November 2013 Newsletter
As I write these words, I am sitting in a hotel in Beijing, China. I am about to teach the second day in the first of a pair of seminars I am offering here. I’ve got about forty students. Many are now friends and familiar faces from my previous visits to this country. When I was a kid, I thought China was another planet. Times change: The concerns of my students here are not so different from those of people in my classes in America, or anywhere. And maybe I am not so different from them either: For one thing, I ate breakfast with chopsticks this morning! I did that while reading about the US government shutdown on my Android smart phone.
When I was a kid, if I had seen a picture of my future self holding a smart phone, I would have thought Star Trek had come true. To say I am living a life that my grandparents could not have imagined understates it. I am living a life that I myself could not have imagined not so long ago. And nowadays “not so long ago” might as well mean the Late Jurassic. That’s true for me, and also for my Chinese friends and students.