(Ed Note: With several major projects in the works and with a gig next week guest blogging for James Fallows, I asked my lovely wife and co-conspirator Yajun if she’d like to help out for the next few weeks.)
I was born in a country where 90% of the people share a single ethnicity, where we have no national religion, but where we do have the stomachs to eat any living creature on earth. So it came as a shock to me, later than it probably should have, that some people may not eat certain things out of choice or because of their religion. Sure, China has Hui people who are Muslim and who eat Qingzhen (Halal) food, but prior to university I’d only met a handful of Chinese Muslims in my life. And even in school, it wasn’t that I didn’t respect my friends’ aversion to pork, but it was just completely outside my own upbringing. I don’t think I lacked sensitivity, just a sense of perspective about what diversity means.
This problem is even harder for my mom. During Spring Festival, some of my husband’s students came to our place for a dinner party. One of the students