Tag: China Daily

China Daily just published my latest monthly column, titled Conversations reveal power of people-to-people exchanges. Here’s an excerpt from the piece:

“China must be a good place, because you love it so much.”

Those words from Donna, a close friend in the United States, amazed me during a recent phone conversation from a hotel room in Seattle, Washington.

Over the years we’ve known each other, I had never heard her gush with such affection for the country.

But there she was, speaking of China with such sweetness in her voice, because of what she had learned of it through talking to me and my husband Jun, who is from rural Zhejiang province.

In fact, during a recent trip back to the US, I found myself delighted again and again in conversations with family and friends there about China, the country I call home.

My friend Bill leaned in with rapt attention over a lunch of hummus and other Middle Eastern delights as I spoke of my positive experience working for China Daily. He told me that my report had given him a new perspective on media outlets in China.

Jun and I had just met Susan, a friend of my parents, at a party and she immediately wanted to know everything about our lives in China, as if she were an aunt I never knew I had, trying to make up for lost time. With each description of the world we inhabited in Beijing, I watched her nod her head thoughtfully and remark, with fondness, how China sounded like a wonderful place.

Elena, another family friend, beamed with excitement after Jun and I helped translate into Chinese the names of everyone in her family－from hers and her husband’s to their children’s－along with a description of the meaning of each character combination.

You can read the full article here. And if you like it, share it!

China Daily just published my latest column, a version of the speech I delivered a few weeks ago, titled Marriage reform empowers people to follow their hearts. Here’s an excerpt from that piece:

On a summer day in 2004, a young Chinese man and a young woman from the United States walked up to a stage draped in burgundy velvet curtains, before the red national flag and the red-and-gold national seal of China at an office in Shanghai. They stood to the side as a government representative－a 30-something woman with a floppy ponytail－asked them to remain faithful and respectful to one another, to care for their parents, to support each other, and to maintain harmony in the family. Then they signed two small red books on the podium, and held those books up beside their smiling faces, as photographers snapped away and the young government representative beamed. By the powers granted her by the People’s Republic of China, the couple became legally married.

That was the day my husband Jun and I registered our marriage, a moment we had envisioned ever since January of that same year, when he had proposed to me over the phone. But none of this－the proposal, and the subsequent marriage registration－would have happened in 2004 without a very significant change that took place in China on Oct 1, 2003.

On that date, a reform of China’s Marriage Law took effect, abolishing a previous requirement: approval by your employer or work unit to register your marriage. In Shanghai, this change applied to students too, like Jun, who was in a graduate program at the time. The prior regulation had barred us from even considering marriage for a simple reason－universities would not permit it.

Thanks to this reform of the Marriage Law, we could move forward to register our marriage without concern over any impact on Jun’s graduate studies.

The only approval that mattered in the process was our own.

We weren’t the only ones that year who took advantage of the change. According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, 2004 stood out as a boom year for marriage registrations across the country, with 8.67 million couples tying the knot, a rise of nearly 7 percent over 2003. At the time, it represented the largest year-on-year increase in marriage registrations in China since 1986.

You can read the full piece here online. And if you like it, share it!

P.S.: Yes, that photo above was taken the day my husband and I registered our marriage!

China Daily published my column titled Translating a US Thanksgiving to family in China, where I share my memories of trying to explain this favorite American holiday of mine to my Chinese in-laws. Here’s an excerpt:

“Well, we have this big meal together with family, and we eat things like turkey and cranberries …”

As I tried describing Thanksgiving Day, one of the most quintessential holidays in the United States, to my in-laws in China, I could already see their eyes glaze over with confusion and sense the questions forming in their minds. Turkey? Cranberries? Even though I expressed these perfectly in Chinese, the result was still gibberish because they had never seen a turkey or tasted cranberries.

So I attempted to translate the holiday through more familiar Chinese counterparts.

I described the roast turkey as something akin to Beijing duck. I equated the sweet-tart goodness of cranberries to Chinese hawthorn in the candied fruit skewers of tanghulu. I called stuffing a savory version of eight-treasures rice. I likened pumpkin pie to the pumpkin cakes, or nanguabing, popular across their province of Zhejiang.

I compared the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade to the yearly Spring Festival Gala on Chinese New Year’s Eve.

And I characterized the entire celebration as an American version of winter solstice in China, as both holidays emphasize food and family and herald the start of the holiday season in our respective countries.

Yet as much as my in-laws nodded and smiled in acknowledgment, I recognized that even these explanations were a poor substitute.

It wasn’t just that some of the food didn’t have a clear analog in Chinese culture, such as mashed potatoes with gravy or the traditional green bean casserole sprinkled with crispy fried onions.

No words could ever fully encompass the Thanksgiving celebrations I had known in the US.

You can read the full column here — and if you like it, share it. And for those of you who do celebrate it, wishing you a Happy Thanksgiving holiday!

China Daily just published my latest monthly column, titled Finding the faith to move forward in the darkness, on their official WeChat account. It’s about this one time several years ago when my husband and I found ourselves lost in the dark on mountain, with no clear trail. Here’s an excerpt:

When the mountain trail you thought would take you downhill suddenly ends in a great snarl of thorny bushes, and it’s nearly dusk, you know there’s trouble ahead.

That’s the situation my husband Jun and I faced years ago when we decided to summit the mountain at the center of his rural village in Zhejiang. And I never imagined that, in getting lost there, I would find something far more important.

While we had always wanted to reach the top, which drove us to hike there in the afternoon, we hadn’t planned for such a precarious descent. But our experience hiking around the village and its hidden network of unofficial trails should have prepared us for this possibility. 

How many times had we followed a well-trodden dirt path, only to have it stop in a thicket of weedy grass or a maze of bamboo? In fact, the very trail we used to climb the mountain had also disappeared into the woods, forcing us to improvise a way through a dense cluster of bushes and trees. 

However, the summit appeared deceptively neat, with a clearing and what seemed to be a far easier trail winding down the other slope of the mountain. We thought it would be a fast, straightforward trip back, until the trail petered out and left us stranded in the remnants of abandoned fields swallowed up by layers of weeds and crawling thorns, stretching down the mountain as far as we could see. 

If we wanted to make it back home, we would have to blaze our own way out of there, in the dark. 

As a lifelong hiking enthusiast, I had logged hundreds of miles on trails in parks across the US, my home country, but never at night. And yet there we were, trapped on the side of a mountain in near darkness with no established trail at all. 

I felt scared, beyond just the fact that walking ahead meant facing a prickly field of thorns. I worried we might take the wrong step and tumble down, or fall into something even worse than those thorns, since we couldn’t see the ground. How could we possibly move forward?

“Just take one step at a time,” my husband told me. “Don’t worry.” It was his way of encouraging me to have faith.

Faith is something I’ve struggled with in life, and being on that mountain was a test for me. It took all of my resolve to lift my foot up and place it among those thorns. 

You can read the rest of the column right here. And if you like it, share it! Also, if you would like to hear me read the article, check it out on the China Daily official WeChat account.