2012 Review (2)

My life at Princeton came to an end in June, after a carnival of Alumni Weekend, a hooding ceremony and commencement. Everyone around was crazily busy - packing, visiting friends, hugging each other with tears and leaving the campus. My story is a little different because of my mum and Joop's visit.

They arrived at the weekend of Alumni Reunion, when the campus was covered by all sorts of camps and suffused with the whiff of beer/wine. We went to Philly the second day after their arrival, spending the entire afternoon exploring the Independence Hall and Liberty Bell, sighing at something that we haven't acquired yet. Later that day, we wandered around the Reading Terminal Market, where Joop tried Philly cheesesteak while mum and Gang had some American-style Chinese food. And that's just the beginning of our week-long trip on the east coast. After my graduation on June 5th, we rented a car and drove all the way up to Niagara Fall, followed by Pittsburgh and DC. I made a 16-page trip plan in advance with two appendix, including detailed information about highlights and must-dos. Unfortunately most of my team members lacked the patience of reading it. Anyway, we had an amazing time in Niagara though we all got wet very quickly; enjoyed some craziness in the Musical Festival at Pittsburgh and knocked ourselves out by walking into one museum after another in DC. After that, mum and Joop continued to Boston and New York, Gang left for London and I came back to California.

I don't know how to describe my thrill after arriving in the bay area again. Days were beautiful with lovely sunshine and cool breezes. Though I very much enjoyed the laziness, I started to reach my connections around to look for job opportunities. The job hunting turned out to be a lengthy process given the few policy openings in the bay area. It was during my idle times that I decided to start this blog as a way to keep myself busy as well as practicing English writing skills when I was not obliged to submit papers anymore.

One quick decision Gang and I made regarding to our new life in the bay area was to get a new car. Our old car, a Nissan Altima 1996 had worked for us for 4 years, accompanying us in most of our roadtrips. It was still in good situation when we sold it. The new one we got was a Honda Accord in crystal black with ivory seats. Soon two visiting students from Peking University moved in the apartment across ours, who joined us a lot in potluck, board games and hiking.

The best time in the second half of this year should be our trip to Hawaii. Details about this trip can be found at Impressionist Hawaii in my previous blogs. After that, I decided to learn some skills in addition to the job search. Therefore I started to teach myself SQL through online courses and textbooks, which kept me busy most of the day. No matter how clear it sounds in the textbook, when I tried to work on it with my laptop, things still went wrong from time to time. Luckily I finally finished the course and acquired some skills of processing data with SQL. It was also during this process that I was reconfirmed of my interests with data analysis, which finally led my applications to a few jobs in this field.

My Family at Niagara Fall

2012 Review (1)

Ten years ago, when I was a sophomore at Peking University working on two bachelor degrees, I wondered how I would look like in ten years. I thought by then I would have received my bachelor degrees, probably with an Master as well, and should have built my career as a civil servant for a few years, therefore I might be expecting a promotion by the end of 2012. Now when I looked back what I did this year, I have to admit it's not quite the same what I had imagined before, it's much more challenging, uncertain and adventurous.

Since I left the Chinese Democratic League (CDL), I knew I probably would never return to the same career track even if I still work on policy issues in the future. I was right - now I focus on the technical skills of tackling policy issues such as impact evaluation and project design, instead of the political part such as decision-making processes. In January 2012, instead of a busy month writing working reports at CDL before the Spring Festival, I was working on two course papers, a group report and a final exam for my third semester at Princeton. I stayed in California for the entire winter vacation except a three-day trip back to Princeton for the International Trade Policy final exam. Before I headed for the East Coast again in February, I had already spent one and a half months with Gang - the longest time I had spent with Gang since my acceptance to Princeton.

The last semester was quick and tough. I had a difficult time in choosing courses, most of which were so tempting. After a busy shopping week, I settled down with Impact Evaluation, Development Econ, Economics of Welfare Society and Risk Assessment. I remembered when I handed my "coursework sheet" with adviser's signature to the Graduate Program Office, Gene said "this is your last coursework sheet", which did make my a little emotional at the moment. The semester was challenging as all the previous ones, but I still had a lot of fun by hanging out with friends at Maggie: dinner parties, crafting nights, board game nights, etc. Since late April, I had to focus more on Qulify Exam2, which lasted 9 hours and included five econ courses. After a day-long torture, I met Gang at Princeton Junction Station. He passed his PhD qualify exam in April, and was happy to take a month vacation with me in May.

That was probably my happiest time in the last two years - I finally finished all the coursework at Princeton, and got the confidence of embracing my beautiful future after graduation. We traveled a little bit in NY and PA, visiting Amish farms, watching Broadway shows and driving along Gettysburg battlefields. In sunny afternoons, we walked around the Princeton campus, sitting on the grass and looking at birds hovering the river by my apartment. At night, some friends came over to play games or hang out. Lifs was idle and slow. Some friends had received job offers and were packing for relocation; some were still looking for opportunities around. But everyone was enjoying the last moment of Princeton.

Keqin, Gettysburg, 2012

When You Don't Belong to Yourself

Mo Yan, the recent Nobel Prize Literature Winner from China, was blamed for defending Chinese media censorship during the Q&A session after his speech at Stockholm University. I didn't watch the live, but read the news from internet. Most critics focused on his response to a question about Chinese government putting some writers behind bars. To me, his answer barely defended Chinese government, but was try to avoid answering this question: he mentioned that writers can commit crimes such as theft and burglary, and therefore it shouldn't be surprising to have writers in prison, which obviously wandered off what the question was about. Mo Yan was not further challenged on the same subject at Stockholm University, but described not only as a coward who was afraid to confront the notorious media censorship, but a sycophant to Beijing.

If you've ever read Mo Yan's books, he is not a communist sycophant for sure, otherwise his books would never be rewarded from Nobel Committee. Mo Yan has kept a good balance between criticizing communist history and complimenting the government, which offers him the opportunity of publishing his satires as well as enjoying a decent life in China. He probably would lead this peaceful life until he dies hadn't he accepted the Nobel Prize this fall. As the first Chinese Nobel Prize Winner who also receives official congratulations from Chinese government, Mo Yan is no longer allowed - by either the government or the public - to keep his attitudes towards Chinese government and the CCP ambiguous. The government, who was furious at the Nobel Committee's decision to award dissidents such as Dalai Lama and Liu Xiaobo, wouldn't allow Mo Yan to act as an anti-government activist and speak against the government. The public (I'm talking about Weibo users here), with strong sympathy for dissidents and inspired by Mo Yan's books, would love to see Mo Yan expressing his dissatisfaction (in books) in the real world. In other words, Mo Yan has to make a choice to please either his bosses or his readers.

Mo Yan is a very thoughtful guy. But no matter how thoughtful he is, when he no longer belongs to himself, he can't express his thoughts freely. That's why we heard the ridiculous answer during his visit to Stockholm University. Some people, at least the one who asked him that question, were hoping that Mo Yan could be another Liu Xiaobo who can use his prestige and influence as a Nobel Prize Winner to fight against the censorship in China. Sure Mo Yan could choose to cater these audiences and condemned Chinese government on its inhumanity, which would cost his career, family and probably freedom. But Mo Yan made it very clear in his answer that he is not a dissident, and he has no intention to confront Chinese government. He's just a writer, and his job is to tell stories.

We live in societies. In social networks, people have different expectations for us, which may not always be consistent with our own plans. Especially when you become a public figure, for most of your life, you don't belong to yourself, but to the public, who has developed certain expectations for you. Then it will be very courageous for you to deviate from their expectations and lead your own life. As a writer, Mo Yan has achieved great success in his career. But as a person, he loses the freedom and privacy. If he asks for the freedom to choose his life, we shouldn't deny it; at least we shouldn't take it for granted that he will sacrifice his life for us.

Numbers

In my teenager, some of my friends chose social science rather than science to avoid maths courses in college. The stereotype is that social science, such as history, literature, sociology and political science does not require quantitative skills, but qualitative ones, like writing reports and communicating with people.  However this looks no longer true. Economics, together with its loyal partner - statistics, has dominated social science methodologies. The first time I read a political science paper inundated with regressions, I thought I found the wrong paper, but now I'm so used to mathy papers of this kind. Obviously numbers are widely applied in social science research, like developing index to evaluate the quality of democracy/dictatorship evaluating policy impacts, and using numbers to show the demographic changes in history, etc. Recently I even found a "poem-making" software which analyzes Chinese poems from Tang Dynasty, identifies the most popular words and phrases and reorganizes them into new poems. Some people acclaimed that this sort of software will put an end to social science, which sounds like a paranoid sleep talk by those with little idea of arts and literature.

It's true that in an information era, traditional way of studying social science may not be sufficient enough. Case studies, which used to be widely applied, are now considered to be biased samples; and causalities between two events are less convincing without excluding other factors rigorously. Interviewees can lie, interviewers can be biased, and it looks like in research the only reliable source is data. The development of data-processing software also makes it easier to do research with large data set. Therefore social science scholars and students, no matter how difficult it is to quantify their research objects, are trying to establish a database and use statistical models to reach certain conclusions. I won't say it's wrong - I've spent the last few years learning these skills, but there are several things that should be kept in mind in data work, especially for policy students.

One concern is that data can "lie" too. If you've worked with STATA, you may have noticed that conclusions can be very different when you use different regression function forms, different control variables or whether to cluster/stratify or not. From time to time, we need to use our common sense and logic to choose the one most likely to be true. However if we come across something that we're not familiar with, then how can we decide if we've handled data in the right way? It's quite common that people have different stances on the same issue even if they happen to use the same data base. Moreover, data analysis always requires a few assumptions, based on which our conclusions can be developed. However, because so many variables (either measurable or not) exist in the real world, that sometimes it's very hard to exam whether your assumptions hold or not. Tons of arguments arise in this field, and researchers are still fighting against each other when new variable/evidence emerges.

Another concern is that when numbers are large, we can easily be misled. If you think about 0.001% of the population, you may think of only a few people; but when you are referring to 13,900 people in China, that's not a small group. Number itself is not enough to display the full picture. On contrary, numbers can be cunningly used to hide the facts.

In addition, obsession with numbers is almost as bad as ignoring numbers. Though it's important to see policy impact on large groups, and therefore exam its effectiveness by looking into the joint benefits received by the population; single cases are vital too. If you think about how policy changes such as the abortion of racial segregation in the US, or how big event happens such as the start of WW1, a single case makes all the differences. There are a lot of psychological studies on cases vs. numbers, and case studies tend to impress audiences more. This is not surprising: after reading an article/report, which can you remember, numbers or stories?

People talk a lot about big data these days, and sometimes I can't help wondering how I look like in those companies' eyes - maybe a few dummy variables to identify my race, gender and consumption preferences, etc, and a few logit regressions to find out what coupons can induce a new purchase record from me - simple and straightforward.

Smell of Weed

As a person who's never tried weed before, I don't really understand why the legalization of mariguana in Colorado can be such an excitement to some of my friends. Not only that, the pleasance of enjoying mariguana in the public produces some negative externalities - the smell of weed on Berkeley streets are driving me crazy. I took a walk this afternoon in downtown for fresh air. Beautiful sunshine lightened up the world, when I suddenly came across strong stink at the corner. I trotted a few steps, but the smell made me sick for quite a while. This is not the first time I've smelled weed in Berkeley, the smell is almost everywhere - in downtown, in parks, by stations. What I don't understand is, in a country where public smoking is strictly forbidden, drugs are not treated in the same way.

Freedom has been widely discussed in modern society: the freedom to speak, the freedom to talk back, and the freedom to escalate the quarrel. Sometimes to protect other people's freedom, the government has to put certain limitations on our freedom. For example, to protect people's freedom of accessing public roads, there are traffic rules to guarantee rational use of infrastructure, the broken of which are subject to punishment. This is straightforward, but more controversial cases arise when freedoms are in conflict. Now to protect people's freedom of "getting high", I have to sacrifice my freedom of enjoying clean air. So the question is where is the line?

In a culture where the respect for individual freedom goes too far, any conflict over freedom can evolve into an endless battle of pushing the line back and forth between different groups. For example, one group (let's say some minorities in the community) wants the freedom of celebrating their traditional festivals by taking days off, and another group (let's say their employers) wants to keep them working as their white peers do. Then whose freedom should we respect? If there is no clear rule of defining the line, the entire issue is subject to power balance.

In China, individual freedom is always subject to collective objectives in the name that collective actions will bring "bigger individual freedom". A notorious example is the propaganda for One Child Policy. The logic provided by the central government is that booming population will undermine the survival of current and future generations. Therefore if we enjoy the freedom of delivering more than one child in a family, the result is exhaustion of resources, poverty and scarcity in the future. To save China from "complete annihilation", actions such as forced abortion and whopping fine for the second child are taken to protect "freedom of majority." In this case, the line is mistakenly drawn.

So back to the question, I think the fundamental rule could be "Pareto Optimal": don't harm other people when you enjoy your freedom. Do not enjoy the weed when creating stink for pedestrians; and do not delay your work when you want to celebrate your own holidays. Another rule should be "mind your own business first": don't tell other people how many kids they should have, and don't assign new graduates to positions "as the country needs". Then may we live in a happy and friendly world!

The Perfect Plan

How amazing it would be to develop a perfect plan, follow which we could have a perfect result. Of course the assumption is that everything is controllable: you've included all the "variables" in the plan, find the right way to handle them, and no worries about uncertainties during the implementation. Experiments like this may be carried out in labs (although even the most strictly controlled experiment faces challenges such as contamination/spill-over), but too many omitted variables exist in the real world which makes a perfect plan in the real world almost impossible. As a result, the perfect plan evolves into an imperfect, sometimes even disappointing plan. You may want to describe it as a good experience/adventure years later, but at the moment when things go wrong, it's still not easy to handle.

A possible solution is to go for options that have lower probabilities of going wrong. For example, shop in branded stores with good return policy, go to a tourist attraction mentioned in "Lonely Planet"; or pick a major that can guarantee a job after graduation, and follow seniors' suggestions to avoid mistakes. But things can still go wrong no matter how high the probability of "being successful" is, and it does require extra efforts to get back to the right track, or to even develop a new track. In Tang Dynasty, a talented young man went to the capital Chang'an for an imperial exam, a qualify exam for government officials. He had prepared it for a long time and had never thought he would fail, which unfortunately happened. Frustratingly he went out drinking, where he met a dancing girl who he used to know. The girl recognized him soon and joked: "You're not a government official yet?" The young man wrote a poet as a response:

I left Zhongling ten years ago in drunkenness,
Now I met Yunying (the dancer's name) and her beautiful dance.
I haven't made my name, and you haven't got married,
It's probably we're not so good as others.

Well, he was wrong. He became a famous poet later. (That's how I got to know the poem above.) After the difficult time of seeing his failure in the original plan, he found a new plan of his life.

One can never find a counterpart in one's life to see whether his decision is right or not, or to figure out where the plan goes wrong, even twins rarely serve as a good case for comparative studies. However, it's quite normal to assume "if I had blahblah..." when facing troubles. When I'm frustrated by the job search in the bay area, I do doubt if I made the right decision to leave my comfort zone - quitting my "iron-bowl" job in China, and going back to school in a new country. But when I think of my vagrant experiences across the US in the past few years, everything looks so deserving, even the painful memory of staying up all night to finish reading hundreds of pages of papers or to write policy memos is rewarding. I could have followed my "perfect plan": slowly moved up in the bureaucratic hierarchy and retired with good pensions, however at that moment, my rational choice was to go for an alternative. I guess it's a trade-off: I lost a stable job, but enriched my life in unexpected places.

Maybe there is never a perfect plan. What I can do now is to enjoy the bitterness of changing, take advantage of my depression and produce some poems.

夜染繁花处，灯挑旧草庐。

青柏二三树，闲竹五六株。

已知春风早，恨将桃李误。

遥看苔阶冷，郁郁待日出。

Young Heroes

The blog yesterday triggered my memories about The Three Kingdoms. After bragging my knowledge about the history to Gang, we watched two episodes (from '95 TV) together, both were about the battle of red cliffs. It's amazing to imagine what happened two thousand years ago, when a group of young people, mostly of my age, led thousands of hundreds of people crusading across the country, cleverly using all sorts of plots and schemes, and finally founding their own states.

Heroes in The Three Kingdoms are amazingly young. Sun Ce occupied 6 counties (80 states in all) when he was 24 and founded Kingdom Wu; his younger brother Quan succeeded at 18 at Ce's death; Zhuge Liang decided to assisted Liu Bei as his chief minister when he was 27; one year later, he facilitated Zhou Yu in defeating Cao Cao and his troops of 800,000. Most generals and advisers made their names during their teenagers, and became well known by 30. This is hard to imagine nowadays - most people barely make any achievement until they graduate from college at around 22, and it will take another few years for them to build up their reputations and move forward in their career path. Luckily one can make breakthrough in his field, and get awarded with a world-class prize by retirement. But most young people, receive little compliment except "youth is beautiful." Especially in China, when aged people are much respected, it's hard for young people to gain acclaim.

One reason that contributes to the emergence of these young heroes is the short life expectancy in ancient China. Confucius called people who are 70 and above to be "rare". During warring times like the Three Kingdoms Period, it was even rare to die in mid-50s, which is considered as "natural death" in The Three Kingdoms. Much more people died earlier, like mid-30s or 40s, usually of wounds or diseases. Given such short lifespans, people had to work hard during their early ages to accomplish as much as they can.

Another reason, I'd assume, was the short educational system in ancient China. Confucianism was made the state mainstream ideology since Han, therefore I'd imagine that children were required to study Confucius books. Other than this, they were not obliged to take extra courses - no foreign language, maths, physics, chemistry, etc. Smart kids could probably finish his coursework in a few years and started to explore the real world as knowledgeable persons. Some generals in the Three Kingdom Period were not even educated, which didn't demean their reputation as most people at that time were illiterate.

The last reason, probably was the lack of child labor protection. It's impossible nowadays to recruit teenagers in armies or hire kids in stores. But in The Three Kingdoms, there were stories about people leading a troop, killing enemies at the age of fourteen; and an eight-year old boy attending policy discussion. Maybe people at that time had a stronger belief in "learning by doing".

I'm 27 now. In The Three Kingdoms, I should either lead an army or at least governed a state for years. Now I'm still looking for jobs. What a progress we've made over the last two thousand years.

Stories Between the Lines

A small piece of book review about The Three Kingdoms, one of the most brilliant works in Chinese literary history, attracted my attention recently. The Three Kingdoms is a long novel written in Ming Dynasty about stories during the Three Kingdoms Period (A.D.198 - 280), when three kingdoms co-existed and tried to annex each other. Relentless wars between them lasted for a century, with thousands of heroes rise and fell. I was obsessed with novel since very young, and I couldn't even recall how many times I've read the stories in them. But this small piece still surprised me by re-interpretating the relation between the ruler and ministers in Wu, the kingdom both Luo Guanzhong and I paid least attention to.

Wu was founded by the Suns. The father Sun Jian was a foresighted general who occupied the rich area south of Yangtze River at the fall of Han Dynasty. However he died in a brutal battle when he tried to expand his kingdom, and was succeeded by his eldest son, Sun Ce. Ce was famous for his bravery and he avenged his father soon after his succession. But not for long, Ce was assassinated when he was 26, leaving a big kingdom to his younger brother Sun Quan, who was neither a courageous pioneer like his father nor a valiant warrior like his brother, but proved to be an outstanding king in defending his kingdom against the attack from the other two kingdoms, Wei and Shu. One of the legacies that Ce left to Quan was Zhou Yu, one of the most famous generals in the Three Kingdoms Period. He was Ce's sworn brother, and also brother-in-laws. After Ce's death, he served as the Command in Chief during Quan's reign for ten years until he died from a wound caused by a poisoned arrow. The heyday in Zhou's career was the Battle of Red Cliffs, when he defeated Wei's main force of 700,000 people with less than 100,000 and made his name in Chinese military history. In The Three Kingdoms, Zhou Yu was described as a tasteful general who won full trust from both Sun Ce and Sun Quan, as well as his colleagues and soldiers.

His life sounds perfect, isn't it? The review mentioned a sentence in Zhou Yu's last note to Quan when he was dying of the wound that makes the entire legend look less reliable. In his letter, he talked about his military plan and concerns, and raised several recommendations regarding to future personnel appointments and military deployment. In his last sentence, Yu said "People speak kindly in the presence of death; if you can adopt any of the above suggestions, I die with no regrets." This sentence sounds weird because none of the sentences in his note seems peculiarly kind. And if Yu considered his note as "kind", it was hard to imagine how he talked to Quan ordinarily. Therefore the review assumed that the relation between Yu and Quan might not be as good as it looked like. Yu, as an experienced and distinguished general, monopolized military power in Wu for decades, which could be even longer if he hadn't died at 36. Quan had little military experience and was much younger than Yu, therefore his prestige in Wu was not as well built as Yu. In the novel, it is mentioned several times that when officials couldn't reach an agreement, people "always" tended to Yu for final decision, not Quan. Thus it shouldn't be surprising if Quan was suspicious of Yu's loyalty and imposed some limitations on his power.

I went through a few chapters in The Three Kingdoms after reading the review, and I found the review did make a good point here. Another evidence I found in the book was a quotation from Yu right before the Battle of Red Cliffs, when Wei sent Jiang Gan, Yu's classmate, to induce him to capitulate. Yu replied :"Here I met a king who is also my bosom friend. We are a king and a master, but we are also in-laws. I follow his order, and he follows my suggestions. We share our fortunes and we meet challenges together. Even Su Qin and Zhang Yi (both of which are famous for their eloquence) revived, I would still turn them down. Do you think you can change my mind?" (丈夫处世，遇知己之主，外托君臣之义，内结骨肉之恩，言行计从，祸福共之，假使苏张更生，郦叟复出，犹抚其背而折其辞，岂足下幼生所能移乎？) Then Jiang Gan knew he couldn't change Yu's mind, and left afterwards. What's interesting is, the Wu King at that time was Quan, but the Wu King who met Yu and took Yu as a bosom friend was Quan's brother, Ce. Also, since Quan only took government for one year when the Battle of Red Cliffs started, it was more likely that the connection between Yu and the "King" mentioned here was the cooperation between Yu and Ce. In other words, Yu pledged his loyalty to Quan after Ce's death, but the reason he used to refuse Jiang Gan's persuasion was not his connection with Quan, but his gratitude to Ce. I take this as an evidence that Yu's loyal to Wu because of Ce, but not Quan. In this sense, the relationship between Yu and Quan could be more complicated than what the novel says.

I remember when I read the novel as a child, I was amazed by the solid relationship between Quan and all his four outstanding Command-in-chiefs, Yu and his three successors. Maybe the true story between the lines is a balance of game between a young king and his powerful generals.

Black Friday

I don't know how many people still go to outlets/groceries on Black Friday given the rapid development of online shopping and regular promotions across the year. After reading all the terrifying stories about queuing, trampling and parking wars on Thursday night, fatigue driving and traffic congestion on Friday, I decide to avoid the war and go on Saturday, which also turned out to be a terrible idea. The newly opened outlet in Livermore was packed with happy shoppers, and it took at least 15 min for us to find a parking space, and another 15 min to get a fitting room in Banana Republic. Impressed with the long line outside ladies' room and the crowd in the food court, we went home with a few new clothes, whose prices were found to be lower through online shopping later.

That's when I started to doubt how important the Black Friday is in nowadays when retailers have thousands of ways to promote sales. I can see in old days, when people learned about sales from local ads and had to prepare Christmas gifts, Black Friday became a good shopping opportunity for the family. But now, as the population booms, the non-monetary cost of shopping on Black Friday has increased, while other choices, i.e. online stores, with good discount and no crowd seem to be a better choice; and following promotions, such as Cyber Monday, also attract a few customers.

But people still flock into stores on the very day, blocking the highways exits and swarming malls. Habit is a second nature. Black Friday, created by shrewd businessmen, has become a tradition over years and taken as an important family activity. Probably people do not come only for shopping, but to enjoy some family time together. Once shopping becomes a tradition, other than a pure economic behavior, it's difficult to abstain from doing it, especially when surrounded by family members and friends. When I think about why we decided to go shopping during the holiday, it was partly because we wanted to show how Thanksgiving looks like in the US to some visiting students from China; and partly because we wanted to enjoy sometime with each other without harassment from work and computers.

Chinese businessmen learned from their American counterparts and turned Nov 11 into Chinese Black Friday. Nov 11 was named as "Single's Day" by college students since a few years ago as "1" is the loneliest number in the world. In the latest Single's Day, Chinese biggest online shopping website, Taobao started a one-day sale, which created a historical sales record of CNY19.1 billion. It looks like Chinese business people learned from the lessons in the US Black Fridays, and carefully avoided stampedes given Chinese big population by offering online sales instead of in-store ones. Nevertheless, the panic online purchase still slowed down internet and created some chaos, though luckily no one was physically hurt. In light of the big success of Single's Day Sale, it may evolve into a new shopping tradition, just as Christmas and Valentine's Day Sale in China.

I used to shop a lot in college, but become much less motivated in recent years. Maybe in the future, when my kids and parents want to experience some craziness in the US, I will still bring them to a mall, and celebrate a Black Friday together.

Jokes

A news release from Chinese Microblog made my day: the People's Daily Online, one of the most authoritative CCP mouthpiece, published an article saying "the US media has elected Kim Jong-un the sexiest man in the world" in an official tone, which was a fake news cooked by the Onion News a few days ago. Soon the article on People's Daily was quoted again in a US newspaper as an example of the lack of humor in China.

It is probably true that Chinese people are less fond of jokes in everyday life, and humor is always connected with frivolousness and sweet talkers. In Confucius culture, taciturnity is valued as a virtue of "gentlemen", and fun makers are always considered as lowbrow. Therefore, you don't want to make jokes at work, at least not when your supervisors are around; and neither should you use too many funny words when talking to elders, who may feel disrespected. Sometimes jokes are still appreciated in occasions such as a blind date, when a joke can help two people rid the awkwardness and get acquainted. But in brief, most people won't want to build their images as "funny" guys, they prefer to be respectable men of few words.

Another explanation could be the culturally different understanding of humor in China and the US. In China, comic dialogues (Xiangsheng), a traditional two-man talk shows, are very popular. The stories in Xiangsheng usually derive from everyday life but are beautifully exaggerated with the joking point released at the end of the show; while baseless jokes are always less appreciated. For example, people may have a good laugh at "Democratic" People's Republic of Korea, a perfect irony of the reality and the name; but they may get lost in the "sexiest men" joke, which has no clue in Kim's previous speech or behavior. That could also explain why the Onion News stories may look less like real jokes to Chinese audiences.

But the best explanation, I think, is how newspapers view their roles in these two countries. In contrast to Chinese newspapers, most of which serve as mouthpieces of the government, the US counterparts have much more freedom in paying a less-supportive role, making fun of policies and degrading politicians. But in China, it's particularly hard to imagine publishing jokes like above in a publicly issued newspaper, which can result in charging editors and reporters with defamation and endangering public safety. Therefore, the People's Daily Online probably didn't even doubt the authenticity of the news, no matter how hard they found to believe it themselves.

All that said, the stupidity of the People's Daily Online editors shouldn't be defended. But thanks for their mistakes, I've read the best joke of my day.

Which Story is True

When I started to write this blog, I intended to make it like a diary with daily updates. Unfortunately I seemed to have overestimated my resolution in keeping writing - the last update was about 10 days ago. I did get very lazy during the holiday season. Our Thanksgiving holiday started with a five-course dinner with Leslie, who came to the bay area to spend the holiday with her sister on Wednesday. We joined a friend and her family  in having a great seafood hotpot instead of turkey at her place Thursday night,  when I cooked HongShaoRou (红烧肉), their most-missed dish from me. The next day was a sunny day, so Gang and I hiked in Point Reyes, and ate apples by the sea (as what we did in Hawaii). Saturday was the "shopping day", when we spent the entire afternoon in the newly opened outlet in Livermore, and finally bought a pair of matching sweaters, one for Gang and the other for me. The long weekend ended with another hotpot last night, when a friend brought all the raw materials and pots over to my place and played SanGuoSha, a popular board game in China for hours.

But the highlight of the holiday, at least in my opinion, is the movie we watched yesterday, Life of Pi, directed by Ang Lee. It's the best movie I've watched this year. It's similar to Li's previous movies such as Lust  Caution and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon in terms of the heated discussion it has already triggered; though it's different in the sense of its new topic. I couldn't help wondering which story is true - the one counting for more than 80% of the entire movie about how Pi co-existed with the tiger during the adventure, or the one explaining how four people in the lifeboat killed and even ate their partners to survive. If the movie had finished ten minutes earlier, I'd happily buy the idea of this drifting adventure with animals, supported by beautiful scenes of the sea and fish stocks. But the second story, if true, turns the entire adventure into a disgusting struggling for survival.

Let's examine the assumptions one by one. If the first story is true, what looks discordant in the movie includes:
- The long introduction of his name, which in my understanding has two implications - 1) it's hard to tell the real story on the face of it; 2) it's hard to understand/explain a human being, just as you can't exhaust writing Pi no matter how hard you've tried;
- The rude French chief and the Buddhist sailor on the ship, who barely appeared later. If the entire story is about Pi and animals, why bother to mention these two in the movie?
- The locked cage and escaping animals. It's clearly shown in the movie that animals are locked in cages, and it's hard to imagine when the ship sunk and most people were unable to escape, these animals could get rid of locks and jumped out.
- On the floating island, when Richard Parker was eating a meerkat, other meerkats didn't get panic or escape. Also, the flower with human tooth and the acid water didn't make much sense in the real world. (There is an article on internet saying meerkats can never appear in that part of the world.)
- Most importantly, if the first one is true, why the movie spends so much time showing how Pi told the second story to the two Japanese investigators with so many details included? Since Pi was only asked to tell a story about the sunk of the ship, he didn't have to provide such a detailed story.

If the second one is true, all the above the irrational plots can be explained. But the only question I have is why? What's the point of telling an inhuman story in such a beautiful way? I'm an atheist, and I simply don't understand how people can still believe in God after surviving this.

Whatever the true answer is, Ang Lee is successful, and his movie makes audience think about the movie, and wonder what's the tiger in their heart. Great movie, recommend without reservation, though it does bother me for a long time.

Unfriend

I was amused by Jimmy Kimmel's show on "National Unfriend Day", which was started three  years ago by the show to have people "unfriend" their "friends" on Facebook. Some enthusiastic audience did take videos explaining why they decided to unfriend some Facebook friends, and the reasons are so funny. Some Facebook posts are simply too boring to read. An example could be a lady who did a trip to Pittsburgh recently. Since she had that plan, her Facebook was updated every few hours with status such as "ready for Pittsburgh", "can't wait to go to Pittsburgh", and "packing for Pittsburgh", etc. Another example could be a guy who's keen of posting pictures of food and his feet - in different places and different times. Some Facebook posts may not be boring by themselves, but are too hard to understand. A girl decided to unfriend her classmate from Hungary because her Facebook posts were written in Hungarian. Anyway, Jimmy is likely to continue talking about unfriending until this Saturday.

Social media has largely changed our life styles. And the definition of "friend" has been evolved as well. "Friends" used to refer to people who we have personal connections and know each other well. For examples, we have friends from school who take the same courses or do the same workshop with us; or friends from some associations or clubs who share similar interests and hobbies. Now we even identify people as "friends" without even talking to them. This kind of people, which I tend to label as "virtual friends", exist extensively on Facebook and Twitter. We add them as friends usually because they're connected to someone we know, or belong to same network, but it has nothing to do with whether we're truly close to each other. Later we always find a big gap between us and these virtual friends, and never have the chance to talk to each other, but also to embarrassed to unfriend them since they haven't done anything wrong.

It's probably nice to know more people in the world, however it's not fun when you are overwhelmed by useless information. For example, what can you learn about a friend from her timely but meaningless updates about a Pittsburgh trip except that she's so boring/or so addicted to Facebook? What's worse, you have to spend time to filter information like this, which I think is all the campaign of "unfriend" is trying to address: forget about the bubble on social media, be realistic about social network, spend more time with friends in reality, and get involved in more meaningful relations.

Talk about reality, I don't think I will unfriend any people on Facebook this Saturday. Just like most Facebook users, I'd rather waste my time going through dumb posts than telling people your posts are terrible.

Study Chinese Politics

I made fun of The Economist for its gossiping methodology in Chinese studies in one of my previous blogs (The Gossips in the Economist). And it's absolutely not alone. Since the new politburo standing committee members met the press conference last night, all sorts of guesses, predictions and gossips about Chinese leadership in the next decade can be found on major newspapers, bold in headlines. Leaving all the bureaucratic jargon aside in newspapers such as People's Daily, the "studies" on Chinese politics have a wide variety of tools, ranging from committee members' resume to their tie colors. Here I will do what The Economist and its peers do: list a few citations/briefs from internet.

Most comments focused on Xi's speech, which followed his appearance as the top leader of the CCP. Weibo posts praised him as the first CCP leader who speaks mandarin. Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping are both famous for their strong accents when speaking Mandarin, which also creates a lot of difficulties for their actors in TV and movies. Jiang and Hu did a better job, but their tones still sound weird. In Comparison, Xi Jinping speaks much better Mandarin. People joked about the last Chinese leader who spoke such good Mandarin was back to Xuantong, the last Qing Emperor. Eulogy for Xi's good mandarin also has another implication: compared to his predecessors who filled their accession speeches (as well as most other speeches) with political jargon and empty talks, Xi seems to be better at talking in a language that ordinary people can understand. We don't know yet whether Xi can make government documents easier to read or the policy better to understand (probably not), but hopefully his speech will be less hypnotic.

The media also paid close attention to Xi's accession as the president of the central military committee. In China the CCP controls the army, and therefore the default is that the CCP president should also be the CMC president. However, ten years ago, Jiang refused to abdicate from the CMC president even though he was supposed to do so after resigning from the standing committee, and it took Hu another two years to get full control of the military power. This time, Hu seems to be less addictive to power than his predecessor, and turned over all his positions to Xi.

Not many people are surprised at the shrinking size of the standing committee as the previous nine-member one was abnormal itself. After Bo's removal from the Party, people no longer doubt that extreme leftists are removed from leading body as well. Pivotal members in the gamble is Wang Yang and Li Yuanchao, both of whom are viewed as relatively liberal and young CCP leaders. They gave their way to some mid-60s, but are expected to join the standing committee in the next term, when five out of the current seven members are to retire.

Other "studies", such as why Wang Qishan's tie color differed from other committee members; how summer birth months affect people's political future (it turned out four members were born in June/July); and what their wives and children are doing, etc, are trying to find some clues in the new Chinese leading group. This is how people study China, even so-called experts are not likely to have better ideas about understanding real political scenes. Let's continue having fun with Xi's standard Mandarin and Wang's blue tie. Maybe mysticism will be the best way to study Chinese politics.

Patriotism

A recent news in the US is widely reported in China as an evidence of a gloomy prospect for capitalism: citizens from 37 states petitioned to secede from the Union. Similarly, Scottish people will decide whether they will won independence from the Great Britain by 2014. Many Chinese readers took this as a result of the failure of patriotism education in both countries, as well as the public's depressing faith in the future. To most Chinese audience, it's shocking to see people want independence from the country, which is considered both as a felony and immorality in China. I don't know how many US people are disappointed at the presidential result or how much the Scottish dislike their fellow countrymen in the south, but here I want to focus on the discussion of patriotism education.

In China, patriotic courses make up an important section in primary education. Children were brought up to "love the Communist Party, love the socialism, love the people and love the country." As Chinese citizens, we are told to serve the people and fight against enemies. Textbooks have a broad definition for "enemy", which include those who want to challenge the dominant position of the CCP (e.g. democrats), change the political regime (from dictatorship to democracy)or intend to split the country (e.g. Dalai Lama), etc. It explains why issues like the independence of Xinjiang, Tibet and Taiwan are considered out of question, because they're "questions of principle". People have been educated to defend sovereignty and territorial integrity since they were not even able to fully understand the meaning of these concepts, and as a result, they rarely challenge it when they grow up, just like the Americans won't doubt freedom and democracy as basic values.

Patriotism becomes tricky when it's very difficult to separate the government from the country, such as in a dictatorship. In the US, you can keep your love for the country while hating the government, and all you need to do is to wait for four years to change it. But in China, the public can't do anything to change the government no matter how poor the performance is, therefore the government and the country (and the party) are bound closely together. So what can you do if you love the country but not the government? Some government dissidents are suppressed by the government and spend the rest of their lives in prison, and some choose to migrate to other countries to escape from the suppression. These people are fighting for better futures for the country and its people in their own ways. But in the public propaganda, they don't love their countries because they don't love the governments.

Government aside, patriotism itself is doubtful. Though it sounds bad to say I don't love my country, I still believe patriotism should be left for each individual to decide, rather than an issue of" principle". Love derives from connection and feelings, not birth place or parents' nationalities. Here is an example. I was born in Jiangxi, a central province in China, and moved to Zhejiang eight years later, which is an eastern province. But I spent most of my time in Beijing, going to college and graduate school, and building my connection there. So which place should I love most? According to patriotism textbooks, I should love Jiangxi the most, as it "gave my life and brought me up". It's true that I might have died without doctors in Jiangxi because of my malposition in my mom's uterus, but I need better reasons to choose my favorite place. And unfortunately I don't feel the same way as textbooks suggest - I love the place that best fits my value. I never thought of going back to Jiangxi, but decided to settle down in Beijing after graduation. Well people may say this example is only about provinces, while here we're talking about countries. But about 2,000 years ago, these provinces did belong to different countries, and even today they're still very different in culture, tradition and even language. Now in the age of globalization, people know more about the world than their neighbors, and they should have the rights to choose the place they love.

A truly strong country don't need to teach its citizen to love the country, it simply attracts them by its value and lifestyle. But if you can't establish legitimacy for your governance, you do need to educate people to love you. It's just like international trade - when you have production advantages, you claim free trade; but when you're disadvantaged in the supply chain, you want tariff protectionism.

http://goo.gl/1P0br

Digital Era

Probably no one has expected an investigation of Ms.Kelly's email account would result in the resignation of the C.I.A director. This is another typical lesson about how private information can be leaked in an information era. Internet seems to be good at preserving information for a long time, even if you mean to discard it. When people search information they may come across some surprises, just as what the F.B.I found out this time.

Actually email is far from the biggest trouble, at least normal people won't have access to your email account and your correspondence should be relatively safe, unless the Big Brother keeps an eye on you and the email service provider spinelessly concede; or like in this case, they get your permission to check emails. Private information can be collected in a much easier way. Social media and smartphones make it much easier for people to share their thoughts, status and locations in the public as long as there is wifi or 3G/4G. People always like to talk about themselves, therefore it's not surprising to see how much information can be collected from one's facebook and twitter account. And to gather this information, you don't need any search warrant or permission, Googling is enough. I have some Facebook friends that I've never met, but I do feel like knowing them for a long time - I know their families, friends, hobbies, education background, work, and even weekend plans even though I never intentionally do the research, all the information just appears automatically on my Facebook timeline. When we meet in reality, we talk like old friends.

It's nice to start a conversation with a real life stranger who happens to be a Facebook friend by avoiding unpleasant topics based on what you learned from his/her Facebook, but problems are created in the same place. We're happy to share information within certain groups, but may not want to be heard by outsiders. There was a kidnapping in China months ago when the criminal collected information about the kid from his mother's Weibo account, an figured out the best timing and place to take him away. Another case reported by a Weibo user also showed that traditional phone fraud also improved its performance by providing more detailed information of children when swindling their parents: he planned a trip to Japan with his girlfriend, and was very excited to share his plan on his Weibo. During his trip in Japan, of course he turned his Chinese cellphone off, and his parents and friends in China were not able to reach him. That was when frauds called his parents, saying he got in trouble and needed money to come back. Luckily his parents didn't buy the story and freed themselves from monetary loss, but they still suffered a lot from anxiety. Private information can induce great damage if it's obtained in the wrong hands.

There is a grey area between private lives and public ones, where the private information can be shared with the public but does not have to. In a digital era, there are tons of tools to fill up the grey area. You may not want to mention pillow talks on Facebook, but you probably will upload a weekend hiking photo there, and you never know how those browsing your Facebook will find out about you as fragmented information like this build up. We can't blame the tools for being too convenient to leak private information, as it's us who decide the line for disclosure. At Princeton, we were warned to take off all the "improper" photos and comments on Facebook by the career adviser who strongly believe interviewers will check candidates' profiles before talking to them. I guess that's Ann was trying to tell us: no one is perfect, so don't be so eager to show people everything.

http://goo.gl/VVqTv

Gossips in The Economist

The Economist has become one of my major information sources in the US. I was excited when it started a special column on China this summer. Though the new section on China is only a page long, but it covers a wide range of topics, introducing social, economic and business issues in China. Some reports, like the one on Inner Mongolia, even surprised native Chinese like me. A few months have passed, and I've noticed an interesting trend when The Economist digs hotspots in China, which is to quote posts on Sina Weibo, the most popular social media in China as both Facebook and Twitter are blocked in the continent.

I agree that surfing online is a good way to observe what some Chinese people are concerned about. And Weibo, thanks to its huge usergroup, does include many interesting stories in China. However it's problematic to rely so heavily on Weibo as an information source. For example, in the latest Economist, there is a small piece called "Congress Watching" with a subtitle "Heard in the Hutong". As the title indicates, it's a gossiping piece, most of overhearings are posted by Weibo users. Among them is a taxi passenger who complains about the removal of all taxi window handles in Beijing according to a government directive in the name of security. The passenger wrote on his Weibo that the he was suffering from the driver's fart during the ride because of the closed window. It was a funny post on Weibo and went viral soon. I had a big laugh when reading it on my Weibo, however I found it weird that The Economist chose to re-post it in its newspaper. Given a more than $100 subscription fee per year, I guess I'm probably expecting more than gossips from The Economist.

In The Economist, pieces on China and other developing countries are very different from those on OECDs. When it talks about the US and EU, it does a good job in integrating small stories into big ideas with analytical statements. But when it talks about China, articles are most detail-oriented, filled with micro-observations rather than analysis. If I think about how Chinese media report foreign news, I think The Economist does a great job in reporting China; but if we raise the standard a little bit, let's say there is still room for improvement.

First comes the question of research methodology. When you want to introduce a country where the information is opaque, the data is always wrong and interviewees don't tell the truth, what should be a possible approach? Even in academia, most scholars working on China have problems in applying the same methodologies used by their OECD-focused counterparts due to the lack of public information, and have to rely more heavily on informal channels, such as personal connection with insiders and social media like Weibo. The difficulties of conveying timely information are foreseeable for journalists in China. However the piece on Wen's hidden wealth in NYTimes shows that in spite of the above difficulties, valuable discoveries can be found in publicly available information sources. David Barboza, the reporter, claimed to the gather all the data in his piece from public sources, but it took him more than a year to process all the information and finally find out the truth. When the information is half disclosed and mixes truths and lies, it's not easy to ferret out the facts. But isn't that journalists' job?

Then comes the concern about accuracy. When you can't get a full picture of facts, but fragmented pieces from a jigsaw puzzle, it's vital for the journalist to infer like a detective. And that's when mistakes can happen. It's crucial to have the news correct, therefore it is a natural choice for journalists to play conservative and report "unbiased" fragments only. However it always makes sense to add some analysis, no matter how accurate it can be, the reasoning will help the audience think and understand better. I once worked with an archaeologist, and most of his work is trying to put pieces together in a puzzle to depict history, which includes a lot of assumptions and deductions. He can make mistakes, but that never undermines his reputation as a great archaeologist. Journalists who make up news to attract eyes are despicable, but a few reasoning that help audience build up the full picture should be awarded.

I still like The Economist, just don't feel that happy paying for Weibo Briefs every week.

http://goo.gl/5n4W9

Delegates

The ongoing 18th CCP Congress gathered more than 2,000 CCP delegates across China, who will vote for the leading group in China for the next decade. The CCP members count for 5% of the Chinese population, but the 2,000 CCP delegates are to decide the future of 1.4 billion people. These delegates go to Beijing every five years, dawdling for a week at the cost of tax payers' money, doing anything but their job. In the end, a few old people make final choices, and these delegates act as rubber stamps and hooray their decisions.

In theory, these delegates represent all the 80 million CCP members and are entitled with the power to determine the next leading group of China. But we all know they're hand picked. In general, the CCP delegates are considered as "elites", including CEO of state-owned companies, presidents of academic institutions or high-level government officials. They go to Beijing, fully informed of how little they can affect the conference outcome, but always enjoy this great networking opportunity which can build up their "guanxi" with the central committee. Not surprisingly, some recent released stories show that these delegates care little about policy, but are more keen to show their loyalty to the Party. Instead of making comments on Hu's 100-min speech or the Party's Constitution Amendment, delegates from Ningxia Province talked about how frequently they were thrilled into crying during the congress when they found the Party is "so clean and pure"; and another old delegate proudly told the journalist that she supported the CCP's policy by never voting against it - as most other delegates did in the past half a century.


To many people's surprise, even these rubber stamps are carefully selected. I worked for a small non-communist party before, and never had the opportunity of getting involved into CCP's issues. But I once worked with some colleagues to interview National People's Congress (NPC) delegates, who by law are the counterparts to the US Congressmen, but are powerless in China. Just like their peers in CCP, the NPC delegates meet every five years to elect the national leaders, which of course are determined by the same group of old guys. But to guarantee the NPC delegates will "behave well" and pass every personnel decision, bill or amendment, it's vital for the central government to screen all the NPC candidates and make sure invitation only goes to those they like. To demonstrate the participation of non-communist parties in state affairs, non-CCP members are always invited to help select NPC delegates. I once worked as the representative of my party in the selection committee, and interviewed 20 candidates. I followed the selection criteria, talking not only to the candidate, but also his colleagues and supervisors - a typical way of collecting comprehensive information about a candidate in the CCP. After quite intense interview, my group reported our final recommendations, which were presented to NPC central committee for their final decisions. Usually 92% of the recommended candidates will get a one-week vacation and a free trip to Beijing.

My friends at Princeton can be very excited at meeting or working with a Congressmen/Senator, while I find it ridiculous that I actually did interview some "Congressmen" in my country, which unfortunately shows how powerless the NPC is in China. No one can confidently say what policy will be like in China in the next decade, and all we know so far is that Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang will announce themselves the next CCP President and vice-president in four days, Bo Xilai and his allies won't have any chance in the game, and tax payers will continue paying the bill.

Painting

The rainy season has arrived in the bay area, making indoor activities much more attractive than before. Carol and I planned to hang out in the afternoon in her place, doing some painting and crafting. We did this several times at Princeton when trying to escape from pressure in the real world. Playing arts while gossiping seemed very effective in relieving stress. Although most people prefer painting with pigments, but I always feel more comfortable with lines. Once I copied a sketch from Uffizi Gallery, showing a girl serenely looking down with a little smile, lost in her own thoughts. We spent about two hours painting and chatting on that Friday night. Carol made a painting of the Twin Peaks with oil pastels, Leslie made a painting of a waterfall and a tourist with charcoals, and I did this one with a pencil. Sketching is easy and flexible: it's easy because I can present all my imagination with just a pencil; and it's flexible because I don't need to worry if I accidentally make mistakes during the painting, a few more lines can fix the problem. Therefore it's always my first choice when painting. As many other painters, I start with portrait, and feel more comfortable with faces than bodies. (I know nothing about anatomy.)

Drawing cartoons can be even easier - no worry about light and shade, and all I need is to delineate the outline and then fill up details. When I'm facing a tight time budget, like one hourish, cartoon is always the best choice. The portrait of Shaka, a character in Saint Seiya on the left took me less than 30 minutes. I was chatting with Gang when drawing. Sometimes I believe that drawing is a processed in a separate part in our brains from thinking as I can think over during the conversation while drawing something totally irrelevant.


Later I bought some crayons at Walmart at around $4, and tried to color some of my paintings. I did a portrait of Okitasougo, a character in Gintama. He has light brown hairs and black eyes, and always wears a dark purple uniform. This picture is about him getting angry, which turns his eyes into scarlet. Crayons help to create a more colorful world, but lack the freshness and softness in oil painting or gouache, which make the color look less authentic. If not applied well, crayons can cover the original lines and make the final product even worse than the sketch. But I slowly get a sense of coloring through these crayons.

After I have a better idea of colors, I try to use them more. This time when I did painting with Carol, I tested oil pastels in traditional Chinese painting. In general oil pastels have brighter and stronger colors than crayons: actually they are so strong that sometimes it's hard to tell whether a painting is performed with oil pastels or brushes. I enjoyed the experiment very much, and for the first time in my life I realized that traditional Chinese paintings can be copied without brushes. Later I looked at more similar paintings, and found that traditional Chinese paintings rarely have strong colors, but prefer to create room for imagination through light colors and clear lines. It came to my mind that I should use crayons instead of oil pastels. That was why I decided to paint "Mountain Streams and Pines" (松涛山涧) as below. Crayons are unable to show details (they're just too thick), but can do a good job in light coloring, which is exactly what many Chinese landscape paintings are about - or in their words, the art of space.

Happy Birthday, Milo

27 years have passed since 1985 when Shueisha started to serialize Saint Seiya (SS) by Kurumada Masami, one of the most influential comic artists in his days. Five years later SS was animated and won hundreds of thousands of young audiences in China after the CCTV bought the its copyrights. In days when Chinese cartoons were far less developed, SS attracted many Chinese children with its glaring pictures and extraordinary characters. Almost every student in my class watched it, and knew fictional things like "burn my cosmos" or could do a few fighting moves. I was one of the kids, and inevitably I got obsessed with SS for years. But my dad didn't allow me to watch SS too much for fear that the glaring pictures would hurt my eyesight.

20 years later, Chinese cartoons were still as poor as two decades ago, but Japanese cartoons were much more developed, and many of them were introduced to the Chinese market. The new cartoons made the SS look like a rough and childish one to its old audiences, who were young adults now. But the SS as part of our memories of childhood, is always missed. That was why they made Saint Seiya Hades, a new series of SS with better computer-made stunts and more gorgeous pictures. (Actually it was the most expensive TV- animation at that time.) In comparison to the old SS which was mainly about Bronze Saints, the new episodes were more about Golden Saints who are also stronger and prettier. This time I was a college student. I watched SS Hades with other SS fans, not worrying about its glaring pictures. The new SS Hades created a strong reminiscent mood among SS fans. New online forums, clubs, cosplays, fan comics and novels could be found everywhere. Even I ordered a SS T-shirt from the fan club in Peking University.

After the SS Hades, Golden Saints beat their Bronze peers and lead the popularity rankings, and one of the most popular Golden Saints is Milo, the Scorpius Saint. He is the youngest one in all the twelve (and later thirteen) Golden Saints, and is also viewed as one of the most emotional and caring saint in the SS. His fans always celebrate his birthday on Nov 8, based on officially released bios. In 2004, I drew a short comic about his birthday, the only comic I've ever made. One year later, I put all my fan novels of Milo into a book, and then decided it's time for me to grow up.

The moment of SS has largely gone. Its following episodes never became popular as the SS Hades. Now most SS online forums are closed, few people are still drawing or writing about SS. Days when we got together to celebrate Milo's birthday will never be back. But Japanese cartoon fans are still growing, with more new animations showing every season and old ones never coming to an end. As long as this industry grows and the Chinese cartoons continue sucking, there will be more Chinese children and teenagers becoming Japanese comic fans, and crazy about the characters in them. You can call this a cultural invasion, but I need to say cultural products like this are truly powerful.

Scorpio Milo

Election Day, None of My Business

Yesterday morning I went to a polling place in Berkeley to watch people voting. As someone who has no say in leadership change in my own country, I'm a jealous observer of what's happening in the US. The polling place was located in a small church on University Ave, with a billboard saying "Vote Here" in English, Spanish, Chinese, etc. People stayed in the short line, quietly waiting to vote. They're lucky to live in California, a deep blue state, therefore they didn't suffer much from ubiquitous campaign ads like in Ohio. People are voting, but are not crazily mobilized to vote. They came here as a stop to work or a lunch break, and checked the box after Obama and Biden.

Democrats' victory in White House looked almost certain before the ballots were counted. Despite the poor performance on economy, Obama seemed to have persuaded voters that Romney could only lead the country to a worse situation. Electoral forecasters on Intrade.com believed the odds for Obama's re-election vary between 60% to 90%. Sandy is the last straw that crushes Romney, as FEMA showed its strong disaster-relief capacity and the NJ governor praised Obama for his reaction to the hurricane and afterwards reconstruction. At least I never doubted that Obama could get re-elected when I heard Romney talking about opening windows on airplane and the 47%. But many of my American friends, those working on environment and energy issues in particular, were truly nervous before the result was released. I guess this is a true reaction when politics is closely related to your everyday life.

Tomorrow the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China will take place in Beijing. It's a party congress, not a national congress. However it will determine the Chinese leading group for the next ten years. We already know who the next CCP chairman, i.e. the next Chinese president will be, and we are also pretty sure who the next Chinese premier will be. But the rest seven vacancies in the central politburo standing committee remains opaque. 800 million CCP members are not able to vote, let alone the 1.3 billion non-communists. A small group of old men decide what China will be like in the next decade. Since I have no clue about what policy options have been debated within the decision-making body, or which policy/politician I should prefer, I'm not nervous at all. I will just wait and see, and probably guess what policy will be adopted in the future.

The beautiful part of checks and balance is to put restrictions over power, therefore incumbents have to carefully watch their behaviors and do less wrong. The relation between the government and the public is like a multiple gaming, with each side trying to gain more. Yes democracy makes mistakes, but the political party and politicians who made the mistakes never had a second chance. While in dictatorship, there is no restriction over the power, and dictators can do anything to maintain their rule, such as lying about history, suppressing dissents and blocking internet. As a result, the public lose the second chance to know the truth. If we try to model these two political regimes, in democracy, both the public and the government have utility functions out of which they try to maximize their utilities; while in dictatorship, only the government has a utility function while the public is a condition to subject to.

@ University Ave, Berkeley CA

Lost in BART, and Everywhere Else

This afternoon I took BART back to North Berkeley from Lafayette. I should first take the train to SF, transfer at MacArthur and then another train to Richmond; and I did plan to do so. However when I got off one platform and headed for another at MacArthur, I made a mistake - instead of catching the train to Richmond, I got on the one back to Pittsburg. (And I strongly believe putting two platforms so close is a design flaw.) It was very crowded on the train, I finally found a holder and stabilized myself. I didn't realize my mistake until I got to the next station. Frustrated but amused, I got off the train and went back to MacArthur again, where I finally figured out the right platform for BART to Richmond and got home in the end.

This was not the first time that I got lost in BART. About one month ago, I took BART from Powell Street to North Berkeley, and was messed up by a misleading timetable which led me to the wrong train. I was obsessed with reading on the train, and didn't realize what was going on until Gang called me, saying I was on the wrong train. Obviously he tracked my place with "find my iPhone", and found his wife going somewhere unknown. Warned by Gang, I got off the train and returned to MacArthur where I found the right train to ride on.

BART is probably one of the most convenient transportation in the bay area, and therefore I only lost twice on it. Buses are much more confusing. When I was living in the south bay, I once saw Gang off in the Caltrain station. Later I took a bus home. Though I had studied its path carefully before making the "trip", I still got off the wrong stop, and had to walk another ten minutes back. Coincidentally Xujing has witnessed my poor sense of direction during her visit to Stanford University as well. After showing her around the campus, we took a campus shuttle to the Caltrain station. Unfortunately though I got the name of the line right, I got the direction wrong. Instead of going two stops, we had a great shuttle tour of the campus and arrived at the Caltrain station more than half an hour later.

For people like me, map is nonsense. I noticed this when I went to college in Peking University. on the first day, all my roommates had no difficulties with walking to classrooms with a map except me. Later my roommate took me to classroom everyday until I was able to do it by myself about two months later. Years ago, I once showed Xinxin around Stanford with a map during her visit, which however didn't give me a clue about the locations of several places. Anyway I guided her for quite a while but had to admit I was lost in the end. So Xinxin took the map over and showed me the way back to bus stations.

What makes google map on smart phones so precious is that it shows your real-time location on map. Ever since I had that iPhone 4, I never got lost on Princeton campus, although it took me a few months to be able to walk to Robertson Hall from GC without referring to iPhone, and I did once have a difficult time to go back to Magie because even the roads on google maps were very confusing. Another invention that I'm very grateful of is GPS navigation systems in cars. I used GPS everytime I drive, even to a Safeway which is 1 mile from my apt. The logic is that if I can't tell directions when I'm walking, there is no way for me to tell directions when I'm focusing on driving.

I had some problems in finding ways abroad when 3G on my iPhone was blocked, but luckily I was always traveling with someone who could tell directions. So far I didn't make a single emergent call for help with road guidance. So at least there is something that I can be proud of.

Cultural Products

How amazing it is to see so Americans dancing to the Gangnam Style without knowing the meaning of its lyrics. It's probably not surprising to see pop stars like Britney Spears to imitate PSY, her Korean counterpart's; but now every one - politicians, scholars and artists, etc is dancing to the song and sharing the videos online. A few weeks ago, I saw a MTV called "Romney Style", later I found a similar one called "Obama style", and finally Romney did dance to the Gangnam Style in one of his campaigns, which was taken as a strategy to attract young voters. Yesterday I found a video on Youtube about PhDs and professors at MIT, and business students at Stanford dancing to Gangnam Style. It looks like you're out of fashion if you're not dancing to the Gangnam Style. Why? Because every one else is doing that.

I have no idea why this song is so popular, and I'm even more confused at why people enjoy it so much without knowing the meaning of the song. But the popularity of Gangnam Style seems to imply a potential global market for Asian cultural products in spite of the differences in languages, traditions and culture. Hollywood movies and American sitcoms already become popular with young audiences in Asia, thanks to the universal English education and values; and a few Asian movies are shown in the US too. But some ideas are hard to translate. Take a Chinese movie for example. Farewell My Concubine, the Golden Globe Awards winner in 1993, tells a story of Peking Opera actors from early 1920s to the end of Cultural Revolution. The film narrative seems prosaic in lack of climax, and a feeling of melancholy runs through the entire movie, which is in sharp contrast to the turbulent era in China and the dramatic Peking Opera. However for audience without the knowledge of Chinese history or Peking Opera, it's difficult to see this artistic expression.

To make cultural products popular in a different cultural setting, a shortcut is to keep it simple and stupid. Gangnam Style is a song mocking at rick people in Soul, but no one cares about what it says, they only like the few dancing movements and shouting "oppa gangnam style!" when doing them. Many Hollywood movies find the best way of selling their movies in overseas markets is to show fancy pictures like The Lord of the Rings, or glaring CG stunts like Transformers, not trying to explore profound themes in 2 hours. This proves to be a very wise strategy. Why is Avatar such a success? Stories are old, but people went there to enjoy an unprecedented imax 3D movie. Most audiences probably can't recall the story, but they will always remember flying with avatars on the back of that big bird. Because of the big gap in technology, it is always easy for American movies to take Asian markets, not vice verse.

But it may come to the point that people's utility curve from fancy movie technologies flat out, and their demand for something else starts to increase. Then the challenge to cultural products is how to convey ideas instead of pictures, and that will be a real headache.

http://goo.gl/hhfHq

Things That Are Unexpected

Gang and I are browsing the latest news and pictures about Sandy, which turned New York City and its neighborhood into an empty area overnight. Friends on the east coast have been updating their status on Facebook and Weibo, such as "out of power" and "on vacation", etc. We luckily are enjoying sunshine in California and have access to electricity, water and internet, but many people have their normal lives interrupted by the hurricane. They may plan to celebrate their birthday or anniversary tonight, or have already invited friends and relatives over for weddings on Monday, or need to close a big deal with overseas partners as soon as possible. However unexpected natural disasters prevent them from following original plans, and force them to go for alternatives - stay in the dark, read or play board games by candlelight while waiting for Sandy's pass.

I always view myself an organized person with strict agenda of getting things done at different times. Unexpected situations can be very annoying. Small changes to plans are tolerable: such as one more problem set due this week, another party to go tonight, or new paper topics. Some changes, though big, leave enough room for me to react and therefore are easy to accept as well, such as marriage and new jobs.

What can be really troublesome is big sudden changes. Last year I went on a field research with five classmates and a professor from Princeton University. We spent three days in Namibia and then went to South Africa, where my luggage were stolen the night before we were about to leave. Everything seemed to change overnight. For all the past two months, I collected data from all the SARB MPC reports, surveys and other database, recorded information through interviews with local government officials and entrepreneurs during the field trip, and wrote my paper day and night, in hope to finish most of the paper by the end of the month. Suddenly my laptop and interview notes were stolen without a copy of my paper or excel files saved online. In other words, I had to repeat the work that I'd already spent two months on. What's worse, my passport was taken away as well, which meant I did not only need a new passport but also a new US visa to go back. Without a penny in my pocket, I was worried that I would spend weeks here miserably and missed all the courses in the rest of the semester without a laptop to either continue to work on my paper or download online readings and lecture notes for other courses. Luckily, with the help from alumni and friends, I received both my travel document and visa in a week, and finally got back. But I remember when I was told by the US consulate that they couldn't issue visas on a Chinese travel document and my only choice was to go back to China to get a new passport and then a US visa there, I did start to plan how to take the rest courses in China and how long should I postpone my graduation in case I couldn't get enough credits by the end of the year.

Sudden disasters brought challenges, but also made us feel better about our lives when they were over. I was stressed by all the qualifying exam and job search stuff before I left for Africa. But after all these happened, I only felt lucky that I didn't wake up when the guy was lurking into my room and thus protected myself from any physical hurt; and I found it so unworthy to worry about things like jobs and exams when I was facing the danger of deferment. I guess that's the biggest thing I learned about things that are unexpected: they remind us what we should be grateful of.

A Car Accident

My car was hit when a Civic tried to overtake me from the left. The driver drove so fast that her car caught up from the behind soon and forced to change the lane before fully overtaking me, leaving scratches and a dent on the left side of my new Honda.

We've maintained a great driving record since moving to the US, and no accident has ever been reported. The result was that neither Gang nor I knew what to do after the accident happened. I called 911, and was suggested to exchange our insurance information with the driver and report to my insurance company. So we got the insurance information and the driver license number done, and took pictures of scratches on each car. The young lady seemed to be driving her parents' car, whose insurance was under her parents' names and expired three days. I contacted my insurance company and was told that because today is Sunday no one was there to provide service. Reluctantly we let the young driver go. And just before we were about to leave, Gang saw a police car coming. We stopped the car, and asked the policeman for advice to handle issues like this. He said the same thing: let the insurance company handle this.

Things look surprisingly simple. There was no shouting at each other or complaints. Both parties were busy making phone calls, writing down information and taking photos. Thanks to iPhone which makes all these things very easy. But for sure driver license should not be issued to careless young drivers like this. I don't know how the auto insurance company with handle this - since it is difficult to find witnesses for what happened this afternoon, I have no idea about how they could figure things out. But at least we've experienced one more thing in the US.

Hidden Wealth

Gini coefficient is so far the most popular indicator to evaluate inequality in a country. The higher the Gini Coefficient, the less equal the country is. Since the coefficient is respected by most countries, economists always use it to rank the level of inequality in a country. It always looks less decent if a country tops the list of Gini coefficient with a low GDP per capita.

Therefore some countries use their own way of calculating Gini coefficient. For example, India calculates Gini by consumption instead of income to lower its Gini coefficient. How does this work? For example, one family owns $1 million a year, but consumes $100K; while another family owns $1000 a year and consumes all of it. The difference between their consumption is much less than the difference between their income. The trick that the Chinese Statistical Bureau is playing with Gini coefficient is equally cunning. Instead of calculating Gini coefficient for the entire country, they calculate two separate Ginis, one for urban area and the other for the rural area. Because of the big income gap between cities and countrysides, both Ginis are considered not reflecting the true inequality in China.

In addition to these obvious tricks of lowering Gini coefficient, it is widely believed that some assets of rich people's are not reported as government officials trade power for money in the grey area, which make the money unspeakable. Though the central government looks determined in addressing corruption and driving its bureaucrats to publish their salaries and assets, very few are willing to do that. And those who have to put the information online usually choose to understate their wealth. It's not surprising. In almost every corruption case that has been disclosed recently, the asset of each official can be counted in billions - millions of cash and dozens of mansions. Even that is not the whole story. Headlines of NY Times yesterday seemed to reveal that in China large assets can be acquired by seniors in the government and their relatives in a legal way. These assets, no matter taken legitimately or illegally, are usually not included in the calculation of Gini coefficient, and they are seeking global investment opportunities with a significant ratio of them already transferred overseas.

Meanwhile, the Gini coefficient can be overestimated as well because of non-monetary assets in a family. When we look at household income, we usually assume that's what people live on; while actually they may live on things other than monetary income. Farmers grow food in their fields and decide to eat half of them instead of selling all; and tailors make clothes for their family members and relatives. Poor people do not always receive paychecks and live on commodities, and complexity of the market makes Gini coefficient even more confusing. But in comparison to the large hidden wealth, this slight overestimation can be ignored.

Data don't lie, but the people who develop and interpret it can lie. That's the world of “闷声发大财" (make money, not noises).