For all the difference between Western and Chinese medicine, they are alike in primacy of the tongue. A TCM doctor looks at your tongue before you even have a chance to use it, then feels your pulse. A Western doctor makes sure your papers are in order, then asks you to say "Ah". They both know the tongue speaks a lot more eloquently for your health than you can, with your vague palaver about "shooting pains" and "not feeling so hot".
Then again, a TCM doctor can write an extended essay on your overall condition after the tongue examination. Color, coating, size and shape are the supporting evidence for conclusions that, sadly, sound more poetic than scientific. But "subsiding yin" and "ghost winds" are valid, if lyrical, ways to describe imbalances in your health that grow more precarious the further you wander from Confucius' golden mean.
Nobody living a sit down and stress, KFC and coffee modern lifestyle boasts the shiny, firm, bright pink organ of perfect health. Just stick yours out at your nearest neighbors. Little chance they'll tell you how healthy it looks. But there's hope. See below for common tongue traits and what they say about your health. With a little adjustment and a lot more clean living, you can stick your tongue out at anyone and get an admiring smile in return. Wiggling your eyebrows helps.
It's enough to make a writer why (s)he ever bothers. Kafka saw more in the blink of a dark, depressed Jewish eye than the rest of us in our most lucid moments. That's why The Great Wall of China reflects more of the Chinese psyche than a thousand expat bloggers tapping for ten thousand days.
Soul-crushing bureaucracy, arbitrary justice, all the chains of empire that keep us in despair of ever making progress, Kafka conveyed with a leavening of bleak humor. The following excerpt from The Great Wall of China should serve as a paradigm for those who would attempt to explain what this country's all about, or as the most eloquent argument why it's best not to try. Either way, it's an astounding take on the nature of power in China, parsed down for the ADD-afflicted Netizen. You can read the entire short story here.
Say one of your New Year's resolutions is to finally learn a bit more about China's rich past. Or perhaps you'd like to find some free entertainment more edifying than TV. In either case, 2009 is your year, the year China will complete its mission of making all museums and memorial halls as free as a packet of McDonald's ketchup.
Did we just say all? Sorry, some draws are too lucrative (and expensive) not to charge for tickets: Beijing's Palace Museum, the Xi'an Warriors, and their world-famous kind. But China has over 2300 museums. While many don't justify the rattly mini-bus hijinx involved in getting to them, others make the highlight reel of any good tour. Here are some of our recommendations.
Look on the bright side, folks: at least we live in interesting times! Yes sir, if you found 2008 a struggle, go directly to bed, pull covers securely over head, and do not peek out from under until you hear people yelling about their real estate equity gains again. That shouldn't be until 2016. How do we know? The oracle bones don't lie. Here's what else they told us for 2009.
So 2008 came in relatively lambish, and goes out a rampaging lion. China had worked eight frantic years planning for two weeks of summer glory. Instead, the Olympics were a brief respite from a ceaseless wrangle: Tibet, the earthquake, the milk, the economy. But scaring people into a state of passive consumerism is the job of the mainstream media. Naïve as it may be, we'd like to focus on the positive, and celebrate China's greatest moments of 2008.
So Time has a man of the year, but where's its animal of the year? Surely we haven't forgotten the vital role animals play in our daily welfare, largely alimentary as it may be.
China hasn't forgotten the fauna, and has gone so far as to include a list of animals in its "Moving China" awards. A Sichuanese pig named Strong took first place this year. Pigs have always been admired in China, symbols of a family's wealth and abundance, unlike the West, where they are merely guarantors of side meat for breakfast.
Strong pig has a rep for more than making bacon, however. Strong not only survived the May 12th Sichuan earthquake, he spent more than a month trapped under rubble before being rescued. Unlike America, where even a talking pig like Wilbur still faces slaughter, China showed its respect for Strong's uncommon valor by granting him a lifetime reprieve from the butcher's block. An insurance company gave him a ten-year policy, and Sichuan's Jianchuan Museum gave him a home, where visitors still throng to see a living exemplar of never-day-die.
Sadly, fame and fortune have changed Strong. He just lies around eating all day like a fat, lazy... the metaphor escapes us. Having grown disdainful of his fans, he frequently blocks the door to his quarters with a porky haunch, and has been known to chase camera-wielding paps off in a rush of pink-eyed fury.
So much for drawing inspiration from a hog. But there are other uncommon animals from the "Moving China" list. Maybe we can learn something from them.
Let's take a moment during this holiday season to appreciate a blessing we all share: the Internet. Fount of free info, scourge of the post office, and time-sucking distraction par excellence, the Internet brings the world to our monitor screen, our way, unlike TV. For a few courageous souls, the Internet is a two-way medium. Through some unquantifiable formula mixing unequal parts silly, brazen, and cool, some people manage to gain worldwide fame, even fortune, by making spectacles of themselves.
By no means does the Internet launch only English-speaking stars. With 253 million web surfers in a market that's reached only nineteen percent penetration, China has more potential fans waiting to turn wannabes into household names than any other country on earth.
This is the author's true account of Christmas day, 1970.
Because of my parents' background, I was considered a "black child" from a counter-revolutionary family. No one dared to take care of me. I became homeless and started to live on my own at the young age of 9. During the day, I helped people push their carts in exchange for money. At night, I slept in the street. If it was a rainy or snowy day, no one worked outside and I could not make any money. Hunger and cold were part of my daily life.
One and a half years later, I met a man who was more than 50 years old. I called him Uncle Shen. Uncle Shen was a strong believer in Jesus. When he found out I was homeless, he decided to take care of me. Actually, Uncle Shen had escaped from prison and did not have a family, so he asked me if I would like to stay with him. I agreed because I felt he was a very nice man.
Uncle Shen decided to go to northwestern China because he thought it would be safer there. Many places in northwestern China were very poor. Most of the people in the countryside were not educated. They did not know how to read or fix their machines. Uncle Shen, however, was a skilled mechanic, so we went to many places to fix machines for the peasants in exchange for our food and lodging. Since there were not many machines in any one place, we had to move frequently to find enough work. Otherwise, we would not have survived.
One day, near the end of December 1970, we were out of work. Uncle Shen decided we should go look for work somewhere else. We were in one of the poorest areas of China. There was no bus available, so we walked a whole day. Before dark, we went to a country inn on a rugged country trail, a single mud house on the roadside. Outside, on the wall, there were four Chinese characters - "Che Ma Da Dian" (Horse-Cart-Grand-Inn) - a grandiose name for such a simple place. The inn had four mud-brick walls and a thatched roof. The entrance was about six feet wide and seven feet high. The "door" was made of dry cornstalks. To get into the "Grand Horsecart Inn," we pushed the dry cornstalks aside. Once inside, we pulled the cornstalks back in place to block the cold wind outside.
What is the greatest gift you could hope for? Poor people wish for riches; rich people wish for love. People with understanding wish for enlightenment, the power to live each moment with wonder, free from judgment and fear. This is the story of how Huineng found enlightenment, and left a legacy whereby any can have it, without a lifetime of study and seclusion.
Remember when fighting piracy meant bending over backwards to make sure the Chinese had to pay $29.99 for a Zoolander DVD? Somali gentlemen of fortune are reminding us that real pirates hold weapons, not camcorders, and put lives at risk, not movie revenue projections. To the rescue, a posse including two Chinese navy destroyers.
China has a much larger stake in fighting these pirates than protecting the sacrosanct coffers of Hollywood. More than 100 ships have been attacked this year in shipping lanes off the coast of East Africa, seven of them Chinese-owned. Not that Chinese sailors are completely helpless without military assistance. Last week the brave crew of the Zhenghua 4 used beer bottles and a home-made water cannon to fight marauders to a standstill. A warship and two helicopters later chased the brigands off.
At the risk of sounding glib, Chinese sailors have faced greater dangers than a speedboat full of desperados wielding third-hand side arms. Any warship within five kilometers can turn a boat-load of pirates into fish food with the press of a button. Matters weren't nearly so disproportionate in the Ming Dynasty, when Japanese pirates harried the East China coast as cruelly as Norsemen.
Known as Wokou, Japanese pirates were menacing the East China Sea during the Yuan Dynasty, although a bigger threat at the time to the kingdom of Goryeo on the Korean Peninsula. The first raid on Chinese territory came in 1302, but the Wokou turned particularly rapacious between 1358 and 1363, taking advantage of China's political instability. Merchant ships plying even the South China Sea faced the threat of pirate attack, and Wokou were not above raiding a defenseless port or two for easy plunder.
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