I often frequent. This restroom also has a hole-in-the-ground toilet, but this one is porcelain, can flush and is connected to the sewer. I haven’t heard any of my friends complain about the hole-in-the-ground style toilet here, so I think they are accustomed to it. This restroom is small, a one holer. The door is a wooden door and, you guessed it, has a top-to-bottom frosted window.

Though the toilet itself doesn’t seem to bother people, it’s obvious the door does. Some expats like to go into the restroom with the light off. Enough light comes through the door from the outside for the person to do without it. However, this is an undesirable situation too because when the light is off, it appears from the outside that the restroom is unoccupied. The lock doesn’t really work, so I can only imagine that the person inside is nervously hoping that no one will just trot on in.

Once I was standing outside the restroom talking to somebody, and a lady came, wanting to use the restroom. She asked me, “Is anybody in the bathroom?” I said, “Go ahead and have a look through the window.” She didn’t take my advice.

Having a window in the bathroom door might seem to be advantageous for whoever is outside. That way they can know if the bathroom is occupied or not. Still I don’t think I really want to accidentally see anybody during their alone time.

Despite having lived in China for a few years and becoming accustomed to many things here, I still do not prefer the open-bathroom concept. I would side with the architectural school that says Philip Johnson was wise to include at least the bathroom of the Glass House in a very opaque brick cylinder.

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Note to my Chinese friends and family: Please don’t think I’m mocking. I’m not. There is nothing wrong with the bathrooms in China generally speaking. I admit that bathrooms in China really were funny to me as an American when I first came there, but I don’t call myself an authority on proper bathroom design. They were funny to me only because I was not used to them. When two cultures collide, there are bound to be some chuckles from both sides. I imagine that there is plenty of things that Chinese might think are funny about American life, and I will not begrudge you your laughter.

Bunch of Nothing

There's nothing to say really. I'm listening to a podcast of a Jose Gonzales concert right now. I don't know much about him as a person, and I haven't taken the time to listen to the words yet. However I am hooked to the sound. It is pure guitar and vocal. His picking is pretty incredible. It makes good background music because it is peaceful, but it is full enough to merit giving your full attention to it.

Just a moment ago there was a big fight behind my house involving a couple dozen young men. I'm not sure what was happening, but it did seem that they were beating somebody quite thoroughly. Eventually the police arrived and sent all the youths running into the night.

I have been listening to a class about the life of Francis Schaeffer recently. I haven't really learned a lot yet. I did learn , however, that he looks really cool. Somehow I always expected him to look really normal. I don't know what word I would use to describe his look, but normal isn't the one that comes to mind.

[I deleted the picture in case it is copyrighted. You can look him up on a Google image search if you want to see his pic.]

There Is Still a Potential

Long, long ago I promised to write a blog entry on potentiality. Well, I've been trying to write it for the past three days. The essay that I have written has potential, but it has still not quite made it into actuality. The more I write, the more I realize that I don't understand the topic well enough. I'll keep thinking about it, and maybe someday I'll be ready to post it.

But I'll post something else a little later, something a little easier to write about and something which I have strong opinions about: Chinese bathrooms.

The Job Might Have Seemed to Have Taken Forever.

Imagine that you are flying around in a spaceship. You see a big pyramid far away, so you fly towards it. When you arrive, you see that it is much bigger than you had imagined. Some workers are putting the final stone on the top of the great space pyramid, finally finishing their massive construction. You stop and ask them how long this task has taken, and they say that it has taken an eternity, that the base of the pyramid is infinitely far away and that their task is done at long last. Can you imagine that?

In this imaginary scenario we have a problem: there is a project that has been from eternity past drawing nearer to its completion finally coming to an end. This is inconceivable. It is reasonable to say that there are two lines that start from one point and go eternally in two different directions, but it is not reasonable to say that you have been from eternity drawing two lines towards each other and will soon bring them to their meeting point. If the starting points are infinitely distant in space from one another, then the lines being drawn can never in finite time meet each other. However, in the sentence above the words “starting points” are nonsense because, of course, there is no starting point. Imagine falling into a bottomless well, and when you reach the bottom, you start to climb out. The preceding sentence contradicts itself.

This is the problem that a worldview falls into that says that all living things are inhabited by spirits which are repeatedly reincarnated from eternity past until they finally reach their goal. If the spirits have been nearing their goal from eternity past, they are like those builders who are getting ready to put the final stone on that great space pyramid.

I think this is accurate. If anybody sees a problem in my reasoning above, I would love to be corrected. If this is right, then I wouldn’t mind if somebody let me know I’m not off my rocker.

T

Sunday night I invited some of my brothers over for tea. Actually I invited all of my brothers living in this apartment building to come over, but only three of them—J, M and R—could make it. We had a good time talking about various things. There wasn’t anything really noteworthy that we talked about that I can remember. However the occasion, just being together with some brothers, was wonderful.

Fellowship with one’s brothers is vitally important to one’s spiritual health, yet I had had little time with my brothers for a long time. It was refreshing to have a long evening chat with them. I just wish more of them could have come over.

Two Questions

Before I had these brothers over to have tea with me, I had been thinking about two things: first, how to entertain people and second, what to do about my hobby of tea drinking.

Regarding entertaining people, I wanted to invite people over to my house for a long time, but I am not a cook. Since it is usually expected to serve food to people when they come to your house, I figured it was hard for me to entertain people.

Regarding my hobby of drinking tea, I had noticed that it was actually isolating me from other people rather than providing a bridge for me to reach out to people, and anything that separates me from other people rather than bringing me closer to people actually prevents me from fulfilling my purpose in life. I was wondering what I should do about this. Should I quit drinking tea altogether? Or how could I use it to come closer to people rather than further?

The solution to my two questions was a no-brainer: invite folks over for tea.

No Frilly Laces

Maybe to Western ears it might sound funny to have guys over for tea because teatime is considered a girl thing. But having tea in China is definitely a guy thing. In the West teatime is marked by frilly laces and delicate flowered teacups, but in China it is not so. In fact, in China you can find stores all over that sell three products that are viewed as macho things here: vodka, cigarettes and tea.

In China the process of tea and the utensils are a fine art. On Sunday evening I did my best to brew tea fit for an emperor. I brewed some Iron Goddess oolong tea in my little (4 ounces?) green Yixing pot, and I brewed some Tenfu brand Yunan black tea from Xiaguan City in my gaiwan (a china cup with a lid and a small platter). The teacups I used for the oolong and the black tea were only one ounce and two ounce cups respectively.

You might think that a four-ounce teapot and a one-ounce teacup cannot hold much tea, but actually the size is perfect for brewing and drinking fine tea. A four-ounce teapot allows the flavor to develop better than a large teapot, probably because one brews the tea in it for only about ten to thirty seconds. One should time each infusion carefully to make sure that the tea is not too strong or too weak, and the time depends on how many infusions you have done already. Each successive infusion should be longer than the last one. And each successive infusion tastes a little differently than the last. That is why the teapot and the teacups are so small, so that the drinkers can taste the flavor developing from infusion to infusion.

On Sunday evening we quaffed so many infusions that I lost count. I don’t know if all that caffeine had kept anyone up late afterwards, but I’m pretty sure of one thing. I’m pretty sure that all of them after leaving my house went straight to the bathroom.

A Few o My Favorite Links

This is another text copied over from my other (now deleted) blog.

Anywhere that I can get full texts of classic works for free is a great place in my opinion. In the following place you can download classic works from church history. For example, you can read Thomas a Kempis' famous book there.
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/kempis/imitation.i.html

I get a kick out of G.K. Chesterton.
http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/index.html
http://www.chesterton.org/discover/who.html

The Stanford Encl. of Philosophy is kinda thick stuff, but it is good information about all kinds of ideas.
http://plato.stanford.edu/

This page has links to lots of free texts that you might not find in your local library. One fellow here that I have heard about for many years but never read is John Chrysostom. I'm interested in learning more about Medieval thought. It can't be as dark as people say it is.
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook2.html

A good page to find full texts of literature.
http://bartleby.com/

Eggs

As I was shutting down an old blog I had, I moved some of the posts over to my current one. Below is one of them.

I came across a couple quotes from G.K. as I was reading his book on St. Thomas Aquinas. In the first one he was talking about how it was in vogue for philosophers to get all caught up in epistemology and start doubting if things they perceive actually exist.

"I saw an almost startling example of this essential frivolity in a professor of final scepticism, in a paper the other day. A man wrote to say that he accepted nothing but Solipsism, and added that he had often wondered it was not a more common philosophy. Now Solipsism simply means that a man believes in his own existence, but not in anybody or anything else. And it never struck this simple sophist, that if his philosophy was true, there obviously were no other philosophers to profess it."

This is a quotation from the same book. It is a simple comparison of various viewpoints' takes on eggs.

"Against all this the philosophy of St. Thomas stands founded on the universal common conviction that eggs are eggs. The Hegelian may say that an egg is really a hen, because it is a part of an endless process of Becoming; the Berkeleian may hold that poached eggs only exist as a dream exists; since it is quite as easy to call the dream the cause of the eggs as the eggs the cause of the dream; the Pragmatist may believe that we get the best out of scrambled eggs by forgetting that they ever were eggs, and only remembering the scramble. But no pupil of St. Thomas needs to addle his brains in order adequately to addle his eggs; to put his head at any peculiar angle in looking at eggs, or squinting at eggs, or winking the other eye in order to see a new simplification of eggs. The Thomist stands in the broad daylight of the brotherhood of men, in their common consciousness that eggs are not hens or dreams or mere practical assumptions; but things attested by the Authority of the Senses, which is from God."

B&W

The lives of those who have lived in China through the past seventy years are very interesting to me. They were alive to see the birth of a nation. Their parents and grandparents talked around the dinner table about the emperors and the fall of a dynasty. They have seen their nation go from a weak one that was abused by western nations to one that all the western nations look to for help when dealing with troublesome locals such as North Korea and Burma.

My wife's grandparents are such people. Her grandfather was a child living in the countryside near Changchun City when Mao Zedong came and besieged it, starving out the Japanese occupiers. He remembers Japanese soldiers, intent on winning the hearts of the Chinese in the northern occupied regions, giving him and other Chinese children candy: one piece of candy for speaking one word or phrase in Japanese, two pieces for two words or a longer phrase.

For a long time I had been wanting to see Grandparent's old memorabilia. Finally, during the recent vacation, they showed us their old pictures. Grandma sat and mended an old quilt and talked about her memories while my wife and I looked at the pictures.

The earliest pictures are from the 1950s when Grandparents were in their 20s. There were only three or four pictures going back that early. One of them was a formal portrait of Grandfather’s father. He wore a dark blue or charcoal colored traditional Chinese shirt (Tangzhuang) that buttoned up all the way to the top and had no collar. He looked like your stereotypical old Chinese man with his thin white goatee.

He was a landowner in the old days before “landowner” was a bad word in China and was pretty well off. However, almost all of his wealth was in the form of land rather than money. After the revolution landlords were denounced and their lands were redistributed, so he and his family lost most of their possessions. If he had had his wealth in cash, he would have possibly been able to keep it. Some landlords were very clever before the revolution and, seeing that the future leaders would be Marxist, sold all their lands and stored up the cash. After the revolution, these former landlords could keep all their wealth and go around denouncing other landlords with the rest of the people.

While my wife and I were talking about her grandfather’s family, her grandmother looked up from her mending and said smiling that her husband’s class status had put her through a lot of trouble. She was born to a poor family in the countryside, but then she married a son of a landowner. After the revolution, she wanted to join the party, but they suspected her, because she was married to someone who belonged to the landlord class. She said that she went through twenty years of observation and testing before they finally let her join the party.

I guess she did pretty well for herself in the party when she finally got to join. She was a party leader of some kind in her workplace. There were a couple pictures of her sitting behind a speaker, who was speaking at some sort of party function in the factory. There was another picture of her at work, where she assembled an electrical component for cars. On the wall behind her was a large picture of Chairman Mao inscribed with an exhortation to work hard for the sake of society.

From looking at the photo album I could guess the family’s favorite vacation destination: Beijing. There were four or five pictures of various family members standing in front of Tiananmen, the red gate over which the painting of Mao Zedong hangs. The earliest Tiananmen pictures were from 1958(?), and in them you can see that the name of the country is written in traditional Chinese characters rather than the newer simplified characters. There were also pictures from the 1970s of the Summer Palace and the Beijing train station. The old Beijing train station was a beautiful building. It had had two clock towers on either side of the front entrance. Above the doors, framed in a large arched window, was a big painting of Mao Zedong.

There was a variety of settings, but not a variety of clothing. Almost everyone wore dark blue or green or grey Mao suits. Several people wore green military hats with a red star on the front. Everyone wore dark colors. This was the patriotic way.

In fact, the whole album exuded patriotism. Right beside the photo of Uncle So-and-so was a photo of Chairman Mao sitting at his desk with a calligraphy brush in his hand. It was as if he was one of the members of the family.

Commonly the pictures were developed with Chinese writing on the front that told the date of the picture and/or a description of the picture. Sometimes the description reflected the political fervor of the time. One picture of Grandfather and two of his friends said, “A Revolutionary Friendship.” Another interesting one was a baby picture of my wife’s aunt. The baby wore a white dress and a big metallic medallion with the chairman’s face on it. To the side of the picture it had three sentences going from top to bottom. They said something like, “Forever support Mao Zedong. Forever follow Mao Zedong thought. Forever fight for the revolution.”

Next time I go to Grandparents house I'll have to ask Grandpa if he still has his badge from when he was a policeman for the Communists. Or better yet, ask Grandpa's brother if he still has his badge from when he was a policeman for the Nationalists.

Breakfast

This week my wife and I went to visit her mother and grandparents. We just relaxed and talked most of the time. And ate. Whenever we go to grandparents house we eat a ton of good food.

For breakfast today there were 12 different dishes on the table.

• 1st there was some roast rabbit. Delicious.
• 2nd there was a big bowl of little bitty shrimp. Each little crustacean was about one centimeter long. You eat them tail, shell, legs, tentacles and all.
  
• 3rd some soybean sauce. Very strong tasting and salty. Tasty, but it smells distinctly like socks.
• 4th hot pepper condiment-like dish.
• 5th Pickled duck eggs. Very salty. These are a condiment too.
• 6th cooked bean sprouts
• 7th an enormous fish.
• 8th a basket full of different kinds of small cakes.
• 9th a mushroom dish with wuhuarou. Wuhuarou is a thick cut of meat that includes a little meat at one end, a bunch of fat in the middle and skin at the other end.
• 10th garlic eggplant. Eaten as a condiment.
• 11th fermented bean curd. Eaten as a condiment.
• 12th something. I couldn't tell what it was.

Each person at the table had a bowl of rice porridge or a bowl of tangyuanr. Tangyuanr are a favorite breakfast food of mine. They are balls of sticky rice with a sweet filling of nuts or sesame inside.

This was not an unusual breakfast. This was a typical kind of breakfast for us to eat at Grandparents' house. I'm used to this kind of breakfast now, but I still remember in the early days when I first came here how I was shocked at the breakfast fare.

It was a lot of work for Grandma to put out this big spread, but it wasn't as much as you might think. These were all leftovers from supper the night before. Almost always when I have eaten breakfast with any Chinese family, they simply warm up the leftovers from supper and eat those in the morning. Americans usually have the idea that breakfast must be something sweet, or if it's not sweet, it needs to be an omelet and sausage. Chinese people however don't have this idea. They don't tend to put their nose up at even a spicy dish in the morning.

October Break

Now I have started my October break. The first few weeks of school have been busy. My teaching has gone really well. I feel like I am finally coming through in my teaching. As an oral English teacher I have always done pretty well at getting the students to talk about things in English in a fun environment, but I haven't always done really well at introducing content (such as grammar or vocabulary) followed by appropriate activities to illustrate or to practice the new material. In the past my activities were a little bit random.

My wife is now in her first year of teaching. She is really a natural teacher (unlike me). She has done a great job. The students like her. She and I share some freshman classes, so they were really surprised that their English teacher is married to their oral English teacher.

I promised last post that I would tell you about my Long March. It is appropriate that I tell you about my Long March right before the October first holiday, since that is the national day of China. This summer I decided I wanted to take a long walk with a couple friends along the side of the only river in town. The city has done a great job of building parks on each side of it the whole way through town, so I wanted to explore it. Also, it had been too long since I had just taken a day and walked. Back home in the Blue Ridge I would regularly go backpacking and hiking, but since moving to China three years ago, I have had only one chance to put on my boots and wend through mountain trails. I sorely missed it.

Taking an urban hike, viewing the design of men, is, of course, not the same as taking a hike out in the woods and enjoying the pure design of creation. However, it is not so different as I had thought. After hiking for several hours across town, I really felt that feeling that a hiker gets that cannot really be described but only felt. That feeling is something like freedom, but more than that because it draws one's heart up beyond the world that one is walking through to an attitude of worship. I don't think I'm the only one who gets this feeling, because I often read atheists that very condescendingly say, "When I stand on a mountain and view the stars, I get a feeling of transcendence, so I can understand how theists get off wrong." Though it was an urban hike, there were plenty of trees and grass and there was the sky and, of course, the river. That helped provide a little reprieve from city life.

There was one great benefit of taking an urban hike. After the first half of the hike, my friends and I sauntered into a nice coffee shop and took our beverages in style. When you are doing an urban hike, you don't bring a bunch of little baggies of Kool-aid to pour into your water bottle. No, you bring Starbucks coupons. After that we slurped down some delicious noodles at a restaurant nearby. On this hike, there were no freeze dried meals or cans of sardines. There was no need to light a stove and trim the flame and burn ones fingers. We dined in luxury.

It was interesting to see the whole town from south to north. Most of the area that the river runs through is not highly developed. There is only one place that is a really valuable business district. The weird thing is that one of the nicest parts of the river park was within walking distance of only a big smoke belching factory. (Of course, one could say that the whole city is within walking distance as we proved by our seven hour walk. And after all, how far is a walking distance? Does a distance cease being a walking distance at a particular number of meters? And the next millimeter over would be considered beyond a walking distance?) The park is uniformly nice through most of the city. However it was old and unimproved in the far north of the city. As we walked in the north part, some cleaning ladies tried to tell us that we should turn around and walk south because the park was not very nice in the north, and we tried to tell them that we had already seen the south of the river walk and didn't want to go that way.

A great highlight of the journey was to be able to spend the day with my new friends J and D. We talked about all sorts of things, especially about philosophy, literature and history. D parted from us at the halfway point to do some work at his home, but J continued with me all the way to where the sidewalk ends. To get back home the two of us had to climb over a fence to get onto a dam, cross the river and then climb over another fence to get off of the dam. Then we had to pull out a city map and walk a distance to find a city bus, the only city bus, actually, in that part of the outskirts of town. Before boarding the rusty old bus, we walked into a snack store and bought a couple soft drinks that are so cheap (1 RMB/600 ml) that they are sold only in the countryside. After the bus ride, we boarded the most advanced form of transportation in our city, a subway/elevated train, to go to the south of town again. Standing there on the train, we (or at least I) felt so superior. Those around us had not felt the distance they were traveling. They hadn't made the earth turn under their feet. They had just zipped here and there on buses or taxis. Or actually maybe some of them had travelled there on their own power and seen the world walk by them in all its beauty. Maybe they had felt that freedom and sense of worship that we had felt.

Having hopped off the subway/elevated train, we still had a ten minute walk from the station to our houses. If I remember right, I think we rewarded ourselves with a little ice cream or something before going inside. For such a memorable trip it would have been appropriate to have kept a memento from it. J brought back the soft drink bottle and still has it sitting on his cabinet shelf beside his precious books as a monument to our Long March. But I have nothing. Not even pictures, as I had leant my camera to someone.

That's ok. If I had kept something then I would have had to throw it away someday. But I didn't, and I won't.

Summertime

Hey folks,

If any of you are still reading my blog, I'm really surprised. I haven't written anything here for so long. In fact, I haven't written anything for a long time. I started this blog back during my last vacation from school. At the time I felt like if I didn't write something I would burst, so I started the blog as a kind of release valve. Well, now in my summer vacation I really don't feel like writing anything, and what's more, I really don't feel like reading anything either. This is really weird because for me to not want to read is like a fish not wanting to swim.

I am reading something however. In the mornings I get up and brew a cup of Pu'er tea or Chinese black tea and read The Training of the Twelve by A.B. Bruce. It is a good book. It's kind of like a commentary. I also have been reading a book called 普洱茶. I say I am reading the book, but it is a Chinese book and I can't really read Chinese very well. Since it takes me about thirty minutes to read one sentence, it is probably more accurate for me to say that I am reading the first paragraph of the book. The book is about Pu'er tea, my current favorite brew.

Later sometime I'll tell you all about my summer and my long march and my favorite tea. But for now I'll go to bed.

Strange Place for a Carrier

As you may know, this nation is debating the merits of adding an aircraft carrier to its naval fleet. Some say that carriers are good for power projection, and thus this nation doesn't need one since it doesn't express an interest in projecting its power overseas.

What you may not know is that it already has a carrier. However, I don't think that it would do much good at power protection given the size of the body of water in which it is found.

Why this carrier is here, I don't know. It is probably just for training or gaming or whatnot. According to what I heard it was built near Shanghai. However, I got this from an internet discussion group, so who knows how accurate the information or even the picture itself is.

Finished Paper

My wife finished her paper yesterday and gave it to her adviser. The adviser will read it and give suggestions. Then we will go back to work on it to prepare the final draft.

I've noticed in this that my wife is one of the most patient people I know. I thought I was really patient, but I noticed lately that she doesn't get flustered about things easily. As the dead lines were looking more and more deadly, she seemed positively unconcerned. She just plugged away at it. Once we made a mistake, deleting a little portion of the paper, and whereas I just about went over the top, she was just as collected as can be.

Today I met with a couple of students for lunch. My wife had been planning to come with me and meet them too, but she was really tired after doing her paper. She stayed home and slept until who knows when. She deserved it because she had worked hard.

Thanks to One and All

I read something by Douglas Wilson the other day that made me smile. He wrote about things he was thankful in the form of a Hebrew poetic convention. He said, "For two things I give thanks, and for three I am extremely grateful. First, I am very thankful for the godly character of my wife and family. Second, I am grateful for the integrity of my friends and co-laborers . . . . But third, after careful consideration of the subject, I have to say that I am profoundly grateful for the caliber of my enemies."

Lately, I've been busy with teaching and my wife is busy writing her graduate paper. We have been staying up late together recently while she works on her paper, but unfortunately I don't have the luxury of sleeping in. So, needless to say, I'm getting cranky. I should go to bed and just let her work, but I just don't like going to bed all by my lonesome. It has been about a year after all since I was a loner like our luchadore friend Nacho. And even then I didn't really agree with his estimation of single life ("It's the best!").

By the way, it has been about a year. Last week was an anniversary for my wife and me. I surprised her with a gift and stuff. It was a good anniversary, but it was kindof overshadowed by a looming dead line of my wife's paper. That isn't too bad that we couldn't have a big celebration because last week was only one of our anniversaries. We have more than one actually because of Chinese tradition. It is the next anniversary that is the most important for us.

If you want to know why we have more than one wedding anniversary, you can look at my "This n'that" entry of February 10, and that should make it clear.

Gone for a While

Hey folks,

I'm terribly sorry that I have been away for such long time. I was quite busy with the beginning of school for a week or two and then something happened which I didn't quite expect. I was unable to get onto my blogs all of a sudden. I have three blogs that I participate in, and all of them one day became inaccessible to me. Even now, strangely enough, though I can post, I cannot view my blogs. I guess I should have expected it; just a day before my blogs became inaccessible, I read a news story on the topic of the Internet here. You can say that the news story was the "writing on the wall" for my blog.

Probably my friends in the States can read my blogs now, but I can't. Perhaps I will start a new blog on an "acceptable" site soon. If so, I'll send you the link. Or perhaps I'll just keep posting here.

I've been encouraged by your comments, both on the blogs and face-to-face. Whether you know my wife and me or not, I am happy to tell you about my sometimes strange, sometimes boring life, and I am especially happy to read your comments. I will go and do some reading now. Perhaps if I have time tonight, I will tell you about my wife's and my first anniversary.

Take care,

Syme

Luo Ye Gui Gen

"Luo Ye Gui Gen" is a new Chinese movie that Zhao Benshan stars in. I feel that it is a movie that Americans should see, but I know most will not. Then name means something like, "Fallen leaves return to the root." It was a humorous movie about a migrant worker returning home with his friend. Well actually, his friend didn't do much during the movie. He was dead.

In the movie Zhao's friend died while the two were drinking together after work. Zhao had promised his friend that if he ever died away from home, he would take his body back to be buried in his hometown. Zhao took the body, and he boarded a bus to go to his friend's hometown. Of course, it would be impossible to openly carry a dead body around with you, so Zhao pretends that his friend is drunk so that people will not be alarmed. The trouble begins when the people on the bus discover that Zhao's friend is actually a dead man and not a drunk man. Disgusted and frightened, they force Zhao and his friend (of course) to get off of the bus. Zhao has many adventures and trials as he tries to get his friend's body back to be buried in his hometown.

The reason that I think Americans should see this movie is that it depicts the lives of normal modern Chinese people. The biggest movie that has come out of China was probably “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” That was a good movie but it was about the upper classes in the distant past. The other big movies that might have gotten wide international viewings, such as “Hero,” “The Banquet” and “The Curse of the Golden Flower,” were all about the upper classes in the distant past. Because of this, Americans that see just these movies from China get an unbalanced and perhaps a hackneyed view of China.

“Lu Ye Gui Gen” shows normal things that you encounter in China today. Here are a few things that made me smile because they mirrored real life here. While Benshan is riding on the bus, it stops on the side of the road. Then the driver stands up and says, “Men on the right, women on the left.” All of the people then filed out of the bus and relieved themselves. There was no outhouse where the bus stopped, just forest. This exact scenario has never happened when I was riding a bus, but if you lived here for a while, maybe this scene would make you smile too.

Another thing that it showed was people’s relationships towards their laoxiang (to others who come from the same region). Benshan is a Northeasterner. One night as he is walking through a town, he hears a hair parlor worker speaking in the Northeastern dialect. Because of this he goes in to her hair parlor and trusts her, telling her his whole story about how he is trying to get the friend’s body back to his hometown. She believes him, and helps him by putting makeup on the face of the body.

Another scene showed the existence of and the fight against the black market in China. Benshan goes to give blood at an official blood center in order to get some money. But because he had had a disease, he was ineligible to give blood. As he left the blood donation center, a man walks up to him quietly and offers him 500 RMB for some blood. Benshan follows the person into a dark building and waits his turn to give blood. Just then, the police raid the blood center and take the operators to jail.

I wish this movie could be exported to America. It would do the Americans well to see a movie about common people in modern China. It is an amusing and lighthearted movie, despite the fact that the movie is about a dead guy.

Spring Festival

The past few days I have been visiting various relatives. The eighteenth was Chinese New Year, or otherwise named Spring Festival. It is the biggest festival on the Chinese calendar, the festivities lasting several days. It falls on a different day of the (international) calendar each year because the Chinese holidays are reckoned according to the Chinese lunar calendar.

As an interesting side note, in the Chinese lunar calendar last year there was two Julys(?). My wife, Poppy, has her birthday in that month so, counting her birthday on the international solar calendar and her two birthdays in the two Julys of the Chinese lunar calendar, she had three birthdays last year, which is simply not fair.

Another note concerning the Chinese calendar. Several Chinese people have said to me very smugly that it is no surprise to them that this winter was so terribly warm. They say they knew it would be a warm winter because last year’s lunar calendar had two Julys. They claim that the lunar calendar is more fitting to the weather than the solar one. I don’t know if this claim is true because I still as yet barely understand the lunar calendar.

Anyhow, back to Spring Festival. On Saturday Poppy and I went to her mother’s relative’s house and talked with them for a while. Then we went to her father’s parents’ house and spent the night with them. We ate a huge meal for lunch, consuming so much delicious food that whereas our mouths were delighted with flavor, our bellies were feeling the crunch. After the meal, most of us drove over to Poppy’s grandfather’s brother’s house to visit them. There is a special word in Chinese for going around and visiting the relatives because it is an essential tradition of Spring Festival. After that we returned to Poppy’s grandfather’s house and talked and watched the annual Spring Festival TV program.

This program is probably the most watched television program in the world. I think the Super Bowl is the most watched program in the USA, and maybe less than 50 percent of TV sets in America during that time are playing the Super Bowl. In contrast, in China during the Spring Festival program something like 90 percent of the total TV sets that are on are tuned into this program.

There are lots of people singing and dancing and doing comedy plays in the program. The Chinese navy boys sang and danced. Then, the brave and handsome army guy sang, flanked by two beautiful young army ladies. As you guessed, the air force guys also got to sing and dance. Then they have various Chinese minority people groups sing and do traditional dances. Then the little children with their red neckerchiefs did their song and dance, which was cute. Probably the biggest star of the show this year was Zhao Benshan. He is the number one comedy play guy in China. Usually the middle-aged Zhao does comedy routines on a stage but he also has a TV show. He is attractive to us laobaixing (common folk) because he always plays a common person, dressed in poor cloth and behaving as a good ol’ Northeasterner. The reason he was such a star this year was that he recently put out a full-length movie. Later, I hope to tell you about this movie which all of you in America should see, but never will.

While we were watching the program, we were making the festival food: dumplings. They are meat or vegetable balls wrapped up in a doughy covering. Right before twelve o’clock, some of us went outside to light off some fireworks, which is a must do before eating any meal during the festival. We didn’t do many fireworks this year, just popped off a few crackers and rushed back inside to eat. Most of us were probably still full from lunch, so we didn’t eat too many dumplings. However, tradition says that we have to eat dumplings at midnight, so we all obliged. Finally, everyone went to bed. That was Spring Festival.

My wife and I visited other family members for the next couple days. Now, we are home for just one night. We will go in the morning to visit other family members.

When I have time, I would like to tell you about many things, including
-Regifting: what to do when you don’t know what to do with it.
-Bathrooms: how sometimes you feel you are in a glass house.
-Zhao Benshan’s movie: why I’m surprised the other main character had a name.
-Potentiality: would it still happen if it wasn’t going to happen in the first place?

More holiday activities

Recently, I’ve had two get-togethers with the school. The president took the English teachers out today for some hot-pot. The restaurant was a great place: the rooms swank, the food delicious. Besides the hot-pot foods, they also served some raw beef on ice, which though disgusting, was tasty dipped in wassabi.

Yesterday, I ate Chinese dumplings with the dormitory building employees and all of the poor expatriate souls that didn’t return to their home countries for the holiday. There were three Russians, one of which could speak English. There were three Japanese, two of which could speak Chinese but not English. And there was my wife and me. Once a Russian that couldn’t speak English asked a question to the Japanese that couldn’t speak Chinese, so the question was translated from Russian to English to Chinese to Japanese, much to the humor of all. I had never had the opportunity to talk to the Russians before, so this was good time to be able to get to know them.

A couple days ago we went to my wife’s parents house. We had a good time there. I was not embarrassed by my poor Chinese this time. The family and I were able to talk this time more than last time, and Mamma didn’t criticize me for not being able to understand them (whew!). Often when we go there to visit, the family will all sit on the bed in the master bedroom and watch TV and talk.

This time we were watching a soap opera that was named rather inappropriately, “Women Don’t Cry.” It was a show about women . . . crying. They had plenty of reason to cry; the show was one disaster after another. I made a prediction as a joke, that the main character would be let out of prison (don’t ask) just as her friend was going into surgery and that her friend would die before she could get there. I was absolutely right. It seems that many of the TV shows here are pretty melodramatic, but this one really went above and beyond the competition.

This n'that

This week I met for lunch with a bro. that I haven't seen for a while. He lives here nowadays, but he's preparing for studying abroad. He has a lot of decisions to make, so we were discussing those things. He is really working hard on his study. Beyond learning a third language, he has also decided that he wants to read thru his book 20 times before leaving: a goal that keeps him busy for about three hours each day.

My wife and I two nights ago met with her friend who had a special surprise for us. She announced to us that she and her boyfriend had gotten their marriage certificate a few days before. They were very happy, as you can imagine. They treated us to a meal of dumplings at a popular restaurant in town. I was pretty quiet since the guy doesn't know English, but my wife and her friend talked nonstop about wedding things.

For those of you that don't know, it is a custom here to get your marriage certificate six months or more before you have your wedding. My wife's friends had not had their wedding yet but just became legally married.

Last night, we met with two of our neighbors, J. and M. My bro. J. was going to leave town for a couple weeks the next day so we invited him and M. over to eat with us. My wife cooked some of her delicious food; I was really proud of her. I’m proud to show off her good cooking to my friends. We all talked at the table for a long time last night. I regret that we had not done it sooner. I think I might see my bro. M. again tomorrow.

Today, my wife went shopping with her mother, and I stayed at home and read. Actually I finished reading two books. I finished reading G.’s Rghteous Kingdom by Walter Chantry and Thomas Aquinas by G.K. Chesterton. Both of those books are excellent and both of them left me with questions. Chantry left me questions about the law and about what law is good for us today. Chesterton’s book on the other hand was mostly understandable except for two paragraphs towards the end. He said something about “the metaphysical problem with mere change.” I don’t know what that problem is. In fact, I don’t even know what mere change is! I looked on the Internet for a while, but to no avail. If you know, I would be really happy if you clued me in on the answers. The other thing I didn’t understand was he said, “potentiality doesn’t explain itself.” I wish that he would have explained himself a little more. :-)

Queue

This is a poem that I wrote in December of 2002.

Queue

Johnson, Schaeffer, Kant.
He bought, studied and scrawled notes
In these books before
He shelved each one, one by one.
I read to learn about Dad.

Study

Today Poppy and I studied all day. She is working on her paper and I on Chinese. Now I need to find some articles online for her about immigration, immigrants, law etc.

Just today I finished reading The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant. It was an old book of my dad's. I don't think he read it b/c he always made marks in the books that he read and this one was unmarked. Now, since I have read it, it is marked from beginning to end. (I wrote a short poem long ago about his books once. I'll find it sometime.) It was pretty easy reading as far as philosophy goes. It was a pretty good book.

One thing that I was struck by as I read it was that almost all of the philosophers in it had a kind of arbitrary prejudice against the possibility of the supernatural. Why do they have this untouchable dogma? Science is wonderful, but it tells us only about the natural world. It can't tell us about many things, including whether it is conceivable for things to happen supernaturally. It was really interesting to see Herbert Spencer weaving an entire system of how evolution explains everything only to discover that it can't explain consciousness. They labeled this, "epiphenomenon." This word somehow seems to me similar to the word supernatural.

One thing that was notably missing from this book was all of the thinkers from Aristotle to Bacon. It seems a little far-fetched to say that no one thought about anything from after 322 B.C. until the 1560s A.D. What about Augustine? What about Aquinas? The author said that he didn't like the scholastics, so he didn't include them. (Aquinas was a scholastic philosopher.) His definition of scholasticism was "the philosophy of the medieval theologians, in general, the divorce of speculation from observation and practice." The definition seems a bit biased against scholasticism, but I don't know; maybe it is accurate. I need to study scholasticism for myself. Aquinas was important because he was the one that introduced Aristotle's ideas into the very Platonic church. He thought that it was a good idea to observe the world around him. Maybe if it were not for his influence, the renaissance would not have come when it did.

Now that I am finished with that book I will get back to The City of God by St. Augustine. I am about 2/3 through. But I will not read very much now because I decided that it is more important for me right now to study Chinese, help my wife with her paper and do some other things.

"Skiing"

Today my wife and I did what people in this province call skiing. It was quite an experience. The ski area was actually in a district of the city. However, it was far out in the countryside; a 45-minute drive. We were treated by the school to the ski trip. The ski area was pretty nice. It had a big lodge, a roller skating rink, an ice skating rink, a (frozen) pond, a dormitory, a hotel and restaurant, an indoor pool, snow, tubes and ski rental. The only thing missing was the ski slope.

Oh, there was a slope of sorts but nothing so steep that the Illinois highway commission would put a “Danger, Steep Grade” sign beside. If you pushed really hard with the poles, you could get up to a pretty decent speed for a bunny slope.

Not to say I was bored. I had a really great time and so did my wife. The slope was good for her since she had never gone skiing before. She didn’t mind the slow rate of descent; in fact, it was about as fast as she wanted to go. She did her happy little dance, which some of you have had the pleasure of observing, every time she reached the bottom. That probably has something to do with the reason that her skis kept falling off. In fact, the reason she fell over once or twice was probably that she was so happy she started to dance up and down while she was still sliding down the slope (but that is just my speculation).

The place was quaint. At about noon a lady came out to the side of the slope with an ampliphone and said that it was lunchtime. The whole slope emptied off as all the people herded into the dining area. Even the lift turned off for a short time. But my wife was so enjoying the slope that she asked me, “Can I play one more time? Can I play one more time?” So I my lunch had to wait for later as she went down one more time.

For supper tonight I made some onion-egg-garlic fried rice. It was pretty good, if I do say so myself. My wife liked it so much she had three helpings. She also requested that I pull out the stinky tofu, a side dish that you eat in small amounts along with the main dish. Stinky tofu is one of those foods that you wonder: who was the first sicko to discover that it is edible? It is ashen-grey, the color of a corpse, and it smells like manure.

It actually doesn’t taste too bad. In fact, it brings back fond memories. As I chew it I feel as if I can smell my grandfather's pig lots in Iowa. Unfortunately, we made the mistake of eating the tofu in the bedroom. Now the whole room smells like poop. If you walked into our apartment right now you would think that the smell you smelled was coming from the bathroom and not from the meal.

I think now we will call my wife’s cousin in Japan. G’bye.

A Snowy Day

This being my first update, I wish that I could say I was really busy and had done the world a great favor today, but actually that's not the case. I awoke at 8:40, read my book and my Book, checked my emails, read the news and then started this blog. Later today I will call a friend and I'll clean the house. My wife plans to work on her graduate thesis today. Though this post was as boring as clipping toenails, I promise next time it will be better.

Out Post

Hello to everybody that calls me a friend or family member,

For years I have been planning of getting a website or a blog started so that all of you can know what I am up to and how I am doing. After numerous failed attempts, I have finally succeeded in the venture, having given up my quixotic idea of making my own website with http. I have wanted much to give you periodic updates; however, I didn’t want to flood your email in-box with my emails if you didn’t want them (a sentiment I wish that spammers shared). Further, even if you did want my emails, there is something intimidating about getting a really long email. If I get a really long email, maybe I will read it later, or maybe I will put it off and never read it.

So I think this blog is a perfect way for you all to know what’s happening in the lives of my wife and me. I think I will also create another blog in which I will write my thoughts about things. If you want to know what I am doing, you can check this blog. If you want to know what I am thinking, you can check the other blog.

Thank you all for your prayers for me through the years and now for my wife and me. I’ll never forget those who have supported me faithfully with your encouragement and kindness.