For Many Chinese, America's Allure Is Fading

For Many Chinese, America's Allure Is Fading
By DAVID W. CHEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/07/international/07IMMI.html

CHANGLE, China — His older brother was the pioneer, more than a decade ago. His son followed three years ago. As recently as last year, his daughter planned to join this exodus of thousands from Fujian Province who have gambled that the life of a smuggled immigrant in America would eclipse that of an impoverished native in China.

But she lost interest after her brother's experience.

"Life is much more difficult than he expected, so I regret sending him to America," said the father, Mr. Wang, who — like some others interviewed for this article — spoke on the condition that only his surname be used. "He is miserable. He says to me, `Why am I working so hard in America? I can get rich at home.' It's very different from the way it used to be."

Ten years ago this summer, human smuggling exploded into international consciousness when the Golden Venture, a decrepit freighter stuffed with 286 Chinese, most from the Changle area in southern China, ran aground off Queens, New York. Ten people died in the cold and pounding surf, and soon, the name Golden Venture became shorthand for a cruel world of exploitation of desperate people.

Today, the smuggling trade continues, though perhaps at a slower clip, people here say, costing $60,000 per head. But for the first time, many Fujianese feel less urgency about venturing abroad.

They have more options at home, with jobs available in small businesses, steel factories or construction sites. It is far more convenient and less troublesome, some people say, to make small money in the comfort of familiar surroundings, instead of relatively big money in the clutches of a lonely and inhospitable land.

Some smuggled Chinese are even leaving America as soon as they pay their debts, and without gaining permanent residency, because they want a less stressful life at home.

"America is no paradise," said one man surnamed Zheng, who returned to the village of Shengmei a few years ago. He described a seven-year odyssey that started in New York but took him to many other places. "It was the same routine every day for six or seven years," he droned. "Get up. Work for 16 hours. Go to bed. Get up again. I was a fool. A machine."

America is still in people's thoughts here. Of dozens of people interviewed in half a dozen villages around Changle, nearly everyone claimed to have at least one relative overseas, most in New York.

In small fishing villages like Houyu, where jobs are scarce, the urge to leave remains strong.

But in many places, that desire is now muted by considerations such as economics, family and safety. Some people attribute their reluctance to tighter security in China and America after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"The Golden Venture has defined the discourse for years, and people still have the same ideas about Chinese and smuggling," said Peter Kwong, director of the Asian-American studies program at Hunter College. But things have changed, he said, adding, "The economic incentive is no longer absolute."

The woman accused of being the chief smuggler, or "snakehead," behind the Golden Venture, Cheng Chui Ping, is on trial in New York. The lawyer who represented many of the immigrants, Robert E. Porges, is in jail, after admitting that he helped many of them concoct false stories of persecution to bolster their asylum cases. The ship itself is being used as an artificial reef about a mile off the coast of Boca Raton, Fla.

Changle, a county of about 650,000 people, has changed, too. Several years ago, the county seat, also named Changle, was a dusty, lethargic town with bleak prospects, said Mr. Kwong, who collaborated on a documentary film about Fujianese emigrants in the mid-1990's. Now, it is a bustling city crowned by new high-rise apartments, stylish new stores and a new boulevard, North Shiyang Street.

Changle is full of people, like Zhou Xueqing, whose attitudes toward emigration have changed. More than a decade ago, her husband went to New York to work as a cook, and he sends home a few hundred dollars a month. But he is depressed, and his health is deteriorating.

His hard life deterred their son from going to America. He went to Shanghai instead. He now runs a mobile phone business and earns $12,000 a year, a good income there.

"The average person doesn't want to be smuggled into America anymore," said Ms. Zhou, who works at a new bedding store. "The economy is so terrible there."

That view can also be heard on the busy streets of Jinfeng, another longtime starting point for illegal emigration. At her family's fashionable Wei Wei wedding store, Chen Meicun described a conundrum of yearning and conflict, risk and reward.

Ms. Chen, 21, said she once thought of joining her brother, who left 10 years ago for Peru. But she is loath to give up her job and the comforts of an upwardly mobile life.

"It's dangerous to go — look at what happened in England," she said, referring the deaths three years ago of 58 Chinese who were being smuggled in the back of a truck. "Every country has its good and its bad, so why should I leave?"

In village after village, people outlined the same choices. If they got a good job here, they would stay. If not, they would try to borrow enough money to leave. Not one person talked about politics or human rights here, or China's one-child policy. The issue was money.

In a small store in Tingjiang, across the Min River in Lianjiang County, questions about smuggling people into America prompted a lively discussion.

The owner, a 28-year-old woman surnamed Lin, said she wanted her only child, a 4-year-old boy, to study hard and get a job close to home. She could not bear the thought of him going to America. "Everyday life here is not too bad," she said. "Our country is developing very quickly."

One customer, playing cards with some underemployed friends under a creaky ceiling fan, disagreed. "Not everyone can afford to go, but everyone wants to go," he said.

The nearby town of Shengmei is the hometown of Ms. Cheng, the alleged Golden Venture mastermind, and she is revered there as a benevolent patron.

But it is also the home of Mr. Zheng — the man who called himself a fool for having gone to America. Mr. Zheng, 50, who holds a degree in marine biology from Xiamen University, said he had a miserable existence overseas. Though he was able to send home about $2,000 a year, he said he never laughed or smiled when he was in America.

His life now is not carefree. He has found only sporadic work, mainly in construction. But at least he can have tea with his friends, go for leisurely strolls and watch his son mature, day by day.

"You don't have to climb too high up the mountain — just climb to a place in the middle that's more suitable," he said. "If you make a lot of money but don't have the time to enjoy it, what's the point? Money isn't everything."

Chinese Economy's Underside: Abuse of Migrants

Chinese Economy's Underside: Abuse of Migrants
By JOSEPH KAHN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/26/international/asia/26MIGR.html?ex=1062993600&en=b9eadcc1c6b32f08&ei=5070

HANGZHOU, China — From his precarious perch 60 feet above morning rush hour, Wang Fulin watched the restless crowd below. Arms were drawing arches in air, he recalled. They wanted a swan dive. People were chanting, "Jump, jump!"

Enraged and afraid, Mr. Wang had scaled the metal frame of a billboard to call attention to his grievances. It was his first day in this bustling east coast city, his first trip outside his home province in southwest China. He had been neglected, robbed and abused. Now they wanted blood.

In the end he does not remember how he slipped. He recalls only waking up in a hospital bed with three cracked ribs, a broken hip and a shattered ego. "I told those people that I'm a good man, not a bad man, that I just needed help," he said. "But I could not believe in anybody, and nobody believed in me."

The six-story plunge was the coda of a two-day cross-country odyssey, a personal tale of desperation emblematic of the gamble every Chinese migrant worker takes, leaving family behind to live on the fringes of urban society with limited access to housing, education, medical care and the courts.

Migrant workers are China's untouchables. They are assumed to be behind every unsolved crime. They are the yokels on the street corners of every city, barely able to speak Mandarin Chinese, wide-eyed with fascination or fear.

They are also the dark underside of China's economic success, which has been marked by annual growth of 8 percent for more than a decade and exports to the United States growing so fast that they have surpassed Japan's. In general these people are vulnerable, pliable, cheap to employ and easy to suppress.

The migrant workers number well over 100 million, staffing the factories of Asia's export powerhouse. They work long hours in dangerous jobs for low salaries and no benefits. They are barred from forming unions — the Communist Party allows just one union, its own — and liable to be fired on a boss's whim.

They would not come to the cities if the opportunities did not outweigh the dangers, and the government has taken steps to stop systematic abuses. Beijing recently abolished a law that allowed the authorities to detain rural workers and send them home without legal proceedings.

Yet even the official news media offer regular examples of their extreme distress. There are migrants who threaten suicide when they are not paid. Some are preyed on by job agents or forced into sex slavery. Migrants say the police often beat them for minor infractions, like forgetting to carry an identity card.

"To them we are nothing," said Wang Xiaozhen, 48, a migrant worker in Hangzhou. "They don't take our lives seriously."

Ms. Wang says she was selling fruit on a sidewalk one day in February when patrolmen approached. She scurried away, knowing officials did not permit vendors there. But she says the patrolmen gave chase and beat her severely, causing nerve damage in her neck and back and making it impossible for her to work.

She now spends her days in a Hangzhou park, lying on a wooden roller bed and begging for change. A Hangzhou police duty officer said he had no knowledge of Ms. Wang or her complaint. He also declined to comment on the case of Wang Fulin, who is not related to Ms. Wang.

It was money that persuaded Mr. Wang to leave his lush but poor mountain village in Guizhou Province and travel 1,250 miles to Hangzhou, near Shanghai. He arranged to take a job making cardboard shipping containers for $72 a month, enough to send cash back to his ailing father and his two young children.

Instead he was caught in a psychological drama worthy of Hitchcock, with clever crooks, derelict police officers and naïve miscalculation. Instead of sending money home, he has relied on relatives to raise $1,500 for his medical care, two years' salary at the box factory.

He seemed hale and steady enough before leaving home, relatives said. His sparkling brown eyes, round cheeks and soft lisp make him appear younger than his 30 years. As an only son with a chronically ill father, he tended the family plots alone. He once recruited volunteers to build a five-mile road that eased the isolation of his mountainside hamlet.

This year, though, Mr. Wang needed cash to pay school fees for his 6-year-old son and buy medicine for his father. Mr. Wang's wife left first. She found a job making light-bulb filaments in Hangzhou. She phoned to say a relative had found a job for Mr. Wang nearby.

The day after summer planting was done, he set out, first by foot along the road he built to Nanlong, then by bus to the provincial capital, Guiyang, where he caught the long-haul K-112 train.

It was trying from the start. His $17 ticket was for standing room on the 36-hour trip, and he could not find a spare seat. He was leaning against the bulkhead of car No. 8, around midnight on the second day, when he heard a fellow passenger whisper, "It's about to get crazy."

A group of men with neatly combed hair and leather shoes had begun working their way through the darkened cabin. Mr. Wang watched them pull down bags from the overhead rack and search the contents, pocketing money and valuables.

Soon they spotted Mr. Wang, awake and afraid. They peppered him with questions about where he was from, how much money he was carrying, where he was going. Mr. Wang said he had answered honestly. He was a country boy with very little money. His cousin was meeting him at the Hangzhou station.

"They accused me of hiding wads of cash, maybe inside my pants," Mr. Wang said. "They said I looked like a sly guy." He said he had stripped off his pants to prove he had nothing strapped to his legs. But a man with a mobile phone, the apparent ringleader, kept harassing him.

"He called someone and told them he had a big catch," Mr. Wang recounted. "He said they should meet me at the station — bring some drugs to knock me out."

If they were trying to frighten him it worked, maybe too well.

When the conductor announced that the train was nearing Hangzhou, Mr. Wang darted from car to car to find a railroad policeman who was aboard. He found him in the cafe car, chatting with two train workers. Mr. Wang hurriedly explained that bad people were plotting to steal his money. He needed an escort off the train.

The policeman, Mr. Wang said, asked just one question, "How much money do you have?"

Mr. Wang said he was a poor man with nothing. The policeman waved his hand to indicate he had heard enough and walked away. But the rail workers stayed. One grabbed him from behind. The other ordered him to turn his pockets inside out. Mr. Wang said he produced a small wad of bills, his travel money, and put it on the table. A worker pocketed the cash. The two then dragged him to the caboose. A door was flung open. He was cast into a rail yard near the Hangzhou station.

His instinct was to flee. He scampered up the rail yard wall, losing his sandals in the climb. Breathless and barefoot, he had arrived in downtown Hangzhou. Mr. Wang said he had thought of going to the factory where his wife worked. But did not have the exact street address, and he had no money. He thought of finding his cousin at the station but worried that the crooks awaited him there.

A shop owner let him use a phone. He dialed the police emergency number, but in his home province, Guizhou. "I couldn't understand what people were saying in Hangzhou," he explained. The operator notified the Hangzhou police.

An hour later officers went to the store. He told them about the robbers, the uncaring policeman, the thieving train workers. He needed help, money, a phone. The police looked at him skeptically. Maybe they did not understand him, with his Guizhou accent. They told him someone else would come to handle his case.

No one came. He wandered the street, wondering what to do. Then he saw a billboard, an ad for Hang- zhou's annual festival on West Lake, hanging prominently over a major boulevard.

"My idea was to go up there and make a scene," Mr. Wang said. "Then I could explain what happened and demand that they contact my family."

He climbed a ladder to the top. To attract attention, he took off his jacket and tossed it down to passers-by. His shirt followed, then his belt. His pants fell to his ankles, so he took them off too. He stood on the billboard in his baby blue skivvies, shouting to people below.

Pedestrians stopped and gawked. Soon, reporters and firefighters were on the scene. "I have parents and children — I don't want to die," he yelled, according to one local report. But one bystander shouted back, "When you dive, make it a pretty one." Others joined in chorus: "Jump, jump!"

Firefighters tried talking him down, offering food and water. But when several rescue workers began climbing toward him at once, Mr. Wang scrambled to an edge, apparently looking for an escape. Then he tumbled. A hanging roll of canvas beneath the billboard checked his fall. He landed on a patch of grass.

Mr. Wang is now back in Guizhou. His wife, who found out about the accident from a newspaper report, moved him closer to home, where the hospital fees are lower.

He says he has decided that he just had bad luck. The next time he goes to the big city it will be different. And there will be a next time, given that his family, once merely strapped for cash, is now deeply in debt.

"For our kind of people," he said, "there's no other choice.'

The Futile Pursuit of Happiness

The Futile Pursuit of Happiness
By JON GERTNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/07/magazine/07HAPPINESS.html

If Daniel Gilbert is right, then you are wrong. That is to say, if Daniel Gilbert is right, then you are wrong to believe that a new car will make you as happy as you imagine. You are wrong to believe that a new kitchen will make you happy for as long as you imagine. You are wrong to think that you will be more unhappy with a big single setback (a broken wrist, a broken heart) than with a lesser chronic one (a trick knee, a tense marriage). You are wrong to assume that job failure will be crushing. You are wrong to expect that a death in the family will leave you bereft for year upon year, forever and ever. You are even wrong to reckon that a cheeseburger you order in a restaurant -- this week, next week, a year from now, it doesn't really matter when -- will definitely hit the spot. That's because when it comes to predicting exactly how you will feel in the future, you are most likely wrong.

One experiment of Gilbert's had students in a photography class at Harvard choose two favorite pictures from among those they had just taken and then relinquish one to the teacher. Some students were told their choices were permanent; others were told they could exchange their prints after several days. As it turned out, those who had time to change their minds were less pleased with their decisions than those whose choices were irrevocable.

''You know, the Stones said, 'You can't always get what you want,' '' Gilbert adds. ''I don't think that's the problem. The problem is you can't always know what you want.''

A professor in Harvard's department of psychology, Gilbert likes to tell people that he studies happiness. But it would be more precise to say that Gilbert -- along with the psychologist Tim Wilson of the University of Virginia, the economist George Loewenstein of Carnegie-Mellon and the psychologist (and Nobel laureate in economics) Daniel Kahneman of Princeton -- has taken the lead in studying a specific type of emotional and behavioral prediction. In the past few years, these four men have begun to question the decision-making process that shapes our sense of well-being: how do we predict what will make us happy or unhappy -- and then how do we feel after the actual experience? For example, how do we suppose we'll feel if our favorite college football team wins or loses, and then how do we really feel a few days after the game? How do we predict we'll feel about purchasing jewelry, having children, buying a big house or being rich? And then how do we regard the outcomes? According to this small corps of academics, almost all actions -- the decision to buy jewelry, have kids, buy the big house or work exhaustively for a fatter paycheck -- are based on our predictions of the emotional consequences of these events.

Until recently, this was uncharted territory. How we forecast our feelings, and whether those predictions match our future emotional states, had never been the stuff of laboratory research. But in scores of experiments, Gilbert, Wilson, Kahneman and Loewenstein have made a slew of observations and conclusions that undermine a number of fundamental assumptions: namely, that we humans understand what we want and are adept at improving our well-being -- that we are good at maximizing our utility, in the jargon of traditional economics. Further, their work on prediction raises some unsettling and somewhat more personal questions. To understand affective forecasting, as Gilbert has termed these studies, is to wonder if everything you have ever thought about life choices, and about happiness, has been at the least somewhat naive and, at worst, greatly mistaken.

The problem, as Gilbert and company have come to discover, is that we falter when it comes to imagining how we will feel about something in the future. It isn't that we get the big things wrong. We know we will experience visits to Le Cirque and to the periodontist differently; we can accurately predict that we'd rather be stuck in Montauk than in a Midtown elevator. What Gilbert has found, however, is that we overestimate the intensity and the duration of our emotional reactions -- our ''affect'' -- to future events. In other words, we might believe that a new BMW will make life perfect. But it will almost certainly be less exciting than we anticipated; nor will it excite us for as long as predicted. The vast majority of Gilbert's test participants through the years have consistently made just these sorts of errors both in the laboratory and in real-life situations. And whether Gilbert's subjects were trying to predict how they would feel in the future about a plate of spaghetti with meat sauce, the defeat of a preferred political candidate or romantic rejection seemed not to matter. On average, bad events proved less intense and more transient than test participants predicted. Good events proved less intense and briefer as well.

Gilbert and his collaborator Tim Wilson call the gap between what we predict and what we ultimately experience the ''impact bias'' -- ''impact'' meaning the errors we make in estimating both the intensity and duration of our emotions and ''bias'' our tendency to err. The phrase characterizes how we experience the dimming excitement over not just a BMW but also over any object or event that we presume will make us happy. Would a 20 percent raise or winning the lottery result in a contented life? You may predict it will, but almost surely it won't turn out that way. And a new plasma television? You may have high hopes, but the impact bias suggests that it will almost certainly be less cool, and in a shorter time, than you imagine. Worse, Gilbert has noted that these mistakes of expectation can lead directly to mistakes in choosing what we think will give us pleasure. He calls this ''miswanting.''

''The average person says, 'I know I'll be happier with a Porsche than a Chevy,' '' Gilbert explains. '' 'Or with Linda rather than Rosalyn. Or as a doctor rather than as a plumber.' That seems very clear to people. The problem is, I can't get into medical school or afford the Porsche. So for the average person, the obstacle between them and happiness is actually getting the futures that they desire. But what our research shows -- not just ours, but Loewenstein's and Kahneman's -- is that the real problem is figuring out which of those futures is going to have the high payoff and is really going to make you happy.

''You know, the Stones said, 'You can't always get what you want,' '' Gilbert adds. ''I don't think that's the problem. The problem is you can't always know what you want.''

Gilbert's papers on affective forecasting began to appear in the late 1990's, but the idea to study happiness and emotional prediction actually came to him on a sunny afternoon in October 1992, just as he and his friend Jonathan Jay Koehler sat down for lunch outside the psychology building at the University of Texas at Austin, where both men were teaching at the time. Gilbert was uninspired about his studies and says he felt despair about his failing marriage. And as he launched into a discussion of his personal life, he swerved to ask why economists focus on the financial aspects of decision making rather than the emotional ones. Koehler recalls, ''Gilbert said something like: 'It all seems so small. It isn't really about money; it's about happiness. Isn't that what everybody wants to know when we make a decision?' '' For a moment, Gilbert forgot his troubles, and two more questions came to him. Do we even know what makes us happy? And if it's difficult to figure out what makes us happy in the moment, how can we predict what will make us happy in the future?

In the early 1990's, for an up-and-coming psychology professor like Gilbert to switch his field of inquiry from how we perceive one another to happiness, as he did that day, was just a hairsbreadth short of bizarre. But Gilbert has always liked questions that lead him somewhere new. Now 45, Gilbert dropped out of high school at 15, hooking into what he calls ''the tail end of the hippie movement'' and hitchhiking aimlessly from town to town with his guitar. He met his wife on the road; she was hitching in the other direction. They married at 17, had a son at 18 and settled down in Denver. ''I pulled weeds, I sold rebar, I sold carpet, I installed carpet, I spent a lot of time as a phone solicitor,'' he recalls. During this period he spent several years turning out science-fiction stories for magazines like Amazing Stories. Thus, in addition to being ''one of the most gifted social psychologists of our age,'' as the psychology writer and professor David G. Myers describes him to me, Gilbert is the author of ''The Essence of Grunk,'' a story about an encounter with a creature made of egg salad that jets around the galaxy in a rocket-powered refrigerator.

Psychology was a matter of happenstance. In the midst of his sci-fi career, Gilbert tried to sign up for a writing course at the local community college, but the class was full; he figured that psych, still accepting registrants, would help him with character development in his fiction. It led instead to an undergraduate degree at the University of Colorado at Denver, then a Ph.D. at Princeton, then an appointment at the University of Texas, then the appointment at Harvard. ''People ask why I study happiness,'' Gilbert says, ''and I say, 'Why study anything else?' It's the holy grail. We're studying the thing that all human action is directed toward.''

One experiment of Gilbert's had students in a photography class at Harvard choose two favorite pictures from among those they had just taken and then relinquish one to the teacher. Some students were told their choices were permanent; others were told they could exchange their prints after several days. As it turned out, those who had time to change their minds were less pleased with their decisions than those whose choices were irrevocable.

Much of Gilbert's research is in this vein. Another recent study asked whether transit riders in Boston who narrowly missed their trains experienced the self-blame that people tend to predict they'll feel in this situation. (They did not.) And a paper waiting to be published, ''The Peculiar Longevity of Things Not So Bad,'' examines why we expect that bigger problems will always dwarf minor annoyances. ''When really bad things happen to us, we defend against them,'' Gilbert explains. ''People, of course, predict the exact opposite. If you ask, 'What would you rather have, a broken leg or a trick knee?' they'd probably say, 'Trick knee.' And yet, if your goal is to accumulate maximum happiness over your lifetime, you just made the wrong choice. A trick knee is a bad thing to have.''

All of these studies establish the links between prediction, decision making and well-being. The photography experiment challenges our common assumption that we would be happier with the option to change our minds when in fact we're happier with closure. The transit experiment demonstrates that we tend to err in estimating our regret over missed opportunities. The ''things not so bad'' work shows our failure to imagine how grievously irritations compromise our satisfaction. Our emotional defenses snap into action when it comes to a divorce or a disease but not for lesser problems. We fix the leaky roof on our house, but over the long haul, the broken screen door we never mend adds up to more frustration.

Gilbert does not believe all forecasting mistakes lead to similar results; a death in the family, a new gym membership and a new husband are not the same, but in how they affect our well-being they are similar. ''Our research simply says that whether it's the thing that matters or the thing that doesn't, both of them matter less than you think they will,'' he says. ''Things that happen to you or that you buy or own -- as much as you think they make a difference to your happiness, you're wrong by a certain amount. You're overestimating how much of a difference they make. None of them make the difference you think. And that's true of positive and negative events.''

uch of the work of Kahneman, Loewenstein, Gilbert and Wilson takes its cue from the concept of adaptation, a term psychologists have used since at least the 1950's to refer to how we acclimate to changing circumstances. George Loewenstein sums up this human capacity as follows: ''Happiness is a signal that our brains use to motivate us to do certain things. And in the same way that our eye adapts to different levels of illumination, we're designed to kind of go back to the happiness set point. Our brains are not trying to be happy. Our brains are trying to regulate us.'' In this respect, the tendency toward adaptation suggests why the impact bias is so pervasive. As Tim Wilson says: ''We don't realize how quickly we will adapt to a pleasurable event and make it the backdrop of our lives. When any event occurs to us, we make it ordinary. And through becoming ordinary, we lose our pleasure.''

It is easy to overlook something new and crucial in what Wilson is saying. Not that we invariably lose interest in bright and shiny things over time -- this is a long-known trait -- but that we're generally unable to recognize that we adapt to new circumstances and therefore fail to incorporate this fact into our decisions. So, yes, we will adapt to the BMW and the plasma TV, since we adapt to virtually everything. But Wilson and Gilbert and others have shown that we seem unable to predict that we will adapt. Thus, when we find the pleasure derived from a thing diminishing, we move on to the next thing or event and almost certainly make another error of prediction, and then another, ad infinitum.

As Gilbert points out, this glitch is also significant when it comes to negative events like losing a job or the death of someone we love, in response to which we project a permanently inconsolable future. ''The thing I'm most interested in, that I've spent the most time studying, is our failure to recognize how powerful psychological defenses are once they're activated,'' Gilbert says. ''We've used the metaphor of the 'psychological immune system' -- it's just a metaphor, but not a bad one for that system of defenses that helps you feel better when bad things happen. Observers of the human condition since Aristotle have known that people have these defenses. Freud spent his life, and his daughter Anna spent her life, worrying about these defenses. What's surprising is that people don't seem to recognize that they have these defenses, and that these defenses will be triggered by negative events.'' During the course of my interviews with Gilbert, a close friend of his died. ''I am like everyone in thinking, I'll never get over this and life will never be good again,'' he wrote to me in an e-mail message as he planned a trip to Texas for the funeral. ''But because of my work, there is always a voice in the back of my head -- a voice that wears a lab coat and has a lot of data tucked under its arm -- that says, 'Yes, you will, and yes, it will.' And I know that voice is right.''

Still, the argument that we imperfectly imagine what we want and how we will cope is nevertheless disorienting. On the one hand, it can cast a shadow of regret on some life decisions. Why did I decide that working 100 hours a week to earn more would make me happy? Why did I think retiring to Sun City, Ariz., would please me? On the other hand, it can be enlightening. No wonder this teak patio set hasn't made me as happy as I expected. Even if she dumps me, I'll be O.K. Either way, predicting how things will feel to us over the long term is mystifying. A large body of research on well-being seems to suggest that wealth above middle-class comfort makes little difference to our happiness, for example, or that having children does nothing to improve well-being -- even as it drives marital satisfaction dramatically down. We often yearn for a roomy, isolated home (a thing we easily adapt to), when, in fact, it will probably compromise our happiness by distancing us from neighbors. (Social interaction and friendships have been shown to give lasting pleasure.) The big isolated home is what Loewenstein, 48, himself bought. ''I fell into a trap I never should have fallen into,'' he told me.

Loewenstein's office is up a narrow stairway in a hidden corner of an enormous, worn brick building on the edge of the Carnegie-Mellon campus in Pittsburgh. He and Gilbert make for an interesting contrast. Gilbert is garrulous, theatrical, dazzling in his speech and writing; he fills a room. Loewenstein is soft-spoken, given to abstraction and lithe in the way of a hard-core athlete; he seems to float around a room. Both men profess tremendous admiration for the other, and their different disciplines -- psychology and economics -- have made their overlapping interests in affective forecasting more complementary than fraught. While Gilbert's most notable contribution to affective forecasting is the impact bias, Loewenstein's is something called the ''empathy gap.''

Here's how it expresses itself. In a recent experiment, Loewenstein tried to find out how likely people might be to dance alone to Rick James's ''Super Freak'' in front of a large audience. Many agreed to do so for a certain amount of money a week in advance, only to renege when the day came to take the stage. This sounds like a goof, but it gets at the fundamental difference between how we behave in ''hot'' states (those of anxiety, courage, fear, drug craving, sexual excitation and the like) and ''cold'' states of rational calm. This empathy gap in thought and behavior -- we cannot seem to predict how we will behave in a hot state when we are in a cold state -- affects happiness in an important but somewhat less consistent way than the impact bias. ''So much of our lives involves making decisions that have consequences for the future,'' Loewenstein says. ''And if our decision making is influenced by these transient emotional and psychological states, then we know we're not making decisions with an eye toward future consequences.'' This may be as simple as an unfortunate proclamation of love in a moment of lust, Loewenstein explains, or something darker, like an act of road rage or of suicide.

Among other things, this line of inquiry has led Loewenstein to collaborate with health experts looking into why people engage in unprotected sex when they would never agree to do so in moments of cool calculation. Data from tests in which volunteers are asked how they would behave in various ''heat of the moment'' situations -- whether they would have sex with a minor, for instance, or act forcefully with a partner who asks them to stop -- have consistently shown that different states of arousal can alter answers by astonishing margins. ''These kinds of states have the ability to change us so profoundly that we're more different from ourselves in different states than we are from another person,'' Loewenstein says.

Part of Loewenstein's curiosity about hot and cold states comes from situations in which his emotions have been pitted against his intellect. When he's not teaching, he treks around the world, making sure to get to Alaska to hike or kayak at least once a year. A scholar of mountaineering literature, he once wrote a paper that examined why climbers have a poor memory for pain and usually ignore turn-back times at great peril. But he has done the same thing himself many times. He almost died in a whitewater canoeing accident and vowed afterward that he never wanted to see his runaway canoe again. (A couple of hours later, he went looking for it.) The same goes for his climbing pursuits. ''You establish your turn-back time, and then you find yourself still far from the peak,'' he says. ''So you push on. You haven't brought enough food or clothes, and then as a result, you're stuck at 13,000 feet, and you have to just sit there and shiver all night without a sleeping bag or warm clothes. When the sun comes up, you're half-frozen, and you say, 'Never again.' Then you get back and immediately start craving getting out again.'' He pushes the point: ''I have tried to train my emotions.'' But he admits that he may make the same mistakes on his next trip.

ould a world without forecasting errors be a better world? Would a life lived without forecasting errors be a richer life? Among the academics who study affective forecasting, there seems little doubt that these sorts of questions will ultimately jump from the academy to the real world. ''If people do not know what is going to make them better off or give them pleasure,'' Daniel Kahneman says, ''then the idea that you can trust people to do what will give them pleasure becomes questionable.'' To Kahneman, who did some of the first experiments in the area in the early 1990's, affective forecasting could greatly influence retirement planning, for example, where mistakes in prediction (how much we save, how much we spend, how we choose a community we think we'll enjoy) can prove irreversible. He sees a role for affective forecasting in consumer spending, where a ''cooling off'' period might remedy buyer's remorse. Most important, he sees vital applications in health care, especially when it comes to informed consent. ''We consider people capable of giving informed consent once they are told of the objective effects of a treatment,'' Kahneman says. ''But can people anticipate how they and other people will react to a colostomy or to the removal of their vocal cords? The research on affective forecasting suggests that people may have little ability to anticipate their adaptation beyond the early stages.'' Loewenstein, along with his collaborator Dr. Peter Ubel, has done a great deal of work showing that nonpatients overestimate the displeasure of living with the loss of a limb, for instance, or paraplegia. To use affective forecasting to prove that people adapt to serious physical challenges far better and will be happier than they imagine, Loewenstein says, could prove invaluable.

There are downsides to making public policy in light of this research, too. While walking in Pittsburgh one afternoon, Loewenstein tells me that he doesn't see how anybody could study happiness and not find himself leaning left politically; the data make it all too clear that boosting the living standards of those already comfortable, such as through lower taxes, does little to improve their levels of well-being, whereas raising the living standards of the impoverished makes an enormous difference. Nevertheless, he and Gilbert (who once declared in an academic paper, ''Windfalls are better than pratfalls, A's are better than C's, December 25 is better than April 15, and everything is better than a Republican administration'') seem to lean libertarian in regard to pushing any kind of prescriptive agenda. ''We're very, very nervous about overapplying the research,'' Loewenstein says. ''Just because we figure out that X makes people happy and they're choosing Y, we don't want to impose X on them. I have a discomfort with paternalism and with using the results coming out of our field to impose decisions on people.''

Still, Gilbert and Loewenstein can't contain the personal and philosophical questions raised by their work. After talking with both men, I found it hard not to wonder about my own predictions at every turn. At times it seemed like knowing the secret to some parlor trick that was nonetheless very difficult to pull off -- when I ogled a new car at the Honda dealership as I waited for a new muffler on my '92 Accord, for instance, or as my daughter's fever spiked one evening and I imagined something terrible, and then something more terrible thereafter. With some difficulty, I could observe my mind overshooting the mark, zooming past accuracy toward the sublime or the tragic. It was tempting to want to try to think about the future more moderately. But it seemed nearly impossible as well.

To Loewenstein, who is especially attendant to the friction between his emotional and deliberative processes, a life without forecasting errors would most likely be a better, happier life. ''If you had a deep understanding of the impact bias and you acted on it, which is not always that easy to do, you would tend to invest your resources in the things that would make you happy,'' he says. This might mean taking more time with friends instead of more time for making money. He also adds that a better understanding of the empathy gap -- those hot and cold states we all find ourselves in on frequent occasions -- could save people from making regrettable decisions in moments of courage or craving.

Gilbert seems optimistic about using the work in terms of improving ''institutional judgment'' -- how we spend health care dollars, for example -- but less sanguine about using it to improve our personal judgment. He admits that he has taken some of his research to heart; for instance, his work on what he calls the psychological immune system has led him to believe that he would be able to adapt to even the worst turn of events. In addition, he says that he now takes more chances in life, a fact corroborated in at least one aspect by his research partner Tim Wilson, who says that driving with Gilbert in Boston is a terrifying, white-knuckle experience. ''But I should have learned many more lessons from my research than I actually have,'' Gilbert admits. ''I'm getting married in the spring because this woman is going to make me happy forever, and I know it.'' At this, Gilbert laughs, a sudden, booming laugh that fills his Cambridge office. He seems to find it funny not because it's untrue, but because nothing could be more true. This is how he feels. ''I don't think I want to give up all these motivations,'' he says, ''that belief that there's the good and there's the bad and that this is a contest to try to get one and avoid the other. I don't think I want to learn too much from my research in that sense.''

Even so, Gilbert is currently working on a complex experiment in which he has made affective forecasting errors ''go away.'' In this test, Gilbert's team asks members of Group A to estimate how they'll feel if they receive negative personality feedback. The impact bias kicks in, of course, and they mostly predict they'll feel terrible, when in fact they end up feeling O.K. But if Gilbert shows Group B that others have gotten the same feedback and felt O.K. afterward, then its members predict they'll feel O.K. as well. The impact bias disappears, and the participants in Group B make accurate predictions.

This is exciting to Gilbert. But at the same time, it's not a technique he wants to shape into a self-help book, or one that he even imagines could be practically implemented. ''Hope and fear are enduring features of the human experience,'' he says, ''and it is unlikely that people are going to abandon them anytime soon just because some psychologist told them they should.'' In fact, in his recent writings, he has wondered whether forecasting errors might somehow serve a larger functional purpose he doesn't yet understand. If he could wave a wand tomorrow and eliminate all affective-forecasting errors, I ask, would he? ''The benefits of not making this error would seem to be that you get a little more happiness,'' he says. ''When choosing between two jobs, you wouldn't sweat as much because you'd say: 'You know, I'll be happy in both. I'll adapt to either circumstance pretty well, so there's no use in killing myself for the next week.' But maybe our caricatures of the future -- these overinflated assessments of how good or bad things will be -- maybe it's these illusory assessments that keep us moving in one direction over the other. Maybe we don't want a society of people who shrug and say, 'It won't really make a difference.'

''Maybe it's important for there to be carrots and sticks in the world, even if they are illusions,'' he adds. ''They keep us moving towards carrots and away from sticks.''

Jon Gertner is a contributing writer for Money magazine.

Report of Ecstasy Drug's Great Risks Is Retracted

Report of Ecstasy Drug's Great Risks Is Retracted
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/06/health/06ECST.html

A leading scientific journal yesterday retracted a paper it published last year saying that one night's typical dose of the drug Ecstasy might cause permanent brain damage.

The monkeys and baboons in the study were not injected with Ecstasy but with a powerful amphetamine, said the journal, Science magazine.

The retraction was submitted by the team at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine that did the study.

A medical school spokesman called the mistake "unfortunate" but said that Dr. George A. Ricaurte, the researcher who made it, was "still a faculty member in good standing whose research is solid and respected."

The study, released last Sept. 27, concluded that a dose of Ecstasy a partygoer would take in a single night could lead to symptoms resembling Parkinson's disease.

The study was ridiculed at the time by other scientists working with the drug, who said the primates must have been injected with huge overdoses.

Two of the 10 primates died of heat stroke, they pointed out, and another two were in such distress that they were not given all the doses.

If a typical Ecstasy dose killed 20 percent of those who took it, the critics said, no one would use it recreationally.

In an interview yesterday, Dr. Ricaurte said he realized his mistake when he could not reproduce his own results by giving the drug to monkeys orally. He then realized that two vials his laboratory bought the same day must have been mislabeled: one contained Ecstasy, the other d-methamphetamine.

Dr. Ricaurte's laboratory has received millions of dollars from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and has produced several studies concluding that Ecstasy is dangerous. Other scientists accuse him of ignoring their studies showing that typical doses do no permanent damage.

At the time Dr. Ricaurte's study was published, it was strongly defended against those critics by Dr. Alan I. Leshner, the former head of the drug abuse institute, who had just become the chief executive officer of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, which publishes Science.

Dr. Leshner had testified before Congress that Ecstasy was dangerous, and Dr. Ricaurte's critics accused him of rushing his results into print because a bill known as the Anti-Rave Act was before Congress. The act would punish club owners who knew that drugs like Ecstasy were being used at their dance gatherings.

Dr. Ricaurte yesterday called that accusation "ludicrous."

His laboratory made "a simple human error," he said. "We're scientists, not politicians."

Asked why the vials were not checked first, he answered: "We're not chemists. We get hundreds of chemicals here. It's not customary to check them."

Memories Are Priceless

Memories Are Priceless
By QUANG BAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/31/travel/31bpviet.html

MY father and I boarded the plane for Vietnam, carrying $15,000 in cash to give away to relatives. We were making our first trip back home four years ago, after nearly three decades in the United States. We purposely scheduled our trip to coincide with the lunar New Year, and we thought nothing could be a better augur for better times ahead than two long-lost family members showing up unexpectedly at the doorstep bearing gifts.

We hid money in suitcases, tucked it into pockets my mother sewed on the underside of our shirts and stuffed it inside socks and underwear. My father had saved money for this trip from his job managing a convenience store, and we were also carrying money and parcels from friends and relatives in the United States who wanted us to deliver the gifts to their families in Vietnam. During the 18-hour flight from Los Angeles to Taipei to Ho Chi Minh City, I pictured myself running from the airport straight to the bank and trying to deposit my entire self into a vault, while a young boy chased me, throwing rocks, until I detonated, all our money flying into the air like chicken feathers.

Though Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City in 1975, when we landed at the airport, our driver held a placard that read "Welcome to Saigon," with my last name first, the way it always will be written in Vietnam. The sign became my only real souvenir.

The driver took the tourist route to our hotel, near the Ben Thanh Market. Looking out from the van, my father appeared excited. He left in 1975, when he was 46 years old, on a boat; my mother, siblings and I were waiting for him in a refugee camp in California.

His city had changed. "That's where Pho Hoa used to be," the driver would say, mentioning a famous noodle shop, and then we looked out at the opulent New World Hotel, opened in 1994 when Ho Chi Minh City was still poised to become the economic tiger of the Pacific Rim.

"Take us to the bank!" my father yelled.

The driver stopped at a gift shop where currency could be exchanged. It was on Dong Khoi Street, with ice cream parlors, upscale restaurants and art galleries. "He gets a commission," my father whispered.

In the back of the van, we bundled the money into a bag. There was no line in the shop but a lot of yelling behind the counter, as if everyone were gambling to win one of the lacquered landscape tableaus, jade bonsais or smiling Buddhas. When the transaction was nearly complete, we realized our problem - a dollar equaled about 15,000 Vietnamese dong. The young girl stacked enormous piles of bills on the counter. We had no way to assess whether we received a fair rate of exchange, and they had no appropriately sized bags to give us.

For four weeks, we traveled all around Vietnam in cyclos, cabs, trains and airplanes, creatively hiding our diminishing supply of gift money. We went round trip from Ho Chi Minh City, a bustling metropolis of commerce, up to the rainy region of Hué with its royal palaces and legendary 19th-century architecture, and toward Hanoi, the beautiful capital city dotted with museums and historic sites. Throughout, we gave away the money in the same manner. The 11 designated recipients, close members of my immediate family, grew to include cousins, children and neighbors. They were poor and didn't have jobs or schooling, and I gave many of them the money my father had given me to distribute. We would take a cab to someone's home because my father wanted the ease and security, though I felt odd being frightened of Vietnamese people. Once invited inside, we were offered black tea, mangosteens, or butter cookies. We emptied a suitcase, containing an envelope of money but also clothing, soaps, pain medication, underwear and other items that we had brought from the United States. We took pictures.

And the recipients would write a note of gratitude for us to carry back to family in the United States.

With so much cash, it was hard not to be lavish. I bought a round of beers at Apocalypse Now in Hanoi for an entire busload of Vietnamese Canadians, a drawing for myself of Can Tho, a city on the Mekong Delta where I was born, and bags of fruit and sour candies from the open markets, giving the bags away randomly. I also tipped anywhere from 20 to 500 percent. My father had a false tooth redone. We traveled first class. We splurged on a few meals. And still, we had a lot of money to spare.

The stories of suffering that my extended family experienced after the war in Vietnam triggered my American sense of philanthropy: I handed over money to anyone who looked as if they needed it. But near the end of the trip, I started to feel manipulated. When the vendor at the sugar-cane stall repeated her war story to me, she had two sisters who drowned off a refugee boat and not just one as in the original telling.

After my aunt's husband was killed and Saigon fell, my aunt lived literally in the jungle and worked jobs she'd rather forget. She now was in line to emigrate to the United States but she wasn't sure if she wanted to die in a strange country. Oh, and did we have $500 to bribe the officer who was handling her papers so that she could be put ahead in the line?

In Vietnam, the cats are extremely skinny, people sleep on the zoo grounds, and I kept dreaming they were all me. Rather, I could have been the one left behind, uneducated and rotten-toothed. At the end of the war, everyone in the south was made instantly poor. Those who fled successfully became the rich Western cousin, friend or uncle to whom they would write their appeals for money. We are called Viet kieus, the overseas Vietnamese. A Viet kieu can find money anywhere in his house, couch or many cars so why couldn't I pay the minuscule entrance fee for a group of six to get into a Saigon disco? It was hard to fault the rationale, but my emotions had nothing to do with the amount of money in question.

I was born in Vietnam but I remember almost nothing about it. In returning, I yearned for a clearer picture of a place I had been trying to imagine for so long. At the end of the trip I only felt an overwhelming sense of loss and guilt, not the connections I was searching for. My father felt exhausted, and he realized that the poverty was too extreme to truly help the few people he tried to aid. We still had some dong when we returned to the United States. On our final day, my father put his hand out to stop me from tipping the bellboy who loaded our cab to the airport. "Don't get their hopes up," he said.

QUANG BAO is executive director of the Asia America Writers' Workshop.

A BALLAD OF THE MULBERRY ROAD

A BALLAD OF THE MULBERRY ROAD
anonymous (Han Dynasty, 1st century)
excerpt translated by Ezra Pound

The sun rises in south east corner of things
To look on the tall house of the Shin
For they have a daughter named Rafu,
(pretty girl)
She made the name for herself: "Gauze Veil,"
For she feeds mulberries to silkworms.
She gets them by the south wall of the town.
With green strings she makes the warp of her basket,
She makes the shoulder-straps of her basket
from the boughs of Katsura,
And she piles her hair up on the left side of her head-piece.

Her earrings are made of pearl,
Her underskirt is of green pattern-silk,
Her overskirt is the same silk dyed in purple,
And when the men going by look on Rafu
They set down their burdens,
They stand and twirl their moustaches.

25 Signs You've Lived in New York Too Long

[my pal dawn sent this to me, and its so true!!]

25 Signs You've Lived in New York Too Long

1. You actively avoid bars that people from the outer boroughs frequent.
2. You get very annoyed with out-of-towners who think the subway is unsafe.
3. You figure that a date costs at least $200.
4. You have not seen a bank teller in several years, because your idea of going to the bank is using the ATM at your corner deli.
5. You haven't smelled grass clippings in over a year.

6. You haven't "called shotgun" in a long, long time.
7. You think that New Jersey is really far away.
8. You plot the Barney's Warehouse Sale on your calendar.
9. You have over two month's rent in credit card debt, but you still eat out every night.
10. Your give out your cell phone number to people you meet,
because that is the only way to reach you.
11. You have stayed out later than 4 am on a Monday or a Tuesday night.
12. Your passport gets more use than your driver's license
13. You are ashamed to be assigned a 646 area code.
14. You can't imagine eating dinner before 8 o'clock at night.
15. Not one of your adult friends is married, has a car, owns an apartment, or aspires to any of the above.
16. You think nothing of a man in leather pants.
17. Your childhood bedroom is bigger than your current apartment, but your rent costs more than your parents' mortgage payment.
18. At least one meal each week consists solely of drinks, olives, and nuts.
19. You eat Thai, Vietnamese, Indian and sushi at least once each week.
20. You tell everyone you love NY because you of the cultural institutions,
but can't remember the last time you set foot in a museum or theater.
21. You spend $10 to see a movie.
22. You take $150 with you every night you go out: $20 for cabs, $20 for cover, $60 for dinner, and $50 for drinks.
23. You have gone out on 3 dates with 3 different people in the same week, but haven't spoken to any of them since.
24. You wear Prada shoes, Gucci sunglasses, a Cartier watch, and cashmere, but claim to be poor.
25. You think the only places you could ever live are New York, Paris, London, San Francisco, or on an island in the Caribbean.