Back in NYC

finally back from my two months in asia (and a family wedding in boston this weekend). every time i come back from asia something seems to happen. the last time, i came back two days before 911. this time i came back a day before the blackout. it was only fate that my sister from paris convinced me to drive up a day early with her and her kids, so i missed it. guess i was lucky. although i'm sure it could have been fun to be here.

now it will take a few days to get back to normal. bills, a foot and a half of mail, errands, and ebaying the extra ipod that i had bought for my girlfriend (which arrived late after i left forcing me to buy another before i left at full retail with NYC taxes!! argh!!). another wedding in two weeks, and a third in october. i really must be getting old. [maybe its finally time for me to grow up. yikes!]

i feel like i took way too many pictures while i was in asia. all digital, and hardly any real pictures. (had to get another portable hard drive to fit them all!!) so it will take some time to put up a few. i always feel like i am in a constant struggle to live or to document instead. i know it does not have to be either/or. but unfortunately, it becomes necessary to split my energies, and i sometimes never really feel in balance. for if we are *really* living, we have no time to be cataloging our past. but if we do not document our present, how soon it is for its completeness to disappear forever from our memory. (like, what did i have for breakfast two days ago!)

i like rich's take on my earlier post. if only i could selectively and capriciously freeze time. good poetry is mood and senses frozen in words. photographs, like architecture and sculpture, are frozen poetry.

Looking Up an Old Love on the Streets of Vietnam

Looking Up an Old Love on the Streets of Vietnam
By R. W. APPLE Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/13/dining/13HANO.html

HANOI, Vietnam -- SHE used to walk past my little villa in Saigon, not far from the American embassy, her conical straw hat on the back of her head, white pajamas flapping as she loped down the street, soup makings dangling from the wooden yoke across her frail shoulders. She came early every morning, repeating the monosyllable with an inimitable inflection.

"Pho," she called, her voice gentle and plaintive. "Pho."

That was 35 years ago, and I took it for granted that the delectable, aromatic noodle soup she sold, crowned with a lush tangle of green herbs, had originated many generations ago in the fertile Mekong Delta. Wrong on both counts, as I discovered when I finally returned not long ago to this ancient land that struggled so fiercely for freedom. Pho was developed by cooks in Hanoi, not in the south, and not until after the French arrived late in the 19th century, importing their love of beef to a pork-eating culture.

The name might have given me a clue. "Pho" is pronounced almost exactly like "feu," the French word for fire, as in pot-au-feu. Did Vietnamese cooks learn its secrets while toiling in the kitchens of colonial masters? Some think so; others think it evolved from Chinese models, like the Vietnamese language and the people themselves.

Today it is a national passion, beloved across the country in hamlets as in cities. It is almost as widely available in the United States, where few big cities lack a pho shop, and some, like Washington, have dozens.

In Hanoi, pho is a cult. It is served in alleyways and on street corners all over town, usually on low plastic tables, surrounded by even lower plastic stools, only about 12 inches high, that always make me feel like a circus elephant trying to balance on a ball. These are set on the sidewalk, in the gutter and even in the roadway; the Vietnamese give special meaning to the phrase "street food."

Here the soothing broth is paler than in the United States or in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon's official name, HCMC for short). The rice noodles are more delicately translucent, and fewer embellishments are added than in the more indulgent south. The result is light and thrillingly restorative. On a good day, I think I could eat three bowls and leave under my own power.

My wife, Betsey, and I stopped in at Mai Anh, one of a string of open-air pho shops on Le Van Huu Street, which runs along the southern edge of Hanoi's bustling French Quarter. Stock made by simmering oxtails and marrow bones for 24 hours, along with onions, star anise, ginger and cinnamon bark, was bubbling away in a cauldron perched on a charcoal stove. Bowls of various meats — cooked chicken, giblets, paper-thin raw sirloin, pig hearts — awaited our inspection. We chose beef.

If you choose chicken, you will be eating pho ga; if you choose beef, you will be eating pho bo. I don't imagine for a minute that you'll choose pig hearts.

The pho-meister dunks a sieve full of flat, precooked noodles into a pot of boiling water (so they do not cool the soup), drains them and slides them into a bowl. Thinly sliced onions and chopped coriander leaves go in next, along with shavings of ginger. Then the blood-red beef, and last a few ladles of hot stock, which cooks the meat in a few seconds while giving off a fragrant, enveloping cloud of steam.

On the table are spring onions, red chili sauce and vinegar with garlic slices to enrich your meal-in-a-bowl, plus several lime wedges. A southerner would feel deprived without some bean sprouts, and without a plate heaped high with herbs — rau que, or Asian basil; earthy ngo gai, or sawleaf herb; and once in a great while rau ram, or Vietnamese coriander. But the northerners are ascetics compared with their southern cousins. Still influenced by the puritanical Confucianism of their Chinese neighbors, they prefer their flavors pure, unadorned and crystal-clear.

As you will find when you dig in — chopsticks in one hand, plastic spoon in the other — no sacrifice of heartiness or complexity is entailed. Mix and slurp, sniff and gulp to your heart's content, for less than $1.

For some reason the snarl of the motorbikes as they stream past, all but nipping at your ankles, is no distraction. Maybe because it's so much fun to watch your fellow eaters, especially if some are novices. We saw an eager if inept German woman get through her soup by coiling her noodles around her chopsticks with her free hand.

THE Vietnamese wax poetic about pho, assigning it a central and unifying place in their culture. Duong Thu Huong, a novelist, rhapsodized about walking the streets, inhaling the soup's subtle perfume as it rises from the stockpots. Huu Ngoc, a social historian, sees it as a symbol of the national fight for self-determination: even in the darkest times, when the wars against the French and Americans were going badly, the Vietnamese were always free to express themselves by making and eating pho, their own culinary creation.

"It was complete, nutritious, infinitely delicious and yet so easy to digest," he recalled a few years ago, "that we could eat it morning and night, day after day." And so the northerners do, looking down upon the southerners, who eat their pho mainly at breakfast and occasionally at lunch.

For the Vietnamese, even those who left the country long ago, pho tends to stir memories, the way a madeleine did for Proust. I, too, was ambushed by the past. A bowl of bun bo Hue, the imperial capital's spicier version of pho, made with round noodles, beef, pork, lemon grass and whole chilies, carried me back to the turbulent days of the Buddhist uprising of 1966, when John D. Negroponte, now the United States representative at the United Nations, was in charge of the American consulate in Hue, on the very street where I was eating.

Our friend Mai Pham, who was born in Saigon, runs a hugely successful Vietnamese restaurant, Lemon Grass, in Sacramento. She also writes cookbooks, most recently "Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table" (HarperCollins, 2001), and she has developed a refrigerated pho stock base, marketed to restaurants and institutions by StockPot, a subsidiary of the Campbell Soup Company.

Why, I asked her recently, does pho fascinate you so much?

"It's so beefy!" she exclaimed with a smile and without hesitation. "For me, it's the ultimate comfort food. You smell the soup's perfume, and it's so beefy!"

Her husband, Greg Drescher, director of education at the Napa Valley campus of the Culinary Institute of America, chimed in. Perhaps for the Vietnamese, for most of whom beef remains a great luxury, he said, but not for Americans, for whom it is one of life's commonplaces.

What attracts me is the hypnotic mixture of flavors in the broth, especially those imparted by spices like star anise and ginger. Preliminary charring of the onions and ginger adds a smoky undertone. In the south, the mingling of sweet, sour and salty tastes is further augmented by a few dashes of nuoc mam, the fermented fish sauce that plays the same role in Vietnam that soy plays in much of Asia. The clearest and most pungent comes from Phu Quoc island, off the south coast.

No one has ever accused me of being a minimalist; when I'm lucky enough to land within range of an In-N-Out burger joint, for example, I order my double double with the works. So it's no surprise that I load up my pho with a couple of squeezes of lime juice, a scattering of bean sprouts (if they're sufficiently crunchy), a disk or two of hot green chili and a variety of herb leaves, pulled carefully from their stems.

That's the Saigon style: a bowl of soup and a salad, all in one.

SAIGON, or HCMC, to be proper about it, has a range of soup shops, from tiny ones in the Hanoi style to a few pho factories like Pho 2000, near the Ben Thanh market, which Bill Clinton put on the map by eating there. Occasionally, a gifted, energetic cook will make pho at home — a major task, given the time needed to make the broth — and one of the best bowls we ate was served to us at home by Nguyen Huu Hoang Trang, a veteran of restaurant kitchens.

So fine was her touch that every one of the key ingredients, from cinnamon to anise to ginger to onions, was individually discernible in the perfumed steam that rose from the soup, and in the flavor, too.

You could miss my favorite breakfast place in downtown Saigon if you got there at the wrong time of day, which is anytime after about 11 in the morning. There is no sign, and most of the furnishings disappear after the close of business.

Run by a tiny, wizened man whom people call Chu Sau, which means Sixth Uncle, it consists of a few battered Formica tables in a gloomy alley covered with a corrugated tin roof, plus several of those diabolically low tables and chairs, murder for my aging knees, on the sidewalk. The address is 39 Mac Thi Buoi, two long blocks from the Caravelle Hotel, toward the river.

Chu Sau's limpid pho comes with a bowl of notably crisp mung bean sprouts, hoisin sauce (best avoided, I think, because it muddies the soup's flavor) and an unusually bright orange chili sauce, as well as Asian basil and fuzzy-leafed mint. What set it apart, for me, was the mellowness of the amber-hued broth, in which the taste of cinnamon was pronounced. It glittered in the mouth, the way homemade bouillon does and beef stock made from a cube doesn't.

The noodles were perfectly al dente, if you will permit a solecism, and I enjoyed them so much that I didn't even give myself a demerit when I splashed chili sauce all over my white polo shirt.

Pho Dau, located in a courtyard off Nam Ky Khoi Nghia Boulevard, which leads to the airport, is an entirely different kettle of soup. During the war, it was a hangout for South Vietnamese generals; now it is a haunt of the new, privileged capitalists, whose Mercedes S.U.V.'s and $6,000 Honda motorbikes are parked out front. Bits of beef cartilage and tendon enrich its broth, as do quantities of coriander.

With our pho, we drank glasses of fabulously smooth ca phe sua da, which is Vietnamese filter coffee, served iced with condensed milk. As we watched the well-dressed customers eating pho for breakfast, we talked about how odd soup seems to us Americans as a daily curtain-raiser. But it isn't that strange, really: the Japanese eat miso; the Chinese eat congee, a soupy porridge; the French (particularly Parisians) eat onion soup after a night on the town; and the Hungarians eat sauerkraut-and-sausage soup to ease a hangover.

Pho Hoa, an open-front restaurant on Pasteur Street, is less grubby and more cosmopolitan than most noodle shops, with comfortable tables and chairs. I learned some more lessons there, even though it came late on our soup schedule. Lesson 1: the richness that characterizes well-made pho broth comes not from fat, which must be skimmed from the broth, but from marrow. Lesson 2: you can order not only rare beef (tai) in your pho, but also well-done beef (chin) and fatty beef (gau).

My teachers were the affable gent at the next table, Lam-Hoang Nguyen, a visiting Vietnamese restaurateur from Thunder Bay, Ontario, on Lake Superior, and his wife, Kim-Ha Lai.

"When we come back," he confided after a while, "we always go right into the street. The street is where you find the quality in Saigon — not in hotels."

THAT'S good advice, not only in HCMC, and not only when you want a bowl of pho. Vietnam is full of quick, fresh, readily available nibbles, and many people eat four or five mini-meals every day.

In the main Saigon market, Ben Thanh, where you can buy a suitcase, look live snakes in the eye, shop for spices and snack the day away, we discovered bun thit nuong — an irresistible combination of vermicelli threads tossed in scallion oil, topped with lettuce, strips of barbecued pork, cucumber and carrot slices and peanuts, and dressed with nuoc cham, a luscious sauce made from nuoc mam diluted with water, sugar, lime juice and chilies. Sweet and tart, bland and spicy, soft and crunchy, ample but light, it made a luscious hot-weather lunch early one afternoon.

No wonder Mr. Drescher always makes a point of heading for the market to eat bun thit as soon as he steps off the plane from California.

One evening at Anh Thi, one of several Saigon crepe shops in narrow Dinh Cong Trang Street, we watched orange tongues of flame dart from underneath charcoal braziers to lick at the dusk. The crepes are called banh xeo, the word "xeo" an onomatopoeic rendering of the sound of batter hitting the pan.

The cooks sit on low benches in front of batteries of braziers topped with 12-inch pans; they control the speed of cooking by shifting pans from one fire to another. The crepes are yet another example of the Vietnamese genius for combining inexpensive ingredients to produce lively but never overpowering tastes and intriguing textures. In this case the secrets are a light, bright crepe batter made with rice powder, coconut milk, local curry powder and turmeric; a filling of shrimp, bean sprouts and unsmoked bacon; and, as is so often the case here, a wrap and a dip.

You tear off a piece of crepe, wrap it in a mustard-green leaf with an aroma so sharp that it made me sneeze, add a chili and some mint, and dip the whole package in peppery, faintly sweet, faintly fishy nuoc cham. The special crepe, with an extra-large portion of shrimp, cost all of $1.35.

"Delicious, nutritious and cheap," Betsey said. "I think that's a pretty tough combination to beat."

At Lac Thien in Hue, whose proprietors are deaf-mutes, we sampled the local version of crepes, known as banh khoai, or "happy pancakes," served at steel-topped tables. These are smaller, about six inches in diameter, sweeter and eggier. They are served not with mustard greens but with coriander and mint, and not with nuoc cham but with a fermented soybean sauce.

Cha Ca La Vong in Hanoi, owned by the same family for generations, serves stunning freshwater fish, cubed and braised with turmeric. Dill, spring onions, peanuts and chilies are at hand to enliven flavor.

Splendid stuff. But except for pho, no street food we ate could touch the phenomenal fare at Bun Cha Hang Manh in Hanoi's Old Quarter, a four-story warren of tiny rooms and cracked floors. Crouching women cook everything on tiny propane stoves in the open-air entrance hall. "Everything" consists of two items, both of which are the best of their kind available, in Hanoi or anywhere else, for that matter.

One of them is bun cha, Vietnam's apotheosis of the pig. It consists of charcoal-grilled strips of belly pork and pork patties the size of a silver dollar. These arrive at a table laden with a plate of rice noodles, a plate of red and green lettuce and herbs of every description, a little bowl of finely chopped young garlic and a bigger bowl of nuoc cham, with slices of tenderizing papaya bobbing gaily in it. For hotheads, there are incendiary bird chilies.

Hang Manh's second dish is spring rolls (nem ran in the north and cha gio in the south) — great fat ones, as thick as your thumb, packed with crab, ground pork, wood-ear mushrooms, onions and bean threads. I noticed right away that the frying oil was changed every few minutes, and of course the rolls emerged from it crackling, light and greaseless.

"These rolls make the rest of what we've had here taste like so many Rice Krispies," Betsey announced.

We went twice, at 11:30 a.m. both times, to avoid the throngs that pack this humble restaurant, while ignoring others serving similar specialties. We ate until we could eat no more. I wonder: can there be any better $3 lunch for two, anywhere in the world?

A China Odyssey

A China Odyssey
By DAVID W. CHEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/17/international/asia/17CHIN.html

CHEN DONG VILLAGE, China — The Chens of Yongding County, all 20 generations of them, in an arc that continues after half a millennium, are chronicled in a local genealogy, a book of more than a thousand pages.

Their fortunes have naturally risen and fallen with China's turbulent history, from poverty and plague to well-being, from peace to the Cultural Revolution.

That dynamic goes on to this day, when some members of the youngest generation scratch by in a crumbling three-story homestead, without heat or plumbing, while others have moved to thriving cities nearby, to make their mark in China's buoyant economy.

Page 1,057 of this chronicle speaks of a particular favorite son, Chen Nanqing, who left the village in the 1930's, eventually went to Taiwan and then made his way to New Jersey, where he became a professor.

He was my father.

Genealogy may be an alluring pastime for many Americans, and sometimes a frustrating one as it reaches back to the country and language of emigration. But it can also provide bracing revelations about one's family. For me, a reporter on assignment in China, not only did a recent visit to this ancestral village bring to life a family heritage that was all but unknown, but it also unearthed a riddle about my father.

He left the village as a boy of 12, seldom to speak of it, never to return. Yet in his later years, he often sent large sums of money home, gave advice to relatives and wrote with pride of the accomplishments of his family in America. All this was news to me.

"Your father always cared a lot about his hometown," said Lu Jisheng, a grandnephew of my grandmother, Lu Yajin, whose name was also unknown to me. "He's very famous. The most famous person in the village."

Poor but Ambitious

It was never easy to get in or out of Chen Dong, in the rugged and mountainous southwestern corner of Yongding County in Fujian Province, near the border with Guangdong Province. For most of the 20th century, there were no paved roads in the area, so walking to the nearest town could take days.

For generations, the Chens worked as farmers and lived in one of Yongding County's famous earthen buildings, called "tulou."

"It's like a hotel, because everyone lives in a room," said Chen Dawen, a cousin, who said that as many as 200 Chens once lived in our family's compound, called Dehuilou.

My father was born Chen Nanqing (a name I had never heard) in 1920, according to the local genealogy book, and not in 1925, as he later told everyone, even my mother.

His father, my grandfather, Chen Tieqin, was evidently an outstanding student; he went to school in Xiamen, about 140 miles away. His father, my great-grandfather, whose pen name was Chen Yintang, was a teacher and poet of some renown.

Grandfather died of the plague in 1923, at 22. Grandmother was bedridden with illness, her mouth drooling, before dying in 1929, at about 26.

Other relatives raised my father, an only child. When he was about 12, my great-grandfather sent him to a school in Dabu, about 25 miles away in Guangdong Province, said Su Huadi, my grandmother's sister-in-law, who is 93 and my oldest relative in the village.

He never went home.

The next stage of his life is murkier. Relatives say he joined an elite unit of the Nationalist army to fight the Japanese, before enrolling at National Chengchi University. At some point, he changed his Chinese name to Chen Qing, adopted a new English one, King Chen, and left for Taiwan.

Eventually, he went to America, became a professor of political science and settled in Livingston, N.J. He married and had two sons.

As he progressed in the world, the family in Chen Dong struggled. During the 1930's, Dehuilou was burned down, perhaps by Communists who had heard that the Chens, like many members of the nomadic Hakka clan, were sympathetic to the Nationalists. (It was later rebuilt.)

During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960's and 1970's, local officials affixed white banners to Chen homes, branding their residents "counterrevolutionaries" because of their blood ties with those who had gone overseas. No one could go to school for years. Sometimes, they ate only tree leaves. At least one relative was jailed. He died shortly after being released.

"We all suffered," said Chen Dahua, who at 57 is the oldest male of my generation. "Two generations were lost."

All that while my father seemed to seldom think twice about his roots. "He never talked about these things, and I never asked," said my mother. "But I also think he liked being abroad, far from home."

That evidently began to change after China began to open to the West, when he reconnected with Chen Dong through an act of filial devotion. In 1978, when he heard about the government's plan to reclaim my grandparents' burial ground to build a public bathroom, he sent several hundred dollars to help.

This was a turning point. Every year, during the holidays, he sent money. Once, he sent $60 to one cousin as a wedding gift. Another time, he sent $380 to be divided among five families.

My relatives still have his letters. In one from the late-1980's, he wrote with pride that my younger brother, Don, and I were studying at Yale, but that he had to borrow a lot of money to pay for our educations. In another, he encouraged his relatives to leave the countryside for cities like Zhangzhou or Xiamen.

"He said that there were better opportunities in the cities to develop, and to have better lives," said Chen Dahua. "He said that while we would never starve as farmers, we would never be full, either."

In his last letter home, written just before he died in June 1993, he sent $100 to a cousin to help with the care of his ailing wife. For the first time, he also signed the letter with his original name; before, he had always used my name, for reasons that remain unclear.

A Hometown Changed

Chen Dong first got electricity in the late 1970's. Five years ago, there were no phones. Now, many people have both regular phone service and cellphones.

About 10 years ago, the government paved the dirt path that connected the village, which has no more than 2,000 residents, to bigger towns such as Longyan and Dabu. About three years ago, a new train station opened nearby, making it possible to go to Guangzhou, which used to take days to reach, in nine hours.

The paved road is already deteriorating from overuse, particularly from trucks carting coal and cement, making some spots nearly impassable.

The trip is starkly beautiful and sometimes incongruous, grinding up the mountains in second gear and slaloming down past the endless convoys of blue construction trucks. Past lush banana fields. Past the occasional tour bus. Past cement factory after cement factory — 30 in all, by Chen Dahua's count — most of them built within the last 10 years.

Sometimes, it is hard to tell where the plumes of smoke end and the clouds begin.

But no one in our family, Chen Dahua said, works at these factories. Instead, more Chens, particularly the younger ones, are heading to Xiamen and Guangzhou. So the family's farms and small roadside stores are minded by the older generation, who spend most of their days watching television, doing chores and inviting people over for tea.

One cousin, Chen Dawen, worked as a farmer before landing a job two years ago at a Guangdong electronics factory run by a relative from Taiwan. He is 42, and makes more money there (roughly $580 a year) than the average farmer in Fujian (about $430), though his income is still below the average urban resident's (about $1,020). But his family still lives here, and he can afford to return home only twice a year.

Now, he views the world through the lens of the middle class.

"Everybody should make more money, but there should be poor people too," he said. "Who's going to sweep the streets?"

My generation shares the middle name of "da," or "big." My brother — Chen Datong in Chinese — and I — Chen Dawei — are the youngest, because my father did not have children until he was 46.

No one in the "da" generation in China had more than a junior high or high school education. But that is not true for the next generation — "sheng," or "birth" for the boys, and "mei," or "beautiful," for the girls.

Chen Dahua's son, Yunsheng, a 23-year-old computer whiz, attends college in Guangzhou and watches "Forrest Gump" on his computer. Two female relatives, Meixiang and Meizhao, both 25, are studying for master's degrees at Fujian Teacher's University in Fuzhou. Another relative, Chen Taisheng, is a Xiamen government official who is an expert on international trade issues.

A few years ago, Chen Dahua's father, who lives in Taiwan, helped the family open a store in the ever-expanding city of Zhangzhou. Another of Chen Dahua's sons, together with his daughter, run the store now, which sells souvenirs, toys and art.

"This generation is better off than our generation," said Chen Dahua. "They have more freedom. More opportunities."

A Warm Family Welcome

When I arrive in Chen Dong Village, the family sets off a round of celebratory firecrackers. Family members ask in heavily accented Mandarin if I can speak Hakka, as my father presumably did. I say no — I did not even know we were Hakka.

Then we try to sort out the usual confusion over ages (they still follow the lunar calendar, which adds a year) and names (Chen Dahua's grandchildren call me "gong gong," or grandpa, though I am only 36.)

No one resembles my father, and no one sees my father in me, based on their fading memories or the blurry photos he sent. But everyone knows about me.

Chen Dawen says that whenever a China Airlines plane crashes, or a big news event occurs, he wonders whether I am safe, or whether I am covering it as a journalist.

"I kept on looking for your name after Sept. 11, hoping I wouldn't see it," he says. "Same thing for Iraq."

Shortly after my arrival, we hike up a slippery mountain path and pay our respects to my grandparents, and my great-grandfather, who are buried in a serene spot overlooking a valley of rice paddies. Later, we visit the earthen buildings where my grandmother lived, and where my father grew up, which are about a 15-minute walk apart. One cousin, Chen Danian, explains that the family has even been preserving my legal rights to the rooms in Dehuilou where my father grew up, and where 60 Chens still live.

"This is yours," he says, pointing to a small room now used for storage. He points to two other rooms, which are locked. "These two are yours, too. They're a little messy. But we can clean it up for you." At Chen Dahua's house, the family pulls out the genealogy book, published in 1998. I scrutinize page 1,059, where the family tree lists my name, and page 1,057, where my father is listed, and page 1,055, my grandfather's page, and so on.

I notice an error: the book says that my brother and I have Ph.D.'s. Perhaps this is what my father told his relatives many years ago, if only because he expected as much.

I wait for questions about what life is like in America, how much money people make, whether we feel free — questions that ordinary Chinese often ask. But they do not ask. Instead, they are sweet and generous, without making judgments.

Everybody asks about my wife and our daughters, whose pictures are contained on my computer. Naturally, they assume that we will have a boy next time. I smile and mutter something vague.

At dinner, the relatives insist that I sit with all the "da brothers." The Chen men exchange toasts of the local brew, Gold Rider beer, and tell stories into the late hours of the inky, rural night.

"Before, we were just a rumor, or some stories, right?" says Chen Dawen. "Now, we're reality. You should visit more often. Bring your brother next time."

China Readies Super ID Card, a Worry to Some

China Readies Super ID Card, a Worry to Some
By DAVID W. CHEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/19/international/asia/19CHIN.html

BEIJING, Aug. 18 — For almost two decades, Chinese citizens have been defined, judged and, in some cases, constrained by their all-purpose national identification card, a laminated document the size of a driver's license.

But starting next year, they will face something new and breathtaking in scale: an electronic card that will store that vital information for all 960 million eligible citizens on chips that the authorities anywhere can access.

Officials hope that the technologically advanced cards will help stamp out fraud and counterfeiting involving the current cards, protecting millions of people from those problems and saving billions of dollars. Providing the cards to everyone is expected to take five or six years. But the vagueness and vastness of the undertaking has prompted some criticism that the data collection could be used to quash dissent and to infringe on privacy.

The project comes at a time when China is doggedly remaking itself into a leaner economic machine in line with the standards of the World Trade Organization. But China is also struggling to track a restless and poor rural population that continues to gravitate toward the cities. So officials are no doubt gambling that the cards can help them juggle two important if conflicting interests: promoting economic liberalization, while monitoring citizens in an increasingly fluid society.

There has been little public discussion or news about the new cards. Brief but rapturous accounts in the official press say the cards will "protect citizens."

Yet many of China's toughest critics, at home and abroad, are skeptical, objecting to the concentration of so much information at the government's fingertips.

"Given the record of the Chinese government on protecting the privacy of its citizens and given the prevalence of corruption, how can we ensure that this information will be managed properly?" asked Nicolas Becquelin, research director at the Hong Kong office of Human Rights in China. "It's scary what the Chinese government is doing, because there is no counterweight."

The original identification card, introduced in 1985, contains such personal data as one's nationality and birth date and an 18-digit identification number. It also indicates a person's household registration, which has traditionally tied a person to his or her province of birth.

In June, China's top legislative body, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, passed the National Citizen ID Law, approving the cards. They are to have a microchip storing personal data, but the face of the card is not to contain details any more personal than what is on the current cards. The cards are to be tested early next year, first in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Huzhou, a city in Zhejiang Province.

The agency in charge of the program, the Ministry of Public Security, declined to answer written questions seeking details. But in an interview published in July with Cards Tech and Security, a magazine of the Smart Card Forum of China, a trade group, two Public Security officials, Guo Xing and Liu Zhikui, said the current cards were too easy to forge and did not take advantage of technological advances.

They also said the new cards, which will feature a rendering of the Great Wall, would not look much different from the old ones.

"The ID card and the ID number are mainly going to be used to verify a resident's identity, safeguard people's rights, make it easier for people to organize activities and maintain law and order," Mr. Guo said.

The use of electronic cards is not particularly new. Other governments and companies issue them. Hong Kong began issuing its own electronic ID cards in June.

With the Olympic Games approaching in 2008, China expects a growing demand for various cards, including transit cards, bank cards and social security cards, said Jafizwaty Haji Ishahak, an analyst in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with Frost & Sullivan, a consulting company. The social services cards that are to be phased in should be able to track all the government services an individual receives, from health care to welfare.

"If you want to live in the fast lane, you have to deal with technology, but you cannot have total freedom," said Frank Xu, executive director of Smart Card Forum of China, who is from Huzhou, one of the test cities. "There have to be conditions."

But detractors say freedom has a far different meaning in China, a place where security officials have never been shy about following or using listening devices on dissidents, journalists or students.

While it may make sense to track would-be terrorists, the cards would also make it much easier for the government to monitor political or religious dissidents. After China's 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators, the government televised photographs and identification card numbers of student leaders being sought. Under the new system, tracking dissidents would be much easier, said Mr. Becquelin of the rights group in Hong Kong.

There are concerns that the technology could be prone to abuse, corruption or the whim of the local authorities who routinely thumb their noses at Beijing. This may be particularly true with China's surging population of rural migrants, now estimated at more than 120 million and growing by 13 million a year.

"This new card will make it possible to locate people who haven't registered, so I think the migrants will be more subject to abuse," said Dorothy J. Solinger, a professor of political science at the University of California at Irvine.

So far, anyway, most Chinese who have heard about the new cards do not seem to mind; indeed, many are enthusiastic. Yes, they say, there is always the possibility of corruption. Yes, one's privacy may be invaded from time to time.

But many Chinese said they liked the idea of guarding against identity theft and ensuring that someone who claims to be, say, a nanny, is telling the truth. Besides, there is also a sense of resignation.

"Our security officials already have all the information about us, anyway, so this is not a big change," said one man, surnamed Sun, who is a science professor in Beijing.

Why Humans and Their Fur Parted Ways

Why Humans and Their Fur Parted Ways
By NICHOLAS WADE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/19/science/19HAIR.html

One of the most distinctive evolutionary changes as humans parted company from their fellow apes was their loss of body hair. But why and when human body hair disappeared, together with the matter of when people first started to wear clothes, are questions that have long lain beyond the reach of archaeology and paleontology.

Ingenious solutions to both issues have now been proposed, independently, by two research groups analyzing changes in DNA. The result, if the dates are accurate, is something of an embarrassment. It implies we were naked for more than a million years before we started wearing clothes.

Dr. Alan R. Rogers, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Utah, has figured out when humans lost their hair by an indirect method depending on the gene that determines skin color. Dr. Mark Stone- king of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, believes he has established when humans first wore clothes. His method too is indirect: it involves dating the evolution of the human body louse, which infests only clothes.

Meanwhile a third group of researchers, resurrecting a suggestion of Darwin, has come up with a novel explanation of why humans lost their body hair in the first place.

Mammals need body hair to keep warm, and lose it only for special evolutionary reasons. Whales and walruses shed their hair to improve speed in their new medium, the sea. Elephants and rhinoceroses have specially thick skins and are too bulky to lose much heat on cold nights. But why did humans, the only hairless primates, lose their body hair?

One theory holds that the hominid line went through a semi-aquatic phase — witness the slight webbing on our hands. A better suggestion is that loss of body hair helped our distant ancestors keep cool when they first ventured beyond the forest's shade and across the hot African savannah. But loss of hair is not an unmixed blessing in regulating body temperature because the naked skin absorbs more energy in the heat of the day and loses more in the cold of the night.

Dr. Mark Pagel of the University of Reading in England and Dr. Walter Bodmer of the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford have proposed a different solution to the mystery and their idea, if true, goes far toward explaining contemporary attitudes about hirsuteness. Humans lost their body hair, they say, to free themselves of external parasites that infest fur — blood-sucking lice, fleas and ticks and the diseases they spread.

Once hairlessness had evolved through natural selection, Dr. Pagel and Dr. Bodmer suggest, it then became subject to sexual selection, the development of features in one sex that appeal to the other. Among the newly furless humans, bare skin would have served, like the peacock's tail, as a signal of fitness. The pains women take to keep their bodies free of hair — joined now by some men — may be no mere fashion statement but the latest echo of an ancient instinct. Dr. Pagel's and Dr. Bodmer's article appeared in a recent issue of The Proceedings of the Royal Society.

Dr. Pagel said he had noticed recently that advertisements for women's clothing often included a model showing a large expanse of bare back. "We have thought of showing off skin as a secondary sexual characteristic but maybe it's simpler than that — just a billboard for healthy skin," he said.

The message — "No fleas, lice or ticks on me!" — is presumably concealed from the conscious mind of both sender and receiver.

There are several puzzles for the new theory to explain. One is why, if loss of body hair deprived parasites of a refuge, evolution allowed pubic hair to be retained. Dr. Pagel and Dr. Bodmer suggest that these humid regions, dense with sweat glands, serve as launching pads for pheromones, airborne hormones known to convey sexual signals in other mammals though not yet identified in humans.

Another conundrum is why women have less body hair than men. Though both sexes may prefer less hair in the other, the pressure of sexual selection in this case may be greater on women, whether because men have had greater powers of choice or an more intense interest in physical attributes. "Common use of depilatory agents testifies to the continuing attractions of hairlessness, especially in human females," the two researchers write.

Dr. David L. Reed, a louse expert at the University of Utah, said the idea that humans might have lost their body hair as a defense against parasites was a "fascinating concept." Body lice spread three diseases — typhus, relapsing fever and trench fever — and have killed millions of people in time of war, he said.

But others could take more convincing. "There are all kinds of notions as to the advantage of hair loss, but they are all just-so stories," said Dr. Ian Tattersall, a paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Causes aside, when did humans first lose their body hair? Dr. Rogers, of the University of Utah, saw a way to get a fix on the date after reading an article about a gene that helps determine skin color. The gene, called MC1R, specifies a protein that serves as a switch between the two kinds of pigment made by human cells. Eumelanin, which protects against the ultraviolet rays of the sun, is brown-black; pheomelanin, which is not protective, is a red-yellow color.

Three years ago Dr. Rosalind Harding of Oxford University and others made a worldwide study of the MC1R gene by extracting it from blood samples and analyzing the sequence of DNA units in the gene. They found that the protein made by the gene is invariant in African populations, but outside of Africa the gene, and its protein, tended to vary a lot.

Dr. Harding concluded that the gene was kept under tight constraint in Africa, presumably because any change in its protein increased vulnerability to the sun's ultraviolet light, and was fatal to its owner. But outside Africa, in northern Asia and Europe, the gene was free to accept mutations, the constant natural changes in DNA, and produced skin colors that were not dark.

Reading Dr. Harding's article recently as part of a different project, Dr. Rogers wondered why all Africans had acquired the same version of the gene. Chimpanzees, Dr. Harding had noted, have many different forms of the gene, as presumably did the common ancestor of chimps and people.

As soon as the ancestral human population in Africa started losing its fur, Dr. Rogers surmised, people would have needed dark skin as a protection against sunlight. Anyone who had a version of the MC1R gene that produced darker skin would have had a survival advantage, and in a few generations this version of the gene would have made a clean sweep through the population.

There may have been several clean sweeps, each one producing a more effective version of the MC1R gene. Dr. Rogers saw a way to put a date on at least the most recent sweep. Some of the DNA units in a gene can be changed without changing the amino acid units in the protein the gene specifies. The MC1R genes Dr. Harding had analyzed in African populations had several of these silent mutations. Since the silent mutations accumulate in a random but steady fashion, they serve as a molecular clock, one that started ticking at the time of the last sweep of the MC1R gene through the ancestral human population.

From the number of silent mutations in African versions of the MC1R gene, Dr. Rogers and two colleagues, Dr. David Iltis and Dr. Stephen Wooding, calculate that the last sweep probably occurred 1.2 million years ago, when the human population consisted of a mere 14,000 breeding individuals. In other words, humans have been hairless at least since this time, and maybe for much longer. Their article is to appear in a future issue of Current Anthropology.

The estimated minimum date for human hairlessness seems to fall in reasonably well with the schedule of other major adaptations that turned an ordinary ape into the weirdest of all primates. Hominids first started occupying areas with few shade trees some 1.7 million years ago. This is also the time when long limbs and an external nose appeared. Both are assumed to be adaptations to help dissipate heat, said Dr. Richard Klein, an archaeologist at Stanford University. Loss of hair and dark skin could well have emerged at the same time, so Dr. Rogers' argument was "completely plausible," he said.

From 1.6 million years ago the world was in the grip of the Pleistocene ice age, which ended only 10,000 years ago. Even in Africa, nights could have been cold for fur-less primates. But Dr. Ropers noted that people lived without clothes until recently in chilly places like Tasmania and Tierra del Fuego.

Chimpanzees have pale skin and are born with pale faces that tan as they grow older. So the prototype hominid too probably had fair skin under dark hair, said Dr. Nina Jablonski, an expert on the evolution of skin color at the California Academy of Sciences. "It was only later that we lost our hair and at the same time evolved an evenly dark pigmentation," she said.

Remarkable as it may seem that genetic analysis can reach back and date an event deep in human history, there is a second approach to determining when people lost their body hair, or at least started to wear clothes. It has to do with lice. Humans have the distinction of being host to three different kinds: the head louse, the body louse and the pubic louse. The body louse, unlike all other kinds that infect mammals, clings to clothing, not hair. It presumably evolved from the head louse after humans lost their body hair and started wearing clothes.

Dr. Stoneking, together with Dr. Ralf Kittler and Dr. Manfred Kayser, report in today's issue of Current Biology that they compared the DNA of human head and body lice from around the world, as well as chimpanzee lice as a point of evolutionary comparison. From study of the DNA differences, they find that the human body louse indeed evolved from the louse, as expected, but that this event took place surprisingly recently, sometime between 42,000 and 72,000 years ago. Humans must have been wearing clothes at least since this time.

Modern humans left Africa about 50,000 years ago. Dr. Stoneking and his colleagues say the invention of clothing may have been a factor in the successful spread of humans around the world, especially in the cooler climates of the north.

Dr. Stoneking said in an interview that clothing could also have been part of the suite of sophisticated behaviors, such as advanced tools, trade and art, that appear in the archaeological record some 50,000 years ago, just before humans migrated from Africa.

The head louse would probably have colonized clothing quite soon after the niche became available — within thousands and tens of thousands of years, Dr. Stoneking said. So body lice were probably not in existence when humans and Neanderthals diverged some 250,000 or more years ago. This implies that the common ancestor of humans and Neanderthals did not wear clothes and therefore probably Neanderthals didn't either.

But Dr. Klein, the Stanford archeologist, said he thought Neanderthals and other archaic humans must have produced clothing of some kind in order to live in temperate latitudes like Europe and the Far East. Perhaps the body lice don't show that, he suggested, because early clothes were too loose fitting or made of the wrong material.

Dr. Stoneking said he got the idea for his louse project after one of his children came home with a note about a louse infestation in school. The note assured parents that lice could only live a few hours when away from the human body, implying to Dr. Stoneking that their evolution must closely mirror the spread of humans around the world.

The compilers of Genesis write that as soon as Adam and Eve realized they were naked, they sewed themselves aprons made of leaves from the fig tree, and that the Creator himself made them more durable skin coats before evicting them. But if Dr. Rogers and Dr. Stoneking are correct, humans were naked for a million years before they noticed their state of undress and called for the tailor.

Rock Musician's City Paradise

Rock Musician's City Paradise
By PENELOPE GREEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/17/realestate/17HABI.html

FOR a guy who is on the road more than he's home, Richard Fortus, now a member of Guns N' Roses (the Axl Rose version) and the Psychedelic Furs, has still gathered a little bit of moss, including 40 guitars, a couple of thousand CD's, five tattoos and two cats.

Classically trained on guitar, cello and violin, Mr. Fortus, a slight, soft-spoken man of 36, has been touring since he was 16, when his band, Pale Divine, was signed by Atlantic Records. Last year he was out of town for nearly eight months, following a typical spate of work for Guns and the Furs, as the two bands are affectionately known, as well as for Enrique Iglesias, Britney Spears and others.

When it was all over, Mr. Fortus bought his first apartment, a two-bedroom with a terrace at Seward Park, one of the complexes that makes up the Cooperative Village, the former socialist and union enclave built between the late 1930's and the 1960's on Grand Street on the Lower East Side (and featured famously in the movie `Crossing Delancey,' as the home of Amy Irving's impish bubbe.)

"This is my first home," Mr. Fortus said on a recent Wednesday morning as the sunlight tumbled through a corner window and the cats, two male shorthaired orientals named Genghis and Kublai, pounced on things that weren't there. "It's the first time I've ever owned anything."

Mr. Fortus and his girlfriend, Jennifer Teichman, a model and photographer, had been living on Park Avenue, in a "dark, dreary and tiny" rent-stabilized apartment with a view into someone else's apartment, Ms. Teichman said. She had stacked the guitars in their cases in the hall; you had to sidle by them to get out the front door.

Ms. Teichman, who is 27 and from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., felt oppressed by the darkness, and by the attention she was receiving every time she left the apartment. Elegant and lovely, Ms. Teichman hails from a state where your car is your armor.

"You're not walking everywhere, as you do here," she explained. "I'd never experienced anything like it." She felt terrorized by the catcalls, and stopped wearing makeup and skirts. During one particularly onerous period, she didn't leave the house for four days.

WHEN the lease ran out, they couldn't find an apartment fast enough, though it seemed as if they had been looking forever. Certainly they looked all over, up and downtown, and even in New Jersey. Guns N' Roses wanted Mr. Fortus to settle down in Los Angeles, where Mr. Rose lives, but Mr. Fortus, who grew up in St. Louis and moved to New York City when he was 25, demurred.

"I knew when I got here I was home," he said, echoing the sentiments of changelings everywhere. "I never felt that sort of connection before." (Mr. Fortus's first apartment in New York was just a bunk at a friend's at 75th Street and Riverside Drive. Marianne Faithfull was the third roommate. "I didn't see her a whole lot," he said, "but when I did she was always very matronly. Like a princess, but in a good way. Always very regal.")

What Ms. Teichman and Mr. Fortus finally found, he said, was the last great deal in New York: one of the reconstituted apartments on Grand Street.

These apartments, built by and for garment workers — one complex is even called Amalgamated, and you'll still find a mural of Roosevelt (F.D.R., that is) in a lobby — shed their socialist links and hit the free market three years ago (that's what "reconstituted" means), rocketing up from a cap of up to $3,000 per room to as much as $450,000 for a two-bedroom.

Mr. Fortus paid $350,000 for his apartment — nearly one-third the price of a similar Village two-bedroom. His monthly maintenance is $560.

Getting a musician through a co-op board is no joke. Getting a guitarist from a famous rock and roll band through is nearly impossible. Jacob Goldman, a broker whose entire bread and butter is the stock — upward of 4,500 units — of the Cooperative Village, chose Seward Park for his client, who had walked in off the street one day, because that complex's board president is a musician.

Mr. Goldman, a voluble lawyer and broker, said he was struck nearly speechless when he realized who Mr. Fortus was. "I did a Yahoo search, and I started saying, `I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy,' " recalled Mr. Goldman, who is 32 and describes himself as a "massive Guns N' Roses fan."

"Anyway, to get him in the building, we had to work against the stereotype of the rock and roll musician," Mr. Goldman continued. "You know, boa constrictors and wild parties and all. So we had his former neighbors and his super write letters about what a nice quiet guy Richard is. And for the meeting with the board, I suggested a long-sleeved shirt for those tattoos, and a suit, if he had one." As it happened, Mr. Fortus's suit was in Los Angeles, but it turned out that he and the board's president were members of the same union, Local 802.

Cooperative Village is a neighborhood unto itself, and Mr. Fortus and Ms. Teichman's tenancy represents the latest evolutionary wiggle in its history. The children of all those socialists fled the area to the suburbs in the 70's and 80's, but by the 1990's, young Orthodox Jewish families were moving in, relishing the connection to a specifically Jewish past.

Today, there's another influx, of young New Yorkers like Mr. Fortus. The other day he made friends with a man in the building's new gym, as they found themselves bonding over their tattoos. "He said, `Hey, finally there's someone in here with more ink than me!' " Mr. Fortus said.

An elderly neighbor on their floor was a bit more standoffish, Ms. Teichman said: "She said, `You're the rock and roll band that's moved in.' But then she found out we had cats, and she snuggled up to us a bit."

Ms. Teichman, who models reluctantly to pay the bills, said she garners no whistles on Delancey Street, or in nearby Chinatown.

"Having a home has completely reordered our way of thinking," said Mr. Fortus, who added that he can't even walk into a restaurant without wondering how the floor was put together.

"We're both fixated," said Ms. Teichman, who found herself captivated by a friend's dentil molding the other day. "Thank God we have the same taste." Mr. Fortus gave her a sewing machine for her birthday; recently she spent a day sewing vinyl seat covers for the stools on the terrace and watching HGTV.

Mr. Fortus and Ms. Teichman are planning a stem-to-stern renovation sometime in the fall, a canny redo that includes opening up the galley kitchen and ripping up the floors. They'll tame the CD collection by transferring it to a computer. Most of the guitars have already moved to other quarters at Mr. Fortus's studio.

They've been buying things on the weekends: Indian art, Anglo-Indian furniture and the odd religious item, like a portable reliquary. They've mapped the renovation out completely, and designed it themselves. All they need is somewhere to bunk for six weeks, and a place to park the remaining 15 guitars.