709 (July 9, 2015)

Yesterday was the sixth anniversary of the start of the "709 Crackdown" on human rights lawyers in China on July 9, 2015. 

From March 1994 to January 1996, I taught English and various classes on US law (mainly Contracts and the US legal system) at the China University of Political Science and Law at the old campus by the Third Ring Road. Some of the over 300 detained in the crackdown studied at this law school, and a few were in my classes. I wonder how they are doing and what I could do to help.

One of them was Wang Yu (王宇), who was arrested in Beijing on July 9, 2015. In 2016 she was the first recipient of the American Bar Association International Human Rights Award. 

"Chinese lawyer Wang Yu given ABA International Human Rights Award in absentia" August 6, 2016, ABA Journal

https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/chinese_lawyer_wang_yu_given_inaugural_aba_international_human_rights_award

This video prepared for The Guardian focuses on a Hainan case in which a school principal and a government official raped school girls. But they were initially charged with having sex with prostitutes, a lesser offense than assaulting children. Wang Yu took up the case to try to rectify this offensive abuse of power.

"Chinese human rights lawyer: 'You might disappear at any time' " September 5, 2015 (7 minutes 44 seconds)

https://www.the guardian.com/world/video/2015/sep/02/china-human-rights-lawyer-wang-yu-video-interview

On March 4, 2021, the US State Department announced that she was one of the 14 recipients of the "2021 International Women of Courage Award," officially awarded on March 8, International Women's Day.

https://www.state.gov/2021-international-women-of-courage-award-recipients-announced/

White Horse Temple--Luoyang, Henan Province, China

In the 1990s I visited the White Horse Temple with my students at the Zhengzhou Textile Institute during Luoyang's Peony Festival. Founded in 68 AD, the temple is regarded as the first Buddhist temple in China. We also saw the Longmen Grottoes.

On the large incense burner, running vertically it says White Horse Temple (traditional Chinese characters--白馬寺; simplified-- 白马寺)

I decided to go to China to take a break from my graduate school program in political science at the University of Michigan since living in China would help me learn about the country, which was one of my specialties. I picked Henan Province because I'd shared an apartment in Kansas with Chinese from Henan and few foreigners  lived there. I was so caught up being with my students and Chinese colleagues that I didn't see another native speaker of English until about 1/2 year had gone by. When a teacher from Britain who was at another college knocked on my door, I was stunned. I wish I'd taken more pictures without identifiable people so that I could share them without violating someone's privacy.

I loved spending time in the department office helping my Chinese colleagues or in the classroom talking with my students when they were studying. (College students in China tend to have a home classroom where they study, although some like to go to the library or their dorms.)

a song

"Far Off, Close By" (1968) by Willis Conover and Alec Wilder:

https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/wilderworld/episodes/2006-12-16T22_55_54-08_00 (2 min 15 sec)

I first heard this song in China while listening to a VOA special on Willis Conover. 

Climate Change

In Harwood Community Garden, southwest corner of Whitridge and Greenmount Avenue, Baltimore (The garden is briefly discussed in this 2018 article: "What’s Growing in Baltimore? Community Gardens!")

Many of my previous posts could be tagged as about climate change since trying to reduce greenhouse gases relates to a lot of my habits going back to the 1980s, such as walking or eating close to a vegetarian diet. This past October, as I looked over the points raised by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C,  I realized that I should have been much more and consistently active over the years.

I like this perspective from environmentalist Paul Hawken:
"The single most important thing to do about reversing global warming is to recognize there is no one single thing, that addressing global warming is a way of seeing the world, a way of being in the world, a pathway to understanding that human systems created the problem and thus the cure is within the whole of the system. The most impactful act an individual can do will depend on that person’s life, knowledge, community, influence, relationships, courage. It will be different for everyone. Together, we act and make a difference. It is not about what 'I' can do. It is about what we can do. Carbon is an atom (and molecule) that holds hands and collaborates. That is what global warming is telling us to do.” From "16 Sustainability Leaders Weigh In: How YOU Can Help To Reverse Global Warming"

While I was teaching in China, I was so immersed in living there but losing touch with life in the US that in 1994 I decided to go to the English-language room of the Beijing National Library and read Al Gore's Earth in the Balance. So much has changed in China since then. I usually felt happy there from spending time with my students and Chinese colleagues. I have too many thoughts about that time and my life now. 

"--for time is the longest distance between two places." Tom in The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. I'm quoting Tom, but I more often feel like what his sister felt. That's one reason why going to China was one of my best decisions.

Zen Garden in Druid Hill Park/Coldspring Labyrinth

Last month I visited the Zen Garden by walking from the southeast along the maintenance road that borders the north side of the zoo. I'd noticed the Zen Garden on the map of the park on its north side (quadrant B1) and got the idea to finally take a look after I read an article shared by one of my FB organizations.  The author of the Baltimore Sun piece, "Reviving Druid Hill's 'Zen Garden'," April 15, 2017, Craig Phillips, found that the garden hadn't really been developed or maintained much since it was started, which I think was in 2010. On his own he created a labyrinth and added some Buddhist-related pieces. Although his intentions are nice, this kind of individual initiative on parkland could backfire, such as because of First Amendment issues.

An easier way to reach the Zen Garden is from the north pedestrian/bicycle entrance, Parkdale Avenue from the Woodberry/Clipper Mill neighborhood. This picture is from inside the park toward that entrance. To get to the Zen Garden from the path, turn left at the gate post, that is, right in this picture.

I took the path just beyond the gate, although Phillips suggests a dirt path a little further down. According to the map, a stream runs between the Parkdale Road path and the path to the Zen Garden, but it seemed dry to me.

Lining this path are concrete remains that I guess maintenance dumped here. It's a short walk to the Zen Garden.

In the garden are two circles--one to the north with a Buddha statue sitting on two slabs and a labyrinth to the south.

Sign below the prayer wheel

One idea I get from walking the labyrinth is when the path takes me away from the destination just as it seems close. This reminds me of how we can face setbacks in our lives and the need for knowing how to handle them or possibly prevent them.

                                                                              

On the left side of the labyrinth is this circle to the left in the ground. The left part of it is the character for winter (冬),  but I don't know what the right part means. The circle on the right has the character for spring (春).

The bench was placed here during the initial work on the garden about seven years ago. Phillips placed that wooden face on the tree.

Baltimore Green Map has created interactive maps along with paper maps of Druid Hill Park and Jones Falls Trail. I used the latter on Tuesday when I walked to Cylburn Arboretum then north through the Mount Washington neighborhood, which has a bunch of large houses, many of which look like they could be used for haunted mansions. 

Just before the Arboretum I stopped at another labyrinth--the Coldspring Labyrinth, which sits by the Coldspring Community Center at 4800 Tamarind Road. Across the street is a Waldorf School. [The map on the Coldspring Newtown website is very good. The labyrinth is between the bird sanctuary and the ball field.]

I'd wrongly assumed that I could walk a circle back to my place after visiting the Arboretum by taking Northern Parkway east to Roland Avenue, but I discovered that stretch lacks sidewalks and is too dangerous to walk along. It has now occurred to me that my detour through Mount Washington to reach another way across I-83, Kelly Avenue, was a setback like in a labyrinth, with the setback actually a blessing in disguise. This reminds me of a useful Chinese saying 塞翁失马，焉知非福 (Sai Weng Shi Ma Yan Zhi Fei Fu--Sai Weng lost his horse - who knows if this is bad or good?/When the old man from the frontier lost his horse, how could one know it is not good fortune?). One way of translating that is this: "It can be difficult to foresee the twists and turns which compel misfortune to beget fortune, and vice versa." Chinese sayings like this tend to have background stories that help explain them. Short version for this saying. 

So many setbacks in life are much worse--making it almost impossible to find any blessing in disguise, which requires some other way to try to understand or forget what happened and move forward. I've been thinking too much lately about my mistakes and don't easily see the blessings in disguise. One way for me to deal with that is to try to use the positives to outweigh the negatives. Walking around and talking with others are among those positives. A short example of that was when I talked with a nice manager of an apartment complex I walked by and was wondering about. She gave me suggestions on how to get around the Northern Parkway obstacle.

-=----------------------------
Added on July 13, 2018
The Zen Garden has changed since I posted this. The main difference is the area around the little statue.

This seems to be a platform for meditation.

This peace sign is to the left in the above picture.

While sitting on the bench last week, I felt that the clear area beside this plot helped make this place relaxing because my eyes kept looking in that direction.

People place objects on the round block in the middle of the labyrinth.

It's been more than a year since I was here. Someone who found this entry messaged me that the Zen Garden had been improved, so last week I walked from near Penn Station along Jones Falls to Woodberry then over to the back entrance of Druid Hill Park. I felt overcome while at the Zen Garden by thoughts of how I'd thought I was getting closer to a destination last year but was actually leading myself away. Near the end of what I wrote in May 2017, I tried to rationalize going in circles, but sometimes cutting through directly is best, and I wish I'd done that.

Authentic Chinese food--an example 西红柿炒鸡蛋 (stir-fried tomatoes and eggs)
The only food critic to win a Pulitzer, Jonathan Gold of the LA Weekly, delivered a lecture last night titled "Authenticity, Culture, and the Korean Taco" as part of the Humanities Without Boundaries series of UW. During the last half, Gold used his cell phone as a miniature teleprompter to read some of his talk. The best part was in Q and A, such as when he was asked about the worst meal he'd ever eaten.

The issue of whether a dish is authentic reminds me of one of the most common dishes in Chinese homes--tomato and eggs.  In my experience, this can be a main or side dish at any meal, but I've yet to notice it at a typical Chinese restaurant in the US.

Whenever I taught oral English, one of my assignments was to ask students to describe how to cook a dish, and I think that the majority chose tomato and eggs. It basically entails cooking scrambled eggs in some vegetable oil-- sort of into an omelet but then cut into pieces with a spatula. You then cook the tomatoes--either diced (my preference) or in wedges--usually with green onion or scallion and maybe some ginger, although this could overpower the other flavors. Finish by mixing together the cooked eggs and tomatoes. Salt is almost always added at some point, and a little bit of sugar is OK, although not so common.

By the way, another common dish I've had in Chinese homes was uncooked sliced tomatoes with sugar sprinkled on top.

Many of the online recipes seem to call for too many tomatoes, even one for every egg; however, I--and most of the Chinese I've talked to about this--use one regular-size tomato with two or three eggs.

A lot of variations
1. mix with noodles or even rice
2. with garlic (I think that green onions are much more commonly used.)
http://www.beijingmadeeasy.com/chinese-recipes/egg-and-tomato-chinese-recipe

3. with some sugar
http://appetiteforchina.com/recipes/stir-fried-tomato-eggs

4. close to what I describe
http://www.travelchinaguide.com/tour/food/chinese-cooking/scrambled-eggs-tomato.htm

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Stir-Fried-Egg-and-Tomato-352835

Videos
This one has too many variations from the norm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRfLNGE2YUo [I think her tomato wedges are too big and she cooks this longer than necessary. Adding chicken flavoring is definitely not typical. I don't push the spatula so much while the tomatoes cook, and mine is not so wet or juicy. Pushing the cooked eggs to the side of the pan while cooking the tomatoes, as she does it, is fine rather than emptying them into a bowl.

At the end she mentions dipping bread into the juices. I think that this would only be good with the very dry mantou (steamed buns) that are common in northern China.]

Bumper Stickers/Eating Jiaozi for Chinese New Year/Music at the Union
"Imagine Whirled Peas"--seen on bumper sticker on car parked near Madison's State Street while I was walking from local library to Memorial Library. [Chinese might want to email me if they can't figure out the message. It's a pun on another bumper sticker.]

I've probably seen this one before, but today it reminds me of a teaching idea of Jack Bowen, a high school teacher in the SF Bay area--asking students to record bumper stickers to discuss the philosophy of the message. Maybe I'll try that with my students. [I first heard of his book, If You Can Read This: The Philosophy of Bumper Stickers, from WPR--http://www.wpr.org/book/100530a.cfm He's interviewed for the third segment.]

Monday is the fifth day of the Chinese new year. Because I'll be busy tomorrow, I made some jiaozi for lunch using pre-made jiaozi wrappers and then finely chopped for the filling Chinese cabbage, green onion, and spinach along with some shredded carrot and one scrambled egg. The typical filling uses ground pork often mixed with Chinese cabbage and maybe some other vegetable. The custom is to eat jiaozi on new year's eve around midnight, the first day, and the fifth day (often leading to people eating jiaozi during the days in between). Another big day for eating jiaozi was the first day of winter. On the 15th day of the new year--called the Lantern Festival in English but yuanxiao jie [ 元宵节] in most of China--the custom is to eat glutinous rice balls--called yuanxiao--that have various kinds of sweet fillings. In about a week, I'll describe how to make them.

Chinese street food that I wish could be found in the US
During this time of year in northern China, I sometimes was able to buy roasted sweet potatoes sold on the street by vendors using steel barrels to cook them. Most of my China photos are out east, so here is a link to a photo showing a barrel with sweet potatoes. The burnt skins don't look that appetizing, but the insides are cooked well enough and nice to eat while walking in cool weather with others: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ajax/3824172/

In Search of Mayonnaise
While I was teaching in Jinan, Shandong Province, I got the idea one late spring day to make with my students some potato salad as part of an American-style meal. Since I didn't want to risk using raw eggs to make mayonnaise from scratch, which I'd never done anyway, I recruited a student to help me explore the city of over 1 million to find some in a store.

Sometimes during my years teaching in China, I'd go on such food expeditions with some of my students and Chinese colleagues. This was to give them some idea of food typically eaten in the US. In Zhengzhou, for example, a student once reported seeing peanut butter in a downtown department store. Although I normally ate Chinese food, I think that I was actually excited by that news, so a few of us went there after class. The peanut butter was in jars similar to what's found in the US, but I discovered that the jar I'd bought was flavored with hot pepper. I'd not noticed the small stamp in Chinese on the label indicating that it was hot. Then on, I was sure to request the sweet kind.

At each store in Jinan, we usually had trouble trying to describe mayonnaise, for the translation in the dictionary wasn't a common term, at least back then, and I was the only one who had ever eaten any. Each time the store clerk eventually said, "沒有."
[For those who don't know Chinese, go to this page for a translation and click on the word on the left side with a little arrow next to it for the audio clip: http://mandarin.about.com/od/dailymandarin/a/meiyou.htm]

Blocked in China

Some people I know in China can't access this blog ever since I've re-started on here, but they can open my old one: http://xizhimen.livejournal.com/ I'll see if I can find a solution because I think that I prefer this site to Livejournal.

Re-Starting This Blog/Recalling My 2003 Return to China

My last posting on here was in January 2003. I forgot I had even started this blog until earlier this evening when I was trying to use Google's blogging service. I discovered that someone had already taken chuckditzler.blogspot, was disappointed, and then figured out that I was the one. I don't think I tried to check this blog when I went to China in summer 2003.

It was just after SARS had been declared over, so I was able to take advantage of a relatively cheap fair--about $700 roundtrip between Chicago and Beijing. Going there was direct on United for about 12 hours; coming back included a four-hour layover at Narita in Tokyo--not enough time for me to take the chance to leave the airport to see something of Japan yet enough to get bored. I've been to Japan about a dozen times and still haven't been outside of the airport.

Returning to Beijing after five years away was a reverse culture shock, for it had felt like home while I taught there in the 90s. Many intersections that I was familiar with had been completely transformed by the destruction and new buildings. At least I was satisfied by the new Wangfujing, more openness, and better mass transit. But it was sad to see so much of old Beijing being torn down, and the traffic was horrible at times. When I was first in China, I sometimes walked by the Third Ring Road when there was almost no traffic. Even Changan Blvd often had little traffic around noon. I was so happy, though, to be able to eat foods I'd missed for five years, to browse in bookstores, and just walk again in the city.

I wish that the Internet had been bigger in China while I was teaching there so that I had email addresses of my students. Some have been able to track me down. That's easier for them because too many Chinese names are the same.

In 2006 I posted some entries at http://xizhimen.livejournal.com/ . I'm thinking about moving to Google's site.

Chuck