Since we do listen to our voice mail, it’s a valid way to communicate with us. This month, we had a number of calls about April’s cover subject, Tom Friedman [“A Man of His Times”]. Friedman’s old friends, colleagues, and even rivals phoned us. Tom M. said his mother and Mrs. Friedman were old card-playing chums. Stephanie J. was a St. Louis Park High classmate giving her thumbs up, and Al E. called all the way from Washington, D.C., to say the story was “being passed around here.” George B. left the following message: “I’m glad someone finally pointed out how superficial some of Friedman’s arguments really are.” Ross K. contacted us the old-fashioned way–by email–to let us know that, in the year of Friedman’s birth, “It was Malenkov who replaced Stalin. There were a number of cold war hard-liners before Kruschev came along as premier.” That’s true. Kruschev did not become premier until 1958. But he was Stalin’s immediate replacement in 1953 as General Secretary of the Soviet–the top of the Soviet communist party.
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Has “bird flu” already arrived in one of the world’s most crowded cities?
The other morning an old man spent several minutes mumbling angry Shanghainese phrases at the two parakeets that hang in cages in front of my apartment building. A few of the old women who regularly congregate in front of the gate watched him with mild interest, but nobody seemed surprised by this behavior.
“Qín líu g?an,” said one of the more assertive women when I raised my brow in her direction. “Qín líu g?an.”
Bird flu. Bird flu.
For the last several months, many of this city’s roughly twenty million residents have assumed that a bird flu cover-up has already begun, despite government assurances that transparency would be the rule in the event of a Shanghai outbreak. This is, of course, learned behavior, acquired during the 2003 SARS epidemic when government under-reporting of thousands of infections resulted in large outbreaks that crippled Hong Kong and Beijing. Somehow, Shanghai, China’s largest city and its most powerful economy, managed to survive that period with fewer than twenty infections.
Regardless, several days after the parakeet incident, I was in Beijing, flipping through China Daily over breakfast, when I noticed a small, below-the-fold beige box packed with unusually small text. The badly camouflaged news was ominous: “A woman may have died of bird flu virus in the first such case in Shanghai, the city’s health bureau said yesterday.” Shanghai’s gossip mill is notoriously efficient, and within the hour I received a phone call from an American friend there who informed me of a reliable rumor that a wild bird market on Nanjing Road, Shanghai’s showplace shopping street, had been shut down and sealed by the authorities. A couple hours later I received another phone call, this time from a Shanghainese friend with the same rumor.
Two days later I returned to Shanghai and hailed a taxi to the Fengyang Road Bird, Flower, and Antique Market, where, I was told, wild birds had been seized by the authorities. The Nanjing Road location, as I knew it, was a low-rise mall that hawks antiques to tourists from nearby high-end hotels. What I did not know was that behind the clean storefronts is a dirty maze of stalls filled with ceramics and bonsai trees that sprawl northward, until literally spilling onto Fengyang Road. I wandered through this tangle, fruitlessly looking for remnants of wild birds. After a few minutes I was reminding myself of the perils of rumor.
Then, searching for an exit, I inadvertently stumbled into a tight lane where several intricately carved wooden bird cages hung empty and low over the pavement. At first I thought that I had happened upon a stall selling bird accessories, but ahead was a procession of dozens of cages, some stacked on the ground and some on boxes, and all just as empty as the ones hanging above me. Around the corner there were still more, some the size of tea cups, others the size of the little old ladies who ambled past them. Again, they were all empty. Men in dusty black suits sat around listlessly, smoking and looking a little lost. When I asked around to find out what had happened, nobody was willing to talk unless the topic was the price of bird cages. Whatever had happened, I could tell that the evacuation had been quick: Droppings and seeds still covered cage floors.
Afterward, I wandered up Nanjing Road and stopped in at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Last year, KFC admitted that its China sales had been hurt by rumors of bird flu, but in recent weeks the company claimed that sales were beginning to recover. The reprieve, however, looks to have been short-lived: On this Sunday afternoon, at one of many Nanjing Road outlets, the counters were nearly empty and the staff wasn’t even bothering to make french fries. Ordinarily, it would have been mobbed with families on their weekend outings.
Among the roughly fifty thousand Americans who call this city and its surrounding environs home, many seem to believe that escape will be an option if the situation becomes dire. The Shanghainese don’t have that luxury, however, and they mostly seem resigned to their fate. Two days ago, as I left my apartment building, I noticed that the two parakeets were gone. Where their cages had hung was a ragged, red Chinese knot that, I was told, would bring good luck. —Adam Minter
Mary Alice and Art Jacobson, of Bloomington, take The Rake to new depths—twenty-five feet underwater—in the Gulf of Siam. They jumped out of the boat at Sail Rock, about five miles off the coast of Koh Tao (Turtle Island), Thailand, and buried their noses in The Rake on the way down.
Here’s the whole story: Last week we vacationed in Thailand. Of course, we had to take our
Rake magazine along for the trip. But there was so much to see and do in Thailand that we started to run out of time to read the Rake. What to do?!? Well, on Saturday, Feb 18th, our very last day in Thailand, we had a scuba diving expedition planned. We were diving at Sail Rock which is about 5 miles off the coast of Koh Tao (Turtle Island) in the Gulf of Siam. Being practical Midwesterners, we decided to just take the Rake down with us and read it down there! These picture were taken at a depth of about 25 feet by our Divemaster, Steve Sissoon of Crytal Dive Resort, Mae Haad, Koh Tao, Thailand. We enjoyed FINALLY getting to read the Rake! And everyone on the dive boat was jealous that we had reading material down there and they didn’t!
Liz Benser, chef at Cafe Brenda since 1986 (!) was enjoying the Taj Mahal on Nov. 18, 2005, and decided to take a “Rake Break”. Liz spent earlly a month in India gathering culinary ideas. Interestingly enough, Dan Buettner (on the cover) is a regular diner at Cafe Brenda. Liz will celebrate 20 years of working for Brenda in 2006 and is looking forward to a new restaurant as well.
The North Dakota article by Jennifer Vogel [“No. 1 Hard,” February] made me want to move back to North Dakota. After living in Minnesota for many years, I have listened to put-downs of North Dakota from fellow workers and friends. But I have always taken it with good humor. After all, most of these people went to a school with a rodent for a mascot. I feel fortunate that I have lived in both North Dakota and Minnesota and it is sad to see what is happening in small towns and rural areas in both states.
Regarding Clinton Collins’ March column [“Who are you calling an ‘underperformer’?”]: You don’t have to go to Silicon Valley to find this point of view about U.S.-born Caucasian students. You can find it here at the U of M. I am a research faculty member in the Division of Biostatistics, School of Public Health. For fifteen years now, a substantial majority of our students have been from mainland China. The same is true of every biostatistics and statistics program in North America. I know of no instances in which a biostat or stat student from mainland China has returned after graduating, so North American junior faculty are now also mostly Chinese. With our foreign students from other countries, this means our native-born U.S. students are a distinct minority. Now, I think this is great. First, our admissions are not competitive, so our foreign students aren’t displacing anybody, and plenty of biostat jobs go begging, so they don’t take jobs from anybody. Second, because they stay here after they graduate, China is essentially exporting its best technical talent to the U.S. Personally, I like mixing with foreign students and I’ve gradually become more and more interested in Chinese culture, to the point where I’m studying Mandarin at the U, playing in the Minnesota Chinese Music Ensemble, and marrying a woman from Taiwan. However, there is some sentiment that our Chinese students are of higher caliber than our native-born students. A U.S. citizen with an M.S. in Biostatistics foregoes a lot of income in the four or five years it takes to get a Ph.D. Also, ours is not a first-tier biostatistics program, so the better native-born students tend to go to, say, Harvard or Johns Hopkins. Therefore, we need to cut our native-born students some extra slack–exactly the attitude Mr. Collins found in Silicon Valley high schools. My own experience supervising M.S. and Ph.D. theses is not consistent with this argument, and this view is by no means universally held. But it’s there.
I have been in the organic-food industry for over thirty-seven years. I have been a retailer, wholesaler, producer, manufacturer, distributor, and IT guy for the largest organic network in the U.S. I will not attempt to repudiate your claims in “Trust but Verify & Serve with a Light Burgundy” [March], although it is very tempting, some are so ludicrous and the logic so ill conceived. I am sometimes asked why organic food is so expensive. I reply, “Why is conventionally raised food so cheap?” The premium prices that some organic growers are paid are merely the prices that every farmer should receive. We are still losing farmers. We are still consolidating farms. Folks are still abandoning rural America after graduating from high school. We pay the lowest percentage for our food of any civilized nation, but no one ever discusses the subsidies that are built into the conventional agriculture system.
In your review long ago of Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King [the Broken Clock, December 2004], you suggested to bring “plenty of nerd repellent.” Do you know where I might be able to purchase some effective nerd repellent? I live in a backward state called Illinois where the inmates are running the asylum, so to speak. Social norms have been reversed and nerds have been able to focus their anger and frustration to repress anything that is cool. Nerds have banded together to give the appearance of coolness in their social cliques, but really they just create jealousy through exclusion. They then pass off this aloofness as coolness and convince the suckers in the baby boom generation that they are actually cool and prestigious thereby gaining access to all the best jobs and exclusive clubs and such. Now you know what I know, I can only pray that I make it through the night and I am not taken out by some nerd gestapo.