One Child Policy Riddle Contest

Here’s a riddle about the one-child policy in China. The person who posts the right answer first as a comment gets a prize. There may also be runner-up prizes for other correct answers.

1. China has a one-child policy. Traditionally, boys have been favored over girls because girls often leave the family when they marry, whereas boys tend to support their aging parents. However, abortion for this purpose is illegal. Assuming everyone has only one child, how will the distribution of boys vs. girls be in the next generation. (Hint: try using probability of getting a boy = 0.50, then try again using a number smaller than 0.5)
2. In actuality, rural families, if they do not have a boy for their first child, may try for a second child. Urban families can only have one child, however, no matter the gender. How will component of the rule affect the proportion of boys to girls?
3. One more caveat: families may choose to have a second child, but they must pay an additional tax. How do you think this will affect the gender distribution, in comparison to other countries?

A Classy Nanjing Valentine

From Valentine's Day Nanjing

A classy restaurant? In Nanjing? With quality food we can order without reading Chinese?

We have found it.

From Valentine's Day Nanjing

We celebrated Valentine’s Day with our friends Fulvio and his girlfriend Lana at a Taiwanese Restaurant.

From Valentine's Day Nanjing

It was completely vegetarian, buffet style, so we could eat as much as we liked of whatever we liked, without having to say “may yo ro,” or sending back dishes or crying our eyes out over the spice.

From Valentine's Day Nanjing

Even Lana, an enthusiastic meat eater, was continually fooled by the dishes, proclaiming, “This is meat,” occasionally.

Exotic icecreams like mango, peach, mint, pineapple, and tiny little cakes of all varieties lined the table for deserts. Fresh juices, fresh ground coffee, and flower tea to quench our thirst.

From Valentine's Day Nanjing

Best of all – classy, English service in a beautifully decorated room. We could forget we were in China!

From Valentine's Day Nanjing

From Valentine's Day Nanjing

Lantern Festival

From Lantern Festival

On a warm Monday night (yes, it’s spring already here) we headed out with several coworkers and friends to a commercial area famous for its 1000 year old Confucius Temple to celebrate Lantern Festival. We were warned that the this area would be packed with people, and the warning were right. The streets inside Fuzimiao (fu-tse-mow) resembled a Boston right before the fourth of July fireworks. The difference here was the police were blocking certain streets so that the entire crowd could only move in one direction. So as a mass we moved through the weaving streets.
I was expecting at any minute to see something special: thousands of lanterns in the water, a massive fireworks display, a statue or even a dance number. I was wrong. Does anyone remember the “line ride” from the Simpsons? It was an amusement park ride where all you did was stand in line. Once you reached the turnstile where you would normally enter the actual ride, it was all over. The lantern festival felt a lot like that.
The huge crowds and police making you go in only one direction felt like there just had to be something terribly exciting, but at the end there was nothing. Thousands of people showed up to see nothing. There was no band, no celebration, no special food, just thousands and thousands of people moving through the streets. I honestly have no idea why anyone would go.
The night was still fun though. We went out to dinner and had a few drinks. Oh, and we were on TV yet again. This time we made the nightly news. Laura had the highlight with her (phonetically) “Wah eye Nanjing” – I love Nanjing.

From Lantern Festival

From Lantern Festival

Luxury Honeymoon on a Penny

This morning, Chinese New Year, we woke up in Chiang Mai, Thailand, to the sound of firecrackers. In my dreamy haze, I thought it was gunfire and tried to tell Matt to stay away form the window, following my BPS emergency “training.” The sound of the local frustrated rooster and the hypnotic chanting of monks helped me drift back to sleep with the tropical sunrise through the window.

We’ve been on vacation for so long now, it’s easy to forget we even have jobs. In Asia, a Westerner doesn’t have to work very much to live a luxuriously upper middle class lifestyle. For this leg of our honeymoon, our room overlooking the city with a view of the morning sunrise, complete with hot showers, is 150 Baht a night – that’s less than $5. The other night we had our feet and backs massaged in the summery evening, 120 Baht an hour, less than $4. Watermelon juice or smoothies, made from real watermelon, not sugar juice cocktail, are less than $2 for a large. You can eat healthy and cheaply in Thiland, a paradox in the US. Every day I’ve had muesli, tropical fruit, and yogurt for less than $2 – I don’t even think the yogurt at McDonald’s is that cheap.

Friends of ours think, “Oh, they love to save a dollar!” as if it were some hobby in and of itself. But this means more to me: My entire life has been, “When this,” or “After than,” – after high school, after college, when I get a better job, when Matt finishes law school, when it’s summer vacation, when we buy a house. I felt like I was when-ing my life away.
I imagined the life of comfort, intellectual stimulus, vacation and adventure was something I could achieve through hard work some time in the distant future or only in small doses, at great expense, maybe a week yearly.

In Asia, I’m able to afford all those things I always cut back on or never imagined I could afford. I rented a motor cycle for less than $7 for a whole day. I had a pedicure – the second in my life, the first one I ever paid for – for less than $2. I always wanted to swim with the dolphins in Florida but could never afford it – here, I got to swim with an elephant. We took a cooking class, a crazy luxury. Where normally I would have packed bagels and peanut butter to curb hunger pains in my adventures, rather than eat out, I can afford fresh tropical fruit, exotically cooked dinners. I feel like I’m living the life held so out of my grasp, reserved for retired women who had saved enough for a cruise.

There’s a strange irony here, too. America’s history is one built on moving to new places that our children may have a better life: the first settlers from Europe, then the pioneers, and today immigrants from the world over. My job is to help Chinese students prepare academically to also realize this American dream. But Matt and I, as foreigners, moved in the opposite direction and found a better life. Where our Chinese students are searching for prosperity in our homeland, we have found prosperity in theirs.

Transportation Thailand

Asia, in a way, is like the Wild West. There is no OSHA, no safety laws, and while this brings danger, it also brings a measure of freedom (and, perhaps, efficiency) lost in the civilized North Western hemisphere.

Here, pick up trucks with benches act as taxies. Motorcycles are fitted with a cart for carrying people and Americans who have been driving on the opposite side of the road for over ten years are allowed to rent a motorcycle without anything like a license.

From Chang Mai

Matt and I rented a motorbike for a day. The man who brought us the bike asked if we had ever driven one before. When Matt said no, he gave us a crash course – this is the o button, this is the throttle, here is the gas tank – the total extent of our lesson! Riding on the back, on the wrong side of the road, I felt a little wild, happy to be living this life. I never would have rented a motor bike back home! Riding through the jungle-thick hills, I felt like Che Guevara in motorcycle diaries.

We had a few scares – you’re not being adventurous enough unless you’re scared. At the top of a hill, our bike refused to start. We looked to be low on gas. We’ll be stranded, I thought, we’ll have to walk the bike all the way back down. It was hot and my neck was burning. Then two young German guys came to our rescue and showed us the kickstart on the bike.

Riding to the temple, we passed the motorcycle parking entrance. Matt got set to make a U-turn. We came too close to a parked pickup truck taxi- my side slammed into the metal. Just stay on, I thought, we’ll pull away. Then the bike started leaning. It seemed to fly away from us. We skidded across the pavement; pain shot through my left leg and arm. Get out of the road, I thought, get out of the road. In the skid I had seem two cars coming behind us, one an SUV. Get out of the road, they’ll run you over. I could stand, so I pulled myself with my arms and crawled on my right knee.

I sat on the curb. “Okay, okay?” asked a gang of pick up taxi drivers and Matt, who was scraped up more but who could stand. I hurt everywhere, I couldn’t say I was okay, but if I could just cry, I knew I’d feel better. “I just need to cry. Leave me alone so I can cry.”

I put my head down on my arm. Though the pain faded, the tears never came. The bike had taken a chunk of metal out of the pickup taxi, though it itself barely had a dent. Matt paid the guy 1000 Baht when the driver shoed him the damage. “We should get out of here as soon as we can,” Matt said, before they try to go through official channels. The driver gave Matt some balm for his wounds. I dreaded getting back on the bike, like a child dreads closing his eyes after waking from a nightmare. “I’ll walk,” I said. But I got back on, gingerly, and we cruised down the mountain.

The wat, or temple itself is overrated – it claims to be from the 1400’s, but it has a new, fake feel, like Disneyland’s Smalltown USA. We’re about wat-ed out.

More fun was the water fall. The sun was fading – it is winter here after all – so we had little time to explore. On the return trip from the waterfall, we hyper-miled, cruising with the engine off, key out, along the winding hills.

From Chang Mai

This morning, we went to the pharmacy to buy antiseptic and bandages for our skinned arms. Mine are small, because I was wearing pants and sleeves, but Matt’s new tan and golden hairs are spoiled. They’re not deep, just a skin, no blood, but I’ve got infections from less, and it’s a tropical environment where anything can survive. But now we have souvenirs with a story to tell – so much better than a tattoo.