Babies come from your mother's armpit.

This is news to me but I was told by students that in China, children are told that babies come from armpits. In the West, we tell our children that the stork brings them.

This came up tonight when I was doing an English Corner on the topic of lies. I first asked the students to tell me lies. Several told me the weather was fine when it was raining. Then another student told me I was handsome - he obviously did not know what lie meant. Ending that line of thought, I asked the students what made a good lie. They thought of a good lie as what I thought of as a white lie. What I hoped they would say was that a good lie was one that was believable. I later asked the question of what was the biggest lie they ever told. Some of the students said they never told lies but were lied to like the one student whose parents, he said, lied to him about where babies came from.

To get the students to tell me an anecdote, I often tell one of my own as for an example. I told them tonight about an incident where I lied when I was in living in Quebec in the 1970s. At the time, we lived on a hill in a subdivision that was being built. Higher up the hill or up the street from where we lived, a lot's basement had been dug in. It had rained recently so the hole was filled with water. At the front of the lot an earthen dam, about ten feet high, kept the water in the hole. I was wandering around the lot and decided to put a little breach in the dam to let the water out. Thinking nothing of it, I went back to my home. Not twenty minutes later, a mud slide went down the street in front of my house continuing down to interrupt a street hockey game. The players all ran to the lot to see what had happened. I joined them not telling them that I was responsible instead telling a story of seeing some other child playing there. None of the students could top my story. Though two did tell me about lying about their marital status and age in matters of romance.


It was raining tonight in Wuxi, so I went home by bus and then motorcycle taxi.


It is shaping up that February will be this blog's best month ever which is good considering that it is only 28 days long. So keep reading and checking out pages and I promise I will keep writing and showing you vids of Tony the great.

On the bus ride into work today, they showed President Hu visiting Africa.


The Shanghaiist is now following me on Twitter. You should too.