Regular posting will be delayed yet again as I will be in Taipei for the Global Initiatives Symposium at National Taiwan University. GIS is an Asian business student conference, modeled on the St. Gallen Symposium - I met one of the organizers when I went to SGS - except that its Asia focused and not Eurocentric like SGS is. It’s the first time Taida is putting this together, and I suspect they did not recognize the enormity of this undertaking when they began, but I’m optimistic that it will be just as professionally organized. This will be my first visit to Taiwan, and a welcome break from my summer of Stata.
qui tacet consentire videtur
wandering the wide world in search of wonders
Pyongyang Diaries: Escape from Yanggakdo
(Pyongyang station) The train station has a curious architectural style… ionic columns and an eight-sided pagoda-like tower.
As the train rolled into the station, I looked out the window and saw the sign above the entrance: 평양 (Pyongyang). Finally – the capital of the hermit kingdom. KPA soldiers herded us out of the train onto the platform, and down through a dark tunnel underneath the tracks. There were no lights, and it was too dark to make out the red script on the walls, but I had some idea of what revolutionary things they said. Only a few hours earlier that day, I had been in a similar tunnel at Dandong station, except on the walls there were advertisements. I was disappointed, because I really wanted to see what advertising was like in the DPRK.
In the company of women
(Wudaokou K-town, Beijing) The wrong question?
She’s very pretty, big sister said. She was, and had an unconventional charm, with the features of those pigtailed red-scarved proletarian heroines rallied from rural mountain villages in the middle provinces to hold up half the sky for the great helmsman. She was strong, productive, innocent – As if she stepped straight out of the kitschy Socialist Realism propaganda posters that adorn his dormitory room.
Wokai microfinancing China’s development
(Balinyouqi town, Chifeng prefecture, Inner Mongolia) The seamstress I interviewed had used her loan to purchase an electric sewing machine, boosting her productivity. I’ll post the interview transcript soon…
Dear readers, you’re probably aware I’m involved with a China microfinance nonprofit, but just in case you aren’t:
What is Wokai?
Wokai delivers an internet microfinance platform that allows individuals to provide Chinese microentrepreneurs with loan capital. Our organization acts as an intermediary in this process, transferring funds from contributors abroad to microentrepreneurs in China through our field partners. Watch our video presentation!
Happy Birthday, my friend
Please excuse my poor photoshopping skills…
NEW HAVEN, CT - “Love Story in Yale” (2009, SBS) is the long-awaited sequel to “Wharton Sonata” and “Tsinghua Spring (semester) Waltz“, starring Geoffrey See as the dashing and brilliant business strategy consultant, and Kim Tae-Hee as representative sample Yale girl.
Happy Birthday and Congratulations on getting into Yale! Through our five years of friendship and mostly-healthy competition 
I’ve been inspired by your ceaseless diligence, prudent foresight, deep compassion, elegant style, love of life and adventure, sheer determination, your exponential rate of accomplishments, and the humility you’ve held onto throughout it all. You’re one of my favorite people in the whole world. Here’s wishing you every happiness and success in the years to come! (incl. w/ hot Yale girls 
)
Five years of dramas
(Seoul Metro) There’s only one good reason to watch this drama, and it’s their preppy outfits. Well, okay, there are two, and the second one is not in the ad.
My grandmother took care of me for most of my childhood. She wasn’t aware of any Mozart Effect and let me watch hours and hours of daytime television with her, which back in the early 90s was mostly trashy soap operas on the state-operated Chinese-language channel. (Oddly, my Mandarin never improved very much) Due to the heavy regulations and high economies of scale in the industry, the state channels never faced any competition (outside of TVB imports), and as such they made some truly horrific pablum (they still do). In retrospect, this may have been why trashy soap operas are permanently seared into my psyche now.
Pyongyang Diaries: The Tourists
(Dandong station) The path to the Dandong train tracks was full of advertising (e.g. GOG sneakers). However, the equivalent in Pyongyang station had none.
I heard them chattering away even while getting through security screening at the Dandong station entrance. Thirty to forty (2 busloads worth) of middle-aged mainland Chinese people old enough to be my parents were clustered on hard plastic seats around the tour operator’s flag. I was the only ‘foreigner’, but thankfully I don’t look too different. Just younger. Hopefully if I kept my mouth shut, my crummy Mandarin and accent wouldn’t betray me.
Development with eyes open
(Beijing) She was there early every morning outside the subway stop.
Since I was staying with a friend who goes to the Foreign Affairs University, I had quite a walk every morning to take the subway to the Wokai office, and on the way there was a BOC branch office, and right outside was a covered area where homeless people congregated to play chess and chat. The one I noticed the most was this old man, who was always there reading a newspaper. He had a dog (everyone in Beijing has dogs, even homeless people!) and when I was walking back late at night from the subway, I would see them cuddled there asleep.
Return from Washington
(Metro station, Washington DC) Seems like I’m always chasing after missed trains…
In retrospect, it was unrealistic to think that I could do much reading or homework while attending a conference, much less running one, but things turned out fine on Monday despite having to skip lectures to catch up on sleep. I had a great time, even if it was a weekend with an average of four hours sleep a night.
Return to Washington, the 2nd
(Metro station, Washington DC) Making my way to the top just to be on the ground floor…
So I’m off to DC for the weekend to run a conference at George Washington University. The last time I was in DC, I never really got to see the interior of GWU (I saw Gtown, SAIS, and GMU), so this will be a new experience, and I get to see all my friends in DC again too. If only I didn’t have midterms next week and problem sets due on Monday, or I would be able to fully enjoy the conference. Conferences are best enjoyed during the summer… but that’s also when its hardest to take time off work to go.