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Read, However: The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder

Posted by :James Howden On : May 1, 2012
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Category: At First Glance

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I can’t say this one was “better read than never”, which faithful readers of this site expect my book reviews to be (sub)titled. I don’t really know why I read it, although I did like the cover photo of a summery small girl leaping into a river, even more than I disliked the magenta cast of the author’s name – REBECCA WELLS – on the front and the full-back-jacket glossy of the writer. The dust jacket of the book fairly screamed Back away now, Howdy, this ain’t meant for the likes o’ you, but it was in my bedroom (ah, the price of marriage is a sometime surprise!) and I was tired and I never meant to actually finish it and besides I’d heard of Ms. Wells’s Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and thought I’d do a little slumming in the bestseller swamp. Arrogance is bliss, too.

By the way, the book is called The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder, 

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(Building Anew)

Posted by :James Howden On : April 22, 2012
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Category: At First Glance

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Blurt 22: I’m not Christian by orthodox definitions, but I know the need to be “born again”. I renew my vows irregularly and often. My physical birth is a myth in black and white, and it’s body downhill from here, but there is a mind to be mined and loves to be learned. Individuals long for it, so why wouldn’t whole creeds and congregations also need renewal? What would a born-again Christianity look like? Where is the rebirth of Buddhism? Islam, remade?

(A Mirror Might Be Nice)

Posted by :James Howden On : April 22, 2012
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Category: At First Glance

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Blurt 23: Not much is more irritating than boomerang criticism. I nag my son on his indolence one morning when I circle and circle and still can’t find my writing desk. I natter about the chronic sleep shortage of Chinese students, while shackled by my own fatigue.

I Bummered At That Time

Posted by :James Howden On : April 16, 2012
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Category: At First Glance

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Momo, a nickname for her that I overuse shamelessly and mispronounce incorrigibly, is one of my favourite students. She’ll volunteer her paper if it contains an example of a writing fault I’ve been discussing with the class. She has one of those shining, intently learning faces that every teacher is nourished by, and she writes an English journal with ferocious interest and effort. Ms. Zhu also reads enough English that she can insert a bit of tasty slang in her writing. I was beyond delighted to find, as I checked her Journal progress, a few paragraphs about a significant disappointment that she had experienced. Looking back on it, she wrote, “I bummered at that time!”

It helps that Momo is such a great kid, but this is one of my recent favourite bits of Chinglish.

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Better Read Than Never: Hessler’s RIVERTOWN

Posted by :James Howden On : April 12, 2012
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Category: At First Glance

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“This isn’t a book about China,” claims author Peter Hessler about the first of his three books set far from his American upbringing. “It’s about a certain small part of China at a certain brief period in time.” And Rivertown: Two Years on the Yangtze is certainly that, though his disclaimer is among the first evidences of the clear-minded humility that is one of the book’s greatest recommendations. It is a first-person account of a young man’s two-year immersion in the life of western China, and it is many things: a wide-open window into a place and a time, a travelogue, a coming-of-age tale, and a teacher’s diary.

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(Fear is a Good Teacher)

Posted by :James Howden On : February 12, 2012
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Category: At First Glance

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BLURT 21: Fear and self-loathing in Hong Kong, Guangdong, Yunnan, over an insignificant promise that terrifies me so that I’m writing THIS instead of THAT.

Not My Brother’s YMCA

Posted by :James Howden On : February 1, 2012
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Category: At First Glance

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I’m looking out the 9th floor window of the Salisbury Street (downtown) YMCA in Hong Kong. Actually, I’m in Kowloon, all part of the territory so proudly reclaimed by mainland China in 1997 from the British, but Kowloon is the part attached to the mainland. The black and silver, soaring, hugely titled buildings — Panasonic, Olympus, Epson — across the harbour are on Hong Kong Island, along with Kowloon the densely populated, high-rising part of the “New Territories” of HK. (By the way, in Mandarin the newly returned “Special Administrative Region (SAR)” is known as Qiang Kang, “Fragrant Harbour”. It looks reasonably fragrant on this bright afternoon.)

It’s a city that works, that is remarkably clean, one that genuinely enacts the concept of “mass transit”, moving incredible numbers of people efficiently and, at least in the district where we are, making walking a useful and do-able way of getting around. They’ve maintained, through the decades, a lovely downtown park with massive old trees and lots of water.

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Better Read Than Never: THE HELP

Posted by :James Howden On : January 24, 2012
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Category: At First Glance

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Amid the pampered comings and leavings in the lobby of a Chiang Mai hotel, and here on a sunny balcony overlooking the baking tourists by the pool in Krabi, I try to pretend I am not one of them. When I can’t simply enjoy warmth and leisure and good food, I am guiltily soured by this tourist business, and am too (self) conscious of the real “tourist trap”: the detachment from the serving class, the presumption that the too-visible disparity between their fortune and mine is at it should be. At its worst, it becomes a bland but bitter-edged condescension at the quaintness/ignorance/pathos/inconvenience of “these people”. These people. What a simple and toxic phrase – surely better than “these brutes”, “these savages”, but not so much different. These thoughts gain traction in a slippery tourist mind that is still digesting a jet-set reading of The Help.

Now, gentlemen! Don’t turn away, I’m talking to you,

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Jingle Jangled

Posted by :James Howden On : January 17, 2012
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Category: At First Glance

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Here’s the Educated, Middle-Aged Concerned Citizen, seeing another country and its troubled, yet pleasant people. What is he thinking as he walks along the crowded streets? How does he correlate what he sees with his experience of the so-called “developed world”, and the perspective gained through his study of education, human psychology, literature and yet more sacred texts? What’s on his mind? Let’s listen in!

Early in the mornin’, come along!
Listen to the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes song!
Catch a bowl of sunshine, here’s how you do it,
Whistle up an appetite and hop right to it!

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(Breathing Other Air)

Posted by :James Howden On : January 9, 2012
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Category: At First Glance

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BLURT 20:  First night in Chiangmai, ancient capital of Siam: warm breezes, friendly smiles, mango fruitshakes, drivers using brakes not horns. Thailand 4, China 0.