When you’ve been in a place long enough to write follow-ups to previous posts, I suppose your “Travel Blog” starts to become an “Immersion Blog.”

In any case….

Before moving on to highlights of excursions to other places in China, I’ll be sharing a series of Anhai “follow-up” posts over the next few days or so, giving updates or expanding on previous posts about life here in the town of Anhai. Be on the lookout for more about such topics as:

• Anhai’s new “bus” system
• More “new architecture” shots around Anhai
• A return visit and more information about the Anping Bridge
• Another senseless death in Anhai
• More angles on the Jinjiang Children’s Welfare Institute

After that, we’ll be moving on to tales of other places we’ve visited and have yet to visit: nearby towns and cities such as Qingyang, Quanzhou, and Xianyou; a couple tales from my Wife’s visit to Beijing (I stayed behind with two sick kids); and Hong Kong.

And since I’m writing most posts in advance and scheduling just one per day, this “live” China blog will keep going even after I’m back in the States.

Plenty more to come, in other words, so stay tuned.

I actually never stopped to wonder why the Western world calls tea ‘tea’, when the Chinese name for it is ‘cha’, but the reason is actually pretty keen if you have an interest in the history or culture of this part of Fujian Province.

First off, let’s note that the word ‘tea’ sounds nothing like the word ‘cha’. What gives?

There’s a longer history lesson needed to fully explain this, but over 400 years ago, when China was experiencing another period of being “very open” to the outside world, nearby Quanzhou was really “The” place where things were happening, in fact being the Asian end of the “Silk Road of the Sea,” and the second largest trading port in the entire world. That is by no means insignificant. In other words, when people thought “China” in those days (even though the country wasn’t called that yet….), they weren’t thinking “Beijing” or “Shanghai” or “Guangzhou.” No, it was all about Quanzhou back then, Baby, all about Quanzhou….

Quanzhou, though, is in this region where the local dialect is Minnanhua, said to be the third largest dialect behind Mandarin and Cantonese. (Min: the name of a river dividing Fujian Province into north and south regions; Nan: south; Hua: language; Minnanhua: south-of-the-Min-river dialect.)

Anyway, one major export commodity going to the Western world from Quanzhou was ‘tea’; but of course the locals didn’t and don’t call it ‘cha’. The name for ‘cha’ in the Minnan dialect sounds like ‘tae’. I’m not sure of the official romanized spelling for minnanhua, but the initial sound is more like a soft ‘d’ than a hard ‘t’.

Anyway, long story short, the Western world calls this ‘cha’ stuff “Tea” because the word “tea” sounds similar to what the locals who spoke Minnanhua in Quanzhou called the stuff when trading with the Europeans.

And there you have it, today’s hastily typed lesson in History and Linguistics.

“Learn from Lei Feng,” oodles of Chinese students have been told over the years.

Lei Feng was the quintessential “model altruistic citizen” of China, which you can read a bit about at various sites.

Some schools–or maybe it’s the entire country?–host a “Learn from Lei Feng” day, where classes take on community and charitable projects of some sort.

But apparently some youngsters are now reading Forbes Magazine as much or more as they are attending their Communist Youth League meetings.

Not long ago, we were visiting some family friends whose 10-year-old daughter happened to be there with us, and someone asked her a question akin to “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

I’ve heard kids in China, though usually older, answer generically that they want to “Go into business” so they can “make lots of money,” and braver girls might answer that they want to “work for a successful company,” but this youngster, even to her parents’ surprise, answered emphatically that she wants to “become a CEO.”

“Why a CEO?” someone asked, “and not just a successful businesswoman of some other type?”

She answered quickly, something to the effect of: “Money is important, but social standing and power are not to be overlooked either, and women shouldn’t have to just ride on their husband’s qualifications in society.”

We were all a bit surprised to hear this from a 10-year-old in China. From a 10-year-old girl in China, more emphatically. We were all among friends, so my Wife asked the girl’s mother if this was an idea she had introduced to her, but No, she said, she was just as surprised as us to hear it, and the girl said she’d come up with it from her own reading and thinking.

I figure I still won’t be of retirement age when this little girl graduates from a university (she said she currently prefers China’s QingHua University to Harvard), so I’m making sure to keep in touch with her parents, just in case she needs an American adviser (or janitor, or whatever) when she launches her empire in 10 or 15 years.

In related news, here’s a list of China’s 400 richest people:

http://www.forbes.com/business/2005/11/01/china-richest-list_05china_land.html