In the New York Times

"What Is the Real China?

"Jason G. L. Chu, a second-generation Chinese-American, has spent the last two summers studying Mandarin in Beijing. He currently works in Seoul, South Korea.

"As a second-generation Chinese-American growing up with a dearth of cultural familiarity, my first exposure to Beijing came as one of the perennially rotating crowd of language immersion students. Amidst the framework of our effective — if rigid — curriculum of cultural and linguistic recital, the official China came vividly into view...."

-(New York Times, August 4, 2008; online archive, pgs. 2-3)