Getting Back to China: It Wasn’t Easy, But We Made It

Home sweet home—back in our pad in Shanghai. It only took seven months!

 As readers of my blog posts should know already, in February, I left China with my two daughters to spend some time in the USA. We began our journey in California, where we sheltered for two weeks in a hotel before spending a few days with my aunt and uncle in the Berkeley Hills. We then flew to Boston, where we settled with my parents in my hometown of Acton, Mass. 

The month of March was a bit of a nightmare as the USA gradually came to the realization that the virus known as COVID-19 was spreading rapidly through the country. Mass. was hit hard early on, mainly because of its proximity to New York and because of Boston’s status as a transnational education and business hub. Things began to close down rapidly in mid-March, and my dreams of spending some quality time with old friends and visiting my old haunts in the Boston area were quickly dashed. By the end of March, when we tried to get back to China and secured a flight back to Shanghai, it was too late. Three days before our scheduled flight, China suddenly announced that it was closing its borders to international travelers. For better or worse, we were destined to remain in the USA for the time being.

We were certainly lucky to be sheltering with my parents in their lovely home in the hills of Acton Mass. There was plenty of space in our home, and we had easy access to street walks and forest trails. Over the spring months, we were quite busy with our online schooling—I was teaching remotely, and the girls were taking their classes online, sometimes staying up until the early hours of the morning because of the time difference (their schools are in Shanghai). This was a difficult period, but we settled in and did the best we could. 

As I wrote in several previous posts, in order to maintain my own health and my sanity in the midst of the uncertainty and anxiety of this period, I began to explore the nature trails and wildlife refuges in the areas surrounding my hometown. In June, I started cycling regularly with my step-father and later with an old neighborhood friend, who lives in the Boston area. In July, when we are normally on holiday in Acton and the girls are usually in summer camp, we took advantage of our location to do some traveling in our home state, visiting the westernmost region of the Berkshires and the easternmost coastal area known as Cape Cod. 

By August, we were eager to return to China as soon as possible. I was gearing up to begin a busy academic year at Duke Kunshan University, taking on a full-time course load for the first time since I joined this startup university in China in 2015. The girls were all set to begin their fall semester at their schools in Shanghai. Needless to say, we were not looking forward to another semester of remote schooling. While Zoom classes had seemed to work the previous semester, we were hoping to get back to our schools, which were opening up for the fall.

Meanwhile, I was corresponding with our leaders at Duke Kunshan, hoping to get on the invitation list for employees returning to China. At first, the response of the leadership was uncertain. The process itself was not yet consolidated. Eventually, we received news that the first batch of Duke Kunshan employees from abroad were in process of being invited back to China. There was hope after all. The first group included deans and other members of the campus leadership team. Fair enough. I was told to be patient and that they were working on getting me and the other faculty members back as soon as they could.

Around mid-August, the news arrived that I was on the invitation list for the next batch of employees to return to China. I was elated by the news, as was my wife, who as readers know, remained in Shanghai throughout this episode. Presently, we received our official invitation letters as well as detailed instructions from our HR team on how to apply for the temporary entry visa to return to China. 

The instructions were rather complicated, and it took quite some time to assemble all of the necessary components of the invitation process in order to secure our visas. I did so as quickly as possible, and sent the package to the New York Consulate, which was handling the visas for me and my daughters. Within one week, I received a package from the Consulate with our passports containing the necessary visas. I was about to head out on my regular Friday morning bike ride when the mail truck pulled up to our house and the mailperson handed me the package. Needless to say, we were over the moon. 

Having secured the visas, we began to work on flights. Fortunately, my wife’s travel agent in Shanghai was able to book us seats on a Delta flight from Detroit to Shanghai, via Seoul. We were told that the Seoul stop was “technical” and that we would not deboard. All of this happened very quickly. We received our visas at the end of August, just as we were getting ready to begin our fall semesters. Our flight date was set for September 7. 

We spent the next few days preparing for our journey. After seven months in the USA, we had accumulated a lot of stuff—clothes, books, gear, and other things (you must remember that we had no idea we would spend so much time in the USA, so we arrived with very little in the way of belongings). That week, I took in a couple of nature walks and a final bike ride. I also met John Hanson Mitchell, the author of the books that had served me well in the past few months as guides to local history, nature, and lore, which was a real treat. Meanwhile I had a few phone calls or Zoom calls with friends and family who we were unable to see in person during our stay in Acton.

One thing that I had been uncertain about was whether or not we needed a negative test result for the virus in order to board the plane. After corresponding with colleagues and with the human resources at my university, I finally determined that that was unnecessary. However, in a Kafkaesque fashion, an announcement soon appeared stating that after September 15, all passengers traveling from the USA would need to complete a test before boarding an airplane to China.

In order to cover our bases and also to rest assured that we would not be spreading the virus to others, I arranged for us to get tested at a local testing center not far from my hometown. The procedure was very quick and efficient, and within a few hours we had the results by email, which thankfully were negative. Of course we had taken great precautions to shelter and to limit our social contacts, so we were not surprised by the results, but nevertheless it was a great reassurance to us and our parents.

Getting ready to head to the airport, overloaded with bags

On Monday morning, Sept 7, my step-father drove us to the Logan Airport in Boston. We were overloaded with suitcases and bags, and also a guitar I brought over from China and a ukulele that my daughter had collected on the journey. At the airport, we checked in six pieces of luggage (two apiece) and carried the rest of our belongings to the security check. There we were told we had to limit ourselves to two items per person. We had to make a sudden decision, and I chose to leave a couple of travel suitcases of books behind, as well as our instruments. This turned out to be a good thing. And it was also a good thing that my step-father was there to take our extra stuff back home, where they await our next journey to the States.

Checking temps in the Detroit airport prior to boarding our flight to Shanghai

We flew to Detroit. After a few hours in the Detroit airport, we took the Delta flight DL283 to Shanghai via Seoul. Most of the passengers were Chinese, although there were a few other groups of foreigners, who like us had secured their special invitations from their companies and organizations to return to China. Before boarding the plane, the airplane crew made us download an app and fill it in—this was a health declaration that we needed to show to the security people upon our arrival in Shanghai. We were also given a temperature check. After that, they put a sticker on our passports to show we’d passed the check. We boarded the long flight to Seoul, arriving around 14 hours later. After a brief stop in Seoul, where they changed some crew members, we headed on to Shanghai, arriving there around 2 am.

On the airplane bound for Shanghai

Upon our arrival in Shanghai, we were all put through a series of checks and tested for the virus. For this purpose, we went through several stations in the airport, where attendants in full hazmat gear took our temperatures and handed us each a test tube for the “nucleic acid” test that would determine whether or not we were carrying the virus. The test involved a nurse taking a long swab and swiping it deep in our nasal cavities. This had to be done for both nostrils. Then she dropped the results into the test tube marked with our identification info. This was an uncomfortable yet painless process.

Taking the nucleus acid test in the Shanghai airport

Following the test, we collected our suitcases and headed to another station in the airport, where we were sorted for quarantine housing. We went to the Jing’an district station(that’s the district where we live in Shanghai). The friendly attendants there had us fill in more forms, and they assured us that since we have an 11-year old child in our group, we could quarantine in our own apartment. This was a huge relief. We were then taken to a bus, which drove us out of the airport and over to the Jing’an district, about an hour’s ride, arriving at the Holiday Inn Express located next to the Shanghai Rail Station. We arrived there around 4:30 am, greeted by staff in hazmat suits, and settled into a hotel room. We were told not to leave the room until they gave us news about our test results.

Quarantine hotel checkin in shanghai at around 4 :30 am

We spent the next day in the hotel waiting for the results. Given the extra-long flight from Boston to Shanghai and our severe jet lag, we had trouble discerning night and day, and we slept periodically through the next day and night. The room was comfortable for a typical hotel room in Shanghai, but for three people living there and unable to leave the room, it quickly became quite cramped and claustrophobic. We did some work, but mostly in our dazed condition we slept and lazed about,watching videos on our screens to pass the time. I had been watching the Bosch series—an LA police/crime drama series produced by Amazon—and I got through the entire fourth season as we rested and waited for news.

On the bus taking us to our home in Shanghai

Finally, on the afternoon of our second day in the hotel, we received the good news that we were to be transferred to our home in Shanghai. We quickly packed our bags and headed down to the hotel lobby. There, we boarded a bus along with several other passengers, and the bus took us to our neighborhood in Shanghai. Upon arriving at the gates of our compound, we were greeted by several staff of the facilities management, who took down our information and helped us carry our luggage to our apartment. Once ensconced in our apartment, we were told that a group of nurses and other quarantine managers would visit our apartment and take our info and our temperatures and give us instructions for the quarantine period. 

We were elated to finally be back in our own home in Shanghai after living abroad for seven months. My wife, who could not be there with us but had to take up residence in a nearby hotel for the duration, had prepared our home with some necessary supplies. For the past three days I had gone without coffee while we traveled to Shanghai and waited in the hotel. (If you are reading this piece and planning to return to China soon, keep that in mind, and plan to bring your own supply of instant coffee to get you by as you quarantine in the hotel.)

A short while later, the nurse and other attendants arrived at our apartment door and took our temperatures. She made me add her on Wechat (the Chinese social media app that everyone here needs) and told me to take our temperatures each day at 9 am and 3 pm and send her the results. They would return towards the end of our 14-day quarantine period to test us again for the virus before we were finally released. 

Now we must go through the two-week quarantine period, and we are fortunate to be able to do so in the comfort of our own home. Not all returnees to China are so lucky, and many are forced to quarantine in a hotel. From the two-day experience we had at the Holiday Inn Express, I can say that this would be quite an ordeal to forbear. 

We are now looking forward to the day when we will finally be reunited with my wife and my daughters’ mother and her family, who wait patiently for us to complete our quarantine period. While we are giving up our own personal freedom and mobility in the process, I am glad that I am in a country that is taking such strict measures to eliminate the virus from its population. 

The flip side is that once we have passed the two-week quarantine period, we can rejoin our communities and our friends and once again enjoy most of the freedoms that we took for granted before the viral outbreak began. While the process of getting back to China was quite an ordeal, we found all of the people involved on the China side to be very friendly, helpful, and supportive, whether it was the HR team on the Duke Kunshan campus, or the attendants taking us through all the various health checks and quarantine procedures. These people are working very hard day and night to ensure that the country remains as COVID-free as possible. And that is very reassuring indeed.

Walking and Cycling Towards Walden: More Meditations on Place, Belonging, Nature, and Displacement

Readers of my blog will know that I have spent the past several months sheltering in my parents’ home in my old hometown of Acton, Massachusetts. When we arrived here from China via California at the beginning of March, we certainly could not have foreseen at the time how fast the outbreak of COVID-19 would spread here in the USA, especially in our neck of the woods. Massachusetts was hit hard early on, along with New York and New Jersey. By mid-March, schools were closing, and eventually businesses followed. April and May were hard lockdown months, with most businesses shuttered. In June, some things began to open up (I’m being very general here), yet everyone was encouraged to practice “social distancing” and mask-wearing. We spent most of our time sheltering in my parents’ house, and if we went out, it was to the local supermarket for food shopping or to Staples to get office supplies. 

Without the ability to go to my usual places and haunts (Boston, Cambridge, bookstores, cafes, malls, cinemas, restaurants, museums, etc.) or to see old friends and relatives, I found myself increasingly drawn to nature. I began to explore the nature trails that are maintained in the forest behind our home. Pretty soon, I’d explored nearly all of the trails and pathways in the Spring Hill and Nashoba Brook trail system. After a few encounters with owls, which I’ve blogged in previous posts, I invested in a good pair of binoculars for birdwatching and started to diversify my nature hikes with visits to nearby wetlands, conservation lands, and wildlife refuges. I took walks in the neighboring towns of Carlisle, Concord, Westford, Littleton, and I also explored more of Acton’s own nature trails, sometimes with my family members but mostly on my own. I suppose this was a kind of escapism, but in another way it was a deeper engagement with the place in which I happened to spend most of my childhood in the 1970s and 1980s.

Me posing for a selfie in the Nashoba Brook conservation land, also known as the Trail Through Time

Since graduating from Acton Boxboro Regional High School in 1987, I hadn’t spent much time in Acton, just a couple of summers in grad school and periodic short visits to see my parents. Now I found myself living here for an indefinite and uncertain and unbounded time, while waiting for our opportunity to return to our home in China, which had decided (wisely) to close itself off to the world in late March. 

A Barred Owl, which appeared mysteriously during a walk through the woods, and then disappeared into the woods

As I delved deeper into local nature sites, one of my indispensable guides was a locally based writer and naturalist named John Hanson Mitchell. A friend encouraged me to read his book Ceremonial Time. As I blogged in a previous post, I was amazed to find that the patch of land he writes about in this book was one very familiar to me since early childhood. 

Another selfie while cycling through Harvard, posing at Harvard Center in front of a monument to the local citizens who fought in the Civil War.

In addition to roaming the streets, train tracks, and forests, and swimming and fishing in the lakes, ponds and streams of Acton and environs, another favorite activity of my teenage years was cycling. I used to cycle, sometimes with friends or relatives, other times on my own, quite avidly. In June, I found myself recovering my appreciation for riding the roads of this largely semi-rural or “ruburban” area located between and around the major highways of Route 495 and Route 128 in the Boston suburbs. I started in late June with some shorter rides, sometimes with my stepfather or with a childhood neighborhood chum named Steve, who still lives in the Boston area. 

One of our more challenging rides, over the hilly country of Harvard and Bolton and back to Hudson

Hudson Town Center, where we stopped for a beer after our bike ride, with proper social distancing of course

Over the two hot months of July and August, my bike rides became longer and more ambitious. I became attracted once more to hills of Harvard, one of our neighboring towns. I also did a lot of cycling along old colonial-era roads that wind through our neighboring towns of Concord, Carlisle, Lincoln, Groton, Westford, Littleton, Bolton, Stow, Wayland, Weston, and Lexington. Hiking along forest and wetland trails was one way to gain an appreciation of the natural environment that we are blessed with here in New England, while cycling through farmlands, fields, forests, hills, and along rivers such as the Concord, Sudbury, and Assabet was yet another way to pay homage to our fair New England towns and their scenic vistas, town centers, and other delights.

My daughters Sarah and Hannah climb Indian Rock at Punkatasset conservation land in Concord

At the same time, I found myself curating my daughters’ summer experiences as well. Without the ability to attend summer camp or other organized activities, and with no friends of their own here in Acton, they were at a loose end. I took them on trips to the antipodes of our home state, where we experienced the beauty of the western mountains and the seashore and wetlands of Cape Cod. I also took them on local excursions to nature sites and to sites of historical significance. As I recorded in my previous post, we spent a lot of time in Concord, paying a visit to Walden Pond, and visiting the homes and graves of famous authors and philosophers, including Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott (Louisa May, that is).  

More recently, I acquired another book written by John Hanson Mitchell: Walking Towards Walden: A Pilgrimage in Search of Place. In this book, Mitchell writes a great deal about the history of Concord, and about the extraordinary men and women who congregated there over the centuries. He argues persuasively that ever since its establishment in 1635, Concord has always been a sacred and central place in the history of our country, as well as a place that has gathered an unbelievable concentration of intellectual power brokers and literary influencers onto its hallowed grounds. Even today, Concord seems to attract luminaries such as Doris Kearns Goodwin, whose home I visited a few years ago with my mother. 

Reading Walking Towards Walden

Hanson frames this book around the story of a walk that he and two of his close companions did, bushwacking their way through forests and wetlands and across brooks and streams as they went. Their walk, which he describes as a “pilgrimage” of sorts, begins in his hometown of Westford (or does he actually live in Littleton?) and ends at the Colonial Inn in Concord Center, covering around 15 miles by my reckoning. He also segues into stories, both historical and personal, of other quests, adventures, and travels, while exploring the ideas of place, the sacred, and belonging. 

A page from Walking Towards Walden describing Henry David Thoreau and his ambles

He also spends plenty of pages telling tales of displacement. In particular, he illuminates how native Americans or Indians were unsettled and eventually pushed out of New England and other American lands by the colonial and post-colonial settlers of the United States. Slavery is another subject that comes up periodically in this book. One of the most significant war stories in this region is King Phillips’ War, which took place in the late 1600s between coalitions of Indian tribes and the colonial settlers of the towns that I have spent the past six months exploring. Hanson weaves this story together with that of the famous episode on April 18-19, 1775, when the colonial settlers or Minutemen marched to Concord and fought bravely against the British regulars at the Old North Bridge and beyond. By the end of the book, I had learned a great deal about this event that I didn’t know previously, including the unerring politeness of the British officers as they raided and ransacked the settlers’ homes in search of weapons and stocks. 

While reading Walking Towards Walden, I was quite delighted to discover that nearly every road, passage, brook, wetland, forest, hill and farmland that Hanson and his companions encounter during their walk from Westford to Concord Center was a place not only familiar to me, but one that I had also walked or ridden upon over the past few months. Like Hanson, I find that something always draws me back to Concord, which exerts a mystical pull to people in this region. In fact, Acton used to be part of Concord, and the old road that connected Acton village and its mills to Concord center is located in the forest behind our home. It is completely overgrown and unusable now, part of the forest really, but you can still see the fieldstones and the wall that was built along both sides of the original road, which comes down to Wheeler farm and Robbin’s Mill along Nashoba Brook, and you can imagine Thoreau coming down the hill on his way to Westford and beyond.

It is comforting and enlightening to realize that all of these lands and pathways that I have followed over the past few months were probably trodden upon by the peripatetic surveyor, naturalist, and scholar Henry David Thoreau, whose keen observations and insights into the natural world and its workings were at least a century ahead of the rest of the world. Hanson also treads in the footsteps of Thoreau, taking us deep into the center of things. You may not have grown up in this place like I did, and you may not have a visceral experience of the places he describes on his journey to Concord, but if you read this book, I believe you too will feel that you are walking alongside Hanson and his companions, historical and contemporary, as you make your way through the forests, farmlands, horse trails, streams, and fields, birdwatching as you go.

Where Else but Walden? Some Reflections on Henry David Thoreau While Walking Around Walden Pond

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

--Two quotes from Walden (1854) by Henry David Thoreau

         Yesterday, I drove my two daughters to the neighboring town of Concord to visit Walden Pond. They are sheltering with me at my parents’ home in Acton Massachusetts as we wait for our opportunity to return to our own home in China. We have been to Concord many times over the past few months, mainly to visit the old town center with its cafes and its wonderful bookstore, and also to walk in the Great Meadows Wildlife Preserve, one of my favorites in the region. Last March, we took a walk in the woods near Walden Pond along with their grandparents, on a trail that memorializes the words and deeds of Henry David Thoreau. Yet we hadn’t made our annual pilgrimage to Walden Pond itself, and it was high time to do so.

         Having grown up in Acton, I paid many visits to Walden Pond during my childhood, and I have fond memories of walking around the pond in all seasons, and swimming in it during the summer months. In one of my earliest memories, I recall first seeing the delicate and mysterious pink orchid known as the Lady Slipper growing along the trail that surrounds the pond. This must have been in the month of May. So now, whenever I see Lady Slippers in our local forests, I am reminded of Walden Pond. Over the decades, I have visited the pond countless times with family and friends, and it always calls me back for another visit.

         There is something magical about this pond, something very unique indeed, which attracts so many visitors, and which attracted Henry David Thoreau back in the 1840s, when he lived there in his famous cabin in the woods, and later wrote his most famous book Walden (1854). First, the pond is startlingly deep. I believe it was Thoreau who first measured the true depths of the water. Looking online, one sees different stats, but they seem to converge at around 108 feet in depth, which is 33 meters to those of us more enlightened folks who use the metric system. That is an astounding depth for such a small body of water. 

Thoreau was also puzzled by the mystery of its source, and whether it was fed by an underground spring. Today we know that this is an example of a kettle hole, which was created during the retreat of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which had covered all of New England 20,000 years ago and which gouged out the five Great Lakes during its retreat 12,000 to 15,000 years ago. The retreat of the glacial age also created all of the conditions of soil and terrain for the New England region, making ours one of the most fertile agricultural lands in the world, and supplying the large squarish or roundish stones for all the New England stone walls. This and the relative proximity of New England to Old England as well as the similarity in conditions brought the colonists here starting in the 1600s, when they began to displace the original human inhabitants of the land. In his book Walden, Thoreau speculates about the origins of the pond and its name, citing some local myths. He was always fascinated by those people we still refer mistakenly to as “Indians.” 

One does not need to know about the unique depth of this small body of water—the deepest natural body of fresh water in the region—to feel its mysterious qualities. The pond seems strangely located, relatively high up in the hills of Concord. You have to walk uphill for quite a ways from Concord Center to get there. And if like me you are fond of cycling in the area, you know how much energy it takes to get from downtown Concord to Walden Pond. By the time you arrive there on a hot summer day, you are ready for a plunge into the cool waters of the pond.

Sarah and Hannah on the trail around Walden Pond

Yesterday, while we were walking around the perimeter of the pond, we noticed that each niche was occupied by a small group of people, or else by a romantic couple seeking a bit of privacy. It helps that in these COVID times, the pond isn’t nearly as popular as it would be in normal times. Also, it was a relatively cool day, but still many people young and old were enjoying their bit of beach and a swim in the cool refreshing water. There were people of many different nationalities there, including a sizeable group of Korean visitors, who were enjoying a splash in the waters and a game of catch (we heard them speaking Korean to each other; my daughters are very tuned into this language these days, since they are big fans of KPop and Korean TV shows). Suddenly, I was reminded of a visit to the pond maybe 25 years ago with one of my best college pals, Alan Chun, who was studying architecture at Harvard at the time. 

It seems that every time I visit Walden Pond, I am reminded of previous visits, in a chain of time that goes far back, as I mentioned already, to early childhood. I have probably spent some time in just about every nook and cranny of the pond, and at some point, I must have swum across it—or did I? Maybe that pleasure still awaits me.

Watching the train go by

During our hike around the perimeter of the pond, we passed by the railway that skirts the edge of the pond, taking travelers back and forth between Boston and Fitchburg, stopping at West Concord Depot and then South Acton. So many times have I been on the train heading back and forth to Boston from South Acton station, with its tantalizing glimpse of Walden Pond. The girls stopped to rest on the fence overlooking the train tracks. Suddenly, a train whizzed by on its way to Boston, and within two minutes, another rushed by heading the opposite direction, much to their delight. Afterwards, they jumped over the fence and touched the tracks to feel if they were still humming from the vibrations of the trains. I told them that during his stay at Walden Pond, Thoreau befriended some of the workers who created the original tracks back in the 1840s. These men were from Ireland, which was sending its sons and daughters by the thousands to Boston and environs at the time.

A loon in Walden Pond

As we reached the main entranceway and beach at the end of our hike, we noticed a loon poke its head above the water near the beach, only to dive down again. Was this the spirit of Thoreau saying hello, or that of one of the original inhabitants of the land before us white folk arrived in the 1600s? Or perhaps it was just a loon. Still, it was a treat to see if not hear the loon as it surfaced again not too far from where it had dived down into the cool waters a minute before.

After our visit to Walden Pond, we drove down to Concord Center, where I took the girls to one of my favorite restaurants from my own childhood, Helen’s, which used to be called Brighams in my time. I told them that I used to order a drink called a lime rickey. They didn’t know what that was, but it sounded good. Sarah ordered a lime raspberry rickey, and Hannah just had a lime rickey. After our long walk around the pond, which took well over an hour with stops along the way, that lime rickey sure was refreshing. I chose to order a cup of black raspberry ice cream, another tradition of mine that goes back to when I was Hannah’s age.

Following our stop at Helen’s, we drove over to the nearby Sleepy Hollow Cemetery on Bedford Street. To get there, we passed by Monument Square, where we saw a group of young people holding up Black Lives Matter signs (a common sight in these parts these days). This reminded me of Thoreau’s efforts to speak out against slavery and to help fugitive slaves. In fact, it was an ex-slave woman I believe whose remarkable example of self-reliance first inspired Thoreau to live in his cabin in the woods.

Louisa May Alcott’s gravestone at Author’s Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

At the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, we drove up the hill to the Author’s Ridge, where we paid homage to the gravestones of Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Louisa May’s gravestone was decorated with all sorts of small gifts including pens and pencils, stones, and flowers, and even a letter. The girls speculated that the recent and latest film depiction of Little Women sparked this renewal of interest in our local author. 

Henry’s gravestone at Author’s Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

Henry’s gravestone was very modest. It was covered with small stones, and surrounding it were pinecones, a few pens and pencils (we’d forgotten to bring ours), and a photograph of Henry, or was it a postcard? Despite his towering prominence in the history of letters, science, arts and humanities in our nation and the world, somehow it seems fitting that he earned a small stone with only his first name on it, positioned in a plot surrounded by his family members and by his friends.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s gravestone at Author’s Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

By contrast, Emerson’s stone is quite magnificent: A large and natural-looking block of quartzite, forged in the fiery furnaces of the earth far below us. Were it not for Emerson’s patronage and support over the years, Henry would not have been able to conduct his experiment at Walden (Emerson owned the land), nor would his words have traveled as far as they did. Emerson was the man of influence, who recognized Thoreau’s genius above all others, and who despite an often difficult relationship, supported him until the end. When Thoreau died in 1862, Emerson wrote, "The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost." Now, more than 200 years after his birth in 1817, hopefully, we do.

Our Cape Cod Adventure in These COVID Times

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece about a three-day trip I took with my daughters to western Mass. It was our first time there, and together we had a fantastic experience exploring the westernmost parts of our fair state. So, it was fitting that we chose Cape Cod for our next adventure. Now, my daughters have a panoramic view of their home state in the USA.

I have been to Cape Cod many times over the decades. Most recently I was there around 20 years ago, when I accompanied my parents on a trip to Nantucket. I have many fond memories of summertime excursions to the Cape going back to early childhood. When my step-father joined our family circa 1980, we participated in a few automobile rallies that took us there in search of clues, and we still own a prize in the form of a cranberry-picker. My dad took me on a cycling trip there in high school that ended with a tour Martha’s Vinyard—and the unforgettable experience (for a 14-year old) of stumbling upon a nude beach. With all those memories stretching back to my own childhood, I was eager to share the Cape Cod experience with my daughters. 

Normally, we spend part of the summer here in Acton, but the girls always attend summer camp and we don’t have time for big road trips. So now I’m taking the opportunity to take them places we haven’t been to before. Too bad my wife and their mother, who waits for our return in Shanghai, can’t join us this year. Hopefully in the future we will do this again.

Coastline and beach near Nobska Lighthouse

For our Cape Cod adventure, I mapped out a three-night-four-day journey that would take us to different parts of the Cape, minus the islands, since I was concerned about the ferry rides (though I’m sure they’re okay). 

A harbor or inlet in Falmouth

After crossing the Bourne Bridge in time for lunch at a 1950s era diner in East Falmouth, we spent the first day and night in Falmouth, giving us time to explore the southern coastline. We visited the picturesque Nobska Lighthouse near Woods Hole. That evening, we watched the sunset on the western coastline on Wood Neck Beach.

Enjoying the sunset over Buzzards Bay from Wood Neck Beach

The following morning, we headed to the neighboring town of Mashpee and spent the morning at the South Cape Beach State Park. We walked a looping trail through pine forest and wetlands, braving the mosquitos (luckily, I had bug spray in my backpack), and then spent an hour on the beach, bathing for a spell in the cool blue water. I found a bench on the dune overlooking a pond and watched as a pair of swans with four young’uns in tow chased away a couple of swan invaders, puffing themselves up as they pursued them around the pond, until the invaders finally gave up and flew elsewhere.

A restaurant on Shore Drive in Chatham

We then drove to Chatham, where we had lunch at a restaurant overlooking the beach. Lobster rolls and fish and chips, fresh from the ocean. The girls remarked on the “whiteness” of the crowd (a common observation from my girls, who are used to living in Asia) and I taught them a new term: WASP.

A boat arrives at the Wellfleet Town Pier

Following our lunch, we took the scenic route up the arm of the Cape to Wellfleet, where we checked in at a boutique hotel. We spent some time at the Wellfleet Town Pier, and then met up with a student of mine from DKU who lives on the Cape for a brief stroll on Le Count Hollow Beach. While I was catching up with my student, the girls cavorted in the water. As soon as they emerged, we saw some seals swimming along the shoreline. Fortunately, there didn’t appear to be any sharks pursuing them. On the other hand, a woman we passed on the beach told us there were some whale sightings. I scanned the ocean with my binoculars, but I could see no sign of them. We bid farewell to my student and headed back to the hotel for a rest. That evening, we had dinner on the back deck of the Pearl, a restaurant near the Pier. While it was busy, the restaurant seemed to be doing a good job of keeping the tables of customers far apart. 

On the Great Island Trail

The next morning, we awoke early and headed to the trail head of the Great Island Trail. I was informed by the guidebooks that this was one of the best trails on the Cape and indeed in Mass., and I have to agree. We wandered past marshy wetlands and into a hilly pine forest. We emerged out of the pitch pine forest, and we followed the shoreline back to the trail head. All in all, we did a 5-mile walk. I was impressed by my daughters’ stamina. They especially seemed to enjoy the walk on the beach, where we were the only humans for most of it.

Great Island shoreline walk

After checking out of the hotel around noon, we drove north to our final destination, Provincetown. We parked in the lot under the Pilgrim Monument and took a stroll on Commercial Street, braving the crowds. Everyone seemed to be wearing masks, so we weren’t too worried. But I was glad to get off that busy street and walk around on some of the quieter streets before we headed back to our car.

Commercial Street in Provincetown

After taking a rest in our hotel on the PTown coastline, we walked back onto a quieter part of Commercial Street and had dinner at a restaurant. Since we didn’t reserve a table, we weren’t able to sit outside, but we were given a fabulous spot with a corner view looking out at the coastline to the Pilgrim Monument and beyond. The restaurant had separated the tables and, like all the others on the Cape, had put plastic barriers between the booths and tables, so I wasn’t too concerned about being inside. That night, I checked my watch and found that we’d walked 9 miles in total, and around 20,000 steps (probably far more for my younger daughter). 

On the trails at the Mass Audubon Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary

The next morning, we slept in a bit later and had a leisurely breakfast at an outdoor café in Truro. We then visited the Mass Audubon Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, braving the noontime sun and the biting flies to take in some more wildlife and coastal micro-environments before heading back home that afternoon. On the way home via the northern route 6A, we stopped at the home of a friend in Yarmouth Port and had a brief social-distancing visit on his back porch, and then made our way through Sandwich, across the Sagamore Bridge and back to Acton.

After we returned home, I asked my daughters what they enjoyed most about the trip and they both replied: the seafood! They seemed to like the Great Island Trail best, despite its length (it was a good thing we did that hike early in the morning). I myself was most taken by the Wellfleet area, although I enjoyed the entire tour. Hopefully, our Cape Cod adventure will be another fond memory for my daughters, who are enduring a much longer visit in Massachusetts than we had ever intended, but these are the times in which we now live.

“The Berkshires Seem Dream-like”: Notes from a Recent Trip to Western Mass.

James Taylor was right. Despite having hailed from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, he really nailed Massachusetts. And while I was visiting the Berkshires in Western Mass for the first time in my life, the lines from his song “Sweet Baby James” kept going through my mind: 

Now the first of December was covered with snow

So was the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston

The Berkshires seemed dream-like on account of that frosting

With ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go

I grew up in Acton, MA, in the eastern part of the state, not too far from Boston. For me, anything west of Route 495 was “Western Mass.” I did make some forays west of Acton during my childhood, including several long cycling trips out as far as Northfield, but I do not recall ever visiting the Berkshires. 

While growing up in Acton, I did plenty of traveling with my parents. Mostly we traveled vertically, from Mass down to New York City to visit my uncle and aunt, or to Delaware to visit my mother’s parents. We also did a lot of traveling northward, to Maine and New Hampshire mostly. We spent plenty of holidays vacationing in Maine, and lots of time in New Hampshire. When we wanted to go skiing, we went to Maine or Vermont. When we wanted to climb mountains, we went to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The idea of traveling westward in our home state to do any of these things just wasn’t on our radar screen, or so it seems.

Perhaps for this very reason, the Berkshires always did seem mysterious and dream-like to me. I do recall having dreams about traveling to western Mass. and climbing mountains there. And since this meant traveling westward, that vector opened up the dreamy vista of traveling across America, something that I’ve never done (at least, not by car).

So, this summer, while still sheltering with my parents in my hometown, I decided to indulge my curiosity and travel out to the western edge of our state. I wanted to take my daughters on a road trip. Given the conditions of the current time of COVID, we didn’t intend to travel far. The Berkshires seemed like an ideal place to go. We hadn’t been there before, and there would be plenty of places to hike and to experience scenic vistas. 

We left Acton on the morning of July 6 and took Route 2 all the way out to western Mass. An hour later, we reached the French King Bridge, where we stopped and walked on the bridge to take in the stunning view of the Connecticut River. After that, the hills got steeper and the vistas began to open up, with rolling green hills, farmland, and fields stretching into the distance. The girls remarked that it seemed more like New Hampshire than Massachusetts.

We arrived in Lenox that afternoon and settled into the Cornell Inn, a quaint hostelry located on the hilly road leading into the main town. The proprietor recommended that we take a walk in the nearby Kennedy Park, and so we did. We barely scratched the surface of the park, which has forest trails running through hundreds of acres of land. And relating to my previous posts, I’m pretty sure I saw the wings of a Barred Owl during our hike.

Looking out upon Bash Bish Falls

The next morning, we drove for about an hour down to the southwest corner of the state to visit Bash Bish Falls, the largest waterfall in Massachusetts. We passed through part of New York State to get there, and then took a ¾ mile hike up to the Falls. They were glorious. Most hikers wore masks, which is always a good sign that here in Mass. we are taking the pandemic seriously.

Fine dining in Lenox—suitably distanced of course

After stopping at a roadside diner for lunch (the line was spaced out and everyone wore masks) and eating in our car, we took a 2-mile hike around Benedict Pond, and then returned to Lenox for dinner at a local restaurant. The food was pricey, but worth it. We ate outside at tables, while the restaurant took all the necessary precautions.

Rabbit Rock

The next morning, we stumbled upon another fine 2-mile hike, known as Tyringham Cobble. The hike starts in a meadow and climbs a few hundred feet to the peak of a local mountain for a nice view of the valley below. The hike features some striking rock formations, including “Rabbit Rock.”

It also coincides with the Appalachian Trail. While hiking along the AT, we ran into a couple of through hikers with big packs and walking sticks. One of them told us he was on his way to Katahdin in Maine, and I felt a twinge of envy. The girls really enjoyed this hike and later they told me it was the best one we did.

On the Appalachian Trail—another dream deferred

That afternoon it was threatening to rain, so we explored some nearby towns by car. But first, we checked out a chocolate shop in Lenox that was reputed to have some of the finest chocolate in the country. Pretty soon, the girls were high on chocolate drinks, and were giggling and bouncing in the car as they played their favorite pop tunes, which Dad had to endure for most of our trip.

We headed over to Pittsfield. We were surprised to discover that it seemed like a small city by comparison, with tall stately buildings lining its main street. It also had more of a working-class vibe than Lenox, which smells of “daddy’s money” according to my precocious daughter.

For dinner, we found a tiny Greek-Italian restaurant run by a real mom-and-pop couple and had pizza, lasagna, and salad. The girls said it was the best meal of the trip. This was the only time we ate inside the restaurant, which had only a few other customers in carefully spaced seating arrangements. While we were eating dinner, the rain came down, and then it quickly dispersed. Following our meal, we took a leisurely drive back to Lenox, again passing through New York State, and saw a rainbow over the hills. By that time, the sun came out and the view overlooking the lake below was magnificent.

The view from atop Mt. Greylock, looking eastward

On our final day, we checked out of the hotel and drove all the way to the top of Mt. Greylock, the tallest mountain in Mass. We spent some time taking in the phenomenal view from the mountain top, where we could see all the way to our own eastern part of the state. Then we drove down the mountain, along with a bug that hitched a ride on the windshield, and had a quick lunch in North Adams—unfortunately, most of the interesting things in the town were closed. Then we headed back to Acton via the scenic byway known as the Mohawk Trail, where we were treated to more gorgeous mountain views as we followed a river down the mountains and headed back eastward.

All in all, it was just like James Taylor sang it. Now we have a much deeper appreciation of the true beauty of our home state of Massachusetts. I hope to go back to revisit Western Mass. in different seasons and in better times.

More Thoughts on Liberal Education: What is it and Why is it Important?

One of my favorite memories of the past few months is of playing and performing music with a group of students and researchers in Kunshan. This group, which we dubbed the Jazzy Tuesdays, started out as a trio, when two graduate program researchers and I performed some songs at the opening of our new Student Center in the fall. Soon after that I invited some of our talented undergraduate students to join an informal music ‘workshop’ held every Tuesday evening in my apartment in Kunshan. Over the next two months, we practiced pop, folk, and jazz songs from the American songbook, while having fun sharing our own musical tastes and traditions with each other. With this Uber-talented group of students, who can sing, play instruments, and perform, we managed to pull together a performance of several songs at the annual DKU staff&faculty gala to celebrate Chinese New Year. This was my last memory of DKU before we all headed off on our New Year holiday break. After that, the Pandemic prevented us from returning to campus. I then left China with my daughters and have been in the USA ever since, hoping for word for when we can return to China and to our campus. This band and workshop, which started out informally and casually, are to me a vital if underrated and certainly understated part of what liberal education is all about.

A jam session and informal ‘workshop’ on music held in my apartment in Kunshan every Tuesday night, starting in fall 2019

Over the past five years, while working for Duke Kunshan University in Kunshan, China, I have been closely involved in the unique project of setting up and launching a four-year undergraduate degree program in China in partnership with Duke University. This experience has led me to think more deeply about the value, scope, purpose, and mission of a liberal education. Part of my job over these past five years has been communicating in both English and Chinese with hundreds of prospective students, parents, and college counselors in China and in many other countries in Asia on how liberal education works and why it is important. 

In previous pieces I’ve written on this blogsite, I offer up some of my own thoughts on liberal education and share stories about my own educational experiences. Not that my own college education was an ideal or even typical pathway to learning. There is no singular pathway through a liberal education, and students will have to navigate the experience of a college education in their own individual ways, according to their own interests, values, and personalities. 

Here are some more thoughts and ideas I’d like to share about the value of liberal education. I hope that these are helpful for other educators and for students to consider as they ponder the value and meaning of a liberal education.

The Rudder vs. the Steering Oar

An ancient Egyptian steering oar . Source

A Chinese invention: The Rudder (Han Dynasty) Source

Many books have been published in recent years on the importance of liberal education for our lives and our societies, at a time when liberal education is arguably in peril. What is liberal education and why is it important? I propose the following metaphor: Liberal education is to the modern human being what the rudder is to ships. Rudders, as everybody knows, are used to help steer ships and keep them on course even in rough waters. Without the invention of the rudder, for better or worse, we wouldn’t have the globalized world of today. 

Prior to the adoption of stern-post rudders (arguably a Chinese invention of the Han Dynasty), ancient seafaring civilizations such as the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and even the Vikings used the steering oar. The steering oar was also a great innovation. It allowed sailors to navigate their ships across long distances and through treacherous waters. Steering oars could be attached to the stern of the ship for further stability and power. Yet it was with the advancement of the stern-post rudder that ships were able to circumnavigate the world. The rudder also enabled airplanes to take off and transformed the ways and the means and speed by which humans could transport themselves around the world. 

While the steering oar could carry sailors across long distances over time, it was no match for the rudder. During the Middle Ages, when the Vikings launched their ships to attack the British Isles, conduct trade along the major European rivers, and colonize Iceland, they used steering oars. The nautical term ‘starboard’ comes from the Norse styrbord, or ‘steering board’—the side where the board was located (source). In the 15th and 16th centuries, when the Portuguese conducted their first great expeditions across the Atlantic Ocean and around the African continent to reach the Indian Ocean, their caravels were fitted with rudders. 

Similarly, while a vocational education can provide a grounding for a specific profession, there is no substitute for a liberal education when it comes to producing a whole adult person. While specific trade skills and technical know-how can get somebody ahead in life, much like a steering oar can do for a ship, a liberal education provides the rudder that will ultimately enable a person to navigate our complex world and have an an enriching life in the full sense of the word.

Studies have shown that technical education offers an initial advantage. Nevertheless, over the long term, people with liberal arts degrees tend to outperform people with more technical degrees as they rise up in the social, political, institutional, and economic hierarchies of our world. 

Yet the purpose of a liberal education is far greater than advancing through hierarchies: the ideal purpose of liberal education is to set a course for our adult lives that will continue to make us better people, and to change our world for the better. The rudder is the value system and the tool set that a liberal education confers upon its bearer, which includes the desire and ambition as well as the mindset and skills to be a lifelong learner.

The Four Quarters: A Different Way of Viewing Liberal Education

People often think of a liberal education as consisting primarily of a variety of courses and subjects in different disciplines and areas. Students major in specific subject areas, but they must take courses in other disciplines and subjects, thus developing a well-rounded education overall. This is true of course, but it is only part of the picture, and in my view, it is a misleading way to think about liberal education.

We are often misled to think of a liberal education as something that transpires primarily in the classroom. This takes us closer to the idea of the steering oar. We tend to think of professors as people who possess valuable knowledge or skills, which they transmit to students, much in the way that a pitcher might pass liquid into a cup. Professors and courses are of course vital to a liberal education, but they are only a part of the equation. What they pass on to their students, if they’ve done their jobs properly, isn’t simply knowledge, but rather, their values, outlooks, and habits.

It is the holistic experience of attending a liberal arts college or university program and engaging fully in what it has to offer both inside and outside the classroom that ultimately generates a liberal education.  This includes the conversations that a student has with his or her professors and, even more importantly, with one’s peers outside the classroom. I would argue that these informal conversations can be even more crucial than formal classroom learning and studying in generating a liberal education. In addition, all of the extra-curricular activities that are available to a student, such as interest groups, associations and societies, sports, music, theater, and myriad others, are also integral to a liberal education.

There is also the learning that a student undergoes when he or she steps out of the campus and into the bigger world. Whether undertaken through summer internships, study abroad programs, group activities, or individual travels, all of these off-campus experiences form another key component to the learning and growth experience. By providing the time and space for a student to grow, learn, and mature off campus, a liberal education helps to integrate the student into the bigger world that he or she will be a part of following graduation.

In sum, a student’s education consists of far more than classroom learning and the homework and other assignments and activities that a student completes as part of their coursework. Nevertheless, many educational programs are designed to maximize the amount of time students spend working on completing their courses. This is a mistake in my opinion, since a proper liberal education must allow for a significant amount of free time for a student to explore learning on his or her own, with or without the guidance of courses and professors. 

Far from being empty or wasted time, this extra time helps a student to develop the skills, mindset, and habits of a self-actuated learner, which is the ultimate goal of a liberal education. College usually only lasts four years, at least in the US system. The student will be spending the rest of his or her life learning new skills and absorbing new knowledge and integrating those with what he or she already knows. Even if one goes on to attend a graduate program or professional school, one will spend a great deal of one’s career learning important subjects and expanding one’s knowledge. This will happen in many different fields of inquiry and usually without the aid of professors or syllabi.

A good heuristic for the division of time and activities during a liberal arts program is to think of liberal education ideally as a pie divided equally into four parts. The first quarter of a liberal education consists of the coursework that a student has to complete in order to earn the degree. The second quarter consists of social group activities and casual conversations that a student engages with others in the learning community outside the classroom, whether through formal associations and clubs or through informal play and ‘down-time’. The third quarter is made up of the off-campus experiences that a student has during his or her four years in college. The fourth quarter is the amount of learning that a student undertakes on his or her own, sometimes with the aid of professors or fellow students, or other times just by pursuing one’s own interests. 

While the reality of a four-year college education isn’t nearly quite so neat and tidy as this chart would suggest, I believe that dividing liberal education into these four quarters is a useful heuristic for professors, administrators, students, and advisors to think about when contemplating liberal education in a more holistic way.

Striking a Balance by Putting Coursework into Perspective

Many people are inclined to emphasize the first quarter—coursework--over all the others. There are many reasons for this. First of all, curricula, majors, and courses are designed by professors, who have a vested interest in maximizing their students’ workloads. Professors--and I should know, since I’m one of them--often think erroneously that they and the courses and majors they offer are the most important aspects of a student’s college education.

This applies especially, although not exclusively, to majors in STEM fields. For STEM students, it is often very difficult to attend study abroad programs, or to find spare time to learn other subjects on their own, or even to pursue sports or other extra-curricular social activities during a regular semester. Part of this has to do with the way STEM majors are structured. In my opinion, there are many flaws in how we do STEM education. 

Of course, this does not mean that liberal arts shouldn’t include STEM components. Far from it. STEM fields and subjects are vital to a liberal education, and all students should emerge with at least some understanding of math and sciences. Yet there ought to be better ways to integrate STEM subjects and majors into the overall framework of a liberal education, so that they don’t overshadow all other aspects of a student’s education.

Trails Through Time: Exploring Conservation Lands and Wildlife Refuges in Eastern Massachusetts

Normally, when I visit my old hometown of Acton, Mass to spend time with my parents, who still live here after 40 years, I spend a lot of time in the city. I will head to Boston or environs to see old friends, attend concerts (such as Coldplay, Radiohead, Thomas Dolby, Barenaked Ladies and others I’ve seen in recent years), visit museums (MFA is my favorite in Boston), take my daughters to the Aquarium, see colleagues at Harvard, BU, or MIT, go shopping for books at Harvard Square, and walk around Boston Common and Quincy Market. We spend a lot of our time in the city in other words.

This time was different. The outbreak of COVID-19 led us to leave our home in Shanghai and seek temporary shelter in my parents’ home in Acton in March. Soon afterwards, it prevented us from doing any of the things listed above that we normally do here. Museums, parks, cinemas, shopping centers, conferences, universities—you name it, they all shut down quickly in March. Since June, there’s been a soft reopening, but we are in no hurry to rejoin the multitudes, particularly in this state, which has seen one of the worst outbreaks of the disease in the USA (our close proximity to New York City, the epicenter of COVID for the world, didn’t help).

Instead, while sheltering here in Acton, I’ve been compelled to take long, solitary walks in nearby forests. What began as a necessity quickly became an obsession, as I rediscovered the joys of nature walks and forest baths. I’ve written about this extensively in my two previous blogs.

I started by taking walks in the conservation land in North Acton behind our home. It is large and has many well-marked trails, and the presence of a wetland and brook (Nashoba Brook) adds greatly to the variety of the experience.

I also began to explore other conservation lands and wildlife refuges that are all within easy driving distance (20 minutes or so) of our home in Acton. Here are some of the places I’ve been to over the past three months:

Rocky Hill Wildlife Sanctuary in Groton

Nashoba Brook Watershed in Westford

Great Meadows Wildlife Refuge in Concord and Lincoln and Carlisle

Greenough Land in Carlisle

Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge in Sudbury

Oxbow National Wildlife Refuge in Harvard

Oak Hill in Littleton

I have plans to visit others this month as well. While some of these have been solo walks, I’ve also gone with my parents, my daughters, and combinations of the above. 

Sacred Lands: No wonder forests and rivers and streams have been considered sacred to the native peoples who once roamed these parts, before they were displaced by colonial settlers from England and Europe in the 1600s. These places offer one endless opportunities to meditate on the beauty and interconnectedness of the natural world and the creatures and plants that inhabit it.

This little adventure has also rekindled my interest in birds and trees, which lay dormant for many years as I lived a very urban lifestyle in Shanghai and Kunshan. I’ve been reading books and consulting guidebooks on trees, forests, and birds, and trying to use the knowledge I’m gaining to interpret what I see during my walks. While I am still a long way away from being comfortable identifying individual birds and trees, or recognize bird calls and songs, I have definitely improved my overall skill sets and can recognize families and types much more easily. In particular I’ve been reading a lot about owls, since they kept appearing during my walks, and they are such fascinating creatures to see in the wild, with their haunting eyes and apex predator behaviors. So between scouring forests and wetlands for birds, and checking out the overstory and understory of the forests, I’ve been well rewarded by these long walks in the conservation lands and wildlife refuges that surround us here in Acton.

I don’t know how all this newfound knowledge, insight, and experience will serve me in my career as a China/Asia specialist and historian. Still, in addition to helping me cope with our current circumstances and the uncertainties, it is endlessly fascinating to learn about nature. One of the big takeaways from all this research and observation is how closely connected everything in nature is, and how each being has a profound impact on the others that share the forest or wetland. No wonder the native Americans considered forests and waters to be sacred places.

Now, I’m reading a book on trees that brings it all home: The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. Since reading the Overstory earlier this year, I’ve become fascinated by these woody characters. This book provides so much food for thought, explaining how trees are intimately connected to each other and can communicate with each other, and how forests operate on the holistic level. Another good book along these lines is Reading the Forested Lands: A Natural History of New England by Tom Wessell, which covers forests, trees, and the natural history of the lands in which they grow, as well as the influence of human interventions on these forests and lands. Like John Mitchell Hanson’s book Ceremonial Time, this book makes one far more cognizant of the deep history of the forests, wetlands and other natural environments in which I find myself roaming.

How I Released My Inner Druid, and Why the Owl Looks Familiar

This post follows up on my previous post, which was about rediscovering my hometown of Acton and environs in light of the pandemic. Now, it is coming upon three months since we arrived in Acton. This is far and away the longest time I’ve spent in Acton in 30+ years, and in the USA for that matter over the past twenty years. Here in this post, I will meditate on how my life has taken on a druidical dimension since I first landed back in my hometown, and the series of coincidences that have brought me deeper and deeper into the forest both literally and metaphorically. So, cue the Outlander soundtrack, and let’s begin.

reflections of the forest in the waters

It all began in January, when the pandemic was just beginning to enter our consciousness. We were on a family trip to Singapore for the Chinese New Year holiday. One evening, during a visit to the Kinokuniya bookstore, I happened to notice a novel with the intriguing name of The Overstory. Although I hadn’t read his work before, I recognized the name of the author, Richard Powers.

A week later, I found myself on a flight to California with my daughters, where we spent a few weeks before heading to Massachusetts. We were on the lam from the pandemic so to speak, which was now spreading like wildfire, much more quickly and comprehensively, than we could have imagined at the time. These stories are told in my previous posts, so I’ll leave it there and go on.

I was reading The Overstory during our journey in the USA, and this book was drawing me deeper and deeper into the mysterious lives of trees and forests. When we arrived in Acton, I already felt a deeper connection to the forest that surrounds us, and this continued to develop as I raced through the book, finishing it sometime in late March. Meanwhile, a Facebook friend introduced me to some other books on natural history and forests, which I relate in my previous post. 

Strange coincidence that as I was being drawn deeper into the world of trees and forests, an old friend from my high school days was organizing a band of players for a Dungeons and Dragons adventure. I hadn’t played this role-playing game in decades, not since I was in high school. As it was a fun way to reconnect with some other friends from those days, I opted in. Lo and behold, I was given the character of a Druid, with magical powers all relating to nature. Those who play the game know what it takes to get into your character. And so, I was primed for a journey, both in the imaginary role-playing world of D&D, and in the “real world.”

Ferns and mayflowers begin peeking up from the forest floor in early May

Meanwhile, I was taking long walks in the forest that surrounds our house. The neighborhood where my parents live abuts a forest and conservation land. As the winter weather gradually gave way to spring, I roamed the trails and pathways of the forest, watching as the forest literally came to life. First, I noticed the sprouting of the ferns and the skunk cabbage especially in the wet areas around the small streams of the forest. Then, the Canada mayflowers began to cover the ground with their green leaves. After that, the small trees such as the beeches began to produce leaves, which greened up the forest landscape considerably. Finally, it was time for the tall majestic oaks to cover the forest canopy with their leaves. All of this happened gradually and steadily throughout the month of May.

Forest ferns in late May

Over April and into May, the ornamental trees in our neighborhood were themselves bursting with colorful flowers. First, the magnolias came out in their white splendor. Then it was time for the cherries and the crabapples to blossom. Finally, in early May, it was the dogwoods’ turn to bloom, just as the cherries and crabapples started shedding in a rain of pink blossoms. Yet my own interests were drawn increasingly into the natural forest. In addition to roaming our neighboring conservation lands, I searched out other forests and other conservation areas that were within easy driving distance from our home in Acton. I went on walks in these areas with my daughters and my parents. As enjoyable as these walks were, I found myself craving solitary forest walks more and more often. Soon this became a daily habit--dare I say, almost an addiction?

Over time, my interests gravitated from the flora and fauna to the wildlife that inhabit the forest and the wetlands. The turning point was when I spotted an owl in the trees behind our home. I was able to snap some photos of the owl before it disappeared into the forest. We identified it easily as a Barred Owl. This happened on May 5, to be precise. 

Then, last Wednesday, May 20th, I was walking along a trail in our local conservation land, when I heard a commotion in the trees above me. I looked up to see a pair of crows cackling loudly, obviously disturbed by something. There in the branches, just below the crows, was a large brownish figure, and when it turned its head to look my way, instantly I recognized it as an owl by its horns or tufts. The crows continued with their loud cacophany. One of the crows did a flyby very close to the owl, and the owl raised up one of its legs and swiped at the crow with its talons, without moving its body as much as an inch. It was such a beautiful and significant gesture, that I later regarded it as an omen. The owl then fluffed itself and eventually it flew off. Later, with some help from my stepfather, I was able to confirm the sighting of a Great Horned Owl. 

Excited about this find, I wrote to an old friend who is a lifetime birder, and he shared with me his own experience of first seeing a Great Horned Owl in Nova Scotia, which was also being scolded by crows. If I ever get together a band, that’ll be the name: Scolded by Crows. My friend the birder told me to look for telltale signs of owl habitation, including pellets left by the owls after they regurgitate the fur and bones and other indigestible parts of their daily meals.

Two nights ago, I was awoken around 4 am by the call of one of our local Barred Owls: Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you? The call was so close, it sounded like it was coming from just outside my bedroom window. Then it receded into the distance. The owls were calling me. I had to follow. 

This morning, I went out onto the porch that looks out from our home into the woodlands, and I heard the call again. Normally I take my forest walks in the late afternoon before dinner, but this time I was compelled to head into the forest around 10 am. Rather than follow my usual pathways through the forest, I chose an alternate route, which took me even deeper into the hilly conservation land dominated by tall oaks and pines. An hour later, I saw a large pair of brown wings flying in the opposite direction amongst the trees. I followed it and found a Barred Owl perched high upon the branch of a tall pine tree. It stayed on its perch long enough for me to take a series of photos, and then it alighted and flew off deeper into the forest. It was a beautiful sight, and not unlike a dream. 

Barred Owl in the forest, May 26

I then walked over to the area where I’d seen the Great Horned Owl. Sure enough, I found what appeared to be owl pellets on the ground near where I had spotted it a week ago. I decided to head back to that area around sunset. I went with my daughter to the spot where I’d seen the owl the week before, and where I’d found the owl pellets earlier that day. We didn’t spot anything in the trees. But as we were walking along, we saw the Great Horned Owl from a distance, perched upon the branches of a dead tree surveying the wetlands. It was a magnificent vision, even though the owl was quite a distance away. And it stared back at us with large yellow eyes. 

And that is how I came to see two owls in one day.

Great Horned Owl, May 26

Some Reflections on Home, Nature, and Displacement in the Ceremonial Time of Corona

It’s been well over a month since I last posted an entry in my online journal, so this post is meant to catch any erstwhile readers up with our little family saga as we continue to shelter with my parents in Acton, Massachusetts. I’m also interested in exploring the theme of home and belonging in this current time, when so many people have been displaced from their homes and even from their homelands.

We are fortunate in many regards, including the ability to shelter in a comfortable environment that also happens to be the place where I grew up. In other words, I am in my hometown. “Hometown” is a funny word—what does it mean, exactly? In Chinese, the term 老家 laojia or “old home” comes close. This term indicates a place of origin, though often it means the place where one’s parents came from, not necessarily one’s own place of origin. In American culture, hometown usually refers to the place one spent one’s childhood and “came of age” into young adulthood. I lived in Acton from around the ages of 5 to 17, when I headed off to Dartmouth College in Hanover NH in the region of New England, which I think of as my homeland. I’m an American of course, but deep down I’m a New Englander—that kind of sentiment.

So this piece is going to be a bit rambling, as my posts usually are, but I want to connect recent events to this sense of belonging and what one considers one’s home to be. For me this is an interesting question, since I’ve spent much of my adult life living and working outside of the USA in other countries, including five years in Australia and around fifteen years in China. I’ve spent more of my adult life living and working in Shanghai than any other city, and I also research, write books, and make films about Shanghai. My wife and her family are from Shanghai and my daughters have spent almost all their lives there and consider Shanghai their home. So in many ways, Shanghai is my adopted home. And yet (and this goes more generally for China as well), I’ve always felt and been made to feel like an alien in Shanghai, since I cannot claim any real citizenship or a true sense of belonging there.

On the other hand, how can I claim Acton as my home? I haven’t lived here since 1987. In fact, the ten weeks that I’ve spent here since we arrived here at the beginning of March constitutes the longest amount of time I’ve been in Acton since I was 17 years old. Nevertheless, my parents have continued to live here almost continuously since then, and each year we come here to visit and spend some time, usually in summers, but sometimes in winters. I still have friends here or nearby in the state of Massachusetts with whom I went to high school. It certainly feels like a homecoming whenever I return to Acton. I have countless memories of growing up here, and I know the roads and byways of Acton and the surrounding towns well enough to navigate without a map. I feel grounded whenever I’m here. It certainly helps that my parents have lived here all these years, as I’m not sure how I’d feel about Acton if they didn’t. But I do claim a residence here. So in all these senses, it sure feels like home.

And yet, it isn’t. Actually, we are displaced refugees, sheltering in my parents’ home. My daughters feel this much more strongly than I do, since they only spend a few weeks every summer here, or a few days over winters. They don’t have friends here, really. They don’t have any memories of going to school here or being part of the local society. They have attended summer camp here for quite a few years, so there is that, but otherwise all their emotional connections are with Shanghai, even though they are American citizens. Perhaps home is where Mom dwells?

I grew up here in Acton with my mother and sister, and we were very fortunate to have my step-dad enter the picture in the late 1970s. What brought us to Acton in the first place? Well, in the early 1970s, when my mother was a single mom taking care of two small children, she moved here for a few good reasons. First, her eldest brother was living in the area. He and his family chose the neighboring town of Littleton, where they settled in a nice small house on the edge of Lake Matawanakee, otherwise known as Forge Pond. Before they moved in, we lived there for a spell over the summer, so some of my earliest memories are of learning to swim in the pond. Over the years of my childhood, we visited our uncle and aunt’s home frequently. We went swimming in the pond in summer, and skating on it in winter. I stayed there many times over the years, so in a way it was a second home for me as well.

Getting back to the reasons why we moved to Acton: My mother took a job with Digital Equipment Corporation, otherwise known as DEC, which had its headquarters in an old mill in the neighboring town of Maynard. Acton was and is still known for having a good school system and affordable housing, so we moved to this town. Eventually, long story short, we settled with my step-father in an old Victorian house on Windsor Ave., and that is where I spent most of my formative years. They remained in that home long after I left in 1987, and eventually they found another home in another part of town, where we are now sheltering.

I’m grateful for my childhood in Acton Mass. It was a lovely town in which to spend one’s childhood, with plenty of places to roam and play outdoors. There are rivers and ponds and brooks galore, and fields and forests in which to wander and dream. Acton is a collection of small villages. We lived in West Acton. Now we are in North Acton. From my perspective, having lived in Shanghai all these years, not much changes in Acton over the years and decades. It seems like a town frozen in time.

Time is obviously a big theme of our current condition. Some may feel that time has slowed down since we were all forced to quarantine in March (for my family, this happened starting in late January). At least, getting out of our typical routines has forced us to reconsider the passage of time and our place in the flow of time. For me, being in Acton the past two and a half months has certainly slowed down the pace and rhythms of my harried life in China. 

When not busy with my own work or taking care of my family, I’ve taken advantage of my time here to rediscover Acton and its environs. For this purpose, I have a boon companion: John Hanson Mitchell, a local writer who was living in Littleton in the 1970s and wrote a gem of a book about this area, called Ceremonial Time. A Facebook friend alerted me to this book recently, and I read it over the past few weeks along with some other books on natural history, forests, and trees. Basically, I’ve turned into a Druid, spending much of my spare time wandering through the forests and following trails in local conservation lands.

Mitchell tells the story of this particular part of New England from the perspective of the longue duree. He begins by recounting how the glaciers receded 15,000 years ago, leaving the rich and varied landscape we see here today with its drumlins, ponds, rivers and streams. Then came the paleo hunters, tracking caribou, wooly mammoth and mastodon herds. Over thousands of years, the native Americans became forest dwellers, living a rich life, growing and planting and stewarding the land, taking only what they needed, and living in temporary dwellings and shelters as they moved from place to place.

Mitchell tells the story partly through the voices of living people, who are connected through blood and culture to those forest dwellers. These original inhabitants were displaced through disease and through violence by the English who settled here beginning in the 1600s. Back then, Acton didn’t exist, but a small village arose not far from where we live, which was connected to the larger settlement of Concord by a road. Over time, the new settlers took over the land and built more permanent, sturdy homes, and then completely reconfigured the landscape for their own purposes, converting forests and meadows into farmland and pastureland. Later, they built the stone walls that criss-cross the landscape of New England and can still be found in the forests today.

While reading Mitchell’s account of the natural and human history of his patch of land, I came to the realization that this was my land too. The stretch of land he documents, known as Scratch Flat, happens to be located right in between my home in Acton and my uncle and aunt’s home in Littleton. I must have passed through it countless times in my childhood, whether by car or by bicycle, and I never noticed the waterway that runs through it, known as Beaver Brook.

Looking out on Beaver Brook in Littleton

Lately, I’ve visited there several times along with my family, and we’ve walked around the forest and marshland. It’s a lovely place, still relatively undisturbed today, even though many developments now surround it. Back when Mitchell was living there and writing in the 1970s and early 1980s, it was already on its way to becoming a development zone for industries, including the computer industry, which brought my family here in the first place. Actually, that industry was responsible for creating my family, since my parents met at DEC in the late 1970s. Many of my closest childhood friends also had parents who worked for the hi-tech industry. And all this is still true of Acton today.

Reading Mitchell’s book and wandering through the forests and fields of Acton, Littleton, and other neighboring towns with or without my family members in tow has given me a much deeper appreciation and understanding of the long history of this place, and how much has actually changed under the surface. Even though this is not my home, and probably never will be again, I feel more at home here in Acton than ever before. Funny how that works.

The Making of Jazz & Blues Ala Shanghai: A New Documentary Film on the City's Live Music Scenes

This documentary film has been fifteen years in the making. It began when I started filming the jazz scene in Shanghai in 2004. That year, an exciting new club called JZ had just started, while the Cotton Club down the road was still going strong with its killer combo of blues, funk, and soul music.

Since then, many other clubs have opened and closed in the city, but the JZ Club, Cotton Club, and the House of Blues & Jazz are the clubs that arguably have made the greatest impact on the city’s jazz and blues scenes over the last 25 years.

Following a brief history of the city’s tumultuous 20th century told by veteran jazzman Bao Zhengzhen, one of the pioneers of the Old Man Jazz Band in the Peace Hotel, this film takes the story of the re-emergence of jazz and blues back to the 1990s. That was the time when HBJ and CC came out of Shanghai’s rebirth as an international metropolis. Over the next two decades, these clubs, along with JZ, funneled a panoply of jazz and blues artists from all over the world into Shanghai’s music scene, while also helping to train a whole generation of Chinese musicians, many of whom had graduated from the nearby Shanghai Music Conservatory, in the jazz and blues idioms.

The film features interviews and live performance footage of leading bands, musicians, scene-makers, and mover-shakers in the city's jazz and blues music scenes since the 1980s. These people include HBJ founder Lin Dongfu, CC co-founders Matt Harding and Greg Smith, and JZ founder Ren Yuqing. Others who appear in the story include Graham Earnshaw, Coco Zhao,  JQ Whitcomb, Alec Haavik, Theo Croker, Willow Neilson, Matthew Cooper, Peng Fei, Jasmine Chen, Jorland Paulino, Denise Mininfield, Greg Luttrell, Mike Null, Tony Hall, and the late Earl Phenix (1976-2014). And many others appear as well.

Two years ago, in the summer of 2018, I finished a rough cut of the film, and screened it to a close circle of family and friends. Based on their feedback and others’, recently while sheltering in my parents’ home in Acton, Massachusetts, I had the opportunity to edit a finer cut of the film. I screened this cut to my parents (my only live audience right now), and to my surprise and delight, they enjoyed nearly every minute of it, even though it was almost two hours long!

I will continue making some fine adjustments to the film. I hope to have it ready for screening to a public audience later this year, in celebration of a century of jazz in Shanghai.

After finishing the latest cut, I made a couple of trailers for the film and posted them on YouTube. One trailer is over 3 minutes long and includes most of the people and scenes that I profile in the film. I had forgotten how excruciating it can be to make a trailer. It took several days of hard work and multiple versions before I felt I got it done right.

The other trailer is a minute and thirty seconds long. It’s for those of you out there who don't have the time or patience to view the longer version. This one was much easier to cut out of the 3-minute version:

Above: The 1:30 minute version of the film trailer. Enjoy!

Here’s a photo of me in my home office in my folks’ home in Acton, hard at work on the film.

I posted these trailers on Facebook and reached out to people who are in the film to view them. So far the reaction among my Facebook friends has been overwhelming positive. I am really looking forward to screening this film, hopefully in better times to come.

Finally, a wholehearted thank you to all of you who have helped me with this film project over the years. I hope this film does credit to the amazing musicianship and entrepreneurship of the people who appear in the film, who have enriched our lives in the city of Shanghai immeasurably.

Why the Hobbit Movies Don’t Work For Me: Notes from a Dedicated Tolkien Reader

As readers of my blogsite know, although an occasional book review pops up on this blogroll (never in my own field, since I wouldn’t be so gauche as to do that outside of professional journals), I hardly ever comment on films. I did write a piece on Bladerunner after seeing the sequel a couple years ago, and it was largely a favorable one. Bladerunner is one of those rare movies where the film surpasses the original book (in my opinion at least), and it has proven a great classic in filmdom.

Unfortunately, with the Hobbit films, it’s the opposite case, proving that books are still the best form of storytelling by far. 

I first encountered The Hobbit in the way that many people my generation (X) did: by having a trusted family member read it to me. The first reading, I recall vividly, was by my dear departed Uncle James Ellingboe, who read us the first chapter of the story in his home in Littleton Mass., right next to my own hometown of Acton. I was there along with my sister and our cousins, and I’d guess I was under ten at the time.
We gathered in the cozy confines of my uncle and aunt’s living room, warmed by the fire of a wood stove, and dug in with hot mugs of cocoa after a cold winter day of ice skating on the lake, as Uncle Jim read us the opening of this miraculous tale. I probably nodded off at some point. It was hard to follow, and there were a lot of complicated details. I recall thinking that the Hobbit was a dragon, because that was what was on the cover of the book, but I eventually realized he was just a little furry creature, some sort of rabbit-like critter that lived in a hole in the ground (not a smelly, wormy hole mind you…). Dwarves were a bit easier to relate to, since we’d all seen Snow White. Gandalf was like somebody’s Great Uncle, the old bearded man with a twinkle in his eye, who always gave you magical presents at Christmas.

Well, needless to say, we didn’t get that far in the book, but my curiosity was stoked. The next reading was by my own stepfather Andy Bodge, who is also a big Tolkein fan. He read it to me and my sister, and again I recall readings by the warmth of our own woodstove on a cold winter’s night. This time, we went through the entire journey together. Of course, he supplied voices for the characters, which added to the drama, and we could imagine them coming to life in our minds through the evocative descriptions that Tolkien supplies for his readers.

A few years later, maybe when I was 13 years old, I read through the entire Lord of the Rings saga on my own. Again, I recall turning the pages on cold winter nights, in my bedroom which was heated by a vent from the downstairs living room where the wood stove was going, or in a cabin during a skiing trip to Maine. It was tough going, and there were plenty of passages that required some skimming to get through, but the backbone of the story shone through the details, and kept me reading on.

What could lead a ten-year-old or a thirteen-year-old to identify with such a story? Well, for Tolkien fans, I think the answer is obvious. Not so obvious if you watch the films, but certainly so if you read the books. The simple answer is that you identify with the Hobbit. He is a small guy in a great big world, just like you are at that age—or girl, though I don’t recall girls being as interested in these largely male tales of adventure. He loves his creature comforts, his home, food and warmth, as do you. He also has a side of him that is up for a bit of adventure. And he gets drawn into it far more deeply than he’d ever imagined.

For humble folks like me, hailing from a small town surrounded by forests and ponds and streams, these sorts of high adventures kept me dreaming and seeking. Okay, I admit that I was also deep into Dungeons & Dragons, and that I practically memorized the Monster Manual, the Dungeon Master’s Guide, and the Player’s Handbook, and I would spend hours at home creating my own adventures, whether my friends joined them or not. Later on in high school, I took an interest in other sorts of fantasy fiction, including Frank Herbert’s epic novel Dune, and Michael Moorcock’s Elric series (along with just about anything else he wrote), and everything that Piers Anthony wrote as well, before graduating to the incredible world of Stanislaw Lem. Tolkien was my gateway to these higher adventures, and yet something always brought me back to his works.

Fast forward to my 40s, when I reread The Hobbit after having lived a life of some adventure, most of it in the Asia Pacific. I remember thinking what a literary gem this was, and looking forward to the day when I would be able to read it to my own daughters. Unfortunately, my older daughter Sarah outgrew my readings before I had the chance to spring it on her.

Fortunately, I have a second daughter Hannah, who is an avid reader of stories involving magic and potions and such. So last year, I read the Hobbit to Hannah over a period of several months, finally finishing it in Bangkok of all places. Since I was terribly ill at the time, I asked Hannah to finish reading it to me, which she dutifully did, and she never ceases to remind me of that fact. Then we were on to another great fantasy tale: The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K Leguin, which we read together in the wake of the coronavirus and our epic retreat from China to the USA. 

Moving to the USA earlier this year to evade the virus reminds me of a particular chapter in The Hobbit, which any avid Hobbit reader will instantly guess. Yes, its chapter 6, “Out of the Frying Pan.” After escaping from the goblin-infested mountain, where he meets Gollum and steals the ring, Bilbo reunites with his dwarf companions and with Gandalf the wizard, only to find themselves up a tree (literally) while surrounded by goblins and wargs. They are saved when the great eagles take pity on them and fly them to safety in their eerie. What a magnificent part of the story! You can feel yourself being swept up in the eagles’ talons and carried off, while getting a view of the entire Middle Earth in the process, until you see that Lonely Mountain off in the distance. And yet, those nasty goblins are ever in pursuit!

Okay, so after all this reminiscing, now I’m going to get back to the original point of this piece: The Hobbit movies (directed Peter Jackson, 2012-2015), and why they don’t measure up to the book. I realize that I am preaching to the choir here, as anybody who has read this far obviously shares my love for Tolkien’s tales, and would be in total agreement. Certainly there are plenty of articles out there on the internet that are deeply critical of the Hobbit movies. But I find that most of them focus more on technical issues and less on the storytelling itself. So here it is in a nutshell:

The Hobbit was given that name for a very important reason: It’s the story of Bilbo Baggins and his great adventures! It’s not the story of Gandalf, or Thorin, or god forbid Legolas and his red-headed companion (lovely as she may be), who don’t even feature in the book at all. If you read the Hobbit, you will find that almost the entire story is told from his perspective and his alone, which is what makes it such a wonderful, magical, and classic tale. It is the journey of one person, struggling to survive in a great big world full of malevolent and powerful creatures that are far bigger and nastier than he is or ever will be. And while he shows great courage, resourcefulness, and cleverness throughout the journey, he does not become a warrior. He remains true to himself throughout the tale.

The films on the other hand turn Bilbo Baggins into one of many characters and offer many different points of view. One moment you’re with Bilbo and his party, and the next you are swept up in Gandalf’s tale, or in the story of Gandalf’s wizard colleagues. Or you are following the story of the villains, the orcs, who also do not get even a mention in the book (certainly they do in the Lord of the Rings but that’s a different tale altogether). How the orcs got their own say in this story is beyond me.

And then there is the Necromancer, who is barely hinted at in the book, but gets some major scenes in the movies (spoiler: he turns out to be Sauron, the Evil One in the Lord of the Rings tales). It seems the Hobbit movies are meant mainly to connect viewers to what they saw or plan to see in the Lord of the Rings film series, not to tell a story that is complete and perfect in its own right.

Let’s not even mention the completely fabricated parts of the tale that are missing entirely from the book or else told in a very different way. Okay, let’s do so anyhow. There’s the story of how Bilbo frees the dwarves from the confines of the wood elves’ dungeons, for example. This is a fantastic part of the Hobbit’s tale, but it is turned into a Disneyland ride in the movie. Same for the escape from the goblin tunnels. As for the Battle of the Five Armies, while it does cleave to the basic story of the book, the film takes great liberties with that episode. In the book, you only learn about snatches of the battle, which Bilbo almost completely misses after being knocked on the head while wearing the ring. In the movie, he is a player in the battle that seems to go on for half the story. Well, the list goes on. 

Last week, we decided to watch the film series along with my parents and my daughter Hannah. Her attention to the film or lack thereof indicates to me some of the fatal flaws in the series. Every time the red-headed female elf got together with Kili the dwarf, Hannah fled the room—and no wonder! Could this have gotten any more schmaltzy? And when the battles were raging, Hannah simply lost interest and left altogether. There was no suspense, no horror in these scenes, as there should have been. Instead, the main characters all perform superhuman feats of derring do, which never seem to cease topping the previous ones. I mean, Legolas using a bat to fly up to the ramparts, and then stepping over falling stones on the collapsed bridge to safety on the other side? Come on! The silliness just compounds itself over time and competes with the real drama of the characters.

I will admit, it was still fun to watch the series, even if it bungles the book beyond recognition at times. One can hardly find fault in the actors, who are superb of course. It’s just that the storytelling gets lost in the endless chain of action scenes. 

Some have tried “salvaging” the film series by cutting and pasting it into a four-hour “complete” film. I have yet to watch that movie, and I don’t intend to do so any time soon. In my opinion, the best part of the Hobbit series is the first fifteen minutes of the first film, when the dwarves gather in Bilbo’s hobbit-hole for dinner and break into song while not breaking his dishes. After that, it just goes downhill from there.

I sincerely hope that this doesn’t mean the end of making Hobbit movies. I’d like to see someone make a complete film of the Hobbit story, focusing as it should be on the story of Bilbo Baggins, told from his perspective. I really think it can be done without sacrificing the fine details that go into this story. Well, okay, maybe a TV series instead?

Count Your Blessings: Some More Thoughts While Coping with the Crisis

As the world continues to embroil itself further and deeper in this pandemic, disrupting the global economy and changing our ways of life, perhaps for a long time to come, it is important to step back and reflect on some of the positive influences that this crisis has brought to our daily lives. This is not to make light of the pain and suffering that it has brought upon humanity and will continue to bring us for the foreseeable future. Yet, for many of us, who have been fortunate enough to avoid the immediate devastation of this global health crisis, we may find some succor as we count our blessings. Here are some positive outcomes for me so far:

First, this ongoing crisis has brought me closer to own immediate family. 

I’ll admit this is a double-edged sword, since I’m separated from my wife, who remains in China, while I remain here in the USA with my two daughters. But first and foremost, the past two months have enabled me to spend more time with my daughters than I have in years. This is particular to my work situation, since I live and work in a different city (Kunshan, China), to where my family lives (Shanghai). For the past five years, I’ve been a “weekend dad”, spending time with my family in Shanghai on weekends while working in Kunshan on weekdays. 

Yet for the past two months, I’ve been more of a 24/7 dad, taking care of my daughters’ needs through several periods of quarantine, overseeing their online learning, making sure they are well fed, doing their laundry, and making sure they keep to a regular schedule, which for two teenage/tweenage daughters is not so easy. I’ve also been able to talk with them more and share my concerns with them, while also learning more about them and their interests, as they continue to grow and learn through these difficult times.

Second, I’ve been able to spend quality time with my family here in the USA.

Again, this is somewhat particular to my life situation, having spent much of my adult life living abroad. After our 14-day self-quarantine in February, we spent a few days with my aunt and uncle in Berkeley, California, and for the past month I’ve been living with my mother and stepfather in my hometown of Acton, Massachusetts. Now it appears that we will be together for some time to come. While I was hoping to return to China with my daughters, that opportunity has disappeared for now, since on March 28, owing to the growing global pandemic and fears of a second wave in China, China closes its doors to non-Chinese nationals. This has been disappointing for us, but on the other hand, I’m glad to be here in my home country and hometown, helping my own parents to cope with the situation. 

Third, I’ve been able to spend more time with nature.

Surrounding our home in Acton and in neighboring towns such as Concord, there are large forested areas, conservation lands with trails and pathways, which enable us to practice physical distancing with others while also enjoying the great outdoors. Even in our own neighborhood we can enjoy daily walks along the streets, while watching the spring unfold. We can hear the birdcalls and watch the trees unfurl their leaves, fruits, and flowers. And we can wave to friendly neighbors, all of whom are out there exercising and enjoying the early spring weather, while practicing physical distancing.

While Shanghai and Kunshan have their own share of parks and gardens, I haven’t spent this much time in a natural environment in years. Acton has a beautiful combination of being a small colonial town and having plenty of rural and forested areas, plus countless ponds and streams. This brings me back to my idyllic childhood years, when my friends and I used to roam and ramble around the town, camping out on starlit nights, fishing in the local streams and ponds, or cycling our way around the different towns of Eastern Massachusetts. Since then, I’ve spent most of my adult life living in large cities, from New York, to Sydney, Taipei, Beijing, Shanghai, and Seoul. I’ve spent most of those years cramped in dense urban apartments, taking public transportation or driving my car in dense traffic for hours each week. It’s nice to be back for a spell in my old hometown and to reconnect with the natural world in a deeper way. Walking is now my main mode of transport, and in this way, my new year’s resolution of 2020 was unexpectedly fulfilled.

Fourth, I’m connecting with old friends again after all these years.

In a crisis such as this one, you really get to learn who your deepest friends are, because you connect and talk to and ask about each other. In our “normal” stream of life, we spend a lot of time with our colleagues, and in my case, with students and other transient people in our lives. No matter how dear they may seem at the moment, these folks come and go in our lives. But when our futures are called into question, we tend to reach out to the most cherished people in our lives, some of whom we may have neglected over the years. And all the technology that’s helping us to continue to work and teach is also helping us to connect back to old friends and rekindle friendships that lay dormant for many years.

While I certainly wouldn’t have wanted things to happen this way, I need to appreciate some of the good things that living in an age of crisis has brought to me, and probably to countless other people around the globe.

The Chinese have a saying, “The old man lost his horse—maybe it’s a good thing” 塞翁失马焉知非福, and with so many other sayings that have come down to us over the ages, this one is full of wisdom and hope.

Battling the Coronavirus Blues

In my previous post, I wrote a short piece with some recommendations for people who are suffering from Coronoia, or a general fear and heightened anxiety surrounding this pandemic. I hope these tips are useful to some folks out there who are struggling with the new normal that the virus scare has brought upon us, which includes social distancing, physical isolation, lack of public entertainment (at least live—we can always watch TV and the internet), and the seeming collapse of our economy and our civilization.

I’m hoping that our fears are exaggerated and that we will get a handle on this virus by taking all the necessary precautions. In the meantime, I’m just trying to cope on a day-by-day basis whilst sheltering along with my two daughters in the spacious home of my parents in Acton Mass. 

One way that I cope with stress is through music. As the saying goes, music soothes the soul. In addition to listening to music, I also like to practice and play music, particularly on guitar and piano. And on occasion, I like to write songs, so I came up with this song to express some feelings I have regarding this virus and its global spread. I’m not trying to make light of the situation, but I do think that music, and the blues in particular, is a great way to express some of the darker feelings we all have regarding our current situation.

I’m dedicating this song to all those who have been displaced by this virus, and especially to my musician friends in China. Here’s what I wrote on my Facebook feed:

Here's a blues piano version of my new song "Coronavirus Blues", which is loosely based on a Count Basie version of "Going to Chicago" (musically, not necessarily lyrically). I hope this song resonates and strikes a chord with all those who have been displaced from our adopted country of China by this pandemic, and for everyone in general whose lives have been upturned by the virus (which means everybody on this Earth). I dedicate this song in particular to all the musicians out there who have been out of work or forced to move their work online. Tony C. Hall, Greg Luttrell, Gregory Smith, Coco Zhao, Alec Haavik, Matthew Cooper, Matt Harding, Willow R. Neilson, Tom Peng, Peng Fei, John A Crespi, Jorland Paulino, JQ Whitcomb, Lawrence Ku, Jasmine Chen, Graham Earnshaw, Matt Roberts, Eddy Goltz, Brian Offenther, Josh Feola, and all my other musical friends from Shanghai, Beijing, and Beantown, this one's for you!

Not coincidentally, most of the names I’ve listed here are musicians who are featured in my documentary on jazz and blues in Shanghai. I’m hoping I will get a chance to work on producing the next cut of that film and screen it when things get better, which they will eventually.

Here are the lyrics to the song, which conforms to the pattern of a typical 12-bar blues song:

Coronavirus Blues

I got a bad case of the coronavirus blues,

I got a bad case of the coronavirus blues,

And you would have it too if you were in my shoes.

I left my home in China and came to the USA,

but the coronavirus followed me each and every way. 

I got a bad case of the coronavirus blues, 

I got a bad case of the coronavirus blues,

And you would have it too if you were in my shoes.

I tried out social distancing and stayed inside my home, 

but that nasty old corona goes wherever I do roam.

I got a bad case of the coronavirus blues, 

I got a bad case of the coronavirus blues,

And you would have it too if you were in my shoes.

Please Don’t Succumb to Coronoia: How to Avoid the Viral Madness

Today I’m writing a short post in order to share some thoughts based on this past week. Now that I’m living in the USA for a spell, things are picking up here, as governments (local, state, federal), businesses, schools, and other institutions are finally awakening to the potential health crisis.

Everyone who reads or watches the news ought to be familiar with the mantra of washing hands, social distancing, etc., so no need to harp on that. Here are some additional suggestions for those among us who are going through the condition of “Coronoia,” a full-blown overreaction to the news of the outbreak here in the USA.

This is not to make light of this health crisis, as you’ve seen from previous blogs I’ve written lately. Still, we do need to pull ourselves together if we’re gonna get through this. Some of these suggestions are based on my own personal experiences over the past few weeks as I left China with my daughters during the peak of the viral madness and came back to my home country, the USA.

1)    Get some sleep. Cannot overemphasize the importance of good sleep. For those whose anxiety levels are now seriously heightened, it’s easy to spend your wee hours tossing and turning and fretting and worrying. If this is happening, try to prevent it from doing so, since this just creates a vicious cycle of exhaustion and fear, and makes you even more susceptible to illness. Best to leave off reading news reports in the late evening hours. Better to grab a good book or watch a show or have a conversation with a loved one—call up your long lost friends and relatives, especially the older ones who are more vulnerable in this health crisis. If you need something else to help you nod off, take some medication; I use melatonin and it works like a charm. Get your 8 hours of sleep in on a regular basis, especially now that you can afford to do so, since you ain’t goin’ nowhere for a while. (This applies to those who, like me are now working from home during regular hours of course).

2)    Take long walks outdoors. Nature has a calming influence, and if you have access to woods, parklands, seashores, and other relatively uncrowded places, make the most of them. Sunshine especially helps, but even cold, cloudy or rainy weather is no excuse for not getting outside and raising your heart rate for a while. This doesn’t necessarily substitute for strong aerobic exercise, which you should also try to get on a regular basis. Go out with a loved one, an old friend whom you trust, or just by yourself, and have a long walk and a good conversation (with yourself if not with others). This will also help you to achieve (1) above.

Do you really need enough pasta to feed an army of 50? Our local supermarket last Friday evening.

3)    Please resist hoarding. Over the past few days, I’ve personally witnessed our local supermarkets getting stripped of things such as toilet paper and other paper products, as well as pasta, canned goods, bread, and other items. Our local CVS is out of hand sanitizer and a worker there told me that people were lining up nearly two hours before it opened at 8 am on Thursday to get their hands on the latest supply. Hand sanitizer doesn’t hurt, but soap and warm water are much more effective, or so I’ve read consistently in health reports. My guess is that once the current frenzy abates, these items (sans the sanitizer) will still be in abundant supply. So no need to fill your shopping cart with ten bales of TP or twenty boxes of spaghetti unless you are hosting an army of 50 people over the next month. Consider all the others who need things too. Their safety is your safety.

4)    If you have children, put them on a schedule now. Don’t wait for them to adjust to the new regime. No matter how disciplined or well-behaved they may be, kids will have trouble adjusting to a home-schooling routine, so best to establish some basic guidelines and routines at the very beginning. For me, the difficulty of doing so has been compounded by our traveling through different time zones and moving to different locations over the past month. Now that we’re settled in my folks’ home in Acton Mass., I’m hoping to get my daughters on a regular rhythm. Work out a schedule with them and award them for sticking with it. This includes wakeup time, showers, meals, schoolwork time, play time, and exercise. (Will let you know how this goes for me, as I’m still working on it myself).

5)    Limit your time with news and social media. The outbreak is a huge bonanza for news services, who have focused almost all of their attention on this global story. To be sure, there’s good reason now to pay attention to what’s going on in the world, but the world goes on nonetheless. Don’t go down endless rabbit-holes of news reports and social media posts about coronavirus, as everyone seems to be doing now. Things will get worse before they get better, that’s for sure. But as long as you are doing your part, whether through your work (in my case, online teaching and writing), social distancing yourself and your loved ones, helping your children with their home-schooling, helping friends and relatives to cope, and so on, there’s no need to keep abreast every moment with all the bad news out there. Better to set limits to when, where, and how you access news. Lately, I’ve been turning more to local news reports, such as our Town of Acton webpage, and to regional news. To be sure, I’m just as bad as others out there, peeking at the New York Times and Facebook in the wee hours of the night over the past week, but now I’m trying to change my habits as we accept the circumstances.

I sincerely hope that these points are helpful to those who are suffering from a serious case of Coronoia right now. Stay safe, protect yourself and your families, and try to remain positive in these hard times!

How to Move Teaching and Learning Online—FAST!!! Teaching A Course Remotely to Students at Duke Kunshan University

I am writing this piece to share my own experiences with transforming my own course for remote delivery, and also to report on how the course delivery has gone so far. I do not speak for other professors at DKU, who have had a range of experiences based on their course subjects and other factors. At least one other professor of history at DKU has also written an excellent piece on his experiences with remote teaching and learning, and I highly recommend this piece to readers as well.

Those who follow my blogsite know that I am currently serving as a professor and administrator at Duke Kunshan University or DKU, which is located in Kunshan, China not far from Shanghai. I have been working there for nearly five years now and have been part of its growth from a study away site for undergraduate students from China, Duke University, and elsewhere, into a full-fledged undergraduate degree program offering a range of majors (DKU has also operated Master’s degree programs in different subjects for several years now). Currently our first class of undergraduate students are in their sophomore year, and I am teaching both freshmen and sophomores, or first-year and second-year students in the more politically correct parlance. 

In late January, the Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak in China led all universities and schools to close and/or contain their campuses quickly so as to prevent the spread of the virus. DKU and its American partner Duke University made a quick decision to move all of our courses online.

At DKU, we work in two 7-week sessions. We were in the midst of the first session of the spring semester when the Spring Festival holiday in China took place, and most students went back to their hometowns in China. Many others, students and faculty and staff, were traveling abroad. Most students did not and were not encouraged to return to campus, and non-Chinese students were encouraged to leave China and return to their home countries. Only a small portion of students in our undergraduate program remained on campus (50 or so). The rest of the students were scattered around China and across the globe. 

Since we were in the middle of the session when the clampdown began, we had to revise our courses in midstream in order to teach them remotely. To complicate matters further, many of our professors and administrators, including me, left China during this period and eventually settled in our home countries, which are now undergoing the same process as schools and universities move to remote course delivery in order to mitigate the spread of the virus.

My course “HIST117: Sounds and the Chinese City: Live Music Scenes in Urban China” finishes next week, so I may later provide an update to this piece, but since so many people have asked me about teaching and learning online, I thought it best to share these experiences right now, since so many schools and universities in the USA and other parts of the world are now going through the same transformations.

First, it helped greatly that we had abundant support from our leaders at DKU and from the leadership at Duke University. We also had great tech support, and so they were able to set up Zoom, one of the leading platforms for holding meetings online, in record time. They also had to gain a license for Zoom in China. 

All this was done with impressive speed and agility. One of the most impressive things was how they integrated Zoom into our Sakai platform, which we normally use for course delivery. Sakai enables us to upload any documents, videos and other course materials for students to download, and we can also send announcements to students and collect, grade, and track their assignments and even calculate their final grades. I’ve been using Sakai ever since I first started teaching at DKU in 2015, and I have always used it for these purposes and others. So it was very helpful that I could now use our Sakai course platform to arrange Zoom meetings for my students as well.

With Zoom in place, here is what I did to move my course online quickly (we had around three weeks to do so):

First, I decided to adhere to the principal of keeping it as simple as possible.

I did not make any great changes to my course plan or to the assignments. I did have to change one or two assignments, which I will discuss below. But mostly, I stuck to the original course plan and schedule of readings and assignments, and I just adjusted it for the three-week delay in restarting the course.

Second, I decided to use Zoom to teach classes in real time.

This was challenging in a few ways. First, because we were now in many different time zones, some of us had to teach or learn in awkward hours. When I first arrived in the USA in February, I stayed in California for three weeks (see my previous blog post on the quarantine experience). The DKU leaders had decided to set up the new teaching schedule to align with China time and Eastern Standard Time in the USA. This made sense, since many of our professors and administrators were either at Duke University at the time, or elsewhere on the East Coast. They set up two one-hour time slots for my course, which normally meets two days per week for an hour and fifteen minutes each time (it’s a two-credit course, whereas a full course at DKU is four credits). My time slots were Monday morning 8-9 am and Wednesday 8-9 pm China time. This meant that on Wednesday I had to teach the class from 4-5 am. Also, one of our students was in central Asia and also had to wake up at 4 am for classes. But for most of the students, the times were reasonable. And when I finally flew to Boston, the same was true for me.

Third, I had to adjust some of the assignments, but I did my best to adhere to the spirit of the original assignments.

This was challenging because my course, “Sounds in the Chinese City” focuses on live music scenes in China, both historically and at present. For their final group assignment, the students were originally supposed to visit a live music scene, document that scene while interacting with people, and produce an in-class presentation as well as a public presentation on the DKU campus. Obviously, this couldn’t happen, so I had to change the final assignment. I instead asked them to conduct an interview with a person who plays an important role in China’s live music scenes, produce a transcript of the interview as well as a summary, and then give a presentation over Zoom to the rest of the class.

Once I had revised the syllabus, I shared it with students via our Sakai site. Meanwhile, I created a Wechat group using China’s social media platform, so that I could also keep students informed of what was going on. I used both the Wechat group and Sakai to make announcements to students and used Wechat to hold informal discussions and answer students’ questions. I also used Wechat with the smaller groups of 3-4 students to faciliate their group projects, and I connected each team to a person they could interview from the live music scenes in China via Wechat. Some students used Wechat for their interviews with that person, while others chose to use Zoom.

As for the Zoom meetings, they have gone as well as they can. Attendance is high, but not perfect. It helps that my class is small, only twelve students, so it’s easier for me to have a rapport with each student and keep their attention focused on the course. For each class, I run them basically the same as a live class. I have a PPT and I show them the slides as I go through the lecture, pausing now and then to ask questions or let them ask questions. Some slides are question slides, and as they answer questions based on the readings for that class, I keep notes on the PPT slide. To be sure, online meetings can be awkward. The participation rate isn’t always as high as it could be or what it might be in a regular classroom, but that’s to be expected. The important thing is that I can still get real-time feedback, and the students can also share ideas with each other. I haven’t felt the need to use the breakout function on Zoom, but other colleagues have done so and apparently it works well.

After each class meeting, we all get a link to the recording of the class, which we can then download and watch on our own time. This is helpful for students who for one reason or other cannot make the class time. The recording function was set up by the IT staff, so it automatically happens, which is huge, since I wouldn’t want to fiddle with this function as a professor. After each class is over, I go through the entire recording of the class in order to review it and make sure that everything went smoothly.

Speaking of that, it is important when using Zoom to check in with the students and make sure they are seeing and hearing what they need to see and hear. I’ve heard that some profs have ignored this (not at DKU but at Stanford of all places) and only found out later that their mics were muted or that the students didn’t see the PPT they were supposed to be presenting. Zoom has a “share screen” function, and you need to be careful with it, because it will only share what you ask it to share. If you move to another program or presentation, such as going from PPT to Youtube, and you don’t share the screen with them, they won’t see or hear it. I figured out all of this early on by holding a test class with my students before starting the real classes. I highly recommend this to all teachers who are new to Zoom technology.

Another important note: Every time I start a class, the first thing I do is to ask students if they can hear me. Then I tell them to mute their mics when they are not speaking, so that any extra noise is minimized. Every time I share a screen with them, whether a PPT, a website, or a video, I ask them to let me know if they can see and hear it. For these purposes, the “thumbs up” function is helpful as is the “raise hand” function. Students can press those buttons to indicate yes, so that they don’t have to keep switching their mics on and off. In reviewing all of my classes, there was only one occasion where I thought they were seeing a PDF file of one of the readings, when in fact they were seeing another reading. This is because I didn’t switch the screen from one PDF to another. Otherwise it’s all gone smoothly.

I have even shared video clips through Zoom with the students, showing them in real time. However, I do not recommend this, because the sound quality is not good. It is far better to upload the video for them to see on their own, or to send them a link to it if it is already on Youtube or another video-sharing site. For my course, it helps that I made several videos and also produced some documentary films on live music scenes in China over the years, so I was able to share those videos with my students. I did not do this through Zoom, but by either sending them the video file or sending them the link to my videos on Youtube.

For sending large files, I use Wetransfer, which is free as long as the video is under 2G. For large videos such as my doc films, I compressed them using Compressor (I am a Mac user and I use Final Cut Pro and Compressor to make videos), and then sent the file to the students. Nobody had trouble downloading and viewing them as far as I understand.

In sum, I have found that using Zoom, Sakai, Wechat, Wetransfer, Youtube, and other websites has been sufficient to teach my course. Obviously, this is a far cry from the real classroom environment and face-to-face meetings with students, but it has worked for us in order to move the course forward and keep students across China and the world engaged with the course materials. I’ve also promised them that as soon as we are able to do so, I will take them on a field trip to experience a real live music scene in China. 

That’s all for now. Once the final group projects are completed and the course finishes next week, I may write an update to this piece.

Take Heart! The Jazz Orchestra Known as the USA Will Prevail Against the Coronavirus

The 7th War Loan drive in 1945. Duke Ellington, America’s great jazz bandleader, helped to promote this drive through radio concerts. So did my own grandfather Stanley Field, who served as a producer for Armed Forces Radio in WWII. http://behindthescenes.nyhistory.org/duke-ellington-wants-you-to-buy-war-bonds/

Hitting the Road in the Wake of the Viral Outbreak

Readers of my blog have been following my rather harried accounts of being caught up in the coronavirus scare for over a month now. To make a long story short, our family was on the way from Shanghai to Singapore for a holiday when news first broke out of the seriousness of this illness. This was during the Spring Festival in China in late January. After spending a few days holidaying in Singapore, my wife and her mom returned to China, and I was weighing the option of staying with my daughters in Singapore for a couple more weeks to see how things went, when news broke out of the closing of flights to China, and so we caught the next flight back to Shanghai. The race to meet the challenge of the virus was on, and it was moving in double time!

We spent a week back in Shanghai settling into the new regime of self-quarantining in and around our apartment—not for fear of having caught the virus, but as a necessary precaution that all people were taking. Shops and restaurants mostly shut down and we scrambled to stock up on our food supply, although there didn’t seem to be any big issues around getting enough food from the local supermarkets and shops, which were still open. 

After a week in Shanghai, my wife and I decided it best for me to take our two daughters back to the USA for a spell. This wasn’t so much to avoid the virus—the Chinese were doing a good job already of managing that—but rather to take advantage of the opportunity to see our families here in the USA, while getting some fresh air and sunshine (Shanghai winters are notoriously cloudy, rainy and clammy). Since our schools were all closed and learning had already begun to move online, there was little reason at the time to remain in Shanghai.

Upon arriving in the USA, we settled in the Bay Area for the recommended 14-day self-quarantine period. There, we followed the basic instructions of the CDC, which kept a friendly eye on us through multiple phone calls. After emerging from our two-week isolation period without any signs of illness, we spent a few glorious days with my aunt and uncle in the Berkeley Hills. 

Then we flew across the country to Massachusetts, where I grew up, and settled in my hometown of Acton with my parents, who still live here after all these years. Since we come to Acton every summer and sometimes during winter holidays, this is like a home for us, and the girls are quite comfortable and familiar with my folks and with our home town. Of course it is a very different lifestyle to what they are normally used to in Shanghai, which goes without saying.

Anxiety Brewing: Coming to Terms with the Viral Outbreak

We have now been here in Acton Mass. for almost two weeks. When we first arrived, I had hopes that I would be able to visit some friends, and I did see a friend and a colleague over the past few days. Now, as the anxiety mounts over the ominous news of the spread of the virus here in the USA and elsewhere around the world, I am hunkering down and planning to stay in or around our home and only go out when necessary. It’s starting to feel like Shanghai all over again, but here we have a large home and plenty of places to walk around and enjoy nature without being surrounded by other people.

It is sad that I won’t be able to take more advantage of being here in the Boston area for an extended spell. I’d like to see more old acquaintances, but after all the experiences I’ve had thus far, I feel that laying low right now is our best option. I have two elderly parents here in Acton, who are in relatively good shape, but still vulnerable. (Now they are coming around to the seriousness of this illness just as everyone else is doing here, but it is hard to break all the patterns and habits that build up over the years and launch into a new regime.) Also, my own immune system is not in ideal shape, ever since I had a skiing accident in high school that ended up in the loss of my spleen. So for me, there is no reason to take any unnecessary risks or put others in harm’s way. 

I hope others here in the USA and around the world are also coming to this realization, that we will have to make some necessary sacrifices over the next few weeks and months in order to save lives. All the evidence is abundantly clear, or else it should be to those who read the news, and I shan’t belabor this point any longer.

Now, given the current situation and the likelihood of this viral outbreak becoming far worse before it gets better, did we make the right decision to leave China and come to the USA? While I am living in a heightened state of anxiety, I still believe the answer is yes. I have had the opportunity to spend time with my cherished relatives, who are now at a vulnerable age, and I have had many conversations with them about the virus, encouraging them to raise their levels of caution as it rises in the USA. I hope we will all fare well, but you never know. My father and step-mother who live in Virginia and my sister and her family are also becoming far more conscious of the seriousness of this outbreak, as all Americans have done in the past few days. I hope we will have a chance to see them too, although for now we are staying put in Acton.

We Shall Prevail

In terms of America’s future, although it will be an uphill battle for some time to come, I am confident that we will prevail over this illness. Rather than looking back at mistakes we made or blaming our leaders for their errors (which is certainly understandable), now is the time to think positive and focus on solutions, and Americans are doing just that. To be sure, there will be some chaotic times ahead as the federal government struggles to get on top of the situation and as states and local governments and health care systems mobilize to face the emergency, and as the economy takes a nose-dive, but we shall prevail.

Already there have been some good signs. Universities were among the first organizations to take action, moving classes online and asking students not to return to campus after spring break. Now other schools are following suit. After dilly-dallying for a long time, the federal government is starting to take actions that may help mitigate the huge crisis—whether and how effective these prove to be we shall see. State governments are also waking up and declaring states of emergency. Pretty soon, local businesses will shut down and companies will be asking their employees to work from home. People are getting nervous and local supplies of toilet paper and hand sanitizer are moving off the shelves faster than they can be replaced.

While I urge people not to panic, this is all good and it is just what should be happening. Ideally this should already have happened weeks ago, but it takes time for large organizations to react to such emergencies, and our top leadership hasn’t been pushing them to do so until now. It’s always easy with hindsight to say that we should have been far better prepared to face this emergency. 

As a historian, I like to make comparisons with earlier times, and the one that comes to mind right now is Pearl Harbor. This event found the USA woefully unprepared for a state of war. Nevertheless, within days, the country was mobilizing on a scale never seen before in world history, and ultimately, we prevailed.

My grandfather Stanley Field, who served in Armed Forces Radio as a writer and producer, bringing entertainment to troops across the world in WWII. Grandpa Stan was from an immigrant Jewish family that fled Russia in WWI to make their home in the USA.

My two grandfathers, Stanley Field and Ellsworth Ellingboe, were too old to enlist as soldiers, but still they contributed in their own important ways to the war effort (those are stories for other times). So did my step-grandfather Alan Bodge, who served as a US Army technical engineer in the Signal Corps working with radar, one of the new technologies that helped us win the war. So did the American women, as my Aunt Connie, producer of the film Rosie the Riveter, the story of how American women helped build the ships for the US Navy, knows well. Everyone with a family history in the USA going back to the early twentieth century has been told stories of the heroic achievements of that generation, and the trials and tribulations of those times—not just for the USA, but for the entire world—that make this current crisis look like a stroll in the park by comparison.

Granted, our leadership back then was different to today. FDR was one of the great leaders of the 20th century, but even he was leading the American people in a state of denial and isolationism prior to the events of Pearl Harbor. Hindsight is always 20/20.

Time to Jazz It Up, Americans!

When I think of China’s reaction to this viral outbreak and compare them with America’s, the analogy that comes to mind is classical music versus jazz. While China’s initial reactions to the viral outbreak are certainly worthy of harsh criticism, like a classical musician who plays an elegantly composed piece without any sense of rhythm or melody, the government eventually mobilized the entire nation in both a top-down and bottom-up pattern.

Like a classical orchestra, the central government eventually controlled the effort and orchestrated the entire nation to mobilize against the outbreak. People did so quite willingly, as I experienced firsthand while still in China, making huge sacrifices in the process. People basically followed the lead of the government and trusted in the mandates that were being issued. The result was a brilliant and beautiful if somewhat terrifying orchestration of how to avoid a virus by minimizing social contact, mobilizing vast resources to build hospitals and staff them, following closely cases of infected people, alerting the society to the dangers, and recommending important behaviors to slow or stop the spread of the virus. Had the people of China not taken these desperate actions, who knows how devastating the virus would have been for such a massive country and for the world. Meanwhile, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea also led strong mobilization efforts, though in different ways, making use of their own strengths and resource capabilities to do so. These actions also helped slow down the spread of the virus, so that other countries could take action as well.

Until now, America’s delayed reactions to this mounting pandemic have been more like a dysfunctional jazz band—perhaps with a heavy dose of heroin or pot thrown into the mix. There’s been a lot of noise, and very little in way of signal.

Even though there’s usually a bandleader helping to shape the overall music of the band, in a jazz band, a lot of the action and initiative comes from the band members themselves. Yet if the leadership and the vision isn’t there, the end result can be disastrous.

America’s great jazz bandleader Duke Ellington in 1945, who pitched in for the war effort, and later became one of our greatest cultural ambassadors to the world. https://cdn.loc.gov/service/pnp/fsa/8d13000/8d13200/8d13230r.jpg

Duke Ellington is a classic example of this. We think of Duke Ellington as a great American composer, but his greatest skill was bringing together excellent musicians and letting them run with their ideas, while admittedly taking credit for most of them. Still, without the Duke, those musicians would not have had such great opportunities to bring their talents together to create something magical through the art of collaboration.

In a jazz band, the members take turns riffing with each other, experimenting, and moving the piece forward in new and unexpected directions. They sometimes make mistakes too, some of which turn out to be ingenious inventions that push the envelope of music. Eventually these “mistakes” become part of the jazz repertoire.

In the case of the USA, like a free-wheeling jazz band, US universities such as University of Washington and Stanford University reacted early on with little direction from above. Other universities soon began to mobilize to move their education online. Unlike in China, where the press is strictly controlled and normally follows the lead of the central government and the Communist Party, America’s press is abuzz with all sorts of opinions, critiques, and ideas. Wechat, China’s all-encompassing social media platform, may be somewhat more similar to jazz than the public media, but it’s still heavily controlled and censored by the government. Facebook, as we all know by now, is only subject to the whims of its participants, who throw up all sorts of stuff, good or bad, into the mix. While this ain’t always good, I much prefer the Facebook model of free and open discourse.

For the past few weeks, as a refugee from China, I felt like the Vox clamantis in deserto—the voice crying out in a wilderness of apathy. My daily Facebook feed is now overflowing with news, info, and ideas about the viral outbreak and how to stanch its flow. Organizations and companies all over the USA are now taking actions and initiatives to stem the flood tide of this viral outbreak. There will be much trial and error, and many false starts and stops as the illness progresses, but out of this seeming chaos will come solutions that will inevitably make their way across the country at rapid speed owing to our open society and our willingness to communicate ideas. 

Right now, America is like a jazz orchestra that’s been given a completely new music score to work with and no time to rehearse for the big show. Comparisons to previous outbreaks notwithstanding, the magnitude and severity of this illness is unprecedented, or else hasn’t been seen since 1918 (the inevitable comparison is with the flu that broke globally out at the end of WWI, killing millions in its wake).

There will be plenty of cacophony in the near future, to be sure, but I am confident that our great experiment, the Jazz Orchestra of the United States, will eventually find its rhythm and will come up with new and innovative ways to fight this virus and help mitigate its spread in our country and around the world. But this will happen only if we all do our part to contribute to the anti-viral war effort. And we need to join in the chorus with others around the world, viewing it as a global problem with global solutions, and not a war against a “foreign disease.”

Whatever happens, the world we live in after 2020 will be quite different to the one we exited in 2019.

To Blame or Not to Blame? That is the Question: Wet Markets, Wild Creatures, Whistleblowers, and Other Polemics Against China in the Age of Coronavirus

Right now, the entire world is watching the unfolding of this dramatic global outbreak of Coronavirus aka COVID-19 with great trepidation and fascination as we ponder the impact and significance of the Coronavirus for China and the rest of the world. As a historian of China and of Shanghai in particular, as well as a long-term China resident (one might even use the word “immigrant” though I prefer “settler”) my own reaction to commentaries about the rise of the virus, its causes and consequences, and the extreme steps taken by the government and people of China to counter its spread has been one of caution. When discussions arise on Facebook, LinkedIn, or other social media, where like so many others I am reading an endless parade of news articles and commentaries that friends and colleagues post daily, I often invoke the Chinese phrase yan zhi guo zao 言之过早 “it’s too early to tell.”

Playing the Blame Game: Chinese Government and People’s Responses to the Initial Outbreak in China

Some of these articles and commentaries focus on China’s slow initial reactions to the viral outbreak and the presumably intentional suppression of news of the outbreak by the government of Wuhan and implicitly the central government in Beijing, as the case of poor Dr. Li suggests. These are of course disturbing reports and they must be taken seriously. On the other hand, how much do we really know at this point about internal discussions and motivations of China’s local, regional, and national government, which are normally quite opaque to begin with? We must assume that the desire to prevent widespread unnecessary panic must have been at least a partial motivation. 

As for the question of local and regional officials underreporting or falsely reporting to the national center, this is an age-old problem in China and elsewhere, and especially in top-down hierarchical structures of governance and authority. Such a historical perspective does not reconcile the issue, but I do think we need to be more cautious about pinning the blame for the outbreak on Chinese officials at this point, or claiming this to be a “China problem” or an issue of a “totalitarian regime” (which China is not, in my own humble opinion.) Hopefully in future as more data comes forth we can provide more sophisticated and nuanced analyses of what transpired in the early phases of this outbreak.

Other news reports and commentaries focus on China’s decision—both a top-down and bottom-up decision as I understand it and as I lived it while still in China last month—to quarantine people, cities, and communities, in order to prevent the spread of the virus throughout Chinese society, and also abroad one assumes, although that may not be the primary intention. Again, I believe we must wait and see to assess how well these have functioned to mitigate the impact of the virus. It is still too early to tell, and we don’t know yet what the inevitable relaxation of these controls will mean for a country that is now so deeply connected now to the rest of the world. These are issues that historians, social scientists, and health experts will be mulling over and arguing about for years to come.

In my previous blog post, which offers some suggestions to Americans and others around the world about what to do and what not to do in the face of the global pandemic, I wrote “Don’t blame China.” My point is not that China is blameless. Rather, the opinion I am offering here is that pointing the finger right now doesn’t really help us to determine the causes and consequences of this event nor to manage this unfolding crisis in an effective way. There will be plenty of time in the future, when we have a much more comprehensive, nuanced and well-rounded perspective on the current crisis, to point fingers and assess blame, as well as judging the consequences and effectiveness of various policies and campaigns to prevent the rapid spread of the virus.

Is China All Wet? Transformations of Wet Markets in Urban China Since the 1990s

To be sure, China must indeed take responsibility for some factors that contributed to the rise and spread of this virus. If one accepts the most obvious and reasonable proposition that the virus was caused by the close proximity of a variety of animals in a local wet market in Wuhan, then the Chinese government should indeed take responsibility for this situation and take serious measures to control these wet markets and prevent the sale of wild animals in particular. Even domestic animals such as pigs and chickens lead to outbreaks when sanitary conditions surrounding such markets are not carefully controlled as has been demonstrated repeatedly in the past. On the other hand, is it really possible to do so in such a vast country and one that depends so much on these markets, whose traditions go back centuries if not millennia, to feed a population of 1.4 billion people?

I have lived in China, mostly in Shanghai, and more recently in the nearby city of Kunshan, for at least fifteen of the past 25 years. When the subject of wet markets comes up, as a historian and long-term resident of China (I first visited in 1988 and started living there in 1996), I can vouch firsthand that these markets have indeed been subject to increasing local controls over the past few decades.

When I first travelled in China as a college student in the late 1980s, every town and city I visited had ample wet markets, where fish, poultry, and other farm animals were sharing space with other animals, some of which seemed more destined for zoos than dinner tables. I recall in particular visiting a wet market in Guangzhou and seeing all sorts of wild creatures from owls to furry mammals that belonged in forests and other natural environments, and not in dirty cages.

In Shanghai, while such exotic creatures were far more rare, wet markets of all sorts nevertheless abounded in the city in the 1990s when I first lived there. Nearly every neighborhood in the city had a street that was dedicated to a local wet market selling live fresh seafood as well as other live animals such as chickens—not pigs, sheep, or cows though—they are slaughtered elsewhere and their meat, flesh and bones are brought to the market and sold there. 

These live wet markets were naturally quite messy, with plenty of water sloshing out of buckets containing the live aquatic creatures and from hoses splashing on the streets, and remnants of produce, cut-up animals, guts and such covering the streets, and they were frequented by a constant parade of buyers and sellers (is it any wonder that Shanghainese people take off their shoes when they arrive home?). How ironic then that during those times, we did not witness any major breakouts of deadly viruses, at least not that I can recall.

Around 1999, perhaps as part of the buildup to the Global Economic Forum that Shanghai held in 2001, Shanghai began to systematically shut down these outdoor street wet markets, clearing up the streets for other forms of commerce. At the same time, they built warehouse spaces to host these wet markets. By the 2000s, nearly every neighborhood in the city had a semi-open wet market housed in a corrugated-roofed open warehouse, and that is pretty much how things continued until this year. This transformation of wet markets from streets to warehouses both eased the traffic flows of an already congested city at a time when more and more cars were flooding the roads, and also helped to create more sanitary and manageable conditions for the wet markets. 

To be sure, these semi-indoor wet markets were still rather unsanitary by some standards, but they were far more sanitary than the outdoor street markets, and better controlled overall. This I understand is the kind of wet market that is the reputed source of the virus in Wuhan. So it is funny that these are the sorts of markets that ultimately led to this breakout, and perhaps others as well.

Perhaps the street markets were not so unsanitary as one assumed? And perhaps the warehousing of these markets actually created the conditions for far more deadly viruses to arise and transfer to human beings. The warehouses forced everyone into even closer proximity, they were not aired in the way outdoor street markets were, and they also provided spaces for sellers to hide creatures that may not be sold legally on the open street markets. This is just a speculation, but it bears out with the Wuhan case.

Ch-ch-changes! China in the 1980s-90s and Now

Another difference is that back then, certainly in the 1980s and less so in the 1990s, Chinese people didn’t eat nearly as much meat or fish as they do today. Consumption has changed dramatically in China since those days. And people were generally healthier since they used their feet and bicycles to get around a lot more than they do today.

There are many other differences between now (2020) and then (1990s) as well. For one thing, China’s cities are now far more populated than before, and they are home (or temporary residence) to millions of people from other parts of China and beyond, and to a much larger flow of people and resources in and out of the city. In the 1990s, Shanghai’s population for example was still relatively homogenous, because of the strict hukou 户口 system and the prevention of migration into cities during and after the Mao years. The great majority of Shanghainese were people whose families had migrated to the city from nearby towns and cities in Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Anhui and many other provinces during the Republican Era (1912-1949). 

Things started to really open up in Shanghai and other cities in China by the late 1990s and especially since the 2000s. Today, Shanghainese people often will blame the government for “polluting” the city with millions of migrants from other parts of China, whom the Shanghainese dismissively call waidiren 外地人，literally “outsiders,” but with a pejorative connotation. 

Some would even say that there is a “racist” element to these social distinctions, with the waidiren serving as the “Other,” in the parlance of academia. I’ve often heard Shanghainese people say that back in the 1980s, the city was far cleaner and more well-managed than it is today. There is a certain nostalgia about the city before it was “polluted” by millions of waidiren. One assumes that similar dynamics prevail in other large cities such as Beijing, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Chongqing, and yes, Wuhan.

Obviously, it is China’s deep connectedness with the world that is the key difference between those times and now. In the 1980s and 1990s, Chinese people travelled relatively little, whether within their own country, or elsewhere in the world. The economy was much much smaller than it is now. Certainly the amount of tourism both inside and outside of China was far far less than it is now. Today, millions of Chinese tourists, students, and businesspeople travel widely and live abroad, thus exacerbating global fears about China’s influence on the world. At the same time, these people are bringing the country’s massive brain power, manufacturing capabilities, and capital to the rest of the world, and increasing the reliance of universities, hotels, airlines, and myriad other businesses on the people of China.

Now that the so-called Coronavirus or COVID-19 has been unleashed around the world, it has ceased to be a “Wuhan” or “Chinese” virus and has instead become a global medical crisis. Yet the tendency to “blame China” for the outbreak is still there. I suggest that we hold off on pointing fingers. Let’s concentrate instead on being safe and sane and doing our best to prevent the further spread of this unfortunate viral transmission from animals to humans, which is more closely related to the human condition and our relationship to the world of nature than the political and cultural dynamics of any particular country, region, or people. 

Stay Safe and Sane Folks! More Thoughts on the Coronavirus and Suggestions for Compadres in the USA and Elsewhere

Since we left China on February 10, the dynamics of the Coronavirus now known as COVID-19 have changed rapidly. When we departed from the Shanghai Pudong Airport, almost all known cases of the virus were located inside China. Since then, the number of cases outside China has grown rapidly, whereas the extreme measures taken by the the government and citizens of China appear to have slowed down the virus remarkably in that country. Now the Chinese are more worried about people bringing the virus into China from outside the country, and the whole dynamic of the virus has shifted. It is on the way to becoming a global pandemic. 

To catch up readers of my blog (of which there seem to be far more than usual of late), after spending two weeks in self-quarantine in the Bay Area, we spent a few days with my aunt and uncle in the Berkeley Hills. At that time, there didn’t appear to be any serious concern among people in Berkeley, who were going about their lives as if nothing had changed. I attended a piano recital at U Cal Berkeley with my Uncle Pierre, and accompanied my Aunt Connie to the Farmers Market in Berkeley. We did have many conversations about the virus as news continued to pour in of its spread across the globe.

On February 27, my two daughters and I took a flight across America to Boston. Since then we’ve been staying with my parents in my hometown of Acton Mass. News has continued to unfold about the virus, and it appears to be spreading with great rapidity to other countries, including Italy, South Korea, Japan, Iran, and many others. The United States is reporting more and more cases every day now. Still, I do not see any signs here in Acton of people taking special measures to avoid the virus. 

Recently, I found out that a conference I was planning to attend in Vancouver called APAIE has been canceled. On the other hand, the annual AAS Conference which takes place this year in Boston has not yet announced a cancelation. I am actually very concerned about that. I was thinking of attending that conference, though I haven’t registered yet. Today, I decided that I definitely will not attend, as it doesn’t seem appropriate to do so under the current situation.

Based on all of my observations and from what I’ve read in news reports on the internet, here are some thoughts and suggestions for my compatriots here in the USA, and for folks elsewhere around the world:

1. Do take this virus seriously. All indicators suggest it is far deadlier than a regular flu, and there are currently no vaccines to fight it, unlike the normal flu. There is still much to learn about this virus. It is not to be taken lightly or joked about.

2. There are good reasons why the entire country of China took extreme measures to fight it. Perhaps those measures seem unreasonable or unfeasible to other countries. And they probably are. On the other hand, China was where the breakout first occurred and where it has been the most devastating. So it was reasonable for China to take severe measures to save countless lives. How many more people would be infected now, and how many more lives lost, if China hadn’t reacted the way it did?

3. Don’t blame China for this virus. It could have broken out anywhere. People eat wild animals in countries all over the planet. Yes, the government of China could have acted more swiftly, and there is certainly cause to criticize their initial reactions. But right now, the world should unite to fight the virus, and we should support the people of China and not point fingers (that will come later I am sure).

4. Don’t panic. There are some very reasonable precautions you can take to mitigate the spread of the virus. There is no reason to hoard things or to run around as if the sky were falling. In terms of its deadliness—yes, it is deadlier than a regular flu. On the other hand, it appears to be affecting young people far less than older folks (I am in the middle, having reached the age of 50 last month). Older people who have pre-existing health conditions are in more danger than others, and men are in greater danger than women. Even so, we should all consider the health of others and try our best to prevent catching and spreading this virus. I am certainly not a doctor or a health specialist, but these are some tips that I would like to offer based on what I’ve read and learned from reliable sources:

5. Do take precautions, including:

   1. Wash your hands with soap and warm water frequently, especially after going outside your home;

   2. Try to avoid crowded areas and places, and try to avoid public transportation if you can;

   3. Work from home if you can (for some of us this has become a necessity already);

   4. Limit your excursions and go out only when necessary; this might be a good time to spend more time in or around your home and catch up on your hobbies, chores, reading lists, and TV series;

   5. Get plenty of exercise, which can and should be accomplished in a relatively uncrowded place. Walking, running, cycling outdoors are all good ways to do so, or rev up that exercise machine that’s been gathering dust in your basement;

   6. Get plenty of sleep to boost your immune system;

   7. Eat plenty of healthy foods and avoid excessive alcohol consumption;

   8. Limit your social interactions as much as possible. Best stick to trusted relatives and friends who don’t show signs of illness that accord with the virus (fever, coughing) and avoid large social gatherings when possible.

I hope these tips are helpful. I know they are not easy for many people to follow, but neither are they impossible, and they may well save lives. Personally, I don’t think it necessary to hoard things or wear masks, unless you have an illness and wish to prevent others from catching it. Just stay safe and sane and do reasonable things to keep yourself that way.

Why We Left China: Seeking Refuge Abroad During the Coronavirus Crisis

Like many families that are based in China, but not citizens of that country, we had a difficult choice to make: stay and endure the uncertain situation, or leave the country. Eventually, we chose the latter course. Here is why we did so, and how our experiences have gone thus far, including our two-week self-quarantine period.

In my previous blog, I collected posts I put up on Facebook of my daily experiences in Shanghai as the coronavirus (COVID-19 as it was eventually know) crisis accelerated. During that week of mounting anxiety in Shanghai, we were presented with a choice: either stay and work through an unpleasant and uncertain period of time, or else leave the country. My wife, who works for Shanghai television, had to remain in the city in order to work, so she was firm on staying. Towards the end of the week, we decided that it was best for me to take our two daughters and fly elsewhere for a while. Since our schools were closed, and all the fun sucked out of the city through the closing of restaurants, bars, clubs, pubs, and other grub hubs, what was the point in sticking around, especially given the uncertainty of when things would open up again?

The question then was, where to go? We thought about going to Japan, but it quickly became clear that that country was facing a rising crisis of its own. Ultimately, the sensible thing to do, being American citizens, was to fly back to our own home country and spend some time there, while also having the opportunity to visit our kinfolk. 

I decided it best to fly to San Francisco first. Given that we were expected to undergo a period of self-quarantining, why not spend it in the Bay Area, where we were guaranteed a warm climate, fresh air, sunshine, and blue skies—all things that one dearly misses during a typical Shanghai winter. Added to that is the fact that my aunt and uncle live in the Berkeley area, and it is always a nice treat to visit them. Also, after many years of flying back and forth to China, I’ve come to the realization that I simply cannot endure the China-East Coast USA flight without risking a serious illness (at least not while flying in Economy class). And that would have been a disaster under the circumstances.

So my wife arranged through her travel agent to get a flight for us on February 10 to San Francisco on Korean Airlines, via Seoul. When we arrived at the Pudong Airport in Shanghai, it was nearly empty. On our flight to Seoul, the occupancy rate was perhaps 20 percent—mostly Koreans I assume, returning to their home country. We were checked several times during this flight, both at the Pudong Airport and the Incheon airport, where they took our temperatures. Even in the Incheon airport, many people were wearing masks. (This was before the crisis broke out in Korea by the way).

The flight to San Francisco was packed, as to be expected I suppose. Many people wore masks on the flight. When we arrived in the SFO airport, while going through immigration, we were diverted to a corner of the room, where CDC officers administered another temperature check and gave us some guidelines for going through our self-quarantine. They also took my phone number and address in the USA, which is my parents’ address in Massachusetts. They gave us a chart sheet and told us to take our temperatures twice a day and record them on the sheet, along with any symptoms or lack thereof. All of this was done with the utmost of friendliness and care.

Now, I will be writing more kind words about the CDC and their involvement with our case, but I do have to stop here and admit that the self-quarantine guidelines seem to assume that one has a home within which to quarantine oneself. I have nothing against the guidelines per say—they were quite reasonable—but for those of us who do not have our own homes in the USA, the self-quarantine period entails a few challenges.

First, it is very expensive to quarantine oneself in a hotel. We needed to find one that we could spend 14 days in, while feeling somewhat comfortable and getting our work and our schoolwork done, since my daughters’ schools in Shanghai and my university in China, Duke Kunshan, had moved all operations, including teaching, online (more of that in a bit). Also, since we didn’t have a kitchen, we had to feed ourselves through takeout and shopping for ready-made food. Not to mention doing the laundry. All of this added up to a few thousand dollars.  

Another challenge is limiting one’s interactions with society. Since we had only spent time in Shanghai (and a brief return to Kunshan for me, where I had only one or two mask-wearing encounters with colleagues before returning), I reasoned that our chances of being carriers of the virus were vanishingly small, though not impossible. At the time we left Shanghai, a city of over 20 million, there were only around 100 documented cases of the virus. Nevertheless, we adhered to the basic principles of the quarantine period and kept our distance from people whenever we could. We had most of our meals in our hotel room, and only went out to do some shopping and laundry and such. I admit we did visit a couple of shopping malls, which by Shanghai standards were practically empty. 

Mostly, when we went outdoors for fresh air and exercise, we visited regional parks and shorelines, taking advantage of our location in sunny California. Our most memorable trip was to Point Reyes, where we went all the way out to MccLure Beach on Tomales Point.  

On the path down to McClure Beach in Point Reyes National Shoreline

Another challenge for us was keeping up with our schoolwork. Like other professors at Duke Kunshan, I was compelled to transform my course into an online course for a group of students who were stranded in their homes scattered all over China, not to mention one in Korea and one in Azerbaijan. I was given a time slot that was designed for professors taking refuge at Duke (where many have gone) or elsewhere on the East Coast, so I had to wake up for a 4 am class the other day. My other class is at 4 pm, so that’s not so bad.

To top it off, my course focuses on the history and current status of live music scenes in urban China, and the group project was to involve field research on a live music scene in China. I had to transform that project into an interview with a musician or person involved in live scenes. In order to teach live classes, Duke helped us to set up a platform called Zoom and integrate it with our learning platform called Sakai. I have to say I’ve been pleased so far with the results, though it is still far from ideal. But I do think that the students appreciate the chance to interact with the professors and with each other, since most of them are stuck in their homes as the crisis or “special period,” as they euphemistically call it, continues to unfold.

Meeting online with my Duke Kunshan students via the platform known as Zoom. That image in the center is from happier days on the Duke Kunshan campus.

My daughters also had to adjust to online schooling, which was not an easy task. Sarah (age 15) goes to Shanghai American School now, and they did a fantastic job of setting up courses online in a very short time. Hannah’s (age 10) school, SHSID, took a bit more time to set things up, and they’ve been in warmup phase. I have to say I’m proud of my daughters for taking up the challenging task of moving to an online schooling platform on such short notice, as well as all the other adjustments they have made since we left China.

A big adjustment for me was becoming a full-time caretaker of two teen girls. For the past few years, since I joined Duke Kunshan, I’ve been a “weekend dad”, spending Friday night through Sunday night with my family in Shanghai, only to return every Monday morning to Kunshan for the work week. Now, I was taking care of them alone, 24/7, making sure that they had three proper meals (not so easy from a hotel room), that their clothes were clean, that they did their schoolwork, got some sunshine and exercise, and had all the things they needed. Now, I have even more respect for single dads and working mothers!

We also had to adjust to the relative isolation of being kept apart from society. While chances were miniscule that we had the bug, we still could not risk spending quality time with friends or family, especially my elderly parents and relatives. My daytime and nighttime companions for the past two weeks were my daughters. Needless to say, this was a huge daddy-daughter bonding experience, and we’ve all benefited greatly from it, but it hasn’t been easy.

Meanwhile, the CDC kept a friendly eye on us as we went through the 14-day quarantine period. They contacted my parents in Massachusetts, who told them we were in the Bay Area. Eventually, they found our location. I had phone calls from CDC officers in San Francisco and Los Angeles, before they narrowed us down to the county where we were located. All of these calls were fairly routine, check-list oriented, and friendly. Basically, they asked us if we were healthy and following the guidelines, which we were, and they gave us information on who to call and where to go if there were any health issues. 

Finally, on day 14, with normal temperatures and no symptoms, we were officially over the quarantine period. The first thing I did to celebrate was to have breakfast with another Dartmouth alumnus, whom I hadn’t seen in several years. Then I took my daughters as promised to get a manicure. After that, we went to a movie theater to see the film Little Women, which the girls were excited to see, especially Hannah who has the book. What a beautiful story about sisterhood! I must admit I shed a tear or two along the way, not so much for the sentimental story, but because of seeing everyone on the screen touching and hugging and dancing with each other, and thinking that those days of closeness and human warmth seemed so far away now in the midst of this ongoing pandemic.

That said, , now that we’ve put the quarantine period behind us, I look forward to embracing my own family members and reuniting with old friends. I don’t know how long we will remain in the USA. Our plan is to visit my aunt and uncle in Berkeley for a few days, then fly to Boston, where we will spend time with my folks in my hometown of Acton. The way things are looking, the USA may also be preparing for a viral pandemic. Well, at least we have some experience with this already.

Coping with the Coronavirus Crisis in Shanghai

Ever since we returned from our family holiday in Singapore last weekend, I’ve been posting messages daily onto my Facebook feed about the situation here in Shanghai. This is completely from my own personal perspective as a longtime resident of this city. I make no effort to give a broader view, and I’m not posing as a journalist or health expert in any way, shape or form. These are just my own observations and experiences. I’ve collected the posts I wrote last week and pasted them into this entry, which covers the past seven days. Mostly it’s been a matter of coping with isolation and anxiety. Otherwise, Shanghai feels fairly safe and secure, there is plenty of food, and things are low-key but orderly, at least from my own vantage point. We are far away from the epicenter in Wuhan, and I can only imagine what our friends and colleagues and millions of others are going through in that city and in others that are in the center of the storm. As I wrote earlier, I’m confident that Wuhan, and China, will bounce back, and will learn a great deal from this event. I hope the rest of the world does too.

A sign on our local Family Mart asking people to wear masks—these are everywhere now.

CVS in Shanghai Day 1 (Feb 2). From now on I’m going to give daily reports of what’s going on in Shanghai, at least what I observe, and since this is the first day since we returned from Singapore, I’m calling it day one. This morning I took a walk around my neighborhood in midtown Shanghai, normally a very bustling area full of shops, restaurants, bars, and malls. The streets are very quiet. There are a few people walking around on the streets, and every one is wearing masks with a few exceptions. The Starbucks, which has been on that corner of Weihai Road and Shimen Road ever since I can remember, is now closed, and has left a notice to its customers. All the restaurants and most stores are shuttered. I went food shopping in the Taigu Hui shopping mall, where the City Super is open for business. It is well stocked as usual and there seems to be an abundance of produce. A man at the entrance to the mall checked my forehead for temperature and let me in. A few other shops in the mall are open, but most are shuttered. Everyone on the streets seems to be calmly going about their business, and the convenience stores are all open, as is the local supermarket on Dagu Road (Hualian), which is also well stocked. I did see some men in plastic suits and masks having some sort of altercation with some neighbors near the compound gate on Dagu Road, perhaps having to do with a request for quarantining a family nearby, but otherwise nothing out of the ordinary, except for what I described above. People seem to be in waiting mode. Wonder how long this will continue?

Strolling with my family in a local park in our neighborhood. Almost everyone wears masks, regardless of the circumstances.

CVS in Shanghai Day 2 (Feb 3): The government highly recommends three things, all of them reasonable responses to the crisis: 1) wear a face mask; 2) wash hands frequently; 3) only go out when necessary. As for number 3, it is up to interpretation. When is necessary? Being cooped up in one’s apartment all day is a challenge, and it is a good idea to get outside for a bit of exercise and variety. We spent most of the day inside, which can be challenging when four people (two being teenagers) share a small three-bedroom apartment. This afternoon, we decided to go walking around our area in the middle of Shanghai. As usual, the streets were fairly quiet, though there were people out and about. I’d say around 80-90 percent of the people were wearing masks. I see the mask as a social compact: You don’t spread your germs on me, and I’ll give you the same courtesy. I didn’t see anybody react in any special way to people who weren’t wearing masks. The feeling I got from walking around today is one of cautious optimism. Most stores are closed this week. I noticed that stores selling food are all open—maybe that’s a government dictate. There were even some lines at the more popular shops. There are also some open retail stores, including big ones on Huaihai Road (one of Shanghai’s big shopping streets). Nike and Under Armour are open. Still, most shops have a sign saying that they are closed until the 10th, the official end of the CNY holiday. A few had signs that said they will close til the end of February, but that was rare. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when stores open up and the work week commences next week. As for food, I did notice some of the usual items in our local grocery store seem undersupplied, but that could be a product of the time of day (late afternoon). Will have to check again tomorrow morning. In terms of anxiety, I’d say it’s not that high. Shanghai only has a few hundred documented cases. Even if there are ten times that number, the chances of running into an individual carrying on the street are probably much less than 1/10,000. We shall see how the numbers go up over the next few days. We are definitely expecting a rise, but given all the precautions everyone is taking, Shanghai is not likely to see epidemic proportions of the virus. Still, let’s all keep our fingers crossed, and give our thoughts and our prayers (or the equivalent depending on your religious inclinations) to the good folks in Wuhan who are in the center of the storm. And people, as the sign on our local Family Mart suggests, let’s keep those masks on shall we?

😭😭😭My favorite neighborhood watering hole is closed for the time being. Don’t know when I’ll have my next good craft beer. I know, First-world problems.

CVS in Shanghai Day 3 (Feb 4): Today I went back to our local neighborhood supermarket (联华) and noticed they are still undersupplied in some of the shelves and seem to be running out of some things, including yogurt, meats, nuts, and green veggies. Don’t know if this is a trend or if things will change after the holiday ends. In any case, we decided to play it safe and headed to Costco this afternoon to load up on food. We weren’t the only ones with this idea, though the place is probably more crowded in normal times (don’t know since I’d never been before). Since we are eating at home now, it makes sense anyhow to stock our larders. We ended up spending around 5000 RMB on groceries! Maybe Americans are used to this, but this was certainly a record for me! So hopefully we’ll be able to outlast a temporary shortage of stuff and continue to eat well at home.

CVS in Shanghai Day 4 (Feb 5): Today I got a different perspective on the current crisis. I decided to drive out to Kunshan to pick up some things from DKU and from my apartment, including my laptop computer. Getting to Kunshan wasn’t so difficult. The roads were nearly empty and it would have been smooth sailing, except that they set up a temperature check at the border of Jiangsu Province, and another temp check at the toll booth of the highway exit into Kunshan. These checks only took a few minutes. Then I waited outside the gate at DKU for a colleague to hand me some stuff from my office (nobody is allowed in or out of the campus right now). After that, I drove to my apartment complex, where I had another temp check at the entrance gate. I watered my plants (which were quite dry after two weeks) and gave my key to a colleague who lives upstairs, who kindly agreed to help water the plants from now on. After gathering some things from my apartment in Kunshan, I drove back to Shanghai. On the way back, I had to wait at the border of Huaqiao into Shanghai metropolitan area for another temp check. This time, it took me nearly four hours of stop-and-go traffic to get through the check. Thousands of cars inched along as we patiently moved towards the checkpoint. Finally, we were asked by a police officer to scan a QR code and fill in an online form with all our details, and this had to be checked along with the temp check before they let us through. So that explains why it took so long. Of course one of the questions was have we been to Hubei Province. I’m sure police were also checking to make sure that no Hubei license plates were getting through. I didn’t see any, but I certainly saw plenty of plates from numerous other provinces in China. So on one hand, we can be assured that there is some close oversight of people moving in and out of cities and neighborhood to prevent the spread of the virus. On the other hand, people are being asked to self-report, so who knows, but at least they are checking our temperature at every border and gate. Needless to say, I will not be making the journey back to Kunshan any time soon (at least not by car—I don’t know what it’s like to travel by high speed rail). When the government tells us to stay in one place, they really mean it. But it’s hard to limit mobility in China, and this will have unfathomable effects on the country for some time to come.

CVS in Shanghai Day 5 (Feb 6): Here’s a pano shot of the City Super in Taigui Hui shopping mall. Normally this would be a very crowded place. Wonder how long this shop will stay open? We went here today to do some more shopping for food and other things. While we’re not too worried about running out of food, I am concerned with the “luxury” items that us foreigners in China have come to prize, such as cheese, butter, bread, wine and other items that Chinese people don’t normally consume in their daily lives. So we’ve been trying to stock up on these sorts of items. If we have go onto a “Chinese” diet of rice and veggies, it won’t be the end of the world, and I may lose those 20 pounds I’ve been meaning to lose all these years. But when you’re a foreigner in China, even one as “integrated” as I am, you still crave your comfort foods! Wearing a mask outdoors has become our daily reality in China. It’s like having somebody cupping your mouth and nose with a warm and comforting hand, while slowly but surely suffocating you. But it’s the unwritten rule and the government highly recommends it. Sometimes, I take walks in our xiaoqu (apartment complex) without the mask, but I always put it on when I walk out the gate. As for the gates of our complex, most of them are now closed, and we can only enter and exit through two of them now. When we enter the shopping mall across the road, we need to get our temps checked with a forehead or wrist check. Most of the shops are closed. I think this crisis will be a real shakeout for small businesses in China. Who knows how long this all will last?

Nanjing West Road, normally a blaze of lights and a sea of shoppers, now the streets are quiet and the shopping malls are all closed.

CVS in Shanghai Day 6 (Feb 7): We are now dealing with the growing feelings of unease surrounding the condition of being in an environment where the future is uncertain and everything is at a standstill. Well, not everything. Men on motorbikes are zooming about the city with delivery packages and food—what would we do without them? There are some places open. Costa Coffee on Wujiang Road. KFC, and a few other restaurants here and there. Shops selling food are open as usual. Mostly, it’s a condition of waiting. Not many people are venturing out of their homes, at least not more than they need to. Most people are wearing masks. As I wrote yesterday, the masks can feel very claustrophobic. I also find that wearing one obscures my vision since my breath ends up congealing on my glasses. And there’s plenty of discussion online as to whether or not masks really make a difference (I notice much of this comes from abroad). Whether or not it does, the fact is that people are wearing them. Shanghai still feels safe and secure for the moment. There is still plenty of food. I think the hardest thing right now is dealing with the collective anxiety about the future. And with people returning from their holiday. There are apps now showing exactly where cases of the virus have supposedly been found. They are not adding to any sense of security, I will tell you that. Probably one of the best things for us now is to limit our social media intake. The Chinese social media is worse. There’s a lot of fear, anxiety and anger flowing through Chinese social media, especially in the wake of the news of Dr. Li’s demise (RIP). There’s anxiety about catching the virus through contact with elevator buttons, or through air conditioning, or by other means. Probably much of this is completely unwarranted, but it is there nonetheless. So staying calm and sane is the challenge for us now. Taking walks is helpful. This evening I walked over to Nanjing West Road, normally one of the most bustling streets in the city. It was practically empty, with a few people strolling about here and there. None of the shopping malls were open. As I wrote earlier, there were a few restaurants and a coffee shop here and there that are still open. I walked over to the Portman, where I did a bit of food shopping at the City Shop. Stocked up on more good bread for example. 25 years ago when I first lived in this city, you would practically kill for the kind of bread that you can buy easily in these shops today (that is if you were a foreigner craving bread). I remember when China Jim’s submarine sandwich shop opened in 1996, and it was a huge event for the foreign community in Shanghai. Those days are long gone. Now, just about anything can be found in Shanghai. But I still fear that shops selling these things that us foreigners crave will close. Holding on to these comforts is one way for us to keep our sanity. Other than that, just coping with being cooped up in a small apartment with your family day after day. We are trying to get out at least into our complex and get a bit of exercise now and then. I look forward to the day when we can drop our masks and go out into society and trust each other as we did a month ago—that trust we took for granted for all those years.

Trying to keep on a positive mask amidst growing existential despair.

CVS in Shanghai Day 7 (Feb 8): Not much to report today. Stayed at home all day and worked from my desk in our living room. Woke up this morning with a splitting headache, which is a bit scary in this climate, but it was a sinus headache and I managed to suppress it with a Panadol. Not taking too many chances now. With my immune system being what it is, best to stay inside and limit myself to walks in our complex, which fortunately is very walk-friendly. Adding to the stress is the need to rethink our programming at DKU in light of the unfolding events, but that’s another story for another time. Right now we’re working on moving all of our coursework online. My daughter Sarah’s school, Shanghai American School, has done the same and she is now taking her classes online at home. While schools here in Shanghai have publicized an early March reopening, I am very doubtful this will happen given how this situation is unfolding. It’s uncertain how long it will take things to get back to a semblance of normality. It’s quite painful to see our vibrant city paralyzed, with shops and restaurants closed, streets quiet and empty, and everyone staying at home. On the other hand, you have to respect the discipline and drive of the people here in Shanghai and elsewhere in China to stop this virus in its tracks before it spreads further. I don’t know quite what to think about the quarantine policy, but there will be plenty of time in the aftermath of the crisis to debrief and reassess. Everyone in China and the world will learn a great deal from this event, there is no doubt about that. Sending a smile out to the world today because it needs one.