Going backwards

Philip Taubman has an ill-thought-out piece in the Times, When the Kremlin Tried a Little Openness:

A dash of openness can be a dangerous thing in an autocratic state.

Mikhail Gorbachev discovered this two decades ago when his campaign to inject some daylight into Soviet society doubled back on him like a heat-seeking missile.

Now China’s leaders are playing with the same volatile political chemistry as they give their own citizens and the world an unexpectedly vivid look at the earthquake devastation in the nation’s southwest regions.

China has had the fastest-growing economy in the world for the past decade; comparing that to the moribund Soviet economy of the 80s is weird at best, stupid at worst.

It's fashionable to bash China, but at least pick the right sticks.

Groping for the dragon

So the NYTimes has launched a new blog, Rings, which "covers the 2008 Beijing Games from every angle -- the politics, the arts, the culture, the competition."

Hmm, let's see--so far none of the 14 points are from an Asian or Asian American, and contributor George Vescey's recommended 4 books to read to understand China are all written by Western journalists.

Wonder if they know the Chinese proverb, about the blind men and the elephant.

Paving the way for peace

There's a story out from the AP, that Mao offered U.S. 10 million women. It's actually a really interesting read; and my take is U.S-Chinese relations would be much better know had the offer been accepted.

Not to mention our average IQ would definitely be higher.

Amid a discussion of trade in 1973, Chinese leader Mao Zedong made what U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called a novel proposition: sending tens of thousands, even 10 million, Chinese women to the United States.

"You know, China is a very poor country," Mao said, according to a document released by the State Department's historian office.

"We don't have much. What we have in excess is women. So if you want them we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands."

A few minutes later, Mao circled back to the offer. "Do you want our Chinese women?" he asked. "We can give you 10 million."

After Kissinger noted Mao was "improving his offer," the chairman said, "We have too many women. ... They give birth to children and our children are too many."

"It is such a novel proposition," Kissinger replied in his discussion with Mao in Beijing. "We will have to study it."

Exception that shames the rule

From Liam Fitzpatrick's post on the death of Kevin Sinclair, who he calls "the doyen of Hong Kong’s press corps":

Kevin was disliked by Hong Kong’s liberal intelligentsia, who depicted him as a barking, right-wing grump. He had a gruff, pugnacious writing style, and championed deeply un-modish things like law and order. But on re-reading his work, it strikes me that posterity will see him rather differently. Here was a man who chanced upon a library copy of Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China at the age of 14, and developed from that a lifelong passion for China. From the moment he arrived in Hong Kong in his 20s, he refused to inhabit the comfy confines of Western media circles, or to subscribe to their patronizing stereotypes of Chinese people and society. In later life, he became a foremost authority on the village culture of Hong Kong’s New Territories, and the only English-language journalist to achieve any sort of profile among the Chinese population. Most Western journalists in Hong Kong never learn to speak Cantonese. Kevin insisted on speaking it despite a tracheotomy at the age of 33.

Teach yourself

Some interesting reading in Jonathan Dee's unlikely profiles, A Toy Maker’s Conscience:

With just a few weeks to go until Christmas, the sensory onslaught inside the Times Square Toys “R” Us was well into its merciless ratchet upward. The infrastructure of aggression — the indoor Ferris wheel, the roaring animatronic T-rex, the woman who blocks your path as you enter the store to snap a picture of you that another employee will try to sell to you on your way out — was augmented by the holiday tension on the ground: mothers on cellphones, seasonal employees in the store’s dark blue shirts pushing carts full of inventory, children banging away at the sample electronics. It seemed as loud as a factory floor; but that is only because most of us cannot imagine how loud a factory floor actually is.

Toy Factory Floor Mattel did more than most companies to improve the conditions for workers in Chinese factories. But when it recalled toys with lead paint it still faced a public-relations disaster.
Prakash Sethi, though, didn’t really see any of it. Instead, standing before a vertiginous wall of toys while shoppers eddied around him, the 73-year-old business-school professor and grandfather saw only what the tens of thousands who march through here every Christmas season fail to see, which is how all these toys came to be here in the first place. ...

The work is hot and loud and exhausting and hazardous and underpaid. But it is also, at least for the 60,000 to 80,000 (or many more, according to Sethi) Chinese factory workers employed directly or indirectly by Mattel, measurably less so than it used to be, and that is in large part the achievement of Sethi himself. A career academic, he is the founder and president of the idealistically named International Center for Corporate Accountability, an operation run out of a two-room faculty office at Baruch College in New York. It may be a reach to style a University Distinguished Professor of Management at Baruch’s Zicklin School of Business as a radical, but in that academic context, at least, he’s something of a flamethrower. He has suggested that multinational companies with manufacturing bases in China and elsewhere not merely raise the pathetically low wages of their factory employees but also pay them restitution for years past. When asked why more companies don’t take steps to monitor wages and working conditions, he once answered “bigotry.” This sort of bluntness makes it less than completely surprising that the I.C.C.A. doesn’t have a long list of clients for its monitoring services. “I don’t work with very many companies,” Sethi says equably. “They don’t want me.” ...

Fitzgerald presented what he called “the concept of Prakash” to the Mattel executives at their corporate headquarters in El Segundo, Calif., and they brought him out for a meeting that led to the establishment of the Mattel Independent Monitoring Council, the precursor to his International Center for Corporate Accountability. (When, several years later, the possibility arose of Sethi and his staff’s monitoring other companies as well, everyone involved agreed it would be best to get Mattel’s name off the door.) What the council was being asked to monitor was Mattel’s adherence to its own “global manufacturing principles” — a two-page pledge consisting mostly of vague ethical declarations to which no one could object, like “facilities must have environmental programs in place to minimize their impact on the environment.” For Sethi — who had spent his career publishing books and delivering lectures on corporate morality more or less into a void — this was an almost unbelievable opportunity to carry his ideas inside the walls of a commercial behemoth, one with sales of more than $5 billion a year. “It was totally unprecedented,” he says. “Really intoxicating. I was inventing everything as I went along. There just weren’t any systems of its kind. Nobody could say, ‘It can’t be done.’ ” ...

Resistance can take different forms. On one audit, a Chinese colleague called Sethi’s attention to a group of men standing beside a black S.U.V. parked outside the factory. At first Sethi didn’t see anything unusual about it. “Where,” his colleague asked him rhetorically, “would you see a group of such healthy Chinese men standing around smoking cigarettes and doing nothing?” The intimation was that the men might be the local police sent by someone to intimidate them. (Sethi had been followed in other countries before.) Rather than risk some sort of incident, the rest of the audit was called off, but six months later Sethi returned to the same factory and wasn’t bothered. ...

Fitzgerald, who left Mattel in 2000, says: “The changes we made in the living conditions in China were extraordinary. I think you can tell from the passion in my voice that I am very proud of what we accomplished. It was a big damn deal. And without Prakash, it could never have worked.”

Sethi remembers one epic argument with a factory manager who didn’t want to upgrade his filthy dormitory on the grounds that it was built before the company created its global manufacturing principles. In the end, Mattel worked out a deal that resulted in a new dorm, and the manager and Sethi became friends. According to Sethi, the manager said, “Prakash, these workers and the ones after them, they’ll never know what a crummy Indian did for them.” ...

But the global manufacturing principles are all about protecting workers; as it developed, there is another constituency whose welfare has been put at risk by Mattel’s operations in China: namely, the consumers who bought and the children who played with what was made there. In early July, a European retailer discovered lead paint on some of Mattel’s toys; on Aug. 2, Mattel announced the recall of 83 different toys, a total of 1.5 million items. Twelve days later, more than 400,000 additional toys were recalled for containing lead-based paint — together with millions more recalled for the choking hazard posed by tiny magnets, which had nothing to do with production shortcuts but were instead caused by flaws in Mattel’s own designs. ...

Alan Hassenfeld, the chairman of Hasbro and the co-chairman of the ICTI CARE foundation, called for a one-code approach in remarks at a Columbia Business School forum last spring that seemed directed at Mattel, offering a somewhat tin-eared anecdote about a Chinese factory that moved the fire extinguishers six inches up and down the walls depending on who was monitoring its conditions that week — as if the real hardship inside these factories was an excess of bureaucracy. ...

There will always be those who consider big business’s vows to make the world a better place fundamentally cynical. But capitalism has often longed for, if not technically required, a moral justification, and for most of the 20th century it was provided by socialism and the various forms of government representing it. Now that opposition is gone, and in search of a nonmaterial rationale, the lords of acquisition have to look elsewhere. The sense of moral aspiration behind corporate social responsibility seems mostly genuine — which is somehow both the most and least appealing thing about it, for it encourages a lot of back-patting among the world’s economic elite, whose members seem able to discern, in their own hunt for the cheapest possible work force, a humanitarian aim.

“I know we have brought a lot of modernity to that part of the world,” Hassenfeld told the audience at that Columbia forum. He said Japan, Korea and Taiwan “exploded” when Hasbro was manufacturing there, adding, “We had to be doing something right.” As for the ICTI CARE code, which now governs the welfare of almost a million Chinese workers inside 1,461 factories, he said: “We’re an industry-driven code. It’s the old ‘fox guarding the henhouse.’ . . . But I made an agreement and shook hands that no matter what we found, we would try and remediate that factory. Be a teacher.”

When I relayed the gist of these remarks to Sethi, he smiled angrily and shook his head. “That’s why I don’t get invited to those things,” he said.

Ah, be a teacher--I wonder if the textbooks will include The Jungle, How The Other Half Lives, and manuals on how to design lead-free toys.

Not to mention each of those countries Hassenfeld thinks Hasbro taught actually invested in education themselves--which is why they outperform us on study after study.

Ginormous

Every so often you read an article that makes you go 'wow!' Here's the Houston Chronicle's Jonathan Feigen, Yikes! Yao vs. Yi is huge:

Tonight will bring the first NBA meeting of Yao and the player expected to be the next Chinese NBA star, Yi Jianlian, an occasion that could draw the largest global audience to see an NBA game. ...

"Here we have two gentlemen, from different regions, Shanghai (Yao) and the Guandong Province (Yi), and who mean so much to this enormous country, with an enormous television market and enormous love for basketball," [NBA Commissioner David] Stern said. "Now we have the exclamation point."

The game will be on 19 networks in China, including CCTV-5, Guangdong TV, Guangzhou TV, and ESPN Star Sports in Hong Kong and Taiwan. It also will be available live through two Webcasters.

Though ratings estimates in China are difficult and vary widely, today's game is said to be certain to draw 150 million viewers and could reach 250 million. CCTV-5 alone is available in 210 million households.

Yao's first game against Shaquille O'Neal in 2002 drew an estimated audience of 220 million and the largest cable television ratings in the United States for a regular-season game since the 1995 comeback of Magic Johnson.

"I heard there were close to 200 million people that watched," Yao said. "But come on, in our country, we have (1.3) billion. That's still a small part of it." ...

When the Indianapolis Colts played the New England Patriots last Sunday, the average audience during the game was 33.8 million; 66.4 million saw at least a six-minute portion.

The average audience for Super Bowl XLI was 93 million, with 139.8 million seeing at least six minutes. There have been estimates Super Bowls draw a global audience of roughly 150 million.

The audience for tonight's Rockets game, starting on a Saturday morning in China, could exceed the Super Bowl, Colts-Patriots game and the Friday ESPN NBA games combined.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Michael Hunt weighs in as well, Young star puts Bucks on global market:

Almost as many people in a faraway land will watch an NBA game as the number of number of people who exist in the country that invented basketball. Such a staggering notion probably wasn't on Dr. Naismith's mind as he drove home that final nail in the peach basket.

Here's another thing to consider: It wasn't that long ago when the Bucks were happy to get a couple of people in outer Waukesha County to watch them play. To think that someone in Inner Mongolia is going to know that our little team even exists seems almost as implausible as Jake Voskuhl dunking on Yao.

That was one of the reasons the Bucks took Yi with the sixth pick in the draft. The most important reason, the one that is making the Bucks look smarter every day, is that Yi is going to be a tremendous player in this league. You can tell after four games, but more on that in a moment.

"I think there were 100 million (Chinese viewers) for our Bulls game," Bucks coach Larry Krystkowiak said. "As long as they're not in my ear yelling at me, it makes it pretty easy.

"It's exciting for us. It's one of the elements of being involved in this. It raises the level of awareness in a lot of ways. I think our guys know they're being watched a little bit closer and it doesn't hurt our effort at all. It creates more of a sense of urgency and accountability for all of us."

Krystkowiak's quote points to the ultimate effect China whill have on all of 'us'--they're so big that for the first time since the end of the Cold War, Americans are becoming aware that there's another country looming behind us.

We're no longer autarchists, competing against the best in each other--we're back in a race again, with a very different opponent; one in which we have a huge lead, but where the other competitor can't help but gain.

How we handle this--whether we use China as a worthy competitor pushing us to our best, whether we turn surly, whether we ignore reality, whether we lose sight of why we're running--will determine whether the 21st century ends with Americans still free to play our own game under our rules, or just another runner jockeying for oxygen.

Although you wonder with numbers like that, how long until the NBA buys into a Chinese network and starts scheduling Rockets and Bucks game for 9 a.m. EST?

AP photo of Yao and Yi by Darko Vojinovic via MSNBC

Not fun and games

It's hard to underestimate the impact on people's views of the blaring headlines and media frenzy that accompanies a 'scandal'. Things get seared into the collective psyche--Wen Ho Lee was a spy, Richard Jewell the Olympic bomber, Iraq behind 9/11--that defy future developments or corrections, which never get the level of saturation of the original.

It's not just a matter of going with what we know at the time, either; certain people and countries never get the benefit of the doubt, aren't treated as 'us' and therefore prejudices are allowed to run roughshod over the unnatural-feeling task of restraint and the unsexy act of deliberation.

You can blame the media for sensationalism, or going for cheap ratings--but then you're divesting yourself of responsibility for the prejudices that allowed you to swallow the story in the first place.

Why didn't your gut tell you that something was being overhyped? Why didn't you have a sense that something was amiss? Because the story fit all too neatly into your map of the world.

Journalists as simply people; there are formal processes and structures set up so their flaws don't get magnified into print or air, and for the most part these safeguards work.

However, where they fall down is when journalists assume something is so obvious that they don't consciously think to question it--the everybody knows Iraq has WMDs, everybody wants to be patriotic in a time of war, nobody wants to second-guess the military while Americans are dying mentality that didn't get shaken until the horrors of reality became impossible to process within the existing frame.

By then, of course, it's too late; you have a small number of people telling you I told you so, while everybody else is in denial and the media starts looking for villains--if only Dr. Freud were around to indict all of us (or our mothers).

All this comes to mind with an article in today's Times, Mattel Apologizes to China for Recalls .

U.S.-based toy giant Mattel Inc. issued an extraordinary apology to China on Friday over the recall of Chinese-made toys, taking the blame for design flaws and saying it had recalled more lead-tainted toys than justified.

The gesture by Thomas A. Debrowski, Mattel's executive vice president for worldwide operations, came in a meeting with Chinese product safety chief Li Changjiang, at which Li upbraided the company for maintaining weak safety controls.

''Our reputation has been damaged lately by these recalls,'' Debrowski told Li in a meeting at Li's office at which reporters were allowed to be present.

''And Mattel takes full responsibility for these recalls and apologizes personally to you, the Chinese people, and all of our customers who received the toys,'' Debrowski said. ...

Mattel ordered three high-profile recalls this summer involving more than 21 million Chinese-made toys, including Barbie doll accessories and toy cars because of concerns about lead paint and tiny magnets that could be swallowed.

The recalls have prompted complaints from China that manufacturers were being blamed for design faults introduced by Mattel.

On Friday, Debrowski acknowledged that ''vast majority of those products that were recalled were the result of a design flaw in Mattel's design, not through a manufacturing flaw in China's manufacturers.''

Lead-tainted toys accounted for only a small percentage of all toys recalled, he said, adding that: ''We understand and appreciate deeply the issues that this has caused for the reputation of Chinese manufacturers.''

In a statement issued by the company, Mattel said its lead-related recalls were ''overly inclusive, including toys that may not have had lead in paint in excess of the U.S. standards.

''The follow-up inspections also confirmed that part of the recalled toys complied with the U.S. standards,'' the statement said, without giving specific figures.

The co-owner of the company that supplied the lead-tainted toys to Mattel, Lee Der Industrial Co. Ltd., committed suicide in August shortly after the recall was announced.

It's the third item on the Times' website; and buried among headlines everywhere else.

It seemed obvious to me when it all broke a few weeks ago that Mattel's campaign blaming China was ridiculous. The problems were so widespread and the recall so big it clearly wasn't the result of some rogue factory--Mattel, thus, was guilty of a systematic failure to properly oversee its own products.

But it fed so well into the China-bashing that's become part of our culture that everyone ate it up. We already all think of China as the Wild West; there's already a significant part of Americans who are bigoted against the Chinese, a racism with hundreds of years of formal and de facto roots in the U.S.

Stir that in with an all-American company like Mattel's motivation to deflect blame, and our underriding fear of being overtaken by the Chinese juggernaut, and you have a scapegoat.

Notice that the retraction was made in China, by the way--if Mattel were serious about it, they should take out full-page ads and buy airtime in the American media, because left to its own whims this isn't nearly as sexy a story for 'free media' as the original charges.

This isn't to say China doesn't have serious, 'The Jungle'-type problems. But let's not use that as a whitewash for the very-American problems of corporate malfeasance and lack of oversight that Mattel should become the poster child for.

Of course, this being China, you also have this:

Li reminded Debrowski that ''a large part of your annual profit ... comes from your factories in China.

''This shows that our cooperation is in the interests of Mattel, and both parties should value our cooperation. I really hope that Mattel can learn lessons and gain experience from these incidents,'' Li said, adding that Mattel should ''improve their control measures.''

Maybe Mattel can write some self-criticisms.

Or maybe we, as the American people, should examine why we find it so easy to see Muslims as terrorists, curse Indians for bad tech support, demean the Japanese (did you miss the profound racism in Lost in Translation?), ignore Africa, look down on illegal immigrants.

These things shouldn't come so easy to us, shouldn't be such a familiar narrative frame; they shouldn't go unquestioned, seeped up in the air around us--and we shouldn't blame the media for tapping into our national neuroses.

Jim Young photo from Reuters via MSNBC

Universal classic

The Times is doing a series looking at "China's embrace of Western classical music"--soon to be followed by a series on America's love affair with Eastern cars?--that is riddled with the expected exotic Orient tone.

The latest piece, Pilgrim With an Oboe, Citizen of the World, by Daniel Wakin, includes this funny-if-it-weren't-sad section:

Despite his extraordinary ability and success, Mr. Wang, like many Asian-born musicians, has had to confront preconceptions about his ability to connect with Western classical music. At the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he studied with Richard Woodhams of the Philadelphia Orchestra, a German conductor said he would be happy to show Mr. Wang how to play Brahms, since it was not in his culture, he recounted.

“You don’t have to be German to play Brahms,” Mr. Wang said. “I was very hurt. People think that way? It never occurred to me.”

Mr. Woodhams counseled him to work extra hard because some critics would blame stylistic failings on his nationality, Mr. Wang said. “I had to go the extra mile,” he added. “It may seem like I won a lot of auditions. But I worked harder.”

Sometimes, Mr. Wang said, he gets naïve questions like, “Did you listen to classical music when you were growing up?”

“There are things called CD players,” he said with some sarcasm. He pointed out that he probably grew up listening to far more classical music than most American youngsters. “The thing I don’t understand is why it should make a difference,” he said. “I am a Chinese guy when I look in the mirror, but I’m a world citizen of music.”

Times photo of Liang Wang by Todd Heisler.

Building the world

Buried in a Washington Post 'wow, aren't they exotic' piece about how people in China are moving to housing complexes modeled on famous foreign cities--"In Nanjing, there are Balinese retreats and Italian villas. In the southeastern city of Hangzhou, there are Venice and Zurich. In downtown Beijing, everything is about Manhattan, with Soho, Central Park and Park Avenue"--is this eye-popping statistic:

Between now and 2015, about half the world's new construction will take place in China, with as much as 6 billion square feet of space expected to be added each year. All over the country, block-like concrete edifices and empty fields are giving way to flashy architectural developments that promise to give the new middle class a taste of places most of them have never seen.

Wow; if half the world's construction will take place in one country, I think the rest of us better get used to standing in line for everything from concrete to architects.

Photo (and article) by the Post's Ariana Eunjung Cha

Sit on this

What are the Chinese up to? Creating the furniture of tomorrow.



What are Americans up to? Making predictable comments on digg.

Twin Mings

So Sun Ming Ming is a 7-foot-9 guy playing in the ABA at the moment. When he joins the NBA--and I see no reason why he won't, he can actually run and doesn't seem to play like a freak--he'll be the tallest man ever to play in the league, bettering Manute Bol's 7-foot-7.

Check out the video; it's hilarious (for the music and 'narration) and also startling (Ming's parts). I don't know how you're gonna stop this guy down low when he gets a bit more polished (oddly, his current team seems to have him out setting picks). And if he ever develops that 15-foot jumper....

Rare pig baby

You never know what (or who) you're going to stumble across in the Times wedding pages. This Sunday, I learned this, for example.

Amanda Morley Boyd and Duncan An-Shea Yin were married last evening in Brooklyn. The Rev. Ron Sala, a Unitarian Universalist minister, officiated at the Palm House of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. ...

The bride is a descendant of William Bradford, a governor of the Plymouth Colony. ...

“All my life I wondered what kind of person chooses to get married when it’s freezing outside,” Mr. Yin said. “Now I know the answer: a man who proposes to his girlfriend too late to reserve a reception venue the following summer.”

Then they stumbled on an auspicious fact: Jan. 27 falls in the Chinese lunar leap year of 4703, which continues until Feb. 17. The current Year of the Dog is considered particularly conducive to weddings because it contains two lunar springs, a phenomenon that foretells a happy marriage and that has occurred only 11 times since 221 B.C.

“When I found out that Duncan and I were going to be married in the luckiest year possible, I thought, ‘This is so perfect, it’s so Duncan,’ ” Ms. Boyd said. “He is just the sort of person on whom fortune seems to smile, and I feel fortunate to be along for the ride.”

Looks like Ms. Boyd is not the only one upon whom fortune will smile; In China, All Signs Point to Wedded Bliss, proclaims the Wall Street Journal (via Creaders.net; with the subtitle Zodiac and Lunar Calendar Smile on Happy Couples;'We Can Have a Pig Baby'):

The extra-long year is a very uncommon event, tied to the complicated system used to keep lunar timekeeping roughly in sync with the solar calendar. The last one occurred in 1944, five years before the Communist Party took control of the country. People seem to have decided that the rarity will magnify the good fortune of the double spring.

Adding to the pressure, the years on either side of 2006 are considered exceptionally unlucky since they have no lunar spring. They are known as "widows' years." Many people believe women married in those years will lose their husbands at an early age. Marriage registrations in Shanghai were down nearly 20% last year.

Then there is the zodiac, which in Chinese culture holds that one's birth year helps determine his personality and prospects. This is the year of the dog, which is widely viewed as good for marriage. Next year is the year of the pig, which is seen as a time when fortune smiles on newborn babies.

The upshot of all the signs is that China is facing a demographic jolt as marriages that would have been spread over three years are being concentrated into one. At the same time, a significant spike in births is expected next year. Nielsen Media Research says it has already detected a surge in advertising for diapers and baby food on Chinese television and in magazines and newspapers.

"I've never seen anything like this," says veteran wedding planner Xu Hongliu, who has handled more than 100 weddings so far this year. "It's causing severe shortages" of everything from disc jockeys to photographers. Prices for roses and lilies have climbed as much as 30% in Shanghai's markets as demand has increased, she says.

Of course, the obvious question is when's the next double lunar spring year?

Uncredited photo of Yin and Boyd from the Times.

Finding the future

The Times is blogging from Davos--although judging from the paucity of comments nobody knows; so here are some tidbits:

This week, Andreas Heinecke, the head of Hamburg-based consulting firm Dialog Im Dunkeln, has been invited to Davos to try out his unorthodox management-training methods — which Bloomberg describes as involving a “pitch-black sensory deprivation chamber” — on the likes of BP’s chief executive, John Browne; Coca-Cola’s chief, E. Neville Isdell; Mr. Schmidt of Google; Citigroup’s chief, Charles Prince; and Daniel Loeb, the head of the hedge fund Third Point.

The purpose of this exercise, Mr. Heinecke explains, is to challenge business leaders with an unpredictable environment where they must accomplish tasks without relying on “ego and physical presence.” Bloomberg writes:

Heinecke says the [World Economic Forum] is the ideal spot to consign some of the world’s most influential people in a 70-square-meter (753-square-foot) room, where they must deal with the consequences of forfeiting power and control.

I think it'd be funny if when the lights went on all the CEOs were dead except for one.

A Chinese television news anchor, Rui Chenggang, has brought his campaign against the Starbucks coffee shop in Beijing’s Forbidden City to Davos.

Last week, the evening television newsman for the state-owned Chinese television network CCTV — an English-language 24-hour news network — touched off a firestorm of controversy by calling the Starbucks location, in the ancient home of China’s emperors, an “insult” to Chinese culture.

At a press luncheon here in Davos on Wednesday, he appeared stunned by the reaction to his attack, which he launched in a blog entry. Although his evening newscasts often have an audience far in excess of 100 million, he said, Mr. Rui, who spent last year in a academic fellowship at Yale, said nothing he had done on Chinese television had resonated as widely as the blog posting, which has now attracted half a million readers and over 2,000 responses.

Not all of those responses, even those coming from China, have been positive. One Chinese news site had taken to criticizing him, referring to him as “Lord” Rui.

Despite the controversy, Mr. Rui, a World Economic Forum veteran and one of the organization’s Global Leaders of Tomorrow, said he had no intention of backing down. At a dinner Tuesday night, he said he had spent time lobbying San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom to support his polemic. – John Markoff

An audience "far in excess" of 100 million?! Are you kidding me?! The top-rated U.S. newscasts at best have around 10 million viewers--that'd be a rounding error to Lord Rui. Who on the side, according to his bio, also writes a column for Beijing Youth Daily, "the most widely read newspaper in Beijing."

My gosh, sometimes you forget how much bigger everything is in China, until you stumble across something like this. He has an interesting personality; here's his list of "Unforgettable Moments":

Successful walking back home all by myself when I was still in Kindergarten
Passing the College Entrance Exams without ending up in hospital

Failed the calculus final in college, have been having nightmares of that until today

First time being hailed as a great karaoke singer

Found out my dog was the biggest fan of Madonna in China

First time anchoring business show on CCTV International, with the make-up that resembles Dracula and the hairstyle of a highway bandit

First time interviewing a senior business leader, the Chairman of Royal Dutch/Shell, Sir Mark Moody Stuart, pretending to be as old as he was.

Finally understanding the essence of new institutional economics, thanks to Prof. Douglas North

Receiving the award of Global Leader for Tomorrow in Davos, Swtizerland, from Prof. Schwab

The successful fundraiser for Project for the Blind, Tibet

Yeah, if I were Starbucks, I'd close the store and ask Rui to join my board of directors.

There has been great debate in recent months about whether the conflict in Iraq can accurately be called a civil war. Iraqi Vice President Adil Abdul Mahdi offered his view Thursday in a panel discussion at Davos chaired by Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

At the session, Mr. Mahdi dismissed the notion that his country is in a civil war, saying instead that it is facing “a war against civilians” that “targets the whole society.”

At another point in the panel, Mr. Mahdi called the occupation of Iraq an “idiot decision.”

Adnan Pachachi, a member of the Iraqi Parliament, said that while there is “room for improvement” among Iraq’s security forces in terms of their training and equipment, “the main thing is really their loyalty to the Iraqi state.” The forces, he said, must be purged of “infiltrators.”

I'm glad one of Iraq's vice president, who owes his job if not his life to us, feels free to call the presence of our troops an "idiot decision".

I wonder how many days he'd last if us idiots went home?

Demonstrators are usually kept far from the action at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where security measures include barricades and barbed wire.

In the virtual realm, however, it is a different story. During a series of interviews conducted in the online universe of Second Life — in which a digital persona of Reuters’ Adam Pasick questioned the digital personae of various Davos attendees — a man carrying an anti-Davos placard apparently sauntered right into the virtual auditorium.

On its Davos blog, Reuters reported Friday that the interloper was Iuemmel Lemmon of the protest group DaDavos. His avatar, or online personality, sported a beard and what looked like a blue beret.

Did virtual guards leap up to eject Mr. Lemmon from the scene? Hardly. Reuters said that he “sat politely with his banner in the front row.”

There's a funny if small screen grab of the event; and the original Reuters article refers to the avatar 'conducting' the interview as Adam Reuters.

That'd be a hell of a future... 'Hello, nice to meet you, I'm John McDonalds, you must be Kimberly Disney.'

Uncredited photo of Rui found online.

Panda-monium

So, really, all I need to say is China is asking the public to help them name 18 baby pandas--as the China Daily's headline reads, Love giant pandas? Name them.

(I saw the posting via Gothamist, whose editor extraordinaire Jen Chung is a known panda-addict).

Oh, and the website has photos of all 18--I can't emphasize how great the photos are--as well as little biographical tidbits. Basket girl's, for instance, reads:

Female, born on August 25th, 2006
Mothers name: Hua Hua
Birth weight: 121.2g
Current weight: 8.2kg
Features: weaker than her brother Panda No. 11, she has an oval face, is slim, has an open personality, and other pandas the same age like to play with her.

I think Fox should buy the rights to the show; I mean, all they'd have to do each week is show video of baby pandas, it'd be like the 5th-ranked show on tv.

Photos of pandas #11, 12, and 17 via China Daily.

Starts with a sandwich

New Yorkers get typecast as rude and uncaring, but in my experience they're pretty willing to help people who are really in need (and not just fumbling or rude).

When I saw the story about a family that was searching for a missing man over the weekend, I feared the worst--but it all turned out okay--with some very typical Daily News quotes:

Lost in city's jungle: New immigrant Damon Mootoo had been in New York for less than a day when he faced one of the city's toughest challenges: navigating the confusing streets of Queens.

Mootoo spent five long, cold days wandering Jamaica after he got lost during a walk and was too intimidated to ask strangers how to get home. Mootoo, 32, was rescued yesterday by a kindhearted churchgoer who spotted him shivering on a Queens street and gave him food and water.

"I want to go home," Mootoo said last night after his stressful misadventure. "I'm thinking about going back to Guyana."

Mootoo got lost Wednesday, less than 12 hours after arriving in New York for the first time, when he left his brother's South Jamaica house to stretch his legs.

He was being treated last night at Jamaica Hospital for the dehydration and frostbite he suffered in the frigid air.

"When we saw him, he was just crying," said Mootoo's brother Mark Miller, 43. "He said, 'I'm glad to see you.' "

When Mootoo left Miller's two-story house on 152nd St. Wednesday morning, he wasn't wearing gloves or carrying an ID.

Miller said Mootoo had recently received his permanent resident card and was excited about starting a new life in America.

"He said he was trying to find his way back," Miller said. "He said he was just walking all over. He was scared. He heard all the stories about New York."

Mootoo, who is hard of hearing but can communicate in English, told relatives he didn't want to approach a cop because he feared he'd be deported.

He survived by begging several homeowners for water, but he was too ashamed and shy to ask for food or directions back to 152nd St., Miller said. At night, when temperatures plunged into the low 20s, Mootoo slept in an abandoned car or sought shelter from the snow under a piece of wood in a stranger's yard, he told relatives.

Meanwhile, his panicked kin posted flyers with Mootoo's picture across South Jamaica and formed search parties.

"We were thinking the worst after so many days," Miller said.

But just when hope was fading, Michael Bharath, 37, was walking home from church and saw Mootoo near his house on 142nd Place at Rockaway Blvd. "He looked in desperation," Bharath said.

Bharath's wife, Cynthia, made Mootoo a sandwich. Feeling secure, Mootoo told them his situation.

Michael Bharath asked if he had anything with his relatives' address written on it. Mootoo dug in his pockets and found a piece of paper with his stepmother's Foch Blvd. address. Bharath drove him there and reunited Mootoo with his worried family.

"When I see people in need, I try to help them," Bharath said. "He was in need, and I'm pretty sure that within a couple more hours he would have been a dead man."

There's another story out of Beijing that reminds me of a Chinese proverb about water vs. rock.

China phone thief repents after 21 text messages: A Chinese thief has returned a mobile phone and thousands of yuan he stole from a woman after she sent him 21 touching text messages, Xinhua news agency said on Monday.

Pan Aiying, a teacher in the eastern province of Shandong, had her bag containing her mobile phone, bank cards and 4,900 yuan ($630) snatched by a man riding a motorcycle as she cycled home on Friday, Xinhua said, citing the Qilu Evening News.

Pan first thought of calling the police but she decided to try to persuade the young man to return her bag.

She called her lost phone with her colleague's cell phone but was disconnected. Then she began sending text messages.

"I'm Pan Aiying, a teacher from Wutou Middle School. You must be going through a difficult time. If so, I will not blame you," wrote Pan in her first text message which did not get a response.

"Keep the 4,900 yuan if you really need it, but please return the other things to me. You are still young. To err is human. Correcting your mistakes is more important than anything," Pan wrote.

She gave up hope of seeing her possessions again after sending 21 text messages without a reply.

But on her way out on Sunday morning, she stumbled over a package that had been left in her courtyard only to discover it was her stolen bag. Nothing had been taken.

"Dear Pan: I'm sorry. I made a mistake. Please forgive me," a letter inside said.

"You are so tolerant even though I stole from you. I'll correct my ways and be an upright person."

It would be interesting to see where the people in the two articles are in a year.

Uncredited Damon Mootto photo from the Daily News

Unfinished business

Imagine if at the end of the Civil War Jefferson Davis, instead of honoring Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox, had slipped away with some of his Confederates to--well, let's say Hawaii.

Davis takes over Hawaii, killing off a bunchof Hawaiians in the process, and sets himself and his ilk up as an absolute dictatorship. Oh, and he also took with him all the treasure and artwork he could get his hands on--the original copies of the Declaration of Indepedence, the Constitution, Gilbert Stuart's portraits of George Washington, Paul Revere's silver... and the contents of Fort Knox.

Pretend, if you can, that the nascent reunited America doesn't go after Davis. And that he then contacts the Russians, who set up some military bases on Hawaii and put his 'Republic of America' under their protection.

What you'd have is how the Chinese see Taiwan.

And it's what lurks beneath the surface of the Times' piece on the reopening of Taiwan's National Palace Museum, Rare Glimpses of China’s Long-Hidden Treasures. Keith Bradsher, who doesn't really 'get' China despite being the Times' Hong Kong bureau, writes:

After four years of renovations that closed two-thirds of the building, the museum housing the world’s most famous collection of Chinese art is reopening this winter and holding a three-month exhibition of its rarest works.

The National Palace Museum, home to the best of the 1,000-year-old art collection of China’s emperors, is often compared to leading Western institutions like the Louvre, the Prado and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But while this museum’s holdings are magnificent, the institution has been known for being a highly politicized place where priceless porcelain sat in poorly lit display cases and where invaluable paintings were kept in a damp manmade cave for fear of Communist attack from mainland China.

That has now changed. Heroic statues of Chiang Kai-shek, Taiwan’s former leader, and of Sun Yat-sen, the founder of modern China, have been banished. New lighting, air-conditioning, climate-controlled storage vaults and other features rival the newest museums in the West. Even the wall labels attached to the artwork are now written in clear and specific Chinese, English and Japanese.

And after many years of hiding its most valuable and most fragile artworks — those from the Northern and Southern Sung dynasties that ruled China from 960 to 1279 — the museum has brought them out for a “Grand View” exhibition that opened on Christmas. Four of the best known Northern Sung dynasty paintings — one of them on loan from the Metropolitan Museum in New York — are being shown together for the first time, along with other rare paintings, scrolls and some of the world’s earliest printed books.

The museum did seem to me to be less a showcase and more a holding pen; not surprising since the Nationalists threw it up, as they did everything else in Taiwan, with the idea that it was all temporary anyway, until they returned in triumph to Beijing.

Bradsher misses his chance to tease out the museum as metaphor for Taiwan (Chinese/English/Japanese, hello!)--a country of gleaming new construction trying to put its history in the best light, thinking that way it can join the ranks of the develped world as a 'normal' country.

It ain't gonna happen; Taiwan, I think, will soon exist only as a historical artifact. It's inevitable--the billion and a half people in the world's most powerful country after the U.S. are all dedicated to 'reuniting' Taiwan with the mainland. The Taiwanese are split, and as China's power, economy and prestige grow, the faction that favors rejoining big brother is only going to grow.

And Taiwan has no Castro, no overriding near-mythic figure who can guide his people and outmanuever the 800-lb gorilla perpetually growling just offshore. If anything, the clamminess that is Taiwanese politics guarantees anti-Castros, selfish figures willing to trade long-term national well-being for short-term political gains.

Besides which, China's leaders are the heirs of a civilization that's been around for more than 4,000 years; regaining control of a province that's gone wayward for a few decades is no big thing.

Whether parochial Americans like it or not--at some point, you'd think they'd stop seeing the Chinese as locusts.

The “Grand View” this winter may also represent the last chance for visitors from the United States and elsewhere to see the best of China’s art without having to push through throngs of mainland Chinese tourists. Taiwan is negotiating with Beijing officials to allow mainland tourists to start visiting here this spring.

Yo, Bradsher, at which point do you plan to stop describing Chinese people using variants of 'hordes'?

Besides which, it is their artwork we're talking about--not only should Americans wait in line to see it, but soon I don't think the Chinese are gonna let us push past them for anything.

Photo of a jadeite cabbage from the Ch’ing dynasty by Chao-Yang Chan for the Times. (Shows you how important food is to the Chinese).

TamenTube

The Associated Press put together their list of the top 10 YouTube videos of 2006. I've seen all but two; it's a pretty decent list, can't really disagree with what's on there.

And reminds me that I haven't yet blogged my favorite YouTube discovery of the year--the Back Dorm Boys. Here's the Wikipedia entry on them:

Back Dorm Boys (Traditional Chinese: 後舍男生; Simplified Chinese: 后舍男生) refer to a Chinese male duo who gained fame for their lip sync videos to songs by the Backstreet Boys and other pop stars. They are also referred to as "Back Dormitory Boys", "Chinese Backstreet Boys", "Dormitory Boys", and "Two Chinese Boys". Their videos, captured on a low quality Web cam in their college dorm room, have been viewed by Internet users within China and around the world. Many of their videos can be seen on YouTube. The two, Wei Wei (Traditional Chinese: 韋煒; Simplified Chinese: 韦炜) and Huang Yi Xin (Traditional Chinese: 黃藝馨; Simplified Chinese: 黄艺馨), were sculpture majors at the Guangzhou Arts Institute (Traditional Chinese: 廣州美術學院; Simplified Chinese: 广州美术学院). They graduated from that university in June of 2006.

They're definitely the funniest thing I've ever seen on YouTube; out of their 12 videos, I particularly like these:

Dadada, Trio

The choreography is hilarious; and has an amazing high degree of difficulty (all in one take, no less). Their moves are somehow very apt; anyone can lip synch, not very many can capture the essence of the song in such telling and funny ways.

Don't Lie, Black Eyed Peas

Their outfits are ridiculously funny--and you've never seen guys vamp so convincingly before. A lot of the BBD charm is their Mutt & Jeff aspects, which really come out here. And the ending--my gosh....


Fairytale, Guang Liang (Malaysian singer)

This is in many ways their masterwork. I recommend watching it after the others, to get the full effect. I imagine thousands of people watched the first minute, wondered what all the fuss over a couple of poor saps was, and left clueless. The second half of the video shows them practicing for Superstar, by S.H.E.

You can see all of their videos via their 'English language' website; which, oddly fittingly, is run by imposters.

I am entirely serious when I say the Back Dorm Boys have done as much to change the image of China among the gweilos as anyone, with only Yao Ming and the student-in-front-of-the-tank as peers. They're strong, self-confident, and totally in charge. And, of course, funny as hell.

They're also a great example of the mostly-young revolution now underway in the world's most populous land, one that fully feels a part of the world, and that is eager to engage, learn from, teach and work with both its neighbors and the West (in that order), whether from within or without China.

Yo Yo Ma and Ha Jin are one aspect of this wave; Tan Dun, Chen Kaige and the seemingly thousands of Chinese who are taking over the modern art world are another. It's only a matter of time before a Chinese Bill Gates or Tiger Woods or Madonna joins them on the world stage. Heck, maybe it's already happened, and we in the West simply aren't yet aware of it--a sinking feeling that we won't want to get used to if this indeed turns into the Chinese century.

In any case, we better hope that this creative side of a China-with-a-sense-of-humor is what emerges--because otherwise, we're gonna be dealing with Bus Uncle.

On a related note, Rosie O'Donnell is a complete idiot. She doesn't get it; her 'apology' for chingchongate only underscores how clueless she is, right down to the chinese/japanese/any asian/whatever part, I do accents all the time (uh... ching chong isn't an accent, Rosie; it's like mocking african americans by making jungle noises) and the 'two Asian girls in the audience think it's funny, so it's okay' ending.

Not to mention I doubt she's been hearing from "Asians" on this--it's your fellow Americans, dearie. Many of whom are part of an interesting discussion on Gothamist Rosie could profit from. Complete with this Stephen Biko quote: "Not only are whites kicking us; they are telling us how to react to being kicked."

Chinese 201

A friend passed along the documentary below, called A Chink in the Armour, made by a Chinese-Canadian.

Despite some rough production values, it's pretty funny; he sets out to test the truthiness of five stereotypes about the Chinese in North America (that they all speak Chinese, are bad drivers, can't drink, are good at math, and know kung fu).

I'd add five more:
-They're all recently arrived from farms in China
-They're rote learners and not creative
-They're various degrees of exotic, inscrutable, ancient, mysterious, and patient
-They all eat 'Chinese food,' which of course is best defined as lemon chicken, beef lo-mein, chicken feet and fortune cookies
-They're generally in secret communication with each other and laugh unpredictably

For me, the unintentionally funniest part of the documentary is the interview with the (non-Chinese) chair of the Chinese studies department at a Canadian university. There was just something about him that made me laugh; he came across as the type of professor who'd good-naturedly butcher the pronunciation of names and without shame display gaping holes in his area of expertise (like the professor of Hitler studies in Don DeLillo's White Noise who doesn't understand German). At one point he quotes something his kid nephew said, either as an example of someone who trades in stereotypes about the Chinese, or as an astute observer of the Chinese; it's unclear.



The documentary ends with a Monty Python song, I like Chinese, which I hadn't heard before. Aside from the slight Chinese mistranslation ('ai' is love, not like, which would be 'xihuan'), I find the song remarkably accurate.

No wonder the British were so beloved in Hong Kong!

The world today seems absolutely crackers,
With nuclear bombs to blow us all sky high.
There's fools and idiots sitting on the trigger.
It's depressing and it's senseless, and that's why...
I like Chinese.
I like Chinese.
They only come up to your knees,
Yet they're always friendly, and they're ready to please.

I like Chinese.
I like Chinese.
There's nine hundred million of them in the world today.
You'd better learn to like them; that's what I say.

I like Chinese.
I like Chinese.
They come from a long way overseas,
But they're cute and they're cuddly, and they're ready to please.

I like Chinese food.
The waiters never are rude.
Think of the many things they've done to impress.
There's Maoism, Taoism, I Ching, and Chess.

So I like Chinese.
I like Chinese.
I like their tiny little trees,
Their Zen, their ping-pong, their yin, and yang-ese.

I like Chinese thought,
The wisdom that Confucious taught.
If Darwin is anything to shout about,
The Chinese will survive us all without any doubt.

So, I like Chinese.
I like Chinese.
They only come up to your knees,
Yet they're wise and they're witty, and they're ready to please.

All together.

[verse in Chinese]
Wo ai zhongguo ren. (I like Chinese.)
Wo ai zhongguo ren. (I like Chinese.)
Wo ai zhongguo ren. (I like Chinese.)
Ni hao ma; ni hao ma; ni hao ma; zaijien! (How are you; how are you; how are you; goodbye!)

I like Chinese.
I like Chinese.
Their food is guaranteed to please,
A fourteen, a seven, a nine, and lychees.

I like Chinese.
I like Chinese.
I like their tiny little trees,
Their Zen, their ping-pong, their yin, and yang-ese.

I like Chinese.
I like Chinese.
They only come up to your knees...

AP photo of Yan Zi and Zheng Jie demonstrating the secret handshake via China Daily.

Meet the Chinese

Really, all you need to do is watch this video and you'll understand more about the Chinese mentality than years of reading or studying.

Be sure to watch all the way through, it only gets better, and the ending is absolutely perfect. On so many levels and from both men's actions this explains what the U.S. can expect from a resurgent China.

Bus Uncle



Update: The rest of the story is on, of course, Wikipedia, under 'Uncle Bus'. Reading that entry inspired me to create a timeline of this clip.

-Get off the bus
-Don't call me boss
-Everyone has pressure (unprompted)
-Don't touch me
-We have to deal with it seriously
-Human dynamics
-Mad cause he's not responding
-Makes him apologize twice, second time louder
-Then let's shake
-Then he introduces his mother
-We may meet again--by destiny
-I welcome fight anytime
-Goes back to you patted me on my shoulder
-I should have patted you on your head
-Don't insult my mother
-I warn you
-Brings up pressure again
-Ends perfectly

Out of the tears

World Cup Tests Iranians' Ability to Have Fun in Public

Michael Slackman in the Times: As Iran's team prepares to step onto the field of the World Cup for only the second time since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the soccer fever gripping the country reveals many of the pressures reshaping Iranian society. While Iran confronts the West over its nuclear program and its president promotes Holocaust denial, the country is also struggling with something far more fundamental: how to have fun together in public.

It is a challenge that has forced Iranians to try to sort through the intersecting strands of their identity, to confront decades of clerical rule that have emphasized traditions of mourning and to accommodate a population increasingly dominated by young people who are far more aware of the world beyond Iran.

"We do speak about this problem: how can we have a happy society?" said Behrouz Gharibpour, director of the main cultural center in Tehran. "We are in the center of trying to change, to find a good and accepted way to be happy — when we want to be happy."

Soccer, it turns out, has been one of the catalysts propelling that effort.

"As a people, we have this very sad streak in us," said Mansoureh Ettehadieh, a publisher and historian in Tehran. "Most of our music is sad. The Shia color is black." ...

"If they win, all of the people will express their emotions, 100 percent, and there will be no power to prevent them from doing this," said Ali Mudi, 44, as he sat in Laleh Park in Tehran. His friend Ahmed Maghail, 82, said he relished the idea of such a celebration: "All of the happiness and celebrations in my life were before 27 years ago."

How long can a regime last when its people are forced to keep much of life's emotions and experiences bottled up inside?

I guess one answer is it depends on whether the regime changes. China, for example, under the predecessors of its present rules went through as much madness as any modern country has had to experience, certainly more during the course of the 'Great Leap Forward' and Cultural Revolution than Iranians have had to bear.

I wonder if China's experiences then and Iran's now were and are in some ways necessary, a sort of mad cleansing to ensure a break with history. In Iran's case, the Shah--installed and maintained by the U.S.--ran a brutal dictatorship from 1941 to 1979. The mullahs have been in power for only a fraction of that time; but because the Islamic Republic stripped the previously-elite of the wealth and power they had amassed under the Shah's plutocracy, there are squawks of outrage now from them that were wholly absent when Iran's poor was the main victim.

In China's case, everybody suffered pretty much equally in the 60s and 70s as the Communist party tried to figure out how to work through the effects of installing equality in a country that was used to being ruled by others, first by Western powers, than by Japan, than by the rapacious Chiang Kai-shek.

China wound up deciding the only way to deal with its past national humiliation was to become strong economically. I wonder, however, if--given the shackles of its history--its present economic miracle would have occurred had it not been for its self-imposed suffering. Thomas Friedman in The Earth is Flat quotes the mayor of Dalian (a mid-sized for China northern city of 5.5 million) as saying:

My personal feeling is that Chinese youngsters are more ambitious than Japanese or American youngsters in recent years, but I don't think they are ambitious enough, because they are not as ambitious as my generation. Because our generation, before they got into universities and colleges, were sent to distant rural areas and factories and military teams, and went through a very hard time, so in terms of the spirit to overcome and face the hardships, [our generation had to have more ambition] than youngsters nowadays.

It's in some ways Nietzsche's what doesn't kill you and all that, but I think certain countries with specific histories need to go through a 'boot camp' sort of experience, where they're broken down--sometimes in nonsensical, heartless ways because really, how can a society disassemble itself logically--in order to find out what their national soul really is and in order to build a sustainable society.

I'm hopeful Iran will go the same path, and will start its road to recovery by giving up its draining nuclear weapons program in exchange for the U.S. ending its economic embargo. Not sure if the same regime that's dragged the country into this mess will be there to bring them out the other end.

In the meantime, until the pendulumn swings back, the Times' characterization (and it very much is a product of the Times' world view) reminds me of the opening lines of Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories (which I always recommend as the perfect introduction to this greatest of living authors)

"There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name. It stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish, which were so miserable to eat that they made people belch with melancholy even though the skies were blue."

Polaris photo of woman at Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's tomb by Newsha Tavakolian for the Times.