This blog is 20 years old!

A lot has happened since I typed out these words.  

A Pennsylvania Dutch proverb that I often heard as a child goes, "Ve git too soon oldt und too late schmart." I think that about sums things up. I don't have any words of wisdom to share after 20 years of off-and-on blogging. I sort of do this for my own entertainment, I guess, so I don't have high expectations for it. (Though I have at times referred to it in my annual self-criticisms merit reviews as an example of the writing that I do.)

If anyone is curious, though, here's a list of what are currently the top three posts on this thing, according to Blogger stats:

• Thoughts and questions about George H. Kerr, Edward Paine, and Formosa Betrayed (Updated, 9/27/18), September 3, 2016
• Brush with history: My father's photos of the May 19, 1946 Tokyo food demonstrations, August 3, 2016
• "The Story of The United States Government..." in Taiwan and Bahrain, July 5, 2016

Odd that the top 3 are all from the summer of 2016. I have my own favorites from before that. Like this 2005 review of 走出白色恐怖 (Farewell to the White Terror) by 孫康宜 (Sun Kang-i). 

And this 2006 post on the Freshman Chinese curriculum reform at Tunghai and its 2013 follow-up on how the course was going. (Yikes! I can't believe the follow-up itself is over 10 years old!!) 

And, of course, this 2005 posting of a FICTIONAL love story that I wrote with the help of the former native Chinese speaker back in 1996. Always liked this story. I can still recite some of it, which always impresses my wife! 

Any other posts I should add to this list?

Need to watch: Fareed Zakaria's CNN special about "Taiwan: Unfinished Business"

I saw an ad for this Fareed Zakaria special on Taiwan, but I wasn't able to see it when it was on CNN, so I'm recording it and will watch it later.

I saw that some people on Twitter criticized the title, wondering whose "unfinished business" it was--the CCP's? One poster (Isla Island) wrote, "'Unfinished business' parrots Beijing's propaganda that its planned invasion & annexation of Taiwan is part of a 'unfinished Chinese civil war'."

I thought the title was interesting in light of the fact that one of the early titles for George H. Kerr's Formosa Betrayed was The Formosan Affair: Unfinished Business on the Pacific Frontier--and then just The Formosan Affair: Unfinished Business. Evidently that title was considered by Houghton Mifflin to be a bit too dry, which is why we ended up with Formosa Betrayed (I really think an exclamation point would go well at the end of that: Formosa Betrayed!). 

Anyway, I'm curious to see what Zakaria has to say. Will it be better than John Oliver's masterful piece on Taiwan, in which he compares it to the "Stanley Cup": "different people keep passing it around and and carving their names on it"? We'll see...

[Update, 3/14: I liked John Oliver's version better.]