Full Circle and A Better Tomorrow
June 3rd, 2007 by MarkFor the past week and a half, Wayne has been staying at my place. He just moved into the city from rural Yilan, and needed someplace to crash. What’s interesting to me, is that I even met him at all.
When I first created this site, my main inspiration was my favorite blog- A Better Tomorrow. Written by a young American who had studied abroad in Beijing, and then gone on to travel all over China, it represented the most credible, most human account I’d ever seen of someone of a similar background who had learned Chinese well. Since that had been my original goal in coming to Taiwan, I read each page of A Better Tomorrow with anticipation. The tales of being swindled at knife-point in the north-west, the updates about classes, the uncensored observations about people… all of it was fascinating to me.
After the Nanjing-Hopkins program that the author, the very same Wayne mentioned above, had been enrolled in was canceled due to SARS, I was shocked to learn that he was coming to Taiwan, the place I’d chosen to study Chinese! On, I kept reading, entertained with stories of “stuff you wouldn’t see in mainland China” (such as Buddhist televangelists), translations of Lian Zhan’s political ads comparing himself with Gandalf and his rivals with Sauron, and a hodge-podge of other things. Then one day, Wayne abandoned blogging in favor of photography.
After I started blogging myself and this site became one of the larger Taiwan blogs, I eventually met Wayne via mutual friends who blog, such as PR and Poagao. It’s kind of amazing to me that due to this site, I’ve been able to get to know someone who was once “that guy with the coolest China blog on the net”. Even more surprisingly, he’s restarted A Better Tomorrow… sort of.
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June 4th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
Too bad Beijing didn’t work out for him. I liked Wayne’s blog too, except for the posts on baseball. Good news that he’s restarting it.
June 5th, 2007 at 8:50 am
Hi there:
I came here quite often, what happened to your 道聽塗說 Chinese blog?
June 5th, 2007 at 1:08 pm
Aww, jeez, now I’m blushing.
Anyhow, regular blogging for me will probably resume once I get a regular Internet connection up in my pad. So many times I’ve thought about writing up something, but then I’d forget about it since I’d have to walk 15 minutes to find some Internet hotspot.
June 5th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
Cool.. Looking forward to see your new story. I have been away from my home town for so long. It will be nice to hear people talking about their life in Taiwan.
Thanks!
June 6th, 2007 at 4:47 am
Mark! So this is what you’ve been doing all this time. You’re just as brainy as ever… congrats on the great investments and the teaching. When are you coming back to Boulder? Any plans for summer break? We should hook up… morning runs just haven’t been the same. Hey, I PR’d at the Turkey Trot last fall! Are you still running? Do they have many 10k’s to pick from in Taiwan? email me.
June 6th, 2007 at 5:26 pm
Hey, Lynn. It’s good to hear from you. Unfortunately, I’m not much of a runner anymore, but I am trying to get back into it. Way to go on the Turkey Trot. Whoever came up with the idea of having a four mile race right before Thanksgiving dinner just rules. I know there are a few races here, but it’s not even remotely like it was in Colorado. I’d love to get back out there to visit everyone, but I’ll be working through my summer break. Maybe next Chinese new year.
June 6th, 2007 at 5:27 pm
Terrence, somehow I broke my Chinese blog when I upgraded the theme. I’ve reverted it back to the old one, so it’s accessible again.
June 6th, 2007 at 11:42 pm
hey. Mark:
Trying to load your Chinese blog. It returns the following PHP error.
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 94371840 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 65536 bytes) in /home/.mole/toshuo/toshuo.com/chinese/wp-includes/functions.php on line 652
Not sure what is happening behind the scene, but I guess the you might have corrupted database.
June 9th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
No, it really was out of memory. That error is common in WP2.04. I just added:
to
functions.phpand that problem was fixed. My Chinese version of the Toshuo2.0 theme is still breaking things, though…June 12th, 2007 at 11:40 pm
I have a friend that’s in Taiwan for a month. I told him to look you up, so you should expect him to email you (at your gmail address). His name is Colin Williams, and he used to work for the American Embassy in Beijing.
June 13th, 2007 at 7:13 am
Good to hear, Tom. I sent him my number.
Everyone else, it looks like the Chinese blog is wrecked beyond repair. When I tried restoring the database, via phpmyadmin, the character encodings of everything were screwed up. I’ve tried dozens of combinations of character encoding settings for both the DB default, and the “import as” options, and I haven’t been able to rescue it.
Maybe I’ll just erase all my Chinese posts and start over.