CHINA Country CHINA City Prof. Peter Tagiuri
Assignment 1
Please find below Assignment 1, part 1 is due in Class this Wednesday Sept 18th , 2:00pm. Class will be in the Visual Arts Building, 5th Floor in the room where the interviews were conducted.
PART 1
“….In 2011, the country [China] passed a development milestone: for the first time, more than half its citizens lived in towns or cities. The number of people in urban areas jumped to 691 million, taking China’s urbanization ratio past 51%......In 1980 fewer than 200 million people lived in towns and cities. Over the past thirty years China’s cities expanded by nearly 500 million- the equivalent of adding the combine population of the USA and most of Europe” Tom Miller, “ China’s Urban Billion: the biggest migration in human history”
In this first assignment please trace back you family tree (history) four generations
to your grandparents’ parents . For each generation, starting with your own find out as much as you can. Where and when people were born (country or city dwellers), how many siblings (brothers and sisters), what were they trained in, were they literate, what was their trade (employment) where did husband and wife meet each other, how many children did they have, did they move to a different home, neighborhood, region, how many times did they move and each time where were they, if deceased how and where did they die and where buried? Please diagram this information.
Part 2
The Chinese art of choosing the menu for each meal is very much admired.
There are many considerations: place and formality of the occasion, region, season, weather, health, gender, age; a balance is sought with vegetables, grains, some meat , fowl and fish, noodles or rice, soups and fruit conclude, cold dish and hot…. tea, beer, wine, liquor or soft drinks may accompany the meal….Freshness is paramount. While tracing your family history please also find out a favorite dish or dishes for each family member: name of dish, what are the ingredients, where are they sourced, are they regional, seasonal, how are they prepared, if cooked how, how are they served? Please organize dish as a recipe.
“When nothing else subsist from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls bearing resiliently on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory”. Marcel Proust, “Remembrance of Things Past”
Please read the attached article by Joseph Rykwert,
”One Way of Thinking About a House” from his collection of Essays called,
“The Necessity of Artifice” NY, Rizzoli Press 1982.
