Lijia Zhang's Blog, page 25
September 23, 2021
China’s legal system is failing the victims of sexual harassment
Xuanzi, the face of China’s #MeToo movement, lost her landmark case against a star presenter. I was so disappointed and angry. I totally believe in her story – she got so much to lose and so little to gain, but not the judge. Here’s my call to change the legal system that slants towards the alleged sexual aggressor
September 8, 2021
Romania
The Palace of the Parliament and the residence of Nicolae Ceaușescu
As someone who has grown up in a socialist country, I am naturally interested in communism and Communist leaders in other countries. While in Bucharest, I had a guided tour to the Palace of the Parliament, a Communism themed tour in town and I visited the former residence of Nicolae Ceausescu.
The Palace of the Parliament, also known as People’s House, is the seat of the Romanian Parliament and the second largest administration building in the world, after Pentagon. Constructed over 13 years, the building is in Socialist realist style, mixed with modern Neoclassical architectural elements.
Ceausescu launched the project, after being inspired by his trip to North Korea. To implement it, a large section of the old town, including churches, residential buildings and factories, were destroyed and 40,000 people had to be relocated. Familiar story？
To this day, the state has not released the precise cost of the building. The common belief was 3 billion USD at the time or 6 billion in today’s term, which makes it the most expensive administrative building in the world.
Cost was obviously not the concern of the former dictator. His family’s mansion in Bucharest doesn’t look like so opulent from outside, but it houses 80 luxuriously rooms decorated with chandeliers, Murano glasses, marbles and paintings, as well as a swimming pool, a solarium, a cinema, a garden with exotic plants.
Oh, well, may his fate – being shot by fire squad on Christmas Day in 1989 – serves as a lesson to other dictators.
August 30, 2021
Hoffman
Lost in Translation, a memoir by internationally renowned writer and academic Eva Hoffman, was published in 1989, way before the best-selling movie of the same title. It has nothing to do with a fading American film star in Tokyo. Rather, it is a remarkable personal story of Hoffman, a Jewish Polish’s emigrant in America, where she lost and remade her identity in a new land with a new language. Anyone who has gained a new language or a new identity can relate to her story, beautifully and thoughtfully told. It has recently been published in China. I had the great pleasure to dine with Eva herself in North London. What an inspiring life. Armed with a PhD from Harvard, she served as an editor for the New York Times for years and has published books in both fiction and non-fiction to great acclaim. And she was also a highly accomplished concert pianist. Please do check out her works.
July 7, 2021
gentle approach
Here’s my latest piece, urging China to take a more conciliatory approach, avoiding the use of hard terms such as ‘cracking heads and spill blood’ 头破血流as president Xi warned hostile foreign https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3139964/china-gentle-giant-would-win-more-hearts-wolf-warrior-diplomacy
I hope this won’t land me in hot waters.
June 9, 2021
my oped on three-child policy
My take on China’s three-child policy. You see, gender equality matters – even to the fertility rate!
https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3136426/chinas-three-child-policy-how-get-women-board
May 18, 2021
May 14, 2021
My piece in SCMP about China’s banning of 6B4T, a brand feminism thatwishes to exclude men from their lives.
Is the idea of simply not wanting to have any relationship with men extremism? Here’s my piece about China’s banning of feminist groups associated with the so-called 6B4T, a brand feminism that wishes to exclude men from their lives.
May 9, 2021
St. Katherine Docks
London is a great city teeming with history. I am slowly getting to know it.
Today I had a guided tour to the St. Katherine Docks and Tower Bridge. It lies on the North Bank of river Thames, immediately downstream from the Tower of London and Tower Bridge. Opened in 1828, it served as one of the commercial docks that made up the Port of London. The expanding empire in the beginning of the 19th century as well as the Industrial Revolution generated massive amount of trade that passed through London, hence the construction of St. Katherine Docks. The name came from the former church and hospital of St. Katherine’s by the Tower.
The St. Katherine Docks were badly damaged by the German bombings during the Second World War and the area remained derelict until the 1990s.
It has now been re-developed. Today it is a trendy area, featuring cool restaurants dotting around the marina, office buildings and modern housing complex. You can still find a few reminders from the past, such as the Dickens Inn and the original wheel mechanism that forms part of the modern drawbridge.
May 7, 2021
Coincidence
Some coincident is so amazing that if I write about it in a novel, it would sound implausible. So I knew my older daughter May/Mei would get a chance to read for a British Library literary event. I didn’t expect that it would have anything to do with China. And it turned out that she was asked to read a poem by Qiu Jin, China’s first feminist. Guess what? I am writing a historical novel inspired by Qiu Jin. What a coincident! Maybe an omen?
Here’s the link to the event. You can watch it in the next 24 hours. If I do say so myself, Mei did a fine job!
April 3, 2021
a canoeing trip
Spring is here and I feel so alive! This Good Friday turned out to be a really good Friday when I had my first outing – a canoeing trip along the canals in Ash Vale. What a sweet delight to be on the crystal clear water! The sun was smiling gold; birds were circling under the blue sky – plenty of them as there’s a nature reserve by the canal, and goose and ducks are swimming about. In the bright light, the water sparkled like fish scale. Loved every minute of the more than 3 hours trip.
