Palate Shock

(photo by Terrapin Trails)

In-and-Out tasted bland after coming back from Cambodia.

Yes, most countries are developing faster than Cambodia.  No infrastructure.  Garbage everywhere.

Yes, there was political instability with the biggest protest in 30 years.

Yes,  I feared social anarchy, plotting my escape to the US embassy or Vietnam.

But after biting into that burger, I couldn't help but feel sorry for the United States.

The United States has one of the most sophisticated infrastructure for growing, transporting, and even scientifically analyzing what we eat.  Yet most American food lacks the capacity to provide nourishment and satisfaction after eating.

Rich and poor Americans alike are constantly hungry, thinking that nourishment comes from quantity, not quality.

Exactly a day after coming back to the US, I walked into Target with my friends.  I was shocked at how sterile the food was.  A whole aisle dedicated to food in bar-form, some only 100 calories!  Boxes are covered with photo-shopped pictures with numbers and chemicals only an organic chemist would understand.  All provide the illusion of fulfillment.

Food in Cambodia is about survival and instinct.  Although some food borrows techniques from modern agricultural science, most of it is still unchanged and organic.

When you drive half an hour away from the city, tanned faces of farmers are sweating, bending, and plucking.  All hope their crop produces something.  The green rice paddy is checkered with patches of dry dirt and weeds.  These are the failures unable to feed, a little closer to death.

The harvest then gets packed briskly and tightly onto anything that runs on gasoline, only to be hoisted across pock-marked roads.

Delivery, seller, buyer all  converge to market, a canopy-covered sweaty arena of organized chaos.  Everyone's movement figuratively and literally tries to survive the mass chaos.

A pedestrian is almost run over by a motorcycle weighed down by onions.

The seller haggles high.  The buyer low.

Mothers and daughters looking, rubbing, smelling, using their feminine instinct to satisfy their family's guts.

Everyone follows the instinct fighting for the last penny.

When the prizes are bought, the food was harvested or killed within the same 24 hours.

The buyer is usually the cook as well.  A good cook will be like a mother tending her baby as she cleans and nurtures the food with all the love and affection she can give.  Sometimes sweating for another 3 hours in the kitchen heat.  When all is said and done, the food is ready to provide nourishment.  When you eat, you feel the power of food down to your very bones.

Food in Cambodia completely satisfies the instinct for hunger.

Isn't He Adorable? : Thoughts on the Value of Translation

(photo by Makoto Kaku)

This afternoon I watched an NHK documentary on Donald Keene, a famous Japanologist who translated and analyzed a corpus of Japanese literature from ancient times to modern times.

He talked about how as a European literature major from Columbia university, he stumbled on Arthur Wiley's translation of "The Tale of Genji" at a  Times Square bookstore.

In his interview he described  "The Tale of Genji" as an escape to the uncertainties of reality.  The book was written simply for the sake of beauty and a beautiful society.  The moment defined the beginning of his career in Japanese literature.

I realized that his success stems from illuminating a part of the human experience that was unknown to the West. He had no competition because no one wanted to go to the wreckage of post-war Japan.

I'm REALLY jealous that he was able to live the life of a mind.   In many ways the life of a literary translator requires the mentality of an artist.  A computer could never translate literary text because translation isn't an algorithm that automatically converts one symbol to another. The first and foremost must communicate the feelings of the human condition.

I'm confused about how to express the relevance of the humanities.  Unlike Keene's career where communication and publication was heavily scrutinized, contemporary society has the opposite problem in that we are barraged with too much unfiltered information that it drowns out authoritative voices like Donald Keene.   The most popular person on the internet has the most credentials, not the person with the most comprehensive line of thought.

Personally I'm conflicted between getting a PhD versus finding an alternative path to study China.  I would have access to resources and connections to professional expertise on the humanities, but this resource is locked behind an ivory tower or digital subscription paywalls.  The alternative  is exploring the humanities without authoritative resources shaped by the internet.  How should this look like?

At least Donald Keene doesn't have to keep justifying the value of his work to the rest of society.  After the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, Keene renounced his US citizenship and moved to Japan.  I've never met Keene, but it's safe to say that he's one of the few rare people in the world that lived a passionate life.

 

The View of Failure in Conventional History

The narrative framework taught in American history classes must fit the American Dream narrative.  Work hard and you can live the dream, regardless of your background.

But what if the individual is unable to accomplish one's goals?  Or goes against American culture?  Focusing on the individual level, the American history narrative is a stark dichotomy.  You are either a success or failure in the American Dream.  No individual historical figure is admirable after failure.

Americans associate the inability to accomplish a feat or reach a state as a "failure."  Failure is a subject we admonish, but rarely sympathize with.  When we "fail" in this sense, we blame out own ability or lack of resources.  We rarely accept it, regardless of who or what is responsible.

Su Shi was a failure in this context.  The emperor sends Su Shi away as political exile for going against the Wang Anshi reforms.  Su shi is unable to prevent suffering of his people and the eventual fall of the Northern Song.

Yet within a decade after Su Shi's death, his legacy was still a threat to Emperor Huizong.

 

(Also my favorite emperor in Chinese history.)

Lin Yutang points out heaven could not forgive the Northern Song's treatment of Su Shi.  A thunderbolt shattered a stone steele containing Su Shi's name and opposition party members to the emperor in Wende Hall, the place where Huizong's  government convenes. Emperor Huizong commented, "His stone steele is destroyed, but these people are hard to forget!"

Su Shi was unique in that he was both poet and politician in comparison to American history.  He was able to express his worldview through political maneuvering and artistic human expression.

I hope as I continue to read Lin Yutong's work, he can show me why I should admire the failings of Su Shi.

 

Su of the Eastern Slope 蘇東坡

I've been on hiatus studying for a test that could not test me.  I'm back on my blog!

I have to put "The Dream of the Red Chamber" on hold for this man, Su Shi:

(Yuan Dynasty, Painted by Zhao Mengfu)

I recently bought the Chinese copy of Lin Yutang's "The Gay Genius:  The Biography of Su Dong Po" delivered from Taiwan.

I have many reasons for reading Su Shi, but before I make any sweeping statements about his life, please read this poem first:

(Emperor Huizong "draft cursive" 12th century)

No, please don't read the draft cursive.  Heck, I can barely read it.  Su Shi's poem is a reaction to a friend who could write this script.

Su Shi, Shi Cang-shu's "Hall of Drunken Ink" (1068)

All worry and woe in life begins

from learning to read and write---

be able to roughly mark your name

and then you should call it quits.

What point is there in cursive draft

that flaunts the spirit's speed?---

the blur in my eyes when I open a scroll

makes me ill at ease.

Yes, i too have been fond of it,

but always I laugh at myself;

how can we cure this affliction

as it shows itself in you?

You tell me that in doing this

you find a perfect joy,

mind's satisfaction, not distinct

from spirit's roaming free.

Just recently you built a hall

and named it "Drunken Ink,"

comparing this art to drinking wine

that melts anxieties.

I see now that Liu Zong-yuan

wrote something not untrue;

such affliction may crave dirt and ask

as if it were haute cuisine.

Still we may say that in this art

you have achieved the heights:

worn-out brushes pile by your walls

like little hills and knolls.

When the whim strikes, one swish of the hand

and a hundred sheets are gone:

in a fleeting moment a splendid steed

bestrides an entire land.

My own script takes shape to my mood,

I have no special technique:

the dots and lines just follow my hand,

it's a bother to try too hard.

Then tell me why in your critiques

I am singled out for praise,

isolated words an scraps of paper

all find themselves collected.

Your script may be properly judged

no lower than Zhong or Zhang;

on a lower level my own is still better

than that of Luo or Zhao.

You should no longer sit by the pool

and practice so ardently,

in the end just take all that writing silk

and use it to stuff a quilt.

Owen, Stephen. "The Ornaments of "Literati" Culture." An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. 640-41. Print.

During my darker, colder days of college, Su Shi knew the right words to speak to my soul.  His life by some standards may be seen as a "failure" because of his fall from political power.  Yet after a thousand years we remember him like an good old friend.

Lin Yutang puts it this way:  knowing a thousand year old dead guy isn't hard, you just need to write.  The living haven't finished telling their stories.  As the old saying goes, we can decide when the coffin shuts.

Time to Enjoy the Moon

(Portrait of Su Shi by Zhao Mengfu.  Yuan.  Source)

水調歌頭

Shui Diao Ge Tou

蘇軾

Su Shi

明月幾時有？把酒問青天。

When will the moon be bright?  I raise my wine to the blue sky.

不知天上宮闕，今夕是何年。

Not sure if the lunar palace, knows what year it is.

我欲乘風歸去，又恐瓊樓玉宇，高處不勝寒。

I wish to ascend with the wind to the top,  I also fear at the marble jade palace, its high and can't withstand the cold.

起舞弄清影，何似在人間。

I dance making a shadow, like you were in the mortal world.

轉朱閣，低綺戶，照無眠。

Orbiting through the red chambers, hanging low by the window, with brightness I cannot sleep.

不應有恨，何事長向別時圓？

You shouldn't respond with such hatred, why must you be full when people separate.

人有悲歡離合，月有陰晴圓缺，此事古難全。

Humans are sad, happy, seperated and together, the moon waxes and wanes. From old times it's hard to be complete.

但願人長久，千里共嬋娟。

But I long for people to live long, so from far away we can bask in your beauty.

Poor Su Shi, after living for years in exile you still pain to see you little brother. After 900 years, your longing for warmth and love still resonate today.

Regardless of whether you are enjoying mooncakes with tea and family, or contemplating your blessings in loneliness, just remember that with the vicissitudes of life, everyone has the yearning for love and belonging.  Feel the present, and count the people who love you.

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!

It Pays to Read: Reading is worth $960 an hour!

There's a story about a miser during the Victorian era who either kept a bond certificate or cash sitting in the bank for his entire life. When he withdrew his money, the buying power of his asset shrunk due to inflation. He ended up being poor at the end of his life.

What if you never read this story and lived this scenario? 43% of workers have less than $10000 for retire. Imagine how many more have no investment plan and are just shoving money into a savings account?

Reading allows you to relive the thought process of another human being. A good chapter book (no pictures) represents roughly a year to a thousands of years of human experience. If you read at a modest pace of 20 pages an hour, you could finish a 300 page book in 15 hours. Let's be modest and some author wrote a book in a year. Assuming that this writer was working 40 hours a week, for every one hour you read, you exchange 133 hours of the author's work!  If you assume that author is working at federal minimum wage, reading is worth $960/hr!

Let's say instead you read about ancient Rome. Let's exclude the author and count the total living hours of each Roman. On average there was roughly 50 million people living every year, and the Roman Empire was roughly 2000 years old. Let's say a book on the Roman Empire was 3000 pages. Assuming your 20 page reading rate, for every one hour of reading about Rome, you exchange roughly 76,000 man-YEARS of human experience! Instead of living and dying 1000 times, you can read for an hour!  If we assume the federal minimum wage again, that's $4.8 billion dollars an hour!  Take that quantitative easing!

I hope this is one reason to motivate you to read.

[caption id="attachment_389" align="aligncenter" width="300"] (My favorite book.  $15 USD) 

[/caption]

The New Academic

(Drool.  Source.)

People would invest more in academia if people saw its value.

For the most of human history, historical artifacts and archives belonged to the rich and powerful. Today it's slightly better. I can walk into a natural history museum and look at prehistorical fossils, or extinct birds stuffed by taxidermists. But fossil are still sold like jackets on Rodeo Drive.

There were two valuable lessons that I learned from my classical Chinese class:

1) It's always tempting to impose your narrative about a subject, but be objective as possible or you lose truth.

2) Always know your source, or else anyone can impose their own narrative.

Science can recreate an experiment to examine if claims are true. If a word is smudged off a primary historical document, the word is lost to history, never to be seen again. Imagine if the word "people" was ripped out of the preamble of the US Constitution?

Data in the humanities is literally ink fading from old pieces of paper. It's inevitable that knowledge will be lost over time.

The internet is powerful enough store data through the ravages of time, but so far we've been poor at storing and disseminating academic work.

I don't want a PhD in the humanities because the process of getting one is prehistoric. For Chinese, I would have to study know English, Chinese and French/German. After 6 years of rigorous research, I would be in debt, unemployed knowing something that barely anyone can understand.

I don't want to belittle the work of graduate students. We need experts to be the gatekeepers of cultural knowledge, but this knowledge must be relevant to the public. The PhD in the humanities currently stores its knowledge in university libraries and locks academic work within paywalls. A person from the public can only access general factoids through Wikipedia and sift through disparate internet sources. There's no academic critique or analysis of cultural data that the public can ponder, and the general public has no medium to respond beyond the comment boards full of extremists and trolls.

I hope that the new generation of humanities PhD's finds a way to effectively distribute cultural data to everyone. I fear that if this doesn't happen, digital noise may drown the value of the humanities.

Until then I will keep blogging. Or as Haruki Murakami puts it:

“If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals . . . We are all human beings, individuals, fragile eggs. We have no hope against the wall: it's too high, too dark, too cold. To fight the wall, we must join our souls together for warmth, strength. We must not let the system control us -- create who we are. It is we who created the system. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)”

Fancy words

Chinese is unique in that every character has it's own unique meaning and sound.  English uses the same 26 characters to phonetically sound out a word.

Whenever I see characters that I don't understand, one of the following things happens:

1.  I have no clue.

2.  I know what it sounds like, but I have no idea what it means.

3.  I have no idea what is sounds like, but I know what it means.

The Dream of the Red Chamber is describing Qing dynasty aristocrats.  Here's an example of my thought process when I encounter fresh text:

頭上戴著金絲八寶攢珠髻，

On her head she carries gold thread and carries 8 precious jewels something

綰著朝陽五鳳挂珠釵；

Some verb dealing with thread  when five brilliant phoenixes hangs a pearl pin

項上戴著赤金盤螭瓔珞圈；

On top there is a red-gold disk of something insect something something hoop.

裙邊繫著豆綠宮條、雙衡比目玫瑰佩；

On her dress a myriad of bean red palace? strips, a pair of horizontal rose amulet

身上穿著縷金 百蝶穿花大紅洋緞窄褙襖，

On her clothes gold threaded hundreds of butterflies with bright red flowers fine? something something some type of clothing.

外罩五彩刻絲石青銀鼠褂;

Her outside something rainbow stone cut green fox scarf?

下著翡翠撒花洋縐裙。

Underneath something jade-colored flower something something dress?

Here's David Hawkes translation:

Her chignon was enclosed in a circlet of gold filigree and clustered pearls.  it was fastened with a pin embellished with flying phoenixes, from whose beaks pearls were suspended on tiny chains.  Her necklet was of red gold int he form of a coiling dragon.  Her dress had a fitted bodice and was made of dark red silk damask with a pattern of flowers and butterflies in raise gold thread.  her jacked was lined with ermine.  It was a slate-blue stuff with woven insects in coloured silks.  her under-skirt was of a turquoise-coloured imported silk crepe embroidered with flowers  (Cao 91).


Geez, I have to be Tim Gunn to understand this high level of fashion vocabulary!

(He'd tell me "make it work!"    Source)

If you want a visual of who this person is, it's Wang Xifeng (王熙鳳)：

(Source)

I have 117 chapters to go...

Works Cited

Cao, Xueqin, David Hawkes, E, Gao, and John Minford. The Story of the Stone: A Chinese Novel in Five Volumes. London: Penguin, 1973. Print.

The Humanities Trump Absolutists (Part 2)

(Source)

...debate with Christian converter continued...

"If goodness doesn't from God, then where does it come from?"

I don't think some higher being appropriates goodness, like from moral Federal Reserve.

I'm not sure if you believe in the science of heredity, but the scientific reason for altruism derives for the need to pass genetic information.  So your siblings have half your DNA, cousins 1/4, etc.  There's the argument that it saves genetic information.

Mencius believes in 性本善, our nature was originally good.  Here cites the example of a the baby and the well.  Wells in ancient China weren't surrounded by a high barrier, it was literally a deep pit in the ground.  When one sees a baby crawl very close towards the hole, regardless of whether the observer desires to save the baby, we all have the gut reaction to fear the death of the child.  He argues that this gut reaction alone justifies the innate good nature of human beings.

"Yes, there are people who can reach a certain level of morality, but recognizing God brings you to His level of moral salvation."

Ah!  Here's what I find most disturbing:  non-believers are sent straight to Hell, regardless of their actions on Earth.  Confucius and Mencius didn't have Christ to die for their sins, do you expect me to believe that they're going Hell?  God sounds clingy and passive-aggressive.

Let's assume Mencius and Confucius was allowed to pass the pearly gates of Saint Peter.  I still don't believe in heaven and hell.  Let's assume there was some grouchy person who harbored extremely evil and violent thoughts, but never outwardly acted on them.  He goes to heaven, and his version of heaven is acting on those violent thoughts. Through your bible, it's not okay to commit for a finite lifetime, but God will provide an eternity of sinful acts if you're patient for your living life?  That doesn't add up to me.

I believe true moral salvation comes from processing one's experience and thinking critically about how to act with morals and compassion.  Everything else is trivia and propaganda.

"Mind I can get your phone number?  My church plans to have a bible study session."

Sorry, I don't give my personal information to strangers.

I finished my nachos.

The Humanities Trump Absolutists (Part 1)

(My Achilles heel.  Source.)

So I'm innocently eating nachos at a public eating area, and suddenly a religious person attempts to convert me.

I talk to Christian converters if I'm in the mood.  I listened to Christopher Hitchens over Youtube, so I decided debate.  Here's roughly the dialogue:

"So what's your exposure to Christianity?"

I don't like the influence of Christianity on culture because it's a presumed basis for Judeo-Christian culture.  I felt my public school education was heavily influenced by Christian values  (I don't say "under God" for the pledge of allegiance). Once I studied Chinese culture, I saw how religion can manipulate for political gain.

I'm skeptical of societies that base the premise of power and good on some monotheistic being.  Stepping aside from Christianity for a second, the Mandate of Heaven 天命 justifies the power of the emperor, and all of his subjects must "obey" (I use find quotes in my conversations).

Having moral authority can easily leverage political power.  If we look at the initial relationship between the East and West, specifically the 18th century when the industrial revolution begins in the world.  When the British Empire sends Lord McCartney to Emperor Qianlong's court, we see the clash of cultural titans.  McCartney refuses to kowtow because he believes divine authority is King George III, while Qianlong thinks he himself is a divine being.

As time passes, Britain jams its foot into China like a cheap salesman.  The British attempt to claim moral authority by depicting the Chinese as immoral heathens.

Before The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, Chinese Characteristics by Arthur Smith was the most popular book about China sold to the West.   It's written by a Protestant minister attempting to generalize Chinese culture.  Both books are horrendously biased, racist, and left an indelible impression about Chinese people.

"Yes.  I agree that immoral people use the word of God for immoral gain.  That's why we have Adam and Eve.  Because they ate the forbidden fruit, they've sinned and need to repent.  All of us sinned, so we need to move closer to God again.   Real experiences with God requires the individual to interpret the Bible themselves."

Are you familiar with Christopher Hitchens?  He calls himself an "anti-theist" because he's against any form of religion.

I agree with his argument with original sin because it has certain glaring contradictions.  The bible claims that all people have sinned and need to repent, yet the same God has a predestined plan for these beings and expect total subservience, or else said being will receive eternal damnation.  Humans only have a book written by someone else at earliest 100 years after Jesus' death to be the true word of God.  Humans can't even agree what happened yesterday, let alone something 100 years ago.  Why would God want flawed beings to serve Him?

"But it's only through the experience of God that one can be truly good."

So you're saying that only a superior being has absolute moral authority?  And everyone else who isn't divine is completely clueless?  What makes God different from the Emperor of China?

Here's what I think about goodness...

How Do We Make The Humanities Relevant?

Okay, you've heard  the cliché that internet is revolutionary and how everyone's life has changed, blah blah.

The internet is a Catch 22.  Information can easy disseminate, but its  horrendously huge size overloads the typical surfer.  Sometimes I read webpage after webpage, only to realize I don't remember anything.

So far the humanities was built from mostly rich or high status people.  Most academic work require similar professionals who painstakingly evaluate the thoughts another human being.

People arguing against the humanities say the results of this process are irrelevant to the present.  It's old, snobby, and too high-brow for the average person.  Who has time to go the library to borrow paper when you can download?  Humanities journals cost thousands of dollars to subscribe annually, Netflix is only $8 dollars a month.

Those in history who had access to this material were either filthy rich, or cloistered within a scholarly community.

People are more willing to fund STEM related degrees because STEM can demonstrate it's relevance to society.  A person with a STEM degree can quantify and solve society's utilitarian problems.

But modern culture is insufficient to satisfy the present moral needs of the individual.  It can't express death because its still progressing forward.  The general public wants a predictable sitcom.  Harry Potter needs children.

Unlike a blogpost or a movie, the humanities wants to express human beings before they disappear.  I don't literally mean an act of death, but all the humanities subjects recognize that the human must die.  Documenting material accounts for their existence.

Sadly modern academia fortresses the wealth of the humanities away from the general public.   Physical libraries only hold books that it assumes a certain number will read.  Public education only wants to follow standardized tests and government curricula, students don't have time to learn.

How Do We Make The Humanities Relevant?

I don't think a large, accessible, open source institution exists yet, but the internet might be the start to an answer.

Institutions that traditionally hold knowledge are slowly eroding in legitimacy. Resources like the links on UnCollege are building communities that study without professional instruction.  Of course, internet self-study isn't the silver bullet.  It can't provide the instant reaction of another human being.

I dream that 10-20 years from now traditional public education as we know it will disappear. We'll have so much Youtube videos that any person interested in any subject can watch a lecture.  We would completely erase the neurotic need to subdivide students by age, and again by subject, and then again by grades.  Active students create their own projects, choose their own mentors/communities, work with their own style.  Because isn't that what happens when they leave school anyways?

I end by repeating this open ended question:

How Do We Make The Humanities Relevant?
Comment to conversate!

First Impressions

The Red Chamber Chapter 3

From the strange netherworld of talking rocks, we finally reach the setting of the main plot with the Rongguo mansion.  My favorite character in the story Lin Daiyu meets everyone in the family, I assume the first time.



(This photo is the 2010 remake of The Dream of the Red Chamber)

The  2010 remake is eye candy.  When I found it, I realized it was better than my imagination.  Here's essentially the video of the 3rd chapter.  Even if you don't know Chinese, body language tells you everything.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tanlyBZoVRQ

Reading the book the second time, new details about the beginning that gave me chills.  But let's stick with Lin Daiyu for a moment.

Here's a teenage girl at the prime of her youth who just lost her mother.  Her father just sent her to her maternal family to be taken care of. Her maternal family is one of the most powerful people in China,  She has to quickly shift from her personal problems and fit in because she's an outsider.

First impressions are like a facebook picture, it only gives you a shell.  But once we crack the shell and see more of the individual, we can't fully determine the goodness of the other person.

I make terrible first impressions.  In the beginning I would introduce myself with the wrong name.  I'm an introverted person.  It takes all of my effort to not choke on my own saliva or defecate in my own pants.  But once I tell myself that the stakes aren't high, and most of the time other people's judgment doesn't matter, I've gotten better about it.

When I first read this scene, I thought Daiyu would feel at ease with rich family wanting to ease the pain of death.  But I didn't consider her status before entering the mansion.  Other than familial obligations between the Rongguo estate and Lin Daiyu, Daiyu is completely alone.  She doesn't know if she can receive unconditional love like what her parents provide her.  She has no idea what these new people value.

Before stepping into a room full of new people, everyone is trying to weigh and calculate value of each other.  If one is going with trustworthy companions, one feels safer in this setting because their reactions can give more clues and details about strangers.  Then again, your certainty could be dead wrong.

The only thing you can do is guess.

 

 

Are We Average?

Chapter 2  The Dream of the Red Chamber

When Yu Cun and his friend talk about the Ning and Rongguo mansions, they discuss the high birth of the founders of that family and how unique cirumstances place them high in society's ranks.

Baoyu's father also hires a monk to display objects and asks the baby Baoyu to choose what he prefers.  Instead of the scholars brush or money, Baoyu chooses women's accessories like makeup and jewelry.  Baoyu's father assumes Baoyu will chase women and be a wastrel in the future.

Yu Cun then discusses how ethers of good and evil concentrate in certain areas, and people who possess extremes of ether has great power to do good or evil while everyone else remains "average" in their respective places.

Christopher Hitchens points out that the Christian concept of God having a unique plan for the individual is ludicrous when one tries to reconciles original sin.  If humans are faulty, why would God entrust the individual to serve Him?  And if humans are fallible, how could the individual interpret or understand the doings of God?  Hitchens argues that "uniqueness" through perfecting God's vision is an excuse for an individual to feel self-entitlement.

Hitchens tells us recognition our averageness and insignificance puts us in awe in relation to the grand scheme of the universe.  He tells us to look at images from the Hubble Telescope and realize that the universe is unique for what it is.

The quintessential breeding ground for average is public schools, especially high school.  There's standard behavior codes and curriculum that everyone must follow.  I still remember the those drab grey "guidelines" manuals.  You paradoxically have to find some way to be unique for college in this environment!  If you think you're special then you're obsessed with average.

Average is a relative and ambiguous term, like conservative and liberal.  You can't average something without looking at everyone else, but who cares what other people think?  Mark Twain said it best:  everyone has a story to tell.  Uniqueness is the average.

Comment to conversate!

 

Why the House Always Wins

The Dream of the Red Chamber Chapter 2



That zero means millions of dollars in profit!
When Jia Yucun (賈雨村) was going out for a walk, he encounters a dilapidated temple.  The two columns at the front of the door has a couplet:

身後有餘忘縮手

When there's plenty behind, one forgets to hold back

眼前無路想回頭

When one there's nothing ahead, one thinks of turning back

There's something called the sunk costs fallacy.   It says one makes decisions about current conditions based on how one invested in the past.

Here's an example I used for my niece that simplifies gambling.

Let's say we bet on a coin toss game and I'm the house.  If it's heads, I win a dollar.  If tails, you win a dollar.  If we decide to play one round, one dollar is at stake.  If we decide to play 100 rounds, 100 dollars at stake.

If we assume the coin is fair, most likely you and I will win 50 dollars.  There might be a chance that I win 49, and you win 51, or visa versa.  There's also the possibility that I win 1 dollar, and you win 99.  But the probability of getting a 49-51 state is much higher than 1-99.

Here's a cute website about binomial probability.  You do the math.

But let's simplify things for the math inept.

Let's go back to the coin toss.  If you win, I give you a dollar.  But if I win, you have to give me 1.01.  After 100 rounds, most likely you WIN 50 dollars, and I WIN 55 dollars.  No big deal, right?

Ah, but let's look at this way, I LOST 50 dollars to pay your winnings, but you LOST 55 to pay my winnings!  If we just take the difference between what was lost and won for each person, I WON five bucks, you LOST 5 bucks.

But if you're a little sunk in the hole, you can win it back right?  SUNK COSTS FALLACY!!!!

1000 rounds?  I win $50.

10,000 rounds?  I win $500.

What if I lived in a world where many people agreed to play against much more than their odds for 24 hours a day?  It would be like some sort of cash gathering machine!

It's called a casino!

Comment to conversate!

The Book Opens with a Dream

SPOILER:  The Dream of the Red Chamber Chapter 1.

Most people fall asleep by trying to blank out their minds, or sing a tune inside their heads.  I have to the think of the weirdest possible thing and follow the logic.  For instance, I might think about the United Nations roll call with all zoo animals, or ostriches might try to sell different kinds of sand on the home shopping network.

For some reason odd situations turn into though provoking dreams.  Last week I dreamt I was a children's raffle and I was sitting next to the President Obama and the Supreme Court.  We were discussing whether the common man had the moral capacity to judge fairness for other people.  I was sitting next to Justice Kennedy, while Sotomayor dyed her hair blonde.

The Dream of the Red Chamber opens with a talking rock.  The story of the stone, which happens to be the alternative title to the book, is about the stone's dream to experience the mortal world.  The story is already written on the stone, so the author forces the reader to frame the story as a recollection of the stone's dream in the mortal world.

When we were kids, our uncorrupted imaginations dreamt of fanciful realities that felt possible to exist.  Dreams feel possible because kids lack the capacity to account for reality.

There were three things I wanted to be when I was a kid:  a power ranger, the president of China, or a food critic.  I learned about the communist party in China.  My parents discouraged me from spending my life critiquing food, there's Yelp for that.  I still want to beat up someone of comparable stature though, that's number 1 on my bucket list.

Sometimes having the temptation of a dream is better than it becoming reality. Sometimes its a reason for living.   Sometimes it can be a foolish fantasy.  Here's a blog post from Mark Mason about someone's rape fantasy almost coming true.

So what does Cao Xueqin think?  Here's his poem that sets the tone for the rock's dream:

滿紙荒唐言

Man1 zhi3 huang1 tang2 yan2

Paper full of gibberish

一把辛酸淚

yi4 ba3 xin1 suan1 lei4

All full of bitter tears

都云作者癡

dou1 yun2 xuo4 zhe3 chi1

All say the writer is crazy

誰解其中味

Shei2 jie3 qi2 zhong1 wei4

Who can understand the meaning of all this?

* I left the pinyin and tone because

the sound of the words are rhythmic.

What are/were your dreams?  Have they changed over time?  Comment to converse!

The Power of Narrative

SPOILER ALERT!  GAME OF THRONES!

Here's a conversation between two bureaucrats of within the fictional kingdom.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH7sIOBJqLA

Start from 1:48 onwards.

Narrative is the most powerful motivation behind human action.  Without narrative, action has no relation of consequence and becomes chaotic.

American history has no utilitarian purpose.  One can't build roads and bridges with this knowledge, yet American history is taught for the good majority of public school education.  Americans roughly agree that all men are created equal and the individual can determine one's fate in life.

But why aren't we taught Norwegian history?  Are the past actions of Americans more important than the peoples of Norway?  Wouldn't that imply that one group of people are more important than another?

To a large extent, American history is public propaganda.  Instead of our education system providing critical thinking tools to analyze and contextualize history and culture that an individual may value, any other culture that doesn't relate of fit within the narrative is implicitly sub-par.

One could counter by noting that studying the movement of American history charts a path of progression and improvement.  Without understanding this evolution we do not see how the thoughts of the past are relevant to our core beliefs today.

Hogwash.  Sociology and philosophy provide enough reasons to justify compassion to our fellow man, but to assume knowing history is reason enough to justify present actions and conditions is a dangerous lie.  Blind attachment to narrative is a cheap and lazy way to justify our actions.

The American narrative believes that the Constitution and democracy is the source of its current advance.  Our moral narrative justifies capitalism and our right to profit.

The Chinese narrative believes its age and history gives it precedence to be "superior" to any other foreign culture.  The name Zhongguo literally means "center country."

Narrative is not absolute truth.  It's only a frame.

This is the lesson I learned from "The Dream of the Red Chamber" (紅樓夢)。

So far my blog has been a semi-random mish mash of little curios in Chinese literature.  At first I thought following Chinese literature anthologies like DeBary and Bloom or Stephen Owen could carry an interesting narrative framework, but a chronological framework is only useful for academia and reference.

From now on my blog will discuss Chinese culture from the standpoint of "The Red Chamber."  Hopefully the narrative frame will be interesting as it was 300 years ago.

 

 

Learning Mandarin

Pai Mai is training the main character Uma Thurman in Kill Bill 2.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEjI0A9iMow

When I see Uma Thurman, I can't help but think about my early days in Chinese school.

My Chinese school had central A/C, but starting out was painful, boring, and repetitive.

My first Chinese teacher was a former radio news reporter in Taiwan, so her Mandarin Chinese was pitch perfect.

Everyday weekday after "English" school was 3 hours of "Chinese school."  For the first six months I didn't write a single character.  We reviewed the Taiwan phonetic table known as Zhuyin Fuhao and practiced pronouncing every permutation.  Here's a table:



Multiply this by 4 and you can pronounce any character in Chinese!  Although the list is intimidating, English fills up an entire book!

The first set of words I wrote was my Chinese name, 陳俊祥。 If a single stroke was off, you had to re-write a page worth of your name, or around 150 times!!

The first character I learned besides my name was "好。" The radical for girl and boy are smooshed together to make 好， and it makes perfect sense because that's how you greet people.  The conversation oddly turned to why procreating children is good.

Every character was written in these neat little white boxes like this.



One mistake and you had to rewrite a character in another column 14 times.

I got plenty of hand cramps like Pai Mai's training.

I wrote sentences in 1 year

I wrote paragraphs in 3 years.

I wrote essays 5 years.

Before entering college I knew HOW to study Chinese, but I didn't know WHY.

Then I knew why.

During the last day of my language class, my college Chinese teacher gave us this advice:

"Right now you are all at the peak of your Chinese ability.  For most of you will slope downward gradually and forget.  But if you want to maintain what you have I only have one word:  Read.  There is no shortcut.  No trick.  Just read as much as you can."

Something within me still wants to learn this beautiful ancient language. Although I can carry a basic conversation, I'm still too far from an educated Chinese person.

After 17 years, my hands still cramp.



 

La Mian Chinese Noodle Recipe in English! 牛肉拉麵

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahr-bIm6MrU

0:44  1 clear, 2 white, 3 red, 4 green, 5 yellow

0:54  Let’s introduce the ingredients! Beef, Noodle flour, scallion, daikon, cilantro, salt, msg, pepper, LYE / SODA WATER/ alkali powder (BE SURE THIS IS FOOD GRADE AND SOMETHING YOU CAN FIND IN A SUPERMARKET, NOT A HARDWARE STORE!)

1:12  PROVERB: A SOUP BEFORE A MEAL, SURPASSES GOOD MEDICINE

1:14 STEP ONE: Make beef broth *Throw the meat in like the video

1:27 It’s healthy

1:31 STEP 2: Mix the Noodle dough 1:39 For every 1 kg of noodle flour, add 10gram of salt and 5 grams of lye/soda water

1:42 As the old saying goes, “Salt is the bones, lye/soda water are the nerves”

1:50 Add water little at a time, DON’T POUR TOO MUCH!

2:01 Mix it until it barely clumps together Skim off the fat, this is a clear soup after all! LA MIAN CAN STRENGTHEN THE BODY! Making noodles is good exercise, like a dancing child!

2:29 WHEN YOU’RE READY GIVE ME A CHANCE to dance

2:31 BOIL THE BEEF ON HIGH UNTIL ROLLING BOIL, then TURN HEAT TO SIMMER AND COOK FOR 40 MINUTES

2:35 After mixing the dough to a ball, let the ball REST FOR 5 MINUTES

2:55 Get some oil and start rubbing (phrasing, lol) Come over here and feel it up (phrasing, lol)

2:57 *scrolling text Alternate with your left and right, you can exercise your upper body (phrasing, lol. Look, he’s trying to seduce you)

3:08 STEP 3: Drop the noodles (I am not kidding, the first character is also slang for male genitalia.)

3:39 Dropping the noodles is the key

3:42 When the noodles twist and rotate, make sure you go both clockwise and counterclockwise. The thinner the dough, the weaker it becomes. Also, don’t forcefully pull the noodles, feel the elasticity of the noodles and let the noodles stretch itself out.

4:05 Oh, my big stomach is in the way.

4:15 rub some more oil

4:26 Let’s flavor the soup salt, msg, pepper

4:45 1. Pull with the strength of both arms. 2. pull with uniform energy

4:55 Flatten

5:04 Pull, pull, then dust with flour

5:09 Again, don’t fight against the noodle and feel, or it will break

5:30 BOIL WATER, THEN THROW IN NOODLES. DON”T IMMEDIATELY STIRE THE NOODLES! LET SIT for 5 MINUTES BEFORE TOUCHING NOODLES

6:50 Add your toppings and you’re done!

6:58 LOSING IS SUCCESS’ MOTHER!

7:05 Let’s review!

1. Bring the meat to a boil and then simmer for 40 minutes

2. Mixing dough: 1 kg flour, 10 grams salt, 5 grams lye/soda water

3. Pulling noodles: Pull firmly and evenly, but don’t rush!


**Editor's note:  I didn't translate every detail, just the basic gist and funny stuff.  Feel free to leave comments for comments, concerns, and future requests.

The Best Graduate Student in Religious Studies: Xuanzang

Xuanzang took a round trip from China to India by foot during the early 7th century.  Talk about the ultimate backpacking trip!   This map charts his journey:



(http://www.silk-road.com/artl/hsuantsang.shtml)

When I think about his journey, I can't help but think about graduate school.  He's arguably the best graduate student in world history:

• He realized that China didn't have comprehensive detail about Buddhism and needed more credible sources.


• He defied the emperor Tang Taizong's orders went against everyone's advice.  Makes modern visa issues seem like a trifle.


• He did amazing fieldwork.  He learned dozen foreign languages and befriended many locals.  Plus there's the whole let's make a loop around India thing.


• Buddhism in India was on the wane, so he went just in time before Buddhist knowledge became irrelevant in India.


• As John Keay in A History of China puts it, he brought 500 trunks, an ENTIRE LIBRARY's worth of Buddhist text carried by HUNDREDS of monks.  He brought an ENTIRE UNIVERSITY with him!  Sadly, one of his elephants fell in a precipice.


• Emperor Tang Taizong ordered 'Great Pagoda of the Wild Goose' to house all of Xuanzang's precious text.  It's essentially a university for Xuanzang.  I use the present tense of the verb "is" because IT'S STILL THERE, 1400 years later!  Take that Cambridge!

(Shablam!  All in it's jpeg glory!)

It's easy to bash humanities graduate students and say that their work serves little to no practical purpose towards humanity.  Then I think about this pagoda, and how Xuanzang permanently changed the moral values of east Asia.

I'm still considering graduate school in Chinese literature.

I have a new twitter!  Feel free to add me: @TPolmelo.  Feel free to comment on grad school or any other thoughts as well!

Kitsch Helps Us Come to Terms With Horror

Spoiler Alert!!!: Scottsboro Boys, Bleach (Anime)

Kitsch is difficult to define, but I like to put it this way:  It's something that tries to exaggerate meaning when it's not there, like a gilded cardholder or pink flamingo garden ornaments.

Sometimes when the world pushes inhumanity to the extreme, and a serious objective narration of the account may not suffice because any attempt to recreate its essence will in some way demean it.

I recently watched the Scottsboro Boys at the Ahmanson Theater.  It's about the wrongful persecution of a group of nine African-American teenagers in Alabama during the Great Depression.  Two Caucasian Alabama women accused the boys of gang raping them.

It was doubly kitschy because it was a circus act within a broadway musical.  The audience knew that obvious inconsistencies, like African American boys playing the part of southern Alabama women, but the musical progresses and gradually stings the audience of the pain of the inmates.

My favorite song was "Southern Days."  Before the verdict was read to the boys, all of them were imagining how they would spend the moment leaving jail.  When all expound their hopes, the interlocutor enters the scene and attempts to convince the boys to remain in the South.  With forced faces they all begin to sing a folk song about the South.

These lines completely shifts the tone of the number:

HOW THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS
COME BACK TO ME!
LIKE MY DADDY HANGIN’ FROM A TREE.

It completely shatters the song's attachment towards Southern nostalgia.

Nostalgia is the greatest threat to history.  At least censorship or forgetting history allows room for one to wonder if pain occurred, but nostalgia erases history AND seduces one to accept a comfortable narrative.

The danger of nostalgia also reminds me of Japanese anime.

(source)

When Ben Lewis interviews Takashi Murakami, Murakami talks about how after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after 30 years Japan creates children's television shows that depicts cartoons of this image.

I didn't realize this until I wrote this blog, but the reverberation of this incident is STILL in modern day anime.

SPOILER ALERT FOR BLEACH!!!

This video is the climax of the Bleach series.  Fast forward to 25:00:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMFTwjj7lO0

I'm skipping vital details, but the flowy hair guy has to kill the evil butterfly looking thing.  The entire Bleach series hinges on this moment, but if you have no idea what's going on, this final explosion of raw power from the protagonist is eerily similar to an atomic blast.

Victims of the atomic bomb blinded and deafened by the explosion explain how they saw something as bright as the sun, and couldn't hear anything because their eardrums would rupture from the shockwave.

When we look back into a traumatic history, we cannot recreate the event to convey the feeling.  Ironically kitsch allows us to look without altering the feelings of history.