How to revise other people's notes with coloured tracks? I don't know how to use the revise tools. It seems that my revisions were still in the original colour and it is very hard for people to see the change.

The differences about love between Chinese and American My friend, a native American who is learning Chinese in Beijing, has told me something about their problems when dating with Chinese girls. He said, some of his friends have dated with native Chinese girls in Beijing. But they often got scared when a girl said "I love you" only after 2 or 3 meetings. That's really too much for them. He asked me that are there any differences between Chinese and American when one use the word "love"? I thought back my childhood and I am sure my father and mother never said that word to each other. I just thought maybe the word is too fresh and fashionable to their generation. However, soon I realised that I myself never said words to my girlfriends in the past even though sometimes I use that word in letter. The word "L-O-V-E" seems to be very dramatic and when I use it in daily life, it is very weird. And personally I can use it in text messages, letters and other indirect situation, rather than saying it face to face. It make me feel like not real. Then why those women used that words in a casual way so that even American men who use "love" frequently would feel too much? The order to form a relationship in China is different from what in America. Of course in China people now are free to love and able to choose their own boyfriends or girlfriends. But still I don't think most of Chinese men and women will date with each other in the American style. I know in America, people can be very intimate in date and even have sex after several dates. Even though people are still not "in love", they are just dating. But if same things happen in China, that means you are in love and you have a boyfriend/girlfriend now. So I suppose maybe his friends had got home run in date, and Chinese girls may misunderstand the meaning. I think in China, people seldom just date. They may like someone secretly or just be friend to someone for weeks or months and declare their love in order to confirm the relationship. if success they may directly become boyfriend/girlfriend. Daters are hardly to see here. I don't know why. Maybe it is because that any close relationship between strangers are still awkward in China. Maybe sex and intimacy in body are still a little bit like taboo here and casual touch is not allowed by most of people. Btw that was my first time to know that American boys might feel too much when facing that situation, since I already know for long that a lot of Chinese girls want to marry Americans. It's interesting!

A Bicycle Travling in Qinghai This summer vacation and cousin and I went to Qinghai Province for a bicycle travelling. Qinghai Province is near Tibet and Xinjiang and the altitude there is about 3,000 meters.There is a famous salty lake called Qinghai lake. The lake is very big and blue, like a sea. That's why Qinghai in Chinese means " the blue sea". The circumference of the lake is about 350 kilometres, and we planned to circle it by bicycle in 4 days. Actually Qinghai lake has become a famous place for bicycling. More than 10,000 people come there to circle the lake every year. The road around the lake is in good state and few cars and trucks drive on it. In spite of the high altitude of the lake, the circling route is quite even and smooth. When we rode on the road, we can always see the blue water on the right side of us. That really delighted our eyes and minds. But sometimes the lake shown its fierceness. In one of the several days, the weather suddenly turned bad, and when we noticed that, we were already on halfway of the journey. At the beginning, scattered drops fell on our face, and we decided to speed up, hoping to reach the destination before the heavy rain. But as the wind strengthened, the black clouds rolled about in the sky and suddenly the heavy rain and hail poured down to us. Almost immediately the temperature lowed down to almost 0ºC and we found ourselves almost freezing to death, even if we were keeping stepping the bikes. If this situation continued for more than one hour, we might get into shock because of the temperature. Fortunately a house of local people appeared in front of us, and we rushed to there without thinking. Five minutes later we were sitting around a stove covered with heavy wool blankets. Thanks to the friendly local Tibetan, or that day would end up with tragedy. Because of some bad fortune, our circling was paused and we had to take a truck to our final destination. There were some regrets but still something impressive. Maybe that is what we call travelling.

My Mother (part two) After I graduated from high school and went to a distant city for college, and my grandma passed away in 2010, the heavy burden on my mother's shoulder suddenly released. I do not know how long it took her to get used to new life, but it seems that she encountered her middle-age crisis. Not until last time I came home did I notice that. The start of the issue was that she suspected my father of having a affair. But after described the situation, she suddenly cried to me and told me how unhappy and trapped she felt in past years. Those words such as freedom, happiness and trap are too individualism and so rare to see in my mother's generation. Their personal life seems quite mixed with others, and it is very hard form them to jump out from the daily life and contemplate on it. I did not know how to comfort my mother.

My Mother (part one) Last time I came home, I noticed that my mom had been old for the first. She was 49 years old, and I knew this number. But sometimes a number cannot tell you a lot. In my mind, my mother was always energetic and strong in facing anything. I never thought that she would need some help. She has suffered a lot in the past 10 years. After my uncle who played the pillar in my big family including my 3 aunts and grandma was threw into jail for 3 years because of taking bribes, my mother took his role and host the whole family. Since medical insurances and approachable loan from official banks in China were greatly in shortage, my mother often played as a family bank since she was relatively richer than other family members and whenever others needed money, she would offer it. Another thorny thing is that my grandma was very old and of weak disposition, and we thought if she knew that her only boy was in prison, she would suffer a totally nervous breakdown, so we had to conceal the situation and try to make her believe that everything was all right. Fabricating a lie in one time is easy, but if one need to fabricate lies for ten years, that will be a great challenge and sometimes even intolerable to liars. But nevertheless we did it. My grandma did not find the truth and passed away peacefully. Besides, since my grandma was too old to take care of herself, my mother played as her nanny and my grandma lived with us in ten years. I experienced the process during which grandma got older and older, weaker and weaker, and gradually lost clear consciousness. In the end, she was almost paralysed, lying on the bed and recognising no one including my mother. My mother took care of her for ten years and almost exhausted herself. In the last period, I was studying in high school and preparing for the National College Entrance Examination. I went to school in 7 am. and came back home in 11 pm. I focused on the in coming tests and my mother just told me to let alone those mess in family and concentrate on study. She was a middle-age Chinese women who need to both take care of the old and the young. In that time, my mother was a common staff in university. She was not a famous professor but a clerk in administration and a party member in CCP. Her job was quite boring and meaningless in a sense, and the atmosphere in her office was bureaucratic and unfriendly. But she was very responsible in work and try to make a living on that.

My Father Sometimes I really envy my father. My father is an athlete, not really professional but he makes a living by teaching people how to play tennis. You may suppose that to coach for living is his job, but actually he treat it as his hobby. Even if no one is asking him to teach tennis, he will go to the tennis ground to play with others himself. So he really love the sport. What's more important is that, he was not trained in college for tennis. In fact, he had served as a middle school PE teacher for more than 15 years, and tennis was just his hobby at that time, which he started to learn when he was almost 30 years old. But he has real talent in sports, and it did not take long for him to build his fame in the amateur tennis circle in his city. About five years from the beginning, he became the best amateur tennis player in his city and won a lot champions in varieties of tennis games. To him, playing tennis is really full of fun and relaxing. He just played it again and again, better and better, than one day he found that someone was willing to pay him in order that he can continue playing. Few people can approach that. So as I said, he is really a lucky guy who deserves my envy.

My Hometown I was born in Guiyang, Guizhou province in China, a beautiful but remote city in the southwest of China. I lived there with my family for 18 years until I went to a university in Shanghai. Compared to Shanghai, Guiyang is a small city. You can just walk from one side of the urban area to another side in no more than one hour. In fact, there are more than 2 million people living there. But in China, it is not so big. The ways of living of people in Guiyang is quite different with Shanghai too. People in Guiyang are more relaxed in work and they seldom try to pursue higher positions in job. If they have spare time, they would rather play mahjong than reading books or training themselves in profession. In a sense, they are a little bit lazy, but good at enjoying life.

What is it like to live with a solipsist ( part 2) Sometimes I wonder, why is this metaphor so attractive to him? It must have some moral consequences, though at the first glance it seems just a word game without any practical meanings. What is his real sense when he quote this metaphor? What kind of scene will provoke his impulse to beg this outlook on world? Since he replied “that depends” then he may agree that it is possible to treat those “fake” people as real. Even if others don’t have souls, we cannot prove it true or false. Maybe both he and I will choose the blue pill if there are girls in the matrix with whom we have fallen in love. Then I understand that what he really want to express by referring to the metaphor is a kind of deep loneliness. Few people will impress him with their souls, so he just conclude they are robots straightforward. For the cold and reasonable parts in his mind, his judgment about the metaphysical truth of the world surely influence his moral choice, but when he fall in love, he is sentimental and soft, and will eat the blue pill. What he is really seeking for is not the truth of world or the way to escape the matrix, but to feel warm and being loved in this world even though it is fake. In the era of Plato, we already invented a metaphor about how fake the world is (allegory of cave), and struggled to escape it. But on the other hand no matter how exciting and exotic the journey of Odysseus is, his purpose is always coming back home. So is a solipsist. How about me? Shit I think I am just a robot in his mind too. But this time he is right. I am just an AI of Xia in this matrix, so do you silly humans! Ok, good night.

What is it like to live with a solipsist (since this essay is a bit long, I have to publish it in two parts) My roommate always claims that he has a metaphor about the world he lives in, that anybody besides him is an actor. They appear in his life here and there occasionally following the orders of a hidden director. They talk with him and have stories with him without true feelings in their minds. It is him who will always be there and undergo all of these. In fact if you have watched the movie The Truman Show, you will understand what I mean. To him, he is the only true man in the world, and others are all robots, zombies or actors, without souls and consciousnesses. I have asked him about what makes it so important to assume that he lives in a theatre, or why did he treat himself so special. He replied that’s because he is the only one who will never quit the play. In fact he concluded that he would never die, because he is the only audience in this play and without him the world can hardly continue to exist. I commented that he is not the audience but the camera, under which the world can exist. Like what in quantum physics that the state of a particle is determined only when there is an observer. As to him, the whole world is a Schwinger’s cat, and relies on his observation to continue existing. But so what? I can also imagine that other people don’t have minds and they are all NPCs in a giant MMORPG world. However, considering I cannot quit the game until I die, and cannot enter into others’ head, why should I assume that they are all fake and I am real? Even if they are all fake in theory, should I act differently or response differently to them? No. So basically I am an agnostic and I do not care about the “truth”. If other people can pass my Turing test, I have no reason to treat them non-human. So I asked him to imagine that there are two people, one is real in his sense, and the other is an actor（but acts completely the same with real people). Now there is a train coming and each of the guys is standing on different railways and you can determine to which railway the train will reach.(Yes it is like the famous moral dilemma) So which guy will you choose to kill ? He replied, the fake one of course. I smugger sinisterly in heart and kept asking, “ then what if the fake one is a girl you have already fallen in love with, and the real one is just a stranger?” “Well,” He said, “ That depends”