mf.rox

I’ve had a soft spot for him ever since he choked up when attending a performance by children with AIDS in Henan.

Here’s an article about him.  It’s from a Chinese site, but I think it accurately reflects the way people feel about him:

Emotional Premiere moves China amid quake effort 

On a more goofy note, a lot of girls have a “thing” for him.  I’ve read there are Web tributes to him with pictures of him as a young man, and captions like, “He could have been a model!”  He is a cute little guy.  I wonder if he is a Cantonese person, or Hakka?

Oh — and OTHER neighbors are fighting now.  They might be the ones upstairs.  I just heard the clanking of a thrown pot.

I swear, what that lady gets mad, she sounds like an angry chicken. I don’t think I could bear it.

I can’t get a good Internet connection either, whether by wireless or ADSL.

Tonight I ordered something from Hello Pizza, and when the deliveryman got here, all of a sudden he started telling me about how he is from Szechuan, near where the earthquake hit, and how he has not been able to get in touch with his family to see if they are okay. What could I say? I felt really bad for him. He was really young, like nineteen, and seemed like a really nice guy. I just told him that I hoped they were all okay. He said that all the phone lines are out near his hometown, and that is why he hasn’t been able to call them. I just told him again that I hoped they were all okay, and that my university was having a benefit activity which I would contribute money to tomorrow. (There are three donation collection points in my school, but I didn’t know how to say that.)

Last I saw, the death toll is close to 15,000. There is one town of 9,000 where only 2,500 people are accounted for, and half of those are seriously injured.

Good luck, pizza man’s family!

I was excited to see it, which makes me feel guilty because it relates to such an unhappy event. In another tidbit, the reporter paraphrased what I said, which is a no-no in American journalism.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/7397445.stm

Thousands (millions?) of spooked toads left rivers entered the streets in Taizhou, Jiangsu. I can’t post the photo, but here’s a link: toads

Here’s one of a collapsed building in Wenchuan, which was the city most affected.

Yikes!

(They had found my photo on Flickr.)

EDIT: I just talked to a woman named Olivia who asked me about the quake and my photograph. They may put several photos of the quake aftermath on BBC Interactive, and she asked me for permission to use mine. I said yes, of course.

Robbiegrob has some good pictures of people being evacuated in Xi’an.

Here’s a picture of a cracked apartment building in Lanzhou. Look at the far right of the building.

Earthquake evacuation.

Originally uploaded by MFinChina

We felt the Szechuan earthquake here this afternoon at about 2:45. Actually, I was at the dentist and didn’t feel anything, so when I came out, I was puzzled about why so many people were standing around, looking up at the buildings. At first I thought it was a fire or someone threatening to jump, but I didn’t see anything. Then I asked someone, and they said there was an earthquake! For the next half hour or so I stood around in the park on Zunyi Lu with several thousand people who had been evacuated from their offices or didn’t dare go home. At one point, some clouds moved quickly in the sky, in back of a tall building, giving it the appearance of swaying. Some people panicked, and ther was a stampede of like one hundred people who ran in the opposite direction. One girl fell down. Nothing else bad happened here, other than not being able to get a phone connection because too many people were dialing out at the same time. Not everyone was so lucky, though. Apparently several thousand people were killed (or are currently missing) close to the epicenter.

I went to Dog Man’s yesterday only to find out he had given Hui Hui away.  His reasoning was that when Hui Hui got old enough to be interested in female dogs, it would cause a lot of trouble.  Right now two of the dogs in our neighborhood are in heat, and it’s been causing quite a bit of chaos.  So anyway, he gave him away to someone who wanted a dog to guard the gate of their house.  Unfortunately, I never took any pictures of Hui Hui — I did take like two, but they were no good, so I deleted them.  Bye bye, Hui Hui!  I’ll always remember your lopsided little face with the sticky-up, wiry little hairs!

The slogan at the top of the page comes from a Russian spam I got today.

A page from a Vietnamese bootleg Batman comic, posted by Ethan Persoff on www.ep.tc.

I must admit whenever I hear about someone I was friends in with the past but had a falling out with, I want to hear that they have failed at everything they’ve done.  When I see they have been successful in any way I feel angry and bitter.  That’s bad.

I’ve had about enough of people telling me how unhappy I’m going to be when I move back to the US, how I’m going to freak out and have culture shock, etc. I don’t need to hear that! Why would anybody think that would be a good thing for me to hear? Do they think I haven’t worried about that already?

I’m also tired of people asking me a million questions about why I haven’t gotten everything totally arranged yet. Moving from one country to another is hard, that’s why, and I can’t wave a magic wand and get everything all done.

I had planned to send off three boxes of stuff today. That would have been the official start to my moving back to the United States. But today I woke up to this really incredible rain that has lasted all day so far. I can’t go get the boxes because they’d get wet, and I can’t go retrieve my drycleaning because that would get wet too. I guess this will have to wait until (I hope) tomorrow.

Congratulations to Kelly K. (formerly Kelly S.) on the birth of her new baby!

Unexpected piety at the supermarket.

Originally uploaded by MFinChina

I found this last week at my local Trust-Mart.

I haven’t written personal stuff in here for a long time. I guess it’s because the stuff I want to say is a little strange and I feel weird about saying it.

I’d like to explain a little about why I decided to leave China, and to leave it now.

To some degree, it’s because I’m feeling sort of flat. Nothing is exciting me here. My job isn’t challenging me right now either. I feel I need to so something new, learn something new, have something to work toward.

I was also sort of worried about the Olympics. I thought Chinese people had built it up unrealistically in their minds, expecting it to be this perfect thing that would gain accolades from all over the world. I expected that a lot of foreign media organizations would be nitpicky, focusing on all the little problems they saw, and that Chinese people would be surprised and angry about that. I guessed, because of my experience with Chinese people so far, that people would get really bitter about this, and it might affect the lives of foreigners here. We might be the target of resentment, or not be as welcome as we once were. Therefore, I thought that now might be a good time to leave. What with all the events in Tibet, the biased media coverage, the disruptions of the torch relay and the nationalistic feelings these things have stirred up here, it seems like I was right about that.

Thirdly, I have a feeling that it’s just time to go. This is what I feel weird about talking about. In a way, it’s a kind of “God told me to” feeling. I have this deep gut feeling that I am meant to leave China this summer. It reminds me of in DONNIE DARKO, when the teacher who is played by Noah Wylie, says something to him about “walking in God’s channel.” I feel like if am going to walk in God’s channel, and stay on the path I am supposed to be on, I need to leave China this summer.

I was goofing around on this dandy site called Oracleofbacon, and typed in Editor B’s name. It came up that he had three degrees of separation from Bacon. According to the site,

Editor B was in ‘Java Madness’ formerly titled ‘Coffee Madness’ (1995) with Kenneth Patrick Brady
Kenneth Patrick Brady was in Dead by Sunset (1995) (TV) with Ken Olin
Ken Olin was in Queens Logic (1991) with Kevin Bacon

If that’s true, because I was in several ROX episodes, I should have four degrees, and anyone else who knows me should have five!

I await confirmation from B to see if the first linkage is correct.

Apparently, during the 2000 primaries, a Bush operative (probably Karl Rove)  started a rumor that John McCain’s adopted daughter from Bangladesh was his “secret black lovechild”!

From:

“Highlight the torture and your brown daughter”

and

http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/000311.html 

Really.

These folks in Dharmsala are way more radical than the D. Lama.  I think it may be a mistake to present the Lama as the true representative of Tibetans now, considering what happened in March.