I've always had an academic interest in Chinese Buddhism but I was never able to pursue it in undergrad or grad school. During law school it was even more out of the question. Fortunately I've got some free time this summer and I'm finally able to explore this interest more in depth. Besides taking the continuing ed class I mentioned in a previous post I also regularly visit the Hsi Lai Temple. It contains the largest Buddhist monastic community in the United States and they've taught me a lot about the development of Buddhist thought in China. This particular Buddhist order is a Pure Land school of Chan (Zen). What you see in the picture is my favorite statue in the temple. His name is Bodhidharma and he introduced Chan Buddhism to China in 520 AD. Although he came to China from India all representations I've seen of him show strikingly Mediterranean features. The Greeks did conquer parts of northwestern India and established the state of Bactria, albeit several hundred years before Bodhidharma was born. But hey I'm no historian---all I know is he is the whitest looking (as in Euro) dude in the temple other than me. Whoever he was he was a very interesting and odd bird. He once sat in front of a wall in a cave meditating for nine years. He had trouble staying awake so he would whack himself on the head with his shoe. This statue shows him holding his shoe in his hand. People put coins in the shoe so he won't feel the need to hit himself with it. Some of you guys reading this may belong to the heretical cult of Green Tea. I never knew this, but apparently one of the most famous legends of Bodhidharma is that he got to the point where pounding himself with his shoe didn't do the job anymore so he ripped off his own eyelids and threw them into the snow outside his cave. In the Spring two tea plants appeared where he tossed his eyelids and that is how China got tea. Later generations of those studying the sutras thus owe him a tremendous debt; if you've ever tried to read a sutra you know what I mean. But Bodhidharma wasn't done yet. He got a gig as abbot of the Shaolin Temple in Henan and when he arrived he was horrified to discover that Chinese monks were pencil-necked geeks. So he taught them a style of martial arts and boxing to whip them in to shape. And that's how the world famous Shaolin kung fu came about. If you're interested in the history of Chinese Buddhism I can recommend a very good book by Kenneth Chen: Buddhism in China: A Historical Survey. The only drawback is that he wrote it in 1964 so he used the godawful Wade-Giles romanization.
- posted by Prince Roy @ 6/30/2003 02:16:00 PM| |

 
I've experienced unforseen downtime as Blogger is converting all its blogs to the new system. We'll see how it goes and whether it will now properly support Chinese characters (note: it isn't and now even my previous entries are FUBAR). UPDATE: all Chinese characters are now displaying correctly, for the moment at least. There's a growing Sichuanese community in LA and last night we went to a friend's house for some Sichuan hotpot 火锅. The girl whose house we went to is quite a character. A native of Sichuan, she originally came to the US as part of a trade group that had obtained a business visa. She was in New York on 9/11 and actually witnessed the first plane strike the tower. Her first thought when she saw the plane heading towards the building was "What a crappy pilot that guy is". It just goes to show how the mind works when it confronts the seemingly unbelievable. Everyone in her building went to the rooftop for a better view where they saw the second plane hit. Soon after that the order came to evacuate her building, though it wasn't near Ground Zero. She tried to get back to her hotel in New Jersey but the tunnels were closed so she was stuck in Manhattan for several hours in the chaos. Going on the lam, she abandoned her group and flew alone to LA where she managed to change her temporary business visa to a student visa by enrolling in one of the schools out here. Now she's working in a San Gabriel law office as a legal secretary. She left a really good job in Beijing with world-wide travel and decent benefits to take her chances here in the States. So far it seems to be paying off---she's hooked up with some super rich sugar daddy (an American) who she found on the Internet. I met the guy last night---he's kind of a geek, but seems decent enough. The hotpot was way out of his league, but he dove right in to the side dishes of chicken gizzard and pig stomach even after I told him what it was he was eating, so there may be some hope for him. Another guy who came just happens to be the chef ʦ�� Shifu at one of our favorite San Gabriel restaurants. He only gets one day off a week and works 14-hour days. It's a mystery as to how he came to know my wife's friends, but he makes the most awesome hotpot stock and he's the guy who cooks that amazing cabbage dish I've written about. The guy has serious skills. He's also from Sichuan, and in fact he used to work next to my wife's elementary school. He told us stories of how the Chinese mafia operates in the San Gabriel Valley---they especially like to target restaurant owners because they are an easy touch-up for cash. He related one incident where the owner of the Chongqing (quite decent food, btw) had somehow pissed off some shady characters so one day they show up at the restaurant asking to speak with a Mr. Chen. The only Chen there was the head chef and when he came out these guys pulled out iron bars and proceeded to attack him. It's happened two or three times. Rather than go after the owner with whom they have a quarrel they beat the crap out of his/her best chef because that way the owner suffers even more. The gangs have even tried to get money from Shifu's restaurant. They are currently still in the negotiating stage---the hoods originally wanted $4000, the owner made a counteroffer of $400. Both sides are at an impasse. The owner has called in the police---evidently this is a common negotiating tactic. Owner: "If you don't come down to a more reasonable figure I'll call the cops." Thug: "Go ahead, see if we care." This buys the parties more time and allows tempers to cool. They later come back to the table and hopefully strike a deal. The police here are woefully inadequate to address the problems posed by Asian gangs. First of all there's the language barrier. Second is the traditional reluctance of Chinese to get involved with the authorities though that is changing, at least in the US. I find it fascinating that law enforcement has taken an unwitting role as a bargaining chip. The Shifu, bless him, wears a little American flag pin. The first thing I noticed was that it was upside down. I was going to tell him about it, but after listening to what this guy goes through in order to send his family in China money to live and go to school on I didn't have the heart to do it. Besides, he may be making a political statement! (an upside down flag is a traditional symbol of distress).
- posted by Prince Roy @ 6/27/2003 02:02:00 AM| |

 

Yet another reason I've taken to hanging around the Hsi Lai Temple: You never know who'll show up. Today it just happened to be Ms. CHEN Szu Yu ��˼��, aka Ms. Chinese-Taipei, the recent contestant at Miss Universe 2003. She and her entourage of eight (including her mom) got the red carpet treatment complete with a personally-guided tour by the abbot. I was hanging out in the temple library, which also fronts as the Dripping Water Tearoom ��ˮ��, when they all walked in. She even had on her "Chinese-Taipei" delegate sash. Now can someone please tell me when Misses Japan, Costa Rica, and Trinidad and Tobago are coming to town?
UPDATE: Now that I think about it, her sash read "Taiwan"; evidently she has her own ideas about exactly who it is she represents. I like a girl with a mind of her own! Back in 1999 I worked in the Chinese Branch at the Voice of America. Word came through the pipe that the Ms. Chinese-Taipei for that year needed an interpreter during the entire week of the pageant. The interpreter would get a per diem stipend of something like $200 per day plus all expenses paid, including business class air and accomodations in the same hotel as the contestant. Caribbean paradise Trinidad and Tobago was the host country. One of the staff at VOA did a lot of freelance interpreting and they offered him the job but he had too much work lined up and couldn't take it. A native of China, his English was amazing, among the best I've ever come across. He asked me if I wanted to do it, and with his recommendation the job would've been mine. But I had just recently started at VOA and so I didn't have the vacation saved up. If I had known then what I know now about VOA I would've taken that job and run (away...maybe with Ms. Taiwan). Just kidding, wifey!
- posted by Prince Roy @ 6/23/2003 08:46:00 AM| |

 
I'm taking an evening extension course at Hsi Lai University, a Buddhist university in Rosemead, CA. So today I go over and get my student ID, email account and Internet password activated. I had a couple of hours before class so I thought I'd head over to the library and check up on some of the China blogs. You can imagine my surprise when I discovered that the school's server blocks the following sites. Keep in mind people, this is America I'm talking about here. The sinners, in no particular order of evil, are:

1. Wayne's Goodbye Laowai Goodbye
2. Richard's The Peking Duck
3. Preston's Reoriented
4. Charles' Why Read This?
5. Phil's Flying Chair

This of course begs the question: What have you guys been up to that would get you on the Buddha's shit list? Remember, leniency for those who truthfully confess!
- posted by Prince Roy @ 6/20/2003 02:07:00 PM| |

 
Postscript: The Late Years of Zhou Enlai I visited a couple of Chinese bookstores in Monterey Park this morning in order to take a closer look at the book and I've decided not to buy it. I simply don't believe Mr. Gao is saying anything that hasn't already been said before. The book may still hold some interest for those with an academic or personal interest in Premier Zhou, but otherwise you can safely give this one a miss. I'd like to further expand on the comment I made yesterday about Mr. Gao's sources. The book does indeed refer to some conversations Mr. Gao had with certain minor Cultural Revolution figures who moved in the inner circles of the CCP. However those interviews were not conducted as part of the specific research for this book. They took place in the early-mid 1980s for other projects and in Mr. Gao's official capacity as court biographer at the Central Archive of the CCP. Therefore one needs to take the information gleaned by Mr. Gao in these interviews in light of that quite important qualification. Chinese bookstores (both in China and the US) can be a frustrating experience and a browser's worst nightmare. Like Western bookstores they categorize books by general subject but the similarity ends there. Every Western bookstore I've been to arranges books by the last name of the author (or by last name of subject if a biography), but Chinese bookstores arrange all titles by publisher. For instance, if I go to the "Fiction" section at Barnes and Noble to look for "Daughter of the River" by Hong Ying (�����Ů�� ��Ӱ ��) I'd normally find it under authors in "H", or maybe "Y" if they don't know about Chinese name order. In a Chinese bookstore I'd go to the "Fiction" section and from there I'd have to wade through all the publishers who offered fiction until I stumbled on Hong Ying's publisher. Or I'd have to ask store personnel, and getting courteous service in China is still a hit or miss affair. I'd like to throw this question out there: Why do Chinese bookstores display their wares in this manner? Why not arrange by name of author using pinyin or some other scheme? Most every literate person in China should have had exposure to pinyin by now---it's been in use for almost 50 years. And this would be a way to reinforce pinyin so that people would remember it after grammar school. The current system makes it a pain to find a book quickly; even if you ask for help a lot of times there may not be many staff in the store or they are all busy helping others. Any thoughts?
- posted by Prince Roy @ 6/20/2003 04:56:00 AM| |

 

The UCLA International Institute sponsored a talk today in Chinese by official CCP 'court biographer' GAO Wenqian. He's got a new book out about Premier Zhou Enlai called "The Late Years of Zhou Enlai" 晚年周恩来. Apparently this is an unofficial biography---Mr. Gao now lives in Flushing, New York and the book makes use of secret internal documents he had privy to all the years he worked in the Central Archive of the CCP. Mirror Books is the publisher---they bring out a lot of books on CCP figures and Chinese political history written from the heterodox dissident perspective, so the company plays an important role in helping keep Chinese dissidents gainfully employed while they are in exile. You can visit the website here. Zhou Enlai is an absorbing figure whose demigod status in the CCP hierarchy still affords him official protection from criticism. Even Mao was wrong "30% of the time" according to the CCP. Among the first generation CCP leadership he is probably the one still most beloved by the Chinese people, although cracks have begun to appear in his armor, especially among Chinese intellectuals no longer in China. While Mr. Gao's talk was interesting enough as he illustrated various intricate political and personal relationships between several elite Cultural Revolution leaders, he didn't provide any bombshells---after all, he wants us to buy the book. But I get the feeling this is no scandalous expose ala "The Private Life of Chairman Mao" anyway. I will most likely wind up buying the book but I am disappointed in one key respect: all his information is from documents; though the press release for the book suggests otherwise, Mr. Gao admitted today he did not interview any major primary sources who worked for Zhou and the CCP leadership, and many of these people, like US-born Nancy Tang, are still alive. Nancy Tang acted as intepreter for the highest levels of Chinese leadership during the 1960 and 1970s; she's the small woman with eyeglasses and bowl haircut you see in the photos of the several meetings between Nixon, Kissinger, Mao and Zhou. So without personal interviews it's hard to know what new light, if any, Mr. Gao can shed on Premier Zhou's life. He did make the rather interesting comment that even if he had conducted interviews 'their hands are so dirty' politically that he doubts the subjects would have been forthright with their recollections. It's true he had access to internal documents, but who knows how much they were edited before he saw them? And I think Western scholarship (by both Chinese and other researchers) has pretty accurately explained Zhou's role and the motivations for his actions. Therefore I can only recommend this book (half-heartedly at that) for those like myself who are fascinated with Chinese elite politics. There is no English translation available as far as I am aware.
- posted by Prince Roy @ 6/19/2003 12:05:00 PM| |

 
A Sincere Regret I've been all over China except for three areas: Tibet, Manchuria and Hainan. And one of the things I love the most about China is that almost every decent-sized city makes its own beer, sometimes several. True, a lot of that beer is pretty bad, but many are respectful and quite a few are surprisingly good. Best of all, it's really cheap---usually around 30 cents for a 630ml bottle (1.3 pints). And most of the time even a bad beer is drinkable if it's cold. You guys in China now just don't know how good you have it. Damn newbies. Nowadays cold beer is everywhere. You can even find draft without too much of a problem. I did my main traveling pre-1998, most of it 1993-1995. Back in the day cold beer was a luxury, and you hardly ever encountered it off the beaten laowai banana pancake trail; those rare occasions we found refrigerated beer were true causes for celebration. Most of the time 'cold' beer merely meant the shopkeep had kept it in the shade for most of the day. One of my prized possessions in those days was a little pocket-sized notebook I carried around with me everywhere I went. At first I did this to write down new vocabulary, either Mandarin or whichever dialect of the place I was visiting. I also listed noteworthy dishes and recorded names and addresses of the various characters I met. But its most important function soon became serving as the home for my Chinese beer label collection. Each place I visited, after each new local beer I would soak the bottle and off came the label. Then I would stick it on a blank page in my notebook along with the date and some comments about the quality of the beer. Unfortunately I seem to have misplaced that notebook. It's one of my greatest regrets, because it contained literally scores of beer labels from all over China. I'm hoping it's in a box of some stuff I have at my friend's house in Oregon. But I came across a really cool site tonight that's taken me back down memory lane. Some guy has put up an amazing page containing beer labels from almost every province in China. Visit it here. Give it a look to see how many you've had. I don't know if the creator of this site has personally tried them all, but I plan to send him an email right after I post this. Maybe somebody can start up a Chinese beer review page.
- posted by Prince Roy @ 6/15/2003 02:20:00 PM| |

 
Today's Recipe Tomato-Egg Drop (Flower) Soup 2-3 eggs (beat well in a small bowl) 2 medium tomatoes (sliced) 2 thin slices of ginger 4-5 cups of water 1 green onion finely chopped 1/2 teaspoon of chicken/vegetable bouillon powder 1/2 teaspoon sesame oil salt to taste INSTRUCTIONS: Spread the chopped green onion in the serving bowl and set aside. Place the water, tomatoes, ginger and bouillon in a soup pan. Add salt (try 1/2 teaspoon) Bring to boil. When the water boils reduce heat and add eggs. Stir constantly so that the egg will 'flower'. Add the sesame oil. Taste broth to see whether it needs salt. Pour into serving bowl over green onions. Easy as that. COMMENTS: Looking back over my previous recipes I noticed one glaring omission: soup. Soup is an integral part of the Chinese meal. A kind of myth exists where Chinese supposedly eat soup as a last course before the fruit which signifies the end of the meal. This may be banquet etiquette, but my experience has been that Chinese families don't operate this way. But unlike much Western custom where soup is its own course consumed before the main meal, Chinese families enjoy soup throughout the meal, often using chopsticks to pick out the occasional slice of tomato, egg or whatever the ingredients happen to be. Or they may drink the broth between servings of rice and to finish up the last remaining rice in their bowl. (Chinese eat soup from their rice bowls, and normally don't use separate soup bowls as in the West). Soup also acts as the 'drink' of the meal, although this habit may be changing now. This is not the gooey, greasy egg drop soup you find in so many American Chinese restaurants; a soup which I always found to be rather heavy and unappetizing. This is instead a wonderfully light, healthful and fragrant soup that is far more like what you'd find in a Chinese home. In fact, that's where I learned this recipe. It literally takes only minutes to prepare---basically as long as it takes the water to boil. It goes well with any course and is amazing on its own with rice---that's how I often enjoy this soup. It can be a great meal in itself. Bon Appetit!
- posted by Prince Roy @ 6/14/2003 02:21:00 AM| |

 
To Be A Fly On The Wall

One recurring complaint by foreign speakers of Chinese is that people in China/Taiwan often don't give our linguistic capabilities the benefit of the doubt. For instance, when we go to a restaurant or try to conduct some other transaction in society, some Chinese automatically assume that we couldn't possibly know Chinese and so they speak in English. Or what really gets our goat, even after we've demonstrated that our Chinese ability is perfectly sufficient to conduct the business at hand, the Chinese person will insist on continuing in English. I'll admit this latter phenomenon used to drive me up the wall. It doesn't bother me so much anymore though. In the first place, it doesn't seem to happen as often as it once did. In fact the last time I was in China I don't recall a single instance. This may be due to the fact that Chinese are getting more used to foreigners who speak Chinese, or maybe my Chinese has improved to the point that they don't feel the need to help me by using English. Chinese who have commented on this issue invariably say that the Chinese person does not mean to insult or act rude, but is only trying to be polite, and I can accept that in most cases. My own take is that the most appropriate thing is to let the one who initiates the conversation determine the language of that conversation. It's a rule I try to live by. But I think even the most frustrated Chinese-speaking foreigner would admit that at least in China/Taiwan there is still an underlying presumption that the lingua franca is Chinese, even for foreigners. So that when I go in a restaurant or shop, more likely than not, the staff will address me in Chinese. Obviously in the US that will not be the case. But this is not always a bad thing. A couple of weeks ago I was in Monterey Park and I decided to have lunch at a new restaurant. My wife was not with me that day, so when I walked in it was just me, a nondescript white guy. I ordered something really quick and simple---a noodle dish I think. The laoban started talking in Chinese to some Chinese patrons at the table next to me. They were apparently friends of hers, because she told them how much trouble she was having getting her daughter to the US. She was currently negotiating with some Chinese man to marry her daughter simply so that she could obtain a green card. These sham marriages appear to be quite common. The woman remarked that the guy was asking for $30,000. She said she would prefer to find an American because they will do it for far less money---she commented something to the effect that Americans are rather gullible and 'don't really know what's going on' (������). So there you have it. Consider this both a Prince Roy exclusive scoop and a public service announcement for any entrepreneurial-minded freepers out there: the going rate for a sham marriage to bring a Chinese to the US is approximately $30,000. Don't let them take advantage of you...
- posted by Prince Roy @ 6/11/2003 12:44:00 AM| |

 
I'm announcing a change to my Chinese summer project. You may remember I was originally planning to read "˭��ս³Ѹ..." [Who Challenges Lu Xun...] and I actually started it on the plane to Texas. But I could only get through the first few chapters. A major disappointment. It seems to be merely a compilation of essays by academic Party hacks. Not at all what I was hoping for. But so much of Chinese academia's output in the humanities �Ŀ� (wenke) is so often a complete waste of time, at least concerning any period after the May Fourth Movement. So I've got a substitute: the two-volume �й�'����'���� (The Tiananmen Papers...). I think this will be more my speed. The editor is ZHANG Liang (��|). It came out in 2001 but I didn't have the time to fool with it while in law school. Anyone else out there read it? I know there's an English translation available but I'll do my best not to consult it.
- posted by Prince Roy @ 6/10/2003 02:57:00 PM| |

 
Both the Flying Chair and the Sensible Erection offer this link about a Saudi executioner. Pretty morbid stuff, but it got some people talking about the most humane way of execution, if any. Many think that beheading wouldn't be the worst way to go. Maybe not, but I wonder if they're right that it is quick and painless. I read accounts of the French Revolution that when the executioner would hold the newly liberated heads aloft the eyes seemed to scan the crowd and in some instances the mouths appeared to attempt to form words. The brain can survive several minutes without oxygen and I'm sure the rational conscious mind would exist for at least a minute or two. But I'm not confident enough of that hypothesis to personally put it to the test! The US is the only Western industrialized nation that still maintains capital punishment and one of only three industrialized nations world-wide that does so (the others are Japan and South Korea). Take a look at the full list; we're in some great company. Anyway, I've always found the macabre American fascination with capital punishment fascinating in and of itself. Here's a site some may find interesting: it's the Final Meal Requests page run by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. I just love that disclaimer: * The final meal requested may not reflect the actual final meal served. But since Texas doesn't consider sleeping defense lawyers a problem is there any reason to believe it would hold its jailhouse cooks to a higher standard?
- posted by Prince Roy @ 6/10/2003 02:14:00 AM| |

 
Don't Blame Them... As you know from reading the title of this blog I am a recently graduated law student. Law school was not a pleasant experience. Out of the 84 units of law courses I took I can honestly say I enjoyed 12 of them---that's just 4 classes out of 23. But law school wasn't quite the unbearable ordeal it should have been and that's because I had four outstanding professors. I would like to honor them here, meager though this tribute may be. And in all fairness I must state for the record that they had nothing to do with the fact that I was The World's Worst Law Student®. Well, maybe not as bad as this guy. With the exception of the first professor, I don't rank the remainder. They were all equally superb.

Professor William Rubenstein was the best professor I had in law school, hands down. He taught my 1L Constitutional Law class. I consider myself amazingly fortunate to have had him for this course. Non-law student folks always think Con Law must be the most interesting, sexy course in law school. I know that's what I thought before I went to law school. Take it from me, it's a cruel myth. The Supreme Court's approach to the Constitution is for the most part exceedingly formulistic and dry, consisting of labored tests through which it analyzes legal issues. This leads to lengthy, tedious opinions that are an absolute chore to read. Nowhere is this more true than our current SCOTUS. But Professor Rubenstein made all the difference. He made a point of concentrating on issues in the opinions that made us question how the law affected the people involved---a humanistic approach that is all too often neglected these days. Professor Rubenstein used the Socratic Method in our class, but he did so in a very non-threatening, effective way. Getting called on before 80 of your classmates is a potentially terrifying moment for a 1L, and many otherwise quite articulate students have trouble expressing themselves clearly as a result, but Professor Rubenstein has a knack for being able to succinctly summarize what a panicked student would like to say. The issues in Con Law can get pretty touchy at times, depending on one's political ideologies, but Professor Rubenstein was always very balanced, both in his presenting any competing legal philosopies in the cases, and in his management of classroom discussion. I had Con Law during the infamous Bush v. Gore period and Professor Rubenstein was instrumental in my understanding of the strengths and flaws of both sides' arguments. It's a shame that more students at our law school don't have the opportunity to take a class with him---other than 1L courses he teaches the very specialized subjects of advanced litigation and sexual orientation law that very few students study. Some students were disappointed that he spent significant time on the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and less time on federalism, but I think that is due both to his scholarly interests and the fact that most important SCOTUS decisions of the latter 20th century dealt with the 14th. The jurisprudence of the 14th is also one of the most difficult areas of Con Law to master; our school offers a separate course focusing solely on that amendment.

I had Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl for two courses: National Security Law and Political Asylum Law. He is one of the nation's foremost experts in these fields, as well as Terrorism and Islamic Law. I regret that I did not have the opportunity to take his Islamic Law class or his class on Immigration Law. Professor El Fadl is leaving our school for Yale, which is a huge loss for us and an enormous coup for them. He is one of the most gifted intellectuals I've ever met and he has the distinction of having memorized the entire Koran. He is a major critic of Wahabism (radical fundamentalist Islam) with the result that his works are banned in the Middle East and he constantly receives death threats from Islamic groups. He is under police protection much of the time. He is also a leading proponent of human/civil rights and he often testifies before congressional hearings on the impact the Patriot Act and like laws have on Muslim and other immigrant communities. He loves to hear himself talk, but that is ok because he is a humorous and engaging lecturer. It's really a shame our school is letting him and other policy people get away, replacing them with professors specializing in mostly tax and corporate fields. We are definitely turning into a corporate cookie-cutter law school, which I think will eventually harm our overall reputation. But I completely understand Professor El Fadl's reasons for leaving---it's hard to turn down Yale when it calls, and of course the East Coast is the place to be for policy wonks. I wish him the best and encourage any Yale Law students to take any course this man teaches. His finals are beasts, though. EL FADL UPDATE: Let me add that he is notoriously late turning in course grades. I can confirm that. 3L grades were due on May 30 and we are still waiting. This means no diploma. C'mon Professor, set us free!

I turned down the opportunity to attend the University of Virginia Law School largely because of Professor Randall Peerenboom. Wise move? No. But certainly not because of Professor Peerenboom---though he did go on sabbatical my second year meaning I could only take his courses in my final year. UVA did not offer any courses on East Asian law, and he is probably the nation's authority on Chinese law. I took two classes with him: Comparative Law: China and Doing Business in China. Professor Peerenboom is brilliant, and I learned an incredible amount from him. He has written the primer on Chinese law. By all means get this book---used if possible, new if you have to. It is available in paperback. Professor Peerenboom understands China from virtually every angle. He has a PhD in Chinese religion and he worked as a lawyer in Beijing for several years. He recently started a firm there with several Chinese partners. Some Chinese students here took his courses and complained that he suffers from an anti-China bias. This is probably true from a philosophical standpoint---human rights law is one of his specialities. And from a professional standpoint most of his clients are foreign businesses trying to get established in China and navigate its byzantine legal system. But unlike so many rabid, simplistic bozo China bashers he knows what he's talking about---he lived in China several years, he is fluent in Mandarin and he understands the culture. Anyway, I don't believe he's necessarily hostile to China per se. While I sometimes disagreed with Professor Peerenboom myself, there is no doubt that he is extremely well-informed and he is able to synthesize the big picture; what I most admire about him is that his analyses integrate a multitude of highly complicated aspects overlooked to some degree by almost everyone else.

Honorable Mention: Professor Grant Nelson ranks pound for pound with Professor Rubenstein as the most effective teacher I had in law school. The 'honorable mention' is no detraction whatsoever on Professor Nelson; rather, it represents my own inadequacies in the course I took from him, Real Estate Finance Law. He is the instructor's instructor and if the average law professor had half Professor Nelson's ability law school might even be an enjoyable experience. I did not perform superbly in the course, but what little I did learn is entirely due to his efforts. Professor Nelson is also wonderfully generous with his time. In addition to his teaching duties he acts as faculty sponsor for several student organizations. Among them is the Veterans group I established. Professor Nelson is a veteran himself, having served as a US Army officer in the Vietnam War. He served on the faculty committee for student admissions and every veteran studying at our school surely owes him a debt of gratitude because he made certain we were given fair consideration and any possible 'plus' for our service. Professor Nelson is a Property Law guru, and I feel cheated that I did not have him for 1L Property. I think it should be a requirement of our law school that he teaches Property Law to every student, even though the difficulty of his finals is legendary---all true if my experience in REF is any indication; but his exams are fair---something that can't be said for every professor. Property Law is one of the core courses of a legal education and there is no better person to learn it from at our law school. We're going to Catalina Island tomorrow and we return Sunday night. It's our first trip out there so we'll see if it lives up to the hype. No cars allowed on the island and you have to take an hour-long ferry ride to get there. All the seats in steerage were sold out so we have to go first class but they do throw in a bottle of champagne. It's at times like these I'm really glad my wife doesn't drink! Oh, saw Kevin Brown beat the Royals 5-2 last night at Dodger Stadium. We had pretty good seats up in the Loge area. Since my wife works at a public accounting firm we can sometimes feast on the crumbs from the partners' table. For one game we were right behind home plate. I don't see how people can afford to attend these games. A freakin' cup of beer set me back $7.50 and my wife's hotdog was $3.50. A family of four could easily spend $100 on tickets alone and then there's parking, cokes, dogs, peanuts and you know the kids are going to want a jersey or cap. And I understand the Dodgers rank among the more inexpensive sporting events. The good news is that the Dodgers are finally making amends for the horrible way they treated Fernando Valenzuela. They've hired him to be the Spanish radio color man and he'll throw out the first ball at tonight's game. It's about time. He's a class act and the Latino community in LA still worships the guy.
- posted by Prince Roy @ 6/07/2003 09:21:00 AM| |

 
I'm back in LA and by god it's good to have returned to the land of the mild climes. Texas is a high 90s to triple digit oven that would give China's famed Four Furnaces (or is it 5?) a run for their money. I'll tell you this right now: Mexican food is so much superior in LA. In Texas it's unimaginative salsas (tastes like something out of a mass-manufactured supermarket bottle---ever had Pace brand?), cheap tough cuts of beef in the fajitas, and the blandest fried beans and rice smothered in cheese. My dad got the 'vegetarian special' at this one place and they brought the poor guy out a tostada smothered in nacho cheese and the above mentioned cheese laden beans and rice. I kid you not: even the California fast food joints like Baja Fresh put San Antonio sit-down places to shame. The so-called 'Tex-Mex' cuisine is uninspiring to say the least. A better appellation would be Tex-Mess. So anyway I'm back and as you may have guessed I was pretty freakin' famished. First stop after touchdown was the San Gabriel Valley, home of the always satisfying Yunan Garden. Oh yeah, we went to see a movie today at the local art house cinema, Chen Kaige's new one, "Together" (������һ��). My honest opinion? Don't waste your time with this one if you can download it off the Internet or can bear to wait a few months for a DVD rental. I don't want to give the plot away, but the first half actually showed some promise. Chen has always been an above average storyteller. In the second half though, Chen just let the sentiment run away from him. He completely lost control of the film. Anyone else see it? My wife loved it, by the way. Bawled like a baby. So take your significant other---it's a good date movie, but bring a box of tissues. I think Chen's career effectively ended with "King of Children" (������), his last decent film. Which is a shame because he is my favorite of the Fifth Generation directors. I still argue that his "Yellow Earth" (���u�) is far and away the most powerful Chinese film ever made. Yeah, every Chinese person hates it; I get that. And it does have obvious flaws---you can see the beginnings of his heavy-handed sentimentality, but the symbolism and metaphor never cease to amaze me. And chock full of very bold political allegory that totally went over the censors' heads. I also liked his second effort "The Big Parade" (���ı�), probably because as a fellow military vet I think I know exactly what he was getting at in that film. But overall he's been something of a disappointment. I actually met Chen Kaige once. In the Spring of 1995 a couple of friends and I were strolling through the Summer Palace (off the beaten path) when we passed a guy in a tuxedo smoking a cigarette by a clump of trees. Damned if it wasn't Chen Kaige. He was attending some banquet and had popped out for a bit. He called us over---I guess he was curious to see some foreigners in that part of the Summer Palace. He spoke to us in English and I was surprised at how fluent he was. He swore he recognized me from somewhere before---I think he said from back in New York (which at the time I had never been to). Anyway, he was quite friendly and very approachable. I'm glad I got to tell him I liked his early films---even he admitted that most Chinese don't like them.
- posted by Prince Roy @ 6/02/2003 02:47:00 PM| |