the random oracle

What a historic election!  In one short night the image of America as a land of war-mongering pronunciation-challenged oil-grubbing unilateral imperialists vanished and the hope of an America living up to its promise of liberty and equality replaced the bitter taste left by the last eight years of the Bush administration.

I was originally a Hillary supporter and I still am; I think practically speaking she would have made a more experienced president and would have hit the ground running even faster.  But there’s no denying that Obama is more inspirational, and what he really brings to the presidency that Hillary could not is the ability to mobilize such a vast base to the country’s service, and that in itself is quite the accomplishment.  Let’s hope that the excitement he stirs up lasts past the election itself.

I was up in Boston this past week for some family and work things, and I’d bought my tickets a long while back on the Bolt / Mega bus companies because they give you awesome deals if you buy far enough in advance.  Unfortunately when I got here I kept on seeing talk on the news about some tropical storm that was supposed to hit New England and so I was worried about going home through torrential downpours, especially since I’d be passing through Connecticut, otherwise known as Automotive Death Valley.

But now I’m on the bus back and really it’s just a rainy day, nothing special at all.  Originally there were projecting 2 inches of rainfall but now I think they’re saying 0.5 inches instead.  I have two thoughts about this:

• Is our weather prediction ability really so poor that we can’t even get an accurate picture of what it’ll be like in 1 or 2 days?  I mean some of these Chicken Little predictions were made last night.
• Maybe the predictions are fine and it’s just that the news stations exaggerate in order to get better viewership?  After all a rainy day isn’t so newsworthy, but a tropical storm is.

Which leads to the next thought: maybe I’m not used to such exaggerated predictions because I rarely watch the weather report on the news; wunderground.com is much less sensationalistic.  But maybe the people who do watch these weather reports have gotten so de-sensitized to such reports that they start ignoring them?  Maybe Katrina wouldn’t have been as bad if people really believed that it would be as bad as people said?  And maybe they would believe it more if they weren’t constantly bombarded with alarming weather reports that turn out to be duds?

So in my efforts to not lose the progress I made in learning Chinese over the summer I’ve started to listen to the podcasts distributed by this website 静雅思听, and I came across this podcast today 没有爱情有善良 (literally “Without love, but with a kind heart”, full text is here).

The synopsis of the story is that a late-middle-aged Japanese man goes to China, where he’s been set up with a Chinese woman in her early 30′s.  They meet and after a few days, the man asks the woman’s family to take her back to Japan.  In exchange, he gives family 5 million yen to buy a new house, and promises to take good care of her, that he’d quit drinking and they’d live a comfortable life together.  Turns out when they get to Japan that he lives in government housing (though I don’t think it has quite as bad a connotation as the projects here) but in any case he’s not rich and he doesn’t quit drinking.  So they live together and for the first few years things are a bit strained because of the language barrier and their financial situation, but bit by bit they start to understand each other.  They have a baby and he does live up to his word about taking care of her and the baby.  He even goes out of his way to help Chinese workers/visitors in Japan who are lost, appreciating how hard it is for them to be in a foreign country.  Here’s the last paragraph:

“希望两岁了，少珍将儿子送入托儿所，自己开始在盒饭店打工。“看看，我爹娘住上了新房子，我们倒住得像贫民窟。我们总也要买自己的房子呀。”少珍笑眯眯的 开始一边照顾儿子一边打工的生活，骑着自行车去盒饭店的时候，少珍感到日本春天的风很柔和，像从前在上海骑车去上班一样。不过现在她心中更安定而温暖，知 道这里有她的归宿，知道她与丈夫间满是关怀的感情。虽然那可以与爱情无关，但足够他们养育希望，过一生了。”

“After Xiwang (the son) turns two, he starts going to kindergarten and Shaozhen (the wife) starts working at a restaurant.  She thinks, “My parents are now living in a new house, but we’re still living like paupers in a cave.  We need to buy a new house too.”  Shaozhen goes about her days happily, sending Xiwang to school, going to work at the restaurant.  She enjoys the soft breeze of the Japanese spring as she rides her bike to work, just like how she once rode her bike to work in Shanghai, except now she’s more content and at peace, knowing that her home is here and that she and her husband will take good care of each other.  Even though it isn’t really love, it’s enough for them to raise Xiwang and live together for the rest of their days.”

It’s a beautiful piece but what was really shocking for me is how different it is from the Western point of view.  I think my first reaction was “poor people”, living a loveless life, just fulfilling society’s expectations and their duties to their parents.  But then again, maybe what we’re taught to value, namely love (of the Romeo and Juliet variety), happiness (often by way of material things), and fulfillment (of the tree-hugging, earth-saving kind, or even the democracy-spreading, Iraq-invading kind) are just as empty and hollow as how we view the values espoused in this story?

I think as outsiders we view the values in this story as coming from (a) tradition, (b) poverty (at least on the wife’s part), (c) lack of better opportunity (on the husband’s part).  But let’s turn the lens on ourselves, where do our values come from?  My guess would be (a) the media, (b) the belief that somehow everyone else is happier than we are, (c) affluence.  The media reinforces this notion of “happily ever after” that seems just within our grasp, even though it has nothing to do with reality; we’re conditioned from childhood to think that it’s possible and indeed that the very definition of happines is to find your own happily ever after.  This reinforces the second point, which is that we see others who have (or look like they have) what we want and we think that “well if they can have it, why can’t I?”  But we do this without taking into account that nothing is as it seems on its surface, and that those we envy or admire really don’t live fairy tale lives either.  And of course being a rich society, we have enough time and leisure to worry about all these (frivolous?) things; maybe we’d all actually be happier if we were a little more appreciative of the simple things in life, like being able to put dinner on the table.

Thoughts?

This song makes me cry.  Yes, I’m a big sap, sue me.

So my mom just moved to a new apartment in Cambridge and I’ve been hanging out here since the beginning of the week.  The location is great, right near the Lechmere T station, and within (somewhat long-ish) walking distance of MIT.  I was able to walk to the Stata Center for RANDOM+APPROX 2008 in about 20 minutes, not bad.  It’s funny because I remember when I was in college and the walk from the Quad to the Yard seemed like an eternity, and now a 30 minute walk seems feasible.

What’s even nicer is that the people here are so different from New York.  OK, fair enough Cambridge is a big bunch of nerds.  The people here are not as pretty to look at and we’re definitely closer to being in America (there are some scary waistlines here), but it’s the nerdy America.  Everywhere you turn here there are research institutes discovering the next treatment for cancer or building a better mouse trap.  And not every other person on the street has an iPhone, wears D&G, or dresses business-formal.  I miss that; I don’t meet enough nerdy people in New York and even though I appreciate it when people dress nice and walk fast, it’d be nice if they could also talk about how their work is helping to save lives or further science.  Of course you get that in Princeton, but there’s a much smaller community there and, let’s face it, living in Princeton sucks.  Living here, on the other hand, actually seems nice.

TNS had her doubts about living in Boston because of the lack of diversity.  But just walking around today I don’t think that’s a problem at all.  True the popular image of Boston is that of a very Irish-American, white-dominated city, but I think that’s very misleading.  Sure, South Boston is still very white and Irish, but the Back Bay, downtown, Brighton, Brookline, Cambridge, Jamaica Plain, all these areas are very mixed.  A lot of it has to do with the large student population, and the universities here attract the best and brightest from all across the world.

And, to venture out on a limb and say something blatantly elitist and snobby, I think people like me benefit from the diversity in Boston more than they do from the diversity in New York.  Let’s face it, even though there are Hispanic, Greek, African, Chinese, Jewish, Russian, etc. neighborhoods in New York, how often do we interact with them except to go to their restaurants?  When was the last time I met a random Senegalese person outside the context of patronizing their store, even though I live in a neighborhood filled with Senegalese people?  Part of it’s my fault, that’s for sure, because I don’t go out looking to meet them; but part of it is also that we have basically nothing in common besides sharing the same neighborhood.

In contrast, I feel like the diversity in Boston is more accessible because we would share more things in common.  Maybe we do research in the same area, or they’re studying here and want to learn more about American culture, or they work in the same building as me in the next office over.  And I guess that’s my point: just there existing diversity isn’t enough, the diversity should somehow also actively influence my life, rather than just being background noise.

The pluses:

• Friends!
• Fairway!
• People know how to dress.
• Clear skies.
• Boys work out here.
• All-night subway.

The minuses:

• $7 beer?  What?!?!
• It’s dirty.  And that’s in comparison to Beijing!
• Food.  At least food that doesn’t cost you an arm and a leg.
• Less bike-friendly.
• People are snobs.
• Less exciting architecture.

Visiting the Olympic Park was incredible.  Even though actually getting there was a huge pain the ass (you have to go through a security check before even getting in the subway that takes you inside the park), it was worth it.  The architecture inside the park is awesome; if the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube hadn’t stolen the show, the other stadiums and centers would certainly have been just as talked about.

Much of the park is dedicated to sponsors’ exhibits.  Now I know people complain and complain about how commercial the Olympics are becoming, but some of the exhibits were actually pretty cool.  I especially liked the GE pavilion, where they had a water fall that had tiny individual jets that could draw designs in the falling water.

The star of the show however was of course the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube.  Walking inside the Bird’s Nest is equally impressive as seeing it from outside; all the stairs are open and the glowing red is just as beautiful inside as it is eery outside.  I didn’t get a chance to go in the Water Cube but got some nice shots of it from outside.

As for the athletics themselves, the show was long but ended with a bang.  The last event of the evening was the men’s 10000m race, and after 8 boring laps around the stadium the competition picked up.  In the last 3 or 4 laps the runners kept on passing each other; first an Eritrean duo was leading, then a Kenyan, but finally in the end the Ethiopian runner Bekele came up from behind and snatched the gold.

On the way to a late-night snack, we saw a bunch of Ethiopian supporters in the subway, and started chanting “Go Ethiopia!” which quickly turned into “Ethiopia jia you (加油)!”  When the Chinese people in the subway started looking at us funny (Who were these crazy laowai screaming things in the subway at 12 in the morning?  I was kind of mortified…) we just started chanting “中国加油!” (Go China!) and they started chanting with us.  See, the Olympic spirit is alive and well; it just needs a little translation sometimes

So in my last week here I’ve decided to take in a few of the many museums in Beijing.  I’d originally wanted to see the National Museum (国家博物馆), which is a propaganda-laden history museum with (I’m sure) spectacularly lavish exhibits showing how the Communist party liberated China and repelled the Japanese.  But alas it was closed for renovations and new installations, so I had to find something else.

My first stop was the Chinese Art Museum (中国美术馆), which hosts a collection that spans much of China’s history.  On display on the ground floor were works from the “Beijing Biennial”, someof which I found pretty cool.  One work I liked in particular was the “Finger-guessing Game (石头，前子，布)”.  I could understand two of the dates, but the rest were a mystery.

Here are some other works that I found interesting there:

Next was the Capital Museum (首都博物馆), which is a beautiful building west of Tiananmen Square.  They were holding a temporary exhibition called China’s Memories (中国记忆).  The museum mostly houses works that were found or composed in Beijing, though some are brought in from outside.  The temporary exhibition had many works from all over the country.

Last was the Today Art Museum (今日美术馆), which obviously is a contemporary museum.  The main building was closed when I got there, but the second building was housing an exhibition on Sports and the Olympics.