January 10, 2008: Gifford says two true things about China.
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"There are nine cities in the United States with more than one million inhabitants. In China there are forty-nine. You can be traveling across China, arrive in a city that is twice the size of Houston, and think, I've never even heard of this place."
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"China does that to you. You go back to the United States or Europe, and people wonder why you're not jumping up and down with annoyance at some minor noise or irritation, and you look at them and think, What's your problem? We have such low thresholds of annoyance in our cozy Western world. (The danger is, though, that you also forget to fit back into Western ways of, say, road safety or table manners on returning to your homeland.)"
January 6, 2008: Chang on my favorite place in all of China
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"I came to like Dongguan, which seemed a perverse expression of China at its most extreme. Materialism, environmental ruin, corruption, traffic, pollution, noise, prostitution, bad driving, short-term thinking, stress, striving, and chaos: If you could make it here, you'd make it anywhere. . . . Dongguan is invisble to the outside world. Most of my friends in Beijing had passed through the city but all they remembered--with a shudder--were the endless factories and the prostitutes. I had stumbled on this secret world, one that I shared with seven million, or eight million, or maybe ten million other people. Living in Dongguan was like arriving in it for the first time, hurtling down the highway at seventy miles an hour, the scenery changing too fast to keep track of it. Dongguan was a place without memory."
January 6, 2008: Chang on the returning traveler
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"The ache of the traveler returning home is a classic theme in Chinese literature. One of the first poems a schoolchild learns, from the eighth century, is about a man who goes back to his village after a lifetime away, to find that he no longer belongs:
'I left home as a youth, and as an old man returned / My accent unchanged but my temples turned gray / The children see me but don't know who I am / Laughing, they ask where the stranger is from.'"
January 4, 2008: Tolstoy knows when he's out of tune
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"'I'm convinced that the Russians must either die or conquer,' he said, aware himself, as the others were, once the word had been spoken, that it was too rapturous and pompous for the present occasion and therefore awkward."
