winter savory

The best seafood restaurants in Hong Kong, a quiet sleepy fishing harbor until the Brits bootstrapped the town the imperial way, are either nondescript eateries with grey washed walls and simple foldable chairs and tables sitting longingly by seaside, or worn red-carpeted diners, complete with gaudy dragons with chipped gold paint twisting in the entrances, tugged away in countless neon lights in old parts of town. In either case there are glass tanks of murky waters caging exotic sea creatures, each with a long thin plastic tube inserted to supply fresh air, stacked from floor to ceiling in formidable fashion. The menus, if there are any at all, are for out-of-towners. A regular would simply stroll to the tanks--with a waiter trailing obsequiously carrying a short pencil and a palm-sized notepad, poke and point and squeeze at the fishes, crabs and lobsters, and debate what are the fresh catches of the week. A sequence of price wrangling would ensure. Once the prices are decided, the selected victims are cooked in specific means dictated by the customer: steam alongside finely chopped scallions and ginger with boiling oil and soy sauce poured on top when cooked; stir-fry with garlic, bamboo shoots and broccoli in spicy ketchup; slow broil in clay pots with lamb chops, seasoned in fermented tofu and bean sauce, etc. Of course, the true connoisseurs do not even bother to peek at the displayed beasts; they speak only to the manager, who reveals in a whisper hide-away treasures carefully stored in the backroom away from eyes and ears of the undiscerning public. They would order a small dish or two from the private collection, savor they carefully chosen portions, before moving to the next venue for the next targeted delicacies.

looking at lust / caution

I finally got around to watching Ang Lee's "lust / caution" on DVD; it's not easy to find an uninterrupted 2.5 hr block to watch a movie these days w/ a hyper-active 7-month-old baby. The movie is a fairly faithful reproduction of the novella by Eileen Chang; many of the memorable scenes from the written work, like the opening majong smoky conversation, the celebratory tram ride into wee hours in the morning after a triumphant theatrical debut,the cafe phone call when the lead character made a cautionary phone call, closely matched the imagery Chang conjured in my head after I succumbed to her 1940's Shanghai enclave. The casting of Tang Wei was dead on; the transformation from a naive but passionate university student to a cynical, masochistic underground worker was painfully convincing, and Tony Leung, a master of minimalist acting for decades, was frighteningly powerful w/ his effusive eyes.

There were a few surprises as well. Tony's character came out more sadistic and violent that I had anticipated; I was expecting a strange and unusual relationship but in a drastically different sense: one where the psychological battle of love/hate and the mental struggle of trust/distrust were the central focus. The gang killing of the HK mole was added with great effect; the stalk contrast of naivety of student and beast-like nature of man's survival instinct was in grand display. Though I understand sexual perversion was a theme in the story, I thought the sex scenes were excessive, and as far as story telling is concerned, there must be more effective and heterogeneous means of accomplishing the same goal. Finally, I would much prefer the ending in the novella, where the traitor returned to his wife's majong table and his wife in passing casually mentioned the departure of the seductress to HK to her female companions, revealing her knowledge in the dirty business all along, sending an icy chill down the traitor' spine.

Overall, the duality of magnificence and apocalypse in occupied Shanghai and the fatalistic psyche of the fallen Chinese people were created artfully with great attention to details. It is definitely a story worth telling and one told w/ passion and compassion. 8/10 for me.

Appalling Palin

GOP presidential candidate John McCain announced his running mate for the 2008 election as Sarah Palin, a 44-year-old, 20-month-tenured governor of Alaska, mother of five (including a 4-month old infant), who previous post was mayor of Wasilla, population 6000. It was bloody obvious that the selection was a deplorable ploy to extract votes from female votes, particularly female Clinton Democrats, especially when Palin's first speech as a VP candidate focused like a laser on the "18 millions cracks at the glass ceiling" by Hillary Clinton's run in the primary. For a 72-year-old man who previously had 4 bouts with cancer, picking someone so inexperienced and ineligible to be a heartbeat away from the commander-in-chief of the free world just to win an election is shockingly irresponsible (Imagine her admonishing Russia's Putin for military invasion in Georgia and the corresponding implications on neighboring Ukraine, or negotiating peace treaties among Israel, Hamas and Hazbellah in the Middle East). Years back, McCain has ridiculed the VP's job as merely comprising of attending funerals and checking on the health of the President, and with this selection he made it more than abundantly clear how little he thinks of the post, and how arrogant he views the game of life to be cock sure he will live out the first term of his presidency. Ironically, this is the man who accused Obama to be so opportunistic that he would rather lose the war to win an election; now he showed he himself is so hypercritical that he would risk the security of his country to win his presidency.

Some commentators have already severely criticized the outrageous pick, saying that McCain is "out of his mind" rather than "thinking out of the box". I would add that the selection is grossly mis-calculated; the evangelical conservative women would have voted for GOP anyway, despite what hawkish Christians like James Dobson complained about McCain, and the majority of female Clinton Democrats with half an ounce of intelligence would realize Palin is on the wrong side of key democratic women issues: she is pro-guns, anti-choice, anti-gay-rights and not environment friendly (she voted against adding Polar bears to the list of endangered species and is pushing for offshore drilling in Alaska). Early evidences show that people do recognize the shameless political pandering and are not shy to show their discontent; a shower of boos interrupted Palin's second address when harangues of Clinton and glass ceiling were deployed again. Of course, there will always be pockets of idiotic self-proclaimed "feminists" who would vote for a female deer simply because she is female (for the record, I am not sexist and supported Hillary for her experience over Obama's would-be on-the-job training early in the primary), but let's hope the nation that is the standard bearer of higher education has more sense than the lowest denominator.

I would like to remind Americans that USA is a country mired in two expensive wars (one of which is extremely unnecessary), stuck in a sub-prime-loan weakened economy due to ill-conceived financial regulations, and fatally addicted to politically unstable Middle Eastern oil. At such a crucial juncture when the fate of the nation is to be decided, should all these important issues with far reaching implications be adequately debated and discussed, or should they be tabled and the election be decided on personalities, ephemeral interpretations of "values" and frivolous and irreverent personal attacks? It is my sincere hope that Americans would see the wise from the charlatans, the facts from the squabbles, and true patriotism from imposition. Yankees! For the love of God, for the love of the country, do 'da right thang!

Thoughts on the Olympics: week 2

1. Much has been said about Liu Xiang's pulling out of the 110m hurdles in the preliminary round due to injuries. There are those who said he disappointed a proud, glory-hungry nation of 1.3 billion. There are those who sympathize with the tremendous pressure and superman expectations a 25-year-old has bore the past 4 years. (Supposedly, when Houston Rockets center Yao Ming relayed the Olympic torch to Liu, he whispered to him, "Now you know how I feel".) I fall in the second camp. A well-written NY Times article argued that China, a nation of engineers, with its thousands-year-long history but a short track record of sports excellence, must learn that sports is full of unexpected events, contains no certainties, and that is what makes it intriguing, riveting, and keeps competitors coming back for more. 110m hurdles is a race of inches; to expect an Olympian effort is human, to expect a guaranteed victory is ludicrous.

2. The biggest upset in the Olympics is the Japanese women's softball team beating US 3-1 in the final. US has won every Olympic women's softball title. Their score total in this Olympics prior this game was 57-4. Yet the short Japanese women, whose ceaseless chatters projected an image of boisterous kids next to the big stocky Americans, fearlessly slayed the American dragon one inning at a time. Pitcher Ueno Yukiko calmly shut down the American bats after going 21 innings and 320 pitches(!) in two games the day before, even with the bases loaded with one out in two innings. ("That's for the A-bombs, ya bastards!" I screamed at the TV as Nina cried in the background. Rinko narrowed her eyes. My sense of humor is under-appreciated in my household ...) I hope members of the IOC will take a good look at the competitiveness of this passionately played game and put softball back into Olympics in 2016.

3. The failure in the US sprint team is spectacular and comprehensive. The Americans were upstaged by Jamaica, a tiny island nation of 2.5 million people, in all sprint races: 100m, 200m, 4x100m. Tyson Gay, who won all three events a year ago in Osaka world championship, failed to make the 100m final, did not qualify for 200m in the US trials, and dropped the baton in the 4x100m preliminary round. For a country of 300 million and a history of track legends like Jesse Owens, Edwin Moses and Carl Lewis, this is a new low after the BALCO drug scandal. In light of G.W.'s unpopular wars and slumping US economy due to mis-management and irresponsible legislation, perhaps by acts of Providence, sports does reflect politics after all.

4. Usain Bolt, winner and world record holder of 100m, 200m and 4x100m relay, is a freak of nature. During my internship in Dallas, I remember watching Michael Johnson winning 200m and 400m in Atlanta 1996. Michael Johnson is a mini-god in native Dallas (they erected a statue of him in the city center), and the way he crushed his competition in the 200m final in golden spikes by many body lengths, I didn't think the world record set then can be broken in my lifetime. And the record stood for 12 years, the longest sprint record to date, and then came Bolt. "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen," Hillary would say; the jovial, dance-crazed Bolt sure has a unique way of handling the pressure of being the fastest man on earth. ("Drinks on me! Drinks on me!" Bolk called out to the Trinadad's relay team after the race.) The 6'5'' bean-pole is brimming with talent and only 22 years old. Stay tuned for better things to come.

5. Dara Torres, age 41, won silver in 50m freestyle, 4x100m freestyle relay and 4x100m medley relay. When she competed in the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, Michael Phelps wasn't even born yet. She has given hope to all sunset warriors around the globe to keep the competitive fire burning just a little longer. I am looking for my swimming goggles as I type ...

Thoughts on the olympics: week 1

1. A friend asked me what country I cheer for in the Olympics. Good question. I first find it difficult to cheer for the Japanese even though I am starting my 9th consecutive year in land of the rising sun. I find it equally hard to cheer for the loud & obnoxious Americans though I had my higher education there for 9 years and now work for an American company. Cheering for China and/or Canada is like cheering for Martians; neither country identifies me as one of their own anyway, despite my biological heritage and official political status. So I cheer for good play and united comradeship, i.e., I cheer for the Olympians!!! (My wife said sarcastically, “you might as well say nothing, ‘cause you basically said nothing.” My Gosh, Olympics even brings the family closer together!)
2. Kitajima is a conceited SOB; even Japanese knows that. But does he walk the walk after talking the talk. Back to back Gold in 100 and 200 breaststroke in consecutive Olympics. The guy is half a foot shorter than the hulking American and European competition, and he killed them all w/ immaculate and well-engineered mechanics. I will never be a fan, but boy, the guy is a winner.
3. What is up w/ the Spanish basketball team posing in a photo w/ their eyes pulled up to make slanted eyes? Is that supposed to be cute? I told my wife I have experienced countless racial ridicules 10 time worse, so I just shrugged it off as a tasteless and unsuccessful attempt at humor, but she was livid. Reading the reactions on-line, it seems overseas Chinese are much more vocal about their criticisms (like OCA) than folks in China. Is it because overseas Chinese are fed up w/ never-ending racial-motivated innuendos and side glances in foreign lands, or because the Communist Chinese government is thumping down any negativities during the games, no matter what it is? In either case, the Spanish only reminded us that we could be in the same global village, but we don't even know our neighbors.
4. The Japanese men’s volleyball team played the Chinese yesterday, and with the Chinese leading 2 set to 0, I commented “Look, 60 years later the Chinese are killing the Japanese … for a change,” cleverly referring to the Nanjing massacre during WW2. My wife didn’t find that particularly funny, so I had to pretend to cheer for the Japanese for a while to atone for my ill attempt at humor. (empty chants of “Go Olympians!”) By chance, I actually ran into the 2002 version of the Chinese men’s volleyball team in HK airport once, and I walked up to them to compare my 6'2'' frame to theirs, and I was COMPLETELY dwarfed. These guys were averaging 2.0 meters or more, young, muscular, athletic, huge hands and feet. I remember a comedian making fun of Chinese w/ a song when I was first in Canada that went something like, “I like Chinese, they only come up to your knees, but they're cute and they're cuddly and they're ready to please… ”. Now that America is knee-deep in debts from sub-prime loans and GW's idiotic wars and the Chinese economy is booming, look who is laughing now. How the world has changed in 20 years...

America the beautiful

On the occasion of July 4th, as Americans across the country celebrate the nation's long and properous history with backyard barbacues, parades and fireworks, wasting time bickering about who is more patriotic about their great country, I have one simple question: how many more apocolyptic signs will it take before the Yanks realize they are in deep shit? No, I don't mean the regular-size, smelly, fly-infested pile of elephant dung that comes around cyclically every 20 years or so, but the A-bomb, end-of-the-family-tree kind of armageddon that can obliterate civilization as we know it and turn the heartland into wasteland a la "Mad Max". Let's count the warnings. Oil passes over $143 per barrel, more than twice the price just a year ago. Wall Street just had its worst June since the Great Depression. Housing crisis continues and foreclosures mount every month. Unemployment is creeping up. Inflation is creeping up. Food prices for basic essentials like rice, wheat around the world have soared and the poor are starting riots. The planet is so warm there won't be any ice in North Pole this September. The next Katrina-size hurricane can wipe out half of Bangladash, which is already slowly sinking below the rising sea level.

At the same time, G. W. thinks the war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan is going great, tax breaks for the rich and large corporations work wonders, and it is okay to torture prisoners, including methods imported from Communist China of 1950's. Finally, we have a 2008 presidential candidate in a statistical dead heat that is so out of touch w/ the digital age that he can't even use a computer! He also thinks there should be a temporary tax break for gasoline this summer because Americans need a gimmicky "gas-tax holiday", and is so clueless about economics that he thought the US economy was strong and would continue to be strong.

Howdy, Americans. If you believe in God, I suggest you to start praying. Now.

in defense of the setting suns

In the dead of the wet and dreary winter months, a sudden flurry of last-minute mega-trades, conjured by the sage GM architects (and in some cases, heartless demolition men) just in time before the 2/21 Thursday deadline, unpexpectedly injected some excitement into the post-All-Stars, pre-playoffs stretch of the NBA season, a.k.a. "the super snooze-days". One deal in particular that caught the united fury of the beat writers and pundits arcoss the heartland is the Phoenix-Miami transaction: Miami sent the hall-of-fame-bound center Shaquille O'Neal to Phoenix for the multi-dimensional forward Shawn Marion. Without a doubt, this transfer makes financial sense for Miami, who can shed the hefty payload of an aging and often injured center moping through a hopelessly lost season despite the heroics of Dwane Wade. On the other hand, critics, including ESPN's Hollinger who rated the Shaq-Marion deal as D- for Phoenix, argued that Shaq is a muscular but slow dinasaur, and an exceptionally poor fit for the high flying Phoenix offense, especially when Shaq has clearly entered the twillight of his illustrious career. To counter conventional wisdom, I am here to argue for basketball sense for the unfairly ostracized Suns.

First, the Suns had no chance to win the West this year keeping the same roster. The Lakers had just landed Pau Gasol in an astonishingly unequal trade, Utah acquired Korver to finally resolve their outside shooting problems, and the Spurs are still the champions and have further fortified their front court with Kurt Thomas. Marion's ineffectiveness during the playoffs, when the game often slowed to a grinding half-court game, is well documented and is the cause of on-going locker room dissent. Shaq is a proud veteran who has repeatedly expressed desire for a fifth ring before retirement; he would be a strong locker room presence tolerating none of the bickering. Moreover, Amare Stoudamire is notoriously poor on defense (partly to avoid unnecessary fouls), and as a result opposing big men like San Antonio's Tim Duncan and Utah's Carlos Boozer frequently scored at will during stretches in playoffs. Shaq at least presents a big wide body with six fouls to stop the opposing front court attack.

Second, the window of opportunities for the Suns is closing fast. The chief-of-staff point guard Steve Nash is 34 and slightly built, with Grant Hill 35 and Raja Bell 31. The heart and soul of the firing squad is clearly the workhorse Nash, and the team will soon begin its decline as its leader slows physically with age, especially when the Suns adopt a run-and-gun offense. The duration of Shaq's contract and Shaq's internal clock are roughly on the same timetable as the Suns' elders, allowing the Suns' front office to rebuild quickly in a few years if the combustion experiment fails.

Finally, Shaq's arrival permits the squad to finally returns to their natural positions in a half-court set. Stoudamire slides back to Power Forward from Center, Grand Hill, who plays the same position as Marion, slides back to Small Forward from Power Forward, with Bell and Nash in the back court. Effectiveness of the half-court offense will be a crucial element in the slow-down playoff.

The slow-footedness of O'Neal in the Suns' fast-break offsense is over-exaggerated; rarely do you see a 5-on-5 break anyway. Suns have enough gunners--Stoudamire, Hill, Nash and Barbosa--that Shaq does not have to score double digits to be effective. Of course, I am not clamoring the Suns as the new favorites in the ultra-competitive West, but the Shaq-Marion trade did present an attractive calculated risk for the Suns, given their present shortcomings, for immediate success in the short term. Go figure, or do you think you can do better?

sympathy for the devil

It seems that after Super Tuesday, when Barrack Obama competed neck-to-neck against the previously heavily favored Hillary Clinton, every columnist and public figure, including Oprah, Ted Kennedy and will.i.am of Black Eye Peas, is ready to join the euphoric Obamamania and dance to the rhetorics of the newly crowned Elvis. America loves an underdog, and there will be no bigger underdog story than a black man winning the presidential election in a country with a bitter, tainted history of slavery and racial segregation. Obama's convincing victories in Louisiana, Nebraska, Washington and the Virgin Islands on Saturday added momentum to the ever-growing bandwagon. It is Obama, every place, every time, everybody. As one pundit put it, it is "Jesus Christ, JFK and MLK" all rolled into one and starring in YouTube with a million hits per day. Aha, so there is a God afterall.

At the same time, Clinton bashing has become an accepted national sport, where the more vicious the commentary, the more readers and airtime it receives. Hillary is "mean-spirited", "win-at-all-cost", and dubbed "Billary" with her sometimes overly spirited ex-President husband. NYTimes columnist Frank Rich decried "how nastily the Clintons will fight, whatever the collateral damage to the Democratic Party", labeling her campaign "desperate" and "an imploding Potemkin village". Note this is happening while Obama is seemingly beyond reproach, where every word from his mouth is silky and every touch golden. The sudden casting of shadows of evil darkness and of heavenly light reminds me vaguely of a movie I have seen before: was it Rocky Balboa rising out of the slums in Philadelphia against heavyweight champion Apollo Creed, or was it Gene Hackman led Hickory High basketball team from rural Indiana town triumphing over the big city heavy favorite in state final? It is funny how memory fades with age.

If one takes a cold shower and then a step back and look at the difference in policies between Obama and Clinton, on health care, on strategies in Iraq, on economy, on immigration, on veteran benefits, it will become obvious that the difference between them are relatively small. (Personally, I will be ecstatic with either one over anything the Republicans can throw up after 8 years of GWB stupidity.) The big difference comes when one examine their resumes: Obama is a one-term senator from Illinois, while Clinton, who had admitted made her share of well intended but unforeseeable mistakes both as First Lady and as NY state senator, has been unequivocally pushing under-the-cover issues like women's rights and proper health care for children and the less fortunate for decades. While it is perfectly acceptable to buy into Obama's numbing repetitions of "yes, we can" and "change we can believe", it is unfair and "un-American" to witch-hunt Clinton for being what she is not. What will become of the American conscience a year from now, after unapolegetically bashing Clinton to death simply because she has been trying to do good for too long? Come on, people, smarten up and play ball. Fairly this time.

airmac: easy for novice, difficult for wannabes

Due to an emergency ADSL modem equipment update, I was forced to reconfigure the home network, including the well used and loved AirMac Express (a.k.a. AirPort Express in the US). This convenient, little jack-of-all-trades device can act as a wireless router (with DHCP capability), extends the range of an existing WLAN network, wirelessly connects printers or other USB devices, and plays music wirelessly to stand-alone stereo using AirTunes. If there is no panacea for wireless ills, this comes pretty close. We have been happily connecting the device wirelessly to our family laptop to play music on our home Onkyo stereo for a few years now.

After setting up the new yahoo BB ADSL modem (w/ DHCP capability disabled) and Buffalo WLAN (with a new SSID name and security limiting access to devices with registered MAC addresses), I proceeded to reconfigure the AirMac Express (AE). Yet using the apple downloaded software, Airport Admin Utility and Airport Setup Assistant, I was unable to discover AE on the network. After a frustrating hour and a hard reset, I discovered AE on the network, but was now unable to complete the handshake procedure, encountering the very undescriptive "unknown error -6753". At this stage, I was stuck for hours. Is it the Windows XP Firewall blocking UDP flows? Maybe it is the sshd or other daemons that is consuming required network resources and/or port numbers? Maybe it is software and firmware incompatibility?

Finally, I realized the problem: I have set my TCP/IP setting for the wireless interface on my computer to a local-area fixed IP adddress (for Port Forwarding purposes, a topic for another entry another day), so when my computer tried to log onto AE network, AE was not able to assign it a new IP address in the address pool it has available. Now if the Apple literature would have stated explicitly that a computer needs to be logged onto the AE running DHCP, the oversight would have been obvious. But the literature is rail thin and the software scant, making the debugging process extremely difficult. Of course, if I were a novice, I would have never used a local-area fixed IP address for the WLAN interface in the first place. This, in fact, exmplifies a golden and damned design philosophy behind Apple Products for years: make all products sexy and eternally simple to use, but for the advanced users, leave few footprints for customization and fine-tuning. So the moral here is simple: if you want to use Apple products, be a novice, or be a master of your domain, more than any references you can find in on-line forums. Otherwise, you will join me in welcoming the morning sun with brandy red eyes and a throbbing head.