I know a guy...

...who knows the president of Taiwan.

Sometimes the connectivity that comes with my job amazes me. I wrote an article last year about my hometown of Columbus formalizing sister city relationship with Taichung City in Taiwan. I met the mayor of that city, Jason Hu, at a shabby little Chinese restaurant in Atlanta. Mr. Hu is a Cambridge-educated former foreign minister of Taiwan and a member of the Taiwan's Nationalist Party.

His party, called the Kuomintang, KMT, or Guomin Dang (using another romanization), took back the presidency of Taiwan in today's elections. Ma Ying-Jeou, a former mayor of Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, ran on a platform of closer relations with China, a breath of fresh air for some citizens of Taiwan who were weary of current President Chen Shui-bian's tendency to rock the boat with China.

Mr. Hu and Mr. Ma were classmates at Cambridge and are great friends. Mr. Ma, also educated at Harvard, is a handsome, charismatic guy that was popular with the ladies, Mr. Hu told me. He also told me that Mr. Ma would be running for the presidency this year and that his election could catapult the KMT back to power the Democratic Progressive Party had taken in recent elections.

The KMT that stems from the Nationalist army that was forced off the Chinese mainland when the Communists won the civil war raging there in the late 1940s. Mao Zedong inaugurated the People's Republic of China in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, while the Nationalist army fled to the island, then called Formosa, to regroup.

That conflict still simmers across the Taiwan Strait. Almost 60 years later, it was a main issue in the Taiwan presidential elections, and I'm now just a few degrees away from the president. I'm still baffled at the opportunities journalism provides.

Goin' Ghetto for a Burger

I had heard the rumors about Ann's Snack Shop, an unassuming little joint on Atlanta's Memorial Drive next to a liquor store and two doors down from a Checkers, a burger competitor whose fast-food fare literally doesn't stack up next to Ann's towering concoctions.

Word on the street was that Ann had been serving up America's best burger by herself for more than 30 years from her little stand, which can only seat nine customers simultaneously at the barstools in her small restaurant. And woe unto those who break Ann's strict rules about intrusion (or any of those posted on the wall above her kitchen). Ann's place is sitting room only, and she quickly shoos out anyone left standing up or milling about.

It wasn't until last year that Ann gained national recognition in a Wall Street Journal article for her culinary specialties, but plaques on her dingy walls proclaimed that she'd been at the top of the city of Atlanta's food chain in the burger category just about every year since AOL Citysearch and other sites began rating shops like hers.

But it wasn't the critical acclaim that drew me to Ann's. It was hunger, for adventure and for ground beef. I'd never heard of Ann's place until I drove by one day and saw a wooden sign out front painted with cursive letters that read, "Home of the World Famous Ghetto Burger." The picture on the sign, I found out, is pretty close to life-size. The Ghetto Burger is a veritable mountain of food: two handfuls of ground beef from a smashed onto a commercial grill, coated with melted cheese, laced with bacon and topped with lettuce, tomato, onions, chili, ketchup and mustard. For coleslaw aficionados, Ann offers the Hood Burger, which is basically a Ghetto Burger with some slaw on top. The Hood is actually a bit more expensive, and I guess the extra cost coupled with slaw's polarizing nature as a fixin' has kept the Hood from reaching the Ghetto's level of worldwide fame.

A co-worker and I traveled to Ann's twice. The first time we were left out in a sort of lean-to lobby area for awhile, waiting behind other eager customers who warned us not to try to enter before a seat came open. They also told us that Ann's old-school shop doesn't fool around with credit cards. Sadly, we settled for Checkers.

Our second try was marked with determination, which we would need along with a little dab of patience. We came armed with cash and blocked out an hour for lunch. We wound up needing two.

Nowhere in Ann's rules does it say, "Provide good or even adequate customer service." Maybe it's the product of being the lone ranger of burgers in her neighborhood, but Ann was too busy to worry about being courteous. Although we sat down immediately this time, we were at the bar for a half-hour before Ann acknowledged our presence. Another hour later, after enduring two soap operas on the blaring TV inside, we had two bags of steaming goodness to take back to the office.

The long wait was trying, especially since my breakfast had been small that morning. But I found that the long period of "burgatory" between entry and exit fostered conversation that produced bonds between the customers. The guy next to us had traveled from across town. Every time he came this way for work, he stopped at Ann's. With the long wait, I hoped he didn't get paid by the hour.

Hip hop mogul P. Diddy, Puff Daddy or Diddy, whatever his name is now, had come to Ann's while he was in Atlanta, this guy told us. Our new friend didn't get to see Puffy, but he heard that the star liked his Ghetto Burger.

I don't know of any more appropriate endorsement for something called with "ghetto" in its name, but another guy in the store offered his as well. He came all the way from the United Kingdom to sink his teeth into Ann's specialty, he said. As he thanked her, Ann nonchalantly took his cash and I think - just maybe - managed a small curl of the lips that bordered on a smile.

She took our payment in much the same way, with little outward expression of gratitude. Ann seems to think that seven-plus bucks is an appropriate price for a burger.

After downing the whole thing in one sitting, I'd have to agree.

For more information on the Ghetto Burger and some good photos of the actual burgers, check out The Blissful Glutton's thorough blog post or check out the YouTube video below from Atlanta's ABC affiliate. Sadly, my one-track focus on the burgers caused me to forget my camera that day.

Tibet, Chinese Law and My Blog

The Internet is a place where ideas float around like dust particles: hanging in the air, waiting to be inhaled and breathed out somewhere else.

I sometimes track which pages on the Internet are exhaling my content to their audiences. Recently, I noticed that a China Law Blog made reference by link to a book review I wrote on Peter Hessler's River Town, a fascinating journey about Mr. Hessler's two years teaching English in a small city called Fuling on the Yangtze River, near the sprawling metropolis of Chongqing (home to 31 million people).

Interestingly, this site was referencing Mr. Hessler for what he wrote about Tibet nearly a decade ago, using one of his articles to give insight into how the Chinese view the Tibet situation. I thought this article and the link to my blog were particularly timely, considering the nasty circumstances on the ground in Tibet and the fact that I, pondering the importance of investigating China from a variety of perspectives, recently finished reading a book from more than 10 years ago and was preparing to write a review about it.

The China Law Blog refers to the importance of reading about the groundswells of a situation and researching what was written on a subject long before it occurs. Nicholas Kristof and his wife, Sheryl Wudunn, heard the rumblings of the continued Tibet conflict (and others) in China Wakes, last published in 1995. The husband-and-wife team of New York Times reporters is particularly qualified to make prognostications about the state of repression in China, as their reporting of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 landed them a Pulitzer Prize.

For insightful reporting from around the world, check out Kristof's blog: On the Ground. Just reading his bio will get your blood pumping (especially if you're an aspiring journalist with an international bent).

A Changing Blogscape

If you're coming to the blog for the first time in awhile, you'll probably notice that some things are different. I've added the graphic at the top to stave off the blackness that ruled the homepage before. And that header also doubles as a link that will take you back to the homepage from any post page.

I've also added buttons at the right side of the page that will soon have a chronological listing of posts from the three trips that I blogged extensively about. This will allow me to recycle some of my earlier content and will give readers the opportunity to check out in an orderly fashion some older stuff they might've missed. I'll be working on these pages throughout the week, and they should be functional by next weekend.

Also, I've moved the subscribe form closer to the top of the page, "above the fold," as it were, so you can see it more clearly. If you want fresh updates from this site, type in your email.

I realize that a lot of my content is pretty personal, so I wanted to organize the site so the few people that visit can find their way around better. I thought about switching to Wordpress because it makes it easier to separate pages, but there are a lot of features I like about Blogger, and I figured it would be more of an adventure to learn how to do more with html and CSS code than to cop out by starting afresh. Hopefully this will be the beginning of a changing blogscape that will attract more readers and give a better experience to those who visit from time to time.

Farzana

If her name tag had more room, it wouldn't have said Farzana. It would have said, "I'm not just a random photo girl behind a Walgreens counter."

After snapping a digital passport photo of me, she took the camera back and started to print out the 2x2 square of paper that would identify me on my visa application for China. The last time I had this done, it was a significantly less technical process that took only long enough for the chemicals in the Polaroids to perform the magically blurry fusion that ends up capturing a memory.

But it took longer than expected, and as Farzana centered my cheesy face in the photo software, we somehow struck up a conversation.

Before my job at GlobalAtlanta as an international business reporter and our move to Decatur, asking someone's nationality would have been an anomaly for me. Now, it's the norm. It's not that I'm a workaholic always looking for story ideas. I'm just interested in the mixture of cultures into the U.S. and how that trickles down to my little street.

Bangladesh was her answer, and it more intrigued than surprised me. Bangladesh, which is enclosed on three sides by a long tentacle of land owned by India, is the seventh most populous nation on Earth. But it doesn't have the space that should come with such a huge chunk of humanity. Imagine cramming half the U.S. population into an area slightly smaller than Iowa, and that's the crowded life Farzana endured before emigrating to the U.S. She estimates that about 20,000 of her countrymen live in Georgia, although the density is probably a bit lighter than back home.

Back home, Farzana was educated. She speaks Hindi and Bengali, and she has only been learning English for the two months since she came here. She'd traveled to Pakistan, Nepal, India and Thailand. She was a lawyer. What need did she have for English? Did I mention she was educated back in Bangladesh?

Apparently, the state of Georgia didn't think she was educated enough. Her law degrees aren't equally valid here, so she's currently saving up her wages from Walgreen's so that she can eventually go back to school at Georgia State University and get a law degree that will enable her to practice here. She's thinking immigration law, something she can relate too that isn't too broad.

Until she reaches that goal, it might seem that she's just a photo girl behind a Walgreen's counter. The more people I meet, the more I realize there's a story behind every name tag.