Can China Save The World?

HONG KONG -- A new issue of Time asks if China's roaring market can save the world by creating a "trickle around" effect for economies elsewhere. Of the biggest 10 economies, only China's is growing. The article raises some cautions about an economy dependent on government cash -- sound familiar? -- but notes that China is on track to overtake Japan as the world's second largest economy.

Beijing, before the crisis, was already rising, its global reach and influence expanding. As the rest of the world falters, that is truer than ever. China is not yet the leader of the global economy. But it's getting there.

Hong Kong is not the best place to see China's astonishing evolution. Hong Kong has long been a hustle-bustle city. To see the pace and scale of change, you must visit cities like Shanghai, where the equivalent of a Manhattan has been built in a decade, skyscrapers springing from rice paddies. Amazingly for such change, the architecture is good, a point made long ago by Rem Koolhaas.

Hong Kong nonetheless conveys the pulse of capitalism animating a culture and a nation. Here you see streets jammed with new cars, well-dressed business people crossing streets, jabbering into cell phones, ignoring the honks from impatient taxi drivers. You also notice a culture that sustains, side by side in jarring contrast, ultra modern subways and night markets where fortune tellers read palms and faces for signs of a person's personal and financial fate.

For the bird's eye vantage, Sally and I rode the tram to the top of Hong Kong island. Up there, the August sun broiled my skin. Smart vistors carried umbrellas as personal shade. A haze partially obscured the vista, but the image posted here shows one of the most amazing harbors in the world, China's second busiest in container shipping after Shanghai, only a relative blip in trade statistics 20 years ago.

This trip may be tax deductible

HONG KONG -- As an employee who does marketing, and whose employer logo must have drawn thousands of eyeballs just in today's walkabout in a targeted market, and whose primary purpose in crossing the ocean was to achieve said marketing objective -- I get a tax deduction out of this, right?

When Rosie's son met Angela's son -- on Frank McCourt

Long before "A Million Little Pieces" triggered new rules for memoir writing -- at least most or at least the best parts must be true -- "Angela's Ashes" charmed me and millions of other readers around the world. It was Frank McCourt's masterful telling of Angela's son growing up extremely hungry in Limerick, Ireland.

I loved that book, and put aside a lingering sense that much of it was just made up, especially the farcical description of Frank's arrival as a young man in New York. I put aside my scruples and just loved the story, the language and the blend of misery and comedy: it was pitch perfect.

McCourt, who died last weekend, told the story through the eyes of a boy who only partially took in the anguish and desperation of his mother. To feed her children, she even took to sleeping with a brutish relative.

"Angela's Ashes" provided a reminder to the descendants of Irish immigrants just why people left the Old Sod: it was miserable to have no work and no future. People had to leave. McCourt told that part with a special twist: his family came to America but returned to Ireland because his drunken father failed to keep gainful employment in the U.S. Back in Ireland, McCourt's father wandered off and Angela made do.

McCourt became celebrated as a great authority on all things Irish and his book tours brought out crowds of well wishing Irish Americans -- except for my dad who complained bitterly about McCourt and went to an event with me in Seattle just to tell him off. McCourt had committed the Unforgiveable Sin, in my dad's estimation: telling tales on your mother. And it was true: McCourt like many other writers had betrayed his mother for the sake of the story he wanted to tell. Or sell, as my dad might have said.

So sometime after "Angela's Ashes" came out, McCourt came to Seattle for an event at epicenter of all things Irish here, F.X. McRory's. I entered with my dad who began to chat people up about the disloyalty of McCourt and the outrage of his writing. The highlight of the moment was my conversation with McCourt in which he failed to hear my dad's running commentary.

I knew why my dad was angry. His own mother lost her husband (to an accident) and she raised her children during the Depression in Philadelphia with the meager wages she earned as a hotel maid. During this time, my dad and his brother Frank went door to door selling vegetables using a cart pulled by a horse named Peaches.

Though she never reached Angela's level of desperation, Rose McLaughlin Corr put two of her sons in a Philadelphia orphanage so they could be educated. One of those sons was my Dad, who remained close to his mother throughout his life, even after he settled in Seattle where he had met a former Potlatch Queen who had become a Navy nurse. As a little boy, I sat next to my dad when the phone rang and he got word that his mother had died. A few minutes into the conversation, I realized what he was hearing and suddenly I sensed the boy in the man beside me. The grief seemed to fill the room. To this day, I don't think I had observed another human being with such intensity.

So my dad just couldn't read "Angela's Ashes" as I had. And I understood.

Update: A former student of McCourt says he had an astonishing memory.

Just kidding?

Who's to say?

Touche, my French-food snob friends?

Pardon the clumsy headline, but I'm posting this on behalf of friends who have spent hours with me marveling at the superiority of all things French -- the beauty of their diplomats, the stylish affairs of their politicians, the cut of their clothes, their dogs in their restaurants, their gallant resistance to that recent unpleasant period of presidential leadership....and of course their vastly superior choices in food. The French are so wise, so superior, that their virtues are borne out in the very manifestation of their corporal being. You cannot find a single fat person in France. Not one. It's that miracle diet of merlot wine, bread and stinky cheese -- not a wrinkle of flab from Normandy to Arles. A miracle! Americans eat Cheerios. Why are they so dumb?

Some of this came even from friends who joined me in sneaking into a McD in Paris when pedestrian matters of finances, convenience, predictable quality and lust for a cheese burger, pronto, trumped social graces and upward mobility. (My all time favorite McD moment was in Madrid when I had tired of slow, disappointing Spanish food, especially sour butter, and just wanted an Egg McMuffin and OJ -- was a happy moment. I had another moment of comfort in Chang Mai.)

Not all of my friends betrayed their principles. One fought the pleadings of a pack of teenage boys who wanted to eat lunch at a McD in Killarney. He insisted on paying 10 times more for Irish food, which is really British food, with a side of historical grievances.

To be clear, I'm not a McD enthusiast. In Seattle, you'll find me at Dick's. In Cle Elum, it's McKean's Drive In. I cheered "Supersize Me," the movie. I try to watch my weight except when I'm within 100 yards of ice cream.

But to all my French-loving friends, may I refer you to a recent article in Slate that shows that the French themselves like McDonald's. In fact, McDonald's is wildly popular:

The company was pulling in over a million people per day in France, and annual turnover was growing at twice the rate it was in the United States. Arresting as those numbers were, there was an even more astonishing data point: By 2007, France had become the second-most profitable market in the world for McDonald's, surpassed only by the land that gave the world fast food.

It's possible the writer is wrong, brain damaged by hormone-injected burgers, shakes infused with fire retardant, and hyper-saturated fat fries. But it seems there's no denying many French love their McD.

Call this an end to civilization, a measure of how the bad drives out the good. But maybe my friends need to dial back their all-things-French hubris and acknowledge a few gaps in their arguments. But take some comfort, freedom-fry eaters. At least now that have a new point of cultural reference. We have the world's coolest president, hitting 3 pointers while wearing his wrap-around shades and karate chopping flies with one swoop. Yes we can!

Would you pay for something free? Of course!

I love the web for many reasons, including the charming mix of hucksters and customers.

Case in point: you are reading a public blog but a guy who has a Twitter account and a few thousand articles posted to the Internet on his byline.

And yet for just 95 cents -- for a limited time -- you can pay to get this information. Save time! Skip Google. Just enter your credit card number, expiration date, home address, security code on the back of the card that can no longer be read, home address, exact name on the card...and just click. In a snap, it's yours!

Exciting news! Nobody is reading what I'm writing

The New York Times reports that nearly 95 percent of blogs are fallow.

Here's the nut graph (old style journo jargon):

"According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

I find this presumptuous, coming from a newspaper read by less than one percent of readers in America, published by a company losing so much money they are selling space in their fancy new office building. Big shots dumping on the no shots. As old as ink. What would A.J. Liebling say? Piffle.

Fear not, fellow bloggers. Being read is over rated.

Better unread than dead.