I.M.Pei, Born Being A Greatest Archtect

I.M. Pei's Pyramid from Below, photo by John Weiss

I can not remember when I started interesting in Mr. Pei's life story and his architectural works. You may not believe that when visited the Louvre thirteen years ago, I even didn't know he designed the beautiful glass pyramid entrance for the iconic building. But I am always fascinated by the beautiful architectures most likely because my uncle, his son and my older brother all work in this professional field, even my young nephew right now.  

Several years ago, I went to New York City attending my graduate school. And the big apple opened my eyes for the wonderful architectural world! By accident, I discovered one biographic book of Pei at a library, and then I started strolling around the whole Manhattan from uptown to downtown to find out the buildings designed by him. I went to Kips Bay area where Mr. Pei started his architectural career in New York City. I went to see the Four Seasons Hotel, the tallest hotel building in NYC, which was also designed by Mr. Pei, I looked around the uptown where Mr. Pei is living...I agree with him that New York City is not the most beautiful city but it's the most vibrant city in the world.  

I. M. Pei(full name: Ieoh Ming Pei, 贝聿銘) was born in China on April 26, 1917, Canton, Guangzhou. When he was 17 years old, he traveled to the United States, initially attending the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia before transferring to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a bachelor's degree in architecture in 1940.

Pei soon continued his studies at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, where he had the opportunity to study with German architect and founder of the Bauhaus design movement Walter Gropius. During World War II, Pei took a break from his education to work for the National Defense Research Committee. In 1944, he returned to Harvard and earned his master's degree in architecture two years later. Around this time, Pei also worked an assistant professor at the university.

Kennedy Library and Museum

 
In 1948, Pei joined New York-based architectural firm Webb & Knapp, Inc., as its director of architecture. In 1955 he left to start his own firm, I. M. Pei & Associates (now known as Pei Cobb Freed & Partners). One of his first major projects was the Mile High Center in Denver, Colorado. Pei also devised several urban renewal plans for areas of Washington, D.C., Boston and Philadelphia around this time.

In the years following the death of President John F. Kennedy, Pei met with his widow, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, on the designs for his presidential library. The project, built in Dorchester, Massachusetts, met several challenges over the years, including a change in location. Completed in 1979, the library is a nine-story modern structure that features glass and concrete. Pei also designed a later addition to the site.

The Entrance of the Louvre, Paris of France

 
Following the dedication of the Kennedy library, Pei continued to create wondrous buildings around the world, including the west wing of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (1980) and the Fragrant Hill Hotel in China (1983). In 1983, he was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize for his contributions to his field. In their official announcement, the committee recognized his ability to "draw together disparate people and disciplines to create an harmonious environment." Pei used his prize money to create a scholarship for Chinese students to study architecture in the United States.

During this time, Pei also began work on revitalizing Paris's Louvre museum. The new, and controversial, entrance he created for the world-famous structure has since become one of the most iconic representations of his work. Pei had visitors descend into the museum through a large glass pyramid, which took them to a new level below the existing courtyard.

The Museum of Islamic Art, Doha Port, Doha, Qatar

 
Pei continued to design impressive buildings during the 1990s, including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. 

For more than 60 years, Pei has been one of the world's most sought-after architects and has handled a wide range of commercial, government and cultural projects. He created Chicago's Hyatt Center, completed in 2005, and the Musée d'Art Moderne in Kirchberg, Luxembourg, completed in 2006.

Now in his 90s, Pei still maintains an active work schedule. In India, he has several designs in process, including Mumbai's Lodha Place. He is also working on Los Angeles's Century Plaza, Fordham University's Lincoln Center Campus in New York and the Charles Darwin Centre in Darwin, Australia.

With a unique west-east perspective, Mr. Pei see the world differently. He said in one book: “In the West, a window is a window, it lets in light and fresh air. But to the Chinese, it's a picture frame. And the garden is always there.”

    
Learn more about I.M.Pei, please go to Bio.

The Odyssey of Shen Congwen

Odyssey discusses Shen Congwen（沈从文，1902-1988）in terms of several pertinent questions in modern Chinese history and literature.

Shen is already well known to many readers in these fields as the young solider from West Hunan warlord armies who escaped what might literally have been a dead end in that career to become a celebrated writer, editor, and educator, until he turned to a third career as an antiquarian in the late 1940s.

The scope of Odyssey as a biography is inclusive in presenting all this in an authoritative account, scrupulously compiled fro a host of documents and interviews, many of the latter with Shen himself. The results should stand as a valuable reference on many facts and a judicious presentation of speculation on them.

Shen Congwen and his wife

As Kinkley states in the Introduction, he is after facts more than explanations, and the levels of detail which emerges gives the reader plenty of room to test speculation about the author against what can be documented.

As a dispassionate biographer Kinkley often summarizes relevant facts in an admirably cogent form, as when exploring Shen's situation on the eve of his suicide attempt in 1949. At other times, in doing justice to, for example, a myriad of possible motives Shen had for leaving West Hunan and going to Beijing, Odyssey demands more patience from the reader. Unprecedented as this study is in its scope and detail, it is not altogether fair to call it a pioneer biography, given the available biographical work done by earlier scholars.

The Odyssey of Shen Congwen, by Jeffrey C. Kinkley
Stanford University Press, 464 pages

Ghost Month

August is Ghost Month in Taiwan-a time to commemorate the dead: burn incense, visit shrines, commemorate ancestors, and avoid unlucky situations, large purchases, and bodies of water. 

Jing-nan, a young man who runs a food stand in a bustling Taipei night market, doesn't consider himself superstitious, but this August is going to haunt him no matter what he does. He is shocked to the core when he learns his ex-girlfriend from high school has been murdered. She was found scantily clad and shot in the chest on the side of a highway where she was selling betel nuts to passing truck drivers. 

Beyond his harrowing grief for this lost love of his life, Jing-nan is also confused by the news: "betel nut beauties" are usually women in the most desperate of circumstances; the job is almost as taboo as prostitution. But Julia Huang had been the valedictorian of their high school, and the last time Jing-nan spoke to her she was enrolled in NYU's honor program, far away in New York. The facts don't add up. Julia's parents don't think so, either, and the police seem to have closed the case without asking any questions. The Huangs beg Jing-nan if he can do some investigating on his own-reconnect with old classmates, see if he can learn anything about Julia's life that she might have kept from them. Reluctantly, he agrees, for Julia's sake; but nothing can prepare him for what he learns, or how it will change his life.

Want to listen to an interview with Lin? Please go to NPR. 

Ghost Month, by Ed Lin
Soho Crime,336 pages

Battle Over a Bottle

Ben Fu, illustrated for Week in China

In Chinese its name means ‘running to riches’, which is pretty catchy as far as most consumers are concerned. But the problem for Australian wine label Penfolds is that someone else claims to have trademarked its Chinese name – Ben Fu – first. This is creating headaches for the winery’s owner Treasury Estates, which is engaged in legal action to ensure the “integrity of the brand”.

Penfolds is facing off with an individual named Li Daozhi, although Treasury Estates says it “is confident it is the lawful owner of the trademark for Ben Fu (奔富) in China” and that its initial legal challenge was successful. However, Li has subsequently appealed against the court’s decision.

Last August a ­Chinese court ordered French winemaker Castel to pay Rmb33.73 million ($5.43 million) to Li after a similar dispute. Castel has since abandoned its former Chinese name. After winning the case, Li said he wasn’t interested in the cash. His aim? To stop “trademark infringement” from those who “want to make money through copying famous brands”…

 /from Week in China/

The Incarnations:Past Lives Haunt Beijinger

British writer Susan Barker's remarkable new novel is ambitious in scope, scholarly in depth and absolutely riveting.

The Incarnations works on a number of levels, pulling together so many strands of history and perspectives and drawing them into a compelling and convincing tale. Part history, part love story, with good doses of horror, comedy and philosophy, it is ultimately a thriller and a page-turner. In less capable hands, such a daring undertaking could so easily have flopped, but Barker has polished it well and the reader never so much as glimpses the cracks in the magic that is fiction writing.

The book begins with a letter written to middle-aged Beijing taxi driver Wang Jun. The writer claims to be his soul mate and to have known him for many lifetimes. But this is no love letter. As with the ones that follow, there is a chilling undertone to the correspondence: "I pity your poor wife, Driver Wang. What's the bond of matrimony compared to the bond we have shared over a thousands years?"

Wang is rattled. Who is stalking him? What do they want? The identity of the letter writer is kept secret until the closing pages but we are treated to intimate details of the lives the writer claims to have shared with Wang.

 The letters - short stories within the framework of the novel - make for compulsive reading. Each tells of a life the two have shared, dipping into the vast pot of China's history and revealing the details of their lives against a rich historical backdrop. The stories run in chronological order from the time they are young slaves struggling through the Gobi Desert to escape the Mongol invasion, to the Ming dynasty where Wang is a concubine plotting the murder of a sadistic emperor all the way through to their lives as Red Guards during the 1966 Cultural Revolution...

The research Barker has done for the book is phenomenal. She was almost 30, but already with two books under her belt, when she moved to Beijing in 2008 to work on the novel. It took her six years to write and the hard graft is visible in not only the scope of the work but the detail...

If you want to learn more about the book, please go to South China Morning Post.

The Incarnations, by Susan Barker
Doubleday , 384pages

A Bite of China II, Too Many Persional Stories

Two years ago state-run broadcaster CCTV surprised viewers with its beautifully produced food documentary A Bite of China, showcasing the country’s culinary heritage. The eagerly awaited second season, A Bite of China II, started in mid-April, with a young Tibetan travelling deep into the mountains to find the ingredients for a dessert that blends honey and shortening. Without a safety harness, the man spends three hours climbing a huge tree to collect the honeycomb he needs to make the delicacy, which he intends as a gift for his brother (who is set to depart for college).

“Honey is the most valuable gift Bai Ma can bring his family,” the narrator says, adding that it is difficult to obtain anything sweet in the impoverished area.
Next, the series travels to Zhejiang province, where it profiles a fisherman who spends two years mastering a technique to catch mudskippers, an unusual fish that his daughter has long wanted to try.

The audience response to the second season has been a little less glowing than the first series. Many say the show’s producers should have focused more on the food. “Too much time is spent on the personal stories, diluting the true meaning of the documentary,” one netizen wrote.

Chengdu Business Daily concurs: “The first season of A Bite of China was so popular because it spoke about Chinese cuisine but wasn’t only about food. The documentary was interspersed with personal stories. However, the second season takes that one step too far.”

Still, more sentimental viewers said they were touched by the narratives featured in the show: “What the Tibetan boy did for his brother, and what the father did for his daughter, that is so moving!” one wrote.

More eagle-eyed netizens wondered if CCTV had been taking lessons from the award-winning BBC documentary Human Planet. A number of viewers pointed out that some of the sequences and camera angles were almost exactly the same as the UK documentary. But Chen Xiaoqing, who directed the episode under scrutiny, denied any plagiarism, saying any “similarity” was intended as homage to the BBC show.

Netizens weren’t convinced: “If you compare the two scenes with screen shots, you will find them exactly the same except for the characters,” one wrote. “If that is not copying, then we can call academic plagiarism ‘paying homage’ to scholars.”

Despite the mild criticism of the format, the food featured on the show quickly sold out online. CCTV reckons that supplies of Sichuan bacon and Beijing roast duck – dishes mentioned in the first episode – soon sold out on Tmall.com afterwards.

Restaurants featured on the show were also mobbed. Shanghai’s Sanlin Benbang, which appeared in the second episode, told the Shanghai Daily that its phone has been ringing off the hook. The family-run joint, which serves traditional Shanghainese cuisine, says diners have been queueing up for a seat at one of its 12 tables. The Li family, which owns the restaurant, says they are already considering expansion to accommodate all the new customers: “There’s an abandoned warehouse behind the restaurant…I will talk to township officials to see whether I can rent it,” says Li Mingfu, the eatery’s boss.

One of Sanlin Benbang’s most popular dishes is Shanghai-style fried river shrimp. River shrimps are tiny – so small that they are consumed with their shells intact. The shrimps are usually dipped in hot oil until their shell turns red. Then they are returned to the wok and coated in a light gravy composed of soy sauce, cooking wine and sugar.

Sanlin Benbang Restaurant is located on 65 Zhong Lin Street, Pudong, Shanghai. (Tel: +8621 5077-1717)

Please go to Week in China learn more.

Chinese Spaghetti

Yi Mian is a type of egg noodle that originates from Guangdong province. Shaped like spaghetti, it is made from eggs and flour. But the egg noodle is first cooked in boiling water and deep fried twice (not unlike instant noodles). The delicacy, definitely not for those who are counting their calories, is perfect with dishes that feature thick gravy or sauce.

Why is it famous?
Legend has it that the dish was created accidentally when the chef of the Qing Dynasty calligrapher Yi Bingshou (1754-1815) mistakenly put egg noodles that had already been cooked into a wok filled with boiling oil. The chef improvised and decided to serve the noodles together with a stock. Unexpectedly, the dinner guests loved the dish and sang its praises.

Where is the best place to eat it?
One of the most popular variations of the noodle meal is one that’s cooked with lobster. In Hong Kong, many restaurants serve Yi Mian with braised lobster too, sometimes topped with grilled cheese.

For a unique dining experience try Loaf On Seafood in Sai Kung, Hong Kong. The restaurant, which was awarded one Michelin star in 2012, is famous for its fresh seafood.

Loaf On Seafood, 49 Market Street, Sai Kung, Hong Kong (Tel: +852 2792 9966).

Learn more, please go to Week in China. 

One of China's Most Unloved Space

Public toilet in China, illustrated for Week in China

It was as far back as issue 11 when we first regaled readers with tales of one of China’s most unloved spaces: the public toilet. Anybody who has visited one won’t forget the experience. So there was good news this week from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, reports the South China Morning Post. Researchers with the institution say they have developed a new “bioweapon” capable of wiping out bad smells in public toilets.

Having laboured on the problem for several years – conducting tests on pig intestines – the researchers claim that a bacteria in the Lactobacillus family can remove up to 75% of odour from human waste. How? It feeds on the waste and releases lactic acid that eliminates the growth of smelly bacteria.

Jiuzhai Valley National Park in Sichuan will trial the bacterial fix. If it meets with the approval of tourists, the China Academy of Sciences claims it can ratchet up production to 1,200 tonnes annually, at a cost of Rmb20 ($3.22) per half litre.

Bravo, says WiC. But wait, there is a catch. The bacteria only thrives at temperatures above 26 degrees Celcius, so it won’t work in the winter, unless the toilets are heated (and few of China’s public bogs are).

Please read more at Week in China.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel Tucked in Kungpao Chicken

Many people will be familiar with kungpao chicken(宫保鸡丁), a staple offering in Chinatown restaurants around the world. The dish is made with chicken breast (cut into cubes), crunchy peanuts and dried chili peppers. Then it is cooked in sweet bean paste, soy sauce and sugar.

Why is it famous?
Ding Baozhen, a native of Guizhou, was a government official in the Qing dynasty. After he was promoted to the rank of Gongbao (a prestigious title) Ding visited the family of a man in Sichuan who had saved his life when he was young. While he was there Ding was served a dish featuring diced chicken, peanuts and Sichuan peppercorns. He enjoyed it so much that he began eating it on a regular basis and serving it to his guests. It came to be known as Gongbao Jiding in honour of the official (jiding loses a bit of glamour in translation, meaning ‘chicken bits’).

The kungpao spelling derives from the nineteenth century Wade-Giles system for romanising Mandarin (Gongbao is the modern pinyin equivalent, although most eateries in the US and UK have stuck with kungpao as their customers are familiar with it).

More recently, the dish made headline news when German Chancellor Angela Merkel – in China on a state visit – watched a local chef prepare it in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. Then she tucked in. “We thought she would just have a mouthful but she finished about two-thirds of it,” the restaurant owner announced proudly. “She asked us to bring more chopsticks so that other members of her entourage could also taste it.”

Where can you find kungpao chicken?
Sample it in Chengdu if you want an authentic experience like Merkel’s. Chen Mapo is a very popular restaurant in the city. The address is 197 West Yulong Street (near Bank of Communications) in Qingyang District, Chengdu. Tel: +86 (28) 8675-4512.

Read more,please go to Week in China.

The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream

Arnold Palmer realised how little the locals knew about golf when he agreed to design the first course in China for two generations.

After years of golfing purdah, the sport was gibberish to the Chinese, something that the American golfing legend soon grasped on arriving at the proposed course in the southern province of Guangdong in 1984.

“[I] gave this man a golf ball I had in my pocket. He stared at it for a few moments and then tried to take a bite out of the cover,” Palmer recalls in his memoirs.

“‘No’, I said. ‘You don’t eat it’.”

Dan Washburn relates this tale in The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream. But Washburn’s own contribution to the story of golf in China turns this sense of cultural confusion on its head, arguing that the development of the game actually offers new ways of understanding some of the social and economic changes shaping the country.

Golf’s progress hints at greater social mobility and highlights China’s expanding wealth, for instance. But the boom also points to darker truths, Washburn says, like corruption, environmental neglect, land disputes and the widening gulf between rich and poor.

The idea of the sport as a parable for modern China is an ambitious one. In golfing terms, Washburn risks swinging too hard and spraying 10 different balls in 10 different directions. But he carries it off as the central theme of his book, avoiding most of the traps by telling the stories of three protagonists: a course builder from America; a migrant worker from Guizhou who ends up joining the domestic golf tour; and a farmer from Hainan whose life changes forever when local land is leased to a golf developer.

These lives are the real focus of the book and they provide the glue for the wider account of the game’s emergence in China.

As Arnold Palmer’s story suggests, when golf first reappeared in China in the mid-1980s the game was at ground zero. Mao had denounced it as a “sport for millionaires” and the few courses that had previously existed had long been ploughed over. The game’s bourgeois origins mean that this sense of taboo lives on today. There are no photos of China’s current leaders enjoying a round, for instance.

Zhou Xunshu, the peasant who turns pro, was equally ignorant of the game when he first encountered it. “What’s that?” he asks, on being told that he will be working on a course as a construction worker. But later Zhou is promoted to course security guard and golf becomes his obsession, primarily for the life that it seems to promise. “We all knew golf as a noble sport – a game for rich men,” he explains. “We all felt that just by being in that environment, we had already raised our social standing.”

Zhou learns by watching others, fashioning his own clubs from discarded or broken equipment, and sneaking onto courses to play when everyone else is asleep.

Years later his perseverance pays off when he joins the blue-collar crew of sushi chefs, motorcycle acrobats and hotel managers that made up China’s first domestic tour.

His story – similar in spirit to the struggle of millions of migrant workers to improve their lives – is the most uplifting part of the book. Yet Washburn keeps his sense of perspective, accepting that Zhou’s experience is wholly unusual, and acknowledging that talk of “golf fever” in China is exaggerated.

Even today the game is played by “zero percent of the population” in statistical terms, simply because very few Chinese can afford it.

Learn more, please go to Week in China.

China Dolls

See brings her “Sex and the City”-meets-historical-fiction act to World War II-era San Francisco, focusing on three young women who come up together on the “Chop Suey Circuit” — all-Asian nightclub shows for mostly white audiences. The setup is familiar, with each girl a type: Helen comes from the traditional family of a well-heeled Chinatown merchant; Grace escaped an abusive home in the Midwest; and Ruby is a scrappy climber, a Japanese dancer “passing” as Chinese. They pledge everlasting friendship to one another, only to see their bond suffer the ravages of fame, time and war, particularly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story

There’s also a boy to fight over, of course, and some serious spotlight hogging. The book can get a little soap-operatic, and each woman telling her story in the first person occasionally makes for some confusion, since none of their voices are truly distinct. The best bits come in the details, the way the girls simply accept being exoticized sex objects as the price of being an “Oriental” dancer — and often play to stereotypes in their desperation to be noticed. It all adds up to a fascinating portrait of life as a Chinese-American woman in the 1930s and ’40s.

Read more, please go to The New York Times.

CHINA DOLLS,by Lisa See
Random House, $27

Three Lessons of LinkedIn's Approach to China

Just last week, LinkedIn announced the availability of its site in Traditional Chinese. This follows the much-publicized February release of its China-specific site in Simplified Chines, Lingying.com — making the professional networking platform available in 23 languages in total, 8 of which are Asian.

LinkedIn clearly believes the investment in translation/localization is money well spent to secure global market share in the race to own social media's professional users. What lessons can we learn from LinkedIn's focus on China?

Place your money on multilingual.
The NSA-rocked U.S. is not the only country struggling with the dual impacts of privacy and censorship in the social media space. China's policies have long shut out giants like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, a factor that has been a boon to domestic players like Sina Weibo and Baidu. China's microblogging giant Sina Weibo has more than 500 million registered users; search engine Baidu is also number one in the market. Market exclusivity has assured their explosive growth, but it has come at a considerable price: namely, a largely monocultural and monolingual user base.

LinkedIn's multicultural and multilingual approach has already proven itself. As reported by TechNode, since its formal launch in February LinkedIn has reportedly drawn in 1 million additional users, raising the in-country total to over 5 million. Many of them are managers (42 percent), living in China's first tier cities (60 percent), and, significantly, working in international businesses (34 percent).

That select profile is not lost on investors. While the company's 5 million users is dwarfed by those of major domestically grown competitor Zhaopin (77 million), LinkedIn China is enjoying the buzz that it is a premiere portal for Chinese nationals who are multilingual and experienced in multinational workforces. According to Ad Age, a research note from BMO Capital Markets "which predicted a 'formal launch' in China in 2014, caused LinkedIn's share price to jump a few percentage points."

Localize your approach.
Facing the China-based incumbents, LinkedIn has adopted a smart approach that combines the best of its global leverage with China-specific strategies. Compare, for instance, the Simplified Chinese home page (still in Beta):

It contains China-specific imagery, rather than the international images used in other locales. LinkedIn has also implemented APIs that allow for working with local providers. In this case, notice the integration with Weibo and QQ, allowing users to share content and invite friends to LinkedIn. At the moment, advertisers can target their campaigns (ads and sponsored updates) for China, but not yet in the Chinese language.

Read more, please go to Libor Safar 's blog post at Moravia.