Because I am allergic to crabs and shrimps, I rarely try seafood. Last week Chef Wang happened to treat me with her homemade oyster soup. It broke my long-hold illusion on seafood, and stimulated me to have a try by myself. Today I finally made the first bowl of oyster soup, yet its success reminds me how essentially the incredible communication technology has changed our life style.

Actually, I even could not prepared the materials well without the wireless telephone. I could not find the oyster after being back and forth in H-mart's seafood area for a long time. If Chef Wang had not timely instructed me through cell phone to the right place, another frozen food area far away from the seafood area, I would have simply abandoned my ambition. However, it turned out that I bought the wrong type of fishcake, on which I did not ask Chef Wang for advice.

I could not start cooking without the Internet, either. Chef Wang showed me the whole process making the soup, but I only remember the taste when it's my turn to cook. In addition, Chief Wang did not pick up her phone. This time I first reached her husband via MSN, through whom I had the way to contact Chef Wang.

These things, actually, are happening everywhere and every time. People take it for granted instead of feeling amazing when they are talking to each other by Skype in wireless networks. "It is the way it is," we may say. Yet when I call my parents in the rural China, I aware that this world is not as it appear in our eyes.

When I was a child, the only way to get local information was to talk with neighbors face to face. At that time, people frequently visited each other; otherwise you would be block out of the community. This remained the dominant way of communication in my hometown when I left for college to Peking in 1996.

Things started changing since then, and I am lucky to be a witness. The first year in college was full of surprises for a village boy suddenly arrived in a metropolitan of 15 million populations. Even students were using pages and telephones that I thought were only for businessmen; however, cell phones were still far away for college students then. I also bought my only page as a senior searching for a job in 1999 fall, but it was stolen few months latter. I bought my first cell phone in the second month after graduation. At that time, cell phones' prices took a half of my monthly wage and the state-owned duopoly service providers charged heavily, so I compared all types of models and plans before I made the purchase. I was among the first group of my classmates having cell phones, but that privilege lasted only a very short time, just one year later, all my classmates had cell phones. After another one more year, when I returned to campus as a graduate student, most students had equipped with cell phones, while text messages became a most popular way of communication.

One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place, a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said: "I have known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you that you are more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged."

These are the opening lines of Marguerite Duras' Lover. Thanks to Wang Xiaobo who repeated these lines relentlessly in his influential essays, I can still recall them. Rather than the unspeakable sadness and beauty, I recall them for feeling that I was already old. It's weird to feel in this way when I am just in my twenties. However, whenever a disease, even just a trivial one, has caught you, this feeling sprawls.

Today is the sixth day, and I still cannot stop coughing. The consecutive coughs make me out of breath; the pressure on my lungs makes me so feeble that I just barely keep myself upright. I have to think again and again before I utter a word in order to save some breath.

When the physical condition is normal, we feel comfortable. At that time, strength and energy seem ready at your disposal, the heart is also filled with confidence. We enjoy this condition. If we are sick, we ask doctors to fix us; and once they have fixed it, we will thank the doctor even we have paid a very high price. Yet when we are in our good condition, as in most time we are, we just take it for granted and thank nobody.

Lying in bed, between consecutive coughs, I have to face my limit and start ridiculing myself. I take the health for granted, and want to appeal to myself in this world. Once the health was slightly disturbed, I realize what I took for granted turns out to be the greatest uncertainty. I don't know when I will be sick, how serious it will become and how long it will last.

The Christ teaches us not to worry, since no one can survive even one more minute through worrying. However, when He was preaching this, the omniscience must know that human beings can't stop worrying when what he most cherishes is out of his control.

Doctor Siu teaches a Sunday school class about Christian Parenting. Partly attributable to his success as a pediatrician, his class is always popular.

The topic of this week is Communication between parents and their children, but it diverts to Discipline as usual at last. Parents seem desperate in disciplining their angels; parent-to-be and parent-in-planning are starting worrying, because all of us have acknowledged that the experience of our parents is definitely out of fashion while our expectation on the quality of our children is soaring with the decreasing of their quantity.

Doctor Sui emphasizes:

1. Children, even as young as 3 years old, are fast learners, so parents should have a consistency on the principles, which children will carry on into their adulthood. So that there should be consistency between parents on the principles as well as consistency in practicing the principles on children. In a word, prevent randomness in everything for children. This theory is at least supported by an interesting experiment on the white mouse. Psychologists put a white mouse in a maze in which they set 3 buttons. Button A, with the white mouse's every touch, releases some food; Button B, no matter how the white mouse touches, does not release anything; Button C, however, releases food randomly when the white mouse touches. The results are that the white mouse never visits Button B after several trials, and just visits Button A when it's hungry, but keeps touching Button C with various methods. The child is just like the white mouse in some aspects. If parents set principles and stick to them, they will learn and get used to them quickly; however, if parents handle them randomly, they will respond their parents like the white mouse in the experiment.

2. The way parents dealing with their own relationship determines the way children getting along with other people, especially for teenagers. I did not pay attention to this part, for it has at least 15 years to go before my children become teenagers.

Doctor Siu's theories on educating very young children are so simple that parents often ignore their importance and efficiency but refer to other tricks. But it's consistent with the recent finding in labor economics.

Several month ago, Heckman, a labor economist of Chicago University and the receptor of Nobel Prize in Economics in 2000, wrote a long article on the editorial page of Wall Street Journal, telling the surprising finding that the education in the very early stage, no later than 7 years old, has the determinative effect on the future of the child. His article calls government on strengthening intervention in the education at this stage.

Last night's storm blew down a big tree nearby which cut off the power line, so we fled to a friend's home for dinner.

Chinese enjoy the time at the table, eating and chatting. We talked about the feeling of security and hope. My friend said he would feel secured after gaining the Green Card; I said people had hope about the future in China.

Human being is a unity of contradictions: she desires a secured environment, but she is dreaming of her own adventure too.

Life is so different from adventures, as sleep from dreams. However, people stick to their adventures as they keep dreaming. A life without adventures is as unimaginable as a sleep without dreams.

Chinese graduates in the U.S always face the question of staying here or going home. Hopes are always in company with adventures, so this question, to a certain degree, is another version of "what should I choose between security and adventure?"

I see considerable Chinese post-docs, mainly in bio- and chem- or related fields, working hard in labs for just an H1 visa, which enables them to apply the Green Card, at a price of their careers in China. Because they earned their Ph.D degrees in China not in U.S, it's rare for them to jump off the bottom in the academic system of U.S. I wonder how much the security concern is, so that they are willing to pay this price. From another point of view, they may only postpone a generation of their adventure, since their children usually rise to very high level careers, like Doctors; and for themselves, the adventure from China to the U.S. is more than enough in the whole life.

Taishigongyan:

On this particular question, fortunately, we have a perfect answer: go back china after gaining the Green Card, or attaining citizenship, so we can have a secured adventure.

But it is really sad to hear that, for 20% of the human kind, going home is starting instead of ending an adventure and starting live happily ever after, as the end of every fairy tale. Thus we know fairy tales are just for kids.