This day, 30 April, in 2010, President Hu Jintao announced the opening of the Shanghai World Expo. With 246 countries and international organisations participating, during the following...
I am a contrarian.
All of this unpopular opining of mine may look like critical thinking, heroic truth-seeking.
But don’t be fooled; it’s just knee-jerk doggerel.
My world-view is permanently controlled by the assumption that “those millions of people talking around me can’t possibly be right”. My brain rails against whatever prevails.
Remember that, especially when you catch me writing about Chinese medicine.
Remember where I am writing from. Here or there. Remember whose those surrounding millions of voices are.
If I am in my native UK, stifled by familiarity, you will find me warmly...
I wrote last month about glossy teas; teas with a polished appearance, mostly from Japan. I also mentioned a pea-green variety from Sichuan’s Emei mountain range called Bamboo Leaf Tea .
Now, let’s be honest. Sichuan is less famous for growing tea than it is for pandas, bamboo and spicy snacks. Were Sichuan and tea are ever connected in people’s minds, it is the tea houses and the tea-drinking culture that stand out rather than native varieties of leaf.
Possibly that is just how Sichuan people like it. Local tea...
The term, “flatscreen TV”, continues to be used in 2023. I sometimes wonder why. Seems to denote value, luxury, modernity. “Police seized 15 stolen flatscreen television sets”; “The room features a mini-bar and flatscreen TV”.
It’s actually been impossible to buy a new TV which isn’t flat for at least 15 years, making the “flatscreen” preface useless. Yet it persists.
There’s a name for this; “redundancy”.
Other examples include “each and every”, “balsa wood” or “cease and desist”.
Like bad handwriting, these are perpetrated more often by first language users, because they rely...
Of course it’s not reasonable to expect commemoration or contemplation.
The “Great War” was concluded more than a century ago. How can I expect “the eleventh day of the eleventh month” to resonate somewhere so far away from where the Armistice was signed?
Yes, China was the non-European nation which committed most men to that war, with real casualties and real costs. It’s a story that needs telling, one which may one day receive more airing. But those events are too far away to claim such as exclusive calendar slot in...
