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After months of planning, YJ and I finally tied the knot on September 8th in Tianjin. YJ looked beautiful (of course) and I tried to keep up with all that was happening. We hired a bus to take our friends from Beijing to Tianjin for the evening wedding and our good friend Nels arranged cocktails for everybody for the ride.
Of course when the guests finally did arrive, we proceeded to try and blow them up. For you see, the bride’s car arrived just ahead of the bus and as the car carrying YJ swept up the drive to the hotel entrance, her uncles set off a thunderous collection of firecrackers (really, almost m-80s) just as the first of our friends and co-workers were disembarking the bus. Here I am, trapped between greeting my friends and shielding the wife of YJ’s boss from flying shrapnel and debris while YJ’s family is urging me to run through the explosives to meet her car.
No matter. There were no injuries and nerves were calmed through cocktails. I greeted YJ’s car, bowed three times (once with her aunts pulling on my neck so as to ensure a suitably low bow–keep in mind that
Fascinating essay in the Boston Globe’s “Ideas” section this past Sunday written by Yale Professor Anthony Kronman. Professor Kronman argues that American universities have given up on teaching the big, fundamental questions to their students in favor of specialized, practical, subject-based curriculum in increasing vogue over the past century. What is the meaning of life or, to put it another way, what is the art of living? Professor Kronman suggests that empirical research in the sciences has served the world well with breathtaking new discoveries, but it has been an ill-fit in the humanities leading to a tightening spiral of minutiae. In a shift of historic importance, America’s colleges and universities have largely abandoned the idea that life’s most important question is an appropriate subject for the classroom. In doing so, they have betrayed their students by depriving them of the chance to explore it in an organized way, before they are caught up in their careers and preoccupied with the urgent business of living itself. This abandonment has also helped create a society in which deeper questions of values are left in the hands of those motivated by religious conviction – a disturbing and dangerous development.
Over the past
With all of the musicians out there Daoist or Buddhist influences to their music, where’s the love for the C-Man?…The brilliant (and it would appear slightly twisted) mind of Sam Crane at The Useless Tree has placed Linkin Park frontman Mike Shinoda (A.k.a. Fort Minor) into the Confucian pantheon. It’s a song made famous by seemingly a thousand different athletic apparel commercials and an equal number of movie trailers, but who knew that Confucius might approve… Fifteen percent concentrated power of willFive percent pleasure, fifty percent painAnd a hundred percent reason to remember the name!
Mike! – He doesn’t need his name up in lightsHe just wants to be heard whether it’s the beat or the micHe feels so unlike everybody else, aloneIn spite of the fact that some people still think that they know himBut f–k em, he knows the codeIt’s not about the salaryIt’s all about reality and making some noiseMakin the story – makin sure his clique stays upThat means when he puts it down Tak’s pickin it up! let’s go!
Who the hell is he anyway?He never really talks muchNever concerned with status but still leavin them star struckHumbled through opportunities given to him despite the
I spent yesterday cruising around the hutongs with a group of my students as well as our program director and Fang Laoshi, a descendant of Manchu bannermen and a real Beijing history buff. Fang Laoshi was a treasure trove of information as we wound our way down Chang’an Dajie, through Tiananmen, up to Houhai and Xihai and then back to our home campus. I think the students found it a little long–five hours of lecture while cycling can be rough on a Sunday morning, but YJ and I had a good time.
We did however attract some unwanted attention. Our stops in front of Zhongnanhai and Tiananmen were both cut short by plain clothes PSB officers who felt that foreign students learning about Chinese culture on bicycle were a danger to national security. Prior to that, Fang Laoshi’s take on Chinese history–he is frank in his opinions of both the good and the bad of China’s recent past–angered an old fellow who wandered by during one of Professor Fang’s explanations and lectured the lecturer that Professor Fang ought only tell foreigners good things lest the Chinese people lose face. Ah yes, objective history–that horrible, horrible threat to precious self-worth.
On
Interesting post on the academic blog, New Kid on the Hallway (“The Glory of Progress“) about the tendency by students and even some scholars to assume that because people from the past didn’t write what we would write or think the way we would think, that somehow this means they were…well, not as smart as we who live in the present day. (I’m excerpting larger than usual sections because the website is blocked in China.)
Something I run into relatively regularly is the idea that people in the past were stupider than modern people. (Granted, it’s not usually stated as bluntly as it was today, when a student explained something we were talking about by saying literally that medieval people were stupider than modern people, but the idea frequently underlies other comments.) I’m curious about how students define “the past” and “modern” in thinking about this – I suspect that they actually draw (entirely unconsciously) on an old school, secular humanist Enlightenment vision of history that disses the Middle Ages, and that they don’t actually believe that the ancient Greeks and Romans were less intelligent than people today – but I’m sure that this idea pops up in many
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