“Mind like water” is the concept that one react appropriately in any given situation. The concept is visual. Throw a pebble in water. A small splash rises from the water and ripples spread out from where it enters.

Unfortunately, when it comes to reacting to body language, my mind is no longer like water. The ripples usually wait a minute before rippling.

But I have a good reason for this. Body language differs between cultures. Living in China I learned not to assume someone’s body language means the same thing it might in the U.S. For example, in China, if someone nods his head it doesn’t necessarily mean he agrees with what I’m saying, as it typically does in the States. It just means he’s listening to me. So I have come to first consider what one’s body language is telling me, based on context and past experience, before I react to it. The problem for me is that people aren’t expecting the hesitation. And since body language is an important part of in-person communication, I get the feeling that this sometimes makes people feel a little awkward around me when I don’t ripple at the right time.

Lately I’ve been feeling like there is some disconnect between me and many of the people I know in Janesville, WI, where I live now. I couldn’t place the cause of it or even define precisely what it was. But then an old friend from school, who herself is from Taiwan, left a comment on my Facebook wall: “You’re so Asian.” And, I think that is it.

And now to contradict that last sentence. It’s not so much that I’m “so Asian” as I think it is that I am not quite so American. I’ve been back in the States now for two years and thought I had long since re-adjusted to life here, and I think that is true too. I have re-adjusted to life here. But I think some of my values have changed, permanently, and I think that is the cause of the disconnect.

A friend of mine from Alabama was up here a couple of weeks ago and we were discussing the fact that this blog is dormant. The main problem I’ve had ever since returning to the States is that I don’t know what to write about. The blog is supposed to be about China, but to be honest I don’t have a whole lot going on in my life related to China right now. Re-branding was one suggestion my friend made. But I really like The Weifang Radish. The best I could come up with sitting here thinking of what to write about was a conversation my wife and I had this evening over dinner about the difference in eating customs between China and the US. I even wrote a couple sentences on the topic, but then I thought, is that really what I want this blog to be about. So I put it to the reader–what should I write about?

With the closing ceremony of the Beijing Olympics under way, I have removed this blog’s Olympic-themed image header.

I’ll miss that header. I think it gave the blog a distinctive look and the sarcastic text concerning the Great Firewall of China was relevant to a lot of the content of this blog for a period of time.

It’s back to good old Apple-blue for now.

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Tags Blogging

The legacy of Lei Feng has one major advantage over that of what will be part of Liu Xiang’s. Lei Feng was dead before he became famous, and therefore he did not have a chance to tarnish the model image the CCP created around him.

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Tags Lei Feng, Liu Xiang, China, Role Models

It’s just a normal day for my colleagues. The biggest thing in the news is Brett Favre’s trade to the NY Jets. But today is 8-8-08! The Beijing Olympics opening ceremony is taking place right now! They couldn’t care less. For me, it’s a series of sighs. Five years in China. Five years listening to the hopes and dreams of the Chinese people. All focused to one single place and time: Beijing 2008 – 8-8-08. And now it’s here, and it’s there, and I’m here, and the people around me don’t care.

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Tags China, America, Olympics

In an effort to prevent tourists from becoming confused or scared-off by Chinese dishes with names often translated directly from Chinese to English, like fish fragrance eggplant (boy doesn’t that sound delicious!), the Chinese government has developed a standardized list of names for Chinese dishes.

I think this is a great idea and I really hope it catches on, both at home and abroad.

Unfortunately, according to the Official Website of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, the guide “will be available to restaurants at the three-star level and above beginning June 20.”

It would be great if it were freely available online too.

For one thing, I’d like to have it as a reference; it sure would be handy to bookmark on an iPhone for use when you’re actually at a Chinese restaurant and want a clearer idea of what you’re ordering.

For another thing, there are plenty of restaurants in China that are not at the three star level but that are frequented by expats. Surprisingly, many of these restaurants have English menus, even in cities with very small expat populations, like Weifang. A freely available, well-publicized, online version of this menu might help speed the adoption of the menu even in these smaller restaurants.

If it has been put online and anyone knows where to find it please point to it in the comments.

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Tags China, Chinese Food

With final projects due tomorrow my computer would have a major crash today, only the second time my iBook G4 has ever kernel panicked in four years (both times a result of conflicts with external devices)!

After the crash I was not able to log in to my computer at all. Oddly, it came up with a network account login screen, rather than a local account login screen. What had happened to my local accounts?

Booting off the restore disc that came with my Mac, running “Disk Repair” and browsing through my files off the boot disc, I found that my filesystem seemed in tact, so the problem was hopefully confined to login.

With this in mind, I quickly realized that the crash might have corrupted the NetInfo database — the file that tells the computer what local accounts exist on the computer, eg., Kevin, Jinjin, Admin, Guest, etc. — especially given the fact that I had recently made some changes on my computer that may have made use of this file.

So off to the interwebs I went. I searched through Apple’s support site for relevant information and found an article entitled Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server: How to Replace the NetInfo Database. Following the directions in this article I was able to restore the NetInfo database from backup and upon reboot the local account login screen came up and I was back in business.

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Tags Mac OS X, Troubleshooting OS X, Login Problems, NetInfo, Apple

A Reuters article, “Masseuses told to padlock pants“, reports on masseuses in Indonesia, but uses a China Daily image from a police raid on prostitutes in a hotel in Jilin, China to go with the story:

The original image from the China Daily article:

And this is three weeks after Western media showed those images of the 3/14 crackdown against Tibetan protestors in Nepal while claiming they were images from Tibet.

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Tags Media, Western Media, Asia

Thanks to Yee for the heads up on Frozen in Shanghai. I wondered if we’d see this in China or not, and what response, if any, it would invoke from onlookers and authorities.

Tags Frozen, Shanghai, China

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