Pooh Lesson

Paul sent me a cartoon about Pooh's philosophy towards life. It makes me wonder why I did not think about it sooner in my life. Maybe that's why I felt frustrated most of time.

天下無不散之宴席

On hearing Sue and Jim are retiring at the end of the year, I cannot help recalling the happy working environment at Dianying xinzuo in the mid-eighties and DIALOG in the mid-nineties. Most of Dianying xinzuo fellow editors were dispersed to the four corners of the earth to seek further education and a brighter professional future, whereas DIALOG colleagues were either laid off or quit after the company was bought twice in less than three years, and finally left California. 

The past and present experience has re-confirmed the truth in 天下無不散之宴席, i.e.,  All good things must come to an end. There is an end to everything.

Resilence Show Coming Down at Cruzio

14 August 2013 was a busy day for Paul, working, attending his long waited lecture by Hitoshi Murayama. In the late after he took down his 30 art works from Cruzio, and got ready for his China-India show at 2014 PVAC (Pajaro Valley Arts Council) with other 5 local photographers.


The show at Cruzio is a success, getting lots of attention from media and friends. I am glad that our May New York reunion intertwined and inspired the whole event.

Hitoshi Murayama at Rio Theatre

Yesterday 8:00 pm, 14 August 2013, Paul and I went to a lecture entitled Quantum Universe by Yotoshi Murayama at Berkeley and University of . It was quite an adventure for me to experience the community's zest for dark matter and dark energy. The whole theatre was packed; all tickets were sold out before the lecture. After the lectures, the audience were limited to only 10 minutes' Q&A.

Murayama's lecture was focused on a number of questions, with a predominant emphasis on where we came from. His saying that we are from star dust seems to be kindred to religious interpretation of our being from dust to dust.

Murayama is an extremely good presenter of a gigantic topic, familiar with his subject areas and his audience, old and young. He has introduced us to some well-known scientific experiments being conducted in Switzerland and Japan.

At a quantum or personal level, I was reassured that our sun would have a collision in 4 billion years. It has always been a childhood scare of mine ever since my next door friend told me that the world would explode soon. As an extra bonus, we saw the long time-no-see Ling at the entrance and sat together through the lecture.

Resilience Show at Cruzio

Santa Cruz Sentinel Art Editor Kirby Scudder published his article on Paul and his new show in the section of The Guide, entitled Photographer Paul Titangos captures images of courage in new show 'Resilience'.

The exhibit is to opened tomorrow evening 6-9 pm at Cruzio, as part of First Friday Santa Cruz for June 2013. Dedicated to human resilience in general and New Yorkers in particular, it will continue to be on display through months of June-August. The following is an interview by Kirby Scudder on NPR's KUSP.

Reunion at Atlantic

This morning, Paul and I arrived in New York the second time this year. We were soon picked up by Yvonne and her husband. We are going to stay with them in Brooklyn today and leave for Atlantic City tomorrow mid-morning.

It will be a true reunion for all of us. For the first time, Paul will see my college mates of 35 years ago, even though only half of us will gather in New Jersey. Th other half are in China either working or engaged in their projects.

In March 26, 1975, 600 of us were selected to study English, French, Japanese and Russian by three universities in Shanghai. There were two grades before us. Two hundred students went to Congming Island, east of the city. I was one of them. For three and a half years we stayed on the island. Some planted rice, cotton, and wheat. Some grew vegetables, and raised pigs and goats. Still some manned the kitchen to feed us with our home-grown vegetables, rice and pork.

In addition to farming, we studied our selected languages, with the ratio of 1/3 the first year, 1/2 the second yeah, 3/1 the third year and full time the fourth year. Being Class 3, English was our major (Classes 1-4 were English, Class 5, French, and Class 6, Japanese). We never finished the 4th year.

With the fall of Gang of Four, the temporary education system established by the radicals was forever replaced by a more permanent one, i.e., high school graduates take entrance exams and go to universities, instead of having to farm or being factory workers for two years, before they could be eligible to become perspective candidates.

In the new era, our hybrid experiment also failed as a regime change. Some classmates might not understand it then, they felt resentful towards our instructor, who in fact was a victim of time himself. A lot of water has passed under the bridge; we have been scattering along the two sides of the Pacific. Now we are going to meet and time will stop for us for a while.

Before our reunion, we are going to see Hui, Ying & Mama for a dinner in Brooklyn this evening. I am so happy that Hui's plan worked: Ying happens to visit home at the moment.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

This coming Sunday will be 2013 St. Patrick's Day. It is reported that on Saturday, March 16 at 11:30 am, San Francisco will hold its annual parade, with 100,000 revelers beginning from the corner of Market and Second Street to Civic Center. One of the paraders will be no other than PennyApple.

Courtesy of Lee Anne, we can see that PennyApple has already started to sip her beer. She cannot wait to observe Saint Patrick's Day, the date when St. Patrick died in AD 460 on March 17. As the patron saint of Ireland, or "Apostle of Ireland," St. Patrick is the primary patron saint of the island.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Reading Grapes of Wrath in the 21st Century

During the 2012 Holiday Season, I listened to, and then read John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath in anticipation of the Santa Cruz Big Read, which inspired me with the following book review posted in SCPL Staff Picks.

According to Steinbeck scholars, the Grapes of Wrath is the most thoroughly discussed novel in 20th century American literature. But a reading in the 21st century can enable us to have deeper discussions, such as the practice of bank foreclosures and their aftermath. Lured by the promises on handbills, the foreclosured Joad family took Route 66 to come to California from Oklahoma. Their hope to make a decent living was soon dashed by California farmers’ obsession with finding the cheapest labor to assure maximum profit. As one of the governing rules of the free market, it caused the oversupply of labor when the Dust Bowl swept across the prairie lands in the 1930s, a phenomenon not unlike 1849’s Gold Rush and today’s fragile globalized economy. During the process, much of the established infrastructure has been sold or destroyed, from farming to manufacturing, from banking to information services and technologies.

In addition, the book dissects some weakness in human nature, i.e., self-preservation and self-protection in the face of threatening competition, thus the antagonism between the haves and the have-nots, and the affluent locals and the Okies. The government aid in the form of Weedpatch Camp, a New Deal agency, was simply too little to help numerous displaced and needy migrants. The traditional trust in family as a helping unit became unreliable. Poor migrant families came to the painful realization that they could get help only from their fellow poor migrants. But such a realization is only relative, for there will always exist a new conflict between early settlers and those who arrive later. Even in the case of the Joad family, they enjoyed a temporary superior status on a cotton farm, “The Joads had been lucky. They got in early enough to have a space in the boxcars. Now the tents of the late-comers filled the little flat, and those who had the boxcars were old- timers, and in a way aristocrats.”

The Grapes of Wrath is a powerful reading, especially in its portrayals of hardy but resourceful characters like Tom and Ma, so as to provide us with glimpses of hope. Confronted with a penniless future, the Joads and Wainwrights celebrated a new union for their son and daughter. After the mourning of her stillborn baby, Rosasharn lost no time nursing back another human life.

Centennial Celebration of Grand Central

This Friday, 22 February 2013, marks the centennial anniversary of Grand Central.

Grand Central is not an unfamiliar place to our family, since both my sister's and brother's families reside outside NYC, with several family members working and studying at Cornell.

Right after Sandy, we rode the train to have a 38-year reunion with two of my former classmates at East Japanese Restaurant. Paul shot many memorable photos before and after. Later we visited our big niece in her lab at Rockefeller University. As we had to go home, our niece accompanied us all the way to Grand Central, by using all side streets and alleys. We did not have wait for long for our express train the way normally passengers had to. With our niece's precise calculations, we only had two minutes before the train was leaving for Croton-Harmon Station.

The permanent scene of people waiting and boarding at Grand Central and other stations is best described by NPR's photo show.