Cotton-Pickin’ Days

The Forbes World’s 100 Most Powerful Women list has been released and I’m embarrassed to say that of the top 10, I only really knew who one of them was right off the bat.

Here are the top 10:

1. Angela Merkel - Chancellor, Germany
2. Wu Yi - Vice premier, China
3. Ho Ching - Chief executive, Temasek Holdings, Singapore
4. Condoleezza Rice - Secretary of State , U.S.
5. Indra K. Nooyi - Chairman, chief executive, PepsiCo, U.S.
6. Sonia Gandhi - President, India
7. Cynthia Carroll - Chief executive, Anglo American, U.K.
8. Patricia A. Woertz - Cochairman, Archer Daniels Midland, U.S.
9. Irene Rosenfeld - Chairman, chief executive, Kraft Foods, U.S.
10. Patricia Russo - Chief executive, Alcatel-Lucent, U.S.

Other women I recognized from their names alone without any descriptors:

20. Ruth Bader Ginsburg - Supreme court justice, US
21. Oprah Winfrey - Chairman, Harpo, US
22. Margaret Whitman - Chief executive, president, Ebay, US
23. Queen Elizabeth II - Queen, UK
24. Melinda Gates - Cofounder, cochairman, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, US
25. Hillary Rodham Clinton - US senator, New York, US
26. Nancy Pelosi - Speaker of the House, House of Representatives, US
32. Dr. Julie Louise Gerberding - Director, Center for Disease Control and Prevention, US
51. Gloria Arroyo - President, Philippines
55. Meredith Vieira - Host, The Today Show, US
60. Laura Bush - First Lady, US
62. Diane Sawyer, Co-anchor, Good Morning America, US
63. Katie Couric - Anchor, managing editor, CBS Evening News, US
71. Aung San Suu Kyi - Nobel Peace laureate, Democratically elected leader of Myanmar, 1990
74. Christiane Amanpour - Chief international correspondent, CNN

How many of these powerful women did you know about?

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China is an enigma to me. The closest I’ve ever been is Hong Kong and Macau. The more I know about China’s history, however, the more incredible it all seems. Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng and The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang (and Chang’s subsequent suicide) shocked and saddened me. And today I read this in Wild Swans by Jung Chang:

One day in 1960, the three-year-old daughter of my aunt Jun-ying’s next-door neighbor in Yibin went missing. A few weeks later the neighbor saw a young girl playing in the street wearing a dress that looked like her daughter’s. She went up and examined it: it had a mark which identified it as her daughter’s. She reported this to the police. It turned out that the parents of the young girl were selling wind-dried meat. They had abducted and murdered a number of babies and sold them as rabbit meat at exorbitant prices. The couple were executed and the case was hushed up, but it was widely known that baby killing did go on at the time.

For every day that I’m alive, I should be grateful to be who I am, where I am, and when I am.

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Color me skeptical.

I feel the Chinese students do not understand what ‘original thought’ means. It doesn’t mean being an Albert Einstein and inventing lightbulbs when lightbulbs did not exist. It simply means the stance you take in your paper, the sources you select, and the way you argue for your stance using your sources. It means being able to get sources offering different opinions from your stance (probably not so easy for Chinese students since censorship is applied), weighing these opinions, arguing for and against these opinions and arriving at a final conclusion. I think, as far as an essay is concerned, it’s not so much arriving at a right or wrong answer as it is about the way you arrive at the answer. And I think Chinese students are too concerned about arriving at the right answer. I think this is what happens when your education system penalizes you for not regurgitating out correct textbook answers. But above all, perhaps this is the fault of censorship and an authoritarian government making sure that its countrymen share unified thoughts.

~methegirl3, currently studying at Peking University in China

Update: Although Andrew Sun may prove me wrong….

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We brought Stephen to his first movie in a theater yesterday. And it wasn’t just any theater, it was the British Film Institute IMAX where they were showing Roving Mars, a movie about the NASA Mars Exploration Rover mission.

The movie started with an explosion of sound showing off all that IMAX cinema can offer. The worst was being in the eye of a hurricane with the cacophony of cows mooing and houses splintering around us. I thought Stephen would freak out and demand to leave considering how sensitive he is to noise but he hung in there and only asked to leave one time. When I explained they were only showcasing the speakers’ capabilities, he stayed fixed in his seat.

He was enthralled with Roving Mars as soon as it begun. When we “flew” over the surface of Mars, he turned to me and said, “We’re moving!” and looked around to see if the theater was spinning. My favorite part of the movie was when the control center received the first green rover signal from Mars. I was so touched I had tears in my eyes. Yes, I cry over strange things.

Here’s a video of that moment and a review of Spirit and Opportunity’s first year on Mars:

And, of course, no experience would be complete without Stephen commemorating it in LEGO.

BTW, if you’re ever curious what Stephen’s been making lately, there’s a slideshow in the middle column towards the bottom you can watch or click on to see the entire picture album.

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In response to my post earlier this week about ethnicity, both Busy Mom and Liz Ditz told me to go read State of Grace who tackles it from a more personal approach. She wanted to know:

1. Is it okay to ask of someone’s racial background?

Sure! In fact, you might want to ask before making comments like this one - “I think Korean women are the most beautiful.” Huh? Did he know that I’m actually CHINESE? Yes or no, it’s a horrid comment. Butthead.

2. If you are okay with asking someone about her or his ethnicity, how do you pose the question? (Frequently used queries include - “What’s your heritage?” “What’s your race?” Or, the oft-asked but incorrectly worded, “What’s your nationality?”)

This one’s tough. Just cut to the chase. “What’s your ethnicity?” is ok with me. “Where do you come from?” is not so good. In Japan, I’d get that question because people couldn’t understand why I looked Asian but spoke English. Then if I said I was from California, they’d look even more confused and ask where my parents were from. If I were fourth generation Chinese (which I’m not), just imagine how much more I could mess with their minds.

3. If you are curious about someone’s racial background, but hesitate to ask her or him to discuss it, what prevents you from posing the question?

I don’t want them to think that’s all I notice about them although our skin color/ethnicity/race is clearly one of our defining characteristics. In fact, even when I’m describing someone I shy away from using any race-connected terms which is dumb because it detracts from painting a complete profile.

4. If you are of color/not white*, is it okay for a white person to ask about your racial background? If you take issue with a white person asking about your racial background, please explain why this presents a problem for you.

I don’t mind if people ask me. It’s far better than assuming I’m something other than I am.

~~~~~
Political correctness means that we’re to assume everyone is equally the same - men and women, white and black, Asian and Caucasian. Reality tells us that’s not true. We’re different!!! Just that the differences shouldn’t be preset at good or bad.

Yesterday I had someone ask when I came to London. London’s a fabulous place because there’s a mix of ethnicities, cultures, and nationalities in almost every corner of the city. I’m not sure where the woman who was asking is originally from but her English is heavily accented. When I said I had come to London about a year ago but grew up in California, she said, “Oooh. That’s why your English is perfect.”

I was not offended in the least that she wanted to know more about me. My appearance sets-up expectations while my behavior shatters them. As long as people accept me for who I am, it’s all good.

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Alister Cameron at Blogologist just joined the b5media family and while i was poking around his blog, I saw that he was apologizing for some sort of screw-up. Turns out he’d revealed someone who’d hired an “assistant” (I’d almost call the hire a spammer) as part of a link exchange/SEO strategy and this assistant had taken it upon herself to leave a poorly worded comment under her boss’s name on Alister’s blog. The comment got red flagged because it was clear via a RDNS lookup that the assistant was not the boss. Why did Alister have to apologize and what did people find most offensive? Alister pointed out that the boss was a white Canadian while the assistant was Filipino (later revealed to be Filipina).

Readers skewered Alister for making a big deal out of where the assistant was based and for calling this person a “filipino dude.” One complaint was that he should have capitalized Filipino. Oooook. Word Police on patrol. I’m a member of the Word Police too but if I were to go around tagging everyone who didn’t capitalize what they should, it’d be a full time job and then some. Then people got bent out of shape because Alister associated bad grammar with being Filipino in the Philippines. The horror! How dare he!

At the risk of getting trashed myself, I’m going to stick up for Alister, who probably has a harder time defending himself in the ethnic wars because he’s a white male. I’m a Chinese-American woman with a very Chinese name. (Hsien-Hsien Lei. Bet you don’t even know how to pronounce it. And don’t forget the Dr.!) I have a good grasp of the English language, if I may say so myself, but in the online environment, I am certain that many people who first come across my name immediately think “FOB - fresh off the boat.” Fortunately, most give me the benefit of the doubt once they read my work, but it’s a fact of life that we are judged by our appearance and our names and ethnicity are part of that.

English may be the most commercially popular global language right now (soon to be overtaken by Chinese and Urdu…haa) but that doesn’t mean people speak the same English everywhere. Jayvee points out that English is a national language in the Philippines. Yeah, and English is the national language in the US, the UK, and Singapore. That doesn’t mean everyone is capable of expressing themselves adequately in each of those countries.

Bad grammar exists everywhere and even people whose mother tongue is English engage in it routinely, deliberately. Remember ebonics? I’ve been living in London for over a year and only recently did I realize that “pants” here means underpants, and not trousers. I’m sure my friends were wondering why I needed to tell them that I’d gotten myself two pairs of new pants at Marks & Spencer. TMI!! And what about Singlish, Singaporean English? To me, it’s reasonable to expect that a person from the Philippines will use English differently than someone from Canada.

Frankly, I am MORE offended when someone ignores the fact that I am an English, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese-speaking Chinese-American woman scientist with a unique name. Being all those things makes me special. I don’t want you to pretend like I’m like everyone else. I’m not. Political correctness be damned.

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“Each home has been reduced to the bare essentials — to barer essentials than most primitive people would consider possible. Only one woman’s hands to feed the baby, answer the telephone, turn off the gas under the pot that is boiling over, soothe the older child who has broken a toy, and open both doors at once. She is a nutritionist, a child psychologist, an engineer, a production manager, an expert buyer, all in one. Her husband sees her as free to plan her own time, and envies her; she sees him as having regular hours and envies him.”

~Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 November 15, 1978) was an American cultural anthropologist.

NB: Rachel left a comment yesterday inviting us to participate in a study of parenting views and practices being conducted by Dr. Kim White-Mills and Dr. Catherine Dobris of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Head over and express your opinion!

Photo: libraryman

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Every now and then, I’m reminded that I should be more diligent about teaching Stephen Mandarin Chinese. A UK government report earlier this month recommended that state (public) schools teach “economically useful” languages, such as Mandarin.

One way of making language teaching in secondary schools more engaging will be through offering a wider range of languages, including Mandarin, which is increasingly valued by employers. The language is growing in popularity in independent schools, in recognition of the growing importance of China to the British economy, but is available only in a small number state schools.

Business leaders are now calling for more Mandarin teaching. They expect sales to China to be worth 10 per cent of their global revenues, equivalent to nearly £200 billion a year, by 2009, making China Britain’s most important export market.

A survey of 500 business leaders conducted by the Hay consultancy group found that many companies believed that poor language skills and a lack of understanding of the Chinese market were holding Britain back.

Sally Low, director of policy at the British Chambers of Commerce, hoped that the report would go further. She said: “The needs of business are changing. In an increasingly globalised economy, Mandarin and Urdu are in more demand than the traditional French and German.”

What’s Urdu*? I’m more behind than I thought! Not only have I got to teach Stephen Mandarin, I’ve got to get on the ball with Urdu.

*Spoken in Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan

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What’s going on in Iraq? Do you know? Yeah, I lived in blissful ignorance too.

Yesterday, top U.S. military commanders recommended an increase in U.S. troops. Wonder if any of them have read What Was Asked of Us: An Oral History of the Iraq War by the Soldiers Who Fought It by Trish Woods. I read the book this past week and was sickened, heart broken, and very disturbed by the stories shared by marines and soldiers.

Up till now, I’d chosen not to pay much attention to the war in Iraq except for the headlines. But the nitty gritty everyday experiences of the people there are what matter the most. Luckily for me, Renee Supriano of Hachette Book Group sent me a copy of What Was Asked of Us and I took it as a sign that I could no longer pretend the entire world was happily celebrating the holidays with shopping and eggnog lattes at Starbucks. And I don’t think you should continue pretending either.

Learn more at the What Was Asked of Us MySpace.

continue reading

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Starting a couple of weeks ago, I began to see people in London wearing artificial red poppies similar to the ones pictured here. I had no idea what they symbolized. I eventually learned they were for Remembrance Day otherwise known as Veteran’s Day in the U.S.

Ilona Meagher of PTSD Combat (who I featured earlier this year at Genetics and Health) wrote me today to share her book review of
What Was Asked of Us: An Oral History of the Iraq War by the Soldiers Who Fought It by Trisha Wood.

In What Was Asked of Us, author and award-winning investigative reporter Trish Wood lets 29 young men and women who fought in and returned from the Iraq War speak without anyone spinning, packaging, cherry-picking, or pre-digesting their words. Some of the voices are convinced of America’s rightness to be in Iraq; others are less sure. Some are angry; some feel guilt. And chillingly, others admit to missing the adrenaline rush of the fire fights, the “fun” of posing dead bodies for photographs–and even the killing.

I want to read more but a part of me would rather stick my head under the warm blankets. Not everyone has the luxury of doing so. The rest of us should at least have the courtesy of listening to those who’ve been involved in the messier, more brutal side of human life.

NB: Ilona has her own book coming out next year - Moving A Nation to Care: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and America’s Returning Troops.

Photo credit: gnb

Technorati Tags: ptsd, veterans day, remembrance day, post traumatic stress disorder

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