It's not leaving, but a new start.
I left Beijing on Sunday night for Geneva. I haven’t been in Beijing for such a long time ever since I graduated from college. Besides the work I did for IBJ’s Beijing office, I met lots of friends, some of whom I haven’t seen for five years. I also audited two courses in Tsinghua University’s law school. One is about American Constitution and the other one is Comparative Administrative law. It was not repetitive at all to hear cases such as Lochner, Griswold, Roe, and Casey again. When I learned these cases in America, I learned how to practically argue on Constitutional grounds, while in a Chinese university, the teacher focused on introducing the social background. For example, when talking about Griswold, the teacher talked about what happened in America in the 60s: the New Left developed, for which the Port Huron Statement was a seminal moment. Along with the movement of the New Left was the movement of anti-culture—sex, drugs, Rock n’ Roll… For that generation of Americans, freedom was to unleash from the ties of laws. In the time of Lochner, being free meant to be economically free; while in the 60s, being free meant physically free. Meantime, in the 60s, people found the Supreme Court was a place to quickly solve social controversies. Thus, a series of cases about conception and abortion appeared in the Supreme Court. Though what the teacher introduced here was still a brief version of the history, it made my legal education more complete as it supplemented the legal techniques with the vivid context. I couldn’t exaggerate how important this context is to me!
IBJ's Beijing staff: from left to right: Amy (she's pregnant!), Kelly (she's also an intern and speaks very fine Chinese), me, Yun Zhang (This is the tenth year Yun works in IBJ's Beijing Office), Aurora (our leader!). The one taking photo for us is Sien Feng. He is a cool guy!
From the Airport of Abu Dhabi: I transferred at Abu Dhabi to Geneva. It was 96 degrees outside. Camel is the specialty of Abu Dhabi. I felt being surrounded by all kinds of camels in the Airport: camel toys, camel paintings, camel T-shirts, camel statues, camel stickers, camel magnets.... name one thing, and you can find it in camel's shape/ image!
