August 13, 2009: From the New York Times:
American Graduates Finding Jobs in China
BEIJING – Shanghai and Beijing are becoming new lands of opportunity for recent American college graduates who face unemployment nearing double digits at home.
Even those with limited or no knowledge of Chinese are heeding the call. They are lured by China’s surging economy, the lower cost of living and a chance to bypass some of the dues-paying that is common to first jobs in the United States.
“I’ve seen a surge of young people coming to work in China over the last few years,” said Jack Perkowski, founder of Asimco Technologies, one of the largest automotive parts companies in China. “When I came over to China in 1994, that was the first wave of Americans coming to China,” he said. “These young people are part of this big second wave.”
One of those in the latest wave is Joshua Arjuna Stephens, who graduated from Wesleyan University in 2007 with a bachelor’s degree in American studies. Two years ago, he decided to take a temporary summer position in Shanghai with China Prep, an educational travel company.
“I didn’t know anything about China,” said Mr. Stephens, who worked on market research and program development. “People thought I was nuts to go not speaking the language, but I wanted to do something off the beaten track.” Two years later, after stints in the nonprofit sector and at a large public relations firm in Beijing, he is highly proficient in Mandarin and works as a manager for XPD Media, a social media company based in Beijing that makes online games.
Jonathan Woetzel, a partner with McKinsey & Company in Shanghai who has lived in China since the mid-1980s, says that compared with just a few years ago, he was seeing more young Americans arriving in China to be part of an entrepreneurial boom. “There’s a lot of experimentation going on in China right now, particularly in the energy sphere, and when people are young they are willing to come and try something new,” he said.
And the Chinese economy is more hospitable for both entrepreneurs and job seekers, with a gross domestic product that rose 7.9 percent in the most recent quarter compared with the period a year earlier. Unemployment in urban areas is 4.3 percent, according to government data.
August 3, 2009: Nicholson Baker’s evaluation of the Kindle
July 27, 2009: This July 21 New York Times Magazine article by Lisa Katayama features Japanese men who are enamored of anime characters. One such man, a thirty-something year old named Nisan, has a body pillow inamorata who he fondly calls Nemutan. Reports Katayama, “Nisan is part of a thriving subculture of men and women in Japan who indulge in real relationships with imaginary characters. These 2-D lovers, as they are called, are a subset of otaku culture— the obsessive fandom that has surrounded anime, manga and video games in Japan in the last decade.” While I don’t think that the feelings and behaviors associated with anime ardor ineluctably foster a baneful disregard for vital facets of a rewarding life, the emphasis on the pulchritude of the female characters as the sole source of love unfortunately parallels the emphasis on idealized concepts of female beauty in societies as “essential” for love. Society is bombarded with many kinds of beauty messages at the expense of the message that beauty is just one component of attractiveness. The importance of the development of characteristics such as proficiency, reliability, resolve, self-reliance, and humanity is overshadowed by the message that beauty is “the” trait women must have in order to attract a man and experience love.
