I was practicing Chinese with some Chinese friends and accidentally got them into an argument. As it turns out, the mind-body duality is built into Chinese; you cannot, in correct Chinese, refer to the mind as merely the activity of the brain. You can say the mind and brain are separate, and you can say the brain gives rise to the mind, but it’s ( Read more... )

One of the things I’ve noticed about the young women in my university is how safe they feel on campus. We were reading an essay that ended in a discussion of date rape without actually using the word “rape,” and I asked the students what the end of the article was talking about. It took these college kids ten minutes of trying to read between the ( Read more... )

The next time a Chinese person questions the dominance of English (it doesn’t happen very often, since most of the Chinese I hang out with speak English fairly to very well), in preparation for pointing out that Chinese is also widely spoken, I think I’ll make the argument that Spanish should be the next “world language.” It’s already spoken in ( Read more... )

The Irish guy, K, and I went to the place closest to a real coffee cafe we could find in Nanjing and alternated between serious talk and joking around.  He smokes for two, yanks off beer caps with his teeth, and came to China to get some teaching experience (he has a degree in education).  Our waitress was cute as a button but apparently new at the ( Read more... )