Happy New Year!

Today is the Chinese New Year. This is the year of Dog.

This is going to be an important year for me. This is the year that my mother turns 60 -- she is a Dog. This is the year that I must propose to be able to stay in the Economics Ph.D. program. This is also the year that I will try to be on the job market. Please, someone out there, give me a job. :)

To start the New Year auspiciously, I made a big New Year Eve dinner last night, with eight dishes. I had been fretting over turning my culinary heritage into a complete joke, but all of the dishes turned out fine, thanks to the Internet. I found many tips and recipes on a Chinese Internet portal.

We Chinese love to give esoteric names to dishes. You really need to be familiar with our culinary art to know what these names refer to. Otherwise, you might stumble upon something you completely dislike, since we pretty much eat everything that walks on the ground, flies in the sky, or swims in the ocean. (Why else do you think we would have SARS? :)) Since I am so proud of my culinary achievement, I am presenting you the menu, sparing you all the artistic names, however. I made: meatball winter melon soup, aster indicus with tofu, deep fried stuffed lotus, shrimp egg tofu, egg white with crabmeat, Hainan chicken (that was a take-out), mushroom bok choi, and fried sweet rice cake for dessert. I hope a full stomach will bring good fortune to my family and me.

Reality of AIDS

New York Times had an article yesterday on a recent study done by the WHO and UNAIDS that estimates China’s number of H.I.V. and AIDS cases to be 650,000, a drop from 840,000 published by the government in November 2003. I was pleasantly surprised by how low the estimate is. I remember looking up CIA’s website with a friend three years ago. The estimate then was already over a million.

Surely there are outcries from AIDS activists that this number is a vast underestimate and propaganda put up by the Chinese government. I am certain some of their complaints are legitimate, such as potential understatement by local officials. However, I do think the new estimate deserves some merit. First of all, the sample data that the new study is based upon has almost doubled its number of surveillance sites. A larger sample, if randomly selected, decreases the measurement error that occurs in the survey process. Therefore, if anything, we expect the new number to represent the truth. Secondly, I have observed in the past that Chinese government tends to adjust towards unpleasant reality with lag. We can see such tendency in events such as the SARS outbreak, macroeconomic data, worker protests… although their response is invariably unwilling and lagged, they do more or less admit, over time, the problems thrust to them by overseas watchdogs. The point here is that if AIDS were to turn into an epidemic in the near future, the government merely does not have the audacity to adjust the estimate downwards. There is too much downside political risk. Third, about one-quarter of China’s HIV cases come from infected blood donation process, according to a study done in 2003 (I am quoting article Anatomy of an Epidemic, July 28, 2005 by the Economist). To be fair, the government has taken tighter measure over the commercial blood donation market, thanks again to the news spotlights cast by the overseas watchdogs. Good control over a major HIV transmission channel can keep the number from exploding. This is a ghastly statement: once the base is under control, we start to see light from the end of the channel, as many of the patients, I imagine enclosed and isolated from the rest of the world, may simply have passed away during the two-year interval.

Enough on defending the new number on China. I am always intrigued by economic studies done on how AIDS affect people’s behavior. I have come across a few papers in the past that claimed that due to the AIDS pandemic in Africa, wealthier and more educated people are having less sexual intercourse. When you think about it, it is really quite intuitive. This sounds like an old wife’s tale: sex, in this case, is no longer a good, but a bad. Wealthier people would of course have less of it, just like how we see them not living in polluted industrial towns. It also makes sense for people who have had many years of schooling. I know I am not going through all my education and willing to risk dying young just because of sex. Sex, after all, has many substitutes.

As part of his thesis, a friend of mine from Chicago saw in one unique dataset that homosexuals avert from their sexual activities if they have relatives with AIDS, thereby drawing the conclusion that their fear for the disease alters their sexual behavior. His conclusion was startling, because there have been many claims that homosexuality is genetic. I do see that his results are controversial, and I agree that his sample size is small. However, I want to defend his thesis by borrowing Kinsey’s idea: sexuality is not black-and-white; sexuality is a continuous scale on which we are placed. I do agree nothing could deter people with strong homosexual preferences from pursing their dream lifestyle, but I would also like to point out that for people who are more centralists on the scale, environment matters. People interested in this study may read Freakonomics: The Economy of Desire December 11, 2005 on New York Times.

One reason I found these studies interesting is that they delve into a sensitive area where social environment conflicts with our instincts. I was forwarded an article recently on how truckers in India are one major HIV transmitter. I thus wondered, as that image comes to spread in India, how it affects their status in marriage market and wage rate. It would be an interesting study.

I hope my readers do not draw the conclusion that I think AIDS in China is not a problem. I am just hopeful that my motherland not to be hit by a new form of epidemic. We have SARS and bird flu to worry about as it is already. I also read, quite recently, that China is marketing female condoms in certain cities. Although this idea offends me because of my feminist tendencies, I am glad at least condom usage has come to attention in China, and hopefully, over time, Chinese men will be more open to the most widespread method of contraception.

Good to Be Foreign

I have been living in the U.S. for nine years. It is such a long time that I am starting to feel and think like an American. I feel I already know the country, know its culture, and can talk about its politics intelligently. I am starting to itch for changes lately, especially after having found out David and YE are moving to London this year. Like YE said, it is not a bad life to have our 20’s in the U.S., 30’s in Europe, and 40’s back to Asia.

Despite all the job market discrimination studies, to me, it is good to be foreign. Life is full of surprises and challenges when one is foreign. Last week, I watched a movie called The Terminal, starring Tom Hanks. It is about a foreigner coming to visit the U.S. but ending up stuck in an international airport terminal because of visa problems. I fretted for him over how he could feed himself with no money and communicate with others with no grasp of English. I loved it. Today, I realized I am fond of it partially because I miss that mixture of anxiety and excitement I felt when I first moved here nine years ago with two suitcases and zero clues.

That said, US is still a foreign country to me. Once in a while, I am tossed a few nice little surprise candies. I was driving to school today when I saw a sequence of cars driving slowly and having their emergency lights flashing. It was raining. My first thought was: com’on guys, sure the weather was not great, but not so bad that everyone had to turn his emergency flashers on. It took me a while before I realized that was a funeral procession. You see, in China, where I grew up, funeral processions are a lot more ostentatious. Funeral processions are strings of identical black cars with white flower decorations and people in them howling (some families even hire howlers to shake up the air). It would be hard to miss the point there. The cars in the procession today did not even match in color, not to mention size or make. One man in a car was just casually drinking coke while driving. It was a somewhat interesting (my condolences to the family nonetheless) observation for me, purely because I am foreign.

I know my limitations. No matter how steeped I am in exotic things, I am always in a way foreign. People unknowingly accumulate knowledge as they grow up in their native culture; it is difficult for latecomers to consciously amass all of it. I have been watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire lately. It is a fun show, but I know I would do poorly on that hot seat – I would stutter when asked about children’s culture or 80’s TV shows. To me, that is in some way good news, because I know I will always get surprise candies.

Frequent Flier Miles

Too much of a good thing can be bad. My addictions to credit card reward programs and frequent flier miles started with me being careful with my finances. Nowadays, I always have maximizing rewards in mind when I consider which credit card to swipe or which airline to fly. This may sound silly to you: I almost went to India this month partially because American Airlines is offering 10,000 bonus miles for booking a new direct flight from Chicago to Delhi, India. Ten thousand miles--that sounds like a lot of rewards, doesn’t it? But how much is the mileage really worth?

A free flight within the continent requires a minimum 25,000 miles and a free flight to Asia requires a minimum 60,000 miles for major airlines. Using conservative flight prices and considering only economy class, I estimate the mileage to be worth about one cent per mile. Normally, we can fly about 10-20 miles for every dollar we spend; therefore, we earn about 10-20 cents for our future flights for every dollar we spend on current flights.

Credit card companies have teamed up with airlines to reward customers mileage for using their plastic. The reward schemes can be confusing to us, but basically, the prevailing rate is about 1 mile for every dollar spent. This is worth about only 1-2 cents on flights for every dollar spent, a much smaller number compared to directly earning mileage from flying.

There are other reasons why accumulating mileage through credit card companies is not a good idea. The minimum block required to have the option of earning rewards at all is 25,000 miles. Using the mile-for-a-dollar rate, it means up to 250 dollars of your money is frozen, for years. I could have taken my money out long ago by using some cash back or gift card reward programs instead. In addition, the massive accumulation of mileages by consumers over the recent years is putting devaluation pressure on the airline mileages. I would not be surprised if the airlines increased the bar for rewards in the next few years.

Start

It is one of my New Year resolutions to follow suit with many Internet enthusiasts and start an online blog of my own, so that my family and friends know what I am up to. Another resolution of mine is to have a short 30-minute morning workout with some television fitness program. We will see how each of the resolutions fare.

2006 has got a wonderful start. My dear friend, Naeem, made his way back to the States. He is now doing a master's in Computer Science at University of Pennsylvania, and he is soon to be a father. I see that he had a productive 2005. :)