The Road to Shanghai

I worked Thursday afternoon. With my colleague and friend Liu Sheng, I am helping bosses Jim and Jamie Kaplan develop a long-term strategy in China for Harlan Global Mfg., as our company is now called. Terry got her CNN fix in the hotel and joined us for a nice Italian dinner.

I spent much of Friday doing research at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center. This was the first post-1949 joint Sino-U.S. university program. It is still unique with respect to equality between the two partners. It also constitutes one-third of the subject matter for my dissertation reseach on private associations in U.S.-China relations. In the morning, I interviewed the Chinese and American co-directors. One of them gave me a free lunch ticket (the vegetarian cafeteria food was was pretty good) and turned me loose to line up my own student interviewees. I did that, interviewing two after lunch and another that evening, after Terry and I treated him to dinner. In between, Terry and I took a nice long walk to the Xinhua Bookstore, where we each compensated for an oversight. She brought a mystery she had already read, and I brought several tapes onto which I had already recorded interviews. (I should note here that I am blessed with a couple of very understanding bosses. They feel I'm working hard enough that they don't have a problem with my taking a few short research trips over the summer.)

Saturday morning, we headed for the lake that hosted our first Dragon Boat Race. A fewer larger cities have a race every year, coinciding with a holiday that has some complex semi-mythological origins that I don't yet fully understand. Watching the race was a lot of fun, as was strolling around the lake and through the park surrounding. Also a treat was spending the day with a Mr. Wang and his nine-year-old daughter, Wang Lina. We met them on the way in, as the little girl wanted to practice her 10 words of English with us and we needed directions to the ticket both. We enjoyed their company, and I got in lots of speaking and listening practice.

Sunday morning, we visited the Musuem of the 1937 Japanese Massacre, which commemorates the event widely know in English as the Rape of Nanjing. Over 300,000 unarmed Chinese were ruthlessly slaughtered over a period of several weeks. I had gone to the musuem before, but this was Terry's first visit. We also took Tao Ling, a colleague from Nanjing. She and I had for about six months been planning such a visit. The museum is moving, something of a cross between the Holocaust and Vietnam museums in Washington, D.C. I find it incredible that there are presently people in Japan trying to rehabilitate the war criminals that were tried and punished by an international tribunal at the end of WWII. The bright spot is that some Japanese have truly repented. Much of the funding for the museum, for example, came from Japanese citizens.

-- Norty