Welcome…
Intro to my Website
I have travelled extensively in China during my retirement, thanks primarily to friendships developed with Chinese visiting scholars that I’ve met during their time at the University of Regina. I’ve visited more than three quarters of the 32 provinces in China, and together with the reading I do in our long winter months, I keep learning about China.
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As a Westerner, I’ve been especially drawn to those times and events where East and West have interacted. Not all the stories are pleasant, of course. At the same time, the changes that have taken place in China are amazing, and now China is engaging the West in unprecedented, although still cautious, ways.
As a proud nation with a culture that has, during its time, been the most advanced on the planet, China is intent on finding its place, a prominent place again, in the world. Exactly what form will it take? It is a question that Chinese leadership, as well as professors and students spend much time contemplating. And we in the West are also watching with interest.
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Recent China Visits
For a number of years, now, I have enjoyed the experience of helping to upgrade the English skills of teachers, professors, and students in China. I have been part of provincial government programs that have welcomed teams of foreigners to engage in short summer teacher upgrading programs for high school English teachers. In Sichuan Province, I have been an annual guest lecturer for a few weeks each year at a teacher education university.
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These professional environments have allowed me to make lasting friendships with professionals, who in turn have introduced me to their hometowns, local historic sites and cultural events.
I have never considered myself a writer, but I have experienced a growing sense that my access to life in China has developed in a unique way. This has allowed me to learn about China in ways that are not readily available to most other foreigners. Perhaps I owe it to both my Chinese and Western friends to put some of my experiences on paper.
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My Photography
Photography for me is not an art form, as it is for most successful photographers. Rather, I approach my photography simply as a teacher, an educator. I enjoy learning myself, and sense that when a story should be told it can often be told most effectively with images. So, my photos are often a record of my experiences. Sometimes, I wish I was able to record in video with sound and commentary, but I am not in the league with such people as Rick Steeves (who creates TV programs on his travels). So, I shoot still images — many of them. I then select, sort, and add commentary as time allows, to provide the larger context and the story behind the images.
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I have done dozens of lectures on China (and other photo/travel lectures) back home in Canada. Sometimes my audience is subjected to 400 images during an hour lecture. Yes, it is close to providing a movie sometimes.
I now try to use this medium in a similar way. When I post a series of images, I often provide captions below each one. It is the next best way to giving a photo lecture. Maybe my life does continue as a teacher.
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Life in Canada
My wife, Roberta, and I took early retirements from our post-secondary teaching positions. At the time, we thought we might have another 10 years of professional life ahead of us. We had an early experience overseas when our children were still preschoolers. Living and working in distant lands and with different cultures were continuing areas of interest, prompted in part by early church life experiences in my hometown where contacts with peoples from many parts of the world (often missionaries) were part of our religious traditions.
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However, during this time, my interests in overseas development led me into home-front activities for organizations that did the kind of international development work that I was keenly interested in. I represented a Christian mission organization within the context of the Saskatchewan Council for International Cooperation. I served on boards of such organizations, and even served a term as President of SCIC.
Meanwhile, my wife and I continue to enjoy contacts with Internationals who spend time at our local university. At the time of writing here (2015), we have enjoyed 25 years of hosting Internationals in a lower apartment in our own house. And at a peak of accommodating Internationals during our time after retirement, we owned three additional houses close to our university and provided housing at one time to about two dozen Internationals.
During these retirement years, we linked up with others who had been providing English Classes for Internationals (mostly Chinese) and found new ways to use our teaching skills in the context of friendship and giving “development assistance.”
Many of these experiences are highlighted in our blogging attempts both on this, and related, sites. And all of these experiences have woven together in creative ways that have brought much enrichment to our lives.
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Blogs and Photos
My blogging and photography in recent years has been primarily China oriented. It is not that my wife and I have only focused on China in our retirement. Indeed, we have been privileged to travel in many parts of the world and have photo stories that can and should be told about many of these adventures. However, my online presence has focused most consistently on my China experiences.
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This China focus, however, had its frustrations, at least in terms of Internet communications is concerned. My first attempts to create online albums suffered a series of setbacks, as one, and then another, online service became unavailable to my Chinese friends and viewers. These setbacks were not personal issues, but simply some bad luck in placing my hopes on continuing access to large Internet services such as Google, MSN (their OneDrive file system), and even my own attempts to use WordPress on servers within China (which became unlawful in 2013).
Meanwhile, I did enjoy the freedom to write for a Chinese government English language service, so I shifted my efforts for a time in that direction. Later, yet, I discovered that a popular Chinese social media service (QQ, by Tencent) was used by large numbers of Chinese, including most of those whom I met here in Canada. And, so, I focused some of my online blogging and photo-sharing activity to this specific service. More recently, another social media system is more popular than QQ, called WeChat. So far I have not attempted to fully explore the potential of the latter.
My most recent focus now is to re-energize this WordPress blogging platform. It continues to be a somewhat risky adventure. For reasons that are not entirely well-known at the moment, access to this site by my friends in China has not always been easy and without interruptions. So, I proceed with upgrading of the Western-based WordPress site without full confidence in its long-term success.
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Navigating my Website
Top menu:
[BLOG] Articles I write here about travels, history, and other significant events and perspectives. I am also in the process of moving articles here that I wrote earlier in other blogging environments.
[3Us–My Hunan Blog] Find links here to articles published with the English language website in Hunan Province, China. This was my first active blogging site, suggested by university friends in Changsha. Due to well-known technical controls imposed in recent years, some photo albums are no longer active. I am slowly doing revisions. The URL: http://forum.3us.com/forum-228-1.html
[QQ Blogs] Brief writings and photos mostly about life in Canada. This site is now largely obsolete. Only people with QQ accounts (a Chinese chat system) can get access here:
- QQ articles (http://user.qzone.qq.com/2379983381/2)
- QQ photo albums (http://user.qzone.qq.com/2379983381/4)
[PHOTO ALBUMS] I have dozens of “public” photo albums online. Some are being moved to this CanadianDragonfly environment since original locations are no longer accessible to my overseas Chinese friends. I apologize for delays in converting all my photo albums for better access by my China-located friends.
[中国语言] Some of my articles have been translated into Chinese. Check the menu option, Chinese Translations, elsewhere on these screen displays.
[SEARCH] My website guests can use three approaches to locating information.
- Listing of articles by Categories (see sidebar menu).
- Search using Keywords/Tags (see Tag Cloud in sidebar.
- Search by any word of the viewer’s choice using the Search field (see right side of header).
First published: 2015/07/28
Latest revision: 2020/04/02