Wedding present for Jialing & Lenny, Part 2

This is the second entry in our series of wedding gifts to Jialing and Lenny - one every two months until their one year anniversary in May 2011.  Our second wedding gift to Jialing and Lenny (from July 2010) is about China.

Chinesepod

I first learned about Chinesepod about a year ago, and I've been regularly listening to their podcasts that seamlessly mix language lessons with discussions about modern Chinese culture.  Patrick doesn't like the guy who does beginner lessons, but we think anyone who wants to learn contemporary, conversational Chinese would enjoy Chinesepod.  Their lessons are like talking to a smart and lovable Chinese friend who also explains grammar and vocabulary.  You can try it out for free, and there are hundreds of audio lessons and online learning tools.

Out of Mao's Shadow

It wasn't until my 20s that I realized how little I knew about the history of my own home country.  When I was a kid, the Chinese adults couldn't stop talking about the "wenhua da geming", but they would never explain to me what that meant.  A year or two ago, I finally asked my dad about what he remembered from the cultural revolution when he was growing up, and he told me stories about mobs rampaging through the streets of Changchun, hitching a train to Shanghai on his own, and how Jialing's dad almost got himself killed when playing with gunpowder.

A lot has been said about how our generation takes social activism as a given rather than following onto the acquisitive, self-involved tendencies of the baby boomers.  Is this heightened social awareness also prevalent in China, the land of little emperors?  I don't know the answer, but the least we can do to help shape the future of China is to educate ourselves.  And then maybe, to find ways to support the people who are fighting for freedom and the empowerment (economic, intellectual, and otherwise) of the millions of marginalized people in China.

As a start, we both loved reading Out of Mao's China, which documents the history of China since the cultural revolution.  It combines an astute perspective of the broad historical forces with deeply personal stories.  It was especially poignant for me because I was reading it when I was visiting my parents last year right at the moment I heard about my uncle's death.  It made me think of him, and how the history of our family, and everyone's family we know, is so tightly intertwined with the history of China. 

Wild China

This BBC documentary series is available on DVD and can also be played instantly on Netflix.  It's one of our all-time favorite programs, mixing the wonderful style of the BBC's nature documentaries with eye-opening glimpses of cultural life outside of China's big cities.  We especially liked the segment about the cormorant fishermen pictured on the cover above.