One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The names for syphilis, when it began its epidemic sweep through Europe in the last decade of the fifteenth century are an exemplary illustration of the nee...
And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese...
There's also a possibility that the landlord is in there right now, wearing women's undergarments. Or a drug addict is inside stealing jewelry.Or a boatload of recent Chinese immigrants without a television watching Russia play Finland in hockey and ...
Besides," said Suriyawong. "This was not a rescue operation." "What was it, target practice? Chinese skeet?" "An offer of transportation to an invited guest of the Hegemon," said Suriyawong. "And the loan of a knife." Achilles held up the bloody thin...
In 2002, after the huge success of Who Moved my Cheese? a management manual that sold 1.6million copies in China, there was a rush of books inspired by it. Titles included Whose Cheese Should I Move?; Can I Move Your Cheese?; Who Dares to Move my Che...
Caregivers, like all of us, inevitably reflect their culture's attitude toward children and life. The story goes that when Pearl Buck was a child in China, someone asked how she compared her mother to her Chinese amah. Buck replied, "If I want to hav...
Ralphie: Oooh fuuudge! Ralphie as Adult: [narrating] Only I didn't say "Fudge." I said THE word, the big one, the queen-mother of dirty words, the "F-dash-dash-dash" word! Mr. Parker: [stunned] *What* did you say? Ralphie: Uh, um... Mr. Parker: That'...
Harold Crick: What do these questions have to do with anything? Professor Jules Hilbert: Nothing. The only way to find out what story you're in is to determine what stories you're not in. Odd as it may seem, I've just ruled out half of Greek literatu...
Yong is the outer manifestation of something. Ti is the underlying essence. Technology is a yong associated with a particular ti that is ... Western, and completely alien to us [the Chinese]. For centuries, since the time of the Opium Wars, we have s...
If little else, the brain is an educational toy. The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too. Sometime they'd rather play with yours than theirs. Or they object if you play with yours in a different...
Christmas is the marriage of chaos and design. The real sound of life, for once, can burst out because a formal place has been set for it. At the moment when things have gotten sufficiently loose, the secret selves that these familiar persons hold in...
New Rule: If you can force a woman to look at a sonogram—to see what will happen if she has an abortion—you also have to let her see a crying baby, a bratty five-year-old, and a surly teenager to see what will happen if she doesn’t. And you hav...
Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commisars didn...
Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Becau...
So what, simply put, is the Third Covenant? It is the recalibration, the reawakening of that which is truly human, truly holy. It is truly catholic, kata-holos (Greek “according to the whole”), truly universal, sacred, and unitive. It is made man...
…It's as if they actually think that what other people think of them somehow doesn't matter. I mean, I know we're all supposed to believe that, but obviously, none of us actually do. And nor should we, because it does! It does matter! And the peopl...
Approaching the Start of Civil Exams Perhaps I was once a young Chinese scholar approaching the start of civil exams, my mind grown weary and sad from seclusion with books on syntax and poetic style. All that I knew were the mist-covered mountains an...
Ip Man: [hits Lei] Traitor! Captain Lei Chiu: Why am I a traitor? Their deaths have got nothing to do with me. I'm just an interpreter. I need to scrape a living too! Ip Man: Scrape a living? You watch your countrymen get beaten to death. Where's you...
We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the...
I know your race and mine are never on the best of terms." There was a cold smile in his voice if not on his face. "But I do only what you force me to. You rationalize, Keeton. You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can't reject them o...
Do you think Bubbles wants Chinese food because it's made out of cats?" Genevieve questioned, shoveling a big bite into her mouth. "Genevieve, that's just gross and wrong. Don't say things like that. Bubbles is a dog, and their stomachs are bottomles...
