因为我的中文不太好， 我觉得应该用这个博客练习。 请中国读者帮我更正。 我是美国人， 住在成都四年了。 两年以后， 跟一个成都人结婚了。 结婚以后， 我的老婆快怀孕了。 我们的女儿现在十个月。 她已经会说二十多词语， 我觉得很聪明。我是老师， 在成都的石室中学教英语和历史。 校园很漂亮， 这年有2160个年。 是世界上最老的校园之一。 我的学生大多数真的很好， 他们也喜欢我。 中国学生比美国学生勤奋。我觉得住在中国也比住在美国好。 中国有一些问题， 可是中国人都团结合作。 在美国， 人都忘了团结。 保守的共和党和自由的民主党互相仇视。 因为你们只有一大政党， 没有这个问题。 男人和女人的关系也不好。 在中国， 我觉得还好。我只希望我和我的老婆将来可能买一个房子在中国的田园， 一座山旁边。My Daughter, Amy

I have been reading, recently, a book about China called "Ways that are Dark" by Robert Townsend, which was published in 1933 and subsequently banned in China and denounced by sinologists as "racist." It may not be precisely racist, but it certainly is an indictment against the Chinese ethnos and social mores. I wouldn't suggest that a Chinese person read it even if it has been translated into Chinese.So why would I deign to read it? I'm someone who likes the Chinese immensely: enough, in fact, to marry one. My daughter is half-Chinese. I shouldn't like to hear, necessarily, a long screed against folks who've become family. And yet, I am curious to know what life was like according to a career American diplomat in China in the 1930s, which Townsend was. In particular, he doesn't shy from talking about the poverty of that time. Seeing through his eyes the abjection of the Chinese at that time--a time of social turmoil--gives us baseline to gauge how far the Chinese have come since.Some vignettes:1. Townsend starts out in Shanghai, near the Bund, where looking out over the waters he sees poor, filthy families in their sampans gathering around passenger ships like remoras. There they lift bamboo poles with nets fitted to the ends up to the drainage holes of the ships. When the ships cast off their refuse--banana and orange peels, day-old bread crusts, plate scrapings--they catch them in the nets and bring them down to their boats where the children fall on them ravenously.2. Townsend also notes that for much of China at the time, rice was something of a luxury. Although it was grown widely, it was mostly used for sale, and no more than 20% of one's own meal was ever given over to it. The rest was typically made up of sweet potato or corn. This accords pretty well with my mother-in-law's memory of her own childhood. One ate a litte rice and mainly potato; on your birthday, you'd get a whole bowl of rice, maybe.3. At the time, rickshas were still a primary means of transportation and 'coolies' carried cargo on their backs. Townsend marvels at how the Chinese are able to work all day while being so lean. He notes that whereas a Westerner works on stored fat, the Chinese seem to have none, and so rely on a habit of constantly eating. Townsend notes that every time a Chinese worker at the time got a little money, he would immediately go and spend a portion of it on bread. In this way--by eating throughout the day--he was able to continue working much longer than an Englishman or American would have been able to. This habit of eating constantly, said Townsend, carried over to the upper class as well, who could be seen spending a surprising amount of time in restaurants.I have taken just a few things out of the book, which is otherwise a very negative look at the Chinese. In page after page, Townsend harangues about what he considers dissembling and poor social institutions as reasons for China's immiseration. Time would prove Townsend almost entirely wrong, of course, at least insofar as his suppostition that the Chinese would remain hopelessly disordered. In fact, strict and ancient social controls have been a key to Chinese cohesion, but Townsend was not in a position to see how it could be so. Chinese society is more of a clan structure, meaning inter-family trust is high; Western society is more individualistic and therefore institutional trust must be higher. At the moment, Western society is coming apart and Chinese society (and Asian society in general) has been remarkably robust in the face of those effects of modernity which lead to decadence. I'll be interested to see a Chinese travelogue through North America in a hundred years, parts of which I expect will be quite nice after a breakup and reformulation into smaller, more defined ethnic units.Feel free to follow my wechat English course and blog, Josh老师.

Viet Phuong Nguyen on China's Floating Nuclear Power Plants: https://thediplomat.com/2018/05/chinas-risky-plan-for-floating-nuclear-power-plants-in-the-south-china-sea/I dislike the above hand-wringing on China's FNPPs. Atomophobia in general strikes me as Baizuo-ism (given certain caveats about the need for strong safety and security reguations). Don't @ me with your environmentalism; I care about the environment, too, and I'm perfectly well aware of all the arguments. So let's talk about the advantages of FNPPs.1. The Russians have been running nuclear icebreakers for decades without incident, proving that the technology (which is new in the sense that the use-case is new) is at least well understood and has a legacy of safety and efficacy. It should be noted that most modern navies operate nuclear vessels; the US has over 60 nuclear ships and submarines. The first FNPP, called the Akademik Lomonosov will launch from the town of Pevek sometime in 2019.As you can see from the photo, Russia is poised to deploy FNPPs along much of its northern border. These regions are hard to reach but are becoming increasingly important as Russia takes advantage of thawing ice in the Artic and new sailing and trade routes being opened up by global temperature increase. The ability of FNPPs to project power brings us to the advantage for China, which is:2. The ability to deploy nuclear barges into the South China Sea to support defense of their islands there against other claimants as well to support oil and gas discovery and drilling. The barges can provide not only electricity but also crucial desalinated water for the islands. As Nguyen notes: "China National Nuclear Corp. (CNNC) and China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN), announced a plan to jointly develop the first Chinese nuclear power barge for deployment in the South China Sea by 2020, the first of a planned 20 such reactors."3. Concerns over meltdowns can be massively assuaged by the fact that FNPPs can use the entire ocean as heat sinks.4. Other advantages include the ability to build in shipyards (where there are highly trained workers), massive cost advantages over traditional reactors in the form of modular design, lower operating costs and efficiency.Indonesia is, in fact, heavily investing in FNPPs it calls 'nuclear islands.' You can read more about those here: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/08/china-and-russia-looking-at-27-floating-nuclear-reactors-but-thorcon-and-indonesia-could-scale-to-100-per-year.html

Today I walked to a nearby park, in Huafu near the Jinjiang River, to commit Li Bai's "Lament of the Jeweled Stairs" to memory. I hadn't done it the day or two before as I'd meant to, and was impatient for a new room in the palace. As the ancients well knew, memory is best served by a walk in which the items one wishes to remember are placed along one's path. The theory these days is that that when we were hunters and gatherers, we developed memory as a method to help us find our way in the world and back again, and so, when we are journeying, our minds fired with activity; we remember well when walking. Notice how your eyes flit from one place to another when next you take a car ride; those saccades are your mind spinning a narrative out of buildings and benches and street corners, in the primal fear that you'll not otherwise know how to find home.Jonathan Spence, who always writes beautifully, wrote the story of Matteo Ricci, that old Jesuit who came first to Macau and tried to teach the memory palace technique to the Chinese. Ricci was unsuccessful in that venture, but nevertheless managed to convert some government officials to the Universal Church, and to get Confucius translated into Latin. Before him, the Romans and Greeks were both practitioners of the Method of Loci, and their methods live with us today: when they memorized some lines of oratory, they literally put those lines into mental loci. Today, because of their mental peripatetics, it isn't uncommon for an essayist to write "in the first place..." and "in the second place...". We've mostly forgotton these ways, what with writing taking the place of oral tradition, and then again with the rise of the internet. But memory champions (and multilingualists like me) still use them. And so today, as I wrote, I went to a park to make a memory palace to walk through. Thus, I started at some nameless statue, where I put "玉阶” and then onto a little platform where "生白露" went. This process continued for six more steps until I had put the whole poem into physical locations. One was the set of steps in front of a stage; the next the stage itself. This kind of thing strains the notion of linearity, or of time moving from A to B. For the poem, it may, but for memory...well, it can be spatial, and I certainly needn't recall "秋月” after "玲珑望." Nor does any of us, with our own memories. Memories gain primacy not by age or immediacy, but by becoming totemic; by becoming central to other, lesser memories. In this way, they are like characters in a book, which, being persons, or animals, or ideas, or something else, are characters in as much as they are something the text surrounds and seems to be working towards.

There is a little blue notebook I carry underarm, into which goes every odd and end of thought as well as pieces of prose and poetry as they seem seemly to me. Yesterday, it was Ezra Pound's tranlation of the "Jade Stair's Complaint" (he rendered it as The Jeweled Stairs' Grievance), which was one of his translations of Li Bai (whom he called Rihaku after the Japanese translation) in the book Cathay. From my two parentheticals, we see that Pound had no Chinese of his own, and was, instead, constructing his poems out of the translations into English from Japanese done by one Ernest Fenollosa. Cathay is not a translation, but consists in entirely new works; nevertheless, it was hailed not only as a modernist triumph in the West, but as faithful to the spirit of Li Bai by Chinese commenters.Ezra Pound-------------------------------------------------------------The Chinese:玉阶怨玉阶生白露夜久侵罗袜却下水晶帘玲珑望秋月becomes:The Jewel Stairs GrievanceTHE jewelled steps are already quite white with dew,It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,And I let down the crystal curtainAnd watch the moon through the clear autumn.By Rihaku.At the end of the poem, Pound adds this memorable note by way of explanation:NOTE. Jewel stairs, therefore a palace. Grievance, therefore there is something to complain of. Gauze stockings,therefore a court lady, not a servant who complains. Clearautumn, therefore he has no excuse on account of weather.Also she has come early, for the dew has not merely whitenedthe stairs, but has soaked her stockings. The poem is especially prized because she utters no direct reproach.-------------------------------------------------------------It was my choice, yesterday, to memorize this poem, which is something I do everyday in order to learn Chinese. This is perhaps not the best--and certainly is not my only--method for learning the language, but it does make the vocabulary live and breathe for me in a way that plodding through textbooks does not. I do recommend plodding, of course, because that's the way a pilgrim makes his progress. But I quite like the time spent with this image of the young lady by moonlight, which rises like a vapor above the warm waters of the mind in quiet hours. The language is so much more when it is Li Bai looking for his next barrel of wine, or when Wang Wei is speaking of the red berries of the South.

It is the fifth of January, and I have already failed in my resolution never to find myself again reduced to a human soup, poured onto a couch, simmering black as a blood pudding in emotional and intellectual crisis. I am the shrinking species of violet Émilie du Châtelet was thinking of when she wrote "One must know what one wants to be. In the latter endeavors irresolution produces false steps, and in the life of the mind confused ideas." Well, every moment in life is its latest endeavor, so irresolution is always causing me straits, which I navigate poorly.The catalyst for all this spiritual malaise is manifold, as effects always are. It could be that my wife was working too much of late, and paid me no heed, in the evenings and the holidays, for longer than my pride would naturally permit. She's Chinese and works in a Chinese company, so they were bound to abuse her goodwill and ethic in order to have her working fourteen hours a day and weekends, too. I've told her not to stand for it, and she has promised to say a word to the relevant taskmasters, but I fear her native restraint will keep her from making too much of a fuss and we'll be back to the couch and soup before long because her laowai husband feels the sting of neglect. Was not this supposed to be the country of Marx and workers rights?It's hard to be too critical of China, though, because another party to my spiritual oppression must be my benighted America, which has lately elected to the office of president its very own tyrant. The term is pejorative but also searingly accurate; no fitter subject for the title has presented its monstrous head in the history of our republic than Trump, who is a ridiculous pustule of a man stepped straight from the pages of satire. We've got our own heaving, bloviating, vacuous, carnival barker of a petty Pantagruel, his mind pickled, as Rabelais would have said "in the scorn of fortuitous things." It's grim to see the beginning of the end of the empire. One begins to understand a little the feeling of Qu Yuan, who hurled himself in a river over his heartbreak at the destruction of Chu.Well, I won't be as dramatic as that. I shall have to write soon about how my Chinese brethren can prevent the sorts of missteps America has made; there is a real social mess to untangle there, and it would be instructive for me, as well.And, after all, there is much good in the world to remember. My desk has two tomes of Aristotle, Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France", and the first volume of Marx's Capital all asking me to reread them. Getting oneself an education is blessedly cheap, if only people are interested. There is this free blog, too, which will give me a place to write a little in the mornings, as Paul Valery did, though I don't presume to make a monument as great as his; still, it's good to have goals, things to be resolute about, in the New Year. These external worries, of course, are external, and we cannot blame the outside world for our own misconduct. It's up to me, as a function of will, to scrape my soup into a container in the shape of a man.