In my increasing obsession with the situation in Tibet, I’d become very curious about how the Chinese media has been covering recent events there. I ran across the following English language documentary done by CCTV9 on the March protest/riots:
Fascinating….
As I’ve been trying to study the Tibet situation more, I’ve read accusations from some Chinese that the Dalai Lama was a tool for the CIA to try to cause trouble for China, and that the CIA had been involved in stirring up trouble in Tibet from the beginning. I did some digging to see if I could find any evidence about this. Looks like there’s some truth to the accusation, and that CIA has been involved, as is evident from a documentary titled “The CIA in Tibet.” You can find it in 6 clips on Youtube:
A few things struck a bad chord with me about the testimony from the CIA agents in this video. Read the rest of this entry »
Early on in my China stint, there was another western expat stationed there along with me named Tony. He and I became pretty good friends during the course of our stay, and we would often compare notes with one another on our experiences interacting with our Chinese colleagues. One day, Tony came by my desk looking upset. I asked him what was wrong, and he pulled me into a conference room and proceeded to tell me about an episode that had just occurred involving one of his Chinese employees named Troy. The story he told provides a great example of a behavioral characteristic exhibited by some of our Chinese staff that I and many of my non-Chinese coworkers had observed periodically: a tendency to sometimes lie to preserve appearances. This particular behavioral disposition turned out to be an especially pernicious barrier to productivity in some cases, as well as a frequent source of friction between our Chinese staff and their non-Chinese counterparts.
Months earlier, Tony had put Troy in charge of a design project. As part of this project, Troy had to order some material from a supplier to create castings. Periodically, Tony would ask Troy for updates on the project. Each time, Troy would respond with vague but firm assurances that the project was on track, and that there were no issues.
I’ve been following the Tibet situation in the news, and it’s highlighted to me how ignorant I am about the whole history of this region and why things are the way they are. I went out to Barnes and Noble this weekend and bought Thomas Laird’s The Story of Tibet in an effort to educate myself on the whole thing. But that’ll take me a while, so in the meantime, I found a video documentary on YouTube called Tibet: The Story of a Tragedy. It’s relatively short (1 hour) and not very well done as documentaries go, in my opinion (and the narrator’s voice annoys me for some reason). But it serves as a good primer on the topic for someone like me who doesn’t know much and intends to learn more.
Just came across the following article in EMSNow addressing one of the pitfalls of sourcing in China: counterfeiting…
http://www.emsnow.com/npps/story.cfm?pg=story&id=32336
This reminds me of a story I’ve re-told several times involving a coworker, who we’ll call Sam…
Sam was visiting China from overseas for a few weeks. One day, he came to me with a problem he was having with a new laptop he’d bought recently. “The network port is very strange. I can’t fit a network cable into it. It’s an odd shape,” he explained. He proceeded to try to draw the network port for me on a Post-it, and asked, “Do you know what kind of port this is?”
An American coworker of mine has been learning Mandarin. I gave him some of my Pimsleur Language CDs (which I HIGHLY recommend for beginners) to use. In return, he sent me links to some of the web sites he frequents. I’ve checked out a few of them and they seem useful. Here’s his note:
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I have been hooked on these as I recently got an MP3 player. The podcasts are all free…………….
http://www.melnyks.com/
http://www.chinesepod.com/podcast/
This was helping me with some consonant sounds……..then I realized it is different than the Southern accent, so I am a little confused right now. ….
http://www.sinosplice.com/lang/pronunciation/
Other “once in a while” sites I visit……..
http://www.csulb.edu/~txie/ccol/content.htm
http://www.zein.se/patrick/chinen8p.html
And some online radio broadcasts………usually way too fast for me…….
http://www.szr.com.cn/
http://www.multilingualbooks.com/online-radio-chinese.html
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Incidentally, I’ve been thinking about trying to prepare for the HSK exam as a way to motivate me to get back into working on my Chinese, and also as a way to sort of put a stamp on the level of fluency I have obtained thus far. I can’t seem to find any info on exams offered in the US though, so I may have to travel to China for this….
I’ve bought a couple of Chinese cook books and have been cooking some of those recipes over the past couple months in an effort to raise my Chinese cooking game. The books are good, but it’s hard to learn certain techniques from a book, so I was hunting for some videos online to see if there was anything valuable I could pick up. Found a few:
I’ve added a new page called “Misc. Reading List“. This will contain a list of books I’ve read related to other Asian countries besides China, or on topics that are tangentially related to China (e. g., communism in general). I’ll add my short review/synopsis for each, as I’ve done with the China Reading List. Both of these lists will grow over time as my study of these subjects continues. (I should be adding a biography of Joseph Stalin to the “Misc.” list shortly.) This is a nice way for me to put a small stamp on my accomplishment of finishing each book. The lists grow as I grow…
I was just in Shenzhen last week for a trade show, and met up with 3 of my Chinese friends for dinner. I hadn’t seen any of them since last December, and it was a cheerful reunion. The conversation flowed in and out of Mandarin and English, and my companions were happy to see I hadn’t “lost my Chinese”. (So was I.)
For the locale, I had chosen one of my all-time favorite restaurant chains in China called “Máo Jiā” (which means “Mao’s home”, as it was begun by a childhood friend of Mao’s in a house next door to his childhood home in Hú Nán province). This turned out to be a coincidental decision given the conversation we ended up having there.
One of the things I first noticed about Chinese culture after living there for a while is that life does not seem to have much value. I was surprised to find how many other foreigners separately came to this same conclusion. Below are a handful of anecdotes illustrating what I mean by this: