As China grows bigger, faster, and heavier in terms of international import, so is our college admission notificiation mail! Yup, it is so much bigger than the small yellow envelope I got years ago. And it reached us exactly a week after the notification was texted to our cellphones. It is so much faster, in other words. It took me more than a month to get my life-saving mail that contained a notification with a misspelling of my name, which still reminded me of a possible accidental mismanagement of my life at times. And the mail itself is so much heavier! EMS uses thicker material to envelope everything for sure, and it has a China Construction Bank e-Card inside, along with other paper work! A separate mail bag still sends her a China Mobile card! What convenience! ...if also control?.

The long and winding road to this day is like no other. The girl standing up straight for the world is like no other. On and off, off and on, we have lived under the same roof, until college is to do us apart. Wherever you’d be weaving yet another circle of life with your warmth and wisdom, I know you’d be doing it fairly well. You are such a sparkle of life, if you care to let yourself go and glow. And you’ve always hidden more. From two adults struggling for love and life in their separate ways comes this third, saying “Relax, mother. I’d be doing just fine. Not just my Juicy Limited of course, but also my life, my love, my dreams.” Fair enough. Big show time. Let me watch. 2014-7-13 10:16 AM, XT

For those who had chosen to go to Academy Theatre on this past Monday evening, their Monday fully packed with panel discussions and workshops ended with an incomparable delicacy. Shang Theatre Academy, chief organizer of PSi (Performance Studies International) 20, presented Miss Julie as "a new Beijing Opera after Strindberg" to some 500 assorted audience from all corners of the earth as one of the showcase performances for the 5-day conference closing on July 8. For those who know not a thing about August Strindberg, the performance is an organic whole in its own right. Thrived on the universal language of love complicated with jealous and frustration, self-fulfillment and social expectations, and above all, sexual desire and class hatred , the 70-minute Beijing Opera features a frustrated Miss Zhuli (Julie) flirting with her cook's fiancee Xiang qiang (Jean), losing her virginity to him in her drunk hours and destroying her otherwise privileged and respectable life. The adapters, Sun Huizhu (aka William Huizhu Sun) and Fei Chunfang (aka Faye Chunfang Fei), localize Strindberg's plot masterfully, presented in superb Chinese libretto and English subtitles. Instead of it being Miss Julie's mid-summer night's frenzy because of her deplorable instinct and upbringing, the new Miss Julie now involves an austere landlord's strong-minded daughter falling for the housemaid's handsome husband-to-be leading the lion dancing. The deployment of this traditional Chinese ritual for celebration embodying the prowess of masculinity and power adds a more clearly stated cultural dimension to the fall of Miss Zhuli or Julie. Accordingly, one of the highlights of the play is when Miss Zhuli gets Xiangqiang to do the dance again with her in the kitchen after several glasses of wine. In dimmer lights and flighty minds, both the woman and the man breaking the social taboos are totally engaged in the social dance that they transform into an intoxicating foreplay. No audience bother to be social critics at that moment of purer human communication. At daybreak, life on the stage gets uglier. All human weakness and folly comes to play when all three characters lay their card of interest on the table. The symbolic death of Miss zhuli's caged bird may or may not suggest her death, but Xiangqiang as the merciless murder of the bird has certainly won no sympathy from the audience in his revenge that is instantly suppressed at the sight of the landlord coming home. The carnivalesque disorder disappears when xiangqiang leaves the stage with the cleaned robe and boots of his master, both of which he has tried on triumphantly and to the helplessness of a flabbergasted Miss Zhuli/Julie.

"What is the position of the institution that educates their students in the different disciplines of the performance arts? Can they teach avant-garde? Can they teach innovation? "Thus spoke Tobias Biancone, director-general of International Theatre Institute (ITI) at the opening ceremony of the 20th Conference of Performance Studies International (PSi 20) held in Shanghai Theatre Academy on the evening of July 4. Some 500 people, theatre scholars, teachers and artists from dozens of countries, heard these questions answered right away, "I think you agree with me: No, they cannot teach it, neither avant-garde nor innovation. This is a creative aspect in someone's life that has its roots in the mind of an individual student, of an individual.What can an institution can do is lead a person to experiment, to improvise and to try out how his or her own ideas can be expressed." The director-general spoke of the avant-garde and theatre education because organizers of PSi 20 have called upon participants to work on the dynamics of "the Avant-garde, Tradition and Community" (ATC). Having noticed how enthusiastic young Chinese college students can be about Karoake during his previous visits to China, he wondered if their teachers could expose them to a performance and watch their reactions, or "even ask the Karaoke enthusiasts to create a play together with the students." The students may also be asked to create a poem of their own, of course, added Mr. Biancone, himself a poet as well. The important thing for the educators to do is to teach the students "inclined to create," to quote the theatre enthusiast from Switzerland supervising ITI since 2008, when the author first got to know him and ITI at Theatre of Nationals Festival held in Nanjing. The students' creation may or may not be good, and their teacher is no judge of its avant-gardism, he elaborated, "If it is really avant-garde history will tell." Given the burgeoning theatre education in China, which was partly showcased at PSi 20 by the performance series of Confucius Disciples presented by Chinese and Bulgarian students at all levels, the idea of theatre education, or art education in general, as essentially an aesthetic education integral for a creative and innovative life for the individual, is tellingly and urgently informative for educators in all disciplines. [imgid=0]

Is your Sunday about your father, or a football? Sadly, and gladly, mine has to be about literature. It is about writing a paper on the avant-garde theatre in the morning, and going to lectures on American literature in the afternoon, and in the evening. Our dean has just come back from Columbia University with perfect confidence in winning us over a little ball that the Americans call soccer. The speakers are terrific, each lighting up some fire here and there. Walt Whitman and the "poetic revolution" is presented first. The speaker has to begin with his memories of poetry readings at St Mark's Place in the East Village, and I can't help feeling, unfairly if also untimely, homesick. Blissfully, the second speaker turns an otherwise dreary academic talk into a sort of stand-up comedy, a translator of Dan Brown and free spirit. The third, a Chinese teaching in America, is generous enough to share all that is new and fresh from his adopted country, including "slam poetry" and "chick literature." So I've paid my respect to altars of literature on a Sunday. Does it make literature my faith? Has not Robert Brustein said modern drama has become the secular faith? Has not Max Weber so located the social function of literature and art? All in all, has literature replaced religion as the secular faith? Reading Chi Zijian's The Right Bank of the Argun River (《额尔古纳河的右岸》; translated into English as The Last Quarter of the Moon) a few days ago has made me ecstastic for the whole night, and then unspeakably sad. For a moment, I thought I had a glimpse of heaven: the communal way the Oroqens live in the forest with their tribal folks, the perfect harmony they feel with the universe, and the miraculous practices of shamanism, etc. But it had to be gone all too soon, and for good. Humanity has long lost the touch with golden times living in the memories of the widow of the last chief of the Oroqens. To make matters even worse, we seem to have even stopped hoping for any paradise.

In the recent NBC interview, Snowden insists he is an American patriot, justisfying what he has been doing by provocating "civil disobedience" , the idea of which Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)has famously come up with and has henceforth inspired, among others, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King in their fight for justice. Given the fact that Thoreau has been generally celebrated as an American hero, one begins to wonder if the same can be said of the former American secret service agent Edward Snowden, who has chosen to disobey his government in order to, in his own words, "serve my country." Snowden insists he is "a patriot,' even though the meaning of the word has been somehow devalued. He has this much to say about what it means to be a patriot, "Being a patriot means knowing when to protect your country, knowing when to protect your constitution, knowing when to protect your countrymen from violations or [imminent?] encroachment or adversaries.And these adversaries don't have to be foreign countries. They can be bad policies, they can be officials that could have a bit more accountabilities..." He is convinced that he has done "the right thing," reminding his audience that in the history of the United States, "what is right is not always the same with what is legal." Right there, one thinks not only of the American Revolution or Thoreau, but also Jack Bauer in 24, the extremely popular FOX TV series that has been around since 2001 in the wake of 9/11. In a note extremely reminiscent of Bauer, Snowden says toward the end of the interview, "I may have lost my ability to travel, but I've gained the ability to go to sleep at night, to put my head on the pillow feeling comfortable that I've done the right thing, even though it is the hard thing." Has Snowden done the right thing in the eyes of American public, if not the American government? After all, Snowden believes what he has done is in the best interest of American public, if also the American ideal of free speech and all.

By now, my daughter should have been admitted to her test room. She was driven over by a volunteer driver who kindly pulled over in our neighborhood five minutes earlier than our agreed time of 8 AM. And her mother got a minute or two to go over her panick attack in the last night's dream: I had to lose my shoes on the way somewhere, and then when I was hungry, there was no spoon or chopsticks to eat with! What about my daughter? The only panick she was having over breakfast was the fact that she once found a taxi driver could recite some classical poems that she couldn't!

Just two days later, my daughter will be sitting for her gaokao, or college entrance examination. We've been talking about some details for the day that her class teacher has kindly reminded us at the recent PA meeting. Whenever I don't seem to follow her, she exclaims, "My Goodness, have you gaokaoed before?," meaning I should have known better. Having been tipped off by a friend majoring in psychoanalysis that all kids have to "kill" (symbolically, of coz ) their parents to grow up, I am actually more than happy to see my 17-year-old playing smarter. Yet she needs to be taught about a few things, doesn't she? I am also an educator above all. To do my job, I've easily come up with this list of things that my daughter does not know about my gaokao in 1987. Trivia 1. My parents didn't not have to check out details about my gaokao. In fact they didn't even know where my school was. (To better prepare my daughter for her gaokao, I had to rent an apartment near her school 2 years ago). 2. I kept my own pass to the test room of my gaokao. (My daughter's pass has been kept by her class teacher until the last minute). 3. I walked over to my test school and lived in a dorm there for 2 nights with other students I didn't know. (My daughter is to be driven back and forth, refusing even to stay over in a hotel nearby with me as a roommate). 4. My gaokao lasted for 3 days and in early July (7,8,9) when it was real hot in the room yet with the fan turned off to avoid the noise. NON-TRIVIA 1. My gaokao was the ONLY entrance ticket for me to leave the dungeon of a rustic life and enter the elitist club of urban citizens. Basically, it means a given job, a given room/apartment provided by your working unit free of charge, and free medical care. Wasn't it heaven then, and now? ! 2. All high school graduates were tested on the same paper for the same subject, but the same score did NOT gurantee the same university or same level of university. In the year of 1987, the entrance score for applicants of liberal arts in Beijing was 430, and 493 in Hunan, the score of which might have sent the applicants to Peking University. Alas, I was, and still am, a Hunanese and ended up in a local college. 3. My parents didn't have to worry about my tuition, for I chose to go to the tuition-free military university or normal university. My daughter chose to go to NYU Shanghai and if she gets lucky in gaokao, I'll have to ask for loans for the annual tuition of RMB 100,000 plus living expenses.

Joe visited me from New York a few years ago, refusing to believe it was over between us not just because my year-long visit there was over. I appreciated his insistence upon the slightest possibility and invited him to my apartment. I had the slightest idea that would kick off a series of shocks for him before I checked him in the school hotel. He could not or would not pee in my toilet, which is basically a hole. After all, my 20-year-old apartment seemed to him worse than the settlement apartment in the Bronx. Still, we visited each other back and forth until last summer. Over a period of 4 years, I was never invited to see his toilet or apartment with the excuse that he lives with his "crazy" sister and her "sick" husband.