China

What Is Up?

October 26, 2008

A new video making the rounds on YouTube updates the famously funny “Wassup” commercial, using the same actors but in scenes of grim poignancy. Instead of hawking beer, they show the travails afflicted upon the citizenry during the last eight years. What once made us laugh has turned tragic.

The video reminded me of a Chinese student who visited us for two weeks in 2002 as part of an exchange program that my oldest son took part in at Wilson High School in Portland. “Thomas” — he adopted an English name rather than expect Americans to correctly pronounce his real name — was among a dozen students from Suzhou, a Portland sister city. Read More

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Arc of nations

August 8, 2008

I doubt I’ll ever see anything as wondrous as tonight’s opening ceremonies at the Olympics. Never has a story been told so vividly on such a sweeping scale. Perhaps only an authoritarian government could pull it off. And yes, the story glosses over a shameful past and present. But to conceive and execute it so stunningly and with so many people playing roles — 15,000 — was awe-inspiring.

When the camera found in the audience a slouching George W. Bush, leg bouncing and eying his watch, I surely wasn’t alone in concluding that more than the grandest spectacle ever produced was unfolding; I was watching the ascension of one nation and the decline of another.

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