Chinese New Year was last Thursday, and we ushered in the Year of the Sheep (or Goat, depending on your preference). I spent the early evening at our Georgian chorus’s arch sing, which was a sort of public rehearsal to generate interest in our upcoming concert. We sang under a vault in the arcade of Royce Hall, one of UCLA’s venerable Romanesque buildings. I don’t know how many passersby we attracted, but it was fun to sing in an arch, even if the unfamiliar acoustics sometimes wreaked havoc on our ensemble.

Afterward, my roommate and fellow Georgian chorister and I went home and cooked a large batch of fried rice with peas, egg, and Chinese sausage. Then we unearthed some haw flakes her parents had brought her from Singapore a rather long time ago and called them dessert. I have nostalgic feelings toward haw flakes because I associate them with my great-grandmother feeding them to me.

Speaking of Chinese culture, I recently finished The Three-Body Problem by Chinese author Liu Cixin, translated by Ken Liu. (Look at me, reading adult science fiction!) It was excellent. On the whole, it is not a funny book, but there were two passages I found very amusing. The second (up first, because it’s less funny) appears when Newton and Von Neumann are about to witness the first test of the human computer they helped Emperor Qin Shi Huang create (it makes sense in the book):

The guard knelt and handed the sword to the emperor. Qin Shi Huang lifted the sword to the sky, and shouted, “Computer Formation!” (214)

The first, possibly spoilery, is from declassified documents about China’s attempts to contact extraterrestrials:

Message to Extraterrestrial Civilizations

First Draft [Complete Text]

Attention, you who have received this message! This message was sent out by a country that represents revolutionary justice on Earth! Before this, you may have already received other messages sent from the same direction. Those messages were sent by an imperialist superpower on this planet. …We hope you will not listen to their lies. Stand with justice, stand with the revolution!

[Instructions from Central Leadership] This is utter crap! It’s enough to put up big-character posters everywhere on the ground, but we should not send them into space. (171)