Articles & Posts

Summer, 2004 One of the fun things to do in Hangzhou is attend the Romance of the Song Dynasty Show.   The Song Dynasty extended for about 300 years, ending in about 1275, with the conquest of the Mongols.   Now I don’t think there are many people in the US who would attend a show titled the Romance of the late Dark Ages, or the Romance of the Era of the Imperial and Magnificent Church.   This was the 1200’s, and we all believe in the progress of history.  But Barbara Tuchman subtitled her famous book about the 14th Century, the next century, the Calamitous 14th Century.    So this emphasis on romance just feels …. sort of misplaced, to me, the westerner. Except that this is China.  Now, really, not even I take the Romance of the Song Dynasty performance as a historically accurate guide to events.   The lasers, smoke effects, and stage lighting are probably later inventions.  But the Song is one of the most celebrated and sophisticated of Chinese dynasties, and Hangzhou was the capital city in the late Song, so there is some local promotion going on here too.   When Hangzhou was the capital of the Song, it was one of the wealthiest …

June, 2010 Anybody in Chicago who has met Alice Zhou Xiaofang remembers her.  She is the number 2 government person in the urban planning department in Shaoxing, but she is a mayoral advisor and all-around whip smart, dedicated, open, public servant.  Who asks questions and tells you what she thinks.  Who is also an electrical engineer and knit me the blue scarf I wore all last winter.   I was in Shaoxing to look at another ancient town, called An Chang, which is on both sides of a narrow waterway on the outskirts of Shaoxing.   It is now surrounded by modern buildings and cars and development, but some of the old town still remains.  Old, in this case, is late Ming-early Qing dynasties, which puts the buildings at about 400 years old.   This is based on fading inscriptions in stone, and on what I am told by Alice and others.There may be some George Washington’s hand ax element to this, since wood exposed to the weather doesn’t normally last for 400 years.  (Those who don’t know the George Washington story are encouraged to ask Rob Clarke).   But there is no doubt about the style of buildings, and that what is there is …

May, 2010 Brenna and I had colds.   Not so bad, but she wanted to go to Shanghai to the Expo in a few days, so I thought we should make sure there was no serious problem developing.   No fun walking around the Expo with some hacking cough.My cough had descended into my chest, sort of a bad sign, so I called my people at the school about a medical visit.Pay first, then see doctor … about $0.58 … eachStudents here seem to get sick a lot, which I attribute to the lack of heat in the dorms when it is actually freezing outside, or maybe to their relative lack of exposure to coffee, sugar, fat, and high-fructose corn syrup.  Anyway, a lot of students call me to say that they are in the hospital, for two or three or five days.    They are being treated for some variation on cold like symptoms.   I did not want some school nurse telling me I had to go to the hospital for three days.   I was not that sick, and neither was Brenna.   What I wanted was to make sure we did not have some weird disease, and if needed get a shot or …

Spring, 2011 For the last six years before I came to China, all of my students at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago were zhonguo zhengfu guanyuan, Chinese government officials. Many have become friends, and I stay in touch with them as much as I can. This is about a wedding I attended recently. Michael, one of my government students, picked me up at school.When Michael got married, in 1990 in the northeastern province of Liaoning, the ceremony was much simpler, he said. At that time, some rural people did not have much money, not even food to eat sometimes, he said. He had been working on a dam project in the south of China, and he took time out from that to get married in Shenyang. His bride was a college classmate, also from Shenyang. He graduated from the university in 1988.He was happy to accompany me to Hangzhou to the wedding of Chen Yifu and his bride, because he said he learned some things about how young couples do weddings now. Michael is about 45.There is no standard format to a Chinese wedding, just as there is none in the US, although there are some common features. I am …

Summer, 2016 Not sure where this fits … I have always thought that the comments on the “Chinglish” street signs and hotel menus were tending to the mean-spirited, even if some were funny.   No one laughs at my speaking Chinese.We were at afternoon tea yesterday with one of my students from Chicago and her husband and daughter.  They both work for the Hangzhou police department, in jobs that have to do with contact with foreign governments and screening government officials who want to go abroad.The place for tea was beautiful –  a hotel developed by Greentown, one of the biggest Chinese real estate developers, set in the hills of Hanghzou and a bit isolated from everything else.  The design of  the hotel is meant to evoke 1920s London – smoking rooms and billiard rooms and card rooms and a veranda looking out onto the hills and landscaped gardens – and the super-Olympic sized outdoor pool, surrounded by falling waters cut into the hills.   The hotel was all highly modern, and highly high end, otherwise.There was a (modern) movie on the big tv in the sitting room, some sort of 1920s setting English upper class drama.  Think Bertie Worcester, but not his …