Culture in the Blender

I’m homesick for China. I think anywhere in Asia would do.  Yesterday morning was rainy with a hint of fog, and I thought for a second that it was smog. I’m listening to Chinese music and wondering what’s in fashion. I want my morning bus to be one of the old Beijing buses with the [...]

Pollock and van Reken mention in their groundbreaking book that one of the unique properties of third culture kids is that we experience the world as three-dimensional, meaning that we can easily imagine that we are on the scene of a news report and understand the consequences, suffering or difficulty reported on.For me, the 四川 (Sìchuān) earthquake is [...]

Something that I rarely hear mentioned in the West regarding xenophobia and discrimination is the existence of China’s minorities, except for Tibetans. (張惠妹 (A*mei) is a Taiwanese minority.) Especially in the US, people seem rather unaware that 汉族 (Hànzú) or Hàn nationality people, who are the ‘ethnic Chinese’ people, have been busy conquering and oppressing [...]

I am visiting my parents at the moment, and while I’m here I thought it might be a nice idea of do some 太极拳 (tàijíquán) with my mother, since we learned in the same context. She bought some 太极拳 (tàijíquán) VCDs in China, and we were going to watch them and follow the instructions to [...]

I’ve been very busy lately, with appointment lists filling most of my days and the remainder filled with research, grading and market research. The latter three have tended to spill into nights and weekends a fair bit as well. I’m in some serious need of calm. I was reading some kind of “women’s” magazine, where [...]

给大家新年快乐!

春节快乐!

Happy Spring Festival!

I learned something interesting in my culture and psychology class the other day. Americans think that the world is more malleable than the self. (Whereas Chinese, and probably most everyone else, think that the self is more malleable than the world.) Maybe that’s why so many Americans play their music out loud without headphones on [...]

I took a 太极拳 (Tai4ji2quan2) class in 重庆 (Chong2qing4) sort of to have something to do over the summer. It was nice to get to know some of my traditions. I liked it, even though it’s not really something someone my age “should” be doing. I can’t help but want to be one of those [...]

Reuters reports that an ad saluting the mothers of the June 4 天安门广场 (Tian1an1men2 Guang3chang3, Tiananmen Square) massacre got published in the Chengdu Evening News! The person who placed it also tried other newspapers, and the clerks who handled the requests didn’t know what June 4 referred to. The other clerks called a supervisor. This [...]