The sound of heartbeats
Posted on 02 April 2009 by Guohua | 12 Comments
It’s really frustrating when I find myself struggling to speak good English, especially when I think about this: I started to learn English as a junior high school student in 1990. It’s 19 years now! Anything can happen in 19 years! But today, I still stammer or talk in a confusing way and nobody can understand me when I speak to native speakers on the phone.
I’ve had enough of this!
I want to speak really good English, like a really good native speaker.
Posted on 13 July 2007 by Guohua | 10 Comments
Narrow-mindedness might be a problem for people who don’t read history. Or, if they do, they might still have a provincial historical world view if their only history-reading experience has been in one single version of history, like history textbooks in Chinese schools. In both cases, they tend to be intolerant of other people who they think are “different”. And, by looking only inwardly, they run the risk of losing the historical threads where their own world fits.
Instead, if people understood the historical contexts in which the world has existed, they would have a much clearer and different view on almost everything. Reading history gives people a revealing historical perspective.
Posted on 05 July 2007 by Guohua | One Comment
I just returned home from a hot two-hour bus trip to Beijing Capital Library, where I handed back an English language history book 36 days overdue and paid 7.2 yuan in overdue fine. This amount equals 72% of the library’s card annual fee.
Every time I visit the library, I feel so good about being served by the government-funded institution because it makes me feel like a Chinese citizen being taken care of by the State. Wrong. The library is in fact financed by Beijing City rather than the State.
Posted on 01 July 2007 by Guohua | 5 Comments
Reading order of his novels: Digital Fortress, Angels and Demons, Deception Point, and The Da Vinci Code
Last night, I completed Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress, the fourth Dan Brown’s book in my reading order. His thrillers are characterized by a day or so time span during which his main storyline unfolds. Generally, his heroes and heroines have to wait almost the whole book before they can go to bed again (sometimes on different ones) after they get up close to midnight or in the early morning. One of his heroes Robert Langdon, in two thrillers, all starts with a rude wakening by phone rings at ugly hours and then checks his clocks, “groaning and dazed”, before reluctantly getting up.
Posted on 26 March 2007 by Guohua | One Comment
I placed an order for two box sets, one containing six Harry Potter books and the other four of Dan Brown’s novels. This order costs me 532 yuan (about USD 70). 
Why so sad? Because this means that I earn Chinese wages to pay for U.K. books: Too EXPENSIVE. Though the money will well match what I’ll get in return.
I’m the kind of people who like buying books more than reading them. More than that, I like owning books better than borrowing them from libraries. I look on books as part of my family, not as come-and-go guests.