Sold Out.

The apartment complex we live in is still under construction. They plan to finish the third phase in May. Not all the suites are occupied. But I have heard they have all been sold.

In the photo above, taken from our second bedroom window, you can see that two of the four suites are unoccupied. The buyers must be waiting to raise capital for the decoration process.

My Son Tony this morning

In this photo, Tony has just opened the door by grabbing the handle. He is about to push the door open and wake up his mom.

Tony glares at me as I take a photo of him

Company Wednesday.

I have no incredible insights to offer you about China or the world or life. I just report the little that happened to me today and may happen tomorrow.

I now have a pretty comfortable routine to get home from school in the evening. I catch a bus on which I can always get a seat. When I get to the bus's terminal stop, I de-board and am greeted enthusiastically by a mini cab driver who knows me well. The driver drives to my apartment like a mad man running lights when it is practical to do so. At the apartment complex, he drives me right to the entrance of my building. I pay him a fare my wife negotiated and he happily goes on his way.

And tonight, I was happy to get home unlike last night when I was in the midst of being in my wife's doghouse. Tony was asleep when I got home (1000 PM) which is earlier than the past two nights when he finally drifted off about midnight.


What is Fascism? I ask this question rhetorically. Rare Reader James says I am a Fascist of sorts because I like reading Ayn Rand. George Orwell said that the use of the word "Fascist" had come to mean disagreeable and that other than that the word was meaningless. F.A. Hayek said Fascism and Communism were competing strains of Socialism both opposed to the free-market capitalism that Rand glorifies in her novels.

Tonight, I continued to watch the China 1972 documentary filmed by Italians. There is an interesting part where the film crew comes across a huge crowd of people. The government handlers didn't want the crew to stop but they jumped out of a vehicle. This crowd of people wasn't protesting. In fact, they were conferring among themselves. Why would the government handlers object to the filming? The reason the people were all together was to trade goods on a fringe private market that the authorities disapproved off but let operate because it was marginal.

The entrepreneurial hustle I see of the common Wuxi people shows how right Ayn Rand is.

And before I forget. Tomorrow is Company Wednesday: I will go to Seagate and Littel Fuse tomorrow for classes.

I have TS Eliot on my Mobile Phone

When Napster was free and people could fill their boots with music, I was able to download a recording of TS ELiot reading the Hollow Men. This afternoon, I put the recording on my mobile phone. How I love high tech!

I was thinking of TS Eliot when I mentioned that the Philip Larkin anthology hadn't made the cut of books I took with me to China. An anthology of Eliot's poetry did make the cut. The anthology I have was the same sort of Faber & Faber paperback as the Larkin's anthology I had.

I am reading GKC's Orthodoxy along with Rand's Atlas Shrugged. In a strange way, these books compliment each other. Though, I don't think the two authors would have seen eye-to-eye on much.

Big Time.

Rare reader Steve tells me I have hit the big time. It seems that my little entry about Morrissey and Philip Larkin was mentioned in an article in the New Criterion. Here is the entry: I am at least one blogger.


Meanwhile, on the home front, the wife speaks to me again. Light has returned to the K household. I know I have to weather my wife's moods. Especially since she has been stuck in the house with Tony all this time because of the rain. I even tell myself to wait. But the waiting is still tough.

There is an exercise in one of the classes we teach where we ask the students to tell us one person they would bring back from the dead. Often they tell me they would bring back a dead grandparent they didn't really know. (I can say that for I don't remember my mother's father) Sometimes, they tell me about a person who died tragically. I then have to canvass them for a famous person they would bring back. As an example, I tell them I would bring back Chairman Mao to find out what he would make the New China. Many students like this so much that they agree and don't think of any others. A few taking my bait, say they would bring back Deng Xiao Peng, the great reformer. One student, in all this time, has talked of bringing back Bruce Lee. Last night, I asked about the possibility of bring back Zhong Shan aka Sun Yat Sen. One student said that he is not so popular these days, having been the founder of the KMT. I look at Zhong Shan as a false start in Chinese history. But he did die prematurely.

Tony this morning.

Here is my son Tony this morning. I felt I had to take a photo of something to fill the blog. Notice, he has one eye round and one eye slanted.

In the doghouse. North Korean Wives.

Some students mentioned something about being able to purchase a wife or wives from North Korea for a bag or rice. They had heard somewhere and now so have I.

I am in the doghouse. So, yesterday, I come home. One attempt to interact with the wife earned me a hard stare. The rest of the night, I was not treated badly but my presence was made to appear invisible. What was my crime? Protesting innocence over Tony's alleged self-induced vomiting.

It is early morning at the K household. I am trying to make a quick entry before the rest of the gang wake up. It is yet another cold wet cloudy day outside. It is enough to make one scream.

Once I went to Seagate to do an SPC (an English Corner - a free-discussion class where a foreigner acts as a moderator), the topic of which was leadership. It had turned out that the day before, there had been a reshuffling and resignation of the company's two top CEOs. Tomorrow, I will another SPC there, the topic for discussion being Can China lead the world out of the recession? I hope nothing happens in the next 24 hours to make that question much too topical.

Rain, Rain, Go Away!

It must have rained in Wuxi for nine days. I am going mad! I feel incurably in the dumps! Blah!

Tony threw up yesterday. My wife says I could have stopped it. I wish.

A lesson in Wuxi, China local dialect #4