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Racial Profiling
[mouse click a photo to enlarge it] My efforts at racial profiling began when a Chinese friend, who like many Chinese still harbor a great grudge against the Japanese, not only on account of Japanese brutality during their aggression into China beginning in 1937, but because of the continuing Japanese denial and historical revisionism…. Anyway, […]
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Musical Magnetism
Still Minatures [mouse click on a photo to enlarge it] Tomoko Ando and Yukiko Hayashi live in Chiba City, across the bay from Tokyo, a locale that the Lonely Planet Japan guide dismisses as being of no particular interest. Perhaps not in terms of shines, temples or beautiful volcanic cones. But music has a powerful […]
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Sake Socialism
[mouse click on a photo to enlarge it] If you are fortunate, as I am, to have a friend and former scientific colleague willing to show you the sights in Tokyo, I suggest allotting equal time to some quiet, far-from-Ginza sashimi bar as to the glitz itself. Perhaps it was the sake more than the […]
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Of Mice and Matriarchs
[mouse click on a photo to enlarge it] On my hotel room wall in Hanoi hung a print of mediocre artistic quality, but provocative content. Stretched out on the long horizontal axis was a bridal procession — I suppose in the Vietnamese tradition, but familiar to me as Chinese tradition. Ranks of musicians and well-wishers […]
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Where have all the flowers gone?
[mouse click on a photo to enlarge it] The tale goes like this. During the Cultural Revolution, when intellectuals were sent to the countryside for a little re-education, Yunnan Province was regarded as the ultimate boondock, the place for the most incorrigible of intellectuals. Then the old guy died, and things began to relax, and […]
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Sea Dragons
[mouse click on a photo to enlarge it] You probably associate the Gulf of Tonkin with the first phoney pretext for a president’s taking America into undeclared war on a foreign country. (Perhaps I’m too young to know of earlier ones. Mexico? For those even younger than I, know that honest-faced Colin Powell’s glossy Power-Point […]
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War Reparations
[mouse click on a photo to enlarge it] Back at the keyboard after a three-week vacation in China’s Yunnan Province and Vietnam. Which border to step across was open to taste: Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar all abut. But, naturally, I chose Vietnam. I have a long relationship to Vietnam. I had earlier taken pains — […]
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A Monday Matinee
As the temperature and humidity climb in Hangzhou interest in my brilliant expositions of the eroterica of biotechnology fades. So I concede to the relaxations of summer by offering to show instead a new American film, a documentary on health care. With apologies to Moore and the Weinstein brothers, the only available copy was a […]
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Circumstance and Pomp
I t’s commencement week at ZheDa = ZJU = Zhejiang University. (Since the Chinese language doesn’t have letters, it can’t form “initials”, but it does have syllables, each corresponding to a character, so it can leave out all but a few key ones, leaving a shortened, but euphonious expression.) A little late by American standards. […]
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Bigbrotherliness
[mouse click on a photo to enlarge it] Some of my readership (i.e. one of the four) have asked about internet access in China. Let’s consider Wikipedia, about whose inaccessibility I have groused previously. The public facts go something like this: in the fall of 2005, when Microsoft and Yahoo and Cisco Systems, were falling […]