China has a unique food culture compared to the West. For instance, my wife loves noodles. I’ve followed her down narrow Shanghai streets to a well-known won-ton and noodle shop on the corner of Chang-le and Shang-yang Road. The front is open and the ceiling low with each narrow table crowded with Chinese sitting on small chairs shoveling noodles in with chopsticks.
My wife orders a small bowl of noodles with peanut sauce for me and a bowl of blood soup and another bowl of noodles with spicy hot Sichuan peppercorn sauce for her. As she eats, sweat beads her face but there is not one word of complaint—not one sign that she is suffering. Instead, this seriously satisfied look spreads across her face as if she has entered a Chinese noodle heaven.
When visiting Nanjing Road in Shanghai between People Square and the Bund, we always stop at the same food shop where my wife orders steaming hot noodles with the same peppercorn sauce, and I order deep fried, fresh chou dofu (stinky tofu) with the same sauce that causes me to sweat too.
At celebration feasts, a wider variety of food will be served from whole fish, crab, a variety of vegetable dishes and tofu.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the unique love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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As of 2014 there were more than 460 Hooters company-owned locations and franchises throughout the United States. The company has restaurants in 44 U.S. states, the US Virgin Islands, and Guam. Hooters also operates restaurants in 24 other countries, and China is one of them. In fact, the first Hooters in China opened October, 2004.
With more than 234 million middle class Chinese, 113 million more than the United States, the fact that Hooters is doing business in China shows how fast China is changing as the Middle Kingdom evolves into an Asian Super Power that is beginning to look more like the U.S. China is roaring toward capitalism with all the trappings of a consumer society.
Will the two countries become equal partners one day, because of companies like Hooters, McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut, Ford and GM? For instance, KFC has more than 4,500 outlets in China and Chinese buyers are obsessed with Buick. According to the New York Times, Buick is the hottest luxury brand in China. Imagine the profits that American companies would lose if China and the U.S. went to war.
I’ve never been to a Hooters in any country, but on my next trip to China, I might visit one since they are six spread out between Shanghai, Beijing, Xi’an and Chingdu. I’ve already watched the YouTube videos. See for yourself.
As fast at McDonald’s, KFC, Pizza Hut, Starbucks, GM, and Ford are all growing in China (and making money), it’s easy to imagine that Hooters may have more stores in China one day than the U.S.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the unique love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Jews settled in Kaifeng, Henan Province in 960 A.D. after arriving along the Silk Road. These Jews were welcomed by the Song Dynasty and encouraged to retain their cultural identity by building a synagogue that was finished in 1163 A.D.
The Kaifeng Synagogue had a Torah written on sheepskin. The architecture of the buildings reflects Jewish culture. Evidence indicates that the Kaifeng Jews were very traditional and obeyed kosher dietary laws and practiced circumcision for males.
The Jewish community in China thrived for centuries before it was assimilated into Chinese culture through intermarriage. By the middle of the 18th century little survived of the Jewish community.
In 1849, the Yellow River flooded causing what was left of the Jewish community to break apart. Today there are about 500 descendants of the Kaifeng Jewish community, who want to reclaim their Jewish tradition.
“Jews were not newcomers to China. Some had lived under Chinese rule from sometime after 92 CE, during the Han Dynasty (206 BCE- 220 CE), when they resided in what at the time was called the Western Region (roughly Xinjiang Province today) in special enclaves that were set aside by the Chinese for foreigners.” — The Sino-Judaic Institute
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the unique love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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From several pieces I’ve read in the U.S. media and a few comments I’ve received on this Blog, it appears that some people think the Chinese are the emperors of greed, but they aren’t.
In fact, greed is everywhere — even, GASP, in the United States.
For example, ABC’s Good Morning America reported, “Phantom Debt Collectors from India Harass Americans, Demand Money.”
GMA reported, “Hundreds of thousands of cash-strapped Americans have been targeted by abusive debt collectors operating out of overseas call centers suspected of links to organized crime in India, law enforcement officials told ABC News.”
Working through call centers in India, the commission estimates that the criminals have dialed at least 2.5 million calls, persuading already cash-strapped victims to send them more than $5 million.
“It’s undetected and undetectable. They’ll use your child’s Social Security number with a different name and a different birth date.” In fact, over several years, 57,000 cases of child identity theft was reported to the Federal Trade Commission. A new report from All Clear ID estimates that one in 10 U.S. children are victims.
“Olivia McNamara was starting her freshman year at Vanderbilt University when she applied for her first credit card. After being rejected twice, she did some digging and found that someone had stolen her identity and had run up massive debt – to the tune of $1.5 million. When she was 9, someone had stolen her Social Security number and set up false identities and more than 42 accounts. All of them had defaulted.”
Then in June 2012, the AARP Bulletin reported (on page 20), Locked out of Luck by Sid Kirchheimer. The piece said, “The overwhelming majority of locksmiths with an 800 phone number are not legitimate … In reality, the pro arrives in a van with no fixed address and a scam in mind. … The work is faulty plus expensive—often $1,000 or more, and demanded in cash.”
AARP even has a book out by fraud expert Doug Shadel, Outsmarting the Scam Artist. Shadel and a team of scientists interviewed thousands of victims and dozens of scam artists who revealed their trade secrets.
The Federal Trade Commission warns, “Consumer frauds pose a threat to consumers and the economy. Even the most wary and sophisticated consumers may fall victim to fraudulent offers – in the mail, in the media, and on the Internet.”
The FTC report stated that in the year prior to the survey the number of victims of the most common types of consumer fraud reached almost 36 million with 53 million incidents.
In fact, in 2010, the Better Business Bureau reported, “$2.9 trillion is lost to fraud annually.” In a decade that adds up to $29 trillion or almost twice the National Federal debt.
So, next time you read in the media or in a Blog that China, or any other country, is filled with crooks and corruption, remember that China is not alone. Don’t stereotype anyone. After all, the Chinese were not behind the 2008 financial crisis that cost the U.S. economy more than $22 Trillion in addition to nine-million jobs, and that does not count what the rest of the world lost. – U.S. Government Accountability Office
One last thought. The 2008 financial crises caused nine-million working Americans to lose their jobs in a few months, but the Economic Policy Institute reports that the U.S. trade deficit with China cost only 3.2 million American jobs between 2001 and 2013 (12 years or about 258 thousand jobs a year). In addition, a recent report from PBS.org and the BBC says that one in three jobs today will be lost to software, robots and smart machines by 2025—not to China.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the unique love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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An honest comment for my first novel My Splendid Concubine gave me the idea for this post on the history of the changing attitudes of when a female child becomes a woman. The comment said, “The girls (the two concubines in the story) were younger than 15, for goodness sake. I had a hard time getting past that.”
According to Live Science.com, “A woman can get pregnant and have a baby as soon as she begins ovulating, or producing eggs. This typically occurs about a year after they first begin menstruating, which for North American women, usually happens between the ages of 11 and 12.”
But according to the law in the United State, a female child isn’t legally a woman until age 16, 17 or 18 depending on which U.S. state you live in.
But the age of consent laws in China in the middle of the 19th century, the time period of My Splendid Concubine, that was based on a real-life story, were not the same as they are today, and China is not the United States.
To understand the difference between now and then, today in the People’s Republic of China, the age of consent for sexual activity is 14, regardless of gender and/or sexual orientation. In Hong Kong, it is 16 and 17 in Macau.
In fact, “Depictions of ‘child-romance’ in ancient or modern Chinese literature are not difficult to find. They include passages on joyous heterosexual or homosexual activities by children as young as 12 to 13 years old with one another or with adults. Children are usually described as natural sexual beings and erotic stimulation and sex-play are seen as beneficial to their healthy development (Chen 2000). … For most of Chinese history, the minimum marriage age suggested by the government had ranged between 12 and 16.” – Department of Psychiatry, University of Hong Kong
What about the United Kingdom around the time period of my historical novel? In 1875, a concern that young girls were being sold into brothels caused Parliament to change the age of consent to 13. Prior to that, the age of consent was 12.
However, in the United States in 1875, each state determined its own criminal laws and the age of consent ranged from 10 to 12 years of age. It would not be until after the 1930s that the term jailbaitcame into use in America as the age of consent laws changed.
I could have sanitized My Splendid Concubine and made both Ayaou and her sister Shao-mei much older to fit the politically correct attitudes of today, but that would have been historically incorrect. Sterling Seagrave in his bookDragon Lady, the Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China, wrote, “He (Robert Hart) had just turned twenty. Ayaou was barely past puberty but was wise beyond her years.”
If Ayaou, one of the concubines in the novel, was barely 14, then there was only a six-year gap between the two, while Hart’s arranged marriage to a young Irish woman named Hester Jane Bredon a decade later sees the gap double to twelve years when he was thirty and she was eighteen. Seagrave says, “He (Hart) sought a wife as straightforwardly as he had bought a concubine.” After returning to Ireland for a brief stay in 1866, Robert proposed marriage to Hester five days after he met her. The courtship lasted three months before they were married.
Should authors ignore historical fact and rewrite history to reflect the moral sensitivities of today’s readers?
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the unique love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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