Asia Blog: China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam

Choi Jin-sil (최진실) was a talented actress from South Korea. Nicknamed “The Nation’s Actress”, she starred in movies The Legend of Gingko (단적비연수), The Letter (편지), and My Bride My Love (나의 사랑, 나의 신부). A full list of her accomplishments on the screen can be found at wikipedia; she was a prolific TV and movie actress.

Her personal life was full of scandal and misfortune. A brief timeline might be the best format for presenting the history that led to her impulsive suicide:

• 1968 - Born on December 24
• 1988 - Starred in Joseon Dynasty 500 years (조선왕조 오백년)
• 1994 - Former manager Bae Byeong-su was murdered by her road manager, Jeon Yong-cheol
• 1998 - Met Cho Sung-min, a pitcher for Japanese pro baseball team the Yomiuri Giants, at a TV show
• 2000 - Married Cho Sung-min
• 2002 - Seperated from Cho Sung-min
• 2004 - Divorced Cho Sung-min for adultery, domestic violence, and debts
• 2008 September - Actor Ahn Jae-hwan committed suicide after incurring large debts due to failed business projects
• 2008 September - A rumour is started that Choi Jin-sil lent Ahn $2M; the police arrested a suspect who started the rumour for defamation
• 2008 October - Suicide by hanging

On October 1, the night before her death, Choi had a drink with her manager, and sent a text message with the text:

“take care of my children no matter what happens” and “I’m sorry”

Choi Jin-sil then went home, locked herself in the bathroom, and hung herself by the neck with the shower hose in the bathtub. Her mother reported that Choi was drunk when she returned home. Yang Jae-ho, chief investigator at Seoul’s Seocho Police Station, said “Given the results of an examination showing no trace of physical trauma on her body, we concluded that it was a suicide.”

And so, in a tragic story of perpetual depressive unhappiness, coupled with substance abuse, another bright flame is extinguished.

Angel Suitcase, an album by Vicki Zhaowei (赵薇) was released September 3, 2007. Since I had trouble finding high-quality album art anywhere on the web, I’m going to post nice ones below:

Zhaowei Angel Suitcase front cover

赵薇的天使旅行箱 back cover

Also, this is the tracklist, for anyone interested:

1. 舊玩具 Old Toy
2. 天使旅行箱 Angel Suitcase
3. Morning Love
4. 多愛自己一些 Love Oneself A Little More
5. 恰恰愛 Cha Cha Love
6. 蝶 Butterfly
7. 小蜜蜂 Honeybee
8. 樹葉的崇拜 Leaf Worship
9. 不怕 Not Afraid
10. 大城小戀 Small Love In a Big City

This is the three Gorges region in the People’s Republic of China. It’s extremely beautiful.

Jinan University (暨南大学) has a new redesigned website that is identical in appearance to Cornell University’s. Check out the comparison screenshots below, and the electronic plagiarism will be easily apparent to the naked eye:

Jinan University home page

Cornell University home page

From what I can find about it online, Jinan University is a small liberal arts college in China, equivalent to a third-tier, mediocre school here in the US. That they have completely ripped off Cornell’s beautiful web design for their own homepage is not particularly surprising in light of the lowly status 暨南大学.

The actual copying is incidental, as Jinan has copied design elements by style, and missing many of the subtler details of the Cornell site. Their images are blurry, aliased, and with halos. Their menu links are cramped and undistinguished; they have no rollover elements. Even their main content doesn’t lay out well on the page, sliding this way or that. So the only question left is why would a third rate school do a poor copy Cornell’s design for their English pages? It just doesn’t make sense, especially as the Jinan Chinese pages are in their own style.

If you organize the top-20 from the official medal table, and normalize the raw counts by the size of each country, Jamaica (with just 2.7M people) is the decisive winner:

Canada doesn’t do badly either, in 10th place. China, unfortunately, given its massive size, ends up last. So, given the recent controversy over “who won the olympics,” what is the best way to do these medal rankings? Total medals? Total golds? Normalized totals? Whichever way you go, someone is going to be unhappy.

Check out this Foreign Policy article How many ways are there to count Olympic medals? where they compare using a gold-is-worth-more weighted ranking with the current US/International methods. Another good take is BBC’s Five alternative Olympics medals tables, or Danwei’s Chinese media calls the Olympics for China. Depending who ask, China won or the US won the Olympics.

I prefer to say Canada won

Addendum of Data