More potos….

By the way, does it sound all right to call the singing thing a rock? What about calling it about a stone? I checked a dictionary, but got no hints.

Here are more photos from the trip…

It never seems to occur to them that they should consider people or things other than themselves. They don’t think it a big deal smoking near others, standing in the way of others who have to get off a bus or overtake them on the road, leaving food wastes in the sink even though they are sure the wastes cannot pass through the drain, let lights or other electrical devices on even though they don’t need so, or worse, never wanting to learn to be considerate……… I’m not implying that I can be considerate every time and on every occasion. But, at least, I want to be considerate and am ready to learn what I can do to be more considerate.

Animal welfare activists and vegetarians who carry things too far.

Unless humans award citizenships to animals and allow them to form states, elect their leaders and build armies to defend their interests against human encroachment, the animal welfare activists can rest assured that humans will remain on top of the food chain and will not treat animals as equals.

Vegetarians, in my view, should die a hungry death because of the absence of “right” food. The animals, fishes, birds, snails, and others that produce meat for humans to consume as foodstuffs are no less sacred and respectable life forms than rice, maize, barley, potato, apples, melons, wheat and other plants that form the “vegetarian” diet. It then follows that vegetarians will have nothing to eat. Maybe they can rightly eat stones and coals. For that matter, stones also have the right to remain to be stones and coals might be a fossilized life form.

People who are not Chinese may have difficulty understanding the following two peeves of mine:
Grown-ups who sponge off their old parents for jobs, spouses, and houses.

If their parents can well afford all these things, it’s quite OK they freeload off their parents. But, the problem is that lots of Chinese grown-ups take it for granted that their parents should give up everything they have for the offspring’s expensive, luxurious welfare. They do so as if their parents owe it to them.

People who say “China occupied Tibet in 1951″, “Taiwan should be independent of China” or things like that.

China’s ownership of Tibet dates back to the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368). Tibet was an administrative region of the Republic of China (1912-1949) that had been created out of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) which ruled Tibet as a province. Today, Tibet is an autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China.

As shown by both the Constitutions of the Republic of China under which the politics runs on Taiwan and that of the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan is not a separate identity outside of China as defined by the two Constitutions. The very reason for the existence of the surviving ROC on the island, a leftover from a technically unfinished Chinese civil war, is that Beijing has elected NOT to dismantle it after it assumed starting from 1949 the exclusive role of exercising sovereignty over the whole of China including Taiwan. To read more about my views on Taiwan, please visit http://surefire.cn/atig .

I wrote this entry in response to Here comes my six pet peeves in which solid copper “tagged” me to write my own peeves. I came up with four of them.

By titling this post “coriander in a flowerpot” and uploading the above photos, I don’t mean that I will only write about the spicy plant I like very much as garnish and vegetables eaten raw. Lots of thoughts are crowding on me now. And I don’t know where I can begin to write about them.



First, the house. By “house”, I mean the place that houses my home and that I can call my own. I’d like to guess that the houses in China are the most expensive property around the world. Take residential houses in Beijing for example. Even if you buy one of them, it’s difficult for you to call it your own, because what you actually buy is the ownership of the house and the “right” to use the piece of land above which the house is located. This means that you do not buy the ownership of the land below your new acquisition.



Chinese laws say that land is owned by the State and you pay rent to have your house built over the piece of the land. For residential purposes, the land above which your house exists is rented (perhaps, jointly with others) to you in a 70-year lease agreement. And it will be the job of the State to decide whether or not you can have your lease renewed. When this lease expires and you fail to have the lease renewed, the State has the right to take your house away, for free.



This is only a small part of the story. Considering the short history of the People’s Republic (1949- ), no one have actually seen houses build after the founding of this State standing in a place for 70 years. As it is, most of them are dismantled to make space for new property projects before they live to be that old. So, these questions crop up in my mind. What if the house you buy is torn down, say, in 40 years from now? Will you be compensated for the rent you’ve paid to use the piece of land in the 70-year lease agreement? If yes, how much? I didn’t check the newly passed Property Law at the recently concluded National People’s Congress and don’t know if the law provides answers to my questions.



Again, the above is only a small part of the whole story. In Beijing, even if you don’t buy the land that comes with your house, the money you pay to own your house is not any less than the amount another guy, who works and earns in a comparable foreign city where land can be privately owned, would pay for a house that comes with the ownership of the piece of land above which it exists. And, of course, I’m comparing you and the other house buyer in the foreign city in terms of income/property price ratios.



Second, … …



I will pick up where I leave off when I feel like it. Please wait, if I may say so.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Now let me continue with my newly found seven-year’s itch I feel about my work. Last night, it suddenly dawned on me that I’d been working as translator for seven years. As I write this post, I also recall that I kept my last job for three years. I now realize they are the legendary three-year and seven-year itches though they are mostly associated with marriage in my reading. Perhaps, the itches might apply in a much wider area than marriage. As time goes on, people are becoming more and more discontented with themselves and everything and everyone around them. Then, they at least want a break from them.

I quit my last job and that saved me from the first itch that broke out last year.

But now, in the seven-year itch, I find myself getting totally stuck between what I want to do, what I can do and what I should do. I want to be a simultaneous interpreter or do some other kind of work. But, I can now do nothing better than just translating in front of a computer screen. And I don’t know what I should do to earn more than enough to cover everything.

My family needs a home. My wife and I will plan our kid in a few years. And with the kid comes the caring and schooling bills. Currently, I’m not covered by social security network and I have good reasons to worry about my pension and have to figure out how I will be able to support myself in my retirement years. My wife still studies medicine and worries about where she can get a good job. My mom and dad are sharing my dad’s pension. And my wife’s mom and dad are better off: they each have a pension.

Moms and dads say they don’t need our support now and instead want to help us buy a home and babysit the little one. But, we want to pay for everything on our own and don’t want to use their money they would otherwise use to support themselves.

I hope that I can figure everything out in the shortest possible time.

Taken on a picnic in the 1990s
when my wife and I attended an elementary school
in Heilongjiang province, China.

This was the photo we had taken right before our graduation from the elementary school in 1990. As you can see, the clothes of my wife and I were the same as those in the photo of the picnic. My wife and I are seen in this photo squatting on both ends of the first row. The one in yellow and the one in grey (is it?).

And considering the extra electricity costs that need to be shared by other housemates if I turn on the device since occupants in the apartment have unmetered use of utilities and share the costs per capita…

I hate myself because I tend to waste so much time doing nothing by clicking through links on the webpages or navigating nearly every “interesting” links in my Favorites. The stupid point here is that I do absolutely nothing. Anyone else have my problem?!

Hungry, now…