Nothing profound here, but just an odd coincidence that yesterday -- the day before China announced the end of the once-child policy -- I was at a three-hour divisional presentation about the experience of international students on campus. Part of the presentation was a half hour documentary about international students at Michigan State University ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Okay, this is one of the most bizarre stories I've seen in a while: "China eyes huge tourism development for Yap". Essentially a private Chinese investment group is looking to build eight to ten hotel complexes with up to 20,000 rooms, and "convention centers, casinos and entertainment centers, and from eight to 15 golf courses." To put this into ( Read more... )

So I finally bought the French DVD of King Hu's Raining on the Mountain (Kong shan ling yu, 1979), on the Films Sans Frontieres label. It has English sub-titles as well as French, and it's a high quality image as well. So now I've seen all the movies from King Hu's prime except for The Valiant Ones (Chung lieh tu, 1975), which is not available on ( Read more... )

( Pretty esoteric, I confess ... )

Chuang Tzu, as I have said, rejects all conventional values, and as a result, like so many mystical writers, he rejects the conventional values of words as well, deliberately employing them to mean the opposite of what they ordinarily mean in order to demonstrate their essential meaninglessness. When a writer does this, he of course invites ( Read more... )

My sister, who you will recall is teaching in China, wrote today to report that on Thursday they invited a Muslim Chinese colleague to tea. "I should say to fruit," my sister wrote. "With his Muslim restrictions on food intake, he was able to partake of the fruit and nothing else ( Read more... )

Or so announced the subject-line on some spam I trapped today, but I had just been outside looking at another: Mt Rainier. Why is it that we don't have a Rainier cam on the UW homepage? The view down Rainier Vista was ... glorious.

Also spotted on the walk: several people walking around with little flags of the People's Republic of China. ( Read more... )

My sister has gone to China to teach ESL for five months. She has been assigned to a town in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, which I had never heard of before -- not that I know much about China! I'm very curious what "autonomous region" means. In any event, according to the linked map, it lies between Vietnam to the southwest, Guangdong ( ( Read more... )