My likes and dislikes about Mr. Qian’s obituaries

My favorite obituary of this week was the one about Mr. Qian Xuesen’s death. As one of the most respectable scientists in China and probably in the world, I feel that his death was a great lose to China and the human history. Mr. Qian lived a very dramatic life. He was educated in the States, but also arrested for a reason that has never been proved. Finally, he went back to China and started to dedicate to China’s aviation industry.

I was really sad when I heard of his death and I read almost every piece of obituaries on all the major newspapers.

• AP: Father of China’s Space Tech Program Dies at 98
• WSJ: Trained in the U.S., Scientist Became China’s ‘Rocket King’
• NYT: Qian Xuesen, Father of China’s Space Program, Dies at 98
• LA Times: Qian Xuesen dies at 98; rocket scientist helped establish Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• New Yorker: The Two Lives of Qian Xuesen
• Chicago Tribune: Father of Chinese missile programs
• Xinhua: China’s “father of space technology” dies at 98

Among all of them, I like the New York Times one and the Wall Street Journal one more than the others, because I found they provided more interesting detail information about Mr. Qian’s life both in the States and in China.

One of the examples tells how important Mr. Qian was to the world’s aviation industry even when he hadn’t been back to China to design rockets.

“In 1949, Mr. Qian wrote a proposal for a winged space plane that the magazine Aviation Week and Space Technology, in 2007, called an inspiration for research that led to NASA’s space shuttle,” says New York Times.

As most people know, the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s halted China’s progress in most areas of Chinese society. But it was not the case for Mr. Qian and his work. “Mr. Qian was largely shielded from the persecution faced by many intellectuals, said Qian Xuemin, a retired professor who is Mr. Qian’s cousin. Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai ‘recognized his importance, and they protected him,’” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Apparently, Mr. Qian remained bitter about his treatment by the U.S. government. He never returned to the States. Neither the Journal nor the Times omitted this fact.

“In 1979, Caltech gave Mr. Qian its Distinguished Alumni Award, but Mr. Qian declined to travel to California to receive the prize in person. A former colleague from CalTech eventually brought the award to Mr. Qian in China in 2001, on his 90th birthday,” the Journal says.

“Mr. Qian never returned to the United States. In a 2002 published reminiscence, a Caltech colleague and professor, Frank Marble, stated that he believed that Mr. Qian had ‘lost faith in the American government’ but that he had ‘always had very warm feelings for the American people,’” says the Times.

If I have to choose one between these two obituaries, I think the Times won over the Journal because of its concise and compelling lede –

“Qian Xuesen, a brilliant rocket scientist who single-handedly led China’s space and military rocketry efforts after he was drummed out of the United States during the redbaiting of the McCarthy era, died on Saturday in Beijing. He was 98.”

Besides these two, I think the one from Xinhua news agency was also interesting because it gives information that American newspapers are not able to offer. It includes an interview with Mr. Qian’s colleague at the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation; it tells a story about how Mr. Qian led the missile project team to overcome failures and finally helped China create its first medium- and short-range missile; it also shows a recent photo of Mr. Qian’s while the New York Times and the LA Times can only use the one of Mr. Qian’s 1948 photo provided by AP.

Now I’m done with my loved ones. The ones from AP, the New Yorker and Chicago Tribune were just OK to me. Nothing wrong, but just I didn’t feel they were exciting.

I don’t like the one on the LA times for two main reasons. One is I think the chronic order of the narration was not clear enough. The other reason was I think the last sentence was really redundant. It says, “He is said to have supported the government’s crushing of the rebellion in Tiananmen Square in 1989.” First of all, it’s something that’s “said to be.” As a responsible journalist, shouldn’t we avoid such unsubstantiated source that may lead our readers make any illegitimate judgment on that? Moreover, I didn’t see any meaningful and necessary reasons here to talk about this.

The changing presentation: from the facts of death to the facts of life

Our research team brainstormed about what have been changed in obituaries yesterday. One consensus was the obituaries in the past were mostly about the facts of death, but it’s more about the facts of life today.

It recalled me something I read from the research readings. That article was “The Changing Presentation of Death in the Obituary, 1899-1999″, which roughly analysis the changing concept of the obituaries in history.

The author gives some actual obituary examples to illustrate his idea. From what I read, in 1899, the details that would allow the reader to more fully construct a narrative about a decedent’s end-of-life experience were often printed with generous specificity, which means the focus was the physical experience of the deceased.

As a conclusion, the author says that the obituaries from the New York Times in 1899 often detailed the following seven contents:

(1) The time of death, sometimes precise to within five minutes,

(2) the names and treatment strategies of attending physicians,

(3) the strength and condition of the deceased,

(4) The discussion of complications from medical procedures,

(5) Attempts at recuperation and resuscitation,

(6) Levels of pain,

(7) Levels of consciousness.

However, this kind of information is marginalized in contemporary obituaries, such as the example from New York Times in 1999. That obituary chronicled a number of the important biographical elements of the person’s life, such as his role in the development of the atomic bomb and in the course of the Cold War. Aside from the actual cause of death, details about the dying process are completely omitted from the newspaper report. This is typical of the manner in which the biophysical aspects of death are treated in contemporary obituaries. More biographical information was printed.

Today obituaries still discuss death with normative themes, only the focus of the discussion has changed with the themes of resistance and self-actualization increasingly emphasized. The core concern of the most recently published obituaries studied here is the reporting of individual biography, accomplishment, and personality, as what we read today on newspaper obituary sections.

Obituaries in different “world” –What I learned from the World of Obituaries

For this project, I’ve been reading this book—The World of Obituaries. One thing, if not more, that interested me a lot was the difference between American obituaries and obituaries in other different cultural environment.

The first discussion was about the term of “obituaries”. The author says that some English-language newspapers reserve the term “obituary” for staff-written obituaries and use such terms as “death notices,” “death announcements,” and the like for family-written ones. But Arabic and Persian-language newspapers do not make such a linguistic distinction but restrict the obituary pages to the family-written type and consider staff-written obituaries to be news items published in other pages of the newspaper in accordance with the importance of the deceased. That means, when famous people like presidents or major figures die, their death were usually reported as a news item on the front page, whereas less prominent people get written up in other pages. But when I did the interviews with staff writers with American newspapers, they told me that no matter this person was well-known or just an “average” person, as long as his/her life story was interesting, they would definitely choose this person to do a news obituary rather than just to put on a death notice somewhere.

The second interesting discussion was about the distinct feature of British obituaries. You probably know that British obituaries are well-known for talking frankly about life and lead the supposed-to-be serious obituaries into a comic world. As discussed in this book, British newspaper obituaries have undergone a drastic change during the past twenty years or so. They are described in an article in The Economist as constituting “a genre that is changing and developing into something of a cult: obituaries as entertainment”. Their style is described as being “anecdotal, discursive, yet elegantly concise; learned, touching, and in a kindly way, often extraordinarily funny”.

Not all newspaper obituaries, however, are as “entertaining” as the British ones. Especially when talk about Obituaries in America, one may characterize them more as matter-of-fact, more serious and respectful. So the American obituaries more focus on describing the accomplishments of the deceased and both of this person’s personal and professional attributes by which the writer of the obituary hopes the deceased would be remembered.

The last but not least thing I’d like to present here was the author’s observation of the difference in terms of religions.

For example, the Arabic and Persian obituaries are set in a frame of religious language much more so than are the English obituaries. They tend to quote a verse from a holy book or introduce the obituary in language borrowed from religious ceremony. The Egyptian obituaries tend not to express personal feelings toward the deceased unless the deceased is young and death unexpected. The Persian and English obituaries ten d to express more feelings: the English by using such words as “beloved,” “devoted,” and the like; the Persian by describing feelings of loss felt by the family, whole names usually appear after the text and a t times by showing concern over the happiness of the departed soul, soliciting help from friends and relative through their participation in the ceremonies. The English obituaries tend to be more formulaic in their expression of “feelings” then the Persian obituaries. The Arabic obituaries seem to be the longest and least personal of all.

A conversation with Tribune obit writer Trevor Jensen

“I enjoy my job very much,” Trevor Jensen told me with a pleasant smile. Like most of the other obituary writers, he is also enjoying learning about people and writing them into decent stories. “There’s never been a day when I came to work, saying, ‘oh man, what I’m gonna work on today?’ It’s a job where there’s always a story.”

Having served as the Tribune’s chief obituary writer for three and a half years, Jensen writes about seven stories a week among the total 15 to 20 staff produced obituaries.

“We certainly have an editor at my desk, but I’m pretty self-contained,” Jensen told me that he finds stories mostly by himself, sometimes getting suggestions from families, friends, colleagues and funeral homes.

“I sit down each day and go through the deck of submissions of death notices in the area and sources I have, trying to find the most interesting stories,” he said.

Here’s the answer: Interesting story! Yes, Jensen told me he didn’t think there’s a totally subjective set of criteria that he’s looking for when he comes to work each day, but he always wants an interesting obituary that can “make people feel like either you knew the person or you’d like to know the person.”

“I did an obituary about a guy who lived in the same home for seventy years and ate dinner in the same place every night for thirty. He just had this very routine. But within that routine, he built a real kind of interesting life form himself,” Jensen said. “So, I really want something that makes one stand out, makes the person pop as it would if you’re doing a feature when they’re living.”

Do they focus on “well-known” people? Not really. Jensen told me even when they write about the famous people, the Tribune pays much more attention to local ones but not national figures.

“We leave those to the LA Times or wires,” he said. “And we don’t have a lot of celebrities in Chicago. The celebrities here are more those politicians. So if city alderman dies or primary sectary for the mayor dies, you have to do them, because they’re at that level.”

“But I really don’t know how to define the ‘well-known’. Like this guy I wrote today was a local official of the Illinois Council. He’s definitely not universally ‘well-known’, a big pie, but he’s still famous locally,” he said.

Jensen told me that as a local newspaper, they always try to find more or less connection with local community that people would feel closer to the deceased in some ways, whether you find out you went to the same college or you joined the same organization.

Beyond that, Jensen also keeps diversity in mind. He said he read an article from the New York Times, explaining why women have been being unrepresented in obituaries.

“People largely written about are in their 70s and 80s, which means their active life was in the 50s, 60s and 70s. And there weren’t as many women maybe in the world place or being CEOs of the companies that time. So that might be one factor,” he explained. “We’re still dealing the world of 50’s or 60’s in our obituaries today, not the world of 80’s or 90’s.”

Even though he has to keep this in mind, Jensen said he doesn’t look at it that way, because his main purpose is still to find the most interesting stories.

“Sometimes it’s interesting just because this person had a friend who really knows how to tell a story,” he said. “And when you talk to the friend, one thing leads to another, they can lay out a good story of this guy.”

And good story tellers are just everywhere. And mostly they’re willing to call to get their deceased loved one a news obituary. Jensen found they were quite helpful, though the amount of calls is far beyond what he needs.

“I get calls constantly,” he said. “It’s hard to say no when I tried to put myself in a situation I have to say no. I hate to turn people down, but you look at what you have each day and what you actually can do, you have to let them know ‘sorry, I have the information, but please hold on. I’ll call if I can.’”

But a good thing for Jensen is that he’s not constrained by space limit.

“Our space limit is matched by our staff deduction, so now I’m not limited on space too much,” he said. “If I have someone interesting to write about, I can write longer. That’s really not an issue.”

Jensen told me that he believes that a good obituary writer has to be able to talk to people and get them talk to you. The process of doing an obituary seems like a whole process of having conversations, starting with the family.

“I try to find out the biographic information from the spouse or children, like a resume and see if there’s something interesting along the way and branch out from there,” Jensen said. “Then you go to this person’s world to find out more. If you write about life of business, then you want someone who worked with the guy; if you write about an academic, you want people in that field who can comment on his contribution to that field.”

It seems impossible to get all those things done in a day, but do they really need to?

“I see a great value of timeliness if the person is famous and we’ll post the obituary online immediately, putting up whatever we can get and keep refreshing during the day,” Jensen said. “But if the deceased is an ‘average person’ with interesting story, it’s always not an issue to take another day or more because you’re not alerting people breaking news of this person’s death but writing an interesting story, so in this case, timeliness is less far important to me.”

Jensen really doesn’t like the idea of writing a family or friend an obituary since it’s inevitable to have bias when you write about a loved one.

“Even there are cases that staff writers knew someone really well, we’ll discuss ‘do you really want them, writing about that?’” he says. “Generally the answer is no. We don’t want friends to get involved.”

However, family and friends can definitely provide paid death notices. Different from what they call “news obituaries”, death notices are handled by classified ads people and funeral homes associate a lot. There literally can be a large amount of death notices and they can be longer ones if more people pay and pay more.

“On Sundays, you can have a hundred of death notices while we have only one or two stories,” Jensen said. “Though other classified has shrunk at newspapers, but there’s still a healthy amount of classified ads every day.”

Jensen has a strong feeling of the difference between death notices and obituaries.

“Some people say ‘thank you for the tribute’, but I hate that people call my story a tribute because I’m really not trying to write a tribute, but trying to write a little profile of a person,” he said.

But sometimes, people might be easily confused.

“They call to ask ‘how much do we pay to get a news story?’I said we don’t accept payment,” Jensen said. “I certainly see the difference of what’s reported and written as a feature versus what’s given by funeral home and family.”

Jensen reads obituaries of the New York Times every day and he appreciates a lot of great obituary writers for writing interesting stories, including names like Robert McG. Thomas, the Times’ statuary, who extended the possibilities of the conventional obituary form, “shaking the dust from one of the most neglected areas of daily journalism”.

“I don’t know a lot of papers that are doing very serious obituaries. When I say serious, I mean seriously approaching obituaries, like the LA Times or the New York Times,” Jensen said. “They fund the voyage, so their writers are always ready to take off. But we don’t have staffs to do that here and not many papers have ability to do that.”

Comparing American obituaries with British ones, Jensen said British obituaries are well known for their frank of talking about the death, in which way that produces fun stories, but Americans are a little bit more cautious and gracious to survivors’ and other family members’ feeling.

“But everything can happen in America and I certainly see it can happen with blog writings,” he said. “It might not be the case for the Times or Tribune though.”

The message that Jensen said he was always fear of getting from a family next day was “who are you writing about?” So he’s really careful about what he writes.

“Fortunately, I never got this message,” he smiled.

An Economist Obits Fan tells…

When you think of an obituary, what comes to mind?

Death? Sad news? Someone passed away?

Hmm, these are probably the answers of most young people of our generation. But Laura Palencia has a different one.

“The last page of the Economist comes to mind, because I read its obits at the end of the magazine,” she was sitting at a Starbucks, telling me her experience as an Economist obits fan.

Did you remember where you read Ted Kennedy’s obituary? Google news? Palencia got it fromthe Economist. She even kept looking for Michael Jackson’s for a while.

“It seems they never published it. Then I just read it online on one of the Google news link.”

For some reason, Palencia didn’t find the obituary of Michael Jackson on the Economist. Actuallythey did one. But still, she surprised me by doing so because I never met someone of my age was so into obituaries, which I even didn’t realize that they exist on newspapers since I knew there was a thing called “newspaper” and there was another thing called “obituary”.

Palencia has her reasons.

“I like reading it to get the perspective of a post-life and the analysis of how this person’s life really meant.”

She told me it’s far more different to write people when they’re still alive than looking back into their life after death, which makes the obituaries seem interesting.

“But I like my news to have a story,” she said.

Well, a very interesting question actually arises from her response here—should obituaries be told in a straight or interpreted way?

Palencia believes that the Economist is doing the latter, which is an essential reason for her to read it.

“Some people think news shouldn’t have an opinion, and a news story should just focus on the facts,” she said. “I preferred an interpreted obituary than just a fact, because I find that a lot more interesting.”

Palencia told me she thought it depends on how a person judges news. Specifically referring to the obits on the Economist, she considers them as stories with writers’ interpretation, which not only tells about what happened but what we could think of it and get out of it.

Then I asked myself, what I would prefer if I read obituaries? I think my answer would be exactly the same. An editorial obituary sounds more appealing than one just of facts, doesn’t it? But you may have a different thought. Why not sharing with us?

Another interesting thing that Palencia bought up was her thinking of oneself to write an obituary blurb before one passed away. And the writer who writes this person’s obituary may use it as reference, to see how this person judging his own life.

“It might sound weird, but it would be kind of interesting,” she said.

Obituaries in China

When I saw Alina’s post, I thought “Wow, what a coincidence!” because I was also thinking of posting something about my experience with obituaries in a foreign country, specifically, my country.

I remembered it was a news writing class last fall when I was assigned to write an obituary the first time, I thought, “How interesting! Obituary is a news category in the States and they even have an actual section of obituaries in print media!” It just never happened in China unless the deceased one is a well-known.

It doesn’t mean there isn’t any obituary of an ordinary person in China. It just never goes to media outlets. A common way for almost all the families and friends to memorialize someone is to have a physical memorial meeting at a funeral home, where all the related ones could gather to mourn the person’s death, with flowers, wreath or donations in some cases. As part of that meeting, a family member or friend may read to the public a person’s obituary, which tells the life story of him/her.

But that’s all. If you’re not related to the deceased or there is no close connection, it’s highly likely that you may never notice this person has passed away or happened to know it years after.

For younger generation, I remembered that it was popular to memorialize the ones who passed away at a very young age by creating a Webpage when I was in college. There were more such specialized Websites than today because it seems people would be more willing to do this on social networking sites nowadays, after renren.com, a Chinese Facebook, or such types of Websites emerged. However, nothing as an obituary comes along on the site. It functions more like a guestbook, where you can post comments, video or pictures of the loved one.

But when it comes to a celebrity, it’s huge for Chinese audience. Here’s an example of a very famous Chinese Anchor who passed away recently.

To help you know this person, it might be better to read this death notice first. (I didn’t find the obituary of him in English.)

Not surprisingly, the state-run Xinhua News Agency did a news package for his death, including his obituary, how people memorialized him, pictures and videos…Basically, everything related.

Personally, people also write blogs about their feelings of this anchor’s death. Some of them even function as an obituary based on their knowledge of this anchor’s life, like this.

So this is a general picture of obituaries in China, where people don’t feel it’s necessary to put obituaries on media since there isn’t a relationship between the deceased and the rest of the world. But referring to the well-known, even though there isn’t a direct relationship, it’s kind of an indirect one that people share a common knowledge of and can chat about.

Geithner to urge China to shift toward a consumer-led economy

(China has to strengthen its social safety net so that people will become more willing to spend, not save./Xinmin Weekly)

BY MING ZHUANG - MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

With its contribution to global economic output pegged at over 10 percent in 2008, no one could deny that China is a key part of any global recovery, least of all U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who is headed to Beijing to meet with Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao next week.

During his first trip to China since taking office, Geithner is expected to reiterate U.S. support and gratitude for the government’s giant stimulus package aimed at boosting China’s economy.

But Geithner is also planning to press Beijing to boost its domestic consumption, shifting away from an export-oriented economy.

“We’re going to be flooding the world with debt for a while,” Tim Adams, a former U.S. Treasury undersecretary for international affairs who helped lead the Bush administration’s economic policy with China, said to Bloomberg. “We’ve got to hope that that the Chinese are willing to keep buying.”

As the world’s fourth-biggest and fastest-growing economy, China’s GDP growth rate in 2008 cooled to 9 percent, the lowest since 2001, as its exports sagged. It was the first time that China’s GDP growth fell into the single-digit range since 2003, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

China’s largest export market, the U.S., experienced a 5.7 percent drop in GDP in the first quarter of 2009 (according to the Commerce Department’s revised “preliminary” report released Friday). So the Chinese government is trying to find ways to offset the negative impact of lower exports by easing its monetary policy and boosting domestic demand.

Since last September, China has cut its interest rates five times and reduced the proportion of deposits lenders must set aside as reserves. Recently, China’s central bank announced that China still has room for further interest rate cuts in the face of the global financial crisis.

According to Xinhua, the state-run agency, China’s shift from a tight monetary policy to a moderately easy one is to ensure the fluidity of the banking system, to ensure stable growth of credit and to demonstrate the positive role that monetary policy plays in the support of economic growth.

Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch all maintain a “positive” outlook for China, holding a debt rating of “A+”, “A1” and “A+”, respectively.

“While China’s economy is decelerating markedly amid recessionary conditions across advanced economies and emerging markets, the Chinese sovereign retains an exceptionally strong external balance sheet,” notes James McCormack, analyst at Fitch Ratings.

Last November, the Chinese government unveiled a four trillion yuan - nearly $600 billion - stimulus package to support China’s economy, putting a large number of incentives into infrastructure and social safety net programs, including areas of health care, retirement, welfare, education and other benefits.

“Chinese consumers aren’t short of money, but confidence,” Ivan Chung, a vice president and senior analyst with Moody’s Asia Pacific Ltd, told the Wall Street Journal.

“The efforts China could take would be efforts to strengthen the comfort that Chinese households have in spending, which largely involves reducing or addressing the reasons why they feel such a great need to save for precautionary purposes,” said a senior Treasury official who briefed reporters in advance of Geithner’s departure, according to the Journal.

“China needs to stop depending on the over-extended American consumer and needs to rely more on the untapped potential of its own consumers,” Morgan Stanley’s Asia Chairman Stephen Roach said to Reuters earlier this month. Roach said China should double the size of its social security fund to $160 billion immediately and strengthen its social safety net so that people will become more willing to spend.

The transition is a must and it’s noted in China’s five-year plan, which focuses on rebalancing the economy away from what it considers an over-dependence on exports. The current global crisis increases the urgency of these priorities.

Premier Wen told the National People’s Congress in March that bolstering consumer demand must become “a long-term strategic principle and a basic point of departure for stimulating economic growth,” the New York Times reports.

In the U.S. view, this will also require Beijing to unharnass its currency to move more freely against the U.S. dollar. But Geithner is unlikely to address this sensitive issue very much during his visit this week.

On the contrary, China at this time may be more concerned about the safety of its dollar assets. As the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves holder, China has total assets of nearly $2 trillion, with more than half of those holdings estimated to be made up of U.S. Treasury securities and other dollar-denominated bonds.

The sheer size of its dollar holdings makes China worry that the Obama administration’s huge economic stimulus plans could lead to soaring deficits in the United States, which could sink the dollar’s value.

“Chinese are quite concerned that the large U.S. government deficits will eventually lead to inflation, which will erode the purchasing power of the dollar-denominated financial assets which they hold,” Nicholas Lardy, an economist and China specialist at the Peterson Institute in Washington, said to the New York Times in March. “It is a legitimate concern.”

In March, the head of China’s central bank, Zhou Xiaochuan, called for the eventual creation of a new international currency reserve to replace the dollar, saying that the global economic crisis has revealed the “inherent vulnerabilities and systemic risks in the existing international monetary system,” the New York Times reports.

So far, however, China hasn’t stop buying U.S. Treasuries, as it is fearful of sending a signal that could significantly affect currency markets.

Despite the global recession and based in part on the country’s stimulus spending, China’s Development Research Center of the State Council forecast GDP growth still at an annual rate of 8 percent for 2009, and Chinese officials have reiterated several times this year that China is on track to hit the 8 percent target.

Morgan Stanley projects a 7 percent to 8 percent growth rate, up from a previous forecast of 5 percent. Goldman Sachs’ outlook is even more optimistic, citing a projection of 8.3 percent for 2009. The median forecast in a Reuters poll of economists is for GDP to expand by 7.8 percent this year, narrowly missing China’s target of 8 percent.