Yajun writing in The Guardian last week: “As many Chinese web users have written, it’s possible that there is a kind of sickness in Chinese society that has infected us to our core, and which has been growing for a long time.”
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An article in the Global Times about How to Marry a Billionaire causes Yajun to wonder about the cost of equating money with love in today’s China. (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 You know it’s cold in your little hutong home when your hibernating pet turtle wakes up, climbs out of his bowl, and is found huddling under the space heater. Still not sure how he did it, we’re thinking he had an outside accomplice with our cat the most likely suspect. Some hits from around the web on this sunny and cold Friday afternoon: ———- Yu Hua has garnered considerable press with the publication in English of his novel Brothers. Ian Johnson interviews the author for the Wall Street Journal Asia Edition and I was particularly struck by this observation on public trust: But what bothers Mr. Yu more about these obvious problems is a lack of trust in society. The book trade itself is good example of this, he says. “It’s really hard for a young author to break in because there are few reputable critics. It’s corrupt. People pay critics to write all sorts of nonsense.” He says reviewers charge 3,000 to 5,000 yuan for a review. The accusation is impossible to prove but it is true that China has a weak scene of literary criticism. He contrasts the situation to a western publication like France’s Le Monde. He |
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