Seth’s blog

In downtown Berkeley I met a group of Chinese students from Beijing. They were entering freshmen at UC Berkeley.

They said there were 40 students like them — from Beijing, entering UC Berkeley. (At Tsinghua, there will be 400 entering freshmen from Beijing.) In all of China, 13 students were admitted to Harvard, about the same number to Yale and Princeton. One of them said she’d wanted to go to Northwestern but hadn’t gotten in. Had she gone to college in China, she might have gone to Renmin University, perhaps the #3 university in China.

Surely their parents were wealthy, yes. But they preferred an American college to a Chinese one for two main reasons: 1. They can choose whatever major they want. At Chinese universities students are often forced into a major they don’t want if their scores are high enough to get into a prestigious university but not high enough to get into the major they want at that university. 2. They believe that if they graduate from an American university they will have more opportunities. Where did they get the idea of coming to Berkeley? I asked. Online, they said. Their English was really good.

The “more opportunities” may not be as simple as they think. In Beijing I know a Chinese businesswoman who hired a recent college graduate. She’d gone to college in England, indicating that her parents were wealthy. The new worker turned out to be irresponsible and had to be fired. Perhaps her parents had spoiled her. In this businesswoman’s eyes, an overseas education may now be a negative.

I am a big fan of pork belly. Whenever I see it on a menu I order it. The mayor of Chongqing (population 32 million) recently made headlines with a speech whose main point was

改善民生不只是吃红烧肉穿漂亮衣服

Which means: Better living standards is not just eating hong shao rou wearing beautiful clothes. Hong shao rou is pork belly braised in a red sauce. Maybe my favorite Chinese dish. Supposedly Chairman Mao’s favorite dish. I’m glad he said “not just” rather than “not”.

You may have seen the lovely Disney movie based on the story of Mulan, the girl who dresses as a boy to take her father’s place in the army. Even better is the original story, which is only 300-odd ancient Chinese characters. It begins like this:

Mulan was weaving. She was having trouble concentrating on her work. The previous night she had learned that her elderly father had been called to military service.

What a great beginning! Instantly you care. You could read every short story The New Yorker has published and not find a beginning as great as that. The essence of how a story should begin is so strong it reminds me of something that happened when I was a grad student. My roommates had cooked something with a lot of ginger. So that’s what ginger tastes like, I thought. I understood for the first time why ginger ale was called ginger ale.

• During the Foxconn suicide epidemic, several media outlets said the suicide rate was lower than expected. “Members of the media have been killing off their own credibility at an alarming rate.”
• Fascinating blog about quality control in China. “Factory workers are paid by the number of pieces they make. Sometimes they see they are working on defective goods, but they keep working instead of sending the bad pieces back to the previous operation.”
• The unsustainability of higher education.
• the Dear Abby of math problems. “The next bubble to burst is higher education. . . . It’s too much one-size-fits-all.” And that one size fits the professor.
• BBC radio documentaries
  
• Raw food leaders no longer raw or vegan

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.

• A Chinese medicine huckster. “Zhang asserts that different body organs have their own color preferences: lungs like white food, the liver likes green food, kidneys like black food, the heart likes red food and the spleen likes yellow food.”
• According to Gawker, “kombucha tastes terrible”. Some store-bought kombuchas contain too much alcohol.