fiefoe

In retrospect, seventeen years later, I can recognize something common in many people new to China. I had become almost intentionally dazzled. I had set off wanting China to be something special and therefore it was. It was a kind of willful infatuation.
Whereas to most foreigners China seemed too centralized, with an all-controlling party brooding at the hub of a vast monolithic state, everywhere I had looked there had seemed to be a kind of institutionalized confusion.
With all its comic imprecision, the mesmerizing poise of its characters and its mysterious capacity to reach back into the depths of history and bring thoughts resonating across thousands of years, I had unwittingly fallen for the language.

<Misc:>

Behind the vast black polished desk there were shelves lined with "tombstones," those little Plexiglas blocks that investment bankers keep as trophies for their deals, with miniature copies of the public announcement of the latest buyout or merger inside.
...rising tone means precisely the opposite, "to buy." {Heh.} Even Chinese people find it confusing. At the Shanghai Stock Exchange the brokers use slang to make sure that they don't mix up buy and sell orders.
More than two thousand people died that summer and forty million homes were destroyed, but the government had responded to the crisis and an even more serious disaster had benn avoided.

scholar tree (1,2); loess; deracinated

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"Mr. China" [.]