The news is out. Hong Kong's fertility rate is now under 1%.

My wife once returned to Hong Kong for a visit after living abroad for over a decade. She went to meet many old friend and many childhood places for old time's sake. She made a remark that the kindergarten she went to has now become a senior home. In a city where things are eternally in flux, few people would have raised an eyebrow about this change. I, however, laughed hysterically because I see too much irony there. A kindergarten has turned into a senior home, this is probably the best epitome of the aging of population in Hong Kong.

The population pyramid of 2006, published in the Demographic Trends In Hong Kong by the Census and Statistics Department, look more like a wacky diamond than a pyramid. Few people talk the issue of severe population ageing, as least not as much their concern about stock price or real estate value. But it is a silent problem that only going to get worst.

What will the demographic of Hong Kong looks like in 30 years, a society with predominantly old people? How different it would be compare to the society 30 years ago when I grew up?

2007.12.28 comments

As a Peace Corp volunteer, American author Peter Hessler has spent two years in a remote part of Sichuan province in China as an English teacher. River Town is a book about this fascinating experience.

The town of Fuling on the Yangtze river is far from the bustling Chinese costal cities. He found himself and fellow volunteer Adam the only Westerners in this place where few foreigners have set foot in. This started a long process of adaption. It was frustrating initially. The English speakers found that it is difficult to function well in a Chinese city and they have always drawn too much unnecessary attentions. But over time, with much persistence and determination, he has picked up Chinese language. This opens him up to many wonderful dialogs and relations with local people, like his college students, his Chinese language teachers, local families, the kafkaesque communist officials and even desperated woman pursuers.

To most people, Fuling is just an unremarkable place and the people are nothing out of ordinary. But to Hessler, this is a place he has called home and they are the people he knows. In his eyes they all become very interesting. Everyone has a story to tell if only you show interest in them. With good knowledge of Chinese history and politics and a great understanding of Confucius value, Hessler has the ability to look beyond Western prejudice and see things in Chinese's perspective. This does not mean he admires everything Chinese, but he is well aware of the different value system and all the trade off between them. Thoughout the book you will find many great insight on China and Chinese through this his observant eyes.

On the personal level, I find Hessler's experience very inspirational. To immerse in and to discover a foreign culture and to associate with people from all walk of life, it is a life live to the fullest.

2007.12.18 [book] - comments

繼續談一下學習粵拼的心得，我對拼音掌握得不好，常常分不清正確的讀音。粵語裡面有oe和eo兩個音我便分不清。幸好用oe和eo的韻母只有六個，我便編了一個口訣來幫忙，就是「靴雙腳，居鄰出」。這六個字正好用了全部六個含oe和eo的韻母，

靴hoe1
雙soeng1
腳goek3
居geoi1
鄰leon4
出ceot1

這個口訣有點是《鄰居穿了鞋子出來》的意思。當我不肯定某字是否用那個韻母時，唸來看看是否跟其中一字押韵便知道了。

2007.12.07 [jyutping, chinese, language] - comments

前幾天開始應真練習粵拼，不過幾天已經很有成果，現在打一編長長的帖子已沒有什麼問題。以前用簡易倉頡，就算一百字之中懂打九十五個字，就是偏偏有三五個字特別難打，特別是一些筆畫少，但又不易分拆的字，真是絞盡腦汁也想不到怎樣拆。於是就是為了幾個字一編短編打了半天也打不成。現在用粵拼，固然不時會遇到不會拼的字，但是猜下猜下總會猜到。很少像倉頡會被某些字難到。現在練得多了就更得心應手，今天正是要用中文來寫這篇網志，以使學以致用。

現在的學習方法是這樣，我編了一個簡單的程式，可以把中文加上粵拼音標。然後我每天找一篇一二百字的文章標音後練打，除了一些難字以外我盡量避免查看粵拼音標，真的不懂才看。那幾個難字再記下來，明天再試打。這樣不用幾天已經掌握了粵拼音法。

2007.12.06 [jyutping, chinese, language] - comments

There is a saying that the Great Wall of China, an earthen fortifications stretching more than 6000km, is the only human-made structure visible from space. Is this a true claim? Unfortunately space tourism has not arrived yet, so we cannot fly over to verify it. But the next best thing, the Google Earth, is already here for free. Better yet, anyone can do an aerial survey simply from a home computer.

Let's go to Badaling(八達嶺), a mountain pass north of Beijing where all the tourists flock to see the restored section of the Great Wall. I have captured three pictures from altitude of 1km, 12km and 100km.

From the 1km picture, you can clearly see the wall and two square towers. The next picture is from 12km above, the cruising altitude of a 747 plane. The gray dot at the center is the park's entrance and a parking lot. The curvy line going from the lower side to upper left is a highway, not the Great Wall! If you look really carefully you can spot the Great Wall as a faint line along the ridge running from the lower left side to upper right side through the visitor's entrance. The Great Wall is already hardly visible from a 747.

Moving on to the third picture from 100km above, not quite from the space yet but from a low earth orbit. Not a trace of the wall nor the visitor's center is visible. The grayish area at the lower right hand corner is part of the Beijing metropolitan.

For comparison, let's do another survey on Beijing's Forbidden City. From 1km we can clearly see the imperial halls and courts. From 12km, the rectangular Forbidden City surrounded by a moat is a distinctly visible feature. Even from 100km, the Forbidden City still appear as a small pod in the middle next to a dark shape of the Beihai lake.

All these are really very logical. The Great Wall is perhaps 5 to 10 meters wide, most of them are now crumbling earth. The Forbidden City on the other hand, have a dimension of about 1000 meters by 800 meters. It is not a surprise that the Forbidden City is far more visible than the Great Wall.

Seeing is believing. The saying that the Great Wall is visible from space is unfortunately only an urban legend.

2007.11.30 [Great Wall, geography] - comments

Initially my blog was focused on technical IT subject. Overtime I have wrote less about that and more on general topics like travel. Today I will return to a technical topic about the Jyutping(粵拼) Cantonese romanization system.

I start off with the quest to learn and master a Chinese input method. Years ago I started with the Cangjie (倉頡) system. I never get much beyond basics because it is a difficult system to learn, let alone to master. Then I looked at pronunciation based system. I am glad to find out Cantonese based system is readily available. Out of the multiple romanization system, people seems to have gravitated toward the Jyutping system by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong.

So the next step is to get familiar with the Jyutping system, which is not trivial for me because I am weak in phonetics. It will be very useful if there is a service to annotate a piece of Chinese text with the pronunciation under each character. Unfortunately I can find no such software besides some dictionary that does it character by character. Instead I have decided to write one myself, as a naïve translation should not be difficult to write.

Now all I need is a table of all Chinese characters and its Jyutping, i.e. the Jyutping specification. I have spent days searching the internet and come out empty handed. Linguistic Society of Hong Kong themselves provides little more than a general description. It is a shame even some links to its description are broken.

The good news is I have finally found it from the Unicode Han Database, a place I have crossed many time but have not realized they have compiled the most comprehensive data on Chinese characters, including Jyutping and even Cangjie code. With the database here I am ready for business!

(2010-02-17 Thanks Helena for the heads up. The Unihan database format has since changed. The new download link is Unihan.zip. Some general description such as Unicode NamesList File Format are also available. )

2007.11.29 [jyutping, chinese, language] - comments

A few years ago after returning from a trip to México, I took much interest in Spanish language. I started to study on my own and make some good early progress. As I was quite fascinated by Latin America novelists, I took a bold step to order a copy of Gabriel García Márquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera" in its original Spanish. I only knew basic grammar and limited vocabulary at that time, but I have vowed to learn until I can read the entire novel. Just in case, I have also brought an English copy alongside.

All these years I have never put enough time into learning Spanish. The two books are collecting dust on the bookselves. Just now I have found out "Love in the Time of Cholera" has made into a movie. The movie review is quite bad so I won't bother with it. But it has reminded me I have the novel for a long time, which I have not read beyond the first page. This time I have finally started reading it.

How is it like to read a major novel in a language I only half understand? I have found a rhythm that is quite productive. First of all I do not want to use a dictionary to look up every word I don't understand. This way will be too slow and I cannot truly enjoy the story. Instead I am reading the English edition first, one paragraph at a time. Then I turned to the same paragraph in the Spanish edition and read it again. When necessary I go back to matching sentence in the English and read them side by side. Once in a while I will looking use the dictionary to learn a vocabulary or stop to learn a sentence. Other times there will be sentences simply too difficult for me and I will just resign and move on. I am happy to find I can decode 50% of Spanish this way without other aid. At the same time I can follow the story quite well. I am very attracted to the story of Dr Urbino and Fermina Daza so far. I am going at a pace at least five times slower than if I read the English alone. On the other hand, rather than speed through the story as I usually do, I am savoring every sentence by reading it at least twice.

In truth I mostly rely on the English edition to understand the story. I am reading Spanish with a training wheel. But what a fun trip that is. It is certainly more enjoyable to take a trip on a training wheel than to study in the classroom all the time.

2007.11.25 [book] - comments

I've posted a comment in response to Tim O'Reilly's blog entry The Other Side of China. It has summarized some of my viewpoint about cross cultural issue. So I think I will repost it here.

---

Right now the West have two opposing view of China. One is China as an enemy, an oppressive government full of hidden agendas to exploit the world and a threat to welfare that the West enjoyed historically. On the other side are people who are fascinated by the long and glorious history of China and are bullish that the industrious people will propel themselves to the center stage of the world. Obviously both side has elements of truth and neither of them have a complete picture. While I don't hold the negative view, I'd say there is merit on those views. Nor do I think people should idealize China because someday they will be disillusioned when they finally see China's limitation.

Having straddle different cultures myself I have formed some theory regarding these cross-cultural interaction. The opinion people make is often a reflection of themselves. A cynical person focus more on negative issues. An optimists focus more on the positive ones. I think the readers of Radar tend more to be optimists and thus will express more positive opinion than the general public.

An universalist see common value among people despite the outward difference. That's why Tim said "The Chinese are very like us". When one find such insight it can often strike a deep chord. I was so moved by Satyajit Ray's film Aparajito. As an urban kid, my life is as different from previous century's Bengali villagers as it can be. Yet I can totally connect the characters, especially with the scene when the mother reluctantly sent the boy off to city for education. There is a kind of love that is universal and transcend above superficial difference.

A discriminator (a poor term perhaps, I use it without any negative connotation) can sense a small difference between different cultures, like the motorcyclist's remark about "family vs. government". They often express frustrations because of the mismatch in people's thinking and expectation. But being discriminatory is not always a bad thing. Something the contrast leads to better self understanding. For example, this person may now realize in his culture the family plays a bigger role than the government, which is not necessary true in other country. This may never crossed his mind if not for this interaction.

These general ideas aside, I think it is extremely interesting to engage with China today because it is one culture undergoing a massive transformation, from impoverished to prosperity, from rural to urban, from isolated to connected. Not all thing in this transformation will be rosy. Nevertheless many new ideas will emerge and countless stories will need narration. I think this is an very interesting time in history.

2007.11.20 comments

I have a lot of fun with this Travel Map application. It allows you to mark on a map all the place you have travelled to. I have diligently checked off every town I have visited whether it is big or small. It ended up with just over 200 places so far! Well the number is really a little be inflated because I have check off dozens of small communities within two hours drive from my home in California. Still it is a fun exercise. [more...]

2007.11.01 [travel] - comments

Two hospitals in my neighborhood both plan to build a helipad on their roof to transport patients. This draw some very vocal opposition in the neighborhood because they think it will give off terrible noise. UCSF has done the best thing by running a test flight this Sunday. I have taken a shaky video below. This is captured near the new children's playground on Arkansas St using a simple Canon A570 camera. [more...]

2007.10.22 [San Francisco] - comments

We went to a free jazz concert at de Young museum's Osher Sculpture Garden. It was a great way to spend an lazy sunday afternoon, eating at the outdoor cafeteria in the beautiful garden while enjoying live music. [more...]

2007.10.21 comments

Just came back from a vacation from St Lucia. The sun and water is great. But it is a little crazy for me to bring my toddler son to the Caribbean island on a 14 hours trips over a total of 5 legs of flight. In anycase he did well on the plane and was asleep most of the time. We have a good time on the beach and going to boat tours. Our trip pictures are now online! [more...]

2007.10.12 [travel] - comments

After all these years living in San Francisco, walking and biking the Golden Gate Bridge no less than 30 times, I have finally make it to Battery Spencer above the bridge. On the Marin end of the bridge I rode my bike up the sleep slope to get there. The reward is a most glorious view of Golden Gate Bridge and the bay. [more...]

2007.09.23 [San Francisco] - comments

When I am planning for travelling, especially to some more exotic destinations, the discussion is often steered toward the question - Is it safe? The underlying concern is the place maybe crime infested or perhaps an active target of terrorism. To the more experienced travellers this is often rejected as an undue concern. The standard rebuff is New York and LA has a higher crime rate than that of the destination. [more...]

2007.09.20 [travel] - comments

The Bridge (2006)
Director: Eric Steel

The Bridge is a controversial documentary about the people committing suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. [more...]

2007.09.16 [movie] - comments

Last night Long Now Foundation has presented a seminar of the title Power to Save the World by Gwyneth Cravens and Rip Anderson. To summary its theme in one sentence - nuclear fuel is THE magic fuel that will save the world from destruction. [more...]

2007.09.15 [future] - comments

When I first started creating this website and my blog, I wrote most of the software on top of Apache myself. I want this to be a learning experience as a webmaster. A very good learning experience it is, I did not have to put in too much time as the software is rather simple. But overtime, things need touch up here and there. Some reorganization is needed to make it friendly to search engine. The layout and presentation also need some fine-tuning. The trouble of building my own website is these maintenance task tend to be deferred and piled up. [more...]

2007.09.06 [tech] - comments

About 150 km to the west of Guangzhou is a rural community known as the village of Tung's clan. This is my ancestral homeland, the place where my father was born and raised. Although he has left for Hong Kong with a few brothers and sisters when he was young, they still maintain strong connection and return regularly to the village. On the other hand I am an urban boy born and raised in Hong Kong. I known very little about the village besides the occasional stories from my parents. I have only make one visit when I was small. I remember very little about the trip beside an impression that the village is a dirty place. [more...]

2007.09.03 [travel, SE Asia 96] - comments

Yunnan 云南

From the border town Hekou, I took an overnight train to Kunming, the capital city of the Yunnan province. Unfortunately the sleeper tickets have already sold out. So I have to sit tight in the hard seat coach for 16 hours. Fortunately this train was not crowded and it turned out to be not as tough as I expected. This section of railway is one of the most scenic routes people ever built. The train twisted slowly along the beautiful canyons, going through many bridges and tunnels in this mountainous terrain. I was marveled by the scenery until the night has fallen. [more...]

2007.03.04 [travel, SE Asia 96] - comments

After much public furor about the relocation and demolition of the Star Ferry pier in Central, I have ridden the ferry to the new pier for the first time. People have staged protests as a last ditch effort to preserve the clock tower. Nevertheless the government have moved ahead and completed the demolition. [more...]

2007.01.30 [hong kong] - comments