Qing Wendy

              In order to help prepare my writing class for either the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) or IELTS (International English Language Testing System) I spent one lesson on strategies for writing timed essay questions.   I gave them the following prompt:   “Some people think that public health is a responsibility of the government while others think that people should be responsible for their own health. Discuss both sides and give your opinion.   Use specific reasons and examples to support your opinion.” The class is composed of 37 third year English minors at Xi’an Jiao Tong University.   Their majors range from mechanical engineering and clinical medicine to economic statistics and sociology.   They are minoring in English in order to read professional journals, communicate with foreign scholars and study or work abroad.   Naturally, since we are li...

Several of you have asked us for updates on life in China with the virus.   I’ve resisted because I didn’t want this blog to be about some crazy virus that has upended the world --   especially given the fact that neither Dave nor I are experts in this.   However, looking from a distance at what’s going on in the US, I often wonder why our experience was so different from my friends and colleagues in the US.   So, I’ll share, if you find it useful.   I also hope that this post will offer some sense that you can get through this.   Although my title suggests we’ve “crossed a bridge” and we are “post-corona,” there are still things that have irreparably have changed.   I suspect the same will be true for you all in the US. First, how are things now?   In our area, cases have dropped off significantly.  8 new cases in the past three weeks; none where we live.  As a result we are seeing a lot of relaxed rules.  No te...

“Dr. David, do you think my essay will make it?   What’s the prognosis?   Should we pull the plug?”   OK, so none of my students have actually said any of those things, but I could have dreamed    them the night before my first three-and-a-half-hour writing class this semester. I have had the good fortune to experience a second career during this “gap year” in China. This semester I have become a writing teacher!   Naturally, it is fun to compare and contrast my work as a writing teacher in China with that of a primary care internal medicine doctor in America.   There are some surprising similarities, and of course there are differences.   The word “doctor” comes from Latin and means “to teach”, so both professions share some common roots.   Practicing primary care internal medicine and teaching writing both have noble aims, cover a broad range of topics, are of key importance to the networks they serve, but are both undervalued. ...

In 832 AD the Tang Dynasty poet Bai Juyi* wrote the following poem about white egrets: White Egrets Forty years and not yet completely in decline; Nothing more to worry about than a few fine white hairs. Why then, at the river side, does a pair of white egrets worry not, when they have nothing more than a dangling thread on their heads? In this short poem, the poet makes the comparison between himself and the birds. Both have white hair. The birds don’t lose sleep over their aging: Why should the poet?                                                                 (*Note: the poet’s name: Bai means “White” in Chinese) This connection between the natural world and humans reaches deep into Chinese history and the literary tradition.   It therefore is hard to understand the seeming deep divide between t...