Humbled by Henges

Every college or university has one. The ultimate cool guy. Girls want to be with him, guys want to be him, even professors love him. At my alma mater, Central, it was it was no different. His name was Josh Henges. He could have been an All-American at any state university, he had the Abercrombie model looks and the charm and personality that just gravitated everyone towards him, and yet he chose to come to Central to pursue a life of missions.
To me this was a huge deal. Here's a guy who looks like he just stepped out of a magazine and whenever he went around without a shirt, you were very conscious of just how much of a gut you were getting. You would need higher math to calculate the number of sit-ups you would need to do get a flawless torso like he sported effortlessly. By coincidence, I happened to wear the same cologne that he wore, and girls would tell me "you smell like Josh Henges." I used to double up on the cologne in hopes of attracting more female attention for just that very reason. He had all this and yet chose to come to Central, to devote his life to what God wanted for him. This blew me away at first as I could not comprehend why Apollo was choosing to come here, a 400 student Bible college rather than becoming the type of legend teen movies are based off at a state university.
He was very humble, always having a great sense of humor - and never believing he was any better than any of the rest of us. As time went on, we found out he was good at judo.
Very good.
My senior year at Central, he traveled to Australia to compete in some international competition. This made a lot of newspapers as a guy from Moberly was finally making news without it involving a police spokesman. As we graduated, I ended up in China and he ended up breaking hundreds of hearts as he got married and we gradually lost touch, keeping in contact sporadically through Facebook.
So this brings us up to tonight. Out of the blue he happens to randomly message me on Facebook and we talk for a bit. I find out he just won a world championship in judo at a competition in Ireland, after having won another competition in Germany. He is now a serious contender for the Team USA judo team in the London Olympics in 2016. To say that I'm honored to know the man is an understatement.
Then the conversation turns like this...(reposted here with his permission)

Dan: If you make the team, I'll be there. I don't care if i have to sell a kidney to get to London.
Josh: If I make it, I'll go halfsies to get you there. Out of all the people from Central, I'm most proud of you for what you're doing.
Dan: Thanks man, that's awesome. Why do you feel that way though?
Josh: You kept quiet, kept to yourself, got your stuff together and are kicking butt in the PRC.

Yeah, a guy from my tiny college who was the most popular guy to ever attend and is a world judo champion and quite possibly competing in the 2016 Olympics is proud of me.....I don't think I have been so thoroughly humbled and exhilarated in a long, long while.

Wild Swans

I just finished reading Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang.

It is quite simply, the best book I have ever read on modern Chinese history.

When I sat down with Wild Swans, I had no expectations but to be informed and entertained by what I hoped would be a good book. I read to gain a personal understanding of the world in which we live through accounts and examples given by others of things of past events. Never have I read a book that drew me in so powerfully and personally as Chang's Wild Swans. Wild Swans is epic in its historical backdrop moving untirelessly through the last century of China, roughly between the years 1911 and 1976, but this is no textbook. It's the story of the author Jung Chang, her mother, and her grandmother. It is through their lives that history unfolds and is exposed. From the end of Imperial China, through Japanese occupation, the Nationalist movement, the Civil War between the Kuomintang and the Communists, Communist takeover, Mao's Great Leap Forward starving tens of millions to death, the Cultural Revolution turning a national identity upon its head and breaking its collective spirit in the process, to Mao Zedong's death,I was constantly amazed at what I learned in this book about the capacity of the heart to perservere and triumph. I couldn't help but to feel ashamed at the provincial life we are handed in our land of freedom, and at once be thankful that we are so endowed. Jung Chang explores her family so deeply that her subjects, such as her stoic father, a true beliver in the Communist cause, and her grandmother, a veritable symbol through her bound feet of a time and place long gone, become indelibly etched upon the mind of the reader.

I would highly recommend this book to you. By the end of Wild Swans, you will feel you know China and Ms. Chang and her family intimately. If you have never been afraid to crack a book, let this fall into your hands, enter your heart, and enrich your life and in the end, thank Jung Chang for sharing her history (and the collective history of hundreds of millions just like her) with you.

Apples to Apples

Over the past few weeks I have seen a lot more apples being sold by the street vendors. I never thought much about it until today when Pastor Liu explained it at church. The word for "apple" is "ping guo" which sounds similar to the word for "peace" which is "he ping" (add in the tones and it does anyway). So by giving out apples, they're giving out "peace" for the holiday season and the start of the new year.

Door

For those of you who sent me Christmas cards, this is where they ended up.

Metric

A big thing to get used to here is the metric system. Temperature is fairly simple, zero is freezing and 100 is boiling, but length, mass, speed and volume are a bit trickier to wrap your mind around. I found this comic over at xkcd that makes a handy guide for converting to metric. I present it here for you, just click to make it bigger.

and the Parent of the Year Award goes to...

A two-year-old Chinese boy is thought to be the world’s youngest smoker.

Tong Liangliang was taught how to light up by his father, who believed the habit would alleviate pain caused by a hernia.

The toddler now smokes a pack of cigarettes a day and throws a tantrum if he can’t get his fix.

‘The father wasn’t aware of how serious the toddler’s habit became until the child began to increase the number of cigarettes he smoked per day’, China Radio International reported.

Tong received his first cigarette at the age of 18 months in a bid to reduce the discomfort caused by his hernia. The boy’s tender age meant he was too young to have an operation.

In 2005 a 37-year-old man submitted an application to the Guinness Book of Records, claiming to have smoked since the age of three.

The man was bidding for an accolade as the world’s youngest smoker, but his application was denied on the grounds that it promoted a harmful habit.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1195513/Is-worlds-youngest-smoker-Chinese-year-old-pack-day.html#ixzz17yDwr1p7

SantaCon is held in Beijing....right.

Maybe Santa should rethink his primary color....

http://www.upi.com/News_Photos/Features/SantaCon-in-Beijing/4306/3/

Foreigners dressed in Santa Claus costumes pose for a group photo on Tiananmen Square for SantaCon, an annual "Santa Claus convention celebrating cheer, goodwill and fun," in Beijing December111, 2010. Police on Tiananmen Square, surprised by the large gathering of people wearing red, ordered the group to disperse and leave the square while also harassing foreign journalists, detaining one. Tiananmen Square was under tight security as the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony was held in Norway.

Amber Goes to the Doctor

One of my best friends and former college buddy, Amber Hope, has followed me to China. We hang out a lot together and so thus, when something happens to one, the other gets concerned. She complained recently of a bad toothache that kept getting worse. She was resigned to the fact that she would wait until the next she got back to America, nearly four months away, to go to the dentist and get it checked out.

Today, I decided to go and see if I couldn't get the Chinese version of Orajel for her ("Improved Formula! 30% less anti-freeze!") None of the facilitators knew if it was possible to get or where to get it. So I went to the Chinese staff office.

Being the start of the new session, the Chinese staff, what limited few we haven't scared off yet, were up to their ears in preparation and most could care less at the moment. I asked one girl, Maggie, and she told me to try the clinic on campus. The clinic on campus is something of a mystery. It's on the far side, where not much else is, and surrounded by many many potted plants, cacti and other vegetation useful for homeopathic medicine. Apparently, the guy is really good as sometimes outside people will come to him for problems, but he speaks no English and I've only been in there one other time before, that was to see my boss get acupuncture. (Admit it, there are times that you'd like to see someone shove needles in your boss's face...)

Anyway, I go there and it's dark and locked. There is however a phone number on the door. Maggie calls the guy and it being around 5 o'clock, he promptly tells her he's having dinner with his family and his normal business hours are posted on the door, thank you very much.

That should have been the end of that, but a former student named Grace happened to be in the room at the time. Grace was Amber's student last session and really liked her.
"Amber is not feeling well? Sad! I love Amber! I will help you!" So she calls the guy another 3 or 4 times until the good doctor agrees to come in around 6:30. When he comes in, Grace and I go there and the doctor is "well, where's the patient?"

"I just wanted to pick up some medicine for her."

"You idiot, how do you expect me to give her medicine if I've never seen her! Go get her."

So I run back to the dorm where Amber (ignorant of all this going on) is in her pajamas and listening to some music and quite curious as to why I'm running around all evening.

"Quick, get your coat on and let's go!"

"What, huh? where? what?"

"Grace and I got the doctor on campus to come in to look at your toothache. Let's go. Now!"

"No, Dan....wait, I'll wait until I go to America."

"Oh no you won't. Not now. Let's go!"

"Ugh, I really wish you would have asked me beforehand so I could have told you no."

"That's precisely why I didn't. Now HURRY UP!"

We get to the clinic and the doctor looks at her jaw line and teeth and in about a minute and a half has determined that a former cavity has become infected and the infection is spreading out, hitting the nerves. He gives her some serious looking medication and prescribes how often to take it (3 times a day for this one, twice a day for this one, this one must be taken every six hours starting at 6am, etc) with Grace rapidly translating. After he's spent about 15 minutes describing all the medication and how much to take and when, he writes up the bill.

Nineteen yuan.

Two dollars and eighty-seven cents.
$2.87 covers an emergency call, examination, diagnosis, and prescription for three packages of medicine.

I love China.

new coworkers

We got in two new coworkers from America. Emily from Seattle and Michelle from LA. Both are recent college grads. It's always fun to see how new people react to our groups interactions when they first get here.