Doubting to shuō

I came to Thailand because my Chinese tourist visa only allows me to stay for 30 days each trip. Thankfully, Thailand offers visa-free entry to Americans. I hadn’t really ever had much interest in visiting Thailand, so this is the first time I’ve come here. I came as late as possible so as to maximize the amount of time I get in China before making another visa run, and I didn’t really plan the particular day I’d be here at all.

It turns out I was incredibly lucky. The one full day of my trip in Thailand happens to be the one day of the entire year that the lucky Buddha statue is open to the public. It’s also the one day that the big Buddha is free to visit. Ditto for half a dozen other places. I woke up with the sole goal of finding a place to buy size 12 running shoes, but after learning about my good fortune, I turned this into a tourist trip after all, visiting half a dozen temples.

I didn’t really have any idea what to expect before coming to Thailand, but all in all it was pretty nice (aside from the tuktuk drivers). I even found the shoes I was looking for! I hear that the internet is censored here, but unlike China, it didn’t have any effect on me. It may have bothered me if I were really interested in reading about controversial religious topics or things related to the Thai monarchy, but I didn’t even notice it. Youtube was accessible. So were Facebook, dropbox, blogspot and all the other sites I can’t get at in China. I might come back someday to visit again.

Due to the horribly expensive and horribly limited visas China offers Americans, I’m going to have to leave the country and make a visa-run. Or maybe I should say, passport-stamp run. I spent over two hundred US dollars getting a visa from an agency in HK and despite my previous visitor visa to China, the best they were able to get me was a 6 month, multiple-entry visa. Unfortunately, while it’s good for six months, I have to make a pointless trip out of the country every thirty days. As a nice additional FU, nearly half the price of a plane ticket to do so is from taxes on international flights.

Living at my friend’s place in Kunming, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam are the closest options. Vietnam is also a pain in the ass about American visas and unlike China I don’t want to go there enough to put up with it. Laos is where my old teacher and friend PR lives, but it’s a pretty rough border crossing and I can’t find a cheap flight.

I’m going to Thailand. It’s not going to be for tourism at all, but hopefully I can find some size 12 running shoes there.

It was already midnight when I got to the Kunming train station. Unlike other train stations I’d seen in major Chinese cities at that hour, it was mostly dark and deserted. Fortunately, my friendly cabin-mate from the ride in was kind enough to call my friend Ben and let him know I was in the city and on my way to his apartment. Thanks to a recent party, the apartment was a disaster, messier than any place I’d set foot in in years. I didn’t care one bit. My friend from Taiwan was there, the wifi worked and there was an actual bed to sleep in.

By the time I got onto the train to Kunming, I was exhausted– exhausted from lugging a backpack and two suitcases around the Guangdong Railway station while looking for a bank, exhausted from getting offers for overpriced services, and most of all exhausted from from sleep deprivation. In the end, though, I did manage to get done what needed to be done. I changed my HK dollars to RMB (losing 100HKD to a slight of hand artist first), I made it from Guangdong Railway Station to Guangdong East Station via the subway for 4RMB instead of the 50-100 that taxis kept offering me, I got my ticket and I stayed awake long enough for the train to arrive.

When I was finally able to board the train, it was an immense feeling of relief. I stowed my luggage, climbed up to the top bunk and fell asleep before the train even started moving.

An interesting travel companion

One man I shared a compartment with was particularly out-going. At first after hearing all the r sounds in his Mandarin, I thought he was a northerner or maybe from Kunming on his way home. It wasn’t a terrible guess since he had, in fact, spent the first ten years of his life in Beijing, but after that he’d lived only in Hong Kong. As far as I could tell, his Cantonese was the same as a any other Hong Konger, but he’d never felt the need to alter his “standard” northern Mandarin into the heavily accented HK version. I suppose that’s pretty understandable. Anyway, the guy was full of stories. He told me about a ruthless gold-digger from Guangzhou. He talked about how he got into EFL teaching dispite having questionable English skills himself. Most surprising were his plans for after he got to Kunming.

On Chinese Police

“Be careful about Chinese police,” he told me. “They aren’t like Hong Kong police. You really don’t want to make them angry.”

“Why?” I asked. “What happened?”

“Well, there’s this one time I was on a train. It was a long distance one like the one we’re on now. In one of the compartments, there were four or five off-duty police officers, and they were smoking!!!”

I didn’t understand. “Lots of people smoke on the train,” I answered. “What was so bad about them?”

“There was a no smoking sign! They were police! I went into the room and said, ‘How dare you!!? It is your job to uphold the law and you break it yourselves! Have you no shame?”

“Uhh… what did they do then?”

“They continued smoking! And they spoke to me very coldly and told me to leave.”

“That’s it?” I couldn’t believe this guy. I wouldn’t ever talk to police like that in any country.

His plans for Kunming

“So, what are you going to do after you get to Kunming?” he asked me.

“I’m going to look for a visa-granting Chinese school for foreigners. I’ve got a friend to stay with. How about you?”

“Oh, I’m just traveling. I’m going to get a hotel room and go the supermarket to buy some paper underwear.”

“Paper underwear??!”

“Yes. It is available.”

When I moved out of my my apartment in Taipei, I gave away all my things I couldn’t fit into either my suitcase or backpack. Several of my friends, even the beneficiaries, asked why I’d do such a thing. I could have sold them on an online classifieds board and maybe made a couple of hundred dollars.

Here’s why I didn’t:

1. It worked out terribly for a good friend of mine who did exactly that. It was frustrating and more of a hassle than it was worth.
2. A lot of my stuff wouldn’t bring in anything near what I paid for it– people are generally hesitant to buy certain things (such as rice cookers, or bread makers) second hand.
3. The value to my friends of the various things I was getting rid of was more than the value I’d get from selling them.
4. I really wanted to get rid of everything. By setting up a free give away, adding certain game mechanics to determine who got what and establishing a ground rule that people take what they ask for, I was able to get rid of far, far more stuff than I could have by putting up an add on a classified board. That would have just gotten rid of a few choice items.

In the end, I got rid of my stuff, my friends benefited and it was a fun party. What more could I ask for?

Today, I found this announcement via Hacker News. Google says their servers were attacked, and that the primary goal was the gmail accounts of rights activists. They said that their security protecting email data wasn’t breached. However, their own investigation revealed that several rights activists email accounts have been routinely accessed by what appear to be third-parties using valid login information. This would suggest that the rights activists’ passwords have been discovered via keyloggers, packet sniffers or some other surveillance at their end.

In response, Google has decided to stop complying with the PRCs filtering regulations.

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer: A new approach to China

Related: A Chinese analysis of the situation
Related entry: Google Rejects DOJ Subpoena

I’ve long been interested in the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis, and how one’s language affects perceptions of space and color. Interestingly, there’s now some quantitative evidence that metaphors can have a strong influence on our perceptions. Primary metaphors, those that are so deeply embedded in our language that we aren’t usually consciously aware of them, are so strong that we confuse our basic physical senses with the things our language has linked with those senses metaphorically.

Bargh at Yale, along with Lawrence Williams, now at the University of Colorado, did studies in which subjects were casually asked to hold a cup of either iced or hot coffee, not knowing it was part of the study, then a few minutes later asked to rate the personality of a person who was described to them. The hot coffee group, it turned out, consistently described a warmer person–rating them as happier, more generous, more sociable, good-natured, and more caring–than the iced coffee group. The effect seems to run the other way, too: In a paper published last year, Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey J. Leonardelli of the University of Toronto found that people asked to recall a time when they were ostracized gave lower estimates of room temperature than those who recalled a social inclusion experience.

In a paper in the current issue of Psychological Science, researchers in the Netherlands and Portugal describe a series of studies in which subjects were given clipboards on which to fill out questionnaires–in one study subjects were asked to estimate the value of several foreign currencies, in another they were asked to rate the city of Amsterdam and its mayor. The clipboards, however, were two different weights, and the subjects who took the questionnaire on the heavier clipboards tended to ascribe more metaphorical weight to the questions they were asked–they not only judged the foreign currencies to be more valuable, they gave more careful, considered answers to the questions they were asked.

Boston.com: Thinking Literally

The question is, how universal are primary metaphors between languages?

I came across this study this morning, and it boggles the mind.

Chronic radiation is defined as the radiation received slowly or in a low-dose-rate from various sources. It is completely different in nature to the acute gamma or neutron radiation generated from the atomic bomb explosions that occurred in Japan at the end of World War II. Tantalizing insights from people living in higher-than-normal background radiation areas in the world and from nuclear energy workers receiving excess radiation over long years have suggested that chronic radiation might paradoxically be beneficial to humans. However, in the absence of an epidemiological study, it has been impossible to conclude whether chronic radiation is harmless or indeed beneficial to human beings. Fortuitously, an incredible Co-60 contamination incident occurred in Taiwan 21 years ago, which provided the data necessary to demonstrate that chronic radiation is beneficial to human beings.

Chronic Radiation Is Beneficial to Human Beings by Yuan-Chi Luan

I hope I’ve been exposed to similarly beneficial radiation and or contaminants during my time here in Taiwan.

I went back to Colorado to see my friends and family this summer. It was a great vacation and it really gave me a lot of things to thing about. So much in fact, that every time I’ve started going over my diary I’ve gotten lost in thoughts before transferring any of them online. This has to go up today, though.

My dear friend and former roommate Matt Ball is running up a mountain. This is the same guy who helped get me interested in both poker computer science over a decade ago, the same guy who used to wake me up at 5:30 am and ask if I felt like riding over to the pool for a swim before work or if I was a wuss, the guy who used to do easy 15 mile runs with me on the weekends and split a 3 pound Beau Jo’s pizza with me afterwords.

He ran a marathon a few years back, but this task is much, much more ambitious. This run is up a mountain called Pike’s Peak, one of Colorado’s 50-some “fourteeners”. For those not used to measuring mountains in feet, that’s an elevation of about 4,300 meters. I’m not sure exactly how much the altitude gain is during the run, but it’s a lot.

Be safe buddy and enjoy the clean air!

My old friend and co-worker Nathan has been back in town this past week and it’s been great! It’s been nearly three years since he left Taiwan and he wanted a chance to come by before starting law school this fall. His friend Joel, who hadn’t ever been to Asia is here, too.

We’ve hiked all over the city, gone to the computer market a few times, hung out with some of my newer friends and eaten lots and lots of good food they can’t get in Michigan. One thing that’s been kind of surprising to me is that Nathan doesn’t seem to have lost much of any of his Chinese skills, where were always better than mine were back in the day. He seems just as capable as ever at getting around town, talking to guys in electronics shops about modding cellphones and video game systems, and just generally being entertaining in Chinese. In fact, when we went to a River Runners meeting last night, he ended up surrounded by about five Taiwanese women the entire evening seemed to completely entranced by his story-telling!

The Master Storyteller by Mark on Zooomr

Then today, under the pavilion by the guāngguá shàngchǎng, somehow he picked up a guide from out of nowhere who took us around to all the tea stands and taste tested various teas from à’lǐshān, nántóu and various other places.

Tea Tasting by Mark on Zooomr

Joel, on the other hand is a complete Asia newbie. Not only, did he decline to eat any of the traditionally “scary” Chinese foods such as intestines, cow’s tongue, duck’s blood, frog meat, etc, but he was unable to handle tofu!!! Or use chopsticks! I hadn’t realized there was anyone to speak of really who couldn’t, at least in my generation. His chopstick skills have improved noticeably, but Nathan and I still weren’t able to peer-pressure him into even trying a piece of it!

I guess Muskegon, Michigan must be quite a bit different from the Denver-Boulder area in Colorado. I think my grade school cafeteria had tofu and gave us chopsticks to use on occasion. I never really went through the jarring culture shock I saw him experience. Still, we managed to show Joel a great part of Taiwan, he loved the computer markets and I think he’ll be back with a bit more culinary daring in a year or two. Hopefully my apartment will be cleaner by then and I can be a bit better of a host.