A Poetic Mid-Autumn Festival

The Mid-Autumn Festival is the second most important traditional holiday in China, after the Lunar New Year. With the Lunar Year starting from the Spring Festival, the Mid-Autumn Festival is on a full moon either eight-and-a-half or nine-and-a-half moons later. In most cases, each “season” in Chinese lunar calendar contains three moons, and the Mid-Autumn Festival falls on the middle moon of the “autumn season”, hence the name. (Exceptions are made for “leap moons”, which are inserted into the lunar calendar so that it does not get ahead of the solar one too much.)

The Mid-Autumn Festival is to celebrate a good harvest. In this sense the Mid-Autumn Festival is similar to Thanksgiving in meaning. The connection between the Mid-Autumn Festival and Thanksgiving does not stop here, however. The Mid-Autumn Festival, just like Thanksgiving, is also traditionally a holiday for family gatherings. But wars and other difficulties in life may prevent one from going home and be united with one’s family. And, again traditionally, a cure for homesickness is poem-writing.

“Chinese Sonnets”

As you may well know, sonnet is probably the most popular “rigid” poetic form in western languages. By  “rigid” I mean that a sonnet has very exacting requirements in the number of syllables per line (generally 10), in the requirements for the syllables in each line (a syllable in a word is categorized as either stressed or unstressed, and the position of a syllable in a poem determines whether a stressed or unstressed one should be used), in the number of lines per sonnet (always 14), and the rhyming scheme. Sonnets originated in the thirteenth century, and became super popular during the Renaissance.

Four forms of Chinese poems have striking resemblance to Sonnets: Seven-Lü, Seven-Jüe, Five-Lü, Five-Jüe. (The ü is pronounced like the same character in German, as in Düsseldorf.) The “Seven” or “Five” part indicates the number of characters per line (the Chinese language is strictly one syllable per character), while the “Lü (律)” and “Jüe (绝)” part designates the number of lines the poem contains, which are eight and four, respectively. So already, we can see that just like sonnets, each of these Chinese poetic forms contains the same number of syllables per line, and an exact number of lines per poem. There are also particular requirements on the tone-types of characters used, (Ping-Ze (平仄), or level- vs. oblique-tones) depending on the position of each character within the poem, which is almost an exact counterpart to the stressed-unstressed syllable designations in the meters of English poems. Overall, the parallel to sonnets is uncanny.

“Thought on a Quiet Night”

The first poem we are going to look at is a Five-Jüe by Li Bai (701-762 CE; aka Li Pai or Li Po). This poem is not written about the Mid-Autumn Festival, but due to its content it is often recited during this time. I’ll first share the original text, its phonetic representation in Pinyin, and a gloss, or word-to-word translation. A proper translation will be presented later.

静夜思 Quiet night thought

李白 Li Bai


chuang
bed
前qian
front
明ming
bright
月yue
moon
光,
guang
light

yi
suspect

shi
be

di
ground

shang
on/upon
霜。
shuang
frost

ju
raise

tou
head

wang
look

ming
bright
月,
yue
moon 

di
lower

tou
head

si
think

gu
former
乡。
xiang
village

We can already appraise a couple of facts about the Chinese language from the above. One is that the text is rather succinct. Each of the characters is expressive of meaning. In other words, each single character corresponds to an English word with one or more syllables. Secondly, we can observe the frequent omission of parts of a sentence that is mandatory in English—for example, the subject of the last two lines, “I”, is omitted. This is not just a poetic expression, but is practiced in prose as well. (BTW, this is also common in Japanese and Korean.) In the wonderful book “Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language”, Eva Hoffman commented that when working in the United Nations, where each document was archived in five languages, and arranged next to each other, she could point out to the librarian the Chinese version from afar, judging simply by the thinness of the volume.

We can glean something from the Pinyin, the phonetic representation below the Han characters: the rhyming scheme. It is common in Chinese poems that a single rhyme is carried throughout a whole poem, as the case here. The common rhyming scheme of all of the aforementioned “Chinese sonnets” is to rhyme on the first line, as well as all even-numbered lines.

Now I’ll present my translation, followed by some explanations.

Thought on a Quiet Night
LI Bai

My bedside’s moonshine’s bright,
Is it a frost so white?
Head up the moon greets me,
Head down a homesick night.

In this translation I used iambic trimeter to approximate the five-syllable original. In iambic meter each foot has two syllables, unstressed-stressed. While other meters could be used, I felt that the iambic trimeter (with three feet per line) allowed just enough number of syllables to express the full meaning of the original poem, without requiring additional filler words. In other words, I’m using 24 syllables in English to translate a poem in Chinese with 20 characters. I also adopted the original’s rhyming scheme, with rhymes on the first, second, and last lines, instead of using a rhyming scheme of the English/Italian tradition.

When reading the poem, one is struck by the simplicity of the words and the directness of the expression of feelings. The author observed the moonlight at night, at his bedside, which imparts the feelings of cool temperature, low light, faded colors, all of which lead to a dampened mental state in the reader. And the mention of bedside implies a sense loneliness—the author was either awakened by the moonlight, or had difficulty sleeping.

The expressive homesickness sentiment is what made this poem often being recited during the Mid-Autumn Festival. As I mentioned earlier, the Mid-Autumn Festival is a particular occasion for family reunions. And traditionally that would mean returning to one’s home village, where one’s elders and clan reside. Confucious famously said: “One does not travel far when their parents are still living, unless good arrangements are made.” We do not know the exact year this poem was written, and consequently we can’t tell what was keeping the author away from home. But the poem gives us the feeling that his heart was very much aching for his home village, and his kinsfolks living there. And it’s precisely that feeling of wanting to go back home but not being able to do so, that made this poem one of the most well-known in Chinese traditional literature.

“How Frequent’s Full Moon”

The types of poems that we previously referred to as “Chinese Sonnets” (called “Shi (诗)” in Chinese) peaked in popularity during the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE). After some years of turmoil, the next relatively stable dynasty, the Song dynasty, (960–1279 CE) was established. During this period a different poetic form flourished. This is the forms of “Ci (词)”, also called the long-short sentence verses.

You may get the feeling that “long-short sentence verses” is free-form, and that would be very far from the truth. Each of the Ci form of poems is actually the lyrics written to fit a particular song, and the songs are often romantic in nature—romantic in the original sense, where intense emotions of any kind are expressed. And just like the Romantic period musicians, the song writers figured out that romantic songs should not have even-length sentences. After all, when one is emotionally agitated, one is naturally not able to keep sentences on an even keel.

I often imagined that in ancient Chinese history the art of melody writing was not appreciated as much as that of lyrics writing, and was delegated to nameless craftsmen. One consequence is that the melodies of this period were all lost, but many of the lyrics were passed down as poems and appreciated by students of all times. (There is a parallel of sorts in western languages. It was once thought that a good libretto for opera is hard to come by, and consequently Pietro Metastasio’s libretto Adriano in Siria was set to music at least 65 times!)

Like Schubert’s lieder, the songs behind the Ci must have been syllabic, containing no melisma or splitting one note between two syllables. Thus, the melody dictated the Ci poem’s sentence structure and meter (the rhyme characters and the choice of level- vs. oblique-toned characters). And because the lyrics were written to fit a pre-existing song, each Ci poem comes with a two-part title: one for the song, one for the poem itself.

Armed with these background info, let’s now examine the poem itself. This being a longer verse, I’ll skip the pinyin and only provide the gloss (the word-to-word translations) after the original text.

水调歌头·明月几时有
Shui Diao Ge Tou[1]: Bright Moon What Time Has

苏轼 (1037-1101)
SU Shi

明月几时有?把酒对青天。
Bright moon what time has? Take wine toward blue sky.

不知天上宫阙,今夕是何年?
Not know heaven above palace, this evening is what year?

我欲乘风归去,又恐琼楼玉宇,高处不胜寒。
I would ride wind go back, but afraid jade building jade world, high places be cold.

起舞弄清影,何似在人间。
Up dance with light shadow, what like in human space.

转朱阁,低倚户,照无眠。
Turn red building, low against house, shine no sleep.

不应有恨,何事长向别时圆?
No should have hate, what matter long toward leave time round?

人有悲欢离合,月有阴晴圆缺,此事古难全。
People have sad happy part gather, moon has cloudy bright wax wane, this thing history hard complete.

但愿人长久,千里共婵娟[2]。
Only wish people long live, thousand mile share Chanjuan.

Notes:

  • [1] Shui Diao Ge Tou: the name of the song that this Ci arrangement is to fit. The exact words have lost their meaning, and therefore I am only showing their Pinyin here.
  • [2] Chanjuan: the name of a beautiful woman, whose was the student of a scholar. Here it is used to represent the moon, which is female in nature in Chinese culture. In Chinese literature and poems, “quoting” earlier works in some way was a very popular, sometimes required, element.
  • [3] The way I did the line breaks is uncommon, but helped to illustrate the rhyming scheme: the last character on each line rhymes, and the piece is on the same rhyme throughout.

Here is my translation:

Shui Diao Ge Tou: How Frequent’s Full Moon
SU Shi

How frequent’s full moon, I want to be told.
Which year is it now? You keep time a-flow.
Up there is where I belong, yet I know,
High as where you are, it’s got to be cold.
So stay I must, dancing with my shadow.

Sleepless, I watch you come through my window.
How can you be full when we are apart?
You wax and wane, just as we gather and part,
Nature’s laws we obey, both me and you.
Sharing you from afar, they’re on my heart.

As I mentioned, a Ci follows strict rules for rhyme and meter. So that explains my choosing the iambic pentameter form. But unlike Shi, Ci has a more varied sentence structure by design. This informed my choices of using five lines per verse, which is uncommon in iambic pentameter poems, and using interlocked rhymes, which is common.

In the original the author uses the character 人 to represent the target of his longing. Through historical record we know that he was thinking of his brother when the poem was written. But 人 is a unisex word for person or people, and it is this meaning readers generally take up, to resonate upon their own thoughts of their loved ones, regardless of gender. In the translation I intentionally used the gender-neutral pronouns “we” and “they” for the same effect.

The Chinese language being much more succinct than English, and my choices of form means that I am using 100 English syllables to translate a Chinese poem containing almost 100 characters, there are many ideas and images in the original I had to omit. Cutting out the translation of Chanjuan is almost inevitable, there being no easy way to evoke the same sentiments. Leaving out the “jade world” is a much harder choice, as I’m not sure if a reader not informed of Chinese language or culture can or cannot see the moonscape as a jade world. There are many words in the original poem that illustrated the lunar world as a cold place lacking bright colors, and the “jade world” description is but one of them. Regrettably I left all of these out.

But the main idea that resonated with people throughout history is that the moon is a connection between people displaced from each other. And in that sense my translation was not amiss. I hope you’d agree.

The two poems I presented here are so famous that all kids who went through elementary and secondary schools in China would be able to recite them. And poems are such an integral part of Chinese culture that possibly all educated people have written some, at least in the Shi form. Some people take the forms loosely, for example by ignoring the specifications of Ping-Ze, the unstressed-vs-stressed characters. Others take them strictly and historically, choosing rhyming words as poets of a thousand years ago would, while ignoring the pronunciation changes that have happened since then. Of course there are now also free-form poems, with or without rhymes. These the Chinese learned from the western cultures, in the last hundred years or so.

Have you written any poems lately? Or in the long past? Please share in the comments below. Your comments are welcome too, of course!

May you have a wonderful and poetic Mid-Autumn Festival, which falls on today, September 17, in 2024.

[Cover image partly generated using AI.]

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2024 North Pole Cruise Travelogue

8/6 Day -2, Oslo

Yiran flew in from Boston, in the morning. I got in late in the afternoon, from Beijing.

Oslo was kind of expensive. Shuttle to airport hotel was €8/p. Yiran got there first, by taxi–she injured her ankle a couple of weeks prior, in Amsterdam, in an accident involving a rental bike, and she was trying her best to protect it, especially to prevent it from getting worse. On this trip she brought a set of braces for the ankle, and a “boot”, which was a heavier set of braces.

8/7 Day -1, Oslo

Some of my classmates tried to fly to Longyearbyen but failed. Their plane took a couple of tries and couldn’t land, and had to fly back. Svalbard area, or North Pole region in general, is known for very changeable weather. One consequence of the attempt to fly to Longyearbyen was that they each got two stamps on their passports: one for leaving Norway and one for returning. Although Svalbard is administrated by Norway, it is considered “international”, and one has to exit Norway in order to fly there.

We took the time to visit the National Museum. There are two types of trains to the city center. The normal train is 128 NOK (about US$12), and takes some 25 min. A fast train is 250 NOK, and shaves a full 4 min from the trip. We took the slower one.

8/8 Day 1, Longyearbyen

We met several of my classmates and their partners and friends at the gate. Weather was perfect, and our flight was smooth. We stopped over in Tromsø, where we had to exit the plane, go through immigration, and get onto the same plane. Yiran was given priority service, but she had to walk up and down the steps of gangways–there was no jet-bridge in Tromsø, nor in Longyearbyen.

Outside of the Longyearbyen airport, there were buses waiting for us, as we were informed. But in addition, a couple of guys in nondescript clothing told us if we meant to go on the Oceanwide cruise we should leave the luggage with their cargo van, instead of onto the bus. I didn’t fully comprehend what’s going on, and couldn’t even be sure that they were related to the cruise, but complied anyway. The air was a bit chilly, but not super cold. A tall Italian guy introduced himself as Marco, an expedition team member from Oceanwide. I wondered whether his last name was Polo, as for the Poles, but no luck there. Outside the bus window, a reindeer grazed on the ground hugging vegetation. Ah, North Pole, land of the Santa Claus and his reindeers.

The bus, arranged by Oceanwide, took us to the town center. There was a supermarket, a mall of sorts (with 2 stories, an elevator that had only single-layer doors, and maybe up to 20 establishments). We found a fusion Vietnamese place, and ordered something simple. This being late afternoon, we were looking forward to food on the cruise. Besides, this place was a bit expensive. Things seems to be that way in Norway, even back in Oslo, but given that here we were at latitude 78°N, where nothing could be produced locally (Polar Bear being an exception), we could swallow the price a little, with spring rolls.

By and by it’s time for boarding. We were told by Marco that it takes 10-15 min to walk to the ship. But Google maps had a different idea, and suggested a 25 min walk. With Yiran in ankle boots, we decided to take a taxi. A taxi showed up before we called the phone number for Longyearbyen taxi, and it’s as expensive as everything else.

At the pier we met the rest of the classmates/partners/friends, and found our cabin number from one of them.

Now we fully appreciate the advantage of parting with our luggage early. We could more easily climb up the gangway to get to the ship! The gangway led us to Deck 4. We got our tappy badges for our room, and were told that we needed to go up to Deck 5 for our safety briefing, and Deck 4 for mandatory safety training. Then we could go to our room (on Deck 3), rest a bit, then go to dinner, on Deck 4, and be present at our first daily meeting (normally it’s called Daily Recap, except for this first one), on Deck 5. And there were no elevators on the ship. I asked whether Yiran could be spared the trouble of going to all these events, and was told that she could skip the safety briefing, but not the safety training. Oh well.

In the cabin, we were happily reunited with our luggage–the staff delivered our luggage based on the luggage tags we had on them, which were not particularly meant for this cruise. We had two beds, a desk, a TV, a restroom with a shower, and two portholes that we couldn’t close. The room-darkening curtain was welcoming–the sun would not set during our trip.

In the evening we sailed out to the open ocean. We both got seasick, but Yiran suffered more from it. She thought going to the open air helped, and so we went to the bow of the ship. It didn’t.

The passengers were split into the Red and Blue groups, so as to better organize activities. We were assigned the Red group.

During the meetings we found that they have simultaneous interpretation into Chinese. And on the ship, signs are generally bilingual, in English and Chinese.

8/9 Day 2, Lillihookbreen and Ny Alesund

The guests were woken up, if not already, by the announcement piped into each cabin. Unlike a normal cruise, this one had militarized schedules. We’d arrived at a part of Svalbard (aka Spitsbergen) that’s full of glaciers. It’s called Lillihookbreen. The ship parked in the fjord for some time, for us to better soak in the wonderful and fantastic sight. A mandatory bear safety training was held. Basically, the expedition team would scout a place before we would be allowed to land, and we’d be escorted on land by them, one in the front and another in the back, for each group. They each carried a signal gun to scare any intruding bears away, and a rifle to use as a weapon of last resort–which they’d never had to use yet.

We were warned that we shouldn’t have too high a hope of seeing polar bears. While the expedition was billed as “in search of polar bears”, we might not actually find them. Walruses are the kings of the arctic, we were told. Then, it was announced over the PA system that one bear was actually sighted. It was near enough that some people with good eyesight might see a yellowish dot on shore, but I needed the help of a camera lens, or better yet, a pair of borrowed binoculars. The bear was feasting on some dead animal, with a bird (most likely a gull) standing by, waiting for its share. Eventually the bird flew away, having waited in vain for too long.

Boots were not distributed as planned, because the ship was able to dock at the pier in Ny Alesund. This would be the last time that we’d reach a pier, though, until we got back in Longyearbyen.

In the afternoon we landed on Ny Alesund. This is a multi-national research site, in use by about 10 countries. The US and Russia do not use this site, because they have their own territory in the arctic circle. The research stations do not fly national flags, due to the host country’s desires. But the Chinese station (named Yellow River) has a pair of stone lions, which became a big attraction. A couple of large groups were from China, and they had a Chinese flag to take picture with. There was also a smaller group from Taiwan, who only displayed their flag at other times.

The research stations are not large, and each is housed in a single-story dorm building used by coal miners in the past. The coal business had long shut down, with a small locomotive and a few train cars telling the “town’s” past glory. The coal excavation company, Kings Bay, survived the times, and now manages the logistics of the multi-national research team–unlike the Antarctic research stations, here all of them share the same dining hall and other logistical support infrastructure, including the airfield, and a dog-care facility. There were also a post office, a general store, and a museum, all open to the tourists, and each proudly proclaiming its northern-most status.

Not far from the Yellow River Station, there was a steel launch tower, of about 25-30 m high, which was used by the 1926 transpolar flight by the team of Roald Amundsen, Lincoln Ellsworth, and Umberto Nobile, using an airship (like a glorified blimp). The guide explained everything in Chinese only. It’s on this occasion I realized that the Red group was a Chinese-speaking group.

During dinner, we figured out that if we sat at a large table, which there were four in the dining room, we have a higher chance of having an expedition team member sitting and eating with us. The expedition team members were all very knowledgeable and personable, and they were all very passionate about what they do, and we benefited tremendously from chatting with them. Later on we learned from Hans, the expedition leader, that eating with the guests became a requirement for his team a couple of years ago, under his directions.

8/10 Day 3, Sjuoyane (Seven Islands)

This is the first day that we rode on a Zodiac, a kind of rubber landing vessel. It’s fast, bumpy, and a lot of fun. One does get sprayed with sea water though. And to get off and on the Zodiac, you had to step into water. Thus the necessity of the rubber boots, and the water-repelling pants.

Yiran wore size 37 on her good foot, and size 42 on the injured one, ankle brace and all. And size 42 happened to be my size. It looked funny but worked well.

Because of our slow speed, we were given an expedition team member for ourselves, Marco. When Yiran asked, Marco turned out to be super-knowledgeable about the geology of the region. The rock formation is migmatite, which Yiran understood, from the “-tite” part, to mean that there is a metamorphic rock. And the way the limestone layer tilted means the rocks had experienced a lot of compression at some time. On the other hand, the “ground levels”, which there were many, were caused by the glacier receding from time to time, which caused earth’s crust to pop up, which in turn causes new levels of sedimentary plateau to form on the part of island shelf newly exposed to the water.

We also saw the carcass of a polar bear. The meat and skin were gone, and only the bones and some fur were left behind. Marco suspected that the carcass was opened by another polar bear, and then the rest was finished off by other bears, arctic wolves and birds (mostly gulls). Animals! What can one say! But it’s known that when pushed to extremes, people can be cannibals too.

Soon pandemonium descended. As some other guests came back from their hike, they got all over the polar bear carcass, partly to be awe-struck, partly to take pictures. The expedition team members tried their best to keep people away, but not very effectively. Yiran realized that many guests did not have good enough comprehension of English to understand the words of the expedition team, and tried to help by translating them to Chinese.

The next activity was a cruise on the Zodiac, to a set of small rock outcroppings with Walruses on them. There were dozens of them, crowded over a couple of very small rock outcroppings. I think the expedition team went downwind to them on purpose, so that they didn’t smell us (we could see each other all right, but neither group was afraid of the other), but we smelled them perfectly, and they stunk! Big time! I imagined that on those rock outcroppings, the rocks were either covered with their wastes, or their bodies, or were recently cleaned of their wastes by their bodies.

Back on the ship, there were a couple of announcements looking for particular guests. Unlike “normal” cruise ships, the expedition ship has a policy that no person was left behind. When we went off the ship, we swiped our badges to check out. And when we got back, we swiped to check in. Apparently some guests forgot the latter step. On one of our Zodiac cruises, I had the honor to interpret for the guests on the boat who were not fluent in English, when our guide/driver told the following story. During WWII, the Germans sent some soldiers to the Svalbard to set up a weather station, because the weather in Svalbard was a good indication of the weather in continental Europe in the coming days. After the war ended in May, these soldiers were forgotten, and was only remembered and picked up in September! Good thing they were well-supplied to live till then!

We were shifted to the Blue team by Hans. Our speed was too slow for the Red team, and our English was good enough for the Blue team.

After lunch the weather became foggy and we were not able to do the afternoon excursions as planned. And when we are stuck on the ship we get lectures. Today, in the afternoon and evening, we learned about glaciers, planktons, geology of Svalbard, and Walruses. The most impressive was the talk about Planktons by Chloe, whose overflowing enthusiasm completely transformed an otherwise less-than-interesting topic.

8/11 Day 4, Pack Ice

We were awoken by strange noises. The ship was now sailing through pack ice, or a sea of floating ice (not icebergs), on purpose. It turned out that during this time, sea ice was not easy to find. Although there were sea ice forecasts for the region, like weather forecasts, they were not very reliable. A sister ship of ours spent two to three days looking for it.

Although our ship was able to handle some ice, it could only deal with ice up to 1 meter thick. So, paradoxically, now that we found the ice field in the sea, the ship was charting a course that’s relatively clear of ice. We learnt that this ship was a polar class 6. And to be able to truly go to the North Pole, one need a polar class 2 icebreaker ship. Pack ice is formed when water froze on the sea, while icebergs are formed when chunks of ice breaks free from a glacier.

Up on the bridge of the ship, which was open to passengers during much of each day, we could see the ship driving through ice field. It’s rare to see very large sheets of ice. Most of the ice sheets were small and isolated from each other. From the bow we could see the ice more closely. Some ice was blue, due to it being compressed at some point. Very often there are small pools of water either on top of a sheet of ice, or slightly below the surface. My classmate Yang Zhu invented the method of sticking a cellphone through a hawsehole, and shooting a video of the ship’s stem cutting through ice sheets. The result is magical.

This was the northern most part of our expedition, reaching about 81.73°N (81°43’37″N by my phone’s GPS). We wished for the sight of a polar bear on ice but it didn’t materialize. We did see a few ivory gulls, a rare and treasured sight for birders, we were told. And a kind of very cute-looking black bird called Little Auks, whose big heads and thick necks, relative to the size of their bodies, made them look like cute babies.

Because this was the coldest day we had on the cruise, the captain kindly provided hot chocolate on the bow, with optional liquor added. We were also graced with a fog bow, also called a white bow, supposedly a rare event.

As there was no chance to go on a Zodiacs cruise, here among the ice floes, we had more lectures. One of these was the gripping tale of Salomon Andrée, retold by expedition member Misha, based on the book Flight of the Eagle. Andrée was an enthusiastic but foolhardy balloonist, who took a disastrous balloon expedition to the North Pole in 1897, with two team members. He designed the balloon to be steerable, but it was not. He designed it to stay in the air for 30 days, but it did less than 3. They were ill-prepared to hike on ice, both mentally, physically, and logistically. They aimed for one island to hike to, then changed their minds and aimed for another, and ended on a third one, all due to the movements of the ice floes on which they walked. Their travels on ice, by foot mostly, with a simple boat to cross between floes, greatly hindered by the movement of the floes, took about three months, and covered the distance of over three hundred miles. They were forced to land on the island of Kvitøya, after the ice broke apart under the hut they took two weeks to build. They died on the island in quick succession, shortly after landing.

In the year 1930, the mystery of fate of Andrée’s expedition was finally resolved, when a couple of sealing ships sent people to the newly approachable island of Kvitøya and discovered their remains, together with their diaries, and a few hundred exposed but unprocessed pictures. Unfortunately the three explorers’ remains were cremated, and their causes of death were never conclusively determined.

The most tear-jerking part of the story was yet to unfold. Among the artifacts left behind were several letters expedition member Nils Strindberg wrote to his fiancée Anna Charlier. Anna was married to someone else by 1930, when the letters were found. When she eventually died, she asked that her body be buried with her husband, but her heart be cremated and entombed with her fiancé Nils Strindberg.

Alas! The book Flight of the Eagle is not completely factual, and I don’t know which part of it is fictionalized. I am afraid the part about the fiancé’s heart is, but I’d rather not find out.

8/12 Day 5, Kvitøya

Now that we heard so much about Kvitøya, we were eagerly looking forward to landing on it. Kvitøya, meaning the White Island, was completely covered with an ice cap, at least before the 1930s. And it was one of most remote islands in Svalbard. In late 1800s it was also surrounded by ice sheets all year long, making landings next to impossible. One of the more plausible theories of the death of Salomon Andrée was that he killed himself by opium overdose. His motive could be that he, the last of his three men expedition, alone on a remote island, facing an upcoming arctic winter of several months of darkness, was too exhausted and lost hope, or desire, of ever getting back to human society.

On the Zodiac we were told that on the beach, which was now free of ice, there was a whale carcass, and it’s hopeful that it would attract polar bears. What we didn’t expect was seeing so many of them! There were a total of six polar bears we saw on a small portion of the island (small relative to size of the island), including one that came up to the water’s edge to take a closer look at us! When it shook itself, we could clearly see ripples travelling up and down its furry coat! What a treat! I came up with the first lines of this nursery rhyme, but did not let them out of my mouth:

Polar bear, polar bear, what did you see?

I saw some food looking at me!

Polar bear, polar bear, how did they get there?

They drifted on something, with noise I hear!

The rest of the bears simply lounged comfortably on the beach, somewhat further away from us, with food in their belly, and a forever shining summer’s sun overhead.

Due to the presence of the polar bears, we were not able to land on the island. Right behind where the polar bears roamed, and rested, we saw the memorial set up near where the Andrée team’s remains were found. It was a simple stone tablet, standing on a mound of moraine stones about waist high.

Besides the polar bears, we saw several groups of walruses bathing in the water near Kvitøya. They looked very cute and playful in the water, bobbing up and down, and looking at us curiously, where they did not stink! Once we were back on the ship, we learned from our friends that a Walrus punctured a Zodiac’s air pocket. Fortunately a Zodiac is designed with several independent air pockets, and can survive two of them being punctured at a time without any danger to its passengers. Still, the driver of that Zodiac called for backup over radio, and another Zodiac came over and accompanied the stricken one back to the ship. The incident was not announced. We heard from one of the lectures that the walruses use their tusks not for food or mate, but for pulling themselves up onto ice floes. So this walrus possibly didn’t mean harm at all, and could simply had been curious. Of course the walrus was also possibly agitated by the noise of the Zodiac engines.

There were more lectures in the afternoon and evening. One of the evenings I also watched a BBC documentary named Bear Witness, about polar bears, and shot on Svalbard. The ship’s collection of videos were great, and it’s a pity that we didn’t have the time to watch them all.

8/13 Day 6, Isisøya

Morning expedition was cancelled due to fog. So we got some lectures. In the afternoon we were able to land on an island named Isisøya. I was sure it was not related to the terrorist group. I thought it related to something Egyptian, and I did find the reference, thanks to the Internet provided by the ship.

Isisøya was full of birds, some with baby hatchlings, that we had to carefully walk around without too much disturbance. We were told by the expedition team that we should never attempt to touch the hatchlings, as the human scent might make the adult birds think that the babies were not their own. We walked up a small ridge and watched seabirds diving Into a pool of water, fishing. It’s a very relaxing sight.

In the evening, Amy, the girl about Yiran’s age, who went to the Antarctic as a researcher, gave a talk about her experience there, to the small group of Beida friends. Her work was to surveil the penguins, by reading the markings put on the “arms” of the birds by scientists with binoculars. Both her work, her living conditions, and her research subjects were interesting to us. And it’s remarkable that she gave the whole talk in Chinese.

8/14 Day 7, Alkefjellet

This was a place where thousands of seabirds, mostly guillemots, built their nests on the almost vertical cliff surface. Guillemots are somewhat like penguins. We were told by our Zodiac driver that penguins were a species of bird that used to live in the northern hemisphere. When early explorers saw the strange birds in Antarctic, they named them penguins, because they somewhat looked alike. Unfortunately the “true” penguins, the ones which originally born the name, went extinct due to hunting, and now we’re left with only these “look-alike” penguins.

The guillemots chose the cliff surface to raise their chicks, where the arctic foxes couldn’t reach. What they gave up are the comforts of spacious and fluffy nests. On the ledge of the rock face, space was very limited, and very limited material was available for nest building. The birds stood side-by-side on the ledges of the cliff surface, while the ledges range from near the water to dozens of meters high. It looked more impressive to me than the skyscrapers in Manhattan–the ledges being very small, all the birds, no matter on ledges high or low, were visible to us at the same time, unlike the glass and steel facades of the skyscrapers, which concealed whether people were hiding behind them at any moment.

The guillemots looked pretty idle, but they were potentially sitting on eggs or guarding their chicks. The chicks, being smaller and shorter, were generally not visible to us, who had to look up the ledges to see the adult birds. There were also many birds flying about in the sky, or fishing in the icy water near our Zodiacs.

Above but not far from the guillemots were also a few large white birds nesting on the same rock surface. These were glaucous gulls, our Zodiac driver told us, and they preyed on the guillemots’  chicks and stole their eggs.

In the afternoon Yiran was a bit sea sick and didn’t want to take another Zodiac trip. I stayed with her. The other guests made another Zodiac landing, and some even took part in a polar plunge. The most amazing of all is that Amy went into the freezing water twice! Going into the water once is already pushing the limit of human endurance of cold temperatures. Doing it again after getting out of the water is super-human.

8/15 Day 8, Fog

A foggy day that didn’t permit landings or taking Zodiac cruises. So we had more lectures. Among the lectures of the day the most gripping was another tragic North Pole expedition story, the one of Umberto Nobile, given by expedition team member Jens.

We’ve seen the name of Nobile before, on the plaque on the airship launch tower in Ny Alesund, near the Yellow River Research Station. That plaque commemorated the 1926 expedition by the team of Roald Amundsen, Lincoln Ellsworth, and Umberto Nobile. Amundsen was the first to conquer the South Pole, and wanted to make it into the history books as the first human to have conquered both poles. Ellsworth was his financial backer. Nobile was the airship builder.

The 1926 expedition was successful. But Nobile and Amundsen had a falling out over who should have gotten the most credit. And Nobile also regretted that the airship he built was renamed Norge (meaning Norway in Norwegian) after it was purchased by Amundsen. Nobile was an Italian, and a proud one at that, and in the year 1926 Italy was in a nationalistic frenzy when Mussolini was the prime minister transforming into a dictator. So Nobile wanted to do an Italian expedition to the North Pole, without Amundsen/Ellsworth or anyone else who might “steal” his glory.

The airship for Nobile’s 1928 expedition was named Italia (meaning Italy in Italian, of course). Also launched from Ny Alesund, it successfully reached the North Pole. Unfortunately, it wasn’t so fortunate on its way back, but crashed on ice. Nine people died, and seven survived. An international effort went underway to rescue the survivors, using planes and an icebreaker from Russia. Eventually, six survivors were rescued, but 27 rescuers lost their lives. Among the 27 was Amundsen, whose plane crashed before finding any of the survivors.

Nobile’s reputation was badly damaged through the ordeal, because he allowed himself to be rescued first, when the first pilot who reached them insisted on taking him and no one else—there was only one extra seat on that plane. This is against the ethos passed down the history that the captain of a sinking ship should either be the last one to disembark, or go down with the ship.

8/16 Day 9, Bamsebu & Nathorstbreen

Today, in Zodiacs, we chased down a few beluga whales. Not intending to alarm them we got quite close and turned off the engine. The belugas played hide-and-seek with us near the edge of a glacier. We also cruised around the glaciers and mini-icebergs.

Then we landed, near a cabin called Bamsebu. It’s a whalers’ cabin, with the bones of hundreds of belugas piled nearby. The cabin is still maintained today, only not for whaling. Soon a few reindeers were spotted at a distance, on the hillside, and a longer-distance hiking group was organized to go and take a closer look. We chose to stay near the cabin, of course.

The second destination for the day was covered in fog, so we went to an alternative site, Nathorstbreen, which had not been visited by any of the past Hondius expeditions. We saw more glaciers, and more belugas. When it’s about time for us to leave our Zodiac drivers (they talk to each other over radios) spotted a couple of seals. Unlike the whales, the seals were much smaller and closer to the water surface, so they were hard to spot while one was sitting down in a rubber boat. Seals are favored by polar bears, but unfortunately not for their cuteness.

In the evening we enjoyed captain’s farewell cocktail, and Marco shared a video of our trip’s highlights, including the places we’d seen, the landscapes and seascapes, the fauna and flora, the happy and excited guests, and the crew. It was beautifully done.

During dinner we the guests were introduced to the full crew, so that they could receive well-deserved thanks from us.

8/17 Day 10, Longyearbyen

We were finally back on land!

We disembarked at a pier that’s clearly meant for bulk cargo, for some reason. As the crew lined up to say goodbye to the guests, Yiran tried to get as much contact info from the expedition team as she could. Buses hired by Oceanwide dropped us off at our respective hotels–for some reason, there were no flights out of Longyearbyen on this day.

In the evening, Cassia, a young woman who, like Yiran, also worked on policy issues in the US, and who organized the Lewis and Clark University’s team on our Hondius tour, walked over to our hotel to deliver a L&C team’s signature turquoise outer jacket to Yiran! Lightly used during the trip, the jacket was still in very good condition, and Yiran was very happy to be able to have it. But I see the jacket as a symbol of a budding friendship. I also was very grateful for the opportunity to know my classmates and their friends and partners better. Through the WeChat group set up for the cruise, I follow many of them’s continued explorations, enjoy the great pictures they take, and share their feeling of renewed youth! The cruise is indeed a gift that keeps giving!

2024 North Pole Cruise Travelogue Read More »

Pandemic in My Neighborhood

Here is a new type of chart I made that demonstrate the severity of Covid-19 pandemic in my backyard. The chart is very information-dense, and I have no name for it.

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The data are all from March 18-28, for a total of 11 days.

The 4 data series all started from the origin on the lower-left corner, at the beginning of the pandemic. As the days go by, the lines push to the upper-right direction, because both the case and death numbers are cumulative–the best they can do is to stop moving, at the end of the pandemic. In the exponential growth period, the distance between neighboring points expand as the lines move to the right. The angle of each point from the horizontal axis is the death-to-case ratio.

What can we see from this chart?

  • New York City has about 10 times the cases and deaths, compared to the nation. It is the indisputable epicenter of the US epidemic.
  • Our county, Suffolk, has about the same cases per-capita as the state, but both are much higher than that of the US average.
  • Our county has a bit lower death rate (per case). There could be multiple explanations. Maybe we are testing more thoroughly. Or maybe while the death count is low, statistical variance is high.
  • In contrast, NYC has the worst death rate, but it was better only a few days ago. It may be an indication that the hospitals are overwhelmed, which is very disheartening.
  • The case numbers are doubling roughly every 3.5 days for NYS, NYC and Suffolk county.

Pandemic in My Neighborhood Read More »

One Day in Tokyo Narita

On the afternoon of October 25, my sister Eva and I flew to Tokyo Narita from Sapporo, basically on time. Right about the time when we were supposed to land, the head flight attendant announced that due to weather our landing would delayed. With her English not easy to understand, we thought she said the delay was for five minutes, which did not make sense — a short delay like that would not be announced.

We ended up circling over Tokyo for about an hour, in a gray soup of clouds. I joked that we were flying in miso soup. Eva said it’s whiter than miso, and more like tofu. We were in good spirits, because it wasn’t turbulent, and we were not in a hurry. My connection was in about 4 hours, and hers in 10, although her flight was from Haneda Airport, which is much closer to Tokyo.

Our plane was greeted by a covered stair truck and a bus on the tarmac. It’s raining lightly. The bus took a long time to get us to terminal 1, and my connection was from terminal 2. Eva needed to go to Haneda Airport, but all trains and buses out of Narita were suspended then. We said goodbye at the airport bus connecting to terminal 2. 

With mobile boarding pass in hand, I rushed to the security checkpoint at Terminal 2, and was promptly stopped. They couldn’t let me through, because Japan Airlines had not started checking-in that flight yet — my American Airlines flight was operated by Japan Airlines. I asked when I would be able to go through security, and was told that it’s for Japan Airlines to decide.

I went to talk to people working for Japan Airlines. Eventually I found a sympathetic woman, who thought I should be able to go through security — I had no luggage to check, and I already had my boarding pass. I asked her to talk to the security line person for me, and she did, but it wasn’t successful. It’s just like in the movie “Lost in Translation”, where a negative answer was given in a speech spanning several minutes.

One train out of Narita resumed operations, and Eva asked me, via phone messaging, whether she should take it. I told her “definitely”. Her staying in Narita couldn’t help me. The train was a slow one, she found out eventually, but she had time enough.

Meanwhile, I had no choice but to wait. The airport started to collect more and more people, as more flights were put in a state of limbo — they were neither cancelled nor delayed, only their check-ins were “temporarily closed”. JAL is the flag carrier of Japan, and their flights dominated the terminal 2 display board, by far. Upon close inspection, all of the flights with such a remark were JAL flights. JAL kiosks were all taped over with a piece of paper, indicating that they were closed. The check-in counters were similarly closed and unstaffed.

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I got a late lunch at 3:30, not knowing that that would be my last meal in some 16 hours. More wait. I join a crowd sitting on the floor of the check-in hall, looking up at the display board. There were maybe a couple dozen seats in the hall, but hundreds of people were milling around waiting for their flights. As any well designed check-in hall, there were no outlets for people to charge their phones. One had to get through security to find outlets, but they couldn’t do that.

A sliver of hope went through my mind when JAL started to manually check-in some flights, first one to San Diego, then one to Vancouver. The announcement was made through the airport’s PA system, but not shown on the display boards. In addition, several people in JAL uniforms, mostly female, were walking the check-in hall with tablets showing the flight numbers and destinations of the flights being checked in.

At 7:40 pm, more than one hour after the scheduled departure of my flight, the display board came alive. All of the “check-in temporarily closed” status lines got wiped at once. My flight was cancelled. Most others got some other status first, before getting cancelled. 

I called our company’s travel agency. The travel agency’s phone system told me first that I should consider booking online to save the company money, then that it was not yet the travel agency’s regular business hours, both of which were pathetically long speeches that I wanted to short-circuit but couldn’t; and then I had to listen to some more speech in order to make some choices by pressing a few buttons. After some wait, I got connected with a real person! Hooray!

I answered all the questions she posed to me, my name, my company, my birth date (yes, that too! Just in case someone was trying to impersonate me to get out of Japan, I guess), my company email (“no, not that, maybe there is another form of the company email?”), and which flight I was to take. And then, boom! She couldn’t see that my flight was cancelled. I told her it was. By this time my flight disappeared from the display boards, inexplicably. She insisted on me getting some verification.

I line up at the JAL counter. I was the third or fourth in line, but the line was not moving. Eventually I was able to grab the attention of a JAL person outside of the counters, and had her confirm that my flight was cancelled. And the travel agent on the phone went to look for replacement tickets. Meanwhile, I stay in the line at JAL counter. 

While I was on the phone, the physical line I was in was barely moving. The agents at the counters had to call someone and talk a lot, before anything could be done. And, incredibly, the man in the line immediately in front of me was there to get his boarding pass issued, because he did not know how to check in on his phone — he behaved as if he’s never heard of such a thing before. During the more than half an hour in line, he tried unsuccessfully to look into the phone check-in process.

Eventually the findings of our remote travel agent were that many of the seemingly available tickets were not really available, because the underlying carrier of them all was JAL, which wasn’t reporting the correct flight statuses online yet. On other airlines a business class ticket, with a connection, would cost me, or my company, an extra $16,000+, and they wanted me to say it was OK. I wasn’t sure it was OK. An economy class ticket would be some half of that, which was too dear also. I said no.

Finally I was served at the JAL counter. The agent found my reservation, made several calls (most were not connected successfully), and after a long time, came back to tell me that since my tickets were bought with American Airlines (AA) flight number, I had to go to them to resolve it.

After some wandering around the terminal, I found that there were American counters, but they were closed. There were a couple of men there, apparently not on behalf of AA. I talked to one of them, and was reassured that the counters were closed for the day.

I found AA’s phone number online and called them. They were extra busy, the automated system said, due to some weather conditions (probably in the US). I was given the option of either holding the line or having them call me back. I chose the former, and was dropped soon after that. 

My new phone was dropping calls from time to time, for different reasons. Once my call was dropped and I was not allowed to dial again, because my phone was “not registered”, meaning international roaming was not activated. And at other times calls were dropped when I was working with the phone, such as trying to turn on the screen to search for my prior reservation info, or to turn off the screen to save battery. A day later I started to suspect that maybe the power button was programmed to hang up the phone. And some 5 days later I found a way to turn that off. 

In any case, I called back and agreed to have the AA system call me back. The system told me it would be 48 to 57 minutes, or something like that. When AA system did eventually call me back, I was on the phone talking to our travel agency. I tried to switch to the incoming call, but resulted in dropping the travel agent without picking up the AA call. And they never called back.

During all this time a couple of things helped me a lot. One is a power-bank my son gave me. It didn’t have enough power to charge my phone completely, but it did charge it from almost empty to half way, while keeping it running for an hour non-stop. The other is a wired headpiece. In the noisy airport, with people yapping around me and the PA system going on from time to time, it gave me a much clearer and consistent sound, while also made using the phone as a note taker a lot easier.

With one phone call after another, it finally was nearly 10 pm, or 9 am US Eastern time. By this time our normal travel agents were on duty, and the effect was vastly positive. For one thing, they knew our system, and asked for my Core-ID, instead of my birth date etc. For another, they volunteered to call AA for me. And thirdly, they worked as a team. When my call was dropped and I called back, I didn’t have to start from scratch. They would know who I was and what the previous agents had done for me. This was such a time saver.

After a long time, an agent found a ticket for me. Because this was through AA, I didn’t have to pay for a new ticket. I gave them my OK to issue the ticket. After some more long wait, it was done. I’d leave the next day, at 1 pm, to fly home via London, on a British Airways flight. I was elated. By now it was about 10:45 pm. I asked if they could book me a hotel. The agent told me that the nearest she could find was one near Tokyo Disney. I asked her to book it for me. She apologized to me for not having something nearer. I assured her that I was grateful that she could find anything at all, considering the number of people stranded here.

By this time all the shops have closed in the airport already, and the security checkpoint was closing as well. When the “doors” of the security checkpoint came down, they formed a solid looking wall, blending nicely with the walls of the check-in hall, and giving people who had the (mis-)fortune to watch it happen such a hopeless feeling. There was no way out of Japan through Narita anymore for the night.

It was drizzling outside, and not cold. A long line was formed at the taxi stand, more than 100 meters (or yards) long. The line moved forward from time to time, not due to people being picked up by taxis, but due to attrition. I waited for about thirty minutes, during which time only one taxi showed up. There were a few other taxis, but they were in the private cars lane, apparently to pick up particular people they were in contact with. I searched Uber and Lyft. Uber suggested Uber Black, a special service that I had never heard before, that would cost me $800 to $1000 US to get to my hotel 59 km away (less than 40 miles). I could have paid for it out of my own pocket, but I decided against it. This was highway robbery to me!

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People sleeping on the floor of Narita Airport, Oct. 25, 2019

I went inside the terminal, and saw that majority of the people there had gotten sleeping bags. I inquired about it, found the place where sleeping bags were distributed — no more sleeping bags were being given out, and nobody was apparently working on it any more.

For a place to crash, I found an unmarked hallway behind the shops, leading to a pair of restrooms. There were other people there too, but there was enough room left for me. Chatter from people gradually died down as the night deepened. The only loud noise was a PA going about every 10 minutes, saying in 3 languages (Japanese, English, Chinese) that all transportation out of Narita had ceased, and ending with a “thank you” for no apparent reason. There being a pair of restrooms, every time someone moved, or maybe the light flickered, a small loudspeaker on the wall would announce, in Japanese and English, “This is the toilet. Follow along the wall to the right for the men’s toilet. Follow along the wall to the left for the women’s toilet.” But fortunately I was able to get some water to drink from the restrooms sink — not easily, as when I withdrew my hands to stick my water bottle under the faucet the water shut off very quickly. 

After about half an hour, the PA content changed. They got more sleeping bags, and they had some crackers and water to give out. I went and got myself a sleeping bag, a packet of “Disaster Preparedness Cracker”, and a bottle of drinking water. The cracker was too sweet for me, but I kept it for memory’s sake.

2019 Emergency Cracker
“Disaster Preparedness Cracker”

I was able to sleep on the floor of Narita airport, for about 3-4 hours.


I believed then, and I still do now, that JAL computer system broke down on the afternoon of October 25. But they blamed it on the heavy rain, which doubtlessly relieved them from a huge financial liability. Here I list the indications to show otherwise.

  1. All of their counters and kiosks were closed. At the same time, other airlines were mostly operating. Was the rain particularly heavy on JAL?
  2. All their flight check-ins were shown to be “temporarily closed” on the airport’s display boards. And no other airlines displayed this message.
  3. No delays or cancellations were shown. Even for those flights whose scheduled time had passed.
  4. Eventually they started processing some flights, but only one by one, such as flights to San Diego and Vancouver. They never displayed these on the display board. Instead, they had people walking around the airport with tablets displaying these flights. And they put the message through the PA system. This clearly showed these procedures were processed by hand.
  5. When the system came back alive, it was a complete revival. All flights with the “check-in temporarily closed” status were changed to something else at the same time.

One Day in Tokyo Narita Read More »

It’s Complicated

In 2015, Prof. Kishore Mahbubani of the National University of Singapore gave a very provocative speech at the Harvard University’s Institute of Politics.

The view points expressed in this speech are very different from those we hear in the press, from politicians or pundits in the United States. They are different from expressed opinions in the US from the left or the right. They are different from expressed opinions in the US from the intelligentsia or from the general populace. The speech is a breath of fresh air. Unfortunately, it did not stir up a thing in the still air that is the political discourse of the United States.

In this speech, he discussed three issues:

  1. What are China’s goals and aspirations as it tries to emerge and rise?
  2. How does the relationship between the US and China influence the rise of China?
  3. How China behaves as #1 will be strongly influenced by how America behaves as #1.

I’m afraid I can’t quite take the first question very seriously. After all, how can a country have goals and aspirations? If by that he meant those of its leaders, wouldn’t that suffer changes when its leadership changes? To wit, see how the US positions on everything changed when president Trump came to office, or every once in a while while he is in  office.

So I’d remove that point, and add one from the Q&A section, to make up another three. And let me skip the questions and jump to the conclusions:

  1. The rise of China from number two economy to number one economy is a probable event in the foreseeable future.
  2. It is in the best interests of the United States and rest of the world to maintain and enhance the international institutions.
  3. China has no intention of exporting its own ideology or government system.

If China’s growth didn’t slow down around 2014, it would have become #1 economy by now. On the other hand, India is not catching up any time soon.

OK. This issue #3 is very much in the same vein as the original #1. It talks about intention. Which is illusive. But beyond making up a triple, I also happen to have a couple of points to make. But let me discuss these items in turn.

First, how probable is the rise of China to #1 in the world, and in what time frame? According to Prof. Mahbubani, it should happen just about now (since his talk was given about 5 years ago), or maybe 5 years from now. But taking the World Bank’s numbers, and project forward rather pessimistically, we get that China’s economy should surpass that of the US by 2040, if China’s grows at a compound annual rate of 4%, and that of the US grows at 2%. This projected date changes to 2033 if the two rates are changed to 6% and 3% respectively.

But that’s just numerical projection. Chinese official policy has vacillated between promoting or suppressing private enterprises. What does that matter? To me, a private enterprise, especially one with competition, has to chase profit. Therefore, its investments are in areas it anticipates to have real demand. Unless there is fraud. One former CEO of my company (in its former self) is still being wanted for committing fraud. The fraud he’s accused of is to sell products to nobody, in order to create the illusion of profits, especially predictable profit growth. On the other hand, a government-owned enterprise can exist without a profit motive. And it can fraud at a bigger scale. And can do it with impunity. That’s why the GDP figures from China are somewhat fluffy. And the marginal rate of return for new investments is quite low. I’m not saying that I can give a projection of China’s GDP, or its growth. I can’t.

On the second point (according to my summary), I can readily agree with Prof. Mahbubani. In international affairs the US has been behaving quite irrationally, and sometimes capriciously, and it’s not good for the US or the world at large. I actually think that there is a grave mistake in the way the country’s government is setup. While there is plenty of check-and-balance in the arena of domestic policy, there is none, legally, in international policy.

On the third point, there is actually historical evidence pointing to China actively export its ideology to other countries, particularly southeast Asia and Latin America. This was mostly before the Cultural Revolution. Hopefully it has changed.

But the biggest problem I have with Prof. Mahbubani’s speech is his benevolent assumption that all economical growths and forms are good. History is not as kind. For example, German GDP grew significantly under Hitler. You may point out, and rightfully so, that he was the appointed leader in a democracy, and it I’d agree. But he did dismantle the democratic institutions and became a dictator. Now I’m not saying that the current condition in China is comparable to that of Germany before and during WWII. But someone in China is seemingly afraid of such a comparison. The example I have is that when I wrote a blog entry entitled Auschwitz, it cannot be transmitted via the Chinese social media app WeChat, unless I avoid using that word in the title. The content of the blog entry had nothing to do with current politics, or China. But the word in the title is too sensitive.

So what am I saying about Prof. Mahbubani’s speech? I like it being different from everything one regularly hears in the US media. I agree with some of his observations, especially about the US government’s hypocrisies. But I do not agree with some of his assumptions, or conclusions. It’s complicated.

It’s Complicated Read More »

A Chance Encounter

Yesterday my dissertation adviser came over to visit with me, with his 10 years old grandson in tow. We had lunch at a restaurant across from the Stony Brook Railroad Station. While we were eating, in came a black woman who sat at the next table. She asked whether I could order lunch for her. I told her that the servers could speak English. She said no, she wanted me to buy her lunch. Okay, I said, finally understanding her meaning.

When I first came over to the United States, an American roommate told me that I should not give cash to beggars, but I’d much better give food. For with money, they could potentially buy drugs, and that would not be what I wished for. But food could not be changed for anything illicit. In this case, for me to buy her lunch, I thought, would be quite reasonable. Only that I’ve never seen, nor heard of something like this.

So there we were, the three of us, eating and chatting, while she ate by herself at a nearby table. When she was done, she stood up, gave me a deep bow, said pleasantry loudly to everybody in the restaurant, and proceeded to leave. The server chased after her to hand her the check, and both she and I gestured for the server to hand the check to me. The check was for $13.52. In this restaurant many dishes were more than that, some quite a bit more! In other words, she was very disciplined when ordering food. I was quite touched!

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At a park nearby, where we went after lunch 🙂

A Chance Encounter Read More »

Auschwitz

It was not easy to go to Auschwitz, emotionally. We knew of holocaust, knew of the scale of the killing, and the method, and even of the entrance gate marked with the slogan “Arbeit macht frei” (work sets you free). But to brave it all, and to be reminded of the depth of human bestiality where it happened, was an emotional journey of a completely different level.

Coming to pick us up from a hostel near where we lived was Conrad, a friendly young man with a Western History degree, and a superb command of English. He drove a small van that can sit about eight passengers, and we made two more stops in Krakow to pick up others. It turned out that Conrad was going to be our guide for the day as well.

DSCF5542When we arrived at Auschwitz, we met the other people of our guided tour. They came from the UK, probably as a part of a multi-day tour—in contrast, the few of us who came with Conrad only booked this day-trip from Krakow. Now we had a group of about 30 in total. Fortunately for the Auschwitz I part, which is run as a museum, we each got a radio receiver which could be dialed into Conrad’s channel, and as such we could hear him clearly without having to be close to him, or for him to raise his voice in order to be heard. This is a good thing. His voice was subdued, due to the solemn nature of the topic, and the place, even with hundreds of people, was quite silent. This is where tens of thousands of people died.

We saw stats. We saw pictures, of the camp, the people, and the running of the camp. We saw where people were housed (crammed), treated medically (not for cure but for medical experiments), and imprisoned (this even inside a concentration camp!), and killed, either in small groups in front of an execution wall, or en masse in a gas chamber. We saw piles and piles of shoes, glasses, and suitcases left by the killed, but the most heart-wrenching sight was the pile of human hair. When the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, they found seven tons of human hair. Apparently they were shaved from people who had just been gassed to death, for the purpose of making some kind of cloth. It’s such a despicable act, people don’t even kill the sheep in order to harvest their wool! Then I realized that I was totally wrong. Nazis didn’t kill for financial gain; that was only a byproduct. Killing was the goal. It was the “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Question”.

DSCF5550The museum tour at Auschwitz took about an hour and a half. After a quick break, we rode the vans to Auschwitz II/Birkenau. We could use the time to grab a bite, but Conrad apparently didn’t eat anything, and I decided to abstain as well.

The Auschwitz II/Birkenau concentration camp is massive. And in this part of the tour we didn’t have radio communications any more. Unfortunately the place was huge, and we were often stragglers of the group, due to my wife’s health condition, and struggled much to try to catch up with the group.

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A “shooting wall” in Auschwitz I, where many people were executed in small groups. On the right side of this wall is Block 11, the prison inside the camp. There, Franciscan friar Father Maximilian Kolbe volunteered his life in place of another man, and was given a deadly injection after the punishment of hunger and thirst for two weeks. He was canonized by Pope John Paul II.

Auschwitz II/Birkenau is a purposefully designed place to kill people in larger quantities and efficiently. People freshly off the trains were sorted by the SS, where children, women, the old, and the sick, were marched to the gas chambers at the end of the rail line, and gassed in large gas chambers, up to 15,000 a day. It’s truly unfathomable that people can repeatedly commit mass murders, using a cheap and streamlined method, day in and day out. And they did this mostly not for what the victims had done, but for what they were. Jews. Gypsies. Homosexuals. Jehovah’s witnesses.

How can some human beings be so evil? How can we tell that some living among us are not just like them, waiting for the right moment to jump out and do the evil deeds? How can we be sure that enough people have learned this lesson, and will come forward to stop the next Hitler? It’s scary to reflect that we do not have clear answers to any of these questions.

Coming to Auschwitz and reflecting upon these questions made me more humble. Humans can be noble, yet when they are villainous, they can be worse than any other animal!

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Birgit

With the meeting yesterday ended early, I was looking for something to kill time. Hopefully something local, and outdoors. I asked my friends from China whether I could give them a ride back to their hotel, as they didn’t have a car. No, that was not necessary. Their landlady was on her way to the meeting place to pick them up already. Then I had the idea to ask her. She’s perfectly local, and, from the brief encounter with her the night before, when she came to the restaurant to pick my friends up, I knew that she spoke English quite well.

Birgit wasn’t really their landlady, as I later found out. The farm/hotel/restaurant, established by her great grandfather, passed on to her brother some fifteen years ago, but she did help out when she could, even though officially she’s not really associated with it. And it was she who answered the phone call from China, when my friends called to ask whether they could rent bikes to ride to meeting. The roads, she told them, were not convenient for bike riding, but she could drive them to the meeting place in the morning, and pick them up in the afternoon, for both days, for free. She could even go pick them up from the local train station. So they took her up on her offer.

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A watch tower at Franken Berg, seen from the main tower.

When I finally maneuvered my car out of the patch of mud holes on the side of a small road acting as an unofficial overflow parking lot, Birgit and my friends were standing in the middle of the road waiting for me. It turned out she was thinking of showing them the Frankenstein castle, and she offered the extra seat in her car to me. I gladly accepted. Reputed as the castle that inspired the Frankenstein story, I was intrigued.

The castle, named Franken Berg, is very close to where we were. Unlike the Heidelberg castle, this one was built as a military outpost, not a noble residence, she told me. The German words for the two concepts are different, though both became “castle” when translated into English. In German, the former is a Berg, while the later a Schloss. The Franken Berg was built in 1200s or 1300s, she conjectured, and was damaged during WWII. Owned by a private party, there is no entrance fee, except during Halloween time, when they put up a good scare. Family-friendly events are held in the day, when mildly scary scenes are put up for the entertainment of the kids, but the more scary stuff are reserved for the adults, in the night. Ghosts may come out of nowhere to grab you, and once in a while a lucky guest is put in a casket, and people would cheer and celebrate when the lid is closed.

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As the Berg is by definition not that extensive, we covered it rather quickly, and had time to spare. Birgit suggested that we go visit a rock formation near her place. For that I’d better drive, following her car. So that’s what I did. We drove on roads that were one lane wide, but shared with vehicles coming the other way, some of them big bad farming equipment with menacing sharp appendages hung about them. The only sensible thing to do, when one of those came our way, was to quickly spot a place where the shoulder of the road looked more friendly, get our cars over as quickly as possible, and wait patiently for it to slowly move over. In the small towns we passed by the situation was hardly any better, where the roads, often designed just barely wide enough for bi-directional traffic, were commonly sprinkled with cars parked on the sides, with one set of their wheels on the sidewalk.

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Birgit’s family farm is rather expansive. Its sheep barn is large enough to contain quite comfortably the little hotel I was staying at. There were dozens of sheep and almost as many lambs, mostly a few weeks old, but with one of them with its umbilical cord still hanging under her. All of the sheep were ear-tagged, including the baby lambs, who wore baby-sized tags, red for the girls, and blue for the boys. The lambs would be raised on the farm, until they were large enough to be served as dinner, she said.

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The stone formation in Felsenmeer is right behind the farm, on the other side of the hill. She used to walk up this hill nearly daily, when she was young, but this time she drove us up. Legend has it that two giants held grudges, and hurled these boulders, against each other, and one could still hear them brawl if one listened carefully. Felsenmeer stones were discovered and made use of during Roman times. On one piece of stone we could see tool marks, while another piece was an already-finished column, abandoned for some reason. The stone column was meant for Trier, only some three hour’s drive away, plus a few months in ancient times. Many years ago we visited Trier, I told Birgit, and saw quite a few Roman ruins, including the Roman Bridge, and Porta Negra.

We came down the hill on the same steep winding road that we went up, that was one lane wide but allowed two-way traffic, and that was a private road such that you drive on it at your own risk with the government having no part of it, and sat for dinner in their restaurant. At first we sat outside, in what they called the beer-garden. But the temperature was going down fast, and not far from us a big truck came by to spread manure. It dawned on us that the inside was much more attractive.

Birgit couldn’t find a menu in English, and felt obligated to translate the whole menu for us. Poor thing! This menu was ten times more extensive than the one in the hotel I stayed with. I tried to follow her translation to see if I could save a few key words in my memory bank, but came to the conclusion that the leaky nature of this particular memory bank and the low frequency of potential recall made this endeavor quite futile. She ordered the food for us, including an alcohol-free beer for me as I had to drive back to my hotel. But in spite of the insistence of my friends, she would not eat with us. She had to go home in a reasonable hour to eat with her children, before turning in early in order to get up early for her work, which would be from two in the morning to eleven thirty. She has two boys, fifteen and eight years old, and they could prepare dinner while she showered and took off her makeup. The dinner would be simple, sausages plus a green salad. She would not have my friends pay for her meal there as it’s a family business and she normally gets to eat for free. Etc.

How many hours a week does she have to work? Nine and a half, including a 45 minute break. As a single mother she’s got privileges, such as the reduced work hours, and a choice of the time slot to work. Fortunately the older boy could feed the younger one in the morning and send him off on the school bus. And after school the younger one could stay in an after-school care program for a few hours. They spoke English well, partly from her teaching, she said. They were also learning Spanish in school. As for herself, she learned English from school, the very same one that her kids went later, and used English at work. Her work was at the duty-free store in Frankfurt airport, but in Terminal 1, instead of the smaller Terminal 2 I was going to depart from.

She’d been to many international destinations, including New York. But she would really like to go to China. To see the Great Wall, among other things. How far is the Great Wall from Beijing? The great wall is very long, and only some sections are close to Beijing, I said. Yes–isn’t it like so many thousands of kilometers long? She asked. I had no idea. She said proudly that she learned about it in school. I didn’t, but I didn’t have the courage to say it.

There was one small embarrassing moment in the restaurant after we said goodbye to Birgit. I wanted to use the restroom, but that word did not elicit any response. Nor did WC, man’s room or washroom. Feeling that maybe hearing me more closely could help, the two ladies at the counter came up to me, which made me feel quite uncomfortable, due to the nature of the business at hand. After a few dreadfully long seconds that felt like an eternity, I finally came up with the word “toilet”, which I knew was the correct word the moment I thought of it. It is used this way in many languages in the old world, but is not used in the new world in that sense. The place I was looking for was right there, outside a set of double doors, and down a couple of flights of stairs. There was even an elevator, I eventually realized.

Back at my hotel, I found the lady manager cum cook in the restaurant. We smiled at each other, and she told me that she was wearing the white apron, which was good for the kitchen but not the office. This was mostly understood through gestures instead of words. I said that she must now change her hat, which she didn’t understand. After the change of attire, or the removal of the apron, we concluded our business quickly, with her happy that I paid so much, and I happy that I paid so little. She asked if I were to move to the city the next day. No, I would fly away. New York? No, Moscow and Beijing. Putin? She said. No, I knew him but he didn’t know me, I said. But that did not produce any comprehension, apparently. I gave up. Moscow and? Beijing. She was puzzled. China, I said. It still didn’t work. Chine. A young lady in the back of the office turned and said. Ah, Chine. I really should have known. Where is Beijing in China? It’s the capital. That word should be easily understood by Germans–Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital, and at least in English, it’s the same word! She gave me a card and a brochure, and wishes I’d stay with them again if I came to this area again. I smiled at her, and thought of Birgit’s family’s hotel. A half hour’s drive, and a world apart. How I missed clear verbal communication! I knew the problem was completely on my side, but now I also knew there was an easy way out, and that’s not learning German.

Back when we were on the rampart of Franken Berg, Birgit pointed out the direction of Frankfurt, somewhere far away behind the trees, the city of Darmstadt, and the haze. From there, many years ago, a young lady came to Beijing to study, and became the first foreigner I got to know by myself. It’s she who taught me that the correct term is Frankfurt am Main, as there is another Frankfurt in Germany, in what was then East Germany. Despite of the two governments, there was but only one Germany. She believed, and therefore I believed, years before it came true again in form. My eyes fogged up. Wherever you are now, 贝尼尼, I hope you are well!

(Written on 3/17/2017)

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Heidelberg

It has been more than 20 years since I was last in Germany. But last time I was never in this part of Germany, and I did not drive. Besides, I have not driven a manual shift car for a couple of years.

It took the car a couple of tries to remind me how to get a manual shift car started. And when I finally did get it started, it moved the wrong way, going forward instead of backward. The car beeped at me, for getting too close to the wall. My first manual shift car, which I’m the most used to, had a “standard H” configuration, with the reverse gear in the lower right corner. This car had six forward gears, and you have to use a lever to get into reverse.

Once I got out of the airport, the fun started. Very quickly, I was on the Autobahn A5, and I got up to 160 km/h (100 mph) on some stretches of the road. I’d done 110 mph in the States, but that was in the dead of the night, in the middle of nowhere, on a stretch of road that’s completely empty, except for myself, and the policeman who caught me. But A5 on a work day is full of traffic, and that made this experience very enjoyable. Not only I passed many cars, but I was also a very polite and gentlemanly driver, moving to the right to let others pass whenever I could. The road was super smooth, especially near the Frankfurt airport. Traveling alone has its drawbacks. For this drive I really would have liked to switch to my sun glasses, which was right next to me, in my computer bag, inside its case. But with the constant traffic, I decided to go without. The GPS, while far from perfect, helped out a lot, as it spoke reasonably good English.

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Heidelberg, seen from the Castle

My first day of business starts tomorrow, so today I am just here to relax and to get over the jet lag. I have a whole half day to kill, and I wasn’t going to let it go to waste. Besides, they say that the best way to fight jet lag is to stay outdoors, especially if there is sun out. So I went to Heidelberg. This is the nearest small town that was highly regarded in online reviews.

My first problem, after getting into Heidelberg, was that I did not know where to find parking. So I just stopped in front of a random building, which turned out to be a tourist information center. I went in and asked, and was directed to somewhere that I wasn’t sure how to get to. Fortunately, after a couple of the seemingly wrong turns, I got there and parked my car. And then I found out that the parking place, an underground parking garage, required payment in cash. It took me a few tries to find somebody to direct me to an ATM machine, as it seemed that ATM is not the correct term in this part of the world, and most people did not react to it. Come to think about it, it might have worked better if I pronounced the letter A as Ah, the way Germans would, but unfortunately I came to this idea one day too late.

After some wandering around town, where there is a university, and a large pedestrian district, I got myself a lunch in an Italian restaurant :P. The food was quite alright, but it was super salty. I used part of my water to wash off the creamy cheese sauce in the spaghetti.

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Next stop was the famous Heidelberg Castle. I was smart enough to find a place to buy the ticket before getting to the castle, as the ticket for the castle included a ride on the funicular. Except that the funicular was closed down for annual maintenance. In its place there was a bus service, but then the bus had a minor accident, when somebody bumped its rear-right lights off, so we wasted a good twenty minutes or so, and had to walk the rest of the way.

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Frederick’s building, Heidelberg Castle. This is the only building in the Castle that was restored, although some other buildings are currently in use.

I asked for the guided tour, which was highly recommended in TripAdvisor reviews, but it turned out that my timing was not quite right, and the next tour in English was to start in more than an hour. So I went in without. After quite a while, I saw some visitors with audio guides. I had to get back out, and go across the street to rent it, I was told, when I asked for that. I did that anyway and I was lightened by €5, which was quite worth it.

The Heidelberg castle was quite large, and it is in a state of deep dilapidation–on purpose in the latter years. There are stories of romance related to it. One of them involved an English princess by the name of Elizabeth. She came over as the young wife of the Elector Palatine, and was Queen of Bohemia briefly, when her husband Frederick became the “Winter King”. Another involved Goethe in his sixties and a young poet by the name of Marianne von Willemer. A very nice verse by Goethe was narrated in the audio guide, and here is a version of it that I found afterwards:

Still may the cypresses confess
To thee, the water leaping, flowing,
From Zuleika to Zuleika
Is my coming, and my going.

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Elizabeth Gate, Heidelberg Castle

After the Castle trip I decided to walk down to the city and to the parking place, which probably was a mistake. I had a picture of the place on my phone, and most people could readily recognize it. But finding it was a different matter. Most people directed me to the correct direction, but one lady actually directed me 180° wrong, and a couple of other ladies just did not know the way. They were all very friendly, though.

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Wine Barrel, Heidelberg Castle. Reputed to be the largest barrel in the world to have been filled with wine.

Getting to the hotel in the evening was troublesome, because I had to fight rush hour traffic–manual shift is painful to use in stop-and-go traffic. Besides, jet lag was finally catching up with me. Once there I found that the lady on duty was also part cook, and did not speak much English. Still her English was much better than my by now basically non-existent German. And when one’s language facilities are restricted, one can be quite inventive in how to use it: “This key is for door #1; this key is for door #2”, she said, effectively. There was no lion nor lady behind either one, it turned out. Door #1 was for an outer door to the rooms, which is left open during the day. Door #2 was my room’s door. She also promised me that she made a great soup, which I made sure that I ordered for dinner, in addition to something that was a specialty of another cook. The soup was OK, only slightly too sweet for my taste, but the corned-beef-with-vegetable roll turned out way too salty, and a side dish of “dumplings” was rather tasteless. I cannot give the proper names to these dishes, because the menu was completely in German. The restaurant also preferred to be paid in cash, but I have run out by this time, so they agreed to add the bill to my room bill, to be paid for with a credit card. I really did not expect that so many businesses don’t take credit cards today. I’ve been spoiled in the US, I guess.

(Written on the night of March 14. Revised on March 15 and 16.)

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9-11: One More Thing We Could Learn

Another September 11. Another opportunity to reflect upon that tragic day, and the turbulent time since.

I do not directly know of anyone who died in WTC on that day in 2001. But I did have a former classmate who told me a harrowing tale about evacuating from another WTC building that day and walking miles to safety. And I had a neighbor who was serving on FDNY and missed worked that day due to family reasons, which could very well have saved his life.

But here I’m talking about something else. I’m talking about the safety of the rest of us. This is triggered by the story of Rick Rescorla and Daniel Hill. Somehow the two of them foresaw the terrorist attacks on WTC, both by truck bomb and, later, by airplane. The key is to see things from a terrorist’s eye. Somehow I missed these stories until today. And I only got to hear them through WeChat, a Chinese social media app.

Something I felt deeply years ago came back to me. Something similar to what Rescorla and Hill felt. That sense of knowing that there is something we know the terrorists would do. That sense of knowing that there are things we can use to protect us. And that sense of helplessness when our government is not doing enough to protect us.

It was Independence Day, 2005. We were celebrating on the National Mall, with a gazillion people. Security was tight, this being only a few years after 9-11. We got into the security perimeter in the morning, with bags checked and people scanned. The security perimeter was large, enclosing the entirety of the Mall, including the Smithsonian building, Natural History Museum, etc. The traffic patterns were changed, with no street parking nearby. And the nearby subway stations, such as those at Smithsonian, Federal Triangle, National Archive etc., were all closed. People trickled in all day, through early evening.2005-july-dc-wait-for-fireworks

We had a good time. The music was great. The fireworks started and ended at the precise hours and minutes as scheduled and published in the newspapers. Then the mass exodus from the Mall started. Remember, there was no bus, no cars, and no subway near the Mall.

We walked to the nearest subway station that was open, possibly Waterfront. It was the most crowded place we’ve ever been to in the US. People were packed standing on the platforms.

Right then and there I realized that were I a terrorist, I could simply make some big noise, or smoke, or some other commotion, and a pandemonium would ensue. Especially if I timed it with the coming of a train.

And worse yet, I could have with me a gun, or a bomb. Not only the station itself was outside the security perimeter, the trains were all coming from unsecured stations.

What we observed:

  • People arrive at very different times. But most leave at the same time.
  • It’s hard to mount an attack inside the security perimeter, but it’s very easy to do so outside of it. And the crowded Metro stations were perfect locations for it.
  • And from the terrorist’s point of view, it’s easy to plan. The schedule was public info, and its adherence was perfect.

What we decided to do as a family:

  • Avoid holiday celebrations at important landmarks.
  • Avoid venues known to be packed.

But thinking a little more today, when I was preparing this blog in my head, I realized that there are things our government could do to make us all safer. I don’t know if they are listening, but I sure hope they are (supposedly they are scanning all of the Internet, which is completely legal):

  • Do not close the Metro stations by the Mall completely. Instead, allow people to leave from them, at least and especially around the time when the fireworks end.
  • Allow only completely empty and secured trains to stop at these stations to pick up passengers.

Be safe. Be vigilant.

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