Picture a paradise.  At a paradise, the landscape is not only beautiful with flowers and beaches, but also it is lush with scrumptious fruits.  People are found to be enjoying drinks filled with ice and watermelons on beaches.

On a hot summer days, people in America crave for fruits and cold, icy drinks – be a slushie, frappucchino, milkshake, or smoothie.  It’s very hard not to miss a cafe or a restaurant offering cold drinks.  There are several Dunkin Donuts, a popular fast food chain primarily offering donuts, hot coffee and ice coffee, within mere a mile from my home.  Starbucks is just around the corner.  There are many smoothie places around the country, which cater only to smoothies – Smoothie Planet, Smoothie King, and Orange Julius.

I make smoothies on regular basis. They not only cool my body down, but also provide me great source of nutrients while slurping something so sweet, just as sweet as a candy bar.

Here is a recipe for a smoothie I commonly make at home – Strawberry-Banana with pineapples, coconut milk and orange juice.  This makes enough for 1 to 2 servings.

5 pieces of strawberries

Half of a banana

1/3 cup of chopped pineapples

1/3 cup of coconut milk

1/3 cup of orange juice

2/3 cup of cubed ice

Place all of the ingredients in a blender and press the mix button!  Have the ingredients blend for at least a minute or until it is completely disintegrated.  After it is done, pour the smoothie from the blender into a cup.

Enjoy!

I assume smoothies are not common in China because I remember when I made smoothies for you in London, you didn’t like having ice in them and always preferred hot drinks.  I noticed that in China, tea is one of the most common drinks, right?

Cheesecake.  It represents our invaluable moments together in London.  It provided us very sweet and scrumptious tastes for our palates.  It helped us pull our strengths through studying for our major exam that we had this past spring.  It provided us source of energy to get us moving through the day.  It lightened our conversations at the British Library.  It was a bright spot in our day.  We will forever miss this luscious blueberry cheesecake from the British Library, but I do hope that one day, we can meet halfway and enjoy the cake together once again.

I thought about you, Sophia, yesterday when I went to America’s most popular restaurant called The Cheesecake Factory.  This restaurant is known for having the biggest menu on the planet.  It has more than 200 menu selections!  I also can’t forget to mention that this place has over 30 different kind of cheesecakes!  The names of the cheesecakes include Vanilla Bean, Dutch Apple Caramel, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, Key Lime, and Fresh Banana Cream.  Their servings of the meals are ridiculously HUGE, so huge that many people cannot finish eating, and they have to take the rest home.  However, the food is absolutely scrumptious.

Yesterday, I ordered Grilled Chicken and Avocado Club sandwich.  This sandwich was well packed with lots of ingredients – chicken, avocado, bacon, swiss cheese, mayonaise, tomatoes, and lettuce.

Then of course I couldn’t walk out of the place without a large slice of cheesecake.  I got Wild Blueberry White Chocolate Truffle cheesecake!  Talk about a fancy name!  Yes, it really did not only have blueberries.  It also had white chocolate in it.  It was just as delicious as the one from the British Library, but it was just different.

Next week, I am going to try to make pumpkin cheesecake like the ones in the picture using the recipe from Bakers Royayle.  I will post my progress when I complete the mission!

Image from Bakers Royale - www.bakersroyale.com

Rachel, I have read the article of BBC news about the Polio in China’s western Xinjiang province in September. Actually, the Chinese media has reported the news and I have watched it before I read this article. My feedback on this article is that it is the same from what I have heard from the Chinese media and I do not have the feeling that China is looked down upon because it has Polio.  Several cases of Polio have been confirmed in Xinjiang province of China and we have to figure this problem out and that’s it.

In your post you mentioned two cases, one of which was that foreigners fear to travel to the US because of the violence issues especially issues with guns and the other was about the Chinese girls you met in Shanghai who thought that Americans were usually not slim. I think these two cases can be regarded as people’s stereotypes to other countries and nations which they are not familiar with and we could  give more examples of this kind of stereotypes. I think the stereotypes or even people’s  misunderstandings of other countries and nations are because they do not know much about what is really going on. Most of their knowledge about other countries comes from media such as newspapers, TV news, movies, etc., in other words, from what they have been told instead of what they have experienced by themselves. If your friend traveled to China with you this time, she would know that Polio was not as serious as she imagined. If foreign people had the experience of living or studying in America, the gun shootings which were hype depicted by the media would probably not prevent them from sending their children to the high schools in the US.  If those girls whom you met in Shanghai had ever traveled to the US, they would know that not all Americans are fat, but they come in all different sizes and shapes.

However, not all the stereotypes and misunderstandings of other countries are innocent but there are ideologies behind them. Sometimes it is not because we are not able to know what is really going on but because we do not want to know.  I have met a lot of people who would like to judge the political and social issues in China just according to what they have been told by the media and their personal imagination.  When I was studying in London for the pre-sessional English course,  a teacher from Scotland once said in front of all the students in his class including me that Chinese people did not drink milk because the majority of the country were rural areas, which were so underdeveloped that there were no milk there. I asked him whether he had traveled to  China or not and he answered no. If he was really curious about whether Chinese people drank milk or not, he could ask me at that time before he made the claim. But he just claimed the “fact” which was existing in his imagination with confidence.  Therefore, what is behind the misunderstandings and stereotypes can be arrogance, jealous and other ideologies.  There are many misunderstandings of China in the western world nowadays,  some of which are not because that western people are not able to know what the real China is but because they do not want to. There are some words from an American movie called “Swing Vote” which I could not agree more. “All the world’s greatest civilizations have followed the same path. From bondage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy back to bondage”. Back to 1100 years ago when China was in Tang dynasty (618-907), it was the strongest country in the world. At that time, Chinese people did not know the outside world and they did not care about what happened in other countries because they did not need to. 700 years later when China was in Qing dynasty (1644-1912), it fell behind most of the western countries.

Therefore, Rachel, we need to be open-minded because there are so much that we do not know about the world. Let’s communicate and share because we want to know each other better : )

When the sunshine rises and brings in light to my room, I sometimes enjoy a delicious and unusual sandwich for breakfast.  When eating breakfast, I need high source of protein to provide me energy through the day while also having some fiber.  So, invented a sandwich that I will just call ‘Rachel’s Breakfast Sandwich.’  The sandwich includes salmon pate, brie cheese, tomatoes and prosciutto.  I normally just use sourdough bread or French bread.  The combination of all these food provides deliciousness taste for my palate and perhaps for you, Sophia, and others.

China, as many other emerging and developed nations,  is catching up in higher education especially in the number of adults gaining college degrees. However, that does not mean the United States is losing its advantage in higher education. As a matter of fact, the majority of Chinese people, including me, still believe that America as well as Europe have the best higher education in the world nowadays.

The situation for higher education in China now is that the number of adults with a higher education degree is increasing greatly in recent years, but the overall quality of higher education is decreasing. I think you are right to mention that China has a much higher population than the US, therefore, the number of students attending universities in China cannot say everything. But let’s consider the historical context of this issue. Because of Cultural Revolution which lasted from 1966 to 1976, the resumption of higher education system in China took place in the year 1977. Therefore, the majority of Chinese people in my parents’ generation do not have college degrees. For the young generation, the situation has been changed dramatically. According to the article you mentioned, China now has 12 percent of all college graduates, but among young adults, its share is much higher, which means the Chinese government has managed to make such progress within the last 30 years. That is a great progress! However, the other side of the coin is that the quality of higher education is decreasing with the rapid expansion of the scale of colleges and universities. We can construct as many new facilities as we need for colleges and its increasing students within 30 years, but we could not increase the number of teachers within such a short time. Not to mention that there are a lot of other problems within the higher education system in China such as  academic plagiarism, no academic independence from politics, etc..

There are some field for Chinese universities to be among the top levels of the world. But the overall quality of the higher education in China is not comparable with that in America and I do not think we can catch up within a short time because it takes time for us to have sufficient qualified professors and college teachers. With the rapid development of  higher education, new tendencies and phenomenon have arisen in China, which makes the issue related to higher education more complex.

More and more top students in mainland China choosing to study in the universities of  Hong Kong is one of the new tendencies. Since after the return of Hong Kong to China, universities of Hong Kong have been enrolling students from the Mainland. Students, especially the top students in the Mainland, are attracted by these universities in Hong Kong mainly because of two reasons. First, the majority of Chinese students think that the quality of higher education in Hong Kong is better than that in the Mainland, and it is much more easier for the college students in Hong Kong to have  international study experience since they have extensive contacts with universities abroad. Second, many universities in Hong Kong provide scholarships to the top students in the Mainland in order to attract these talents.

There is another phenomena that is drawing more and more attention in recent years in our society.  According to a recently published report in China, among the newly enrolled college students, there are less and less students who are from the rural area. The different levels of  development of economy in cities and countryside and the wider and wider gap between the rich and the poor in our society nowadays are the social roots for this new phenomena. If more and more young people from the rich families are gaining college degrees while less and less young adults from the poor family and rural areas are doing the same because of their economic situations and because of  the imbalance of educational resources, the development of higher education in China is questionable – are we really making progress?

Sophia, I’m glad to hear that you finally finished watching the first episode of Switched at Birth.  I can appreciate too the scenes regarding the arguments between Kathryn, the wealthy mom, and Regina, the middle class mom, about allowing Daphne, the deaf girl to ride the motorcycle with Emmett, the deaf guy because the safety of riding mopeds and motorcycle has been brought up in conversations between my parents and me.  While we don’t see a whole lot of mopeds and motorcycles in London and also in the States too, but if you travel to other parts of Europe such as France and Italy,  you will notice that mopeds and motorcycles are extremely common like in China.  Since my first trip to Europe, I’ve always been fascinated by mopeds and motorcycles and have told my mom that I’d love to own a moped as it’s cheaper than owning a car and it’s more environmentally friendly.  At the time when I asked them, I was a high school student who wanted to have the independence of going to places, including school.  My parents had hectic schedules as my dad was working full-time and my mom also had to take care of my two younger siblings, and thus, I had lack of freedom of choosing when I could go to places.  There were a few times when I wanted to go to school early or stay late so that I can meet with teachers to get some extra help or participate in school activities, but I couldn’t because my parents could not pick me up.  Public transportation is very lacking in Atlanta where I grew up.  During the first two years of high school, I took the yellow school bus almost everyday, which was free, and the problem with the yellow school bus was that it went from the stop near my home to my school only once every morning and same for afternoon, only once from school to the stop near my home.  Cars were expensive for teenagers to afford although some are able to save up some money or some other teenagers’ parents will buy them one.  I will not deny that I did beg my parents A LOT to own a car.  It wasn’t because I simply wanted a car.  Like I said, it was simply because I wanted the independence of being able to get around my town with ease.  So, owning a moped, which is a lot cheaper, should be a viable solution right?

However, my mom and my dad, especially my dad, are totally against the idea of my riding a moped because they think they’re dangerous.  My dad even told me that I was not to ride on any mopeds during my trips to Europe.  This is a very typical American view of mopeds and motorcycles, especially for those coming from American suburban life like the Kennishes, the wealthy family.  I have an American friend living in Italy who told me the last time I visited her that she was not going to allow her son to ride a moped even if most of his friends do.

It is true that that mopeds and motorcycles are more dangerous but there are valid points to why they still exist for both cultural and financial reasons.  Even though the western part of Europe is very well developed like the States and many families live in very comfortable homes, gas price is extremely high, much much higher than in the States, and so, mopeds provide cost-savings advantages for many people there.  Also parking is extremely limited in throughout Europe and so, mopeds allow people to have easier time to find parking as it doesn’t take up as much space as cars require, and roads are extremely narrow in many parts of Europe and so, mopeds allow people travel through the roads more easily.  Plus, many people in France are very concerned about the environment, much more so than in the States and so, many prefer to ride a moped as it uses much less or no gas.  I’ve actually asked my mom if we were born, raised and living in Europe, would she allow me to ride the moped.  She paused for a moment and then said, “I’d likely have a different view if I were an European.”   And here’s the thing…many people in America says it is perfectly OK to ride bikes on roads…The irony is that riding bikes is just as dangerous as riding mopeds!

So, for my reasoning wanting to own a moped rather than a car was because it is more affordable for a teenager to own it and of course, it is environmentally friendly.  At the end, I ended up owning a used (second-hand) car as my parents and I agreed that I would save up as much money as I could, which I earned through allowances, babysitting, and birthday and hanukkah gifts and my parents would help me pay for it.  I drove myself to school and everywhere in my town throughout my junior and senior (3rd and 4th) year in high school.

Sorry that I got off tangent here, but the subject of mopeds and motorcycle is a really hot topic in the States.

I agree that money is important and can in some way provide a better quality of lifestyle such as better quality of health care and education and also greater conveniences such as my example of owning a car.  I do totally agree that money does not always bring in happiness.  Look at Tiger Woods, a famous millionaire golf player who had affairs and divorced his wife.  And Lindsay Lohan, a movie star, who has been arrested several times. And Britney Spears, a pop singer, who has been on drugs, arrested, and temporarily lost the custody of her children.  There has even been a few cases where people who win a lottery and say that they wish that they could go back in time and not purchase the lottery ticket at all because suddenly having millions of dollars made them less happy.

Since you asked me if I were a poor Chinese girl, what my life would be like, the first and the only thing I can imagine is that I would likely not be able to hear and speak as I would not have the technology, cochlear implant or would not have gotten it until later in life, when it is too late as it is much harder or almost impossible to learn to hear and speak at an older age.  Cochlear implants didn’t come to China until 1997.  I hear that rehabilitation for children with hearing loss hardly exist in China.  Rehabilitation is extremely important as we can’t just put the cochlear implants on our ears and expect us to magically start being able to speak and hear well.  We have to go through rehabilitation to train our brain how to hear with the device so that we can learn to speak too as we learn to speak through hearing.  Because my parents were so involved in my life, I know that even if the technology did not exist, they would still find a path to ensure that I still had access to communication and education.  They would both learn sign language and teach them to me and join a community where I would be surrounded by people utilize sign language so that I would not be lonely and have access to social life.  Life would certainly be much harder as my access to communication would be limited, but I think we would make the best of the best, and I would still find my own happiness.  I know that many deaf people who were born prior to the invention of cochlear implants and utilize sign language to communicate still lead very fulfilling lives.

Rachel, I have just finished the first episode of Switched at Birth and I really enjoy watching it. Yes, you are right that the wealthy people in America really have huge and nice houses. But like I said, I prefer the decoration of the middle class more.

You know what is funny?  When the wealthy mom got really angry when she saw a teenager who was deaf gave her biological daughter ride frequently, this reminds me about you. When you got sick in Haikou, I remember very clearly that you told me that your medical insurance would cover the cost of sending a helicopter and take you back to America if necessary. My feeling at that time was Chinese people never had this welfare because we are not as rich as American. So being rich always has advantages. Everyone knows providing car ride to children by parents is more safer and having good medical insurance is critical but the problem is that whether you can afford a car and an expensive medical insurance or not.

However, I always believe that money is important, but money is not everything. Seriously. The middle class mom is very charming and I especially like her artistic taste. I think whether we are happy or not depends on whether we have a meaningful life or not. People who are poor or in middle class can also have good life if they have happy family and have their own hobbies.

I was moved by the last scene, when the girl who was deaf was asked by her friend who the other girl was and she said “me in another life”.  Imagine, Rachel, if you were a Chinese who was poor, what kind of life you would have?

Photo from BostonGlobe.com - Image by Liu Jin

I just had a little dispute with my grandmother over the political situation in China because she had just read an article in Boston Globe about the government in China gaining strength in authoritarian rule and is promoting its political power to other countries and also relationship issues between China and the US.  Like many people in the Western world, I believe that my grandmother was under the impression that people in China are living with lack of freedom and are constantly being controlled and watched by the government.  I explained to her that life is really not all that bad as she may imagine and Chinese people still have more freedom than she may realize – Chinese people can still discuss political issues openly with their friends and family without being prosecuted including online although they acknowledge that the government has the right to censor certain political opinions Chinese people may post online, and they have their own Chinese version of Facebook and YouTube.  Plus, Chinese people can meet with politicians at local meetings and have their say, and they can also vote.  I also mentioned Chinese government have valid reasons to create certain stances such as blocking many of the American social media sites including Facebook, Twitter and Youtube and they are not in to be cruel people.  I said the government are in for the best interests of people – they censor not only because they want to show that China is a great country but also to prevent the spread of misinformation.

I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on the article.  One question I do have though is do you ever sometimes feel that the government is taking away your freedom, such as not having the right to access many of the American sites and the possibility of your opinion that you may post online being deleted by the government?

Then I also have to ask you about the story of the high speed train accident in China that occurred fairly recently and the Chinese government tried to prevent part of the story from being shown to the public.  Now what’s up with that?  I understand that the government was trying to cover it up not only because they wanted to ensure that their country is portrayed as a great country, but also because they were embarrassed as the accident was due to “man-made,” not natural disaster.   I also see that according to the article in the Guardian, the government was trying to present the story in a different angle in order to present a positive portrayal of the country by showing greater coverage of people making blood donations in honor of the disaster.  In my opinion, I think that’s not acceptable not to present all information as the public deserves to have transparent information about current issues.  Plus, we should realize that we’re not perfect, and we’re humans who can make mistakes in building infrastructures although I do not wish that the accident had occurred and my sympathies go out to the families who lost their loved ones from the accident, and I hope that the government will improve the situation of the infrastructure of the train system.  I’d be curious to hear your view as a Chinese person.

Let me start from London, the place where Rachel and I first met each other. When I first saw Rachel in the Anthropology Department of UCL, she was talking to a staff member there for information of the coming term. I asked her to help me communicate with the department since I had some problem with downloading the anthropological films from the website of the department. This nice American girl gave me a deep impression. Her  eyes were full of curiousness and patience, which told me that she was interested in talking with me and was ready to help me. The following stories between us came naturally. We became good friends,  did a lot of things together and found we had a lot in common: both of us love Mexican food and shopping in Anthropologie; both of us are interested in talking about news happened in the U.S. and China and are curious about each other’s feedbacks towards these news; both of us love baking and visiting museums and art galleries. We even ordered the same food in the restaurant and chose the same clothes in Anthropologie. For me, this is really hard to imagine before I studied in London since I have never thought that two girls, one of which comes from America, a typical Western country, and the other from China, a country in the Orient which has totally different culture and history, would have so much in common to share!

During the time we spent together in London, discussing the news and issues about America and China was an important part of our daily talks. As a Chinese student who has never studied abroad, I have met a lot of cultural shocks and embarrassments when I studied in London. The political issue of Tibet was one of the sensitive topics I would encounter frequently. From being mad with students who believed that Tibet should be independent to learning to respect people who held the different opinions about this issue, I have learnt a lot during the year in London. But I still believe that we should try to understand the whole issue and the historical and cultural context of Tibet before we make our own judgement. And it is very hard for  people who have never traveled to Tibet or known the history or language of Tibet and China and who  just get information from mass media to judge the whole issue. Rachel was always the girl whom I could share my argument and feelings about these sensitive issues. As a matter of fact, she encourages me to write down my thoughts and share them with more people and this is one of the reasons why we create our own website. Now when I watch the news from Chinese media about America and other countries, I try to search for  information from foreign websites and listen to the feedback from Rachel and other foreign friends instead of believing the one side of the story from the Chinese mass media. Rachel and I plan to share the different sides of the issues happened in America and China and write down our feedbacks on the website.

Baking was definitely the most enjoyable thing we have done together when studying in London. Rachel opened a new world for me when she taught me how to bake. I think desserts are not only part of the Western cuisine but also part of the Western culture. Baking helps me to understand people’s tastes and aesthetics of food in the Western world. The traditional desserts in China are very different from the Western desserts and although we do have a lot of Western desserts in China, they have been changed to adapt to Chinese tastes. Actually, almost all of my Chinese friends who studied in London, including me, found the desserts there were too sweet for us. I was shocked by the amount of sugar and butter we used when first made pumpkin  cookies  with Rachel. I will probably not eat that much sugar through the whole year in China and the traditional Chinese cuisine does not use butter at all! Another cultural shock I had when learning baking with Rachel was that she told me oven was very common in America and almost every American family had oven in their kitchen. However, oven is never to be common in Chinese kitchen. I think this is basically due to two reasons. First, the traditional Chinese dish seldom uses oven. Second, most Chinese families before 1980s could not afford  oven. But with the economic development of China, Chinese people especially the younger generation choose to buy oven and begin to enjoy baking at home.

With the continuous communication, Rachel and I find that what we take for granted in our own culture may have totally different version in another one and such findings really fascinate us  and we decide to have dialogues with each other through the website and the story about the American girl and the Chinese girl will continue…

China is just so funny…So, I have Air China booked from Shanghai to Beijing and then Beijing to Los Angeles. You’d think they’d be able to put the ticket together and have my bag go all the way through to LA because they’re the same airlines? Nope! They can’t find my flight from Beijing to LA because I booked it through a travel agent – ebookers.com, not with Air China and because I am in Shanghai not Beijing. But they said that it should show up in the system in Beijing and so, I’d just simply have to get my bag and re-check in Beijing. What a f**king pain in the ass! I hope that at least my flight is IN the system in Beijing! I’d think it should because it did show up in London when I was flying from London to Shanghai.

I should also note that when I booked my flight from Shanghai to Beijing with Air China, I couldn’t even book the flight directly on the website.  I had to call them directly…not cool.  This is 21st century!  What’s up with that, Sophia?

In the past, when I booked flights to other countries, other airports never had problems putting my flights together if I had to make transfers, even if they’re different airlines or when if I booked each leg at separate times.