PEACE trip inner mongolia

Hohhot (呼和浩特) is the capital city of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (內蒙古自治區), a territory almost 3 times the size of California, stretching from northwestern to northeastern China, buffering between northern China and "Outer Mongolia" (the Mongolian People's Republic). 

The “People's Hospital of Inner Mongolia”--the tier-one hospital for the whole region--was what we visited the first morning we got there. We met with the head of the hospital/party secretary, the region's health department chief, the hospital administrators, etc., followed by a tour of their 17-story hospital building that includes a "hall of fame & glorious history" exhibition room, and concluded with a grand lunch at a grand (simulated) Mongolian tent at a local restaurant extension.

At night, we were entertained by hospitality of another kind, from some business associates of Jason's uncle's, a festive feast tinged with Mongolian folk dancing and singing and a full roast lamb (烤全羊) in another grand simulation Mongolian tent restaurant in the city. We were just now getting a taste of the generosity and hot affection from people of this cool land under blue sky (the name "Hohhot" actually means "Blue/Green City" in Mongolian, and the city is not hot at all).

We took a short tourist break the next morning, driving two hours out of the city to a tourist camp for horseback riding, then headed back and went west 5 hours straight, through the wild Mongolian prairie, to get to our next stop in Inner Mongolia: Ordos (鄂尔多斯).

Here we were at Jason's home turf. He was born and raised in a remote part of Ordos before he went east for school and settled in Beijing. He hadn't been back here for years, so he had arranged a reunion dinner at a restaurant near where we stayed to meet a dozen of his elementary school classmates and we were invited to join them after checking in.

It was the most fun-filled party dinner we had attended so far in the trip. All told, we had over 10 people stood up and sang during the dinner, including, to everyone's surprise, Jason singing a Taiwanese pop song "愛拼才會贏" he learned somewhere somehow. That was such a great performance I had to stand up and congratulate him with a toast "on behalf of all Taiwanese people," I said, to a roar of laughters. I then told them I recently saw a popular Chinese movie online "人在囧途," and besides being greatly entertained by its fun-filled plot, I was most moved by one line in the movie: "人間有真情" ("There is true affection in the world"). To Christians, love is the ultimate true affection in the world, therefore we would like to sing the song "The true meaning of love" ("愛的真諦," from 1 Corinthians 13) to express our gratitude and admiration of the outflow of love and affection we saw today. So we (Julia, me and my wife) stood up and sang, holding the lyrics right in front of us on an iPhone screen that Jason just searched and downloaded from the Net for us.

We took a road trip the next day to Jason's real home town, the little village at the northern edge of this super city called Ordos (its territory actually covers two cities and 7 "banners" (旗, large counties), for the size of almost two and a half times Taiwan). Here we first saw an old clinic that we could hardly see any patients in, then were taken to a nearby brand new community that they said the government are moving villagers into and shown a brand new hospital building that they said is in the process of being occupied too, as soon as they can get the beds and chairs and other necessities ready.

We drove back to the county seat in the afternoon and had dinner with Jason's uncle and auntie, who both work for the county government, one for the tax department, the other for the police department. "This is surely your town," we joked with Jason, "With powers-that-be like these, who else need you fear :)"

Back in metropolitan Ordos the next morning and after exchanging ideas on how we may like to help here healthcare wise (Jason is planning on sponsoring in-hospital social workers/counselors, Joyce thinking on creating mobile medical units for remote villagers, etc.), we received yet another great treat of Jasontown hospitality, a fine dining (even though it's lunch time) at a fine restaurant owned by Jason's brother. 

Jason's brother actually lives in Shanghai, but started the restaurant here less than a year ago, seeing the great business opportunity occurring. The fact about Ordos is that it is the hub of a booming economy in west-central Inner Mongolia that started 10 years ago when its easy-to-reach coal mines began to be developed to meet the nation's insatiable need of cheap energy, creating oodles of money to oodles of people here. This explains the Vegas-like night light and flashy buildings and luxury foreign imports we saw in the city, and the always-full situation at this high end restaurant of Jason's brother's that charges average $100 per person, he said.

After the lunch, Jason's brother took us to a local mart for some fine cashmere clothing shopping, and then we managed to stop by the (nominal) tomb of the man who put Mongolia on the map (or rather, the man who put the world on his map), the Khan of all Khans, Genghis Khan, on our way to the airport.

Perhaps the Khan did not want us to leave too soon, or was jealous of our air horse that he didn't get to have in his times, we got stranded at the airport, again. This time the cause of delay was some "military air maneuvering" somewhere on the sky. We made good use of the extra time, though, by spending one last devotional together with Jason and Ruth, before they boarded their flight back to Beijing, and eventually our own flight taking off for Xi'an (西安) after midnight.

Pictures by the day:    

Day 8 (July 18):

https://plus.google.com/photos/106815509376349700576/albums/5694443211479812097/5641666256902148050?authkey=CJjGj_H-9vqRJA&pid=5641666256902148050&oid=106815509376349700576

Day 9 (July 19):

https://plus.google.com/photos/106815509376349700576/albums/5694443211479812097/5641871613598985266?authkey=CJjGj_H-9vqRJA&pid=5641871613598985266&oid=106815509376349700576

Day 10 (July 20):

https://plus.google.com/photos/106815509376349700576/albums/5694443211479812097/5641930240144452786?authkey=CJjGj_H-9vqRJA&pid=5641930240144452786&oid=106815509376349700576

Day 11 (July 21):

https://plus.google.com/photos/106815509376349700576/albums/5694443211479812097/5641958623873626594?authkey=CJjGj_H-9vqRJA&pid=5641958623873626594&oid=106815509376349700576

This trip journal is dragging on too long, I think. So, I am putting the last segment--for the trip to Xi'an and Tianshui, along with its pictures--on my Facebook page for those of you who are still interested:

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?created&&note_id=2443036320432

PEACE trip beijing

It's 1200 miles between Shenzhen and Beijing, south to north (think of it like between San Diego and Seattle), flight time 3 hours. The plane was all packed, but the seat was fine (it's a Boeing, anyway) and the service was fair, except when after the plane landed and as it often happened some jittery passengers tried to unbelt themselves to get up, the flight attendant called out a stern "Sit down!" command that sounded so much like a school teacher disciplining her classroomful of students it amused us to no end (and I could not help but fake an attempt to get up myself).  

Picking us up at the Beijing airport was a weird shaped, Chinese made minivan (which we later found out was exactly the same model used by police in Tiananmen Square), our main and sole transportation means for the next few days in and around Beijing. We got a good taste of Beijing's bad traffic right after we entered the city circles--the 5th-Ring (五環), 4th-Ring (四環) "speedways," then finally into the 3rd-Ring (三環) proper to our Friendship Hotel (友誼賓館), the once prestigious lodging reserved for foreign dignitaries that probably not looking as sharp as many of its contemporary competitions, but charming and elegant nonetheless. After checking in, we did a cursory visit to the all famous Bird's Nest (鳥巢) and Water Cube (水立方) that were built for the 2008 Summer Olympics and now have become city landmarks. We then had a dinner of, what else, Peking duck, at a restaurant recommended by our "Old Beijing" driver (“Much better than that over-rated 全聚德," he said), and indeed it was quite good. The irony of that was it was a chain restaurant from Guangdong, place we just traveled from :)

We played tourists the full day next day, visiting the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, and had dinner at a pomp-and-circumstance restaurant converted from the residence of an old time Qing nobleman. Two notes I'll only add here for the day: 1. My wife did meet up the unexpected hazard the trip dealt her: We unknowingly took an open-air chair lift up the Great Wall trolley, and having never taken such lift before and realizing there was nothing except a wire and a chair to support us up in the air, she panicked, and literally kicked and screamed, eyes closed, all the way to the top; 2. They crowned me "Lord Daddy" (王爺) at the p&c restaurant--just to have fun when we ordered food, I suppose, and for the rest of the trip that title could not escape me, or rather I could not escape that title :(

We went back to hospital visiting business the next day. First thing we did that morning, though, was to meet up with Jason Liu, who, like Alex, was another key person that helped define the tone of this trip for us. Jason was a Beijing University graduate student 10 years ago when he found out he had leukemia, a disease that is almost fatal if no bone marrow from a compatible donor can be found and transplanted. Even though he later found out his doesn't require transplant and he can survive and live well on advanced medicine alone, he started and continues to lead a charity foundation that promotes and collects voluntary registrations of potential bone marrow donors all over China for leukemia patients. 

Joyce met Jason in her last PEACE trip to China in March while visiting a 3-Self church in Beijing of which Jason was a member, and started off a good working relationship with him, along with other church officials. He was the one who suggested we visited Inner Mongolia in place of Tibet when the latter got scrapped from our trip plan. He had been having some notion himself of going to Inner Mongolia, where he came from, to build some healthcare network for remote villagers, which somewhat coincides with the idea Joyce has for the PEACE plan. Long story short, he became the person who not only arranged our hospital visits in Beijing, but also planned and accompanied us throughout our trip to Inner Mongolia.

The first hospital we visited was a Beijing University affiliated women & children's hospital, with several child leukemia patients sponsored by Jason's organization already. The doctor/administrator in charge of the child leukemia department, a woman in her early 30s, took us for a tour of the facility and chats with patients and their parents, then did a presentation on the work they do and discussed with us their needs and observations. It looks like they have been doing quite some good work here, resulting in high survival rates and great demands for their services, many of them from the poorer side of the country. The problem is they don't have enough beds to meet their demands, and the living expenses are so high in Beijing that parents of the out-of-town patients have to find work during the day and sleep on the hospital floor at night to accompany their patient children throughout the treatment that can last for months.

The second hospital we visited that day was a Beijing city affiliated children's hospital. Here we did not get to tour the hospital but only met with a senior doctor/administrator (again a woman) and chatted with her about the general status of the healthcare needs and how she thinks things can be improved here, etc. 

We had some spare time left for the day after the second visit, so we drove to one of the famous "seas" (big royal ponds nearby the Forbidden City), the North Sea, that we missed seeing the other day. Great move! It had a beautiful lake, swaying willows, balanced landscape, and pleasant amount of visitors. It restored for me some romance and glamour relics of golden ages ought to inspire but was totally lost in the rushy, rowdy, trash-strewn "old palace" we visited the other day in the place called Forbidden City.

Came Sunday the next day, and we were ready for church, the 3-Self church in Haidian (海淀) District, the one Joyce and her team visited last March. Some may still have legitimate doubts about how truly free religious freedom is allowed in China today, but here we are, in one of the busiest districts of Beijing, standing outside a tall shiny building that has a giant white cross in front and big Chinese and English inscriptions that say "Christian Church" on top, waiting in line among a crowd of predominantly young people to get in for a regular Sunday worship service, with no hint of obstruction or intrusion from authority of any sort.

The service proceeded at a well orchestrated pace, beginning with a young worshiping band, then a young lady pastor-in-training who happened to be doing her first sermon ever in English today, for about 45 minutes, then the welcoming of newcomers, the announcements, the end of service, etc. Take away some rigidity, this could well be like any modern day church service in America. 

After the service, Joyce took us to greet Pastor Peter Wu and his wife Ruth, both she got acquainted with last time she visited here. We chatted, took a picture, then left.  

That about concluded our business in Beijing. Now we were getting ready to leave for Inner Mongolia in the evening. We got to the airport in time and waited in the long line that didn't seem to move much for quite a while, then we started hearing announcements of flight cancellations, due to some thunderstorm that's happening here in Beijing, it seemed. A few moments later, voila, we heard our flight got delayed. To what time, the clerk wouldn't tell, and the board wouldn't display, you have to come back to the counter to check with us later, the clerk would only say. 

So we pulled our luggage up the food court floor and started out waiting. Now, "who's responsible for such a mess," I asked my feudal subjects, pretending I was the Lord Daddy again. "I tremble (臣惶恐)," one of them confessed. "What are we going to do now, Lord Daddy," one of them asked. "Lord Daddy trembles (王爺惶恐)," I said.

Our flight finally took off after midnight, a 4-hour delay, for a one hour flight, to Hohhot (呼和浩特), the capital city of Inner Mongolia, where Jason and Ruth, who had both taken an earlier flight from Beijing to Hohhot that day, had long been waiting for us.

Pictures of the days:

Day 4 (July 14):

https://plus.google.com/photos/106815509376349700576/albums/5694443211479812097/5640014045773849042?authkey=CJjGj_H-9vqRJA&pid=5640014045773849042&oid=106815509376349700576

Day 5 (July 15):

https://plus.google.com/photos/106815509376349700576/albums/5694443211479812097/5640022775602620722?authkey=CJjGj_H-9vqRJA&pid=5640022775602620722&oid=106815509376349700576

Day 6 (July 16):

https://plus.google.com/photos/106815509376349700576/albums/5694443211479812097/5640115468394484018?authkey=CJjGj_H-9vqRJA&pid=5640115468394484018&oid=106815509376349700576

Day 7 (July 17):

https://plus.google.com/photos/106815509376349700576/albums/5694443211479812097/5640182238691414898?authkey=CJjGj_H-9vqRJA&pid=5640182238691414898&oid=106815509376349700576

PEACE trip guangdong

I heard our small group sister Joyce mentioned a PEACE trip to Tibet a few months ago and was intrigued, by the Tibet destination (that mysterious, "roof of the world," semi-holy land to some) and a vague intent of showing support to all the great works Joyce's been doing through these years under the PEACE banner (Rwanda, Katrina, etc) and stepping out of my own comfort zone and reaching out to the other side of the world for a change.

That vague intent became solid reality mostly because when I mentioned the idea to my wife she responded with a curt, cheerful sound bite: "Yes, let's do it!"  If my fragile, handle-with-care girl wife who in my opinion prefers 5-star hotel rooms and fine dining when we travel thinks she can handle a trip to a potentially hazardous foreign land with ease, who am I to second think it?

The Tibet destination got annulled at the last minute due to some unforeseen event (the Chinese government was celebrating the 60th anniversary of the "peaceful liberation" of Tibet in July therefore forbade all foreign visitors from entering that region), but the trip was on: We'll start from southern Guangdong (廣東), to Beijing up north, then Inner Mongolia (內蒙古) to the west, then further west to Xi'an (西安) and Gansu (甘肅), for a total of two weeks, of visiting hospitals, government officials, local churches, etc. Some sight seeing along the way, too.

When my wife and I arrived at Dongguan (東莞) in southern Guangdong on July 10, Joyce (and Gary) and Julia, another great sister member of the team who planned and did all the nitty-gritty work for the trip, were already there to welcome us. It's good to see brother Gary again, handsome and healthy as ever (forgive him for not having a hot cappuccino at hand for me as I dreamed he would:), who took us to a suburban place for a delicious barbecue dove (烤乳鴿) feast, then a local beauty parlor for a soothing head-to-toe massage, before we settled into their newly furnished condominium in a gated lakeside community near their factory, and took a comfy sleep as the night fell.

The next day, July 11, a Monday, kicked off our PEACE trip. The plan for the day was to first meet up with Alex--a Hong Kongese Christian who's been doing quite some philanthropic work in Guangdong and also has a factory in Dongguan--and his group, then go on to meet some city officials, visit some hospital, etc.   

China is a vast place, with wide roads/highways and tall buildings swishing and scattering all over southern Guangdong. From where we stayed, a district of Dongguan southeast of Guangzhou (廣州), to the district of another city southwest of Guangzhou, it took about a couple hours straight driving. We actually met Alex and his team, a group of 7, midway through the drive, at a rest stop, introduced ourselves, and sat back in our separate minivans and continued on to our common destination city.

It's already noon time when we arrived at our destination, the Gaoming district (高明區) of Foshan city (佛山市), hence a customary, somehow-luxurious lunch was in order. As the first meal I ever had with Chinese government officials, I was impressed not only by those big plush plates of food, but the self-propelling lazy-Susan turn-table and the luscious flower bouquet at the center of the grand round table. Settings like these, however, as we found out later in our trip, are pretty standard at banquet dinners wherever we go in China.

The government officials introduced themselves and their city affairs in friendly atmosphere as we lunched along. Afterwards, we were led to another government building to hear presentation of a brand new community they are planning on developing, and discussed the possibility of setting up healthcare facilities at designated sites. We then actually toured the planned community, a rural site with grassy fields and bumpy dirt roads and a little dam which they think could be a scenic background for future nursing homes.

As the dusk fell, we made our final trip of the day, visiting a local hospital Alex's group is considering buying for their own purpose. It's a pretty banged-up multi-purpose community healthcare facility, with housing for leprosy patients that were spotted by some of our team members. 

Tuesday was an even bigger road traveling day for us. We first made a 4+ hour trip to Lianzhou (連州), a historical old town bordering Hunan (湖南) province where there is a prime property built by the early Western missionaries over 110 years ago as a hospital and missionary center and is now occupied by a vocational high school that Alex had been talking to the city officials of repossessing and converting back to a modern day hospital/missionary center again. We also visited another government planned industrial/residential community for potential healthcare/hospital sites. In this case, the planned development is aimed at bringing up the living standard of the Zhuang minority (壯族) in this mountainous, poor region between Guangdong and Hunan provinces. We then traveled back 2 hours to stop by the city of Qingyuan (清遠), where we visited a hospital that was quite new and had some vacant rooms Alex and his group were considering setting up eye care center for local kids so they don't have to go all the way to Guangzhou for glaucoma exam, for example. We then visited a local "3-Self" church (三自教會) and had dinner with their pastor, a humble, middle-aged lady, who then took us to an empty landfill nearby a major city road that they said they had purchased and will be building a new church to accommodate their ever growing congregation in the city.

Before the day ended, we visited Alex's factory in this remote town northwest of Guangzhou. This is his satellite factory from the one he owns in Dongguan. He bought the land and set up the factory about 4 years ago, before the highway was even built and making a trip here was quite a venture. He did the expansion not purely for business reason, but so that he can set up operation here for more humanitarian/Christian work: For years, he had been arranging and sending out mobile medical units to rural areas where volunteer doctors from Hong Kong and other parts of the world can do health checkup and eye exam and surgeries for poor villagers for free; he also organizes an annual biking event where volunteers from Hong Kong and other countries will bring their bikes and gather at his factory to start biking in this beautiful, rough terrain to villages everywhere and then leave their bikes there for the villagers to use as their main transportation means.

We visited Alex's main factory in Dongguan the next day. It is one making medical supplies, with neat office cubicles, assembly lines, clean rooms, etc. But again, one main thing he uses his factory for is to spread the good words and do the good work for the Lord: his factory offers employees after-work bible study/fellowship groups, provides accommodation for mission workers from overseas (we happened to meet a couple of young men from a seminary, as well as a youth group from Hong Kong that were there for summer mission), etc. And Alex himself is such a pleasant and loving person we all enjoyed his presence during our short acquaintance with him of two days. 

By the end of that day, Julia's husband, David, and their two teen-age kids, daughter Melody and son Ryan, had arrived from the States to join us. We now had all our team members together. We had a happy reunion dinner at one nice restaurant Joyce took us to--they say "Eat in Guangdong" (吃在廣東) for a reason, all foods are delicious here--before we returned again to Gary and Joyce's condo and fell sound asleep, ready for travel to our next stop, Beijing, the next day.

* A picture is worth a thousand words, and here are a bunch of them, in chronological order, for what's described above:

Day 0 (July 10): 

https://plus.google.com/photos/106815509376349700576/albums/5694443211479812097/5638634906453135042?authkey=CJjGj_H-9vqRJA&pid=5638634906453135042&oid=106815509376349700576

Day 1 (July 11):

https://plus.google.com/photos/106815509376349700576/albums/5694443211479812097/5638635284516895666?authkey=CJjGj_H-9vqRJA&pid=5638635284516895666&oid=106815509376349700576

Day 2 (July 12):

https://plus.google.com/photos/106815509376349700576/albums/5694443211479812097/5638643328088046290?authkey=CJjGj_H-9vqRJA&pid=5638643328088046290&oid=106815509376349700576

Day 3 (July 13):

https://plus.google.com/photos/106815509376349700576/albums/5694443211479812097/5638652576642413522?authkey=CJjGj_H-9vqRJA&pid=5638652576642413522&oid=106815509376349700576

commencements

It's the graduation season again. Here are excerpts of some recent commencement speeches posted on New York Times that I find interesting...

Steve Ballmer
Chief executive, Microsoft 
University of Southern California

People think passion is something you either have or you don’t. People think passion is something that has to manifest itself in some kind of explosive and emotional format. It’s not. It’s the thing that you find in your life that you can care about, that you can cling to, that you can invest yourself in, heart, body and soul. Finding passion is kind of your job now.

Toni Morrison
Nobel Prize-winning novelist 
Rutgers University

I have often wished that Jefferson had not used that phrase “the pursuit of happiness” as the third right — although I understand in the first draft it was “life, liberty and the pursuit of property.” Of course, I would have been one of those properties one had the right to pursue, so I suppose happiness is an ethical improvement over a life devoted to the acquisition of land, acquisition of resources, acquisition of slaves.

Still, I would rather he had written “life, liberty and the pursuit of meaningfulness” or “integrity” or “truth.” I know that happiness has been the real, if covert, goal of your labors here. I know that it informs your choice of companions, the profession you will enter. But I urge you, please don’t settle for happiness. It’s not good enough.

Personal success devoid of meaningfulness, free of a steady commitment to social justice, that’s more than a barren life; it is a trivial one. It’s looking good instead of doing good.

Daniel F. Akerson

Chief executive, General Motors

Bryant University

I do have a few final bits of advice:

Acknowledge your mistakes, learn from them and move on.

Don’t be afraid of new ideas; be afraid of old ones.

Be faithful to your family and friends. You’ll get the same in return.

Tell the truth and always play by the rules.

If you think nobody cares, try missing a couple of payments.

It’s cool, again, to buy American!

Happy Commencement... of Summer!

a matter of mind

What is mind, and what is matter?
How free is free will?

When traditional (classic) physical laws can no longer explain how elementary particles behave in sub-atomic world, a new set of physical theory--called quantum mechanics--takes its place. It states that in sub-atomic world, the elementary particles (electrons, protons, photons, etc.) can behave like waves and their location is no longer deterministic but only describable through probability, and is affected by the behavior of the observer. 

Just what does this mean? Physicists use the "double slit" experiments to explain it:

In these experiments they try to observe particles of light (photons) fly toward a screen, one at a time. The screen has two slits. If each photon goes through one slit (particle-like behavior), they form two bright spots on the blinds beyond the screen. If each photon somehow goes through both slits (wave-like behavior), however, they form black-and-white stripes when they land on the blinds. Physicists have found, as the experiments show, if they put a device to observe the slits, bright spots appear in the blinds; but if the observation device is taken away, the blinds show the black-and-white pattern. It is as if the particle is aware it is being watched or not, and decides to behave particle-like or wave-like, respectively.

Elementary particles thus appear to possess a certain degree of "intelligence" and awareness of the environment. Some scientist, such as renowned plasma and particle physicist, David Bohm, thinks "In some sense a rudimentary mind-like quality is present even at the level of particle physics." Some go even further, suggesting since the elementary particle's behavior is in direct response to the experimenter's (to observe or not to observe), it actually has the same "free will" as the experimenter's. ("If experimenters have a certain freedom, then particles have exactly the same kind of freedom," wrote mathematicians John Conway and Simon Kochen, of Princeton University in New Jersey, in a paper published in Notices of the American Mathematical Society last year.)

Flip the coin to the other side, let's examine the physiological center of human consciousness--the brain. It is consisted of billions of nerve cells with their axons (output fibers) and dendrites (input fibers) being linked together into complex networks. An electrical impulse travelling onto a dendrite makes a cell "fire" and send an impulse out along its axon so setting some other nerve cell into action. Though the attempt to explain the human thought, feeling, intuition and complex behavior with a picture of a web of axons and dendrites of the nerve cells interacting with each other has been abandoned as too simplistic, it is becoming recognized that these events on the membranes of nerve cells are often triggered by shifts in the energy levels of sub-atomic particles such as electrons. In fact, at the root of such interactions lie quantum events, and the central point within our consciousness can now be seen as an entity that can work to control quantum probabilities. 

Thus it can be postulated that our consciousness at times musters energy to align the particles in our nerve cells to a temporary quantum state that together manifest a thought, emotion, etc., before it is forced to jump and move to other regions of the brain. This explains why our thinking is fleeting and indiscernible at its most infinitesimal level, as quantum mechanics laws dictate minuscule particles to behave, while at a grander level our thoughts can have all the qualities of predictability and solidity, as classical mechanics laws allow things of larger scale to be.

So, what is mind and what is matter, and how free is my free will?

Sometimes when I travel, I look down from the plane and see all the cars moving on the roads, smooth and orderly, going high speed when the road is straight and wide, slowing down when the road curves or narrows, like well behaving physical objects. If I didn't know better, or if I were a physicist out at the N-th dimension observing this physical experiment of mine, I would most legitimately call these "lifeless particles behaving perfectly according to some pre-defined physical laws..." Yet, there are human beings inside each and every one of these physical objects, each with his/her own consciousness, emotions, thinking mind, and yes, free will...

what differences a day makes

It is a slow day in the small Minnesota town of Marshall, and streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody is living on credit.

A rich tourist visiting the area drives through town, stops at the motel, and lays a $100 bill on the desk saying he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs to pick one for the night.

As soon as he walks upstairs, the motel owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher.

The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer.

The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill to his supplier, the Farmer's Co-op.

The guy at the Farmer's Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer her "services" on credit.

The hooker rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill with the hotel owner.

The hotel proprietor then places the $100 back on the counter so the rich traveler will not suspect anything.

At that moment the traveler comes down the stairs, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, picks up the $100 bill and leaves town.

No one produced anything. No one earned anything... However, the whole town is now out of debt and now looks to the future with a lot more optimism.

one morning in taipei

Every time I travel to Taiwan, I stay in the apartment house that belongs to my father's (before he passed away last October, that is). It is just a few alleys away from where I lived before I went abroad and settled in the USA, and also just a few alleys away from another residence where I spent my kindergarten and junior high years, and a few more alleys--across a now high rise expressway--from the place where I was born 53 years ago. 

Partly due to the jet lag, and partly due to my incurable need of daily exercise that has been programmed into my living gene through the years, I will walk out of the house in the early morning, to a community park nearby, and do some exercise there.

I will walk past that little Presbyterian church that my two elder sisters said they'd been to a few times when they were little, mostly for the fun and candies they gave out. I will walk past a police station, seeing some well suited-up patrol cars and motorcycles lining up to the curb, a good indication of the better clout the policemen get nowadays. I will also pass by that little 4 story corner building where I lived during my kindergarten-junior high school years. It seems just yesterday when the little kindergarten van would come to pick me up and my dear young mother would wake me up from bed; and when all kids in the block would gather after school to play dodge ball, chase and hack each other with "hand swords" in the evening and sometimes late into the night, with all the energy and rowdiness kids of that age could generate--the sounds of "baby booming" of our times, so to speak. 

I'll then cross a major street, a hundred yards to the left after the crossing is the elementary school where I went for my basic education. It was one of the most "populous" elementary schools in Taipei at that time, hosting over 60 students per classroom, 26 class units per grade, for a total of around 10,000 students. It had some tiny green belt surrounding its exterior walls that we had to take turn cleaning as students. Now it's all torn up, replaced by brick walkways and a new subway station entryway nearby.

Then I'll pass a "mansion," the only single family, detached home (using the housing terminology we are familiar with in the US), with its own front yard and driveway, that you can find within kilometers around in this part of the town. We'd often wondered what kind of people lived there or who the owner was--must be pretty well off, we thought. It is still the only housing of its kind around here, but now the building looks a bit tired, and the garden not as well manicured as it should be, and there are so many real grand "mansion" homes (豪宅) in this affluent city today that it looks like an old relic from an olden time.

A few steps down, there is supposed to be a girl's home-making vocational school since I was a kid. I said "supposed to" because I never knew where that school was--probably hidden behind some walls in some nearby alleys. But I do see many young girls in uniform stepping out of the bus or walking around this area during early morning hours. Their dress reminds me of some pretty, classy high school girls I secretly admired and hoped to bump into during my morning walk to school when I was that dreamy, dumb little lad at my teens.  

Then I am at the park. It has been transformed quite a bit since I was a kid, mostly positively. From just a wild open field with grass and bushes, beetles and dragonflies, it then had circled gardens, a labyrinth maze, a soccer field, some tennis courts, and a jogging trail. But none of the changes is as big as the one brought about by this International Floral Expo thing the city started building up for a couple of years ago. It basically overhauled the whole park with several exhibition houses and new landscaping. It was a great, successful redevelopment, but it disrupted the daily use of the park during the construction--the majority of the park was cordoned off limit and many exercise groups had to relocate outside the park to continue their daily workout; the jogging trail was so carved up by the construction zones it left each jogger jumping their own hoops around the park if they hadn't given up the idea of jogging there altogether. But now that exposition is over, it is gradually reopening itself to the public, and to those exercise groups in particular.

I walk in the park, and see those same groups of people I have been seeing for the past 10-15 years well back in action again: A Zen-style qi-gong (氣功) group practicing the simple inhale-exhale, leg-and-shoulder movements; a mostly women group doing aerobics with American pop music; and a Tai-Chi group, which subdivides into 3 small groups, each to its own proficiency level, gesturing along with taped instructions.  

Though I know I shouldn't be jogging again--taking cues from the painful experiences of recent years with my inflammation prone feet--I can't help but try trotting just a few steps when I get to the spot where I used to start jogging, and I feel fine. So off I go again. 

The old jogging route had meter marks painted on the ground and traversed the park all the way. The meter marks are now gone and part of the route is now occupied by new buildings and plant plots, but without any debris or fenced-off area, this is definitely a joggable park again. I see a couple of old faces who I know have been jogging here for years, and meet a friendly "foreign maid"--woman from southeast Asia who comes for domestic work here on work visa--who smiles at and says "good morning" to me. By the way, I have seen more and more old people on wheelchairs accompanied by these domestic workers strolling in the park in recent years. Though I haven't seen any of them today--probably because they haven't heard the park is open again--I am sure they'll come back gradually soon.  

When I approach the corner of the park where the Tai-Chi groups are practicing, I sneak a view at the crowd and find someone I have been looking for--my elementary school teacher Mr. Lin. I first met Teacher Lin at the park back 10-15 years ago, a surprise teacher-student reunion so many years after the elementary school. I then saw him from time to time through the years when I came and did my jogging at the park. I haven't seen him for the past couple of years, though, and was a bit concerned that he might no longer be around--he's about the same age as my parents after all. But now here he is again, looking as healthy as he was 10 years ago. Doing Tai-Chi must have done him good all these years, I figure. 

I decide not to disrupt his Tai-Chi practice and continue on with my jogging, and finish it with the usual 3 rounds like before. No pain or discomfort on my feet or any part of the body. I can live to jog for another day now.

Then I head home. Strolling down a bigger street than the one I came from, I start thinking, whether I should have my breakfast at one of the soymilk joints (豆漿店), or pick up an oyster noodle soup (蚵子麵線) at a street peddler, or some hand-made sandwich at some new generation breakfast stop or a convenience store, or sit in and eat pig-tripe noodle soup (冬粉豬肚湯) at an old style noodle shop... 

Tough decision to make to start a day,