I've spilled a lot of words on the subject of smoking, so I won't bore you with a lengthy diatribe now. But the basic point is this: most smokers are intelligent adults who become very good at rationalizing their addiction to nicotine. I know this because I used to do it too. It's easier to vilify anti-smoking advocates as fascist nannies rather than face up to one's own relationship with the drug. But I still believe that only through throwing your hands up and admitting defeat at the mighty cigarette can one quit successfully.

So no- smoking isn't defensible. Smokers aren't bad people, but smoking is bad and every effort should be made to make it easier for people to quit.

Being 6 foot 2, broad shouldered, with light brown hair and blue eyes, I've often been correctly identified as an American well before my accent could give it away- at least whenever I've been in Europe. Europeans had little trouble distinguishing me from the many Scandinavians, Germans, Dutch, and Eastern Europeans with whom I share similar physical characteristics.

(For the record, I'm half Norwegian and half Italian)

The Chinese, though, often guessed I was German. Once, in a Kunming elevator, I overheard the following conversation between two young Chinese women:

'He's American'
'Nah, he's definitely German. Look at his eyes!'
'Americans have blue eyes too!'
'But Americans aren't that tall. He's German'

I couldn't resist telling them, in Mandarin, that I was American, causing them to blush and giggle once they realized I had been eavesdropping the whole time.

I've occasionally erred in this regard. Once in Xiamen, I was sitting with a friend at a cafe when a very attractive young Asian woman walked in. I said rather too loudly, 'Wow, she's beautiful', only to have her turn around and reply to me in a standard US accent, "Thanks!' (Makes me glad my comment fell on the innocent side).

Usually though it's pretty easy to tell Americans apart, even from our Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and European cousins. Americans tend to have a less natural look, while Europeans tend to be more liberal with longer, unkempt hair and beards. In Asia, meanwhile, I could always without hesitation spot the ABC from the, well, CBC just based on dress and posture.

Any thoughts from the peanut gallery?

I got much of my information from a website set up by a Yunnan-based British trekking guide called Richard Scotford, who used to run a trekkers lodge in Deqin. In an article Death on The Kora, Richard describes a strange encounter he had with Margo while he was leading a group of trekkers over the Doker-La pass on the first leg of the Kawa Karpo kora in October 2009.

His group were surprised - to say the least - to be passed by a lone western woman traveling at speed (alone, that is, except for her dog and a local guide with a horse, left trailing well to the rear) and they noted that she was only lightly clad for the trail. Not only that, but they were taken aback by how rude she was to the trekking group, refusing to talk with them at all during their brief encounter on the trail.
Things got stranger later in the day when they saw her again and she chose to camp alongside them, but again was uncommunicative. That was until she started saying that she would 'turn them in' to the local authorities and warning them that they would be turned back at local police checkpoints further up the Salween (Nujiang) valley and the local Tibetans would shun them. The group were un-nerved by her unfriendly and bizarre behaviour (she would only talk to them in Chinese at one point) and her apparent threats.
Margo left early the next day and they never saw her again. In fact, they were some of the last people to see her alive. Richard is an experienced trekker in the region and he thought the claims that Margo made to them about the authorities were implausible and hard to believe. He was proved right. There were no roadblocks, and after some cautious checking, his group continued on uneventfully into the Salween valley, where the local Tibetans were friendly and helpful, and soon the trekkers had put the memory of this odd encounter with the 'mad' western woman out of their minds.
However, a few days later when they came to do the strenuous return leg of their kora, back over the high passes to the Mekong valley in the east, they got a shock. After the exhausting climb up to the exposed Shu-La pass, they descended on the eastern side to find Margo's guide waiting at the first small settlement high up on the mountain. He was frantic and said he had not seen Margo for two days. She had gone missing at some point after leaving the guide behind when she hurried along in front to attempt the pass by herself

I actually met Margo once, when hiking the gorge in 2006. From what I remember she was small and wiry and talked a mile a minute; she struck me as the kind of person who was always doing a million things at once.

I found her helpful, though- she provided useful recommendations for how much to bring, for what to eat, and other details inexperienced hikers like me were bound to get wrong. She also recommended a guesthouse in Lijiang which proved to be a nice place to stay.

I imagine it takes a dash of eccentricity for a Westerner to want to live in a place as remote as the Gorge, and certainly spending 15 years there would be challenging from a mental health perspective.

The list of foreigners drawn to Yunnan's stunning landscape is long and peppered with eccentrics like Margo, someone whom I'm sure never intended to settle here but did anyway. That her last days were characterized by bizarre and unpleasant behavior are merely a sad coda on what was apparently an interesting, full life South of the Clouds.

(link via Danwei)

This stasis can be called assimilation, a word with a distinctly positive connotation in expat circles. But can it go too far? Can one over-assimilate? What would over-assimilation even look like? I hazard a guess:

Assimilation: You no longer mind squat toilets and even find them preferable in public latrines.
Over-assimilation: You break your friend's toilet seat by attempting to stand on it and squat.

Assimilation: You develop a fine taste for Chinese vegetables, even ones prepared with a gallon of oil.
Over-assimilation: You demand to the waiter at the "Western restaurant" that he boil the elements in your green salad.

Assimilation: You're more than happy to drink beer with your Chinese friends in the "ganbei" style, at least on occasion
Over-assimilation: You refuse to drink beer in anything larger than a shot glass.

Assimilation: You don't mind sitting with your Chinese girlfriend under an umbrella in the shade when you take her to the beach
Over-assimilation: You tell your friends just coming back from vacation in Thailand that they have turned "too black".

Any others?

The deal at the restaurant included both food and a "performance", which we imagined would be a song and dance routine that would last less than an hour.

Soon after arriving, the performance started. Groups of "Tibetans", many of whom I suspected were actually Han Chinese, emerged wearing traditional Tibetan costumes. One man wore a fur coat so thick that I'm sure a PETA member would have thrown paint on him had one been present.

Some of the performances were nice- I liked the percussion and dancing. The singers belted out "traditional" songs at such a high volume and register that I was surprised the neighborhood stray dogs didn't storm the restaurant in unison. Conversation became reduced to people leaning next to each other and shouting. I started sweating from the noise, which I didn't believe was physically possible before.

After about two hours of straight high-volume performance, our beleaguered guests began straggling out of the restaurant. I thought about complaining about the music being too loud, but the thought that I had reached an age where high volumes bothered me was too depressing to contemplate.

Finally, we agreed to move on to a little bar near the restaurant. The twenty or so performers subsequently stopped, and while we moved outside I saw a few of them in their street clothes. All of them were gracious and kind, wishing my friend and I a happy birthday.

The event, I thought, was pure China- dinner theater at maximum volume, audience participation, abundant food, and good humor throughout. I do believe everyone left in high spirits, which is the most a birthday boy can ask for.

A week is far too long for Shenzhen, readers. The city itself isn't too bad, but once you get over the modernity and prosperity its appeal begins to run dry. The closest analogy I can find for the city is "Los Angeles with rain". All of my Bay Area readers just shuddered.

However, when one lives in the Chinese hinterland as I do, Shenzhen's bland internationalism actually feels refreshing. For instance, there are Starbucks' everywhere. I drank a pint of Carlsberg at a real Irish pub. I've eaten a different type of food each night, only once eating Chinese. My guiding principle, so to speak, is to take advantage of opportunities that don't exist in Kunming.

On a related note, I realized just the other day that I've eaten Chinese food on this trip no more frequently than I would have back in the US. I'm sure Shenzhen, with its Chinese melting pot demography, has its fair share of excellent restaurants; I'm positive they exist somewhere.

There are competing schools of thought for laowais in China on the subject of food. Some take the "go native" approach, devoting themselves to eating Chinese food almost exclusively. The logic for this scheme, admittedly, is solid. Chinese food is cheaper and better and fresher than foreign food. Following a Ricardian principle of comparative advantage, why eat anything else?

Well...sometimes Chinese food just doesn't cut it. Four and a half years here cannot erase the 24 I lived before them, when my taste buds enjoyed their formative experiences. And while I know that a bowl of noodles will be nutritious and tasty and cheap, I still often opt for a mediocre burger or sandwich. In the mornings, bad coffee trumps good tea. For a quick lunch, cheese and crackers cannot be beat. Even if the cheese cost me an internal organ at an imported supermarket.

One of my favorite travel experiences in China was my two-week jaunt through Tibetan Sichuan. The food, my friends, was the same- every meal, every town- local Chinese. I enjoyed it enough, but the first thing I did upon arriving in Chengdu was splurge on a gigantic meal at Peter's Tex-Mex bar and grill. My stomach still hasn't forgiven me for the sudden gastronomic bounty after two weeks of deprivation.

I walked back to my guesthouse nearly doubled over, but quite happy. For overcooked "Tex-Mex" restored my proper sense of culinary balance, regardless of where I was in the world.

Learning a system of measurement, like learning a foreign language, occurs in stages. First, of course, there's the learning process- for example, that an inch is comprised of 2.54 centimeters. This stage is straightforward and even most Americans I'd guess are at least familiar with how to do basic conversions between the imperial and metric systems.

When I moved to Italy and then China, I was still in the "conversion" stage. When someone said, "Oh, it's 34 degrees today", I mentally converted this figure to a more familiar 95 degrees Fahrenheit. When people said "meters", I converted to feet. And so on.

Then comes a second stage, in which you no longer need to convert but have in fact internalized both systems. For example, when someone says meters I can visualize the distance, and when someone says feet I feel equally comfortable.

The third stage, of course, is when you become so familiar with a new system that you're forced to convert back to the old one. For an American, this would mean that when someone says "feet", you have to think in meters and translate back.

In my experience, these stages describe my use of different types of measurements; in other words, my assimilation of different aspects of the metric system occurred at different speeds. Some, in fact, haven't occurred yet at all.

For height and weight, I'm still in the primary stage. I know what 5 ft. 10 "looks like", and when someone says they're 176 centimeters tall, I mentally calculate that figure back into feet and inches. Ditto with weight; I still think in pounds rather than kilograms or the ludicrous Anglo "stones".

For distance, I'm in the secondary stage. When I'm cycling, I know all to well what "20 kilometers left" means. Yet when people say, "San Francisco is about 400 miles north of Los Angeles", I don't need to convert that into km.

In temperature I'm firmly in the third stage. Perhaps this is because I have a little Firefox widget in the bottom right corner of the screen telling me what Kunming's temperature in centigrade is each day (22 degrees and sunny today, for those who want to know). Perhaps because every time I listen to the radio in China (usually in cabs) I take in a weather report. Perhaps because for some reason I've always been curious about the weather. Who knows?

I've lost the ability to conceptualize Fahrenheit. This occasionally results in a situation in which I'm talking to another American who mentions, "Oh, in Vietnam it was really hot- about 90 degrees" and I have to pretend I know exactly what that means. Whenever I go home, I change the temperature gauge in the car to Centigrade. This makes me highly suspect I realize, but being from San Francisco I'm no longer fazed by accusations of unpatriotism.

Go metric!

First, sometime last year a small dog attempted to bite me on the street, missing by a milimeter or so.

Second, a big dog the other day jumped me in the elevator, while his owner struggled feebly to retain him.

Normally, I'd be a good sport about this, but having read this report (via China Rises) about the explosion of rabies in China, I'm in a less understanding mood.

Also, I don't really see why owners don't see the benefit in leashing their dogs. From personal observation it seems that people with dogs here spend a disproportionate amount of time running after and yelling at the poor beasts.

Maybe it's just me and the prevalence of leashes in China is no greater or less than anywhere else. Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon?

At the second-hand market, of course, all prices are negotiable. I'm not a terrible negotiator, but eventually my patience runs thin and I acquiesce to a price higher than what I probably could have gotten away with. I think of the extra money as purchasing "hassle-free" time.

Of course, my cleaning lady boasted of how she could have gotten the same items for roughly half of what I paid. She muttered 太贵了，太贵了 ("too expensive") every time I told her how much I paid. Eventually, I started lying and telling her I paid half of what I actually paid, just so she wouldn't chide me.

Some foreigners are very sensitive about being ripped off and make every effort to get the lowest price. I take a different approach- if the price seems reasonable to me, I'm happy to pay it. Four plus years in China have given me a pretty good idea of how much things cost. Plus, I find shopping to be stressful and unpleasant so I'm usually willing to pay a bit extra to get the hell out of there.

So I'd like to define rip-off a little differently. Bought a vodka tonic that didn't have vodka? Rip-off. Been driven around in circles by Shanghai cabbies?* Rip-off. Paying 300 kuai for a service that a local could have gotten for 175? No worries.

*Both of these things have happened to me.

I imagine it would take a certain amount of pluck to place a farm animal in this most urban a setting. Yet on second thought it really isn't all that surprising. Quite a few of the residents in my new apartment complex are elderly. Quite a few elderly people in Yunnan come from the countryside.

These people, I suspect, had children who chose to live in the city. When these children started to make money, they invested in a nice, modern apartment for their parents. This is a very common Chinese custom.

In fact, many Chinese people I know find the Western practice of placing elderly people in retirement homes to be barbaric, regardless of whether a home might be the most suitable place for them for health reasons.

Americans of my vintage undoubtedly recall a 1980s era television program called The Voyage of the Mimi. This series featured a group of people on a boat out at sea. One of the people grew up in the inner city, and in order to fall asleep, he had to listen to an audio cassette of city noises.

Perhaps a rooster crowing is the inverse effect. In any case, it sure beats the usual morning din of construction cranes, honking horns, and blaring music through the dread Chinese loudspeakers.