Chinese Idioms-庄周夢蝶，Zhuang Zhou Dreams a Butterfly

The Chinese idiom 庄周夢蝶（zhuang1 zhou1 meng4 die2）literally means "Zhuang Zhou dreams a butterfly."

Zhuang Zhou, also known as Zhuang Zi, was a famous Taoist philosopher during Warring States period. Zhuang Zhou was moved by a particularly vivid dream, a dream that led him to ponder the reality of his existence.

One night, Zhuang Zhou dreamed that he was a butterfly, flitting about with care-free ease. The dream was been so real that, when he awoke, he wondered if he was Zhuang Zhou who dreamed he was a butterfly or if he was really a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuang Zhou. If the dream seems real,how does one determine which is reality?

Zhuang Zhou posed the question, "Are we awake or are we dreaming?" challenging human notions of what is real and what is illusion. He examined the relationships and connections between different realms world and so-called reality.

Emperor Ming of the Western Han Dynasty was also inspired by a dream, a dream of watching a gigantic, golden man descend from the sky. Because of his interpretation of the dream, Emperor Ming brought Buddhism to China.

This story is an example of how the ancient Chinese understood and mediated the relationship between dreams and reality, and how the dream world,or dimension, helped shape the history of the reality that is our dimension.

The concept behind the Chinese idiom庄周梦蝶has also been presented in various forms in other cultures. It is posed as philosophical theories, the foundation of spiritual quests, and fundamental questions regarding the human condition.

The French philosopher Rene Descartes explored the "dream/reality argument"in his" Meditations on First Philosophy."

Contemporary cinematic approaches to probing this concept include "The Matrix" in which Neo's choice of one pill over another would serve to perpetuate the "dream" or awaken him to the reality of his existence.

In the film"Inception," the characters carry a token to ground themselves to what they believe is reality as they drift between levels of dreams at the risk of getting lost in them forever.

Dream or reality? Zhuang Zhou's question is as important today for those who engage in spiritual quests; human beings earnestly seeking enlightenment.

Chinese Character -Dream 梦（夢 ）

夢（Meng4）,then Chinese character for "dream," is made up of four parts and is ideograph. The two upper parts, ++ and 皿，together resemble the shape of an eyebrow above the eye of a person. The middle part is interpreted as either a bed or the roof of a house;and the lower part 夕is the character Xi1,which means evening. 

As a whole, the character suggests a person going to sleep in the evening, and refers to the dreaming that then occurs.

The character 夢has two shades of meaning. One is based on its pronunciation that is similar to the character 瞢（Meng 2),which can mean having obscured vision, or being unenlightened.

In ancient writings, there is another meaning that refers to a place where the divine and humans communicate. This particular thought reveals the ancient Chinese people's understanding of multiple realities and the relationship between man and Gods.

In the modern Chinese language, the character 夢 is used as both a noun and a verb. It is combined with other characters to form words that refer to something either fantastic or unreal, and they can have both positive and negative meanings.

One example is meng4hua4(梦话), literally dream talk, which can mean a daydream or nonsense. The word meng4xiang3（梦想）means to dream of or vainly hope for something. It can also mean a fond dream or an earnest wish. The phrase meng4huan4 pao4 ying3（梦幻泡影） refers to an illusion, or a pipe dream.

To the Chinese, as with many other cultures around the world, dreams can have significant mystical or existential meanings.

They can be viewed as a communication channel with the supernatural, or they can provide deep insight into events past, or yet to come. However, in the Chinese culture, dreams are seldom disregarded.  

'Amazon Coat' Hits Jackpot in U.S.

Arielle Noa Charnas/Instagram

It never entered Chiu's mind that his Orolay puffer jacket became a huge hit, celebrated as "Amazon Coat" in the U.S. And held up as a budding rival to premium brand Canada Goose.

Using duck down sourced from China’s Hebei and Anhui provinces, the polyester coats are priced between $80 and $139. By contrast, Canada Goose jackets start from about $575 in the United States. 


He estimates his firm made $5 million in sales last month and expects to bring in $30-$40 million this year. U.S. sales - almost all of which are sold through Amazon.com Inc - account for 70 percent of total revenue.

Orolay’s success is, however, not just a tale of competitive pricing and a design that found favor with U.S. consumers. Read More at Yahoo! and People.
 

"The Wandering Earth" Hit Chinese Movie Theater

Last year, Chinese cinemas took in Rmb5.8 billion ($913 million) in ticket sales during the first seven days of the Chinese New Year holiday – the most ever in a single week.

Comedies are traditionally the biggest crowd-pleasers during the holiday, but sci-fi could secure a greater share of ticket sales this time round. That’s because this Chinese New Year week sees two sci-fi blockbusters hitting the big screen. Admittedly, one is a sci-fi comedy – filmmaker Ning Hao’s Crazy Aliens, starring actor Huang Bo. The other is The Wandering Earth, which many in the foreign press have hailed as the first proper sci-fi film made in China.
Both movies are adapted from stories by Liu Cixin, the first author from Asia to win best novel at the Hugo sci-fi and fantasy literary awards.

Information Times felt the need to clarify the claims of a ’first’, however. “The Wandering Earth is definitely not the first sci-fi movie China has ever made, but it is the first sci-fi film that’s garnered so much attention in China.”

Read more >>

Happy Chinese New Year!

Hi friends! It's been a long time not update my tea house. Many things happened and have tried something new. And felt lost somewhere...And one day when I walked around our local bookstore and grabbed a book and turned to one page, on which there is a quote from Virginia Woolf, saying: “If you are losing your leisure, look out! -- It may be you are losing your soul.” That reminds me to come back and continue my journey,my passion about writing and sharing...Here I am, hello 😀! Happy Chinese New Year! Wish you have a peaceful, meaningful, and healthy 2019! Cheers!

Exhibition on China and Fashion Attract 0.7 Millions

“中国：镜花水月"Damon Winter/The New York Times

A dress by Guo Pei at the “China: Through the Looking Glass” exhibit.

The talk of Wall Street over the last week may have been Shanghai’s plunging stock market, but many blocks farther uptown, where commuter traffic gives way to verdant sidewalks, a different set of numbers related to China was making news. As it entered its final week, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s spring Costume Institute show, “China: Through the Looking Glass,” was attaining blockbuster status.

As of last Friday morning, 735,000 people had attended the show, with a week to go before its close on Sept. 7, including a final Friday and Saturday with viewing hours extended until midnight. That has already made it the most-visited Costume Institute show in the museum’s history, displacing “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” which pulled in 661,509 attendees, as well as elevating it to No. 7 — and climbing — on the museum’s top-10 most popular list, on a par with other 700,000-plus-visitor shows such as the “Mona Lisa” (1963), “Origins of Impressionism” (1995) and “Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art” (2010).

Andrew Bolton, curator at the Costume Institute and the man behind the show, said there have been more positive responses left in the visitor’s comment box than ever before. (“Usually people use it as an opportunity to vent displeasure,” he said. “Often at the lighting, or the signage.”)

By any objective measure, this will be the most successful fashion show the Met has ever had. The question is: Why?

“Honestly, it totally surprised me,” Mr. Bolton said. “I was prepared for it to be polarizing. We were predicting around 500,000 visitors. I never expected this level of response. ”

“No one expected it would surpass McQueen,” said Maxwell K. Hearn, the Douglas Dillon chairman of the department of Asian art, and Mr. Bolton’s collaborator on the exhibition, which is in the Asian art galleries on the second floor, some Egyptian galleries on the first floor and the Anna Wintour Costume Center on ground level.

A visitor photographs a Dior dress by John Galliano at the Met exhibition.
/Damon Winter/The New York Times

A visitor photographs a Dior dress by John Galliano at the Met exhibition.

I didn’t expect it, either. Not because I didn’t like the show (it’s visually engrossing in its mix of luxury, whimsy and point) but because it doesn’t have the single iconic hook that can transform a purportedly high culture meditation into an extended pop culture moment.

After all, it isn’t, as Mr. Bolton said, immediately obvious from the name what the show is about. (Answer: the way a received fantasy version of China engages the imaginations of Western designers.) And the subject itself was ripe for criticism from those who thought the approach played to a now-discredited stereotype of the East. You can’t attribute it to the sheer size of the exhibition, the largest ever, or it’s length, because size does not equate to allure.

There wasn’t the sort of human gossip element that helped drive interest in the McQueen show, held a year after the designer’s suicide and days after Kate Middleton married Prince William in a dress by Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen.

There was, to be fair, lots of striking use of mixed media, which made it seem both very contemporary as well as historic. And it included film — Wong Kar-wai, who wrote and directed “In the Mood for Love,” was the exhibit’s art director, and clips from movies like “The Last Emperor” and “The World of Suzie Wong” abound — always a popular medium.

But Mr. Wong is an independent director as opposed to a household name, and when Baz Luhrmann, a much more recognizable Hollywood figure, was the creative consultant on an earlier Costume Institute show, 2012’s “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations,” it wasn’t nearly the same hot ticket.

When I first saw the show in May, I was struck by the facile nature of the fashion when juxtaposed against the antiquities. No matter the clothes’ beauty — I remember the runway impact of Tom Ford’s pagoda collection for Yves Saint Laurent and being amazed by the broken blue and white china shards of porcelain on an Alexander McQueen bodice — they pale when compared with the source of the inspiration, in part because the latter has a creative integrity the former only borrows. Often too literally. Please go to The New York Times read more about this story.

Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale

I just happened to read the book this week. I am impressed by Yang's power of telling a story using her graphic talent. 

When Belle Yang was forced to take refuge in her parents’ home after an abusive boyfriend began stalking her, her father entertained her with stories of old China. The history she’d ignored while growing up became a source of comfort and inspiration, and narrowed the gap separating her—an independent, Chinese-American woman—from her Old World Chinese parents.

In Forget Sorrow, Yang makes her debut into the graphic form with the story of her father’s family, reunited under the House of Yang in Manchuria during the Second World War and struggling—both together and individually—to weather poverty, famine, and, later, Communist oppression. The parallels between Belle Yang’s journey of self-discovery and the lives and choices of her grandfather, his brothers, and their father (the Patriarch) speak powerfully of the conflicts between generations—and of possibilities for reconciliation.

Forget Sorrow demonstrates the power of storytelling and remembrance, as Belle—in telling this story—finds the strength to honor both her father and herself.

At Pearl River, Four Decades of Helping New Arrivals From Asia

Every morning, Ming Yi Chen walks down to the basement of Pearl River Mart, the Chinese department store he opened in 1971, and burns incense. Then he walks back to the first floor to light more incense. He breathes in the sandalwood, to him a calming scent. And the day can begin.

With the news this week that Pearl River Mart, at 477 Broadway in SoHo, would close in December because of a significant rent increase and an unsustainable business model, it became clear that Mr. Chen’s routine — and those of his 40 employees — would soon disappear into the capitalist cloud.

“There are people waiting for this space,” Mr. Chen, 76, said from the tea balcony, overlooking a floor that stretches from Broadway to Mercer Street, 30,000 square feet in all. “Maybe H & M, one of those big chains — with big pockets.”

It is fair to say that those big-pocketed stores do not offer the soundtrack of traditional Chinese music and tweeting birds, nor do they display lanterns, gongs and 60-foot-long paper dragons amid waterfalls. From the soy sauce and Chinese underwear that were lifelines for homesick Chinese immigrants to the slippers and qipao dresses that became staples for New York fashionistas, Pearl River Mart tells a lesser-known tale that is more than the sum of its dry goods.

Run with a strong, nurturing hand by Mr. Chen’s wife, Ching Yeh Chen, 68, Pearl River has provided a life for its immigrant workers for four decades. It has been a welcome alternative to restaurant and supermarket jobs for new immigrants, a place where Cantonese and Mandarin were spoken and employee banquets were held every year. The store, overseen by a board of trustees and 30 shareholders, has helped some workers apply for green cards, once had a matching 401(k) plan and still offers health insurance.

“We are probably one of the few pioneer companies that does that in Chinatown — I’m proud to say that,” Mrs. Chen, the president, said of the insurance plan. “Most of Chinatown, everything is in cash. In that sense, we are pretty fair, and people will stay here long enough.” (The store has been in four locations, including Canal Street.)

Often, two generations have worked side by side, and some employees have turned a job stocking shelves into a lifelong career.

“I’ve been with the Chens since I immigrated to the United States, as a part-time worker,” Wilkie Wong, 50, said. He had just arrived from Burma in 1982 and was attending Seward Park High School on the Lower East Side. Mrs. Chen knew a school counselor and asked her for part-time employees. Mr. Wong showed up with two of his classmates; now he is the company’s vice president.

Asked about the store’s closing, Mr. Wong said, “I have mixed feelings.” He just got an office with a window two years ago, he explained. A graduate of the State University of New York at Buffalo with a degree in economics and international trade, he had been doing the accounting in a separate basement office on Wooster Street.

But the future concerns him. Mrs. Chen said she would like to move to smaller quarters, downsize the inventory and, to better compete with Amazon, boost the online business, which Mr. Wong directs. “If we continue, he’s still with us,” she said.

But Mr. Wong’s 16-year-old son will not be joining him. “As an immigrant to the United States, it’s the same as my parents and every parent who wants their kids to have a high education, be a lawyer, doctor,” Mr. Wong said. “Even though I enjoy working here, I want him to have better than what I had.”

For some longtime employees, it might be time to move on. Lapyan Ng, 63, from Hong Kong, has worked at Pearl River for over 20 years. “Maybe I need to retire and take care of my granddaughter,”   >>

Not Loving It

Salon magazine asked this month whether McDonald’s has developed a “self-hating complex” in China. The reason for its question was the local translation of its slogan – “I’m lovin’ it”.

The Chinese version is Wo jiu xihuan which, as Salon points out, can have pretty negative connotations because the second character in the phrase is used to contradict something emphatically. “The natural implication is that the speaker is responding to someone who has just insulted McDonald’s food,” writes Salon. “While there is no perfect translation for the phrase, it has the same essential spirit as ‘I like it no matter what you say!’”

Hence you might use the phrase in a defensive retort when someone asks: “Why do you eat that garbage?” Salon went to the experts to confirm its analysis and Professor Liu Lening, head of Columbia University’s Chinese language programme, said the publication’s interpretation was correct. He advised that a better translation of ‘I’m lovin’ it’ would have been Wo hen xihua and also suggested Wo hao xihuan, which means “I really like it”.

Chocoholics? Ferrero to Open First Chocolate Plant in China

The first record of chocolate in China is from the court of the Kangxi Emperor in 1706. A papal legate by the name of Charles-Thomas Maillard De Tournon brought some with him in order to charm the Chinese monarch. Unfortunately the cocoa-based product, which at that time was served as a drink, failed to impress. One account of the imperial tasting holds that Kangxi took a sip and declared he would much rather have a cup of longjing tea (a specialty from Hangzhou in Zhejiang province).

Three hundred years later and there are still many Chinese who would agree with Kangxi. The sweet, creamy taste  and texture of chocolate – now mainly consumed in solid form – is too rich for many Chinese who grew up with little or no dairy in their lives.

But that is changing rapidly. The Chinese confectionary market is growing between 10% to 20% annually, depending on who you ask, and the big players are all jostling for sales.

Cue another Italian from Piedmont – Giovanni Ferrero, the head of the family-run business that produces Nutella and the gold-wrapped Ferrero Rocher balls. He sees Asia as the main source of his candy company’s growth in the coming years and this summer he will open a Rmb5 billion ($800 million) factory in Zhejiang, reports China Business Journal.

In 2013 the notoriously private CEO told the Wall Street Journal that “the strength of the Rocher brand [in Asia] is an early indicator of the route to follow”.

Four companies currently dominate the Chinese chocolate market – Mars, Nestle, Ferrero and local brand Le Conté. Mars, which has the biggest market share, has two factories in China, producing Snickers and Dove bars, and M&Ms. Mars also makes a locally available rice-infused chocolate called Cui Xiang Mi.

Hershey’s, the world’s fifth largest chocolate maker, has also launched a major offensive: buying Shanghai candy maker Golden Monkey last year and opening a research centre in the city in 2013.

The feeling is that urbanisation, rising wealth and an increasing interest in non-Chinese foods will keep the market growing. Annual Chinese chocolate consumption is currently only 200 grams a year per person. If the average Chinese were to consume even a quarter of the 11kg of chocolate the British munch annually, it would result in more than $20 billion in additional sales for the confectionary industry.

Last month Hershey’s predicted the Chinese market as a whole would be worth $3.4 billion by 2019, up from $2.7 billion today (the global chocolate market will next year grow to $98 billion according to research by the consultancy Markets and Markets).

Ferrero, which had revenues of $8.7 billion last year, is the only one of the major players not to have some kind of Chinese facility.

This, however, is very characteristic of the privately-held company which began life as a pastry shop in Alba. In the years following the Second World War, Giovanni’s grandfather Pietro began mixing cocoa with ground up hazelnut. The result was a solid, chocolatey block. His son Michele – who died last month at the age of 89 –  then came up with the idea of mixing it with vegetable oil to make it spreadable. As Nutella sales surged, an empire was born.

Michele insisted on growing the company naturally and resisted making any acquisitions bar one – a small hazelnut company in Turkey. His son Giovanni, who has been running the company since 1997 shares his father’s business philosophies.

“We’re not interested in maximising revenue in the short term, like everyone else. If we were listed, we would be under short-term pressure to deliver dividends and profits,” the WSJ quoted him as saying in 2013. Indeed, while other multinationals have moved production away from China recently, Ferrero’s long-term mindset has led him to make a major investment instead.

In the short term it may hurt its margins in China. That’s because some Chinese have been heard to moan about the price of imported Ferrero Rocher chocolates. As the Beijing Commercial Daily pointed out, after Ferrero opens its 30,000 tonne a year plant it will be harder for the company to justify the price tag for the locally-made versions. “Ferrero’s price has always been higher than other brands, but Chinese customers won’t accept this once the company reduces their transportation cost.” >>

Disney’s Cinderella Tale Woos China’s Grown-up Audience

Charles Perrault’s folk tale about Cinderella was written around the seventeenth century. But a Chinese legend bearing a striking resemblance to its plot seems to have appeared in the Tang Dynasty, almost a millennium earlier.

It is the story of a very bright girl named Ye Xian. Not only is she beautiful she also has a very kind heart. But her father dies so she is forced to live with her stepmother. One day when drawing water Ye catches a fish with red fins and golden eyes. She takes the fish home and places it in the pond, taking every scrap of food she can find to feed the fish.
Unfortunately her stepmother snatches and kills (then eats) the fish while Ye is out running errands.

When Ye discovers her fish is gone she becomes terribly upset. A little old man (the fairy god father?) magically appears and instructs her to retrieve the fish bones, put them in a bowl in her room and it will grant any wish she wants.

One day, during the annual festival for young maidens to meet potential husbands, her stepmother and stepsister set off for the dating fair. Ye wants to go too and prays to her fish bones. Suddenly Ye finds herself clad in the most beautiful green silk robe with jade and other fine jewellery adorning her. More importantly, she is also given a pair of gold embroidered slippers.

In her new outfit, Ye rushes to join the celebrations. She is so beautiful that men and women – including her stepmother and stepsister – start wondering who she is. Worried that her identity could be compromised, Ye runs back home but leaves one of her slippers. The Emperor later finds the slipper and becomes determined to find its owner… (Presumably, you can predict the ending.)
That helps explain why many Chinese are familiar with the Cinderella story – even if they didn’t grow up watching the famed Disney cartoon. And last week, Disney’s live-action film Cinderella became the biggest box office winner, taking in over Rmb200 million ($32 million) during its opening weekend. >>

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon

The secrets behind China’s extraordinary educational system – good, bad, and ugly Chinese students’ consistently stunning performance on the international PISA exams— where they outscore students of all other nations in math, reading, and science—have positioned China as a world education leader. American educators and pundits have declared this a “Sputnik Moment,” saying that we must learn from China’s education system in order to maintain our status as an education leader and global superpower.

Indeed, many of the reforms taking hold in United States schools, such as a greater emphasis on standardized testing and the increasing importance of core subjects like reading and math, echo the Chinese system. We’re following in China’s footsteps—but is this the direction we should take?

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? by award-winning writer Yong Zhao offers an entertaining, provocative insider’s account of the Chinese school system, revealing the secrets that make it both “the best and worst” in the world. Born and raised in China’s Sichuan province and a teacher in China for many years, Zhao has a unique perspective on Chinese culture and education. He explains in vivid detail how China turns out the world’s highest-achieving students in reading, math, and science—yet by all accounts Chinese educators, parents, and political leaders hate the system and long to send their kids to western schools. Filled with fascinating stories and compelling data, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? offers a nuanced and sobering tour of education in China.

• Learn how China is able to turn out the world’s highest achieving students in math, science, and reading

•  Discover why, despite these amazing test scores, Chinese parents, teachers, and political leaders are desperate to leave behind their educational system

• Discover how current reforms in the U.S. parallel the classic Chinese system, and how this could help (or hurt) our students’ prospects

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World  by Yong Zhao
Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Jossey-Bass; 1 edition (September 15, 2014)

Who's Winning China's Chocolate War?

M&M as Terracotta Warrior Credit: FITCH

At the new M&M's World chocolate megastore in Shanghai, the decor is a tribute to Chinese culture. There's a Great Wall of Chocolate and a massive M&M statue wearing the armor of a Terracotta Warrior. Chen JieTing, 20, posed for photos with an M&M wearing Bruce Lee's yellow jumpsuit. "I love M&Ms -- not too sweet and so cute," she said.

Chinese consumers traditionally prefer salty snacks, but the world's chocolate makers have been making converts -- and competing fiercely for market share -- in the high-stakes market that's home to 1.37 billion people. The local chocolate market has been growing 12% annually, according to Euromonitor International. China's embrace of chocolate has helped push up cocoa prices and contributed to fears of an international shortage. (Mars Inc., the maker of M&Ms. has warned the industry will need 1 million more metric tons by 2020 and is working on sustainable farming to boost yield.)


Meanwhile, Western brands have upped the ante in China by building factories and innovation centers, launching flashy campaigns, buying local chocolate makers and creating retail experiences like the M&M's store, which opened in August.

Mars, which also makes Snickers, has come out ahead, with a projected 39% of the Chinese market in 2014, according to Euromonitor. Its biggest hit is the Dove brand, which accounts for a whopping 34% of national chocolate consumption.

After the era of Chairman Mao Zedong, "when China's doors opened in 1979, you really had a billion people who had never tasted chocolate," said Lawrence Allen, a former Hershey and Nestlé executive in China. "It was a virgin market."

Companies rushed in and learned by trial and error -- Mars tried first with M&Ms. he said, but Dove was what took off. Hersheys had a hit with bite-size Kisses while others were selling 60- or even 80-gram bars, because "Chinese people do not sit down and eat 60 grams of chocolate at a time," said Mr. Allen, author of "Chocolate Fortunes: The Battle for the Hearts, Minds, and Wallets of China's Consumers."

There were cultural differences too. China traditionally classifies foods as "heating" and "cooling," concepts not about temperature but about the effect on the body. Chocolate is a heating food, so it's ill-advised for summer.

Read more at Adage.

The People’s Republic of Chemicals

The name of China is almost obscured by a grey smudge on the title page of The People’s Republic of Chemicals, and this image proves to be apt.  This book examines the crisis caused by toxic smogs that periodically choke vast regions of China and the massive particulate clouds that drift far beyond the country’s borders.

Authors William J. Kelly and Chip Jacobs joined forces once before in order to write their climate classic, Smogtown: the Lung Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles, a remarkable 2008 exposé and memoir about air quality, politics and health in Southern California’s smog belt. This time, the duo of self-described “smog gumshoes from Los Angeles” go farther afield to investigate air pollution that threatens to put a chokehold on the Pacific Rim. What’s more, Mandarin editions of both books will be available through the Central Party School Publishing House.

No doubt the translators were challenged to render some of the exaggerated gonzo phrases and slang from this “murky yarn of atmospheric pain and karma” into prose that doesn’t come across as glib or simply baffling.

“Ashtray-skied towns” abound and burning coal “cruds its troposphere like cigar smoke in a closet.”  Beijing is described as “the city where your oxygen sometimes came spiced with black char.” A chapter entitled “Tweets for the Wheezy” notes that “a Twitter account had economic superpowers throwing each other the stink eye.” It goes on to describe how the U.S. Embassy in Beijing inadvertently raised a ruckus in 2009 and 2010 by posting hourly readings of particulate pollution as measured on the roof of their former compound. Intended as a service for American travellers and embassy staff, the air quality statistics appeared on @BeijingAir, an embassy-run Twitter page, and showed that the capital’s atmosphere frequently was less healthy than the official daily averages posted by China’s Environmental Protection Bureau would indicate. Chinese officials took umbrage and tried to block the public’s access to these damning numbers.  It’s obvious that Kelly and Jacobs are relentless researchers, and they don’t hide a heavy reliance on secondary sources. They readily confide: “We Googled until our fingers tingled. Then we gasped.”
...
U.S. President Bill Clinton also emerges as an eco-villain. Although Clinton championed environmentalism in the United States, Kelly and Jacobs note how the bilateral trade deals made during his administration got the American consumers hooked on inexpensive Chinese goods. Prices were kept abnormally low because of China’s cheap but dirty energy sources and sweatshop wages paid to labourers. But exporting dirty manufacturing to China could not outsource pollution indefinitely, particularly when antiquated or wasteful methods were used there without modern filters. Regrettably, no provisions prevented China from financing highly contaminating coal-based projects.

“In post-W.T.O. China, something biologically creepy was only a factory pipe away,” the authors observe. They conclude that ultimately, the world cannot escape the consequences of carbon gluttony on its climate. Kelly and Jacobs urge President Xi Jinping “to make eco-restoration as much his legacy as ridding the party of the endemic graft he so loathes.”

Read more at ChinaFile.

Chinese Smartphone Brands Push Into U.S.

A host of Chinese smartphones have big ambitions for the U.S. -- but don't expect a flood of marketing from them.

Just a few weeks ago, research firm IDC declared that Xiaomi, a four-year-old Beijing company, had stormed to third in the worldwide smartphone market based on units shipped. Only a day later, it was leapfrogged when Lenovo completed its Motorola acquisition. These companies now aim to replicate industry leader Samsung's rise, parlaying success at home to go global.

Realizing this goal, however, could be an expensive marketing proposition for brands that are obscure outside of China. U.S. carriers are reluctant to carry the political risk (and marketing weight) of selling Chinese devices. That puts the onus on the smartphone brands themselves.

"Chinese brands don't do a great job of brand building," said Ben Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies. "The cost to invest and build a brand in the U.S. seems a bit too daunting for them."

Daunting but tempting. Western markets still hold the industry's best margins -- and its prestige. "To be a truly global brand, you have to be in the U.S.," said Lawrence Lundy, a Frost & Sullivan analyst. He expects that some Chinese brands will follow Samsung's strategy of investing broadly in media; others will attempt to sell devices without spending big, like Apple. Here's what to expect from the top five. >>

A Map of Betrayal, An Ambivalent Double Agent, Torn Between Two Countries

When the Chinese writer Ha Jin came to the U.S. in 1985, he was only planning to stay long enough to finish his graduate degree. After that, he thought, he'd return home and teach English.

But a series of events shocked him into staying permanently, starting with the capture and trial of a Chinese spy named Larry Chin. Chin spent decades infiltrating the CIA, but swore at his trial that he was trying to improve the relations between the two countries.

Larry Chin "claimed that he was basically serving both countries. He used the metaphor 'mother and father' ... really, he was torn by the two countries," Ha Jin tells NPR's Arun Rath.

In 1989, the Tiananmen Square massacre took place. Ha Jin soon decided to settle permanently in America.

In the decades years since, his novels and stories have won him international acclaim and a National Book Award.

His newest novel, A Map Of Betrayal, describes the life of a spy who is deeply ambivalent about spying on America, a country he loves as much as China. There are unmistakable echoes of Larry Chin — and, Ha Jin tells Rath, of the novelist's own experiences.

Please read/listen the interview highlights with Hajin at NPR.

Kissing Your Socks Goodbye

By her own account, Marie Kondo was an unusual child, poring over lifestyle magazines to glean organizing techniques and then stealthily practicing them at home and school, confounding her family and bemusing her teachers.

As she writes in “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing,” which comes out this month in the United States and is already a best seller in her native Japan and in Europe, she habitually sneaked into her siblings’ rooms to throw away their unused toys and clothes and ducked out of recess to organize her classroom’s bookshelves and mop closet, grumbling about poor storage methodologies and pining for an S-hook.

Now 30, Ms. Kondo is a celebrity of sorts at home, the subject of a TV movie, with a three-month waiting list for her decluttering services — until recently, that is, because she has stopped taking clients to focus on training others in her methods. Last Friday, I brought her book home to practice them.

What better moment to drill down and ponder the fretful contents of one’s sock drawer? Global and national news was careering from the merely hysterical to the nonsensical (the Ebola cruise ship incident was just peaking). Closer to home, other anxieties beckoned. But in my apartment on Second Avenue, the world was no larger than my closet, and I was talking to my T-shirts.

Let me explain. Ms. Kondo’s decluttering theories are unique, and can be reduced to two basic tenets: Discard everything that does not “spark joy,” after thanking the objects that are getting the heave-ho for their service; and do not buy organizing equipment — your home already has all the storage you need.

Obsessive, gently self-mocking and tender toward the life cycle of, say, a pair of socks, Ms. Kondo delivers her tidy manifesto like a kind of Zen nanny, both hortatory and animistic.

“Don’t just open up your closet and decide after a cursory glance that everything in it gives you a thrill,” she writes. “You must take each outfit in your hand.”

“Does it spark joy?” would seem to set the bar awfully high for a T-shirt or a pair of jeans, but it turns out to be a more efficacious sorting mechanism than the old saws: Is it out of style? Have you worn it in the last year? Does it still fit?

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The contents of one of Ms. Kondo’s own drawers.

You can find YouTube videos of her technique, but it’s not so hard: Fold everything into a long rectangle, then fold that in upon itself to make a smaller rectangle, and then roll that up into a tube, like a sushi roll. Set these upright in your drawers. And pour your heart into it, Ms. Kondo urges: Thank your stuff, it’s been working hard for you.

“When we take our clothes in our hands and fold them neatly,” she writes, “we are, I believe, transmitting energy, which has a positive effect on our clothes.”

She proposes a similarly agreeable technique for hanging clothing. Hang up anything that looks happier hung up, and arrange like with like, working from left to right, with dark, heavy clothing on the left: “Clothes, like people, can relax more freely when in the company of others who are very similar in type, and therefore organizing them by category helps them feel more comfortable and secure.”

Read more at NYTS.

American Women Love South Korea's BB Creams

Coco Masuda

First came the wave of manufacturing, with Samsung and LG; then the K-pop stars, whose ubiquity reached its regrettable height with Psy. Now comes the latest import from South Korea: a formidable array of beauty products.

It all started with the BB cream. In early 2011, the Korean brand Dr. Jart introduced two BB creams at Sephora in the United States. They had dermatologic roots, intended to protect and heal patients’ skin after treatment, and had been popular as all-in-one skin-care and makeup products in Korea for several years before they came to the United States.

The cream was a hit. Major beauty companies took note. Soon enough, it had spawned versions from L’Oréal, Smashbox, Clinique, Jane Iredale, Stila and Dior — and paved the way for a Korean beauty invasion of the United States.

The beauty market has long been led by European countries, which were thought to be the source of innovation. But in recent years, American women (and beauty companies), their interest piqued by the BB cream, began to look more closely at Korean multistep skin-care regimens, and they liked what they saw.

“It shifted our consciousness on what it means to take care of your skin,” said Megan McIntyre, the beauty director at the lifestyle site Refinery29. Seeing the care Korean women devote to their skin made consumers curious about new techniques, Ms. McIntyre said, adding that the often adorably twee packaging, high-tech innovations (peel-off lip stains, overnight masks) and affordable prices have not hurt, either. But let no one think that Korean women just slap on a BB cream and call it a day.

“The American approach is: the simpler the better, the faster I can get out the door,” said Cindy Kim, a founder of Peach and Lily, one of a number of online retailers, including Soko Glam and Memebox, that sells Korean beauty products. “The Korean mentality is comprehensive and detailed.”

And it is exhaustive. First, there’s cleansing, often with two different cleansers (one oil-based to remove makeup, then a foaming cleanser), followed by a toner to balance pH levels on the face.

Then there are “essences” and serums, which is “where the number of steps can blow up,” Ms. Kim said. The serums often target single issues: aging, radiance, hydration, redness. An eye cream, plus moisturizer, and BB cream (for day) or an overnight sleep mask are applied next and all sealed with a mist. There is even a term for the desired plump and sticky feeling after application of these products: “chok chok.”

Taking a half-hour for your skin-care routine “isn’t weird,” said Esther Dong, the senior vice president for marketing at the Korean line Amorepacific, whose Time Response anti-aging moisturizers are selling well in the United States. “When people describe a beautiful girl in the U.S., it’s all about the body, and the third or fourth sentence is about the face. When you describe a beautiful girl in Asia, it’s about her face and how pure and fine her skin is.”

Such standards are reflective of Korean culture at large. “The culture of South Korea is very much tied with technological advancement and the rapid pace of life,” said Richard You, the deputy general manager for Dr. Jart in the United States. “Everyone has a smartphone, is concerned about their looks, and companies are working around the clock to provide new products. Word gets around quickly regarding what’s working and what’s not.” In Korea, more than one television show is devoted to reviewing new beauty products.

Even if American women aren’t likely to massage five different creams into their faces for 30 minutes, they are willing to try new products. Alicia Yoon, the other founder of Peach and Lily, reported that most of its customers are non-Asian and that, month to month, its sales nearly double.

“The appetite is huge,” said Priya Venkatesh, who oversees the merchandising of products with Korean roots at Sephora. And not just for Korean brands. Korean-inspired masks and essences from Dior, Shiseido and SK-II are emerging as popular, she said.

American companies are also hoping to strike a chord with similar products. Peter Thomas Roth, a skin-care line in New York, makes a CC cream (a lighter sibling to the BB cream) in South Korea. Its answer to the Korean essence, a step between cleansing and treatment, is its Un-Wrinkle Turbo Line Smoothing Lotion. It also has a sleeping mask (a concentrated mask you wear overnight) and an oil-like product made from squalene, which comes from sugar cane and has long been popular in Asia.

For sure, there is an exoticism to Korean ingredients, with products like LadyKin Vanpir Dark Repair Cream (which touts Red Dragon Blood Resin Extract) and Mizon Returning Starfish Cream (with 70 percent starfish extract). Alpha-hydroxy acid-based peeling foot masks that remove layers of dead skin have been gaining followers here, the most popular being Baby Foot. (Best not to Google the product. Eeew.) 

Read more at NYT.

In a Topsy-Turvy World, China Warms to Sci-Fi

Liu Cixin

With a state-owned power plant in nearby Shanxi Province temporarily shut down to reduce air pollution, one of its engineers, Liu Cixin(刘慈欣), is using the free time to work on his hobby: reigning as China’s best-selling science-fiction author.

Along with working on a new novel and advising on screenplay adaptations of his earlier fiction, Mr. Liu, 51, has been promoting the English translation of “The Three-Body Problem,(《三体》)” the first book in his best-selling apocalyptic space opera trilogy. Translated by Ken Liu, an award-winning science-fiction writer in his own right who is based in the United States (the men are not related), it is one of the few Chinese science-fiction novels to be translated into English. It will be released in the United States on Tuesday by Tor Books.

The success of the “Three-Body” series, as it is called in China, has gained a following beyond the small but flourishing science-fiction world here. Since the third book was published in 2010, each entry in the series has sold about 500,000 copies in the original Chinese, making Mr. Liu the best-selling Chinese science-fiction author in decades.

In addition to the usual high school and college-age fans of science fiction, China’s aerospace and Internet industries have embraced the books. Many interpret the battle of civilizations depicted in the series as an allegory for the ruthless competition in the nation’s Internet industry.

The series has also breathed new life into a genre that, here as elsewhere, the literary establishment often marginalizes.

For decades, science fiction was subject to the whims of Communist Party rule. The genre went from being a vehicle for popularizing science for socialist purposes to drawing criticism in 1983 from party newspapers for “spreading pseudoscience and promoting decadent capitalist elements.” When the prestigious People’s Literature literary magazine published four of Mr. Liu’s short stories in 2012, it was a sign that the genre was back in official good graces.

At its core, science fiction capitalizes on uncertainty about the future to push the boundaries of the reader’s imagination. In fast-changing China, stories that lay out what coming years may hold in store have therefore found deeper resonance among readers.

“China is on the path of rapid modernization and progress, kind of like the U.S. during the golden age of science fiction in the ’30s to the ’60s,” Mr. Liu said. “The future in the people’s eyes is full of attractions, temptations and hope. But at the same time, it is also full of threats and challenges. That makes for very fertile soil.”

Chinese science fiction serves another purpose in the eyes of Xia Jia, a science-fiction writer and professor at Xian Jiaotong University. “Chinese science fiction, in a way, has borne the weight of the ‘Chinese dream’ since the genre first appeared in China in the late Qing dynasty,” she said, referring to the turn of the 20th century.

“The dream is about wanting to overtake the Western countries and become a very powerful modern China while still preserving these old elements,” she added. “This is what we who write science fiction in China have to grapple with.”

The “Three-Body” tomes chronicle a march of the human race into the universe set against the recent past, the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution. It is a classic science-fiction story in the style of the British master Arthur C. Clarke, whose work Mr. Liu says he grew up reading. “Everything that I write is a clumsy imitation of Arthur C. Clarke,” he said.

The first book in the series explores the world of the Trisolarans, an alien civilization on the brink of destruction. When a secret military project in China attempts to make contact with aliens, the Trisolarans capture the signals and decide to invade Earth. Back in China, people split into two camps: those who welcome the aliens and those who want to fight them.

The series is likely to be a change of pace for science-fiction fans in the United States, where many leading contemporary writers in the genre are rejecting classic alien-invasion plots in favor of those that take on real-world issues like climate change or shifting gender roles.

Please read more at NYT.

Hungry City: The Bao in the East Village

It’s a perilous moment, lifting a soup dumpling from its basket, hoping it won’t tear and spill its beautiful guts. This one’s skin is delicate but does not break, at least not yet, not under the tongs’ little teeth. The dumpling lands in the spoon intact, plump but not sagging, buoyant as a ball gown. Take a bite, gently, from the top; watch the steam flee; sip the broth inside, just enough to taste; then down it whole.

At the Bao, which opened in the East Village in July, the soup dumplings, or xiao long bao, are near perfect. (The menu calls this achievement “kung fu,” using the term in its original sense, as mastery acquired through practice and discipline.) Other specimens in town tend to the thick, to prevent leaks; here the dough is ultrathin, less armor than envelope for the broth — pork-stock jelly, which melts into soup as the dumplings steam — and the ball of minced pork at the center, loose and yielding, as if itself in midmelt. I did wish the soup were more flagrantly meaty, but this far from Shanghai, I’m just grateful.

 The Bao is an outpost of Kung Fu Xiao Long Bao, which the owner, Hong Bao, opened two and a half years ago in Flushing, Queens. She oversees the dim sum at both locations, but beyond the classic varieties of soup dumpling — pork and notably briny pork and crab — the restaurants diverge. East Village innovations include xiao long bao jacked up on chile, anticipating the bravado of the young and the drunk, and others spiked with wasabi, a gesture toward the neighborhood’s Japanese expats.

The rest of the menu is greatest-hits Chinese, corralling flamethrowers from Sichuan and Hunan with old-school Cantonese and Taiwanese specialties. Much of this is delicious: a garlicky confetti of chives, with pork nubs and dark pops of salt from fermented black beans; pressed, dense tofu ruddied from steeping in five spice; pickled string beans chopped into tiny rings and bobbing in a sour rice noodle soup; strips of featherweight fried chicken, almost outnumbered by dried red chiles; noodles alchemized by an age-old calculus of soy, sesame oil and sugar; and shrimp dashed with Shaoxing (rice wine) and engulfed in barely set scrambled eggs that slip through the chopsticks. (I ate the leftovers, still slippery, out of the box when I got home.)

 Please read the whole story at NYTs.com.