Chick-Fil-A, The Tragedy of Liberation, Tattos, Sins, Passion for Teaching, WWWC

• I forgot to mention that while we were in the States (that is the USA), we twice went to the restaurant Chick-Fil-A: once in Fargo; once in Grand Forks. It was a political-cultural statement on my part, though the original Chicken sandwich was tasty. The service was very friendly – All-American Friendly. And the big American flag in the front of the restaurants along with quotes of allegiance to Jesus Christ on the walls inside were enough, I'm sure, to make a progressive's head explode.

• I am in the midst of reading The Tragedy of Liberation by Frank Dikötter. It's a history of the Chinese Revultion from 1945 to 1957. It leaves me very disinclined to want to have anything to do with the 70^th anniversary "celebrations" of the establishment of the PRC that will take place October 1^st. "Liberation" involved a lot of killing on the part of the Chicoms to get their revolution going and to keep their power.

• I said I couldn't stand to look at Chinese men. I also have a hard time looking at laowei who have tattoos.

• Jesus Christ died for the sins of all, even those of Chairman Mao and Xi Jing Ping.

• I overheard a girl say that she was leaving China because she had lost her passion for teaching. I wonder if I ever had this passion. And I wonder when it was that this idea of having a passion of an activity entered the language. Was it with Rousseau? And why was that the girl lost her passion? Chinese students? I was initially drawn to teaching students in China because they were quiet. I soon found teaching them to be mostly a bore because they lacked imagination and were painfully dull. I also found teaching them to be an ordeal because they looked upon foreigners as monkeys. Never once, was the advice I gave them to improve their English ever heeded. At a certain point, I started to mail it in and look to run out the clock in my so-called classes.

• The two "What's Wrong with China" books I have read discuss China's that aren't full of Communist fervor. The first WWWC was written in the 1920s and it depicts the Chinese has having a very low-trust society. The second WWWC, written twenty years into the China opening up to the market era, depicts the shadiness of Chinese business practice. Read these two books and spend some time in mainland China, and you will take a dim view of the people of the PRC. It is with these two books fresh in my mind that I read the Tragedy of Liberation book, which depicts the era between the time of the first WWWC book and the second. The Maoists, the Chinese Communists were horrible, causing untold suffering and death of innocents. No organization is responsible for more deaths of innocents than the Chinese Communist Party. But what does the Maoist era reveal about the character of the Chinese people? If a mainland Chinese person, who I suspected was a sympathizer of the current regime, ever asked me what I thought of Xi Jing Ping, I would tell them that his countrymen had the leader they deserved. I would leave it up to them to try and ascertain my meaning, which in fact I am not sure of myself. I either mean that they could do much better than Xi Jing Ping if they weren't such pussies or that their leader is perfectly in keeping with their character. Could it be that the brutalities of the Mao era happened because there is something wrong with Chinese civilization?