Below is a book review by a famous Chinese blogger He Cai Tou. He wrote it in both Chinese and English. This is the English version:

China is unhappy
Coz authors want money
All western country are enemies
Just wanna be our daddy
All liberals are pussy
Just gonna be western country's puppets
Buy my book and pay me money
The greatest country we will be
Follow my words and follow me
The greatest country we will be
Come on! Baby!

Of course, the Chinese version is much funnier.

(Change subject for a minute. He Cai Tou is a very popular blogger in China. Recently he wrote a piece about the special program ran by Chinese government about Tibet. I will write about Tibet another time . It was very obvious he disagreed with the proganga the Chinese government launched. However, a BBC's Beijing correspondent quoted him to show how a Chinese blogger enjoyed the program. Using a correspondent who does not speak the local language is a very ineffective thing. Just like the FBI use agents who do not know anything about China to run Counter Intelligence program against China. It is not just ineffective, but could be dangerous sometimes. )

This review reflected a pretty common opinion held by many Chinese intellectuals: The authors were just using the young generation's immature anger against Western countries to make money. The authors, however, said the book was triggered by the western efforts to boycott 2008 olympics held in Beijing. The purpose of this book, they said, was to awaken Chinese liberals who have been embracing Western values.

The main ideas in the books are:
1. Why is China unhappy?
a. Western countries were behind March 14, 2008 Tibet uprising against Chinese rule. It was very obvious the western countries were united to enforce the China containment strategy.
b. Tainted milk scandal tore China's value system apart.
C. French president Nicolas Sarcozy offended China constantly. That's despicable opportunism.
D. Some Chinese elite liberals are corrupting China's core value.

What should China do:
a. China should be more ambitious to become a leader. China should play a major role in international stage.
b. China should develop its economy with sword in hand.
c. PLA (People's Liberation Army's task is to protect the government's economic benefit, not to defend the country. )
d. Economic base is not finance, but industry. Obama is going to fail miserably. The real reason of this financial crisis is American people are too lazy. They don't work hard but they want to enjoy their lives. They consume way more than they earn.
e. Realize western countries' diplomacy of opportunism. China should not attempt to repair the relationship with France.

------- to be continued.

In 1996, almost every Chinese scholars read the best seller "China Can Say No". Many readers commented that they felt that book vented their anger towards "western bullies". At that time, the western world was lifting the sanctions imposed on China in the wake of crackdown on student movement in 1989. Chinese economy was growing at an eye-popping pace. The authors felt it was time for their country to stand up to the western world and make decisions free of western influences.

The famous quote from that book said it all: " America can't lead anybody. America can only be its own leader. Japan can't lead anybody. Sometimes Japan can't be its own leader. China doesn't want to lead anybody. China only wants to be its own leader."

13 years later, the same authors felt they needed to revise their statements. Maybe China can be a leader, and maybe China does not want to just be its own leader. Maybe China can be the new America. After all, America is experiencing the worst crisis while China is still growing rapidly and continuing to buy up American debt. China's Premier Minister Wen Jiabao excluded France in his European itinerary after French President Nicolas Sarkozy met with the Tibet spiritual leader Dalai Lama.

This year, the same authors published another best seller "China is Not Happy". The book has attracted lots of debate on the nationalism promoted in the book. However, the authors contended that the nationalism they supported was different from the western definition. The nationalism in China should be called "New Patriotism". The book also faulted China's liberal elites for corrupting the country by glorifying western values.

Regardless how Chinese people reacted to this book, it is obvious that China has gained tremendous confidence through the economy growth. It also reflected the conflicts between the liberals and the nationalists.

Dear Baby,

I am sure someday you will ask my about Chinese martical arts. In the movie, skinny Chinese guys/girls beat up big fat villains with one finger. Yes, your mom did dream about having that kind of skills to kill the bad guys. Unfortunaly I only learned sword fighting (or to be more precise, sword dancing) for a couple ofmonths, I did think about jumping up and down the hole wearing sandbag, poking rice sack or hitting tree trucks or walls, but none of those lasted more than one week.

However, like many people who grew up at the same time, or even nowadays, I was deeply influeced by the martial arts novels, not so much by the amazing gong fu the heroic characters had, buy by their dream, their life principal, their pride and courage. They didn't make promise easily but once they did, they would do anything to keep their promises. The loved their friends, but also respected their enemies. They defined what a real "MAN" should act like.

There were three famous martial arts novel writers: Charles Cha, Long Gu, Yusheng Liang. My favorite is Long Gu. Gu lived a very interesting life and created some very interesting characters. Gu's novel definitely helped to shape mom's life phylosophy.

Gu said, if your friend betrayed you, don't blame him, blame yourself. Because you made a mistake by letting him to be your friend.

Gu said, never, never regret anything you did. Because if you did it, you had a good reason to do it at the time. You should take the consequence instead of regretting it.

I definetly took those two things to heart. Therefore, I never hate anybody I liked or loved no matter how they treated me. Therefore, I never regret any choice I have made in my life.

Gu did not write very good stories. As a matter of fact, his stories sometimes did not even make sense and the phrases and sentences were very repetitive. What touched the readers were his characters. They were lonely, sad but also strong, brave and courageous.

Dear baby, mom will teach you Chinese and let you read those stories yourself. However, those books did not promote the practical way to live lives. A lot of mom's stubborness came from those novels, but at the same time, those martial arts heroes did help mom to live a life the way she enjoys.

Watching movies was a big and rare thing when I was a child. The villages did not have movie theatres. We probably watched movies 2-3 times a year. Days before the movie started, a big white screen would be hung between two trees, sometimes two high sticks. Words spread fast among the surrounding villages. All people talked about was the movie and who they would go see the movies with. At the day of the playing, schools were off early so kids could go home, eat an early dinner and head off to the movie. It was all like a holiday.


I don't remember any specific movie I saw back then, but I vividly remember the chaotic movie nights. People started to trickle in with stools and chairs long before sundown to find a good spot. Kids were running around, yelling out the lines they remembered from other movies. People greeted each other loudly, chatting and laughing together. When the darkness set in, every parent started calling their kids to come back to the seats. You can hear the mix of crying, screaming, scholding a mile away.


At that time, the movies were all the same: how CCP (Chinese Communist Party) soliders defeated either Janapnese or KMT (Kuomintang or Chinese National Party. led by Chiang Kai-shek) soliders. You pretty much expect the following lines in every movie: We CCP members are not afraid of death. Long live CCP. Long live communism. Communism must be achieved. We PLAs (People's Liberation Army) never takes a needle or a thread from the civilians. We PLAS treat POWs well. They sounded funny now, but at that time, I truly believed all KMT people were evils. I thought Chiang Kai-shek was the the biggest enemy of Chinese people.


There were six generations of movie directors. Most directors I know are the fifth and sixth. I will start introducing the directors and their movies one by one. To name a few directors: Zhang Yimou ( raise the red lantern/ house of flying daggers/hero/Curse of the golden flower. Zhang also directed the 2008 olypmic game opening and closing ceremony), Kai Wai Wong ( Chongqing Experess/2046/Times of Ashes/In the Mood for Love), Zhangke Jia (Xiao Wu/Still life/Unknown Pleasure), Ye Lou (Summer Palace/ Purple Butterfly/ Suzhou River), Kaige Chen (Farewell My Concubine/Together/The Promise) etc...

Before my husband met me, he thought Cantonese food means Chinese food. His family does birthday celebrations at the same Cantonese restaurant for years. The restaurant is a good one, I have to admit, but I was tired of its food after several meals. Anyways, I started to take my husband to try different style Chinese food. He absolutely loved the experience. Now his favorite is Sichuan cuisine.

Officially, there are eight main regional cuisines: Cantonese, Anhui, Fujian, Hunan, Jiangsu, Shandong, Sichuan and Zhejiang. However, even in Los Angeles, the most common ones are Cantonese, Hunan (spicy), Sichuan(spicy) and a mix of Shanghai/Zhejiang/Jiangsu or Yangzhou cuizine. I am from Yangzhou, a city in Jiangsu Province. There is absolutely no good Yangzhou restaurant in Los Angeles, probably not even in the whole US. There is a restaurant in Arcadia, California that serves the similar type of food from Yangzhou. The wait at that restaurant is usually over an hour but the food is not even half as good as the the real Yangzhou cuisine. I told my sister if she wanted to come to the States, the best way to make a good living is to have a real good Yangzhou restaurant.

Anyways, if you like spicy food, you probably want to try Sichuan and Hunan restaurants. If you are not that adventurous, you can never go wrong with big Cantonese restaurants. I will list some good restaurants by its cuisine style in some big cities.

Sometimes Chinese Cuisine makes you think about monkey brain, snake, dogs and other wierd stuff. I will make a confession here: I did have dog meat one time. That's about it. Dog meat is actually not that delicious and it was pretty gross to me when I thought about what I was eating, so I never tried again. As a matter of fact, dog meat is definitely not a common dish. Snake meat is very common, especially in Canton and Hongkong. I had snake skin once. It was very delicious, crunchy and chrewy. I will never try money brain or cat meat, or chicken eggs with small chicken inside (this is actually quite common). I do still eat wierd stuff, including fish brain. There is an old saying: Eating the same organ of animals nourishes that part of the human body. Therefore, eating fish brain is supposed to help with the development of my own brain, in another word, makes me smarter. I don't know if that's why some people eat Cow penis for the performance enhancement-:).

Dear Baby,

June 4 is always a special day for me. Every year on this day, I would read lot of articles online. I used to post myself, but since I came to America, I hav not written much. It has been 19 years now. I remember at the time, I regret that I didn't get the chance to participate, to really make contributions. My friend told me not to worry, because it seemed every 10 years there was a big event in China. At the time I thought, 10 years, that's so far, far away.

It's 19 years now. 19 years. Many people choose to forget. The young generations has no idea what June 4th is. However, to us, the generation who went through the event, no matter how hard we try, it keeps coming back. The wound is covered up. You can't see it, but you can feel the pain. It hurts, and will always hurt.

Every time I write about June 4th, I feel I have so much to say but always end up saying nothing. I don't have confidence I can accurately describe what happened and how it forever influenced my life. I read the diary I kept during that time. It sometimes still makes my eyes watery. I was naive, but I was young and passionate. I was so eager to do anything for my country at any price.

Maybe I will try another time, but for now, I just want to write down the lyrics of two songs. The first one is what happened 19 years ago. The second tells you what has changed in this 19 years.

Fernando

(By ABBA)

Can you hear the drums fernando?
I remember long ago another starry night like this
In the firelight fernando
You were humming to yourself and softly strumming your guitar
I could hear the distant drums
And sounds of bugle calls were coming from afar

They were closer now fernando
Every hour every minute seemed to last eternally
I was so afraid fernando
We were young and full of life and none of us prepared to die
And Im not ashamed to say
The roar of guns and cannons almost made me cry

There was something in the air that night
The stars were bright, fernando
They were shining there for you and me
For liberty, fernando
Though I never thought that we could lose
Theres no regret
If I had to do the same againI would, my friend, fernando............

(You can hear this song at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ohr4P8E_io)

Another one is a Chinese song. I translated it into English. This song described exactly what happened to those who cared (those who were sad and lonely until they chose to forget and live a materialistic lifestyle)

Song of a Consumer

Everything is meaningless
His past is gone

That summer, his first girlfriend was shot with her classmates
Before he had chance to tell her he loved her
He tried to find the killer, until
Many year later he realized the gun was not in the hand of the killer
Nobody killed anybody. Nobody.
Although his friends, along with their big dreams, were forever erased

Everybody was trying to forget it,
The dark event he thought may change their lives
To forget what happened people would forget about him
He is lonely, he is sad
He thought he would be lonely forever
Until the day he found his freedom, freedom of conscience
He will never be sorry to anybody or for anything

He felt he was born at the right time
This is the time for him
He has no soul, no conscience
He has learned how to become a consumer
He owns big house and luxury cars
He knows how to enjoy service because that's the only thing
He can buy with money
But he is tired...
He is tired of rich people, he is tired of angry young men
He is tired of women who have sleep with him, he is tired of those who serve him
He is tired of anybody who tells him there are things meaningful in this world

Above all,
He hates anything that reminded him of the past
Of what happend in that summer

You can hear this song at http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/nfw1ZfT1y5I/.

Dear Baby,

I've stayed home for two days. If you have lots of free time, your thoughts start to wander. I seem to have lost interest in everything, food, shopping, my job, bigger house… Nothing seems to be appealing to me. Your Dad said it was just hormones. I don’t know about that, actually I often ask myself what I really want, but never have a real answer. Maybe that is why your Dad thinks the stars are lined up for me, but I just don’t know how to be thankful and still ask for more from my life.

I read a story long time ago. Once upon a time lived an unhappy king. Needless to say, he had everything, money and women, but he was still unhappy. So he promised to reward anybody who could make him happy. One day, this guy showed up, told the king he knew where the happiness was, but they had to walk across the desert to get it. The king said he was willing to do anything to be happy. The two of them started walking in the desert. After a while, the king wanted to pee. The guy told him not to pee the happiness away. So the king held it. As they continued to walk, the king got thirsty and started to drink water. He had to pee badly. The guy told him if he peed, there was no point to keep walking, because the happiness would be gone. So the king held it. This happened several times. Finally the king almost cried, he begged the guy to let him pee. The guy told him to go ahead. After he peed, the king sighed deeply with relieve: “This feels so great.” The guy bowed to him, said: “Congratulations, your highness, you found your happiness.”

Does that mean the real happiness is physiological? That’s probably not the point of the story. I guess the point is to appreciate what you have, a kind of cliché. Unfortunately the king’s happiness is short lived. Happiness is always short-lived. Say first you want love, once you have love you want money, once you have money you want power, once you have money and power, you probably want lust, once you have all that, you either want more money, more power, more women or you may start taking drugs or make it easy, jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.

So far in my life, I have never been near to having everything I want. Thank God for that so I have no desire to jump off the bridge or anything. However, I think I did taste the emptiness of that kind of life once.

In China, once you get into school, it’s very unlikely you will not graduate. There was no academic pressure whatsoever. So when I was in graduate school, I had an easy time in school. I had 3 close girlfriends who I was always with: DY, WC, DSC. We always went to class and leave at the same time. We went dancing, drinking, partying. After we got half-drunk, we would walk back to the dorm on the main road and laugh loudly and stupidly. I was the only one smoking. I would smoke in public which was very rare at the time. We would wear similar colorful jackets, riding bicycles down the street, yelling and laughing with each other. We had guys wait in line to buy us dinner. It’s hard to not pay attention to four young fearless, blatant, arrogant, intelligent yet silly girls. DSC was married, but her husband was working at a different city for a year. As for us three, we had guys who liked us, but we just pretended we didn’t know. We would go out with them but never really gave them the chance to go on a date. At the time, none of us tasted what it was like to love somebody but not being loved back. We enjoyed being the center of the attention.

One day, we were singing Karaoke at DSC’s apartment. It was so cold so I stayed under the blanket. Oh, by the way, four of us would often sleep in one bed because if we came back too late at night after the dorm closed, we had to go to DSC’s apartment. All three of them were singing and eating snacks. WC started to sing a folk sang “Walking on the road of the village”. I was smiling and eating with them, but all of a sudden, tears welled into my eyes. I was shocked myself. It’s still hard to describe what happened. It was like I was happy, I enjoyed that life but at the same time, I felt something was missing, I felt sadness and emptiness. I felt I was floating in the air. I couldn’t touch the ground. I was not holding onto something real. My life was like a dream. I remembered the laughter, but if I look back, there was nothing in it.

Soon after that, WC and DY both started dating seriously and eventually got married. I was attracted to someone too except I didn’t have a good ending. It was the first time I tasted the bitterness of love or infatuation or whatever. However, years later when we looked back at those times, we did agree that was one of the happiest times of our lives.

Dear Baby, when I was in high school, I really liked a Buddhism poem I read. It was about taking happiness, sorrow, life and death lightly, about having a peaceful heart and mind, and accept what fate bestows on you. It took me so many years to realize I am way too ordinary to be like that. I can’t really see life so wisely. I am still confused and have no clue what I want, but for now, I just want you to be healthy, to come to this world safely. That’s what happiness means to me right now.

Dear Baby,

Today I was browsing on the Internet and came across a book written by one of my old internet friends LDL. LDL is a famous newspaper editor now. He wrote this book for his daughter. It is a very beautiful book, but I was having a hard time connecting this loving father with the LDL I knew. I guess everybody has to grow up, especially when they become parents. After all, it was about 10 years since I chatted with LDL and other friends in an internet chat room.

In 1999, my college days finally came to an end. I started working for an American company in Changzhou before I came to this country in July 2000. During that one year’s time, I spent all my spare time chatting online with my internet friends. We all met in a forum called "Reader’s Life." Everybody was in their mid to late 20s, intelligent, talented but extremely arrogant. Most of us were pro-western and pro-democracy, and largely affected by the 1989 incident in Tiananmen Square. Around June 4th, we became very emotional. The threads we posted were usually deleted by the Website moderators in less than one minute because of the sensitive topics, but we kept trying to post and save the articles before they were deleted. I will probably talk about 1989 in another time.

Rye is my first true best friend. At the time, I was in love with the book The Catcher in the Rye, and that’s obviously where Rye got his nickname from. I exchanged pictures with Rye before I left for America. That was one of the pictures ZB took for me. ZB is a photographer. He told me he wanted to capture the most beautiful moment of me on his camera. I don’t know if he was successful, but I did send the picture he took of me to Rye. Rye said on the forum: lala (my nickname) smiles like sunshine in California. After that, everybody started to call me Pretty Girl Lala. I met Rye in 2002 when I was in Beijing. Rye had a big party for me. When he saw me, he said I looked so different. I laughed and told him that the California sun was too strong for me. Rye is a CEO of a website now.
That year was the one of the most memorable times of my life. People who I talked to now are famous editors, journalist and book publishers. I obviously never read as many books as they did, nor was I a good writer, but I was able to pull some tricks once in a while. We used to talk to each other by writing poems. It is really not too hard, all you need to do is remember some classic lines. One night I used Ezra Pound:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd
Petals on a wet, black bough.
That was considered a classic flirt for a long time. I am sure Pound would jump out of his tomb if he knew I was using his poem in this way.

Dear baby, I will tell you more stories about them later. It’s always a pleasure to talk to people who have the same interests and passions and who are at the same intelligence level as you, but in the end, it’s very hard to maintain friends with them because when you start arguing and fighting over things, most likely over stupid things, you know the worst way to hurt each other because you are all so much alike.

Getting back to Catcher in the Rye. I remember the first day I arrived at Changzhou, a strange city with no friends and family of my own. It was a rainy day. I walked 15 minutes to find a small noodle soup restaurant around 8pm at night. I was the only customer. Everybody was staring at me as I was finishing my soup as quickly as possible. Then I walked back to my apartment. I stood at my balcony, smoking my cigarette and drinking my wine, looking at the apartment complex like 50 feet in front of me. There were hundreds of windows, all lit up so you could see people walking back and forth, and you could hear the sounds of the TV, a piano, parents yelling, kids crying. Every window was like a movie screen, showing the story of the family behind the window. As I was drinking more and more, the screens became shaky, all I could think of was the ending of the Catcher in the Rye:

It began to rain like a bastard…All the parents and mothers and everybody went over and stood right under the roof of the carrousel, so they wouldn’t get soaked to the skin or anything…. I got soaked…I didn’t care though. I felt so damn happy all of a sudden.. I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don’t know why…God, I wish you could have been there…

Dear Baby,

When I saw the dark line on the stripe, I went to get your dad. He was buried in the big couch watching the Lakers game on TV. I told him to come with me. “No no no no,” he didn’t move his eyes away from the TV, “Only one minute left in the game.” He was struggling with me as I dragged him to the bedroom: “Only one minute left. Please, just one minute!” I showed him the test result. “Oh, you are pregnant! I told you so!” before he uttered the last word, he was running back to his Lakers’ game.

Next, I called the doctor’s office. The lady told me I was pregnant in a monotone voice, after putting me on hold for about 5 minutes. I hung up the phone and called your dad. He said, "Oh, yeah, of course, I knew you were pregnant." Then I sat there, staring at the screen for a little bit. For the whole week, I felt nausea, dizziness and fatigue. I became a little annoyed at you. “Come on, be a good baby,” I touched my belly, “don’t be too hard to your mom.” Obviously you didn’t hear me, ‘coz I didn’t feel any better -J

My mom, your grandma was the happiest person to hear the news. She sighed with relief: “It’s about time. I had you when I was thirty, and you are the youngest.” Then she asked me what I wanted to eat. I really had no appetite at all, but out of nowhere, I remembered a flour bun soup I had when I was a kid. So I told her I wanted that.

At the dinner table, I tried one sip of my soup and complained it was nothing like what I had in my memory. “Maybe we don’t have the right type of flour,” my mom said, apologetically. I turned around and looked at her. Suddenly I was hit by sadness. She looked so old, standing next to the sink, waiting nervously to hear my comment of the soup. Her face was filled with deep wrinkles, and the hair color dye couldn’t cover all of her gray hair anymore. I had remembered when I was so sad that my mom was getting old as I grew up, now I am so used to seeing her as an old woman. I told her she cooked terrible food, puts too much salt, and she was always forgetful. I hate that she used an old wash rag to clean the countertop instead of a clean sponge or paper towels. I used to love my mom like she wass the only thing in this world to me! I looked at my mom. Memory brought me back to that Spring afternoon when my mom took me to my grandparents’ home. That was one of my happiest memories I had when I was living in the village. Yes, many many years ago, when my mom still had smooth, glowing skin, when she had long black hair flowing like a waterfall, when she was an attractive young woman, in a sunny, warm, breezy Spring afternoon, she held my hands, walked to my grandparent’s house.

It was such a beautiful day. The birds were chirping, the flowers were blooming, the chicken, ducks were aimlessly roaming around the road. The villagers greeted each other from far away, laughing together loudly. My mom and I walked along the river, across the bridge, climbed the hills, and passed several villages. My mom waved at the peasants who were working in the fields. “Busy?” She raised her voice and smiled at them. “No, busy doing nothing.” They would stand up, wipe their faces with the sleeves and greet her back. When she stopped to talk to somebody, I would grab the corner of her shirt and look around. My mom said I was always a curious child. One time her friend pointed at me, “Is this your youngest? She is so big already!” My mom looked down at me. She touched my head. “Yes,” she said, her voice was so gentle and sweet, “this is my favorite baby. She is big now! Time flies!” She messed up my hair a little. I felt her big, warm hands. I giggled, leaned closer to her. I don’t know why I remember this, but I just remember it, remember in that beautiful Spring afternoon, I was the happiest 5 year old girl, held my mom’s hand, talked and smiled to the people in the whole world.

Dear Baby, someday I will be old, just like your grandma. I will be nagging and annoying. Baby, I just want to you know, at one point of time, your mom is a pretty, lovely young woman. She talks a lot, she laughs, she is mean sometimes, but she is true to her friends. She is clumsy, she breaks stuff all the time, she is lazy but she is fun and playful. She enjoys annoying your dad, but she kisses him while he is sleeping. Oh, before I forget, she does curse and cry sometimes-J