• Traveling

    Being a Highly Respectable Foreigner with Chinese Characteristics

    You like spicy food?  You know how use chopsticks?  You know Chinese President Hu Jintao? Of course I do.  Chinese people are so easy to impress.  Either their expectations are very low, or I just don’t fit the mold of a stereotypical American. A college mathematics student at a party told me that while hanging out in Beijing and Shanghai she was amazed at the ignorance of foreigners pouring into the country without knowing the current president or the role Deng Xiaoping (kind of pronounced  like “Dung show—rhymes with plow—ping”) played in the Reform and Opening of China.  Of course everybody knows Chairman Mao Zedong.  But to know that under…