Once a year, the birthday. Thank you all my friends for the greetings and gifts! And thank you, mom and dad, we had a very good and warm home dinner tonight. Even know that you may will never look back to this post to see all of these 
Last but not least, show-off time:
What’s the headline and hottest topic of this week throughout China? Boycotting the Carrefour and LVHM will be the top one and with fulmination from commentator of CNN on the heels. All of a sudden, unprecedented patriotism blows over our country. Without saying that dozens of duplicated mails spammed my mail box summoning every Chinese stop going to Carrefour or buying LV luxuries. The overall reactions remind me what happened after that incident around 9 years ago, if any one could still recall it: our embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia was bombed by NATO. Our citizens were pissed off by U.S severely at that time, also with lots of protests followed up. And this time, we were hurt again. Exactly like what we had suffered times before. But again, what they planned to show their loyalties of this country is very kind of self delusion. Even quoted by some of my colleagues was “cheap patriotism”. Like some one suggested to abandon the shopping cart with full of ice creams near a warm place to waste them by melting, such a naive and stupid statement!
Normal citizens are everlasting toys and pieces on the chess-board in eyes of politicians. I do believe this was not the first time that so what we called “western media” maliciously attack China. But why this special time our government jumped out in a fury and keep lodging representations for those insults? As nowadays, voices of dissatisfaction to government’s policies on controlling the inflation, dropping of the stock prices are getting louder and louder. The government needs to find a channel for releasing the potentially dangerous emotions to itself which will finally lead to a power to overthrow the regime. Especially in China, as so many dynasties were vanquished by their own people instead of invasions. No matter CNN or Carrefour they are only imaginary enemies can be made use of. Then our people will zero in on the “western enemies” together with the anger of disruption of Olympic Torch Relay.
Recently I read Bo Yang’s masterpiece “The Ugly Chinaman“. He noted that there was a priest concluding the very slowness of Chinese revitalization after the World War II. He pointed out its a vicious circle between the Chinese government and its citizens. The government was constantly busying on levying. It only served for a small group of potentates. They didn’t really care about most rest of Chinese. Normal chinese people were exploited and can hardly dispute. All of these were miserable but repeated again and again.
Definitely we shall at least love our country, that’s the very first prerequisite as a Chinese. There are lots of ways to show the faith. Just keeping ourselves away from mouthpieces if we need to think independently and take right judgements is probably one important step to get closer.
“That’s life”. It was a popular phrase which has been quoted by young women in modern cities like Shanghai. But right now I’m using it to illustrate my normal and vacillating lifestyle. It wasn’t all romantic.
Now I am in a urge to write down something after I’ve dropped off my blog life again two or three months ago. The original stimulation was a result of reading my friends’ spaces. They have their lives and so do I. Those friends I seldom meet or never meet again since they resigned their jobs or I did.
But it’s of fun to peek at some other’s life occasionally. Although you may also criticize that I am in the end a lonely dummy. Never mind.
Bring back to the topic about my life. Yes I did something besides sleeping and eating. Let’s start from yesterday. I went together with Yuki to an alley near SuZhou River next to the Shanghai Railway Station. The Mo GanShan Road. If you’re a native Shanghainees like me, you won’t be very shocked by the first impression: a ruin and shabby street, not much different from what you can get just near the central station. But don’t defend yourself from it. After walking for another 200 meters or so, we’ve again impressed by something, but no longer the garbage treatment forge. Instead, they were beautiful graffitis on the wall. I did believe that they represented the very high levels of skills in China. They were crafted artistically subtle. At the same time, both sides of the road were occupied by small galleries which are free of charge. I have to admire that I weren’t really tuned into those mostly abstracted arts, like pieces from Yayoi Kusama, an artist unfortunately suffering mental disables.
As the centre of this road and it’s where the fame comes from is one abandoned manufactory building. Now almost every small workshop room in it was moded to a gallery. The area is called M50, named after No.50 of Mo GanShan Road. That’s exactly what you couldn’t expect: artists, visitors and fashioned gentlemen and ladies congested in a far less notable alley.
One thing astonished me was it seems this road is more famous among foreigners, they treat it as a kept land for weekend. Every gallery you can find more of them than local citizens. We native people are more busy on strolling around in business streets and shopping malls for weekends in parallel. In respect of arts, as usual, we’re still minorities.
Then looking back into last week. Several ripples here:
I bought my colleague a new Nokia E51. A really impressive gadget! Fell in love with this black steel and thin like a candy-bar handset. I’m seriously considering to get one as a substitution of iPhone. Also there are some side effects recently on S60 based models on their certificate hardships.
Secondly, another gadget related news was I got an IBM UltraNav USB Keyboard. It works perfectly with my MBP with the help of a handy plugin called Remap4Macbook which solve the problem that the keyboard doesn’t have a native “Windows” key (in OS X, it will be recognized as Command key which is quite essential for every application). IBM’s laptop keyboard is probably the most comfortable keyboard I’ve ever used from the T40 era. It’s more elastic and with snaps when you typing. As a comparison, Mac’s keyboard is too soft although I’m very much like its illuminated sensor at night.
