What is china? What is america?

Rather relative and not any one thing. Today's topic for class was what best represented China and the US. We came up with a quite an impressive list.

China:

• Panda
• Jackie Chan
• Kung Fu
• Manufacturing ('Factory of the World')
• China Shipping containers
• Tea
• Calligraphy
• Great Wall
• Silk
• Chinese Opera

US

• Efficient
• Democratic
• Equality
• Self Importance
• Arrogance
• Freedom
• Money
• Modernity
• Hollywood
• McDonalds, KFC, Nike, Coke

I cant say I agree with either list. Actually the whole activity of making lists to represent countries is rather disagreeable. I just want to argue with each item, argue that a list couldnt ever hope to even come close to accurately representing a country, let alone a city. But I have to play along in class.

Friday I get to give an oral report on what represents chinese culture. I give oral reports daily, and dislike them. I dislike them because I feel limited by the rather simple and often binary prompts. Like "is a large national population a good thing or a bad thing?" I begin most of my reports with, its not a question of good or bad. There are advantages and disadvantages to both sizes and there are sizes in the middle. Then go on to give some examples. In the population report, I talked about per capita natural resources, carrying capacity, and agricultural output's dependency on oil(or rather, how oil has allowed us to exceed the natural carrying capacity). I think pomona might have influenced my responses.


I went for a walk the other day and here are the results.
http://picasaweb.google.com/xisphias/archy

I have been adding photos to existing albums rather than creating new albums. So expect the archy, strange things, chongzi, and soon to be 'sheng huo' albums to get new photos regularly.