Oddly, I've just had a cluster of Mandarin language stuff hit my inbox, in the form of two useful web resources and one fascinating (and inspirational) bit of research.

Resource #1:

Professional Mandarin tutor and Chinese translator Samuel Chong, from Beijing and Los Angeles, has provided a list of adoption related phrases in Mandarin Chinese. They're mp3s and they're free.

Yes,... more

Somehow, another year has passed and it's the festival of the Autumn Moon, celebrating the one day of the year when Cheng-Er (or Chang-O, or Chang-Ngo) can come down from her prison on the moon. It's also the day before the festival of Sukkot, the Feast of Booths.

I was thinking about this lucky coincidence while reading this story about two... more

Every so often, I play the "What If...?" game. I think, in part, it's because I grew up reading comics - or, well, more like listening to friends tell me about the comics they were reading, because buying comics wasn't really on my parents' list of things to do. Forbidden fruit. Or, as "What If..." comics would have it: "The road not taken!" This series, in particular, took familiar characters like Spider-Man and placed them in subtly... more

Traveling to China? The future seems to be arriving there in some pretty spectacular ways. I mean, more than just the kind of future you see in a child's eyes - I'm talking about the kind of future you used to see in movies with the number "2000" stuck at the end of the title.

No ordinary Olympic pool.

Like, for instance, you have to see the pool they've built in Beijing. It's like a mad hybrid of Roger Dean... more

The perfected person penetrates infinity with a wonderful mind, and the finite world can't stand in the way. He absolutely dedicates his ears to listening and his eyes to seeing, and neither sound nor color can hold him back. Is this not because he leaves the emptiness of things in ordinary reality, so these things can't affect his innermost mind?

Thus, the sage uses his true mind. He is in agreement with li (principle or propriety), and there's no obstacle he can't overcome. He sees the transformation of all things and clearly understands that... more

I like reading stories about Chinese adoption... but I also think it's important for traveling families to keep up with what's going on in China right now, and for families at home to know what's going on with Chinese people that they (parents and children alike) might be running into or looking up to.

So here are a few of those stories, fresh off the wires:

The Cincinnati Post reports on teenagers from America returning to their birthplace in Changzhou. Funny, my first reaction to that is: maaan, teenagers. I'm so dooooomed! My... more

I'm a big advocate for adoptive parents learning Mandarin - even just a few words (which is all I know) - in part because it makes the process of being in the country for the first time easier, but also because it makes going back later in your kids' lives easier, and, most importantly, it's kinda fun, too.

It's hard enough dealing with official paperwork and anxiety over small, new, hungry human beings without having to wonder about what strangers are telling you when you bump into them in the street. In general, the best tools for picking up your first few words... more

As if a person who has become intimately involved with China (as adoptive parents and parents-to-be do), the drums are continuing to rise in volume somewhere in the background. "Is China preparing for war with the U.S.?" the articles ask (and more often than not, the answer is yes - and, in fact, in the case of the one behind that link, the war has already started, just not with guns).

This,... more

Faithful readers of this space will recall the tragic plight of the baiji, the Yangtze River dolphin, that isn't around any more to complain about the noise and bustle of modern industrial China. Before adopting son (son!) last year, we took a river cruise. It was gorgeous, memorable, gave an unforgettable perspective on ... more

By now, you may have heard about the Russian government's latest goofy idea: Let's celebrate conception day!

It's funny, you see, because people are being told by the government to take a day off work and have sex. In order to make more babies, because this lack of... more