Graphic

Nope, not China.  Mexico, San Miguel de Allende, a couple of years ago.  But it looks kinda Chinese, yes?  What is that?

Shenzhen 3

So I guess the Times is on the hunt, or it's just that I'm noticing their China coverage (more, and especially here) because I'm about to go back.

What I think we need to get to is the ambiguity - the mix of massively good and massively bad.  Brand new and ancient.  International and intensely domestic.  Plural, and the Han people.

Over 90 percent of China, and one in five people on Planet Earth, is Han Chinese.  Not very ambiguous, and maybe not very important.  But it does catch the eye.

Shenzhen 2

There is more to the dark story of Shenzhen than the massive workplaces and the lives of their workers.  There is the fact, persuasively argued in a recent article in the Times, that the system responds at a level that America simply cannot match.

Margin Call Calling

All my stuff about the movie had moved over to my Facebook page, but this one - well, got to scream it out wherever I can.

JC Chandor, our wonderful son-in-law, was just nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

It's all him, and it couldn't happen to a better man.

Progress

I suppose the first thing you'd notice is the visa.  Back in my day - mid-'90's - a visa to China was a little hard to get, didn't last long, and when it came in it was a chop (a stamp, to you Yankees) and maybe a grid with some writing.

Now, my visa is slick, uncounterfeitable, high-tech.  It's for a year and multiple entries.  Came back in a week, using a travel agent less than a half-mile away.

The photo (from my Android) could be clearer, but I'm not sure I want it to be.  I suppose my entire life is in those numbers.  Oh, but wait... whatever data is there, it's known to the governments of the USA and the PRC.  Ay-ya.

Shenzhen

We used to laugh at this place, kind of a honky-tonk version of Hong Kong.  Now it's got 16 million people and its own dark signficance.  As complicated as the rest of the China story.  An example from This American Life:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/play_full.php?play=454

My first stop, after Shanghai, when I get over there.

Back to China

In 1994 I moved to China.  The first person is intentional.  My family came too, but they never really moved there - for them it was just a two-year stay, always looking back to America.  I don't recommend the mixture.

It was Hong Kong, actually, when HK wasn't legally China - under British law, in any event.  My beat was the PRC, plus the rest of East Asia.  Call it all China.  Really, it all is.

The family made it back, bless 'em.  As I've said here before, however, I died in Hong Kong in a typhoon in 1995.  Someone who looks like me did come back, and has played out this strange atonal coda for the last 15 years.

Though a set of coincidences I (or the guy who looks like me) is now going back, to Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, I hope Macau, then up to Changzhou and I hope Nanjing.  Nine days total, pretty much all business.  I'm told it will be different from the world I left behind, but I doubt it. All the promise was there in the '90's, just the buildings hadn't yet been built.  I think the smells will be overwhelmingly familiar, not strange.

And I'm sure the Star Ferry still runs.   When I dream, and live that life I never lived, I am usually on it, going back and forth, Kowloon to Honkers and back.  I keep leaving something on board that I fail to retrieve.

Kleos

An idea long gone.  A reputation so profound that it becomes the son's obligation to carry it on.  No modern counterpart.

Who's to say whether the smartest, the noblest, only lived long ago, and we are just in a long descent into mere survival.

Achilles chose death and glory.