The Clash between America and the Middle East: Dr Laura Nader's views

Dr Laura Nader, who is a professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley, recently gave a speech at the University of Southern California in which she expressed her views on the Arab conflict and its relationship with the United States. When I first heard of this talk and on how Dr Laura Nader might be controversial in her views, I was a little skeptical, but I found her talk to be very interesting and thought-provoking.

I grew up in Beijing and was educated under a Western school system – around 60 - 70% of our high school graduates end up going to study in the United States, and the rest either in the United Kingdom, Canada or Australia. Having never had the chance to reside in the United States for a permanent period, my impression of the US was that of a melting pot, where democracy ensured justice and equality.

I realized I was somewhat mistaken when I moved to Los Angeles two years ago. I learned that women still do not receive equal pay for the same job and the same effort. I learned that there was a disproportionate number of Black inmates sentenced to the death penalty. I learned that people can't even vote without it being a bipartisan struggle – in Ohio, a law restricting early voters is being challenged. Currently in Pennsylvania, a new law requires voters to show photo identification (which many minorities do not own). So in a nation which preaches equality, not everyone gets the equal chance to vote. It is still divided on the issue of same-sex marriage, whereas it is already legal in Canada and many parts of Europe.

Photo courtesy of FreedomHouse

Professor Nader stresses that many Americans still hold onto the notion that their nation is the best in the world, that they have the power and privilege to instruct other nations on how to behave. As she mentioned, Amnesty International reported Syrian husbands who beat their wives as 26%. It is the exact same for American husbands. Hilary Clinton opposed Egyptian military when they pulled a woman by her hair, not realizing that the exact same thing happened to a protester in Berkeley just one week before.

We are under the notion that we are the more civilized nation, yet we do not take enough time to look at our own flaws. America is the only industralized nation that until recently did not have universal healthcare, and incarcerates more people than any other nation in the world. We routinely hear of gun shootings, death penalties are still legal, and creationists are constantly trying to undermine the concept of evolution.

We have created a war in Iraq and Afghanistan, while at the same time condemning acts of violence and unjust terrorism. “It is for the greater good” is often the argument used. Except that is not how the Middle Easterns view these wars – they instead view the West as driven by its interests and blinded by bias and hostility. They see the West as empowering Israel, and disregarding the aspirations of Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East. There is undoubtedly a lot of anti-Americanism and bitterness everywhere.

I find Professor Nader's views on America's foreign policy in the Middle East to be an provocative theory on explaining why there is so much bitterness in the Middle East. Given what has already happened, including various riots, uprisings, the September 11^th attacks and other acts of terrorism, it is inevitable that we ask the question: “why do they hate us so much?” Professor Nader gives us a little insight on exactly why.

Following up on Outliers: My father's story of success

After having discussed Malcolm Gladwell's theory of success, I've begun to give more thought about my father, and how he achieved success.

My grandparents fled from China to Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War in 1949. My grandfather was a foot soldier during the war; my grandmother was illiterate, like so many of the women who couldn't afford basic education back in the days. My father grew up the youngest of seven siblings, and they, along with my grandparents, lived in a one-room shack.

My father has only begun to recall tidbits of his poverty to me in the recent years – how he didn't ask for new shoes even though his were tattered and torn, with glaring holes in them. How he used to have to borrow his friend's motorcycle to pick up my mother on dates. His circumstances were terrible, even for standards at those times.

My father is inarguably an intelligent man. He graduated top of his class in middle school, and went on to study at Jianguo High School, the most prestigious boys' high school in Taiwan. He then took the college entrance exams and scored in the top percentile (where he aced the writing and English portion). He was accepted into Tsinghua University, the top engineering school in Taiwan, where he studied electrical engineering.

When I was in high school taking advanced calculus, he could still explain the concepts to me in simple and articulate ways (I, on the other hand, can't even remember what derivatives are anymore). He takes one look at the LSAT Logic Games that I've been studying for, tells me it's for dweebs, and solves it within minutes. He remembers Chinese history like it was yesterday. His hobbies include Sudoku (which he always beats me at) Chinese chess (ditto), and Chinese classics (can't read 'em to save my life). Once, I asked him to explain the economic crisis, he conversed with me for two hours about it. It was like being given a free lecture.

I've always admired my father; I still do. Contrasting his impoverished background against how well off we are now, it is hard to imagine how he overcame all these obstacles to be where he is right now. But over the years I've been taking a more in-depth look at his success and how circumstances in his life have prodded him along the way, and here's what I found.

My father was the youngest of seven children. He was male. Being the youngest and male in the family meant one thing – he was spoiled by his siblings and his relatives. The gap between him and his oldest sibling is roughly around twenty years or so, and by the time he started school he had several sisters, as well as aunts, pampering over him. While theymight not have been well off, my grandparents had, by then, grown-up children who could help with the burden of providing for her other children.

It was also during my father's childhood that Taiwanese education was at its peak. Built on the education policies that were launched in the 1950s, the country began to invest in public and private education at a rate that “far outstripped most countries with similar resources.” In fact, in 1961 (a year before my father was born), primary and secondary schools received 80% of all public education funds. When my dad attended the best high school in Taipei, he was already being taughted by professors and teachers with graduate degrees from the United States.

In addition, during the 1980s, Taiwanese economy boomed and it was coined one of the “Four Asian Tigers” (along with Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore). My father was there at a time when jobs were plenty and he didn't need (and could not afford) an overseas graduate degree to get a decent job.

In 1998, when I was five, IBM offered my father a higher position in China, with multiple benefits, and we moved to Beijing. For the next ten or so years, China's economy boomed exponentially and with the right investments, my family gained from China's growing prosperity. My father now has the ability to send one daughter to college in the States, another to graduate school in Switzerland. We live comfortably. We have a house, a car and a gorgeous black Labrador named Grace. Plus, my father has way too many shoes to count.

My father's background, as well as his timing in both Taiwan and China, were lucky gems for him. Things would have turned out differently if my grandparents had not fled to Taiwan after the civil war; my father would've had to experience the Cultural Revolution. This meant, crucially, a halt in education for a couple of years (and instead, forced labor in the fields). If my father was not given the opportunity to move to China, we would not have been given the chance to flourish in a one of the world's fastest growing economies. 

My father always tells me, there were so many more hard-working and smarter people than him in college. There was a guy who could read his textbook once and still ace every exam (a useful skill to have). There were other guys who would sleep only two or three hours a day, and to make sure they wouldn't sleep for more, they never slept on comfortable beds, only on straw mats.Yet my father has had luck and opportunity thrown upon him time and time again, and with these countless chances, he has achieved the extraordinary: a young, poor boy grew up to able to afford the best education for his daughters, to enjoy vacations, and to never go hungry again.

Malcolm Gladwell: The Public Intellectual and His Theory on Success

Authors are public intellectual figures. They seek out new research, make new theses, and voice their opinions in a way where the average person can understand. But are public intellectuals a dying breed?

Stephen Mack, in his essay “Are Public Intellectuals a Thing of the Past?” denies the possibility of America turning anti-intellectual, and instead argues that the academic field still wields enormous financial, technological and cultural power. In addition, he stresses some of America's most cherished social myths, like the “American Dream” to indicate how we revere education.

There is a myth in America that America is anti-intellectual, and thus, not supportive of intellectual pursuit nor discussion. In this kind of myth, the common-folk can be compared to a kid for lacking impulse control. As Mack puts it, they're “exhibit A in nearly every hand-wringing, anti-democratic treatise in western tradition.” For example, Rick Santorum shows his evident distrust and distaste for intellectuals in a recent speech. He told a crowd with overwhelming applause: “We will never have the elite, smart people on our side [Republican], because they believe they have the power to tell you what to do. So our colleges and universities, they're not going to be on our side.”

This is, I believe, the kind of typical thinking that makes people worry about anti-intellectualism in America. It's a kind of open animosity to ideas, to scientific facts, a false sense of a power struggle. Since when did the elite, the “smart” people have to choose sides? And since when did having a college degree equate to having the power to tell people what to do (That's just wishful thinking).

Everyone has a role in democracy, to “keep the pot boiling”, and to make sure you're talking about something worth talking about. There is no war of intelligence going on. There are only stories to be told, facts to be discussed, and one public intellectual has definitely got something worth talking about.

This person is Malcolm Gladwell, who is the author of several books, including bestsellers such as the Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers. While he has made interesting points in his previous books, his ideas in Outliers are of particular interest to me.

Gladwell began to form his idea for his book when he noticed that people ascribe Bill Gates’s success to being "really smart" or "really ambitious." Yet there are lots of people who are really smart and really ambitious, and not worth 60 billion dollars, the way Bill Gates is.

Our understanding of success, he therefore reasoned, was very crude. There must have been something else. But what? As Obama famously has said of success: “You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think I'm so smart. There are a lot of smart people. Or they think, I got here because I'm so hard-working. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges.” 

Malcolm Gladwell epitomizes what Obama sees, and what a lot of us neglect to see, either through blissful unawareness or because we haven't given it much thought: there is more to the successful person than just himself. Bill Gates had access to technology that wasn't available to most college students at the end of eighth grade. Steve Jobs, who grew up in Palo Alto, the hub of new inventions, asked the HP founder for spare parts so that he could work with them. Bill Joy played with computers when most places couldn't afford to buy one. What Gladwell is arguing isn't that they're not brilliant – trust me, I couldn't have invented Apple software even with all the right parts in front of me – but that their circumstances were also extremely exceptional.

Thus, in Outliers, Gladwell examines the factors that contribute to the different levels of success. He delves in the causes of why most Canadian ice hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year, and how this increases their chances to play at better leagues. He looks into the Beatles' days in Europe, having to tour and play non-stop for days straight. He explains the 10,000 hour rule, which is a general rule that applies to how people – musicians, chess players, even him – can become a success in one particular field.

One of the most prominent examples that Gladwell gives to support his thesis that it is not just the genius, and not just the hard work and determination that one has to succeed. He chose to tell the story of Christopher Lagoon. Lagoon was one of those child prodigies – he got a perfect score on his SAT, even though he “fell asleep at one point during the test (Outliers 71).” He would draw things and they would look like photographs. He could read and comprehend heavily philosophical texts and Classics. He could brief a semester's worth of textbooks in two days, and tested as having an IQ of around 195. He attended Reed College on a full scholarship, which he then lost because his mother forgot to fill out her financial statement. Instead of accommodating his circumstances, the financial aid office simply did nothing. He went back to Montana, where he grew up, and tried to go to community college and work at the same time. He tries to move from a morning class to an afternoon class, but to no avail. He ended up owning a horse fram in rural Missouri. Gladwell points out that Langan has not reached a high level of success because of the environment he grew up in. With no one in Langan's life to help him (economically, emotionally, and in opportunity-wise) and with nothing in his background to help him take advantage of his exceptional gifts, he had a hard time achieving success.

Thus, what Gladwell stresses is that not no one makes it alone. Being smart doesn't suffice. Being hardworking doesn't suffice. There are a lot more variables, either generational, age-wise, by birthdate, by place of birth or occupation of their parents – that contributes to our notion of success. There are a lot more unseen factors than society cares to admit and not everything that happens to a person is up to that person.

I think his thesis and his ideas are particularly important to us as society because it sees success from a different light. It's from a perspective that tells us that sometimes, one person isn't enough, and that has it's pros as well as its cons. To me, Gladwell resonates to the millions (or at least, lots) of people who are both smart and hard-working, yet fail to make it big. But it play the opposite effect, where people will want to rely on others to help them, instead of working the amount they should, and resort to blame and finger-pointing when things do not go their way.

Gladwell himself is successful too. He was born in England to a Jamaican mother and an English father. He moved to Canada when he was six. He studied at one of the top universities in Canada, the University of Toronto, where he earned a bachelor's degree in history. After a series of jobs, he began covering the business and science for the Washington Post, and then at the New Yorker. 

Gladwell is a journalist and an author, and has written national bestsellers such as The Tipping Point, Blink, and What the Dog Saw, in addition to Outliers. The Tipping Point was named one of the best books of the decade by Amazon.com customers, The Guardian and The Times. It sold over two million copies in US. Blink sold equally well. His ideas have been interesting, as well as well-received. The Tipping Point talks about why and how some ideas can spread like social epidemics. Blink, on the other hand, was about the notion of a sudden, rapid cognition, and how we can understand them.

Gladwell was appointed the Order of Canada in 2011. Yet from what Gladwell makes of success, it is that everyone has had some sort of push. Gladwell himself may have been severely influenced by his father, who allowed him to wander around the offices of where he worked (as a mathematics professor at the University of Waterloo). Gladwell's interest in reading and libraries, he infers, may have been contributed to those days. How many children have the opportunity to be surrounded by intellectualism at such a young age? How many visited a college campus since they were a child?

Gladwell's book is prone to critcisms from other public intellectuals, and that is exactly the point of public intellectuals: to critique, to explore different options, to offer a contrasting and insightful opinion.

Yet as a public intellectual, our job is to think critically and examine beneath the surface (much like Gladwell's theory of success). Critics have often cited that as a journalist and not a scientist, Gladwell often oversimplies his work. He has also been criticized for his emphasis on anecdotal evidence over research to support his conclusions (example being the case of Christopher Lagoon). Steven Pinker has challenged Gladwell's approach to data collection and analysis, claiming that he cherry-picks evidence to support his thesis, leaving out additional or conflicting information.

Gladwell's critics all make interesting claims, but I think Gladwell's use of anecdotal evidence is an advantage - it helps the average reader to understand his basic idea. You see papers and books being written that are not tailored toward the public, but amongst others in other academic circles. Information and ideas should be shared, but they should be shared with everyone, not with just the few. Gladwell's greatest strength is that he takes scientific evidence, and he weaves the hypotheses and the statistical data and the strange science jargon, and he weaves it into a beautifully crafted story. He doesn't claim to be an expert, or a scientist. He simply tells us stories. 

It is up to us to not rely on other people to feed us evidence, to tell us "truths", but foster the ability to "prod, poke, and pester". We all need to keep the pot boiling. Intellectualism isn't dead, but people need to start thinking, and thinking rationally.

The Holstee Manifesto

I live my life by following inspirational words that I agree with. You can too!

Here's one known as the Holstee Manifesto.

Picture courtesy of this website

But sharing is caring: why won’t Chinese men donate their sperm?

There seems to be a shortage of sperm donation in China. Sperm banks in China were set up in 2001, and there is a maximum limit of one per province or autonomous region. As of last year, only 10 operate nationwide, and all of them are state-run. In southern Guangdong province, 14 percent of the population, which was around 104 million in 2010, cannot conceive. Having one sperm bank is, needless to say, kind of a problem when there are families waiting up to a year for viable sperm, and they would like a child (but just one, please).


If we’re building on the assumption that we are not more immensely concerned with overpopulation in China, it seems as though this pesky problem needs to be addressed. You know this has become a serious issue when Chinese officials start spouting propaganda in an effort to convince men to donate. Luo Wenzhi, who is the head of Guangdong’s family planning commission, has some encouraging words of thought: 

"Donating your sperm is healthy. It will neither harm you nor kill you."

Indeed, it will not do either. Yet why are Chinese men reluctant to donate their sperm?


According to the Time article “Is China Running Out of Sperm?”, sperm is associated with vitality, and giving it away is considered a cultural taboo. Wang Jian, a graduate student in Beijing who has an “excellent sample” of sperm (sperm donations have strict standards), told the China Daily last year that he kept his donation a secret from his family because he feared they might kill him “for letting a stranger use the precious family seed.”

Maybe it’s the lack of a proper sex education that have men still believing donating sperm is potentially harmful or life-threatening. Maybe it’s just one of those irrational cultural beliefs that just won’t be eradicated, no matter how irrational we know it to be (I still refuse to buy anything in amounts of four, since the number four sounds like the word death in Chinese). Maybe it’s their conservative nature to feel queasy about doin' the dirty in a cup, and then subsequently handing over their cup to some stranger. It is the precious family seed, after all.

Regardless, there’s some poor Chinese couple out there, some couple who is perhaps desperate to pass down their family name, or enjoy a nice dose of filial piety in their later years.

So guys, guys, have some heart. There are 200 to 500 million of your little swimmers every time you ejaculate. Help some fellow comrades out. Spread those seeds!

Somewhere in China, a happy couple will be thanking you.

"Wanna go to the sperm bank?"