When my parents and their five children first moved from Canton, China to Hong Kong in mid 1949, we moved into a second floor of an old, two-story house that was rented by my second maternal uncle whose family had been living in Hong Kong for some time. There were many people living in this house, with about twenty people after we moved in. There were eight in my uncle’s family, my maternal grandmother, the widow of my oldest maternal uncle, one or two step-brothers of my uncle, my uncle’s house-helper to help take care of the old, the young, and his large family, plus seven members of my family.
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View from the Balcony: Tale of Two Cultures and Two Countries – Part III
February 2011
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A Comprehensive Review of Health Benefits of Qigong and Tai Chi
December 2010
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On and off I have written about the health benefits of Taiji [1] and Qigong. Recently an article “A Comprehensive Review of Health Benefits of Qigong and Tai Chi” was published in the American Journal of Health Promotion. [2] The authors are Roger Jahnke – OMD, LInda Larkey – Ph.D., Carol Rogers – Ph.D., J. Etnier, Ph.D., and F. Lin – MS. They have reviewed a vast amount of clinical trials whose results were published in peer-reviewed English-language journals between 1993 and December 2007, and found that there is substantial evidence indicating that there is a variety of health benefits associated with Qigong or Tai Chi. We provide a short summary of the findings of their review article.
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“He’d Grown Up Just Like Me”
December 2010
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“My child arrived just the other day. He came to the world in the usual way. But there were planes to catch, and bills to pay. He learned to walk while I was away.” [1]
- Thus began the relationship between the baby boy and his father. But you expect that this is just a coincidence of events that kept the father from missing key events in his young son’s life.
{And he was talking ‘fore I knew it, and as he grew, he’d say, “I’m gonna be like you, dad. You know I’m gonna be like you.”}
- The young boy admired his father, and started saying that he wanted to grow up just like his father.
“When you coming home, dad?” The father replied as he was leaving “I don’t know when. But we’ll get together then. You know we’ll have a good time then.”
- This is beginning to sound like a routine.
A Most Unique Diplomat: Anson Burlingame
Those of us who are familiar with the San Francisco Bay Area have all heard of and drove by the city of Burlingame just a few miles south of the San Francisco International Airport. However, most of us do not know that more than 100 years ago the city was named after a most unique diplomat Anson Burlingame. [1] In 1861 Burlingame was appointed by President Abraham Lincoln as the Minister to China. Six years later in 1867 when he was contemplating retirement from that position and returning to the U.S., China appointed him as the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to head a Chinese diplomatic mission to the United States and other principal European nations. This article describes this extraordinary and unique diplomat.
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