Chunjie is a time to catch up one work, fulfill my jiaozi quota for the quarter, and to write snarky blog posts about the holiday season while pretending to work on my laptop.
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I’ve been riding the subway more. I don’t know why. I’ve never before been particularly masochistic nor do I generally enjoy close physical contact with strangers. But it seems an economical way to get around the city now that every available road surface is jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive. Having spent quite a few commuting hours below ground now, I’ve started to distinguish a taxonomy of my fellow passengers, including several species which I find it best to avoid. 
Does singing “Red Songs” really mean a new revival of the old Party spirit? Or is it something that has been happening all along but makes for easy headlines with Bo Xilai’s recent Chongqing campaign and the CPC anniversary just around the corner? A Guest Post by Zhang Yajun. (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 |
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