You can take the girl outta the village....

[laoserge]

My wife was born in a tiny village in Fujian province. Really tiny. 8 houses. Up in the mountains. The joys of bucolic life are not strange to us, city dwellers, and I too enjoy planting dill up on our roof in clay pots. But my wife was adamant in her wish to grow stuff on a larger scale - the pleasures of mucking about in freshly plowed furrows

Comments

[anonymous]

It's crazy fun reading your posts, Serge!

My body is screaming at me to let it go to bed, but before I do, I'll leave you with one of my first reactions to the sale-of-land-that-is-not-one's-land issue:

Selling land that is not technically one's to sell but which is respected as such may be an excellent way to escape showing the favoritism implied by giving it away. In a sale, it is simple and fair (in a certain sense of "fair"): the land goes to the highest bidder. There are still opportunities left to show favoritism, of course, but it leaves one less degree of freedom in the whole space of ways that favoritism could be perceived.

[laoserge]

Thank you, uhm, Anonymous : ) If only I could know who is my only reader : ) Anyhow - quite a development of the no-man's land controversy.
I didn't think of that and honestly I don't believe it is the case - seems to me it is more a pursuit of happyness filthy lucre rather than a stab at favoritism, but again, who am I to judge.
An interesting topic for a research on the other hand, because favoritism would really be perceived in a different light here, in quite a different position on the value scale...