Paul's blog

Chair

2008-02-21T17:32:00.000-08:00

Mathematics is a hard subject. Mathematics is a sedentary job. So, here comes my new chair, my Chinese New Year present to myself :).

My chair at home for comparison :).

Juno

2008-02-14T19:39:00.000-08:00

So I watched the movie Juno. Great movie.

I think a great movie is made of 50% driveling and 50% tension. 100% tension movie is unbearable and 100% driveling movie is shallow. Juno got it in this aspect.

What's more? It has its unique aestheticism. From words to music. The urban usage of words always brings life to a movie or TV show I think. Yes, urban but not verbal abuse. Like in "the office", we don't hate "that's what she said". "Freakin' cool" or "have a wicked time" adds much vividness to the characters.

One of my professors at UCSD is a guy from Chicago. He likes all sorts of bad jokes and urban languages. Maybe they should make him a film sometime.

I listened to Moldy Peach's album. Juno took the best I think. Anyone else but you is the best and let's see if I'll find any other good ones.

Finally, Juno is quite cynical which reminds me of myself. I've been staying at English dominating places too much so I haven't been able to radiate my cynicism very much. Well, maybe I should work on being cynical in English. (That's gonna be bad. My parents hate it when I'm being cynical.) Anyways, this line characterizes Juno and I would have totally said that in Chinese- Go Carol!

PS. Thanks for the Happy Chinese New Year note Allison. I had a special one-two midterms on one day :). How's this little movie appreciation post? What's the grade :)

Learning without knowing

2008-01-21T15:34:00.000-08:00

I was reading Bert's blog yesterday and a question in his post stuck in my head for 20 hours. (But unfortunately, the original post was in Chinese so most of you will not be able to read it and since blogspot is blocked in China, my Chinese-knowing friends won't be able to read my post...So, only our HK friends are left to read both posts.)

So Bert said when he was studying with HK kids, he discovered that they are very good at "using" the knowledge without understanding. In other words, there's a formula or something and Bert asks the question how we should look at the situation that students just use them without understanding why.

Another professor was talking to me about almost the same topic another day regarding a UCSD knot theory course. Traditionally, you are supposed to lay much mathematical foundation to the material and then teach the theory. Or that's what they did at Princeton. But here, another excellent professor (who also found me a lift to AMS meeting) somehow managed to teach the course "hand wavy" without getting much into the details.

First of all, if you want to survive or even thrive school, in my observable range, it is absolutely fine just being able to use anything they teach you. And the tests at HKU and UCSD are mostly brain-dead versions of how to use facts (with some UCSD graduate courses as exceptions). It may be a sad fact but it can only be the way it is especially for a math test. For one, most theorems etc. are too hard to reproduce in a test's time. It took some great mathematicians at least several years to prove them or even a lot of mathematicians hundreds of years to prove them so they are highly non-trivial. And we are not all that great. For another, asking to reproduce a proof is unfair in a way (but tests may never even be fair...) because that's more like a reciting competition rather than something more meaningful. So in the trade-off between theory and application, I guess it's more sensible to choose application over theory.

But is it good? I mean being able to use them is definitely better than not being able to use them. However, there are harms being able to only use them. Generally, when the circumstances change or you need to somehow change or develop something new, dabblers fail. If all people only know known conclusions, there will hardly be new knowledge. And the biggest discoveries are always fundamental, like all things fall at the same speed (with no air resistance etc.).

I always want to know why and knowing only the fact never satisfies me. It's not practical or good all times but I believe knowing why stands for being able to create and knowing only how stands for being able to duplicate.

Coke vs. teeth

2008-01-14T04:22:00.000-08:00

Health is a great deal in America. I thought people lived "naturally" in "the woods" (compared to building-covered Beijing, walking on a street in San Diego is like taking a stroll in a park in Beijing.) but people listen to science projects, etc. Ha, that's why all these biology, chemistry teacher get their funding.

Anyways, since the claim soda is bad for teeth started, the price of coke dropped. Then a friend and I decided to buy some pepsi.

I've always loved coke but I somehow forgot them since I got here.... Maybe the Chinese translation of Coco Cola is just too great or maybe I took five courses one quarter and didn't have time to think about drinking some coke :).

So before I went to buy some coke, someone told me, brush your teeth after you drink your coke. After I got the coke, two girls walking behind us in Vons commented, that's a lot of soda. Be careful about cavity. And one of them fell down in front of the "wet floor" sign. Hmm...It made me thinking: someone who takes that amount of care of herself that she falls down in front of wet floor signs would know coke is bad for teeth, I gotta know better than that! (Joking.)

So I got my coke, my chips and wish they do very little damage!

AMS meeting

2008-01-07T07:28:00.000-08:00

Annual American Math Society meeting is held at San Diego. So it seems not only bad things strike when I am here (such as the fire). Good things still happen :).

A very nice professor of mine, Justin Roberts from last quarter arranged another professor to pick me up from where I live which is very far from downtown to give me a lift to the convention center. (I feel bad I let such a great professor and a potential good friend down last quarter by taking 5 courses last quarter and not being able to perform my best after 3 hours of travailing over some other test. )

The only thing I found understandable is that I didn't understand anything. Well, it's reasonable because I haven't got to the level of knowing what their keyword meant. But that's OK. Time will take care of that.

I had lunch with them and who said math people are not fun. They make the same jokes everybody else does except someones with math stuff that I didn't understand. A post-doc felt sympathetic about confused Paul. So she talked to me more which was very nice. I asked for her email and she told me to google her... I haven't really deciphered that.

Another discovery is that math society is just like any other society, again. People are attracted to celebrities. We went to hear Terence Tao speak whose fame is equivalent to a guy like this, "finishing PhD at 22 and winning Nobel prize before 30". Many of them gave a praise about his speech but I thought it was not bad but not that good either. I gave it "normal". But with a 1 hour plenary talk, that's as much and as little he can / should do.

Met this Russian scholar Sasha Voronov. Chinese scientists have an unexplicable respect for Russians because above all, we learned most from them. And we were still using almost Russian textbooks in PKU my first year. And if Americans think we are any unhumane at education, I suspect it's learned from Russia. And I don't think it's not necessarily bad to be strict with education. And in fact, UCSD, the school I'm currently on exchange at, is has a quite heavy work-load for undergraduates.

Oh, last but definitely not the least, there are SOOOOOOO many mathematicians. So many. I remember when I was young, I was very supprised how many people take the math competition. This is reminds me of that, for no obvious reason.

OK, done with babbling today.

Life is an IQ test

2007-12-30T05:49:00.000-08:00

It took me a day to finally figure out what's going on with my Bank of America "keep the change" thing-y. So the deal is: asymptotically, they're paying you 5% for "the change" (well, after 3 months actually.). It's ok if you shop 2 times a day and on average, the change is 50 cents. Then your "change" is 1 dollar a day and 360 in total, so you get 18 dollars by, de facto, saving $360 dollars in Bank of America. So it is almost equivalent to a 5% annual interest rate saving's account. If you can find a CD of higher interest rate and you can plan your money well, you shouldn't really let them do "keep the change" to your account because they are transferring the change out of your checking account that you can spend.

So, life is an IQ test. Not only are you faced with those choices that you don't really know what to do with but also products are adding to the "intellectual" selection.

I bought a TI 83 plus calculator for my statistics class. The manual is as thick as my statistics book. Even though the contents are more spreaded out in the manual, still, which exactly is easier? I imagined the calculator would help me...

A friend got a home TV studio. We were trying to get PIP (picture in picture) but there are altogether 8 buttons on 2 out of 3 remotes that controls PIP. Well, if pressing one button should work, we are to try 8 times, if pressing altogether 2 buttons makes it work, we have potentially 64 choices. Oh, and we have 12 books of manuals too.

Another friend had this security system in her car that you need to do many things just to start it...

I've always liked complexities because above all, I'm a math major. But I just wonder why people are paying the bank (you think the bank is paying you interest but look at how rich the bankers get), the designers to make things complicated.

If I were to predict what's going to succeed in 2008, simple things. So "Linux for human" can make a hit, *indows that asks you whether to send out a problem report or how to deal with this security problem every other minute fails.

What will beat iPhone and Blackberry? Blackberry has the charming QWERTY keyboard, iPhone has its amazing features and visual effects. A phone that calls whoever you tells it to call and you input your messages through speech recognition. (This could be technologically hard, but no pain no gain right?)

So moral of the story: frozen food is good, again. Easy and simple :).

Americans fed like cats and dogs: Frozen food in America

2007-12-27T14:42:00.001-08:00

I remember years ago when we first had packaged dogs and cats' food. I almost got myself some as snacks.

A lot of Chinese people here do their own cooking in California which turns out to be even cheaper than living in Beijing. Most Chinese women from the last generation are quite good at cooking, fast and delicious.

I'm not a woman. I am the post-80 generation and I am lazy. I am on exchange, so I need to do it as the Americans do.

I went to Trader Joes today and got myself a lot of frozen goods. I don't think we have it in China so I find it amazing. It is almost made ready for you and you just need to microwave it. It can last like forever too. They come in packages and I think they very much look like cats and dogs' food.

Chinese cooking is very involved. There's no strict recipe either-everything is like "add a little bit of salt into..." "heat it for a while" etc. I think the reason most Chinese families do their own cooking is first of all lower price. The Chinese supermarkets are much cheaper because they have much cheaper labor from HK or Cantonese immigrants. So most Chinese families in America own more fixed assets (forgot the accounting term. I got an A+ for that course and so you really don't remember much from school...) than American families with similar income. Secondly, it is supposed to taste better to Chinese people than American food. I really don't have that concern because my Chinese cooking is generic- it doesn't have a taste so I am quite satisfied with today's frozen food discovery and we'll see how it works out tonight.

Bill Clinton and the story of the ancient Chinese prime ministers

2007-12-26T20:34:00.001-08:00

Talking about leaders, Bill Clinton, in spite of mistakes, I heard that he contributed much to the booming of American economy and only for that, I see him as a hero.

There is a story about two ancient Chineses prime ministers.

The first one: When he was carried to cross a river, the river was flooded, so he asked a fishman to take him across on a ferry. When he saw beggars on the road, he asked his servants to go faster. Then he went home and worked harder to boom the economy. Then the farmers build a bridge to cross the rivers and the beggar had work.

The second one: when he was crossing a flooded river, he built a bridge over it. When he saw a beggar, he gave him food.

When we choose leaders, are we sometimes blinded by their personal kindness like the second prime minister and forgot to consider their deeper influence?

In senior 2, I was somehow elected a student leader of the class. "The bad boy" doesn't usually get to be a class leader especially this is "preparational party member" kind of union even though every student is in. So it is like the "political" class monitor. I tried to beat the formailities because I thought there was too much but the approach obviously didn't quite succeed. The teacher didn't like it and the classmates didn't appreciate it.

We had an annual evaluation of yourself and others in honor of "the union" and I somehow avoided it for the whole class. It didn't get me into too much trouble but I was judged lack of "political achievements".

We have a popular phrase in Chinese calling something "an image project" where a person in position of power does something only to make it seem that he has done something. We have many of that and that's why the phrase is also catching up.

So culturally, we've made the choices in the story but why is it still popular now? It is due to how the political system works and it seems to me that a lot of problems in China are structural. We need to improve laws and regulations.

Confuscious said...

2007-12-26T20:27:00.001-08:00

Confuscious said is an expression in English. In China, there is a famous book called "Lun Yu" which is a book made by Confuscious' students to record what he said. Confuscious was a big traveller and taught wherever he went. His influence increased because one of the great and controversial emporers in Chinese history banned other philosophies and only chose to spread Confuscious.

I never knew too much about Confuscious but I did learn some of his thoughts. I had always wondered why he is regarded such an influential philosopher in Chinese history until one day, I had a thought and I realized, isn't that Confuscious' philosophy?

I guess the reason he is so important is, at least, he put it as a philosophical question. Then you can either agree or disagree with it. I have never doubted some of my thoughts before and they just appeared natural in my Chinese mind.

I don't know if Confuscious brought it up to a philosphical level or what he said seeped into our thinking, but it is pretty amazing to see that sometimes what is natural to you may only be the only way of thinking and there are others. I think that's the significance of Confuscious, at least to me.

LA downtown

2007-12-26T20:23:00.001-08:00

I went to (had to go to) downtown LA after dusk today. I saw Staples Center which was nice.

But when I got off the bus, the streets were full of beggars. Then there came by a person carrying several knives and he was scratching it against the wall. So I went another direction. I called my friend in LA and he told me to go to take the subway, or Metro Rail, the way they call it in LA. When I went downstairs, three beggars surrounded me. So I gave each a quarter. In Chinese, we have this saying to "scatter some fortune to avoid misfortune". I guess this is a perfect description of this. But it was Christmas too and I hope they can have a better day even though I contradict my belief of doing good in the two prime ministers story.

I hated Hong Kong for its astonishing income gap but LA seems to have not only an income gap. I think Hong Kong does a really good job seperating crime from poverty and I wonder why there are so many poor people in Hong Kong but the city is still very safe.

Shopping Season

2007-12-26T20:16:00.001-08:00

The shopping season in the US is indeed big. I went to UTC which is a shopping mall nearby and saw scads of people.

I remember from Macro Economics last year the theory that savers help the economy more because the bank is better at allocating money to maximize profit. That makes sense because the banks are specialised and are theoretically better at picking out the most promising businesses.

However, if people don't spend, how does a business make money?

China tends to save much more, but I wonder if there's the possibility that you save too much to the extent that aggregate demand is pushed to low.

parades

2007-12-26T05:53:00.000-08:00

I went to LA and saw the remains of the big parade. I also watched the Disneyland parade.

The US is very into parades and I wonder why. And why are parades not popular in China? Only because they were tainted with political complications?

Go home and work it out late at night

2007-12-22T15:39:00.000-08:00

It seems to be a common saying in math "You should go home and work out the butterfly lemma late at night", keywords being go home and late at night.

I've always liked having some time to think about math on my own. My belief is that you cannot just be taught math, you need to learn it on your own. When the teachers teach, they easily cover the hardest part that you may not even realize where the difficulty lied. Well, if you only need the conclusion, that another issue. But to learn math, I think it takes a lot of personal efforts out of class.

Guidance is definitely needed because you can reach higher when you stand on the shoulders of giants, but the most important part is usually something you need to figure out alone late at night.

Classroom education is kind of fake in this way because the teacher covers everything easily (because they know the answer) and without trying, you won't realize where the most amazing thing lies. There are times that you just need to know the conclusions like ... Jordan-Holder theorem but now we do sermonize math too much I think and that's probably why people hate it.

11 The fight

2007-12-22T15:07:00.000-08:00

Eight years after I haven't seen one person throwing his fist into another or throwing a chair at another after I finished primary school, I didn't need to listen to Maximus(Gladiator) to bring up my courage.

So 5 in the morning, after the runs, I was getting ready to go to Shen Zhen, a southern city in China to visit my cousin. My roommate asked me if I wanted to take a shower. I thought it was weird. We had a common bathroom with two shower places. I thought he was gonna use one and another was occupied or something so I said yes that I indeed need to take a shower before I leave for the morning train.

But a few minutes after I washed myself up, 20 people ran into the bathroom, asked the other person in the bathroom to come out, blocked my bathroom door and started dumping salt, sugar, flour,vinegar, soy sauce that were mostly more than 2 years old that they had in their kitchen. After the culinary down-pour, they started the sermonizings again.

They asked me to think about "how disrespectful I was towards seniors", "how I was wasting their time" (when I said I had to go for the train and did not have the time for this) etc.

We exchanged words when I first realized that I could argue and querrel in Cantonese which I again learned off watching Hong Kong TV shows. For half an hour, we argued and we finally got to the point where they said "if you could come out ...". I didn't let them finish when I knocked the bathroom door down and broke all the plastic brooms, mops that they used to latch the door. I have had no chance to test how sturdy the bathroom door was but I was surely very mad.

Then they kind of talked to me at other end of the corridor and the event was soon over.

I learned that cultural shocks can be fierce. No matter how I verbally mocked them, they still hold their strong belief that by doing all of the things they do, they show their perseverence and love of their hall.

10 Orientation

2007-12-22T15:06:00.002-08:00

I always thought I grew up to be a conservative man. I fought in primary school twice but everybody fought in primary school.

At the end of their second orientation week (which is highly disorientational because they keep you from sleeping more than 2 hours a day for a week and it's notorious among professors. Probably another reason the university is willing to minimize the traditions. In Chinese, when you talk about tradition, you would really thought of something good, but now I think technically, you can call eating human flesh a tradition and the word is complete neutral.), we were taken to run from the hall, down Hong Kong island to Sea World which is at least ... . It started from 8 pm after 800 sit-ups, 800 push-ups, 400 jumps finished in groups of 5, and we arrived at Sea World at 12 pm. Then we were supposed to complete this task that the seniors set for us. We were each given one HK dollar to go back to our dorm but the bus fares are all above 4.5.

Then the HK kids came up with this idea that we just took a cab back and borrow money from other hallmates.

A good math problem is a problem that gives you insights when you only think about it, not a statement that you simply prove right or wrong.

The seniors obviously considered their task that way too so half an hour of scolding started again about how we "wasted their thoughtful design". And we were taken to another place 1 hr run away and to complete the same task, in pairs.

Another guy and I tried to talk to ambulances, police cars, goods distribution cars 4 in the morning that we could find on the street and finally a mini-bus driver told us to hop in and we finally got back. We were the latest pair and the other pairs obviously walked back faster.

Let me just make my verbal revenge for one last time and you'll be all set to turn to the next page of a personal highlight of my life.

So I still don't know what they expected us to do other than walking back. Maybe it's just stupid problems call for meaningless solutions.

9 Hong Kong University Halls

2007-12-22T15:06:00.001-08:00

If I were in Peking University, I would be mentally 10 years younger (or less mature). I didn't even live in school dorms because our apartment was so close that I just rode my bike to school everyday (and the school bed is literally a piece of wood too, no A/C.). Some of my friends drive to school.

Hong Kong is the first time I am on my own. It would have been all much easier if the following didn't happen.

Hong Kong is a very welcoming and international society outward. But among the HKU students in HKU halls, they have their own strict hierachy and fraternity. They scold at freshmen and some halls goes as far as the top level won't slap the third level students' face because theoretically, that defiles their hands. I cannot argue how democratic China was but I've certainly never had any of that. I did have much of the scolding but the amazon, my primary school teacher was paid to do that and does a much better job. I am way over that however.

Some of the halls have already been dominated by mainland students where such traditions certainly disappeared. The school administration realises that and the colonial traditions also seemed inconsistent with the image of Hong Kong. In my hall however, some of the students are adamant defenders of their traditions. Well, I can only say that's where the British put opium first and Lin Zexu (famous Tsing Dynasty Chinese government official. Famous for his patriotic acts and fighting against opium) had to fight the people to ban it.

I'll see how that goes when I return after my year at UCSD.

8 Peking University

2007-12-22T12:26:00.001-08:00

Peking University is a place of contradiction. I personally think the students achieve much more than the school does, which is ironically consistent with my theory of going to a school too. An ambitious student don't go to an honorary school, you go to a school to honor it (well, of course, eventually, not that you can know that when you're still in the school).

The school facilities are really poor. They had a grass soccer field but isn't usually available. I played my freshman cup semi-final on the field but we lost to physics department. They are now going to change the soccer field into a parking lot for the table tennis stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. So it seems either the students don't need a playground or the table tennis stadium won't need a parking lot after the Olympics. During the process of building the stadium, it was once on fire. But they didn't plan for the fire so there was no way the fire cars could get near so they just watched the building burn down and start over again. Now I kind of suspect some PKU student did that.

I only met very few new people in PKU, but because 48 out of 51 in my class went to Peking or Tsinghua University (and the overall rate in China is / of the highest scorers) I was kind of with the same old gang.

7 the Gao Kao

2007-12-22T12:24:00.001-08:00

Gao Kao, aka, the college entrance examination is the first actual exam that I took to decide my future. From primary school to high school, I was "invited" (Ch4). From junior high to senior high, it was like any other day and the school was actually afraid that we were going to leave for other schools.

How I was just out in the market to be picked is beyond me, but a few factors contributed. I did bad in a mock test. In all other mock tests, I was top 20 in the grade (and we had about 150 people going to Tsinghua / Peking University each year at the time). But I was sick during that one and got something like 200th place. We had many prize winners. And the order the put on level of recommendation was somehow artificially manipulated. And the explanation one vice principal gave to my parents was "he can get into wherever he wants anyway.". Well, I don't blame him for his logic because he got laughed at when he was commenting on a district Gaokao trial when he studied the statistics and made a mathematical observation that the people above 650, 640, 630 etc monotonously increased.

And he was right. I did get to where I wanted. I just didn't know before hand. And it didn't seem too much so either. My biology and chemistry was always the last in the class and they are just as important overall as math and English. But what my father told me was probably right, this is something you'll never have the chance to experience again, the pressure. Well, I can say that after I got top 15 in Beijing but what if I failed...

The story is not over however. I am admitted to Peking University math department. As a lot of PKU students, I didn't know what I wanted or we tried and worked to go to PKU just to go to PKU. PKU has a high drop out rate first of all because of academic pressure and I think more importantly is that not everyone who goes knows what to do next. I didn't quite but I think most of them have figured out after 3 years. For me, PKU was a challenge. I know they have a strong math department and everything but I didn't have any clear goals.

At the mean time, Hong Kong University offered a full scholarship. I don't know how people make life decisions but I just heard they have more opportunities and I was planning on doing math for graduate school in the US so I thought it would be nice if I can adapt to the system early. Besides, they have only three years of university in Hong Kong so they would allow me to stay at PKU for a year. I thought it was a very good deal and the year indeed turned out to build a very rigorous foundation for me for my later math learning and I imagined above a certain level, math is not taught, math is figured out, so the place isn't really the most important factor.

6 Foreign Teachers' Day

2007-12-22T12:24:00.000-08:00

In my senior one year, we had SARS in Beijing. We were off school.

We had foreign teachers at the beginning of the school year who taught us classes in English. I was first introduced to the TV show Friends and Avril Lavigne, both of which I loved. When SARS struck, I had only a few Friends episodes back at home but I just watched them over and over again. Oh, if I could meet Jennifer Aniston, I promise I won't cry. When the foreign teachers came back after SARS was gone and school resumed, I know all the trivia in Friends and I could recite to you what happens in every episodes or even line for line. And my English went to a new useful level too. I could have some real English conversations.

Then, because of my fond of Friends, I made a TV show episode based on our foreign teachers' life here in Beijing, their adjustments, their cultural shocks, how strange they appeared to us. I became very good friends with many of them probably due to my ability to be able to talk to them and they tried to reach out to us too. The show was sitcom style just like friends even though I have only a few scenes. In spite of my little humors, I really did searched to convey something deeper. One of the thematic sentences I had was "universal similarities go deeper than universal differences".

The filming of the show was a big challenge to my leadership skills too. I had many great classmates, and foreign teachers to help me out. I wrote the script, directed most of the work but they went through my script several times, added after-effects, subtitles etc. We showed it in the school multimedia room several times. I didn't dig too much into the significance because another major event in my life came along.

5 National math competition

2007-12-22T12:23:00.000-08:00

Many high school principals were negotiating with my parents about benifits if I went to their schools. They do that with all the prize winners.

My parents decided for me, a pretty good high school, RDFZ, which is closest to our apartment. The rational was easy. High school is just high school, when you are a kid, why do you need to go that far for school. (And apparently for university, I went as many places, as far as possible. ) But it was definitely not the best. The school boomed after 6 years to be the best high school in Beijing. If you are in Beijing, you don't know RDFZ, I won't but people will definitely say you don't know anything about child education. 1/4 of the students each year go to Peking or Tsinghua University which are the best universities in mainland China and students work deadly hard to get in. A lot of students went to Yale, Duke, Harvard etc. if only I was prepared or know how... Well, information is part of the competition too. If you know where the chances lie, you are half way successful. But that's OK, I'll still work my way up the hard way. (Developing countries, developed countries, and career.)

We had many opportunities in our high school. I had chances to go to Italy and the US. More importantly, we had good education too. Even though I am not a big fan of collective education(collective education, math), a lot of people are willing to pay 200 thousand RMB (= $20,000) just to get in and they're still competing among the paid students. And if RDFZ could, they would set it 1 million and I believe those classrooms will still be as full.

I've always been in the math competition business but I was never really as good as was. I didn't try very hard either. So that's part of the reason. In my senior two year, the national math competition had a number theory problem for one of the big problems. I was very good at number theory in primary school and I was determined to get this one. I didn't do it very elegantly but rather with brute force. But still, it won me a provincial first prize and I was perfectly satisfied.

4 How I started doing math

2007-12-22T12:13:00.000-08:00

I played the accordion for almost ten years and the best memory was when I was selected one of three to play, out of thousands test takers of the accordion level test, in a hall in the national music institute of China. A blank of memory rather than a memory, I remember going up stage, looking down the stage, seeing complete darkness. I looked up, saw a big neon light. I was terrified, but it was warm. I looked right and my mom was there at the entrance of the proscenium. I played my song, bowed and left. I have no memory of how I played the happy Chinese spring festival song but muscle memory has probably done it correctly for me because I had practiced so many times. And I was fine when I later watched it in educational news.

I said my parents had a plan is because back then, there are three ways you get admitted to a high school. Specialty, random allocation, and money and relation. (Someone once commented relation is the grease of the Chinese society. I think it's more universal however. Relation creates trust, the way ideally it works.) However, you're never randomly allocated to a good high school. So my accordion learning falls under the category of specialty. (Students and high schools now in Beijing)

In the 5th grade, a few of my friends stopped going to school. The parents realized that school doesn't teach them enough, so the parents started other ways to teach kids English, math, computer etc. Despite my father's conservativeness, I am still amazed how my parents decided for their child to do the unconventional. They had no exact plans this time. I just had fun at home watching TV etc. for the first few days. Then I found that boring and I happened to have a few math Olympiad books for primary school students. So I started reading that and worked with a friend ZH who lived nearby on problems that I couldn't figure out.(ZH)

In the end, we took this primary school math competition and I won the first prize, the 13th place in Beijing.

Then, I started schooling at RDFZ. When I was a child, I only remember people calling. But the math competition is a great deal because the educational department cancelled the normal high school entrance examination and this virtually replaced that. The funny part is how we've always chosen government officials based on their literal ability, but now the first important test in a Chinese child's life is a purely mathematical one. The decision retained it seems and I don't know exactly how it works now. But a few things the educational department decided didn't give me a very good impression on their wisdom (elaboration under construction).

3 My childhood

2007-12-21T20:54:00.000-08:00

I didn't have a very healthy childhood. I intend to blame the lack of food and nutrition but there were obviously other childs who had no more than I did but grew up fine.My mother counted that I was sick 360 days in a year.

I grew up playing in a dirt yard in the area, which was a little smaller than a soccer field. It doesn't exist anymore and Beijing is now all congested with buildings. Where do kids play now? I do not know.

I started playing accordion at the age of 4. We couldn't afford a piano and accordion was apparently the closest thing my parents could find. My parents always had long-term goals for me which I am very thankful because I never missed a chance in my life to develop civilized skills. (Parents and authorities.) And under their influence, I grew up to be an ambitious young man. But as the US foldlores go, Chinese are inscrutable, I don't easily show them.

I also played soccer a lot. From kindergarten kids to university boys in the neighborhood played soccer in the dirt yard. I started off play goal keeper and I guess that's what you are capable of doing when you are the youngest. Then somehow, I worked my way up from letting other people kicking the ball into my face to kicking the ball into other people's faces.

I went to this back street primary school. Our district was full of professors and intellectuals but my primary school was famous for sending students to this hulligan middle school that you have to be beat up when you enter to beat other kids in other middle schools up. We had a playground though and I now realized how luckier I am compared to some of the Hong Kong pupils (My feelings about Hong Kong(under construction)). Our teachers were mostly city shrews and I remember in the 6th grade, I somehow made my math teacher cry because she couldn't solve linear equations with two variables. And of course, she sent me to someone else who made me cry. I was just a kid. I would cry if I lost a transformer toy that I could only get one after I recover from a bout of sickness. But I was sick a lot, so I had many toys. My father was never thrifty on spending money for me, even at the hardest days. But he would never indulge me either. He has always been the traditional strict Chinese father who doesn't talk with their kids too much but only cares about them deep in their hearts. And that's probably another proof how we are inscrutable to Americans.

2 The opening of China

2007-12-21T20:52:00.000-08:00

In the 1980s, Beijing is very different from what it is now. Our apartment now is on the third ring road but we lived much closer to the second ring road when I was born. Where we live now was still Tsing Dynasty tombs. And now Beijing has the sixth ring road. And we live in "central" Beijing.

The neighborhood I lived in were all geologists from the same institute. Despite extreme lack of everything, when my mother was pregnant with me, they gave us eggs, meat, etc (Or more precisely, they shared their certificates for their quotas.). A set of clothes would pass on three generations among the kids in the neighborhood when they grew into it.

In the mean time, one of my favorite Chinese leaders, Deng Xiaoping (Deng Xiaoping and the government), opened China. He opened a few experimental districts first. And that's when my father ended his scientific pursuit.

My mother came from a rural family. One of her older brothers however, became an Economics professor in one of the most famous Universities in Northern China, Ji Lin University. He then became a government official and one of 11 decision makers( equivalent to senators?) of the city.

One of his student was obviously open-minded and venturesome and I call him Uncle H. My father went with Uncle H to Hainan Island, the southmost part of mainland China to exploit the market. After a few years, they moved to Shang Hai because Shanghai stock exchange was ready.

Uncle H was apparently resourceful. He made a big fortune. I don't know what exactly he did but risks were involved too. The earlier players' of the market, as I don't think there were small investors at that early a stage, gambled and rivaled among themselves. 7 out of 10 went to prison and 3 survived. My father wasn't any part of that. He is highly conservative and he only did office work. So when he went off work one day and went back to find the office was all empty the second day, it was pretty obvious what they had paid him and the car he had was the decision on his share.

I don't know how to evaluate what he did in proportion to what he got. When he left, we only had a tantamount of $250 total in cash and deposit. But it was pretty impressive to have a car when he came back. No family was isolated from this big change in China. A few men in the neighborhood also went to Hainan with different groups and they came back after a while too.

(The opening of China restructured the society quite a bit. Tailors for example, was regarded low in social status. Money isn't everything but when the tailor in our neighborhood got really rich, he enjoyed above par respect. The commercialization taking place in China will continue to transform our values. A friend told me how she valued entrepreneurship and that impressed me because no one knows what entrepreneurship is ten years ago and how the new generation of young people like me differed from the rural, idyllic mentality of our progenitors.)

But all I knew was happy to have my father back. But my father certainly learned more street survival than during his scientific pursuits and repeated failed attempts to join the party because my grandfather was a nationalist.

1 A long long time ago...

2007-12-21T20:49:00.001-08:00

As far into family history as I know of, my grandfather's father is a Tsing Dynasty's provincial government official. My grandfather was born into a family of 80 family members. Back in the days of kindoms, wealthier Chinese families were bigger.

During the war (WWII and the Chinese civil war), my grandfather was a nationalist. Once, in northen part of China, they were surrounded in this city, then they persisted, then they ran out of supplies and had to eat dead human. They were cooked into fillings Bao Zi (for which the best explanation I can give is something similar to semispherical burrito). I don't know how my grandfather adapted from possibly "the priviledged" to selling potatoes on the roads after the war, but I guess you adapt to anything when there's no choice.

The same year China declared independence (independence from no one. It is just an declaration that the war is over, and a new government has formed when the major war had been over for a few month in most part of China but places in the west were still under military action.), my father was born. He grew up in a family of one older brother, one older sister, and one younger brother.

When it was time for him to enter university, the cultural revolution broke. He worked as a bank clerk for a few years and when the revolution was over, he and my mother both when to the geologist institute in Changchun, northern China (At that time in China, my impression is that education is centered in the north. Shanghai and Hong Kong were far less prosperous and we learned most of our science from our "Bigger brother" Soviet Union. And hence our analysis style in math.). After they graduated, my parents came to Beijing to work in the National Geology Institute of China.

My father is smart and a hard worker. He discovered a big oil field in the west (Or by discovering, this is I think how geology works. You collect samples from the wild and analyze the earth's structure. So my father thought, oh, there might be oil there. Then people went and boom, there lies the biggest oil field in the west of China.). He was awarded a national science contribution second prize and he wrote several geology books in his early thirties.

MIT invited him to study geology,probably Chinese geology, for them. But they had another big crisis in China.( I don't know how it is internationally refered to, but a direct translation from Chinese would be the "June 4th event".) So he couldn't go and nobody could go anywhere.

Despite his academic achievements, we were really poor. And the whole geologists community was poor. A few of my fathers' colleagues thought about going to Saudi Arab to sell suitcases and other manufactored products. That didn't work out eventually without me knowing why.

Some things I'd like to say...

2007-01-07T07:51:00.000-08:00

Why do I use English?

I'm highly against speaking English to Chinese speaking people. I know people who speak English to other friends but I just do not understand it. And I see it as an act of showing off. So I am not going against my own adamently beholden principle but I just want my American, Hong Kong friends to be able to read it.

Why blogspot?

It's blocked in China it seems. But they are the only one who offers a stable blog space and full custimizability. I am a perfectionist. I just like the fact that I get to make it the way I want it to be. MSN space is crappy (the same way I think facebook is crappy) because it is very distracting. I actually want people to be able to read what I post. What's the word, gawdy... And msn spaces spreads computer viruses. They sometimes contain viruses and MSN spaces doesn't filter it.

Xanga is much more elegant compared to MSN space.It's blocked in China to so choosing that makes no difference. Besides, it's not that custimizable. So...

Where I have been

2006-12-31T17:27:00.000-08:00

I haven't been to that many places, but don't worry, I still have a lot of time and the number is increasing :)

Beijing is convenient.

San Diego is peaceful.

New York City is individualistic.

Los Angeles is dilapidated.

Hong Kong is crowded.

Italy is medieval.

Hawaii is relaxing.

Gilmore Girls

2006-12-29T01:58:00.000-08:00

I watched it from season 1 to 7 during the fire at San Diego.

Great family show. All characters have their own sharp personalities and tells us much about family care, love, trust etc.

The English is fast too :). Quite good for advanced English learning. I hope those guys teaching at RDFZ could use it.

CSI NY

2006-12-29T01:46:00.000-08:00

The reason I consider CSI NY particularly successful because it always has a longer story line spread across episodes. This way, slack people can just catch some random episode and will enjoy the excitement of solving the cases, be dazzled by the gadgets and the devoted audience will enjoy following the story all the way through.

Smallville

2006-12-29T01:40:00.000-08:00

I've been watching it since season 1. It has evolved from a simple story pattern to a much more continuous and complicated story of the relationship of its main characters. The switch from repetition to complexity is definitely a smart one because the show became not at all superficial and was able to keep some long-term audience(Like the way I think CSI NY is successful).

However, I think the script writers are definitely running out of inspiration and kept pulling the trick of adding in more characters to make the show interesting. I don't like this that much.

What I am up to now

2006-12-26T20:52:00.000-08:00

I'm on exchange at UCSD.

I am on winter break.

I am going back to HKU to finish my last year.

Still a math major.